It was a February afternoon, but it wasn’t cold. It had never been cold, that winter.
I passed the bar downstairs from the office but didn’t go in. I was ashamed to ask for a decaffeinated coffee, so I went to a dismal bar five blocks away.
Ever since I’d started suffering from insomnia I didn’t drink proper coffee in the afternoon. I had tried barley coffee a few times, but it really was too disgusting. But decaffeinated coffee seemed like real. The main thing is not to be seen ordering it.
I had always looked with a certain condescension on people who ordered the decaffeinated stuff. I didn’t want the same sort of looks to be cast at me now. At least, not by people I knew. I therefore avoided my usual bar in the afternoons.
I drank the coffee, lit a Marlboro and smoked it seated at an ancient Formica-topped table. Then back five blocks and up to the office.
As far as I could remember, it was due to be a rather quiet afternoon: only one appointment. With Signora Cassano, due for trial the next day for maltreating her husband.
According to the indictment, this gentleman had for years come home from work to hear himself called, at the best, a shitty down-and-out failure. For years he had been forced to hand over his wages, allowed to keep only some loose change for cigarettes and other personal expenses. For years he had been humiliated at family gatherings and before his few friends. On numerous occasions he had been slapped about and she had even spat in his face.
One day he could stand it no longer. He had plucked up the courage to leave home and had denounced her, asking for a separation and damages.
She had chosen me to represent her, and that afternoon I was expecting her for us to settle the details of the defence.
When I got to the office Maria Teresa told me that the harridan had not yet arrived. On the other hand a black woman had been waiting for me for at least half an hour. She didn’t have an appointment but – she said – the matter was very important. As always.
She was in the waiting room. I peered through the crack in the door and saw an imposing young woman, with a face both beautiful and austere. She can’t have been over thirty.
I told Maria Teresa to show her into my room in two minutes’ time. I took off my jacket, reached my desk, lit a cigarette, and the woman entered.
She waited for me to ask her to take a seat and in an almost accentless voice said, “Thank you, Avvocato.” With foreign clients I was always in doubt as to whether to use tu or lei. Many of them do not understand the lei form, and the conversation becomes surreal.
From the way this woman said “Thank you, Avvocato” I knew I could address her as lei without any fear of not being understood.
When I asked her what the problem was she handed me some stapled sheets headed “Office of the Magistrate in Charge of Preliminary Investigations, Order for Precautionary Detention”.
Drugs, was my immediate thought. Her man was a pusher. Then, almost as quickly, that seemed to me impossible.
We all of us go by stereotypes. Anyone who denies it is a liar. The first stereotype had suggested the following sequence: African, precautionary detention, drugs. It is usually for this reason that Africans get arrested.
But straight away the second stereotype came into play. The woman had an aristocratic look and didn’t seem like a drug-pusher’s moll.
I was right. Her partner had not been arrested for drugs but for the kidnap and murder of a nine-year-old boy.
The charges stated were brief, bureaucratic and blood-curdling.
Abdou Thiam, Senegalese citizen, stood accused:
a. of the offence as under Art. 603 of the Penal Code for having deliberately deprived of his personal liberty Francesco Rubino, the latter being under age, inducing him by subterfuge to follow him and thereafter restraining him against his will.
b. of the offence as under Art. 575 of the Penal Code for having caused the death of the said minor Francesco Rubino, exercising on him unascertained acts of violence and subsequently suffocating him by means and methods equally unascertained. Both offences committed in the rural district of Monopoli between 5 and 7 August 1999.
c. of the offence as under Art. 412 of the Penal Code for having concealed the body of the minor Francesco Rubino by throwing it down a well.
Polignano Rural District, 7 August 1999.
Francesco, nine years old, had disappeared one afternoon while playing football on his own in a yard in front of the seaside villa of his grandparents in Monopoli, to the south of Bari.
Two days later the boy’s body had been found at the bottom of a well some twelve miles further north, in the countryside near Polignano.
The police doctor who had performed the autopsy had been unable either to confirm or to exclude the possibility that the child had been subjected to sexual violence.
I knew that police doctor. He wouldn’t have been up to saying whether a child – or even an adult or a senior citizen – had been subjected to sexual violence even if he had been eyewitness to the rape.
The investigations were in any case based from the first on the assumption of murder with a sexual motive. The paedophiliac track.
Four days after the discovery of the body the carabinieri and the public prosecutor had triumphantly announced at a press conference that the case was solved.
The culprit was Abdou Thiam, a 31-year-old Senegalese pedlar. He was in Italy with a valid residence permit and had a few previous convictions for dealing in counterfeit goods. In other words, apart from regular wares he sold fake Vuittons, fake Hogans, fake Cartiers. In summer on the beaches, in winter in the streets and markets.
According to the investigators, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Numerous witnesses had declared that they had seen him talking on the beach to little Francesco on more than one occasion and at some length. The owner of a bar very near the house belonging to the child’s grandparents had seen Abdou pass on foot only a few minutes before the boy disappeared, and without his usual sack of more or less fake merchandise.
Questioned by the carabinieri, the Senegalese who shared lodgings with Abdou had stated that during those days – he was not able to say on exactly which day – the subject under inquiry had taken his car to be washed. As far as he remembered, that was the first time it had happened. Evidently, the prosecution considered this useful evidence: to eliminate every possible trace, the man had had his car washed with a view to frustrating the investigation.
Another Senegalese, also a pedlar, had stated that the day after the little boy’s disappearance Abdou had not been seen on the usual beach. This too was considered – and rightly – a suspicious circumstance.
Abdou was interrogated by the public prosecutor and fell into numerous, grave contradictions. At the conclusion of the interrogation he was detained on the charges of unlawful restraint and murder. They did not accuse him of rape because there was no proof that the child had been violated.
The carabinieri had searched his room and found books for children, all of them in the original languages. Three books in the Harry Potter series, The Little Prince, Pinocchio, Doctor Dolittle and others. Most important of all, they had found and confiscated a photograph of the boy on the beach in swimming trunks.
In the detainment order which the woman had handed me across the desk, the books and the photograph were considered “significant facts in support of the circumstantial framework”.
When I raised my eyes to look at the woman – Abajaje Deheba was her name – she began to speak.
In his own country, Senegal, Abdou was a schoolteacher and earned the equivalent of about 200,000 lire a month. Selling handbags, shoes and wallets, he earned ten times as much. He spoke three languages, wanted to study psychology and wanted to stay in Italy.
She herself was an agronomist and came from Aswan, Nubia. Egypt. On the border with Sudan.
She had been in Bari for nearly a year and a half and was towards the end of a postgraduate course in the management of soil and irrigation resources. When she returned to her own country she would be employed by the government on a project to bring water to the Sahara and transform sand dunes into cultivable land.
I asked her what Bari had to do with the irrigation of the desert.
In Bari, she explained, there was an institute of advanced studies and research in agronomy. It was called the Centre Internationale Hautes Études Agronomiques Méditerranées, and it attracted postgraduate students from all the emerging countries of the Mediterranean. Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Maltese, Jordanians, Syrians, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians. They lived in a dormitory annexe of the institute, studied all day, and at night went swarming about the city.
She had met Abdou at a concert. In a nightspot in the old city – she told me the name but I didn’t know it – where Greeks, blacks, Asians, North Africans and even a few Italians gathered every evening.
It was a concert of the traditional Wolof music of Senegal, and Abdou was playing the drums, along with some compatriots of his.
She paused for a few seconds, her gaze fixed somewhere outside my room, outside my offices. Elsewhere.
Then she started again and I realized she was not really speaking to me.
Abdou was a teacher, she said without looking at me.
He was a teacher even though now he was selling handbags. He loved children and was incapable of doing harm to any one of them.
It was at this point that Abajaje Deheba’s firmly controlled voice cracked. That face of a Nubian princess contracted with the effort of fighting back tears.
She succeeded, but she was silent for a very long minute.
Immediately after the arrest they had hired a lawyer, and she gave me the name of one I knew all too well. On one occasion, chatting away, he had boasted of declaring an income of only eighteen million lire.
Ten million he had demanded simply to make the petition to the Provincial Appeals Court. Abdou’s friends had passed the hat round and put together nearly the whole sum. My so-called colleague was satisfied and pocketed the money. In cash and in advance. No receipt, of course.
The petition was refused. To go to appeal again would cost twenty million. They didn’t have twenty million so Abdou had remained in prison.
Now that the trial was approaching they had decided to come to me. A young member of the Senegalese community knew me – the woman gave me a name that meant nothing to me – and also knew that I wasn’t one to make a fuss about money, and that in any case, to be going on with, they could give me two million, which was what they had managed to collect.
Abajaje Deheba opened her bag, drew out a bundle of banknotes fastened with an elastic band, laid it on the desk and pushed it towards me. There was no question of my being able to refuse or discuss the matter. I said I would get my secretary to make out a receipt for that advance. No thank you, she didn’t want a receipt, she wouldn’t know what to do with it. What she wanted was for me to go at once and see Abdou in prison.
I told her I couldn’t do that, that Signor Thiam would have to appoint me, if only by making a declaration in the prison register. Very well, she said, she would tell him when they next spoke. She rose to her feet, held out her hand – she hadn’t done so when she came in – and looked me in the eye. “Abdou didn’t do what they say he did.”
Her handshake was as firm as I expected it to be.
When I opened the door I heard my secretary trying to explain to a Signora Cassano distinctly annoyed at having to wait that the Avvocato had had an emergency visit and would see her just as soon as possible.
I could imagine my client’s thoughts when she saw Abajaje Deheba pass by, and realized that she had been made to wait on account of a nigger.
She entered the room and gave me a look of disgust. I’m sure she would have spat in my face if she could have.
The next day she was found guilty, and for the appeal she went to another lawyer. Naturally she didn’t pay the remainder of my fee, but maybe she had a point: I hadn’t exactly done my best to get her off.
I parked the car illegally, as usual on a Friday. On visiting days you can’t find a legal space anywhere near the prison.
Friday is visiting day.
However, this isn’t a problem, because you are unlikely to get fined. No traffic warden is too keen on having words with relatives visiting the prisoners; as a rule, no traffic warden is too keen on being on duty at all in the prison neighbourhood.
So I parked illegally on a pavement, climbed out of the car, straightened my tie, took a cigarette from the packet, put it in my mouth without lighting it and set off for the entrance.
The warder at the door knew me, so I didn’t have to show my lawyer’s card.
I went through the usual metal gates, then the gratings, then still more gates. Finally I reached the room reserved for lawyers.
I am convinced that in all prisons they go out of their way to choose the room that is coldest in winter and hottest in summer.
It was winter, and even though outside the air was mild, in that room, furnished with a table, two upright chairs and a broken-down armchair, there was a mortifying chill.
Lawyers are not much loved in prisons.
Lawyers are not much loved in general.
While they were off fetching Abdou Thiam I lit the cigarette and, just for something to do, rummaged in my bag and pulled out the precautionary detention order.
Once again I read that “the impressive probative material acquired against Abdou Thiam forms a reassuring picture serving not only to justify the restraint of personal liberty at the present stage of proceedings but also, in prospect, to allow for reasonable predictions of a conviction in the forthcoming trial.”
In plain words: Abdou was up to his neck in evidence against him, must be arrested and kept in custody, and when the trial came up would certainly be found guilty.
While I was reading, the door opened and a warder ushered in my client.
Abdou Thiam was a strikingly handsome man, with the face of a film star and liquid eyes. Sad and far away.
He remained standing near the door until I went up, gave him my hand and told him I was his lawyer.
A person’s handshake says a lot of things, if one takes the trouble to pay attention to it. Abdou’s handshake told me he didn’t trust me, and that perhaps he no longer trusted anyone at all.
We sat ourselves down on the two chairs and I realized almost at once that it was not going to be an easy conversation.
Abdou spoke Italian well, even if not in the well-nigh perfect, accentless manner of Abajaje. In any case, it came naturally to me to address him as tu, and he replied in kind.
We hurried over the matter of how they were treating him and whether there was anything he needed. Then, since I had not yet examined the file, I tried to persuade him to give me his version of the whole story, with a view to starting to get my bearings.
He was not collaborative. He spoke apathetically, without looking at me, giving vague answers to my questions. It almost seemed as if the matter was of no concern to him.
This very soon got on my nerves, not least because behind that absurd vagueness I could clearly perceive a hostile attitude. Towards me.
I made an effort to conceal my irritation.
“Well then, Abdou, let us get things straight between us. I am your lawyer. You appointed me yourself” – I produced the telegram that had arrived from the prison the previous day and waved it about for a moment – “and I am here to help you, or to try to do so. For this I need your assistance. Otherwise I can do nothing. Do you follow me?”
Until then he had been bent slightly forward, looking at the table. Before answering, he straightened up and looked me in the face.
“I only sent that telegram because Abajaje told me to. Maybe you will try to do something, like the other lawyer, or maybe not. But I’ll stay here whatever happens. When the trial comes up I’ll be found guilty. We all know that. Abajaje thinks you are different from the other lawyer and really can do something. I don’t believe it.”
“Listen to me, Abdou,” I said, forcing myself again to keep my voice calm, “if you cut yourself and the wound is deep and bleeds a lot, what do you do?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “You go to a doctor and have it stitched up, don’t you? You don’t know how to stitch a wound because you’re not a doctor.”
This seemed to me an appropriate metaphor to explain to him that there are times when one simply has to avail oneself of a specialist, and that in this case the specialist was me.
“I know how to put in stitches because I was an army nurse during military service.”
At that point I gave up trying to appear calm. It was obviously useless.
“Listen here and listen carefully. Listen very carefully indeed, because if you give me another crappy answer like that I’ll walk out of here, call your woman, give her back the money – what there is of it – and you can find yourself another lawyer. Otherwise the court will appoint a counsel who won’t do a damn thing for you unless you pay him. And he probably won’t do anything even if you do pay him, seeing what you can afford. Obviously, if you are behaving in this idiotic manner because you really did kill that boy and want to pay for it, well, all the more reason for me to drop the matter…”
Silence.
Then, for the first time since we had been together in that room, Abdou Thiam looked at me as if I really existed. In a low voice, he spoke.
“I didn’t kill Ciccio. He was my friend.”
I held still briefly, to regain my balance.
It was as if I had hurled myself bodily at a door in an attempt to burst through, and someone on the other side had calmly opened it. I took a deep breath and had a hankering for a cigarette. I drew a soft packet from my coat pocket and offered it to Abdou. He said nothing, but took one and waited for me to light it for him. Then I lit my own.
“All right, Abdou. I’ll have to read the prosecution’s documents, but first I must have a clear picture of everything you remember about those days. Can we begin to talk about them?”
He was silent a while before nodding.
“When did you learn about the boy’s disappearance?”
He took a long drag at the cigarette before replying.
“I learned that the boy had disappeared when they arrested me.”
“Do you remember what you did on the day the boy disappeared?”
“I went to Naples to pick up my supplies. I said this when they questioned me. I mean, I said I’d been to Naples, but I didn’t say I had been to buy handbags, so as not to make trouble for the people who sold me them.”
“You went there alone?”
“Yes.”
“When did you get back from Naples?”
“In the afternoon, the evening. I don’t remember exactly.”
“And the next day?”
“I don’t remember. I went to some beach but I don’t remember which.”
“Do you remember anyone you met? I mean both on 5 August and on the following morning. Someone who might remember having seen you and whom we can call as a witness.”
“Where were you that morning, Avvocato?”
I was in the shit, was the answer I would have liked to give. I was in the shit also the morning before and the morning after. I’m pretty much still in it. Just a little bit less.
This was of no interest to Abdou, however, and I said nothing. I rubbed my forehead, then passed a hand across my face and finally lit another cigarette.
“OK. You’re right. It isn’t easy to remember an afternoon, a morning or a day that’s just the same as so many others. However, we have to make an effort to reconstruct those days. Now would you like to tell me something about the boy? You knew him?”
“Certainly I knew him. Since last year. That is, ever since I worked that beach.”
“Do you remember when it was you last saw him?”
“No. Not exactly. But I saw him every time I went to that beach. He was always with either his grandparents or his mother. Occasionally with an aunt and uncle.”
“Have you ever seen him near his grandparents’ house, or anywhere other than the beach? Have you ever visited his grandparents’ house?”
“I don’t even know where his grandparents’ house is, and I’ve only seen the boy on that beach.”
“The owner of the Bar Maracaibo says that he saw you on the afternoon the boy disappeared, that you didn’t have your bag of goods, and that you were heading towards the grandparents’ house.”
“I don’t know which house that is,” he repeated irritably, “and that afternoon I didn’t go to Monopoli. When I got back from Naples, I stayed in Bari. I don’t remember what I did but I didn’t go to Monopoli.”
With an angry movement he seized the packet of cigarettes and matches, still on the table, and lit up again.
I let him take a few puffs in peace, then went on.
“How did you come to have a photograph of the boy at home?”
“It was Ciccio who wanted to give me that photo. An uncle of his, I think, had a Polaroid and took several photos at the beach. The boy gave me one of them. We were friends. Every time I passed I stopped to talk to him. He wanted to know about Africa, about the animals, if I’d ever seen any lions. That sort of thing. I was happy when he gave me the photo because we were friends. What’s more, at home I had masses of photos, lots of them of people on the beach, because I am friends with lots of clients. The carabinieri took only that one. It’s plain that this way it looks like evidence against me. Why didn’t they take all the photos? Why did they take only a few books? I didn’t have only children’s books. I have manuals, history books, books on psychology, but they took only the children’s books. Obviously this makes me out to be a maniac. What’s the word? A paedophile.”
“Did you tell these things to the magistrate?”
“Avvocato, do you know the state I was in when they took me before the magistrate? I couldn’t breathe from the beating I’d taken, I was deaf in one ear. First I was beaten up by the carabinieri, then I was beaten up by the warders as soon as I got to prison. In fact, it was the warders who told me it was much better for me to say nothing to the magistrate. Then the lawyer told me I mustn’t answer questions, as there was a risk it would only complicate matters, and I’d already made a mistake by answering the public prosecutor. He needed to study the documents carefully first. So I went before the magistrate and told him I didn’t want to reply. But even when I did answer, it made no difference, because the magistrate took no notice of what I said. In any case, I stayed in prison.”
I waited a second or two before speaking again.
“Where are all your things, the ones you mentioned, the books, the photos, everything?”
“I don’t know. They cleared out my room and the landlord has let it to someone else. You’ll have to ask Abajaje.”
We were silent for a few minutes, with me trying to sort out the information I had received, him I don’t know where.
Then I spoke again.
“All right, that’s enough for today. Tomorrow, or rather on Monday, I’ll go to the prosecutor’s office and see when we can make a copy of the documents. Then I’ll study them, and as soon as I’ve got my ideas a bit clearer I’ll come back and see you and we’ll try to organize a defence strategy that makes sense…”
I left the sentence in the air, as if there were something to be added to it.
Abdou noticed, and gave me a faintly questioning look. Then he nodded. He hesitated a moment, but he was the first to hold out his hand and shake mine. His grasp differed slightly, only slightly, from the one of an hour before.
Then I opened the door and called the warder who was to take him back to his cell, in the special section reserved for rapists, child abusers and those who had turned state’s evidence. All of them subjects who wouldn’t have lasted long in the company of the other prisoners.
I picked up the cigarette packet and realized it was empty.
On Monday I woke up at about half-past five. As usual.
In the early days I’d tried to stay in bed, hoping to get back to sleep. But I did not get back to sleep, and ended up wrapped in sad and obsessive thoughts.
I therefore realized that it was better not to stay in bed, and to content myself with four or five hours of sleep. When things went well.
So I acquired the habit of getting up as soon as I woke. I would do some exercises, have a shower, shave, make breakfast, tidy the apartment. In short, I spent a good hour and a half managing to think about practically nothing.
Then I would go out and there would be the daylight, and I’d take a long walk. This too helped me not to think.
And so I did that morning. I got to the office at about eight, glanced at my memo pad and put it into my briefcase along with a few pens, some official forms, my mobile. I scribbled a note to my secretary and left it on her desk.
Then I set out for the law courts. Getting up so early and arriving so early at the law courts had certain advantages. The offices were practically deserted, so it was possible to get through chancellery matters more quickly.
I had a hearing that morning, but first I had to go and talk to Prosecutor Cervellati. The public prosecutor engaged on Abdou’s case.
He was not exactly the most congenial man of law in the judiciary offices.
He was neither tall nor short. Not thin, but not exactly fat. His paunch was in any case always covered, summer and winter alike, with a horrible brown waist-coat. Thick glasses, very little hair, and what there was of it always a shade too long, grey jackets, grey socks, grey complexion.
On one occasion a friendly female colleague of mine, speaking of Cervellati, called him “a man in a singlet”. I asked her what she meant and she explained that this was a category of human being that she had come up with herself.
A man in a (metaphorical) singlet is first of all one who, at the height of summer, when it’s 95 degrees in the shade, wears a (real) singlet under his shirt, “because it absorbs the sweat and so I don’t catch my death of cold from all these draughts”. An extreme variant of this category is constituted by those who wear singlets even under a T-shirt.
A man in a singlet has an imitation-leather pouch for his mobile, with a hook to attach it to his belt. In the afternoon he gets home and puts on pyjamas. He keeps his old e-tacs mobile because those are the ones that still work best. He sucks mints to sweeten his breath, uses talcum powder and mouthwash.
Sometimes he has a condom hidden in his wallet, but he never uses it and sooner or later his wife discovers it and gives him hell.
A man in a singlet uses phrases such as: nowadays it’s impossible to park in the centre of town; nowadays the young have no interests except discothèques and video games; I have nothing against homosexuals/ gays/queers/faggots/fairies as long as they leave me alone; if someone is a homosexual/gay/queer/ faggot/fairy, he can do as he pleases but he can’t be a schoolteacher; sincerest condolences; there’s no difference between right and left wing, they’re all thieves; I know when the weather’s going to change because I get a pain in my elbow/knee/ankle/corns; we learn by our mistakes; at the end of the day; I don’t talk behind people’s backs, I say it straight out; only fools work; worse than wetting your bed; don’t dig your grave with your knife and fork; where there’s life there’s hope; it seems like yesterday; I must decide to learn how to use the Internet/go to the gym/go on a diet/get my bicycle going/give up smoking etc., etc., etc.
It goes without saying that a man in a singlet says there are no longer any intermediate seasons and that the dry heat/cold is no problem, it’s not so much the heat/cold, it’s the humidity.
The man in a singlet’s swearwords: oh sugar, shoot, drat it, oh flip, bloomin’ heck, well I’ll be jiggered, ruddy hell, for Pete’s sake, naff off, eff off.
Anyone who knew him would have agreed. Cervellati was a man in a singlet.
One of his few merits was that of being in the office every morning by half-past eight. Unlike almost all his colleagues.
I knocked at his door, heard no invitation to come in, opened the door and looked in.
Cervellati raised his eyes from a tattered dossier on a desk covered with other rather grubby dossiers, codices, files, an ashtray with half a Tuscan cigar that had gone out. As usual the room stank a bit: dust and stale cigar smoke.
“Good morning, Mr Prosecutor,” I said with all the fake affability I could muster.
“Good morning, Avvocato.” He did not ask me to come in. Behind his glasses and the barrier of dossiers his face was devoid of any expression.
I entered the room, asking if I could come in and not expecting an answer, which indeed I never got.
“Mr Prosecutor, I have been appointed by Signor Thiam, whom you will certainly remember-”
“You mean the nigger who killed the boy in Monopoli.”
Evidently he did remember. In a few days’ time he would announce that the preliminary investigations were concluded and I would be able to view the documents and make copies. He had no doubt at all that I would ask for the shortened procedure, which would save time for everyone. Perhaps I had not noticed, by a mere oversight, that the charge did not contain the aggravating circumstances of “the teleological nexus” that could trigger a life sentence. If we opted for the shortened procedure, without those aggravating circumstances, my client could get off with as little as twenty years. If we went to the Assize Court he – Cervellati – would have to include those circumstances in the charge and for Abdou Thiam the door to life imprisonment would stand wide open.
He declared his innocence? So did they all.
He thought of me as a serious person and was sure I would not conceive any wrong ideas, such as going to the Assizes in the absurd hope of getting an acquittal. Abdou Thiam would be found guilty anyway, and a court of judges and jury would tear him to shreds. In any case he – Cervellati – had no intention of wasting weeks or even months in the Assize Court.
The shortened procedure is one of the things which in the trade are known as special procedures. As a rule, when the public prosecutor concludes the inquiries in a murder case he asks the judge for the preliminary hearing to commit the accused for trial.
The preliminary hearing serves to verify whether there are sufficient prerequisites for a trial, which, in the case of murder, falls within the competence of the Court of Assizes, composed of both professional judges and a sworn-in jury. If the judge for the preliminary hearing considers that these prerequisites exist, he orders the committal for trial.
The accused, however, has an opportunity to avoid being sent up to the Court of Assizes and to get himself a simplified trial, and this is the shortened procedure.
At the preliminary hearing he can ask, either directly or through his defending counsel, that the trial be determined within what is called the state of the acts. This means that the judge for the preliminary hearing, basing his judgement on the documents provided by the public prosecutor, decides whether there is sufficient evidence to convict the accused. If he finds that such evidence exists, he finds the accused guilty.
It is a far swifter procedure than a normal trial. No witnesses are heard and, except in rare instances, no new evidence is acquired. The public is not admitted and the case is decided by one judge sitting alone. In short, it is an abbreviated procedure that saves the state a great deal of time and money.
Of course, the accused also has an interest in choosing this kind of trial. If convicted, he has the right to a considerable reduction in his sentence. To put it in a nutshell, the state saves money and the accused saves years in prison.
This shortened procedure has another advantage. It is ideal when the accused hasn’t much money and cannot afford long hearings, witnesses, experts, examinations and cross-examinations, summings-up, lengthy harangues and so on and so forth.
Opting for the shortened procedure, the accused clearly loses numerous chances of being acquitted, because everything is based on the documents provided by the public prosecutor and the police, who, as a rule, work to get their man, not to let him go.
However, when for the accused the chances of acquittal are few or none even in a normal trial, then the reduced sentence is a really attractive prospect.
From all points of view, therefore, the shortened procedure seemed ideal for Abdou Thiam, who truly had very slim chances of being acquitted.
“Read the indictment and you’ll see that it’s better for all concerned to do it the short way,” concluded Cervellati, dismissing me.
Outside it was raining. A fine, dense, perfectly odious rain.
I was just getting to my feet when Cervellati said it: “Nasty weather, this. I have no trouble with dry cold, perhaps with a fine sunset thrown in. It’s this damp cold that gets into your bones…” He looked at me. I could have said quite a number of things, some of them even amusing from my point of view. Instead I gave a sigh: “It’s the same as with heat, Mr Prosecutor. It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.”
After the meeting with Cervellati I attended a hearing and negotiated a settlement for a woman accused of fraudulent bankruptcy.
In point of fact, the woman had nothing to do with the bankruptcy, the insolvency, the firm or the law. The real owner of the firm was her husband, who had already gone bust once and had a record of swindling, embezzlement and indecent behaviour.
He had registered his fertilizer business in his wife’s name, had made her sign masses of promissory notes, had not paid his workers, had not paid his electricity bills, had not paid his telephone bills, but had raided the till.
Naturally the firm had gone bust and the titular owner had been accused of fraudulent bankruptcy. The husband had chivalrously allowed justice to take its course and his wife to be found guilty, albeit with plea-bargaining.
I had been paid the week before, without submitting an invoice. With the money from the till or acquired from goodness knows what other swindle on the part of Signor De Carne.
One of the first things you learn as a criminal lawyer, especially when dealing with types like De Carne, is to get paid in advance.
Obviously you are almost always, or at least very often, paid with money obtained by criminal means.
It shouldn’t really be mentioned, but when you defend a professional pusher who pays you ten, twenty, even thirty million if you manage to get him out of prison, well, you’re bound to have some vague doubt about the source of that money.
If you are defending a man arrested for persistent extortion in complicity with persons unknown, and his friends come to the office and tell you not to worry about the fee, they’ll take care of it, here too you can make a guess that that fee will not be composed of spotlessly clean money.
Let me make it clear that I was no better than the rest of them, even if I did sometimes try to retain a morsel of dignity. Not with types like De Carne, however.
In short, I had in any case been paid in advance with money from an unknown – and dubious – source, I had concluded a decorous plea-bargaining that at least guaranteed the poor woman a suspended sentence, and as far as that morning was concerned I could go home.
I took advantage of a lull in the rain, did my shopping, reached my apartment and had hardly begun to make myself a salad when my mobile rang.
Yes, I was Guido. Of course I remembered her, Melissa. Yes, at dinner with Renato. It had been a very pleasant evening. Liar. No, I didn’t mind that she’d got hold of my mobile number, far from it. Did I know who Acid Steel were? Sorry, I didn’t. Ah, well there was a concert of this Acid Steel lot in Bari this evening. Well, near Bari anyway. Would I like to go along with her? Yes, but what about tickets? Ah, she had two tickets, in fact two invitations. Fine. Then it’s agreed, tell me your address and I’ll pick you up. You’ll come here? Very well. Ah, you already know where I live. Very good, this evening at eight, yes, don’t worry, I won’t dress like a lawyer. Ciao. Ciao.
I remembered Melissa very well. About ten days previously my friend Renato, a former hippie now working in the art side of advertising, was celebrating his fortieth birthday. Melissa had arrived in the company of a stumpy little chartered accountant wearing black trousers, a black elasticated pullover, a black Armani-style jacket, and black hair long over the ears, non-existent on top.
She had not passed unobserved. Levantine face, five foot eight, quite unsettling curves. Even an apparently intelligent expression.
The accountant thought he had picked an ace that evening. But instead he had the two of spades with clubs as trumps. No sooner had she entered than Melissa was on friendly terms with practically every male at the party.
She had chatted with me too, no more and no less than with the others, it seemed to me. She had shown interest in the fact that I boxed. She had told me that she was studying biology, that she was going to do postgraduate studies in France, that I was a charming fellow, that I didn’t seem like a lawyer at all and that we’d certainly be meeting again.
Then she went on to the next one.
Time was – a year before – when I would have dashed to retrieve her from the jungle of illintentioned males who populated the party. I would have thought up something, given her my mobile number, tried to invent excuses for meeting again as soon as possible. And the inky-cloaked accountant could drop dead. He, however, was actively engaged in knocking back one cocktail after another, so he would soon be dead of cirrhosis anyway.
But that evening I did nothing about it.
When the party ended I’d gone home and gone to bed. When I woke up after the usual four hours, Melissa was already far, far away, practically invisible.
Now, ten days later, she called me on my mobile to invite me to a concert by Acid Steel, who were playing in Bari. Or rather, near Bari. Just like that.
I had an odd feeling. For a moment I was tempted to ring back and say no, I unfortunately had another engagement. Sorry, it had slipped my mind, perhaps some other time.
Then I said out loud, “Brother, you’re going really mad. Really mad. You go to this bloody Acid Steel concert and let’s put an end to this nonsense. You’re thirty-eight years old and have a pretty long life-expectancy. D’you think you’re going to spend it all like this? Go to this bloody concert and be thankful.”
Melissa arrived punctually a few minutes after eight. She was on foot and her attire was an incitement to crime.
She said that her car wouldn’t start but that she’d come into the centre anyway, and was wondering if we had time to get mine. We did. We got the car and set off in the direction of Taranto.
The concert was in a small, disused industrial warehouse out in the country between Turi and Rutigliano. I’d never have been able to get there on my own.
The atmosphere in the place was semi-clandestine. Some of the audience looked clandestine without the semi.
Luckily, one was not forbidden to smoke.
One was not forbidden to smoke anything.
And in fact they were smoking everything and drinking beer. The air was dense with the stench of smoke, beer, beery breath and sweaty armpits. No one was laughing and many seemed absorbed in a dark, mysterious ritual from which I – fortunately – was excluded.
I began to feel uneasy, and the impulse to make a run for it grew and grew.
Melissa talked to everyone and knew everyone. Or maybe she was simply doing a repeat performance of Renato’s party. In that case, I thought, I was in the accountant’s shoes. The impulse to cut and run redoubled. Worry. Worry. I felt prying eyes on me. More worry.
Then, luckily, Acid Steel started to play.
I have no wish to talk about the two hours of uninterrupted so-called music, partly because my most intense recollection is not the sounds but the smells. The beer, the cigarettes, the joints, the sweat and I don’t know what else seemed more and more to fill the air of that gloomy warehouse. For a moment I even had the absurd notion that from one minute to the next it would explode, hurling that deadly cocktail of stenches off into space. The positive aspect of this eventuality was that Acid Steel – whose visible perspiration led one to suppose that they made a determining contribution to the fetor – would also be hurled into space and no one would hear of them ever again.
The warehouse did not explode. Melissa drank five or six beers and smoked several cigarettes. I am not sure that they were only cigarettes, because it was pesky dark and the source of the smells – including that of joints – was indefinable. At a certain point I seemed to see her wash down a few pills with her beer.
I confined myself to smoking my cigarettes and drinking the occasional sip of beer from the bottles Melissa handed me.
When the concert came to an end I refrained from buying the Acid Steel CD on sale at the exit.
Melissa greeted a bunch of characters with whom I feared we might have to spend the evening, but then she took my hand. In the darkness of the churned-up field that served as a car park I felt the blood rush to my face, and elsewhere.
“Shall we go and have a drink?” she gurgled in a strangely suggestive voice, meanwhile stroking the back of my hand with her thumb.
“Maybe we could eat something too.” I was thinking of the pints of beer already swilling about inside her and of the other unspecified psychoactive substances circulating in her blood and among the neurones.
“You bet. I really feel like something sweet. A crêpe with Nutella or with cream and a dark chocolate sauce.”
We returned to Bari and went to the Gauguin, where they made very good crêpes, were polite and nice, and had beautiful photographs on the walls. It was a place I had often been to when I was with Sara, and had not visited since. That evening was the first time.
No sooner inside than I was sorry I’d come. Familiar faces at every table. Some I had to greet, all knew who I was.
Between the tables, the owner and the waiters staring at us. Staring at me. I could hear the wheels turning in their heads. I knew they’d gossip about me now. I felt like a squalid forty-year-old who takes out teenagers.
Melissa, meanwhile, was relaxed and talking non-stop.
I chose a crêpe with ham, walnuts and mascarpone, plus a small bottle of beer. Melissa had two sweet crêpes, the first with Nutella, hazelnuts and banana, the second with ricotta, raisins and melted chocolate. She drank three glasses of Calvados. She talked a lot. Two or three times she touched my hand. Once, while talking, she suddenly stopped and gave me an intense look, almost imperceptibly biting her lower lip.
They’re shooting with a hidden camera, I thought. This girl is an actress, there’s a TV camera somewhere, now I’ll say or do something ridiculous and someone will pop out and tell me to smile at the audience.
No one popped out. I paid the bill, we left, reached the car and I started up. Melissa said we could round off the evening by having a drink at her place.
“No thanks. You’re an alcoholic and maybe something worse. I shall now take you home, I won’t come up, and then I’ll go home to bed.” That’s what I should have said.
“I’d love to. Maybe just a drop and then we’ll get some sleep because tomorrow is a working day.” I said exactly that: “maybe just a drop”.
Melissa gave me a kiss on the corner of my mouth, lingering over it. She smelt of booze, smoke and a strong perfume that reminded me of something. Then she said that she didn’t have much at home and so we’d better go to a bar and buy a few beers.
I wasn’t entirely easy in my mind but I stopped in front of an all-night bar, got out and bought two beers. To prevent the situation from degenerating.
She lived in an old block of council flats near the television studios. The sort of building populated by five or six foreigners living in one room, old council tenants (a species on the verge of extinction) and students away from home. Melissa came from Minervino Murge.
The entrance had a very dim bulb that shed no light whatever. Melissa lived on the first floor and the stairs smelt of cat pee.
She opened the door and went in first, with me following her into the darkness. Stuffiness and stale cigarette smoke.
When the light went on I saw I was in a minute hallway that gave onto a study-cum-bedroom on the left. On the right was a closed door that I took to be the bathroom.
“Where is the kitchen?” was my fatuous thought of the moment. And at the same instant she took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom/study/living room. There was a bed against the wall opposite the door, a desk, books everywhere. Books on shelves, stacks of books on the floor, books on the desk, books scattered here and there. There was an old radio-tape recorder, an ashtray containing two squashed filters, a few empty beer bottles and a nearly empty bottle of J &B whisky.
The books ought to have reassured me.
When I enter a house for the first time I check on whether there are books, if they are few, if they are many, if they are too neatly arranged – which is a bad sign – or if they are all over the place – which is a good sign, and so on.
The books in Melissa’s tiny home should have given me a good impression. But they didn’t.
“Do sit down,” said Melissa, pointing to the bed.
I sat, she opened the beers, handed me one and drank more than half of hers without taking the neck of the bottle from her lips. I took a sip, just to show willing. My brain was searching frantically for an excuse to escape. After all, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, I had to work the following day, we had had a pleasant evening, we would certainly be seeing each other again, don’t worry I’ll call you, and anyway I’ve got a slight headache. No, there’s nothing the matter except the fact that you’re an alcoholic, a drug addict, probably a nymphomaniac and I want to cry. I’ll call you, really I will.
While I was struggling to think up something less pathetic, Melissa – who in another single gulp had finished her beer – slipped off her panties (black) from under her skirt.
She didn’t want to waste too much time on preliminaries and other boring formalities. So much was obvious.
And in fact there were no formalities.
I stayed in that place, what with this and that, until nearly daylight.
While she smoked and finished the bottle of whisky she recited the difficulties of living away from home with next to nothing coming from her parents. Of paying the month’s rent, of eating – and of drinking, I thought – of buying cigarettes, clothes, paying for the mobile, having the odd evening out. And books, of course. The occasional job – hostess, public relations – hardly ever brought in enough.
That month, for example, she was already late with the rent, had an exam to prepare for, and the landlady waiting for nothing better than an excuse to chuck her out.
If she wouldn’t be offended, I could lend her a little. No, she wouldn’t be offended, but I had to promise that I’d make her pay it back. Of course, don’t worry. No, I haven’t got half a million in cash, but look, here’s 220,000 in my wallet, I’ll keep the twenty just in case. Don’t worry about it, you’ll let me have it back when you can, there’s no hurry. I really must go now, because tomorrow, that is today, I have to work.
She gave me her mobile number. Of course I’ll call you, I said, screwing up the slip of paper in my pocket, wrenching open the door and fleeing like a scalded cat.
Outside was a leaden dawn, a mouse-coloured sky. The puddles were so black they reflected nothing.
My eyes reflected nothing either.
There came to mind a film I had seen a couple of years before, The Ghost and the Darkness, a splendid yarn about big-game hunters and lions.
Val Kilmer asks Michael Douglas, “Have you ever failed?”
The reply: “Only in life.”
The next day I changed my sim-card and mobile phone number.
The days that followed that night were not memorable.
About a week passed, then we were notified that the inquiries were concluded.
At eight-thirty next morning I was in Cervellati’s secretariat to request copies of the file. I made the application, they told me that I could have copies within three days and I left the offices prey to pessimism.
On the Friday my secretary called at the public prosecutor’s office, paid the fees, collected the copies and brought them to the office.
I spent Saturday and Sunday reading and re-reading those papers.
I read, smoked, and drank big cups of weak decaffeinated coffee.
I read, smoked, and what I read I didn’t like a bit. Abdou Thiam was in a pretty pickle.
It was even worse than I’d thought when I read the detention order.
It looked like one of those cases without any prospects, in which going to the Assizes could lead only to a pointless massacre.
It looked as if Cervellati was right and that the only way of reducing the damage was to opt for the shortened procedure.
The thing that nailed my client most of all was the testimony of the barman. He had made a statement to the carabinieri the day before Abdou was arrested. He had been heard again, a few days later, by the public prosecutor in person.
A perfect witness – for the prosecution.
I read and re-read the two reports, on the look-out for any weak points, but I found almost nothing.
That of the carabinieri was a summary report written in the most classic police-station jargon.
On the 10th day of August 1999 at 19.30 hours, in the offices of the Operations Unit of the Carabinieri of Monopoli, before the undermentioned non-commissioned officers of the criminal police Sergeant-Major Lorussa Antonio, Sergeant Sciancalepore Pasquale and Lance-Corporal Amendolagine Francesco, all of whom are attached to the aforementioned Command, there appeared Antonio Renna, born Noci (Bari) 31.3.1953, resident in Monopoli, Contrada Gorgofreddo 133/c, who when properly questioned as to facts falling within his cognizance stated as follows:
Witness replied: I am the proprietor of the commercial premises denominated “Bar Maracaibo” situated in Contrada Capitolo, Monopoli. During the summer months my premises remain open from seven in the morning until nine at night. In the management of the aforesaid commercial concern I am assisted by my wife and two of my children.
Witness replied: I was acquainted with little Francesco Rubino and in particular with his grandparents, who are proprietors of a villa situated at a distance of approximately 300 yards from my bar. They have been spending holidays in Contrada Capitolo for many years. The grandfather of the child frequently visits my bar to purchase and consume a coffee and smoke a cigarette.
Witness replied: I am acquainted with the non-European citizen whom you inform me is named Abdou Thiam and whom I recognize in the photograph you have submitted for my inspection. He deals in counterfeit leather goods and passes nearly every day in front of my bar on his way to the beaches where he sells his wares. On occasion he visits my bar to take refreshment.
Witness replied: I recall having observed the aforesaid non-European citizen on the afternoon of the boy’s disappearance. He passed in front of my commercial premises without the bag which he habitually carries with him and he was walking rapidly as if in haste. He did not stop at the bar.
Witness replied: The non-European citizen was proceeding in a northerly-southerly direction. In effect, he was coming from the direction of Monopoli and proceeding towards the beaches.
Witness replied: The house of the missing boy’s grandparents is situated at about 300 yards south with respect to my bar. If I am not mistaken, it stands almost opposite Duna Beach.
Witness replied: I am unable to indicate with any precision the hour at which I saw the non-European citizen pass. It might be between 18.00 and 18.30 hours or perhaps even 19.00 hours.
Witness replied: I did not observe the non-European citizen pass on his way back in the opposite direction. That day I did not see him again at all.
Witness replied: If I remember rightly, I learned of the disappearance of the child the day subsequent to the fact. Before being summoned by you carabinieri I had not been aware of being in possession of information relevant to the inquiries, and that is to say it had not occurred to me to connect the passing of Thiam that afternoon with the disappearance of the child. If it had occurred to me, I would have presented myself of my own accord to collaborate with the law.
I have nothing more to add and in witness thereof I append my signature.
Cognizance is taken of the fact that the present statement, due to the unavailability of recording equipment, has been drawn up only in summary form.
Read, confirmed and undersigned.
The evidence given to Cervellati was complete, in the sense that it was recorded and stenotyped. Here the person in possession of the facts did not use improbable expressions such as “the aforesaid commercial premises” or “purchase and consume a coffee”. But the upshot was the same.
On 13 August 1999 at 11.00 hours, in the offices of the Public Prosecutor, and before the Prosecutor Dr Giovanni Cervellati, assisted in the drafting of the present document by legal clerk Biancofiore Giuseppe, there appeared Antonio Renna, whose particulars are already documented.
It is here noted that the present statement will be documented in full by means of shorthand typing.
Question: Well then, Signor Renna, some days ago you made a statement to the carabinieri. The first thing I want to ask you is whether you confirm it. You remember what you said, don’t you?
Answer: Yes, yes, sir.
Question: So you confirm it?
Answer: Yes, I confirm it.
Question: Let us, however, recapitulate what you said. In the first place, I take it you already knew the non-European citizen Abdou Thiam?
Answer: Yes, sir. Not by name, though. The name I learned from the carabinieri. I recognized him from the photograph they showed me.
Question: You know him because he often passed in front of your bar and on some occasions had something to drink. Is that so?
Answer: Yes, sir.
Question: Would you care to tell me about the day the child disappeared? That day, that afternoon or evening, you saw Thiam, didn’t you?
Answer: Yes, sir. He passed my bar between half-past six and seven.
Question: Did he have his bag of goods?
Answer: No, he didn’t have the bag and he was rushing along.
Question: Do you mean that he was running or that he was in a hurry?
Answer: No, he was hurrying. It wasn’t that he was exactly running, but he was walking quickly.
Question: In which direction was he going?
Answer: Towards the beaches, which is more or less the direction to take to the child’s grandparents’ house-
Question: All right, towards the beaches. That means from north to south, if I have understood correctly.
Answer: Yes, from Monopoli towards the beaches. Question: Did you see him pass on the way back?
Answer: No.
Question: You told the carabinieri that you knew the boy, and his family also, particularly the grandparents. Do you confirm this?
Answer: Yes, I confirm it. The grandparents have a villa 300 or 400 yards past my bar, more or less in the direction the young Moroccan was going.
Question: Moroccan?
Answer: Non-European citizen then. We use the word Moroccan for all these young niggers.
Question: Ah, I see. Do you recall any other detail, any other fact relevant to the inquiries?
Answer: No, sir, but in my opinion it absolutely must have been that Moroccan because-
Question: No, Signor Renna, you must not express personal opinions. If some other fact comes to mind well and good, if not we can bring this statement to an end. Does any other specific fact come to mind?
Answer: No.
Abdou’s interrogation by the public prosecutor was little less than catastrophic.
It had taken place at night, in the carabinieri station in Bari, with a defence lawyer appointed by the court.
The report was a summary, without recording or stenotyped record.
On 11 August 1999, at 01.30 hours, in the offices of the Operations Unit of the Carabinieri of Bari, before the Public Prosecutor Dr Giovanni Cervellati, assisted in the drafting of the present statement by Sergeant Sciancalepore Pasquale, attached to the Carabinieri of Monopoli, there appeared Abdou Thiam, born 4 March 1968 in Dakar, Senegal, and domiciled in Bari, Via Ettore Fieramosca 162.
Note is made of the presence of Avvocato Giovanni Colella, appointed for this occasion by the court to defend the said Thiam, the latter not having chosen to appoint a lawyer of his own.
The Public Prosecutor charges the said Abdou Thiam with the offences of unlawful restraint and murder of Francesco Rubino and gives him a summary of the evidence against him.
He informs him that he has the right not to answer questions, but that the inquiries will continue even if he does not answer.
The suspect states: I intend to answer and expressly renounce any time for defence.
Counsel for defence has no observation to make.
In answer to questioning, the suspect replies: I deny the charges. I am not acquainted with any Francesco Rubino. This name means nothing to me.
Suspect replies: On the afternoon of August 5th I believe I went to Naples in my car. I went to visit some fellow countrymen of mine whose names I am, however, unable to indicate. We met, as on other occasions, in the neighbourhood of the Central Station. I am unable to provide useful indications for the identification of these fellow countrymen of mine and I am unable to indicate anyone in a position to confirm that I was in Naples that day.
Suspect replies: I refuse to admit that I went to Monopoli that day. When I returned from Naples, I remained in Bari.
Suspect replies: I take cognizance of the fact that Your Excellency points out to me that the version I have provided appears totally unworthy of credit. I can only confirm that I went to Naples that day and never went at all to Monopoli or adjacent areas.
Suspect replies: I take cognizance of the fact that there is a witness who saw me in the vicinity of Capitolo on the very afternoon of August 5th. I take cognizance of Your Excellency’s advice that I should make a confession. I take cognizance of the fact that by confessing I might mitigate my situation. I must, however, confirm that I did not commit the murder of which I am accused and do not understand how anyone says that they saw me on August 5th in the vicinity of Capitolo.
At this point it is placed on record that the suspect is shown a photograph found in his lodgings in the course of the search there carried out.
Having viewed the aforesaid photograph, Thiam states:
I know the boy portrayed in the photo but I learn only now that his name is Francesco Rubino. I knew him by the name of Ciccio.
When questioned, the suspect replies: It was the little boy who gave me the photograph. It wasn’t me who took the snap. I don’t even own a camera.
At 02.30 hours the taking of the record is suspended to enable the suspect to consult with his defence counsel.
At 03.20 hours the record is resumed.
When questioned, the suspect replies: Even after talking to the lawyer – who advised me to tell the truth – I have nothing to add to the statements I have already made.
The defence had no observations to make.
Read, confirmed and signed.
Two days after his arrest, the hearing took place before the magistrate in charge of preliminary investigations. Abdou had availed himself of the right not to reply.
Since then he had not been further interrogated.
I re-read the order for precautionary detention. I read the decision of the regional appeals court by which – rightly, in view of the evidence – Abdou’s appeal was rejected.
I read and re-read every single document.
The statements of the habitués of that beach who said they had often seen Abdou stop and talk to the child. The statements of the Senegalese who spoke about the car-washing and the other Senegalese who had said that he had not seen Abdou at the usual beach the day after the child’s disappearance.
The scene-of-the-crime report about the finding of the boy’s body. The report of the search of Abdou’s home and the list of books confiscated.
The report of the police doctor, which I leafed through swiftly, avoiding the photographs.
The upsetting, useless statements of the boy’s parents and grandparents.
On the Sunday evening my eyes were smarting and I left the flat. The mistral was blowing and it was cold.
That pitiless cold peculiar to March, which makes spring seem a long way off.
I had thought of taking a stroll, but I changed my mind, fetched the car and headed north along the old State Road No. 16.
Bruce Springsteen was booming from the loudspeakers and in my head as I drove through the coastal towns, all deserted and swept by the north-west wind.
I stopped in front of the cathedral in Trani, facing the sea. I lit a cigarette. The harmonica screeched in my ears and in my soul.
The terrible words were written especially for my desperate solitude.
But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse.
At dawn I woke up shivering with cold, the taste of tobacco smoke in my mouth. My hand was still clutching the mobile, which I’d stared at interminably before falling asleep, thinking of calling Sara.
The code of criminal procedure requires that at least twenty days elapse between the announcement that inquiries have been concluded and the application for committal for trial. The public prosecutors nearly always take much longer. Months, sometimes.
Cervellati filed the request for committal on the twenty-first day. Obsessive punctuality was typical of him. You could accuse him of practically everything, but not of letting documents stack up on his desk.
The preliminary hearing was fixed for early May. The judge was Ms Carenza, and all in all it could have been worse.
Among us defence lawyers La Carenza was considered one of the good ones. The shortened procedure became an increasingly interesting possibility. Abdou really did have a chance of getting off with twenty years.
In about 2010, with good conduct, he would be out on parole.
While I was having these thoughts, still holding the note with the date of the hearing, I had an uneasy feeling. A feeling that stayed with me all day long, without my being able to find a reason for it.
The same uneasy feeling took hold of me when, a week later, I had to visit Abdou in prison to explain to him why it was to his advantage to accept the shortened procedure, take twenty years or so instead of life, and begin chalking up the days on the wall of his cell.
Abdou was, or seemed, thinner than last time. He didn’t want to tell me how he had come by the enormous bruise on his right cheekbone. As he listened to what I had to say, he looked at the grainy lines in the wooden table, without making a single gesture suggesting that he’d understood or wondered what I was talking about. Not so much as a nod. Nothing.
When I had finished explaining what was the best solution for his case, Abdou remained silent for several minutes. I offered him a Marlboro but he didn’t take it. Instead he pulled out a packet of Diana Red and lit one of those.
He spoke only when he had finished the cigarette and the silence was becoming unbearable.
“If we choose the shortened procedure, have I any chance of being acquitted?”
He was just too intelligent. With the shortened procedure he would be found guilty for sure. I had not told him that but he knew implicitly.
I felt awkward as I replied.
“Technically, yes. Theoretically, yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that in theory the judge could acquit you, but on the basis of what is in the documents produced by the public prosecutor, which is what the judge will base her decision on if we opt for the shortened procedure, it is extremely unlikely.”
I paused, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t feel like beating about the bush.
“Let’s say that it’s practically impossible. On the other hand, with the shortened procedure you’d avoid-”
“Yes, I’ve understood that. I’d avoid a life sentence. In other words, if we choose the shortened procedure I am certain to be convicted but they’ll give me a discount. Isn’t that it?”
My embarrassment grew. I felt the blood rising to my face.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“And if we don’t choose this shortened procedure, what happens then?”
“You will be committed for trial before the Court of Assizes. This means you will be tried in public before two judges, and six jurors, who are ordinary citizens. If you are found guilty by the Court of Assizes, you are in danger of life imprisonment.”
“But I do have a chance of being acquitted?”
“A slender one.”
“But more than with the shortened procedure?”
I didn’t answer at once. I took a deep breath. I passed a hand across my face.
“More. Not much more, but more. Bear in mind the fact that with the shortened procedure you are practically certain of being found guilty, whereas before the Court of Assizes something can always happen. All the witnesses have to be questioned by the public prosecutor and then we can cross-examine them. That means that I, as your counsel, can cross-examine them. One of them might not confirm his evidence, one of them might contradict himself, some new factor might arise. But it is a very grave risk.”
“What are my chances?”
“Hard to give a figure. A 5 or 10 per cent chance at the best.”
“Why do you want to choose the shortened way?”
“What do you mean, why? Because it’s the thing that suits the case best. With this judge you get off with the lightest possible sentence, and in-”
“I didn’t do what they say I did.”
I took another deep breath, got out a cigarette. I didn’t know what to say, so naturally I said the wrong thing.
“Listen, Abdou. I don’t know what you’ve done. But for a lawyer it can be better not to know what his client has done. This helps him to be more lucid, to make better decisions without allowing himself to be influenced by emotion. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
Abdou gave an imperceptible nod. His eyes seemed to have sunk into their black orbits. Averting my gaze, I continued.
“If we don’t opt for the shortened procedure, if we go before the Assize Court, it’s as if we were playing cards with your life, with very few chances of winning. And then, to play it that way takes money, lots of money. A trial before the Assize Court takes a long time and costs a great deal.”
I realized I had said something stupid even as the words were coming out of my mouth. And at the same time I realized why I was uneasy in my mind.
“You mean that because I can’t pay enough money it’s better to opt for the shortened procedure. Is that it?”
“I didn’t say that.” My tone of voice went up a notch.
“How much money does it take to have a trial before the Court of Assizes?”
“The money is not the problem. The problem is that if we go before the Assize Court you’ll get a life sentence and your life is finished.”
“My life is finished anyway if they convict me for killing a child. How much money?”
I suddenly felt dead tired. An enormous, irresistible weariness came over me. I let my shoulders slump and realized then how tense they had been until that moment.
“Not less than forty or fifty million. If we wanted to make investigations for the defence – and in this case we would probably need them – a good deal more.”
Abdou seemed stunned. He swallowed, with some difficulty, and gave the impression of wanting to say something but failing. Then he began to follow a train of thought from which I was excluded. He looked up, shook his head, then moved his lips in the recitation of some soundless, mysterious litany.
In the end he covered his face with his hands, rubbed them up and down two or three times, then lowered them and looked me in the face again. He said nothing.
I had an unbearable buzzing in my ears and spoke chiefly to drown it.
We didn’t have to decide that very morning. There was still a month left before the preliminary hearing, when we might or might not opt for the shortened procedure. And then we had to talk to Abajaje. The question of money was the least of our problems. I would give the documents another reading, look for other rays of hope. Right now I had to be off, but we’d meet again soon. If he needed anything he could let me know, even by telegram.
Abdou said not a word. When I touched his shoulder in greeting I felt a body totally inert.
I escaped, pursued by his phantoms. And my own.
When I left home the next morning I realized there was a removal in progress. New tenants were moving in to our building. I registered the fact in my mind and uttered a quick prayer that we were not getting a family with Pomeranian dogs and rowdy children. Then my thoughts turned to other matters.
That day was to see the beginning of a trial that the newspapers had dubbed “Dogfighting”.
To be exact, it was not the papers which called it that, but the police who had carried out the operation some ten months previously. The papers had confined themselves to repeating the code name for investigations into organized dogfights and the related clandestine betting ring.
It had all started with a denouncement by the Anti-Vivisection League and had continued because the inquiries had been entrusted to a truly exceptional policeman, Chief Inspector Carmelo Tancredi.
Inspector Tancredi had succeeded in infiltrating the clandestine betting ring, had attended the dogfights, made recordings, managed to find out where the breeders kept their animals, and noted how and where the bets changed hands. In short, he had nailed them.
He was a small man with a gaunt face and a large black moustache that looked completely out of place on it. He seemed the most innocuous person on earth.
He was, in fact, the most intelligent, honest and deadly cop I have ever met.
He worked in the sixth section of the flying squad. The one that dealt with sexual offences and everything that the other sections – the more important ones – wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.
He had always refused to leave that job, even though they had often tried to induce him to transfer to the Criminalpol, the anti-drug section or even the Secret Service. All jobs in which he would have worked less for more pay.
On one occasion I’d had a visit from the parents of a nine-year-old child who had been sexually abused by his swimming instructor.
They wanted advice on whether or not to report the incident, on what they would be up against if they did, and especially what the child would be up against. I took them to Tancredi and saw how he spoke to the child, and saw how the child – who until then had answered in monosyllables, never raising his eyes – spoke in turn to Tancredi, looked him in the face and even began to smile.
The swimming instructor ended up behind bars and, what’s more, stayed there. Just as ending up behind bars and staying there was the fate of most of the maniacs, rapists and child abusers who had had the bad luck to cross the path of Inspector Tancredi.
The organizers of the dogfights were similarly unlucky.
The first strike of the operation led to the seizure of eight pit-bull terriers, five Fila Brasileros, three Rottweilers and three bandogs, these last being a deadly cross between Alsatian and pit bull. They were all champions, each worth between twenty and a hundred million. The most priceless was a three-year-old bandog called Harley-Davidson. He had won twenty-seven fights, invariably killing his opponent. He was considered a sort of champion of southern Italy, and the inquiries established that there were preparations in hand for a contest for the All-Italy title against a pit bull which fought in the Province of Milan. A contest worth over half a billion lire in bets.
Dozens of videos of dogfights, not to mention fights between dogs and pumas, and even dogs and pigs, were confiscated as well. The owners of a kennels, where not only the animals but also arms and drugs were found, were arrested. Among those charged were a very well-known vet, a number of breeders and three people who had previously been arrested and found guilty on charges of association with the Mafia and trafficking in drugs. Needless to say, they had all been released, because the length of time for which they could be held had run out.
Anyway, that late March morning the trial resulting from Operation Dogfighting was scheduled to begin. The Anti-Vivisection League planned to start civil proceedings and had appointed me to represent them.
There were only two precedents of trials concerning cruelty to animals in which the Anti-Vivisection League and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dogs had been admitted as civil parties. The matter was anything but a walkover, so I’d had to work hard the previous afternoon to find convincing arguments to present in court. And to clear my mind of the meeting with Abdou.
Purely because I was well-prepared that morning and ready to do my job in a professional fashion, the preliminary hearing was immediately adjourned on account of – in the words of the same old formula that was always used – “the excessive workload involved in the hearing and the impossibility of concluding all the proceedings at today’s date”.
The adjournment was immediate, but it was ordered only after four hours of hearing. And waiting.
In short, at about half-past two in the afternoon, the judge read out the formula and adjourned the trial until December, since, as all the defendants were at liberty, there was no hurry.
I was used to it. I donned my raincoat, picked up my briefcase, made my way through the now deserted law courts and set off for home.
I was walking along Via Abate Gimma, towards Corso Cavour, when I heard myself called from behind, “Avvocato, Avvocato”, in an accent from somewhere inland which I couldn’t place.
There were two of them, and they seemed to have stepped straight out of a documentary on suburban thuggery. The smaller one came up very close and spoke, while the bigger one hung back a little and looked at me through half-closed eyes, as if measuring me up.
The small man was a friend of – he said the name – whom I knew well because he had been a client of mine.
His voice conveyed a forced, almost diplomatic politeness. I said I had no recollection of his friend and that if they wanted to speak about professional matters they could make an appointment and come to the office.
They had no wish to come to the office and, according to the small man, I should stay calm. Very calm. The diplomatic tone hadn’t lasted long.
They knew that I intended to represent those arse-holes of the Anti-Vivisection League, but it was better for all concerned if I minded my own business.
I took a deep breath through the nose, at the same time placing my briefcase on the bonnet of a car, then pronounced the four syllables which, ever since I was a child, had always been the prelude to a street fight: “What if I don’t?”
The small man opened with a wide, clumsy blow with his right. I parried with my left and almost simultaneously delivered a straight right to the face. He fell back, cursing and calling to his friend to give me the works.
The big man was a lumbering great oaf, six foot four and eighteen stone at a guess, much of it paunch. From the way he covered the space between us and squared up to attack, I realized he was a southpaw. And in fact he started with a left swing, which was probably his best punch. If the fist had connected, no doubt it would have hurt, but this lout was moving in slow motion. I parried with my right forearm and went instinctively for his liver with a left hook, doubling with a straight right to the chin.
The big man had a glass jaw. He stayed on his feet for a moment, motionless, with a queer look of surprise on his face. Then he fell.
I resisted the temptation to kick him in the face. Or to insult him; or to insult them both.
I picked up my briefcase and left, suddenly aware of the blood throbbing in my temples. The small man had stopped swearing.
I turned the corner, walked for another block and then stopped. They were not following. No one was following, and since it was three in the afternoon the street was deserted. Putting down my briefcase, I raised my hands in front of my face and saw they were trembling violently. My right hand was also beginning to hurt.
I remained like that for a few seconds, then I shrugged. An infantile smile flickered on my lips. I went on home.
The next day I found my car with four slashed tyres and a deep scratch – the work of a knife or a screwdriver – running the whole length of the body.
Rather than anger at the damage, I felt humiliated. I found myself reflecting on what it is like for someone to come home and find the place turned upside down by burglars. Next I thought of all the petty thieves I had defended and got off.
Lastly, it occurred to me that my brain was turning to pulp and I was becoming pathetic. So, luckily, I dropped moral speculation and made an attempt to be practical.
I called up a client of mine who had a certain reputation in criminal circles in Bari and the surrounding province. He came to the office and I told him the story, including the street-fight. I said I didn’t want to go to the police or the carabinieri, but I would if these people forced my hand. In my opinion we were even. I would pay for the damage to the car and they, whoever they were, could nurse their bruises and leave me to get on with my work in peace.
My client said I was right. He also said that they really ought to pay to repair my car and provide new tyres. I said that I’d get the car done up and I didn’t want new tyres.
It had occurred to me that neither did I want a summons for receiving stolen goods, seeing that they certainly wouldn’t have gone and bought them from an authorized dealer. But this I didn’t say.
All I wanted was for everyone to stay put and not go making trouble for anyone else. He didn’t push the point, and gave me a nod signifying respect. A different kind of respect from that usually paid to a lawyer.
He said he’d let me know within two days.
He was as good as his word. He came back to the office two days later and mentioned a name that carried weight in certain circles. That person sent word offering his apologies for what had happened. It had been an accident – two accidents in fact, thought I, but let’s not split hairs – that would not be repeated. He, however, was at my disposal should I need anything.
The story finished there.
Apart from the two million lire I had to fork out to put the car in order.
A few days later I discovered the identity of the new tenant in our building. Or rather, the tenantess.
About half-past nine in the evening I had just come back from the gym and was about to thaw two chicken breasts, grill them and prepare a salad, when the bell rang.
I spent a few seconds wondering what had happened. Then it registered that it must be my own doorbell, and while on my way to answer it I realized that this must be the first time anyone had rung it since I’d been living here. I felt a pang of melancholy, then I opened the door.
At last she’d found someone in. It was the fourth time she’d tried my door but there was never any answer. Did I really live alone? She was the new tenant, on the seventh floor. She had introduced herself to all the other tenants in the building, I was the last. Her name was Margherita. Margherita, and I didn’t catch the surname.
She gave me her hand across the invisible frontier of the doorway. It was a fine, masculine hand, large and strong.
Certain women – and especially certain men – give you a strong handshake but you realize at once that it’s for show. They want to make themselves out to be decisive, no-nonsense people, but the strength is only in the hand and arm. What I mean is, it doesn’t come from inside. Some people can actually crush your hand, but it’s as if they were doing body-building.
There are others, if only a few, who when they shake your hand tell you that there’s something behind the muscles. I held Margherita’s hand for maybe a second or two more than necessary but she went on smiling.
Then I asked her awkwardly if she’d care to come in. No, thank you, she had just stopped by to introduce herself. She was actually on her way home after being out the whole day. She had a mass of things to do, what with having just moved in. When things were more organized, she’d ask me up for a cup of tea.
She had a good smell about her. A mixture of fresh air, dry and clean, a masculine, leathery smell.
“Don’t be sad,” she said as she made for the staircase.
Just like that.
When she was already out of sight I realized that I had never really looked at her. I went back inside, half closed my eyes and tried to reproduce her face in my mind. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her if I saw her in the street.
In the kitchen the chicken breasts had thawed in the microwave. But I no longer felt like having them simply grilled, so I got out a recipe book I kept in the kitchen but had never used.
Tasty chicken rissoles. That sounded just the job. At least, the name did. I read the recipe and was glad to see I had all the ingredients.
Before starting I opened a bottle of Salice Salentino, tasted it, and then looked for a CD to listen to while I was cooking.
White Ladder.
The syncopated rhythm of “Please Forgive Me” started and then, almost at once, came the voice of David Gray. I stayed near the speakers to listen until it got to the part of the song I liked best.
I won’t ever have to lie
I won’t ever have to say goodbye…
Every time I look at you
Every time I look at you.
Then I went back to the kitchen and got down to work.
I boiled the chicken and minced it, along with a couple of ounces of cooked ham that had been in the fridge for some days. Then I put the meat into a bowl together with an egg, some grated Parmesan, nutmeg, salt and black pepper. I stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon before kneading it with my hands, having added some breadcrumbs. I shaped the mixture into rissoles the size of an egg, then dipped them into beaten egg to which I’d added salt and a little wine, then rolled them in breadcrumbs to which I’d added another pinch of nutmeg, and finally sizzled them in olive oil over a moderate flame.
I drained the rissoles – which smelled delicious – on kitchen paper and prepared a salad with balsamic vinegar dressing. I laid the table with a cloth, real plates, real cutlery, and before sitting down to eat I went and changed the CD.
Simon and Garfunkel. The Concert in Central Park.
I pushed “skip” until number 16 came up. “The Boxer.”
I stood and listened to it until the last verse. My favourite.
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him, till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
I’m leaving, I am leaving
But the fighter still remains…
Then I turned off the CD player and went to eat.
The rissoles were excellent. So was the salad, while the wine had a bouquet and reflections danced in the glass.
I wasn’t sad that evening.
“The fact is that we have opted for American-style trials, but we lack the preparation the Americans have. We lack the cultural basis for accusatory trials. Look at the questioning and cross-questioning in American or British trials. And then look at ours. They can do it, we can’t. We never will be able to, because we are children of the Counter-Reformation. One cannot rebel against one’s own cultural destiny.”
Thus, during a pause in a trial in which we were fellow counsels for the defence, spake Avvocato Cesare Patrono. A Prince of the Forum. Mason and Millionaire.
I had heard him express that idea about a hundred times since the new code of criminal procedure had come into force in 1989.
It was to be understood that others couldn’t do it. Other lawyers – certainly not him – and especially the public prosecutors.
Patrono liked to speak ill of everything and everyone. In conversations in the corridors – but even in court – he loved to humiliate his colleagues and, most of all, he loved to intimidate and embarrass magistrates.
For some unknown reason he had a liking for me. He was always cordial towards me and occasionally had me assist him in the defence, which was big business, from a financial standpoint.
He had just finished expressing his views on the current criminal procedure when there emerged from the courtroom, still wearing her robe, Alessandra Mantovani, Assistant Public Prosecutor.
She hailed from Verona, and had asked to be transferred to Bari to join her lover. Behind her in Verona she had left a rich husband and a very comfortable life.
As soon as she had moved to Bari her lover had left her. He explained that he needed his freedom, that things between them had gone well up to that point thanks to the distance, which prevented boredom and routine. That he needed time to think things over. In short, the whole classic load of shit.
Alessandra Mantovani had found herself in Bari, alone, with her bridges burnt behind her. She had stayed on without a murmur.
I liked her a lot. She was everything a good public prosecutor ought to be, or a good policeman, which comes to more or less the same thing.
In the first place she was intelligent and honest. Then she didn’t like crooks – of any sort – but she didn’t spend her time eating her heart out at the thought that most of them would get off scot-free. Above all, when she was wrong she was up to admitting it, without argument.
We had become friends, or something like it. Enough to lunch together sometimes, and occasionally tell each other something of our personal histories. Not enough for anything more to happen between us, even if our presumed affair was one of the many bits of gossip that did the rounds of the courthouse.
Patrono detested La Mantovani. Because she was a woman, because she was an investigating magistrate, because she was more intelligent and tougher than he was. Even though, naturally, he would never have admitted it.
“Here, Signora,” – he called all women magistrates Signora, not Dottoressa or Judge, to make them nervous and unsettle them – “come and listen to this story. It’s the latest, really a peach.”
La Mantovani stepped nearer and looked him in the eye, tilted her head to one side and said not a word. A slight nod – yes, go on and try to tell your story – and the ghost of a smile. It was not a warm smile. The mouth had moved but the eyes were utterly still. And cold.
Patrono told his story. It wasn’t the latest, or even very recent.
It was the story of a young man of good family talking to a friend and telling him how he is about to marry an ex-prostitute. The youngster explains to his friend that his fiancée’s ex-profession is no problem as far as he is concerned. No problem either are his fiancée’s parents, who are drug pushers, thieves and pimps. Everything therefore seems hunky-dory, but the lad confides to his friend that he has one really big worry.
“What’s that?” asks the friend.
How’s he going to tell the bride’s parents that his father is a magistrate?
Patrono had his snigger all to himself. Personally, I was embarrassed.
“I’ve got a rather good one too. About animals,” said La Mantovani. “Snake and Fox are wandering in the woods. At a certain point it starts to rain and they both take shelter in an underground tunnel, going in at opposite ends. They begin making their way along the tunnel, where it’s pitch dark, getting nearer and nearer each other until they meet. They actually bump into each other.
“The tunnel is very narrow and there’s very little room for them to pass. In fact, for one to pass the other has to flatten himself against the wall, in other words give way.
“But neither of them is willing to give way and so they start to quarrel.
“ ‘Move over and let me pass.’
“ ‘Move over yourself.’
“ ‘Who d’you think you are?’
“‘Who are you anyway?’
“ ‘You tell me first.’
“ ‘No, my dear, you tell me first who you are.’ And so on and so forth.
“In short, the situation seems to have reached an impasse and the two of them don’t know how to get out of it, partly because neither wants to take the initiative of attacking the other, not knowing who he is up against.
“Fox then has an idea. ‘Listen, it’s no use going on quarrelling, because that way we’ll be in here all day. Let’s have a game to solve the problem. I’ll stay still and you touch me and try to guess who I am. Then you stay still, and I’ll touch you and try to guess who you are. Whoever finds out the identity of the other wins and can pass first. What d’you think of that?’
“ ‘It’s an idea,’ says Snake. ‘I agree, but I have first guess.’
“So Snake, moving sinuously, starts touching Fox.
“ ‘Now then, what long, pointed ears you have, what a sharp muzzle, what soft fur, what a bushy tail… You must be Fox!’
“Fox is rather miffed, but has to admit that the other has got him.
“ ‘However, now it’s my turn, because if I guess right we’ll be even and we’ll have to find another way of deciding who goes first.’
“And he starts to touch Snake, who in the meanwhile has stretched out on the floor of the tunnel.
“ ‘What a small head you have, you don’t have any ears, you’re long and slimy… And you have no balls!
“ ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be a lawyer?’ ”
I lowered my eyelids and laughed to myself. Patrono tried to laugh too, but failed. He came out with a sarcastic cackle and tried to say something, but nothing equal to the occasion occurred to him. He didn’t know how to lose.
La Mantovani took off her robe, said she was going to her office, that we’d all be meeting when the hearing resumed and went her way.
Every so often, a real man, I thought.
Some days passed and then I got a telephone call from Abajaje.
She wanted to see me. Soon.
I told her she could come that very day, at eight in the evening, when the office closed. That way we’d be able to talk more calmly.
She arrived almost half an hour late, and this amazed me. It didn’t fit with the image I’d formed of her.
When I heard the bell ring I was already beginning to think of leaving.
I crossed the empty offices, opened the door and saw her. In the middle of the unlit landing.
She came in, dragging a big box. It contained the books and a few other belongings of Abdou, including an envelope with several dozen photographs.
I told her we could go through and talk in my room, but she shook her head. She was in a hurry. She remained where she was, one step inside the door, opened her bag and took out a roll of banknotes similar to the one she produced the first time she came to the office.
She held out the money and, without looking me in the face, began talking quickly. This time her accent was very noticeable. As strong as a smell.
She had to leave. She had to return to Aswan. She was forced, she was forced – she said – to return to Egypt.
I asked when and why, and her explanation became confused. Broken at times by words I didn’t understand.
She had taken her final exams more than a week before. In theory she should have gone straight back, and in fact all the other scholarship holders had already left.
She had stayed on, asking for an extension of the grant, claiming that she had to do further work on some subjects. The extension had been refused and yesterday she had had a fax from her country ordering her to return. If she didn’t do so, and at once, she would lose her position at the Ministry of Agriculture.
She had no choice, she said. Even if she stayed she could do nothing to help Abdou. Without money or a job.
Without anywhere to live, since they had already told her to vacate her room at the annexe as soon as possible.
She would go back to Nubia and try to obtain temporary leave. She would do everything she could to come back to Italy.
She had collected all the money she could to pay for Abdou’s defence, meaning me. It came to nearly three million. I must do all I could, all I could to help him.
No, Abdou didn’t know yet. She would tell him tomorrow, at visiting time.
However – she repeated, too quickly and without looking at me – she’d do everything she could to come back to Italy. Soon.
We both knew it wasn’t true.
Curse it, I thought. Curse it, curse it, curse it.
I had an urge to insult her for leaving me alone with all the responsibility.
I didn’t want that responsibility.
I had an urge to insult her because I saw myself in her unexpected mediocrity, in her cowardice. I recognized myself with unbearable clarity.
There passed through my mind the time when Sara had talked about the possibility of having a baby. It was one October afternoon and I said that I didn’t think the right moment had yet come. She looked at me and nodded without saying anything. She never mentioned it again.
I did not insult Abajaje. I listened to her justifications without saying a word.
When she had finished, she backed away, as if afraid of turning her back on me.
I was left standing near the door, with the cardboard box containing Abdou’s things, holding the roll of banknotes. Then I picked up the telephone on my secretary’s desk and without really thinking rang Sara’s number, which had been my number.
It rang five times, then someone answered.
The voice was nasal, fairly young-sounding.
“Yes?” The tone was that of a man who feels at home. Maybe he’s just back from work, and when the telephone rang he was loosening his tie, and now while he’s answering he’s taking off his jacket and tossing it onto a sofa.
For some unknown reason I didn’t hang up.
“Is Stefania in?”
“No, there’s no one here called Stefania. You’ve got the wrong number.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Could you please tell me what number I’ve rung?”
He told me and I even wrote it down. To be certain I’d heard right.
I looked for a long time at that piece of paper, my brain circling round and round a nasal voice, faceless, on the telephone in my own home.
“That was a lovely film this evening. What are the actors’ names again?”
“Harry is Billy Crystal. Sally, Meg Ryan.”
“Wait, how did it go… the bit with the dream about the Olympics?”
“ ‘Had my dream again where I’m making love, and the Olympic judges are watching. I’d nailed the compulsories, so this is it, the finals. I got a 9.8 from the Canadians, a perfect 10 from the Americans, and my mother, disguised as an East German judge, gave me 5.6.’ ”
She bursts out laughing. How I love her laugh, I thought.
A person’s laugh is important because you can’t cheat. To know if someone is genuine or fake, the only sure way is to watch – and listen to – his laugh. People who are really worthwhile are the ones who know how to laugh.
She made me jump by touching my arm.
“Tell me your three favourite films.”
“Chariots of Fire, Big Wednesday, Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
“You’re the first who’s ever answered like that… quickly. Without thinking.”
“This favourite film game is one I often play myself. So you might say I was ready for it. What are yours?”
“Number one is Blade Runner. No doubt about it.”
“ ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. And all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time – to – die.’ ”
“Well done. It’s said just like that. ‘Time – to – die.’ With the words spaced out. And then he releases the dove.”
I nodded and she went on talking.
“I’ll tell you the other films. American Graffiti and Manhattan. Tomorrow perhaps I’ll tell you a couple of others – Blade Runner is a fixture – but that’s them for today. I’ve often said Metropolis, for example.”
“Why these for today?”
“I don’t know. Come on, shall we go on playing?”
“All right. Let’s try this game. An extraterrestrial arrives on our planet and you have to give him an example of what’s best on earth, so as to persuade him to stay. You must offer him an object, a book, a song, a quote or, well there’d also be films but we’ve already done those.”
“Good idea. I already know the quotation. It’s Malraux: ‘The homeland of a man who can choose is where the biggest clouds gather.’ ”
We remained for a moment in silence. When she was on the point of speaking, I interrupted her.
“You must do me a favour. Will you?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“If you fall madly in love with me, I’d like you to tell me at once. Don’t trust me to know instinctively. Please. Is that all right with you?”
“Fair enough. Does the same hold good for me?”
“Yes, it does. And now tell me the other things for the Martian.”
“The book is The Catcher in the Rye. I’m pretty doubtful about the song. ‘Because the Night’ by Patti Smith. Or else ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen. Or ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love’, by Cohen again. I don’t know. One of those. Perhaps.”
“And the object?”
“A bicycle. Now tell me yours.”
“The quote is really a quick exchange. From On the Road. It goes like this: ‘We gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’ The reply: ‘Where we going, man?’ ‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’ ”
“The book?”
“You’re sure not to know it. It’s The Foreign Student, by a French writer-”
“I’ve read it. It’s the one about a young Frenchman who goes to study in an American college in the 50s.”
“Nobody knows that book. You’re the first. What a coincidence.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment in the darkness of the car, like little knife blades.
We were parked on the cliffs, almost sheer above the sea at Polignano. Outside it was February and very cold.
Not inside the car though. Inside the car, that night, we seemed to be sheltered from everything.
“I’m glad I came out with you this evening. At the last moment I was about to call you and say I wasn’t feeling up to it. Then I thought you must have already left home and that anyway it would be bad-mannered. So I said to myself: we’ll go to the cinema and then I’ll ask him to take me home and I’ll get an early night.”
“Why didn’t you want to go out?”
“I don’t want to talk about it now. I only wanted to tell you I’m glad I came. And I’m glad I didn’t ask you to take me home right after the cinema. Let’s play some more. I like it. Tell me the song and the object.”
“The object is a fountain pen. The song is ‘Pezzi di vetro.’ ”
“Can I say something about the book?”
“What is it?”
“I’m no longer sure about The Catcher in the Rye.”
“You want to change?”
“Yes, I think so. The Little Prince. It seems more appropriate, maybe. What does the fox say to the little prince when he wants to be tamed?”
“ ‘The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…’ ”
She turned and looked at me. In her eyes was a childlike wonder. She was very beautiful. “How do you manage to remember everything by heart?”
“I don’t know. It’s always been like that. If I like something, I only have to read it or hear it once and it sticks in my mind. But The Little Prince I’ve read lots of times. So it’s not really fair.”
“What do you think is the most important quality in a person?”
“A sense of humour. If you have a sense of humour – not irony or sarcasm, which are different things entirely – then you don’t take yourself seriously. So you can’t be catty, you can’t be stupid and you can’t be vulgar. If you think about it, it covers almost everything. Do you know any people who have a sense of humour?”
“Very few. On the other hand, I’ve met a lot of them – men especially – who take themselves a hell of a lot too seriously.”
She had a moment of hesitation, then added: “My boyfriend is one of them.”
“What does your boyfriend do?”
“He’s an engineer.”
“Pompous person?”
“No. He can make you laugh, he’s nice. What I mean is, he’s intelligent, he makes funny remarks and so on. But he can only joke about other people. About himself he’s always tremendously serious. No, he hasn’t got a sense of humour.”
Another pause, then she went on, “I’d like it if you had a sense of humour.”
“I’d like to have one too. To tell the truth, in view of what you’ve just said, I’d sell my mother and father to the cannibals just to have one. Without taking myself seriously, of course.”
She laughed again and we went on chatting like that, in the car that protected us from the wind and the world. For hours.
It was past four in the morning before we realized that we ought to get back.
When we arrived outside her place, in the centre of town, the sky was already beginning to lighten.
“If tomorrow you think you still want to come out with me, phone me. If you call, I’ll give you a book.”
Sara took my chin between finger and thumb and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then, without a word, she got out of the car. A few seconds later she had disappeared through a shiny wooden door.
I gave myself a couple of light punches in the face, on one side and the other. Then I started up the car and drove away, music playing full blast.
Ten years later there I was alone in my empty office, with my memories and their heart-rending melody.
It was a long time since I’d been able to memorize songs, passages in books or parts of films just by hearing or reading them once.
Among the many things gone down the drain there was also that.
So I had to go home at once, hoping that among the books I had brought away with me I would find The Little Prince. Because at that hour there were no bookshops open and I was in a hurry, I couldn’t wait till the next morning.
It was there. I turned to near the end, where the little prince is about to be bitten by the snake and is saying farewell to his airman friend.
“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You – only you – will have stars that can laugh!” …
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them ‘Yes the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy.”
I slept for exactly two hours.
I slipped between the sheets a few minutes before three, opened my eyes at five on the dot and got up feeling strangely refreshed.
I had no commitments that morning, so I thought I’d go for a walk. I had a shower, shaved, put on some comfortable old cotton trousers, a denim shirt and a sweatshirt. I wore gymshoes and a leather jacket.
Outside it was starting to get light.
I was already at the door when it occurred to me that I might take a book, stop and read somewhere. In a garden or a café, as I used to do years before. So I looked over the books that I’d never arranged but were there in my flat. All over the place, scattered provisionally.
I had a momentary thought that they were provisional there just as I was, but immediately I told myself that this was a banal, pathetic notion. I therefore stopped philosophizing and returned to simply choosing a book.
I picked up Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, in a cheap edition that fitted easily into the pocket of my leather jacket. I took some cigarettes, deliberately did not take my mobile, and left the house.
My flat was in Via Putignani, and immediately to the right as I went out I could see the Teatro Petruzzelli.
From the outside the theatre looked normal, with its dome and all the rest of it. Not so inside. One night nearly ten years ago it had been gutted by fire, and since then there it stood, waiting for someone to rebuild it. It was inhabited meanwhile by cats and ghosts.
It was towards the theatre that I turned, feeling on my face the cool, clean air of early morning. Very few cars and no pedestrians at all.
It reminded me of the time towards the end of my university days when I often used to come home at that hour.
At night I used to play poker, or go out with girls. Or simply stay drinking, smoking and chatting with my friends.
One morning at about six, after one of these nights, I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water before going to bed, when my father came in to make coffee.
“Why have you got up so early?”
“No, Dad, I’ve only just got home.”
He looked at me for only a second, measuring me up.
“It is beyond my comprehension how you get the urge to make idiotic jokes even at this time in the morning.”
He turned away and shrugged with resignation.
I reached Corso Cavour, right in front of the Teatro Petruzzelli, and continued on my way towards the sea. Two blocks later I stopped at a bar, had some breakfast and lit the first cigarette of the day.
I was in the part of Bari where the finest houses are. It was in that neighbourhood that Rossana used to live – my girlfriend in university days.
We had had a rather stormy relationship, all my fault. After only a few months it seemed to me that my freedom was, as they say, jeopardized by that relationship.
So every so often I stood her up, and if I didn’t stand her up I almost always arrived late. She got mad but I maintained that those were not the things that mattered. She said that good manners did matter and I began, with a wealth of sophistical arguments, to explain to her the difference between formal good manners – hers – and real substantial good manners. Mine, of course.
At the time it didn’t even remotely occur to me that I was being no better than an arrogant lout. On the contrary, as I was so good at twisting words to suit my purpose, I even persuaded myself that I was right. This led me to behave worse, including in the meaning of “worse” a series of clandestine affairs with girls of dubious morality.
I came to realize all this when we had already separated. I had several times thought back on our relationship and come to the conclusion that I had behaved like a right bastard. If I ever had an opportunity I would have to admit it and apologize.
Perhaps seven or eight years later, I came across Rossana again. In the meantime she had gone to work in Bologna.
We met at the house of some friends during the Christmas holidays, and she asked me if I’d care to have a cup of tea with her the next day. I said yes. So we met, we had tea and stayed chatting for at least an hour.
She’d had a daughter, was separated from her husband, owned a travel agency which made her a pile of money, and was still very beautiful.
I was glad to see her again and felt relaxed. It therefore came quite naturally to me to tell her that I’d often thought of when we were together and that I was convinced I’d behaved badly towards her. I just felt like telling her, for what it was worth. She smiled and looked at me in a rather strange way for a few moments before speaking. She didn’t say exactly what I expected.
“You were a spoilt child. You were so intent on yourself that you didn’t realize what was happening around you, even very close to you.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“You didn’t so much as suspect that for nearly a year I had someone else.”
I’d like to have seen my face at that moment. It must have been a pretty picture, because Rossana smiled and the sight of me seemed to amuse her.
“You had someone else? Excuse me, but in what sense?”
At that point she stopped smiling and began to laugh. Who could blame her?
“How d’you mean, in what sense? We were together.”
“How d’you mean, you were together? You were together with me. When did you see each other?”
“In the evening, almost every evening. When you took me home. He was waiting for me round the corner, in his car. I waited in the doorway and when you’d gone I went round the corner and got into the car.”
My head started spinning rather weirdly.
“And where… where did you go?”
“To his place, on the Walls in Old Bari.”
“To his place. In Old Bari. And what did you do on the Walls in Old Bari?”
Too late I realized I had said something too stupid for words, but I wasn’t connecting very well.
She realized it too, and did nothing to ease matters.
“What did we do? You mean, at night in his flat on the Walls?”
She was tickled to death. I wasn’t. I had gone to have a cup of tea with an ex-girlfriend and found I had to rewrite history.
I discovered that his name was Beppe, that he was a jewellery salesman, that he was married and rich. The place on the Walls, to be precise, was not his home but his bachelor pad. At the time of these events he was thirty-six and had a sterling wife.
At the time of these events I was twenty-two, my parents gave me 40,000 lire a week, I shared a bedroom with my brother and – I was now discovering rather late in the day – I had a whore for a girlfriend.
I reached the coast, turned left towards the Teatro Margherita, and headed for San Nicola, passing below the Walls. Just where this Signor Beppe had his bachelor pad. Where he used to take my girlfriend.
By now it was daylight, the air was fresh and clean, and it was an ideal day for a walk. I continued as far as the Castello Svevo and then further still towards the Fiera del Levante, to arrive perhaps two hours and several miles after leaving home at the pine wood of San Francesco.
It was practically deserted. Only a few men running and a few others seated, preferring to let their dogs do the running.
I chose a good bench, one of those green wooden ones with a back, in the sun. I sat down and read my book.
When I finished it, about two hours later, I was feeling pretty fit and thought I’d take another ten minutes’ rest before setting off for home. Or perhaps for the office, where they certainly must have begun to wonder what on earth had happened to me.
It was starting to get hot, so I took off my jacket, folded it up into a kind of pillow and stretched out with my face in the sun.
When I woke it was past midday. The joggers had multiplied, there were pairs of young boys, women with babies, and old men playing cards at the stone tables. There were also two Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert anyone who didn’t show them a sufficiently hostile front.
Time to be gone. Very much so.
As soon as I got home my eye fell on my mobile and I ignored it. When I went to the office in the afternoon it was in my pocket, but still turned off.
Maria Teresa engulfed me the very moment I opened the door. They’d been hunting for me all morning, at home and on my mobile. At home there was no answer and the other was always off.
Naturally – I thought – because I was in the pine wood, taking the sun, in defiance of the lot of you and without the damn phone.
That morning all hell had broken loose.
Surely I hadn’t forgotten some hearing? Ah, just as well, I thought not. Lots of people looking for me? No matter, they’ll call again. No, certainly I hadn’t forgotten that the time limit for Colaianni’s appeal expired tomorrow.
Liar! I had completely forgotten. Just as well I had a secretary who knew her job.
They’d called three times from the prison since midday? Why was that?
Maria Teresa didn’t know. It was something urgent, they said, but they hadn’t explained what. The last to call had been a certain Inspector Surano. He had asked me to call him back as soon as I was traced.
I called the switchboard of the administration building, asked for Inspector Surano and, after a wait of at least three minutes, I heard a low, hoarse voice with the accent of the province of Lecce.
Yes, I was Avvocato Guerrieri. Yes, I was acting for the prisoner Abdou Thiam. Yes, I could come to the prison, if he would first be good enough to tell me the reason.
He told me the reason. That morning, following visiting hours, the prisoner Abdou Thiam had put into effect an attempted suicide by means of hanging.
He had been rescued when he was already swinging from a rope made of torn-up sheets plaited together. He was now in the prison infirmary with a round-the-clock watch on him.
I said I’d be there as soon as possible.
As soon as possible is a very ambiguous concept if it is a matter of getting to the prison from the centre of Bari on a working afternoon.
However, in scarcely over half an hour I was outside the admin building and ringing the bell. Having parked the car illegally of course.
The warder in the guardroom had been alerted to my arrival. He asked me to wait and called Inspector Surano, who arrived surprisingly soon. He said the governor wanted to talk to me and we could go to him at once. I asked how my client was and he said he was fairly well, physically. He personally would accompany me to the infirmary immediately after our meeting with the governor.
We plunged into the yellowed, ill-lit corridors, in which hung the unmistakable odour of food typical of prisons, barracks and hospitals. Every so often we passed a prisoner wielding a broom or pushing a trolley. We finally entered a freshly painted corridor with potted plants in it, and at the end of this was the door of the governor’s office.
Inspector Surano knocked, looked in, said something I didn’t hear and then opened the door wide, ushering me in and following.
The governor was a man of about fifty-five, with an anonymous air, papery, lustreless skin and an evasive look.
He was sorry, he said, about what had happened, but thanks to the presence of mind of one of his men tragedy had been averted.
Yes, another tragedy, I thought, remembering the suicide of one of my clients – a twenty-year-old drug addict – and the rumours, never confirmed, of violence committed on the prisoners to impose discipline.
The governor wished to assure me that he had already given strict instructions for the prisoner – what’s his name now? – ah yes, the prisoner Abdou Thiam to be under constant surveillance with a view to preventing further attempts at suicide or any kind of self-inflicted harm.
He felt sure that this unpleasant incident would have no consequences, let alone publicity, for the peace and quiet of the penal institute and of the prisoner himself. For his own part, he was at my disposal in case I needed anything.
In plain language, if you don’t give me any trouble, it’ll be better for all concerned. Including your client, who’s in here and here to stay.
I would have liked to tell him to go fuck himself, but I was in a hurry to see Abdou and in addition I suddenly felt exhausted. So I thanked him for his readiness to help and asked him to have me accompanied to the infirmary.
We did not shake hands and Inspector Surano led me back the way we had come, and then along other even more dreary corridors, through barred doors and that stench of food that seemed to penetrate into every cranny.
The infirmary was a large room with about a dozen beds, nearly all occupied. I failed to spot Abdou and looked questioningly at Surano. He jerked his head to indicate the far end of the room and went ahead of me.
Abdou was in a bed with his arms strapped down and his eyes half closed. He was breathing through his mouth.
Close by him was sitting a fat, moustachioed warder. He was smoking, on his face an expression of boredom.
Surano chose to assume an air of authority.
“What the hell are you doing smoking in the infirmary, Abbaticchio? Put it out, put it out, and give your chair to the Avvocato.”
Such courtesy was new to me. Plainly the governor had given orders for me to be treated with kid gloves.
This Abbaticchio gave the inspector a sullen look. He seemed on the point of saying something, then thought better of it. He put out his cigarette and moved off, ignoring me completely. Surano told me I could take my time. When I had finished, he would himself escort me to the exit. Then he too retired as far as the infirmary door.
Now I was alone at Abdou’s bedside, but he didn’t seem to have noticed my presence.
I bent over him a little and tried calling his name but there was no reaction. Just as I was about to touch him on the arm he spoke, almost without moving his lips.
“What do you want, Avvocato?”
I withdrew my arm with a slight start.
“What happened, Abdou?”
“You know what happened. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
His eyes were wide open now, staring at the ceiling. I sat down, and realized only then that I had absolutely no idea what to say.
Once down level with him, I noticed the marks on his neck.
“Did Abajaje come this morning?”
He made no answer, nor did he look at me. He closed his mouth and set his jaw. After two attempts he managed to swallow. Then, like a scene in slow motion, in the inner corner of his left eye I saw a tear – one only – forming, growing, detaching itself and coursing slowly all the way down his cheek, until it vanished at the edge of his jaw. I too had trouble swallowing.
For a time incalculable neither of us spoke. Then it came to me that there was only one thing I could say that made sense.
“You’ve been abandoned and you think that now it’s really all up with you. I know. And you’re probably even right.”
Abdou’s eyes, which had stayed riveted on the ceiling, now turned slowly towards me. Even his head moved, though very little. I had his attention. I started to speak again and my voice was surprisingly calm.
“In fact, as I see it, you have only one chance, and even that is a slim one. The decision is up to you alone.”
He was looking at me now, and I knew I was in control of the situation.
“If you want to fight for that chance, tell me so.”
“What chance?”
“We won’t opt for the shortened procedure. We’ll have a trial before the Court of Assizes and try to win it. That is, to get you acquitted. The chances are slight and I confirm what I said last time. My advice is still to choose the shortened procedure. But the decision is up to you. If you don’t want to go for the shortened procedure, I will defend you in the Court of Assizes.”
“I don’t have the money.”
“To hell with the money. If I manage to get you off, which is unlikely, you’ll find a way of paying me. If they convict you, you’ll have more serious problems than a debt to me.”
He turned away his eyes, kept fixed on mine while I was talking. He returned to gazing at the ceiling, but in a different way. I even had the impression of the shadow of a smile, a wistful one, on his lips. At last he spoke, still without looking at me but in a firm voice.
“You are intelligent, Avvocato. I have always thought of myself as more intelligent than other people. This is not a lucky thing, but it’s hard to understand that. If you think yourself more intelligent than others, you fail to understand a lot of things, until they are suddenly brought home to you. And then it’s too late.”
He made a motion to raise his right arm, but it was checked by the strap. I had an impulse to ask him if he wanted to be freed, but I said nothing. He started to speak again.
“Today it seems to me that you are more intelligent than I am. I thought I was a dead man and now, after listening to you, I think I was wrong. You have done something I don’t understand.”
He paused and took a deep breath, through his nose, as if summoning up all his strength.
“I want us to go to trial. To be acquitted.”
I felt a shiver that started at the top of my head and ran all the way down my spine. I wanted to say something, but knew that whatever I said would be wrong.
“OK” was all I could manage. “We’ll meet again soon.”
He set his jaw again and nodded, without taking his eyes off the ceiling.
When I got back to the car, the windscreen bore the white ticket of a parking fine.
Two weeks later came the preliminary hearing.
Judge Carenza arrived late, as she always did.
I waited outside the courtroom, chatting with a few colleagues and the journalists who were there especially for my case. Cervellati, on the other hand, was not present.
He didn’t like waiting for the judge outside the courtroom, mingling with the defence lawyers. So he had his secretary tell the clerk of the court to send for him when the hearing was about to begin.
La Carenza entered the courtroom, followed by the clerk of the court and a bailiff pushing a trolley loaded with dossiers. I went in too, sat down in my place at the bench on the right for those facing the judge, and opened my file, casually, just to have something to do and calm my nerves.
A few moments later I noticed that also in court was my colleague Cotugno, who was to represent the boy’s parents. He was an elderly lawyer, a bit of a windbag, deaf and with murderous bad breath.
Conversations with Cotugno were surreal. He, being hard of hearing, tended to move up close. His interlocutor, whose sense of smell was usually in working order, tended to back away. As long as the size of the room and the limits of good manners enabled him to. Then he was forced to endure it.
Therefore, when I saw Cotugno sitting at the public prosecutor’s bench – as is customary for counsel for the civil party – I enacted a complex strategy to avoid his breath. I half stood up, leaning on the desk before me, stretched out my arm to its fullest possible extent, and gave him my hand while maintaining this precarious stance. Plainly incompatible with any conversation. I then sat down again.
The judge told the clerk of the court to call the warders to bring in the prisoner.
At that moment Cervellati materialized on my left. He was wearing a grey suit and brown moccasins with leather tassels. He asked me what I intended to do with this trial.
I lied. My client – I said – had wanted to think about it until the last moment, so I myself would only know that morning whether or not we would ask for the shortened procedure.
Cervellati gave me a look, seemed on the point of saying something, then shook his head and sat down at his place. He hadn’t believed me and he didn’t look exactly friendly.
Two minutes later, through a side door, surrounded by four warders, his wrists handcuffed, in came Abdou. He was wearing khaki cotton trousers and a white shirt; over his arm was some sort of jacket. He had a clean look. He was well shaven and his shirt might have been ironed that very morning.
“Your Honour, may I have a word or two with my client before the hearing begins?”
“Certainly, Avvocato. Please remove the prisoner’s handcuffs.”
The eldest of the warders produced a key and freed Abdou’s hands. When I came up to him he was massaging his wrists. I spoke very quietly.
“Well then, Abdou, if you’ve changed your mind we’re still in time. Only just, but still in time.”
He shook his head. I stood for a moment looking at him, and he gave me a straight look back. Then I returned to my seat, my heart beating faster and fear sweeping over me like a wave.
The opening formalities were quickly dispatched and then came the moment.
“Are there any requests for alternative procedures?” asked Judge Carenza.
I got to my feet, buttoning up my jacket. I darted another look in the direction of Abdou.
“Your Honour, my client and I have considered at length the possible advantages of requesting the shortened procedure, but we eventually decided together that this is a case to be submitted to a full hearing. In view of which, no, there are no requests for alternative procedures.”
I sat down without looking at Cervellati.
The judge then asked the parties to formulate their conclusions.
Cervellati spoke briefly. The case was loaded with evidence against the accused, Abdou Thiam. There were proofs that as a result of the hearing would certainly lead to an affirmation of penal responsibility on all the criminal charges – the very grave, odious criminal charges – set down in the counts of indictment. The preliminary hearing could only lead to the accused being committed for trial before the Court of Assizes, to answer to charges of unlawful restraint and wilful murder. All that was needed was to supplement the charge contained under count B. In accordance with Article 423 of the code of criminal procedure, the public prosecutor intended to alter the murder charge. From simple murder to murder with aggravating circumstances.
Cervellati dictated the new charge for the records.
He had been true to his word. My client was now facing a charge which, if he was convicted, would lead him straight to life imprisonment with hard labour.
The judge asked me if I intended to apply for time for defence. This was a courtesy gesture, she was not bound to do it. I thanked her and said no, I did not so intend.
Then it was the turn of Cotugno, who was even briefer than Cervellati. He associated himself with the requests of the public prosecutor and also asked for a committal for trial.
I had little to say, because in a case like this there was obviously no chance at all of an acquittal in the preliminary hearing.
So I simply said that we had no observations to make on the request for committal.
Then the judge pronounced the ruling.
The trial of Abdou Thiam, born Dakar, Senegal, on 4 March 1968, on the charges of unlawful restraint and murder with aggravating circumstances, was fixed for 12 June, before the Assize Court of Bari.