The phone call came in the afternoon while I was seeing a client.
Maria Teresa called me on the internal line and, before I had time to tell her that I didn’t like to be interrupted when I was seeing a client, she told me it was Avvocato Corrado Macri, calling from Rome.
I was silent for a few seconds. I remember asking myself, word for word: why the hell didn’t it occur to me that he might phone?
“All right, put him through.” I covered the receiver with my hand and asked my client – Signor Martinelli, a stolid-looking pensioner whose beautiful little villa, which he’d built without permission in the middle of a protected forest, had been seized by the forest rangers – if he would excuse me for a few minutes, I had an urgent matter to attend to. What I meant was: if he’d be so kind as to leave the room for a few minutes, but he didn’t understand. He told me not to worry, I could carry on, and stayed where he was.
“Hello?”
Pause. Noise in the background. He must have been in a car.
Then a deep, rather mellow voice. With a barely noticeable Calabrian accent, much less obvious than I would have expected from my stereotypical image of him.
“Avvocato Guerrieri?”
“Who is that?”
“Your colleague Macri from Rome.”
My colleague, right.
“Go on.”
Another pause, a shorter one this time.
“Listen, colleague, I won’t beat about the bush. I had a letter from the clerk of the court’s office in Bari yesterday. A summons to appear as a witness in the appeal hearing of a man named Paolicelli. I defended him, as I’m sure you know.”
Defended was a somewhat loose way of putting it, I’d say. How about saying you really fucked it up for him?
“I found out that you’re his counsel now and I wanted to ask you why they summoned me. Was it the prosecutor’s doing?”
A barely perceptible hint of anxiety in that mellow voice. He didn’t know why he’d been summoned. Which meant he didn’t yet know it was me he had to thank for it. The most amusing part of the call was still to come.
“Look, Macri, we need to clarify a number of details-”
“I’m sorry, Guerrieri, but who is ‘we’?”
The hint of anxiety had become an aggressive undercurrent.
“My client and I-”
“Your client and you? You mean Paolicelli? Are you telling me it was you who asked for me to be summoned?”
“As I was saying, we need to clarify a number of things -”
“What the fuck are you saying? You had me called? Me, a colleague?”
This was it. We’d got past the hints now. Instinctively, I pressed the receiver to my ear and glanced at my client. He was looking with vague interest at a framed reproduction of a Domenico Cantatore painting I had hung in my office a few weeks earlier.
“Look, I’m not accustomed to talking to someone who raises his voice to me” – it struck me that I was talking complete bullshit – “and anyway I don’t think it’s a good idea to continue this conversation. I’m representing my client in an appeal in which, whether you like it or not”-I felt a wicked little pleasure in uttering those words: whether you like it or not – “you have to appear as a witness. When you appear in court-”
“Appear in court? Are you completely stupid?” He was almost choking with rage now. “Have you got shit for brains? Do you really think I’m going to appear before some fucking court of appeal? Get this into your thick head. I’m fucked if I’m going to come to Bari and go through all that crap.”
For a few moments I was silent, torn between two kinds of answer. Then I took a deep breath and replied in an apparently calm tone, “I don’t think it would be a very good idea if you didn’t appear. If you’re not in court on the day of the hearing I’ll ask the presiding judge to have you brought in by the carabinieri. I hope you’ve got the idea by now.”
Silence. Background noise. I thought I heard his laboured breathing, but maybe I was only imagining it. Just as I briefly imagined the homicidal thoughts that must be passing through his head. I decided to take advantage of the situation.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m with a client.”
That woke him up. He said that I hadn’t realized who I was dealing with, and that I had to be very careful. That was the last thing I heard before I slammed the phone down on him, not entirely in control of myself. Like someone who closes the door behind him to escape a pursuer.
“Is everything all right, Avvocato?” my client asked me, with a gleam of curiosity and even a hint of anxiety on his stolid face.
“Everything’s fine,” I replied, and had to make an effort not to tell him all about it. I knew that would only be a way of putting a brave face on it.
Everything’s fine. Like hell it was. I noticed that my hands were shaking and I had to put them down on the desk and keep them there to avoid making an exhibition of myself in front of Signor Martinelli.
What the hell was I getting myself into?