The following morning, when I turned my phone back on, I found a message from Caterina. She’d spoken with Nicoletta and made an appointment with her for the following afternoon. So I wouldn’t be able to reserve a round-trip flight for the same day; I’d have to arrange overnight accommodations. It was exactly what I expected, but I pretended-to myself, that is, a pretty easy audience as far as simple deceptions were concerned-to be moderately surprised at the news and at the consequences that it entailed.
Then I blocked any potential return of awareness by getting ready to leave my apartment. At eight o’clock Signore De Santis, my client in that morning’s trial in Lecce, would be swinging by to pick me up.
Signore De Santis was a builder and developer and, as the phrase goes, he was a self-made man. He’d started working as an assistant bricklayer at age fourteen and, step by step-without letting annoying details like paying taxes, respecting safety regulations on the job site, or complying with city zoning plans and regulations get in the way of his climb to the top-he’d become a very wealthy businessman. He was short, slightly popeyed, with a beard dyed a ridiculous, incongruous black, a head of hair that had all the earmarks of a transplant, and a strong smell of cheap aftershave.
He had been charged-unjustly, he claimed-with building an illegal subdivision in a historic district, after bribing a number of city officials. His interpretation of his indictment was that it was clearly a conspiracy orchestrated by a corrupt ring of Communist magistrates.
My own interpretation was that he was about as innocent as Al Capone and that if I succeeded in winning an acquittal (which struck me as a pretty remote possibility), eventually I’d have to answer to a higher authority for it.
He had insisted on giving me a ride to Lecce, in his car, a Lexus that probably cost as much as a decent-size apartment and was nearly as big. It didn’t take long for me to regret bitterly having accepted the offer. De Santis drove with all the caution and care of a Mumbai taxi driver, while blasting a succession of Italian pop hits from the seventies-the kind of stuff the U.S. could have used at Guantanamo to extract confessions from al-Qaeda hardliners.
We pulled onto the highway, and De Santis immediately accelerated to a cruising speed of one hundred five miles per hour. He took over the left-hand passing lane and would not give it up. If a car ahead of us failed to move out of his lane quickly enough, De Santis hit the horn-which sounded like a tugboat foghorn-and flicked his headlights so hard and fast that the car must have looked like an ambulance.
Hey, you psycho, slow it down. I don’t want to die this young.
“Signore De Santis, why don’t you take your foot off the pedal a little? We have plenty of time.”
“I like going fast, Counselor. You’re not scared, are you? This old bombshell can hit one hundred forty.”
I’ll take your word for it. Slow down, you old crackpot.
“I have two great passions in life,” he said, and he slapped the steering wheel. “Fast cars and fast women. How old are you, Counselor?”
“Forty-five.”
“Lucky man. I’m seventy. At your age, I was wild.”
“What do you mean?”
“With women. I never let one get away. A waitress-I hit that. My secretary-I hit that. My friend’s wife-I hit that. Once even a nun. I was-what’s the word?-relentless.”
You’re still relentless, I thought to myself, thinking of the road still ahead and the fact that I would be spending at least the next four hours with him.
“It’s not like I’m not getting any now. I’m still hitting it regularly, but when I was younger…”
That’s a cleaned-up version of what he said. He was much more clinical, and he frequently gestured at his personal equipment. I nodded understandingly, with an idiotic, bland expression of tolerance painted on my face, while deep down I did my best to repress a vision of myself in my seventies with a dyed mustache, telling someone about how I still hit that.
“Are you married, Counselor?”
“No. I used to be, but not anymore.”
“So you’re a free man. Free and easy,” he said.
At this point, I was afraid he’d ask me whether I, too, was relentless. Whether I hit it with, say, my cleaning woman. In my case, the cleaning woman in question was Signora Nennella, a stout woman who stood four feet eleven inches in her stocking feet and was in her mid-sixties, to say nothing of sagging breasts that were barely contained by her D-cup bra.
The whole scene was disturbing. I tried to find refuge in a Zen place in the recesses of my mind where I could filter out the disturbing stimuli from the outside world. I told myself that if I found my Zen place, it would all be over before I knew it.
De Santis noticed my silence and assumed it must be due to a health issue. Something that might lead me to consult a urologist.
“What, you have some kind of problem?”
“Problem?” I was thinking the time had come to be a little more selective in choosing my clients.
He turned to look at me, completely ignoring the fact that the highway was hurtling toward us at one hundred ten miles per hour now. He looked down at my lap and winked. The melodic guitar and sappy vocals of the Teppisti dei Sogni filled the interior of the car like a mist of maple syrup.
“So, you’re okay down there?”
Pull over at the first rest area and let me out, you old psycho. After that, feel free to drive at top speed into a bridge or an oak tree, as long as you’re careful not to involve innocent third parties.
That’s not what I said.
“Just fine, thanks.”
De Santis didn’t seem to consider the answer satisfactory, so he kept up his questioning, pursuing the same line of inquiry.
“What about your prostate? You getting your prostate checked?”
“No, I’m not, to tell you the truth.”
“Have a doctor look at it, I’ll bet you anything he finds it’s enlarged. If you ask me, you don’t have it looked at because you’re afraid of what they do. The urologist puts on a pair of latex gloves and then he takes his finger-”
“I know what a urologist does.”
A few minutes of silence ensued. It seemed that our discussion of a visit to the urologist might have given my client pause. I hoped in vain that the silence would last until we reached Lecce. No such luck.
“Have you ever taken Viagra?”
“No.”
“I have some on me at all times, even though my doctor tells me not to overdo it, because it can be bad for the heart. But I say, what better way to die than to have a heart attack right in the middle of a good lay.”
And so it went, on and on, as we got to Lecce and entered the courtroom. Only when the trial actually got underway was De Santis forced to stop talking. We listened to the testimony of the prosecution witnesses. We listened to the analysis of the prosecutor’s expert witness, and then the court adjourned for another session to hear the testimony of the defense witnesses. By that point, if I had ever had any doubts, I was quite certain that my client would be found guilty. For the sake of my own mental health-we still had the whole return trip ahead of us-I decided that the better part of valor would be to keep that information to myself and not share it with the man who always hit it.
When we finally got back to Bari that afternoon, I asked him to drop me off in front of a travel agency across town from my office. This wasn’t the agency our law firm normally employed. I bought two round-trip tickets to Rome and I reserved two rooms in a hotel near Piazza del Popolo. I explained to the agent-and I’m pretty sure she could not have cared less-that I was going on a business trip with a colleague. It finally dawned on me that I was behaving as furtively as a criminal about to go on the lam.
As I was leaving the travel agency, Quintavalle called me.
“Counselor.”
“Damiano, any news?”
“I have some information that might be useful to you.”
“I’m all ears.”
After a couple of seconds of silence, I realized how stupid I had been. I thought back on all the times that I had laughed at the stupidity of people who said things on the phone they shouldn’t have, only to wind up in handcuffs.
“Or maybe we should meet to discuss it in person?”
“Shall I come to your office?”
“I’m on the street, over near Corso Sonnino. If it’s convenient to you, and you’re not too far away, maybe you could swing by and meet me in a cafe.”
“I’m on my Vespa. How about we meet in ten minutes at the Riviera?”
“Okay.”