A Fine Line Read online

  “Another time.”

  “Shall we go for a walk? I feel like getting out.”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t have your baseball bat, do you?”

  “I only carry it in the evening, for after dinner.”

  The streets of the old city were packed with people. Tourists off the cruise ships, young people sitting at café tables, local oldsters walking along their streets like inhabitants of a territory occupied by an enemy power, children zooming dangerously by on bicycles, a young Bengali selling whirligigs and balloons, police officers from the street crimes squad, looking unmistakably like predators, holsters bulging beneath their T-shirts. The sun was low, getting ready to set and spreading orange light over the white walls. It’s a moot point whether May is actually the cruellest month, rather than April.

  We were walking side by side, at the natural pace of those who have nothing specific to do and who, in the brief space they’ve given themselves, can ignore time.

  “Avvocato Guerrieri!”

  He was a man in his sixties, tall, big-boned, a bit ungainly. I was sure I knew him, but couldn’t place him.

  “What a pleasure to see you,” he said as he shook my hand. “How are you? I don’t think you remember me.”

  “I remember your face very well, but if you help me…”

  “My name may not mean anything to you either. Seven years ago, you defended my son after he’d got involved in a nasty business…”

  “Alessandro. Of course.”

  “Alessandro, yes.”

  “Did he resume his studies?”

  “He graduated last year. He’s been working in Milan for the past few months.”

  “I’m pleased. When you phone him, say hello to him for me.”

  “Without you, he wouldn’t be there now.”

  I gave an embarrassed smile. I never know how to respond to compliments. The man and I stood there for a while, looking at each other. I could feel Annapaola’s eyes on my right. I didn’t know how to take my leave of him without being impolite. He seemed to be searching for the words to say something else.

  “I’ve thought many times over the years about going to your office. I’ve never summoned up the courage because I felt ridiculous. I wanted to thank you, and not only for what you did for my son. You won’t remember this, but while the trial was going on my father died. You expressed your condolences and added a sentence I’ll never forget.”

  “Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room.” I remembered it a moment before he said it.

  “It’s incredible how words can ease suffering sometimes. I’m so glad I ran into you.”

  We said goodbye, and for a while Annapaola and I carried on walking without saying anything or looking at each other.

  “It’s a beautiful line,” she said after a few minutes.

  At that moment we again passed the Bengali who was selling the whirligigs. Annapaola bought one and gave it to me. I must have been a sight, in my impeccable grey suit, my blue shirt and my dark blue regimental tie, with my yellow, purple and orange whirligig turning with a slight rustle at every breath of wind.

  “I’d like to make something clear.”

  “I love it when you do that.”

  “I’ve said that vanity is one of the reasons, but not the only reason why I think this case is making you so uncomfortable. I want that to be quite clear, otherwise you make me feel like a pedantic schoolteacher.”

  “A pedantic, self-important schoolteacher. It seems like an accurate description. But although I hate to admit it, you’re right. When Larocca came to me, I immediately took it for granted that he was innocent because I wanted to accept the assignment: I was flattered that he had chosen me. To accept it, to satisfy my vanity and remain consistent with my role, as you said, Larocca had to be innocent. That’s why it never even crossed my mind that he might be guilty.”

  We sat down at the tables of a little bar much frequented at night by young people because of the low prices of the alcohol. It was called the Blue Papaya and had only recently opened.

  “You’re getting too worked up about it.”

  “I’m helping to make sure that a corrupt judge gets away with it. Out of vanity, and for a few other reasons, that upsets me.”

  “I wouldn’t like to dent your self-esteem – I’m sure you did a great job – but even without you and your brilliant cross-examination, they wouldn’t have got anywhere on so little evidence.”

  A waitress emerged from the semi-darkness inside the bar. She was very pretty, with a slightly sleepy expression, several piercings – on her lips, on her ears and on her nose – and enormous breasts. We ordered two spritzes, she said no problem and went back inside.

  “Do you like her? She’s famous, the boys come here for her. Her name is Maya.”

  “Maya, gosh. Pretty, maybe a little… overblown. Anyway, I don’t suppose she’s your type.”

  “You never know, these girls are unpredictable.”

  “It’s true they would have dropped the case anyway, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m part of the mechanism that will lead to Larocca becoming president of the court, even though he’s a crook.”

  “Maybe you’re taking his guilt too much for granted, just as before you took it for granted that he was innocent. What do you actually have on him? What you were told by Tancredi, what he was told by an informant of his who he says is very reliable. With all due respect: Tancredi’s good, but he isn’t infallible.”

  Maya reappeared with our spritzes and placed them on the table together with the bill. She passed close by me. She smelt of white musk, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what kind of fantasies she aroused in the bar’s night-time customers.

  “Would you like me to ask around?” Annapaola asked me after sipping at her drink.

  “About Larocca?”

  She nodded.

  I didn’t reply immediately. I thought it over for a while. It didn’t seem a good idea. Why on earth make those kinds of inquiries, without any reason or objective? The proceedings were going to be dropped, I would continue to practise as a lawyer and he as a judge, and the rest was none of my business.

  The guilt or innocence of a defendant is none of your business, Guerrieri. It makes no sense for you to accept her suggestion. Drop it.

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  That was all. For now.

  Half an hour later, we were again outside my office, saying goodbye.

  “I told a girlfriend of mine that I went out with you, and she asked me if I was interested in you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She said that if I’m not interested she’d like me to introduce you.”

  “And what does she know about me?”

  “I don’t know. She knows who you are. Should I arrange it?”

  “That depends. What’s she like?”

  “You really are a bastard.”

  “I get by.”

  “Why did you never call me over these past few days?”

  “You didn’t call me either.”

  “Was it a competition?”

  “I’ve got my hands burnt a bit too often recently. I’m a timid creature. What are you doing this evening?”

  “This evening, I have something to do. But you owe me dinner. I’ll get in touch in the next few days. My friend is very pretty and I wouldn’t even dream of getting the two of you together.”

  She gave me a kiss on the lips, turned and walked away without adding anything else.

  I went back to the office with my yellow, purple and orange whirligig.

  25

  I had a hearing at the court of appeal. My client was a wholesale shoe merchant who, together with his partner, had been correctly sentenced to five years for fraudulent bankruptcy.

  The partner was being defended by an old colleague of mine, Avvocato D’Amore, a man who smelt of mothballs and liked to express radical opinions on every subject unde
r the sun: from the selection of the national football team to the government’s foreign and economic policies, and from the state of justice in Italy to the quality – which was in fact questionable – of the coffee in the cafeteria of the appeal court. When he was feeling particularly sociable, he even told jokes – two of them, always the same ones – about people with intestinal problems. I enjoyed the company of D’Amore and his mothball smell about as much as a headbutt to my nasal septum.

  The judges were in their chambers, deciding on our hearing. I had asked for my client’s acquittal or else a reduction in his sentence, but if I’d been in the judges’ place I would have confirmed the sentence without a moment’s hesitation.

  I was trying to take advantage of the waiting time, searching for a point of law on my tablet for an appeal that I would have to write the following week.

  “What are you doing with that, Guerrieri?” D’Amore asked. “Playing video games?”

  “I’m looking for a judgment,” I said, trying to give my reply a tone of polite disinclination to engage in dialogue. In vain.

  “I hate those things. I like paper codes, manuals, law books the size of encyclopaedias.”

  You also like mothballs, I thought, catching an unusually strong whiff of them.

  “The world is getting worse every day, and they call it progress. I hate progress. I wish we were back in the time when lawyers and judges were cultivated people, when school was serious and educated children, when doctors cured their patients. When kids played football in their gardens, not on computers, and for a snack ate bread and tomatoes, or else, if there were no tomatoes, bread with oil and salt. All our problems started with the coming of computers.”

  The connection between the presumed end of bread and tomatoes and the coming of computers was obscure, but I took care not to ask him to explain it.

  Just then, my phone vibrated in my pocket, which gave me permission to escape from the courtroom, beyond the reach of D’Amore, in order to reply. It was Annapaola.

  “Hi, boss, I’m in a hurry. I need a piece of information.”

  “Go on.”

  “When you told me about the search of Larocca’s apartment, you said there was a dressing gown from Claridge’s in the bathroom, isn’t that right?”

  “No, I don’t think it was from Claridge’s. It was probably from a Mandarin, or the Plaza Athénée. Why?”

  “But you did mention something from Claridge’s, I’m sure of it.”

  “Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?”

  “Bye for now, boss. I may have something to tell you in a few hours.”

  She hung up. I stayed outside the courtroom, to avoid being buttonholed again by Mothball Man. A few minutes later, the judges emerged from their chambers and the presiding judge read the decision confirming, correctly, the sentence on the two defendants.

  Annapaola called again that afternoon. “I have a couple of things to tell you.”

  “Shall we meet?”

  “I’m going out of town, on business. The usual divorce thing; I can’t bear it any more. Maybe I’ll become a journalist again, or else I’ll look for something else. I could be a softball coach.”

  “Or else train people to fight with baseball bats.”

  “Right, that might be an idea. Sometimes I feel so bored. Does that ever happen to you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “All right, let’s get to the point.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was something strange about her tone.

  “Last night I talked about your client with a friend of mine who’s a carabiniere. A good man, I trust him. He used to pass me excellent information when I was a journalist. He thinks Larocca is on the take, but when I asked him why, he couldn’t tell me anything more. Just rumours going around. The same things Tancredi told you, but with less precision and less certainty.”

  “Okay, let’s leave it at that. Basically, it’s none of my business, and it’s none of yours either.”

  “Let me finish. I hate dead ends. So I started going over what I knew about this business. After a while, I remembered what you told me about the search of Larocca’s apartment.”

  My trainee Federico, the one with a face like a psychotic pigeon, put his head round the door of my office. I raised my finger to tell him to come back later. In four or five years, maybe. It struck me that I ought to find a way to dismiss him, without offending him and without offending my old teacher.

  “I told you that when I was in London I worked in a hotel, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a very good hotel. Not famous like the ones your client stays in, but very good. I learnt a whole lot of things and met a whole lot of people there.”

  I held back from asking her any questions. I couldn’t figure out where she was going with this, but I knew she’d tell me when she wanted to. I just had to wait.

  “Among the people I got friendly with when I was there was a Pakistani guy. One of the nicest men I’ve ever met, by the way. Aren’t you going to ask me what this has to do with Larocca?”

  “I’m trying hard not to, but if you’re hoping to arouse my curiosity, you’re doing a really good job.”

  “Good, I like self-control. Hamed – that’s my friend’s name – works at Claridge’s now. I phoned him and asked him if Larocca stayed there often. He told me I shouldn’t be asking him for information like that, and he shouldn’t be giving it to me. I replied that I knew that. Then he told me that Larocca has stayed there seven times in the last four years.”

  “I don’t in any way want to detract from your inquiries, but the fact that he’d stayed there could be guessed from the objects he had in his home.”

  “Could you also guess how he paid his bills there?”

  “What?”

  “Hamed was more reluctant about that. I told him I needed the information for a divorce case, that it was important, and that he owed me one. Which isn’t true: he doesn’t just owe me one, he owes me lots. In the end he said he’d try to check, but couldn’t guarantee anything. He’d call me back.”

  “What did he tell you when he called you back?”

  “The payment always comes by transfer from a bank in Switzerland. Every time it’s a large amount, because he charges to the hotel not just the cost of the room and meals – which is a lot in itself – but even his shopping, the rent of a chauffeur-driven car, restaurants, everything.”

  She didn’t add anything else.

  I sat there in silence, trying to assimilate the information. It’s one thing to imagine something unpleasant in a general, undefined way, it’s quite another to hear it described in detail in all its nastiness.

  “What made you think of checking this?” I said at last, noticing that my voice had gone down a couple of tones.

  “I remembered how the manager of that hotel in London once told me how some guests paid with transfers from coded accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg or other countries. These accounts are where people put funds from tax evasion, money laundering – and corruption.”

  “Do you know which bank the payments came from?”

  “Yes. I even have the dates of the transfers. No documents, obviously. I took a few notes as I was talking to my friend on the phone. Since I don’t trust emails, I’ll leave a paper for you in your office letter box. I’ll drop by in half an hour, just before I leave.”

  With this information, I thought, the Prosecutor’s Department would be able to issue letters rogatory, and sooner or later it would emerge that a judge being investigated for corruption in Italy had a bank account in Switzerland, and that this account contained sums incompatible with the salary of the said magistrate – or any magistrate – and it might also emerge that fifty thousand euros had been deposited in it in the days following Ladisa’s release.

  I felt nausea rising inside me. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t know. The bastard is your client. It’s up to you to decide.”

  “You’r
e right.”

  Another long pause.

  “I’ll drop by and leave that paper.”

  “Thanks.”

  26

  The important events of my life have happened by chance. If there was a design, I never noticed it. I studied law by chance, or as a stopgap, or because I hadn’t had the courage to ask myself what I really wanted to do, maybe fearing that choosing involved a responsibility I wasn’t quite up to. In the same way, I found myself working as a defence attorney: swept along by the current, telling myself that, basically, I liked the work, and that in any case life is a journey partly made up of compromises, and that it’s an adult thing to accept this truth. Justifications, most of them, which are like certain rocks just below the surface of the water. You can lean on them, you can grab hold of them, but you can also hit them and hurt yourself very badly.

  I had dealt with my unease about my job – a job I had never really chosen – by constructing for myself the character described by Annapaola. She had said things that I knew perfectly well but which I’d been determined never to admit.

  I had an image of myself and tried to live up to it. One way or another. Whenever there was a clash with reality, it was reality that had to adapt. But that’s a mechanism that can’t last forever. Gradually, you lose your sense of balance.

  I left my work hanging and walked out of the office. I passed a bakery from which the aroma of freshly baked focaccia emanated. I bought a schoolboy slice – in other words, a big one. I had a cold beer at a bar frequented by habitual drunks who looked at me as what I was: a foreign body.

  Then I took my bicycle and started riding with no particular aim, but with the intention of not stopping too soon. I was very, very confused.

  Try to simplify, Guerrieri, otherwise you’ll never get through this and it’ll be another sleepless night. So: a client of yours is accused of judicial corruption. You defend him, convinced of his innocence, then you discover that he’s guilty. What to do? Keep defending him or give up the brief? Basically, it’s quite a simple question.

  Maybe not so simple, though. To start with: would you have the same dilemma if you discovered that a client of yours accused of robbery had indeed committed that robbery and maybe had also committed many others? If you actually discovered that he was a professional robber? No, you wouldn’t.