A Fine Line Page 23

  He had assumed a didactic tone that sent shivers down my spine.

  “What are you saying? If a judge takes money for a ruling, however well founded, however right and proper, that’s still judicial corruption.”

  He looked at me with a good-natured, almost affectionate expression.

  He was mad.

  He took another big gulp of his wine. If he carried on like that, he’d be drunk within half an hour.

  “You don’t understand, Guido. It’s my fault, I haven’t explained myself well. We agree on the fact that the punishment should fit the crime, don’t we?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Let me give you an example to make it clearer. Let’s say someone is called to give evidence about a robbery to which he was an eyewitness. During his testimony, in which he relates what he saw on the occasion of the robbery, he also says something that isn’t true. For example, let’s imagine he does a job he’s ashamed of, so he lies about it. Do you follow me now?”

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “He told the truth about the robbery and a lie about his work. He told the truth about what’s relevant to the case and a lie about something completely irrelevant. Technically, his conduct counts as perjury. Article 372 says something like: ‘Anyone testifying as a witness before the legal authorities, who affirms a falsehood or denies the truth, is punished with imprisonment of two to six years.’ If that man were tried for perjury and you were the judge, would you feel up to sentencing him to two years’ imprisonment?”

  “Look, Pierluigi—”

  “You’d acquit him if you were the judge. Or you’d get him acquitted if you were his lawyer. And the defence argument would be quite straightforward. Even though from a technical point of view he’s committed an offence, there is no offence against the legal good, as protected by article 372, because that lie has no possible bearing on the verdict in the robbery trial. It’s in no way able to influence that verdict. It’s a technical violation of the letter of the law. There’s no major harm done. There’s no perjury.”

  “So what?”

  “Let’s talk about what interests us more closely. Think of a custodial sentence that ought to be overturned because there was insufficient evidence, no need for custody, absence of motive, legal irregularities. Whatever you like. If this sentence is correctly overturned, it’s of no importance that the judge – who’s only done what it was right for him to do – accepts a little gift from the defence lawyer, because that lawyer is pleased about a ruling which in all probability will be upheld in the Supreme Court. And sure enough, as you already know, very few of my rulings are overturned by the Supreme Court. Very few.”

  “I admire your clever use of euphemism. Not everyone would call fifty thousand euros a little gift.”

  He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and assumed a self-satisfied expression. The expression of someone who’s heard a banal observation and doesn’t even want to waste his breath refuting it. He has a more important argument to follow through.

  “What interest is protected by the rule on judicial corruption?”

  He paused briefly, a pause that served merely to give rhythm to his speech. He wasn’t interested in my reply, and I wasn’t interested in giving it to him. The impulse to tell him to stop talking bullshit was becoming ever more irresistible.

  “The interest protected by the rule is the smooth functioning of the judicial office. The rule aims at preventing the judicial office from being distorted in favour of personal interests. The payment of money, the remittance of other utilities, should not interfere with the correct forming of decisions. That’s all.

  “Let’s apply this to my work in the appeal court. If, in exchange for money, I overturn a custodial sentence which has no irregularities, then clearly I’m committing the offence of judicial corruption. But think of a suspect who’s been unjustly arrested, for lack of evidence or procedural irregularities. In this case, the verdict ought to be overturned: that’s the duty of the appeal court judge. What happens afterwards – gratitude, gifts, things like that – is irrelevant.”

  It struck me that when you find yourself caught up in certain arguments, arguments that have their own erroneous and deadly inner logic, the cold wind of madness touches you, too.

  “If they ought to be released,” I said, “they will be released and that’s that. It’s what you have your salary for.”

  “An unjustly arrested suspect who receives justice pays a lot to the lawyer who defends him. If part of that money goes to the person who’s the real architect of his freedom, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong in it.”

  That isn’t true, as any student of criminal law could have said: article 319c considers any collection of money or other utilities on the part of a judge an offence, regardless of whether the decision for which he has been paid is correct or not. The idea is that when there’s money involved, the entire mechanism is altered and it becomes impossible to distinguish correct decisions from incorrect decisions. They’re all incorrect, because they’re influenced by the personal interest of the judge who’s prostituting his office.

  Larocca the highly experienced jurist knew that perfectly well. Larocca the man, who had lost his sense of balance and was living in a world of his own lies and justifications, didn’t. What was that sentence from The Brothers Karamazov? “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he can no longer distinguish the truth, within him or around him.” My grandfather often quoted it, and said that the rule of moral balance is the opposite of the behaviour described in that sentence. It means not lying to ourselves about the significance of, and the reasons for, what we do and what we don’t do. It means not looking for justifications, not manipulating the account we make of ourselves to anyone, including ourselves.

  I didn’t say these things to Larocca. I was feeling terribly weary. “Why did you do it?” I asked, almost without meaning to.

  He sighed. He was about to pick up his glass again, then changed his mind. “Did you know I suffered from gastritis for a long time? Terrible burning sensations, I could eat almost nothing, just horrible thin soups, I couldn’t drink wine, I was pumped full of gastric inhibitors. An impossible life. I decided to drop my gastroenterologist and go to see a psychotherapist, because people kept telling me that gastritis is the most psychosomatic of illnesses. To cure it, you really have to identify the cause. The man was good and he explained to me, in a very simple, clear way, that gastritis is caused by anger. By the sense of injustice we feel regarding something, or someone, or life in general. He told me that in order to get at the root of the problem I had to identify who or what was at the basis of my repressed anger. That’s when I started to understand.”

  “Then help me to understand.”

  “Do you remember which of us had the highest marks at university?”

  “There was no contest. You never got anything less than top marks, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You’re not mistaken. Do you remember what I said I wanted to be?”

  “Either a notary or a university professor and lawyer.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “You took the bench exams immediately after graduation, you passed with flying colours, and you became a magistrate before you were even twenty-four. You must have a quarter of a century’s length of service by now.”

  “Excellent summary. I like your ability to always get straight to the point, never wasting words. Your arguments are always the best. You’re the best lawyer I know. I liked being a magistrate when I wasn’t even twenty-four. Not many people have managed that. I admit my weakness: I’m competitive, I like coming first. I thought I’d be able to be a magistrate for a few years, while continuing to study. I thought I’d write articles and essays and then decide whether to be a notary or a university professor.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Life happened. The work took up more of my time than I’d thought. I married ver
y young – maybe you remember, although you and I didn’t see very much of each other at that time – then we separated and it wasn’t an amicable separation. To cut a long story short, ten years later I was still a magistrate. I’d lost contact with the university and had stopped studying to be a notary. I was trapped in this profession which I’d considered just a temporary occupation.”

  It was only now that I managed to take a sip of wine, whereas he, carried away by what he was telling me, seemed to have forgotten his drink. It was as if it was what he had been waiting for: the opportunity to tell his story. As if he had never told it before. Maybe he had never told it before.

  The waiter asked us if we wanted anything to eat. He could bring us, if we wanted, focaccia, mozzarella bites, olives, pistachios, crisps, celery, carrots, fennel. I nodded, without even thinking. The waiter looked at me, puzzled.

  “A bit of everything, a mixture,” I said in an impatient, dismissive tone. He looked at me for a few seconds, then must have decided that I was a strange character, the type of customer you have to humour if you don’t want any trouble. He gave a half-bow and walked away. I turned again to Larocca, who was just waiting for a sign from me to resume.

  “And so I kept on being a magistrate. It was a stopgap, but on the outside I made it seem like a choice. To tell the truth, I managed to convince myself for a while, but soon I realized that I had committed an injustice towards myself. People much less capable and gifted than me – or you,” he added after a few seconds, “had become notaries and were making lots of money, or were filling university seats, becoming professors and therefore rich lawyers. Real idiots, people who floundered at university and have never understood anything about the law.”

  About this he was right. Some people who in our university days had struck us as common imbeciles – because they were – now occupied major seats. Boys we had laughed at had become full professors, revered and respected as great jurists.

  “They put themselves in the right place, licked the right arses. They were patient, they wrote unreadable monographs full of things they’d cribbed and ended up with university posts. You remember Di Maio?”

  I did remember Di Maio. A young man of incomparable mediocrity and ignorance, now a full professor and a rich lawyer. His biography could have been entitled: The Triumph of the Idiot.

  “Villas, boats, holidays, luxury hotels. With just one of the judgments he gets one of his slaves to write for him on behalf of a bank or a business company, he earns what I get as a salary in six months. Do you think it’s possible, do you think it’s right, that some of the two-bit bunglers who appear for the defence in my court earn ten times what I do?”

  “If you don’t think it’s right, resign and start practising as a defence lawyer.”

  He ignored my words. He didn’t even hear them. He wasn’t interested in my comments. The light of madness shone in his eyes.

  “I was telling you about the gastritis. Since I started accepting… gifts, I’ve got better. I didn’t realize immediately, but after a few months I didn’t have any more symptoms. None at all. It wasn’t hard to link the two things, even though, as you can imagine, I couldn’t tell that to my therapist.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I’d followed his advice. Abandoned trying to control everything, let go, stopped judging myself. Actually it was all true; there was just that one thing missing.”

  He gave a knowing little smile. At that moment the waiter arrived with the focaccia, the mozzarella bites, the olives, the pistachios, the crisps, the celery, the carrots, the fennel, just as we’d ordered. I don’t know why, but I was struck by the odour of the celery: it set off one of those roller coasters of memory that only smell can. Within a few moments, I was in my grandmother’s kitchen. She was cooking, cutting something I couldn’t see on the old streaked marble table and holding it out to me. It was the stem of a plant, and she told me to taste it. I bit into it a little suspiciously, it was crunchy beneath my teeth, I liked it. Then someone else came into the kitchen, but at this point the memory faded.

  “I want you to understand, Guido. Have I ordered the release of any of your clients in the past few years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever wondered about it?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

  “What should it tell me?”

  “Your clients were well defended. You’re a good lawyer and a decent person. Sure enough, when I needed a lawyer, I turned to you. I take gifts only from rogues and rascals, for clients who should be released anyway and whom they – their lawyers, I mean – may not be capable of defending adequately. Just imagine, I’ve sometimes had to suggest myself the things they ought to write in the appeals.”

  “But how much—”

  “A lot. Since I started accepting gifts, I’ve made more money than I would have earned in thirty years of work.”

  “What do you do with all that money?”

  He looked at me with a strange expression. There was surprise in it, but it wasn’t just that. It was as if this question placed us on a level he hadn’t thought about. He took several seconds to reply.

  “Almost nothing. It’s there, put aside. I’ll use it when I retire and have a very comfortable old age.”

  “Tell me about that account in Switzerland.”

  “I opened it in 2001, just before my fortieth birthday. At that time, some kinds of operation were still quite common. Today, everything’s much more complicated. Just imagine, back then some banks even provided smugglers.”

  “You mean people to carry the money over the border?”

  “Yes, they’d come here and collect the bags with the money. Because cash is a nuisance, you know. Whenever possible, it’s much better to transfer money from one foreign bank to another, using confidential accounts. Accounts created for that purpose, where the money usually comes from over-invoicing or invoicing for non-existing operations. In such cases, it doesn’t matter if the transfer is made to an account in Switzerland, or Luxembourg, or the Isle of Man. Someone presses a button somewhere and the money is transferred to the other side of the world. It’s much better when I receive gifts like that. It happens when the people involved are big companies which have had their assets seized.”

  Big companies. I recalled some controversial cases in the last few years where Larocca’s court had ruled the release from seizure of considerable assets: land, manufacturing plants. In each of these cases, tens of millions of euros were involved. I felt rather nauseous, the kind of nausea you feel on a winding mountain road when you aren’t in the driver’s seat.

  “But when it’s a matter of cash, as I was saying, things are a little more troublesome, less sterile.”

  “Less sterile?”

  “Cash needs to be taken to a safe bank abroad, and the physical distance is quite important. That’s why Switzerland is better than other places. And that’s why using the services of smugglers was very… convenient. Expensive but convenient.”

  “How does it work?”

  Larocca smiled, and drank some wine. He seemed pleased to be able to explain it to me. “Imagine you’ve opened an account in a bank in Zurich and you have to deposit some cash in it, but you don’t want to take unnecessary risks crossing the border with so much money on you. You call your bank, your trusted official, and you arrange for it to be carried by smugglers. In some cases, for large sums, they even flew down on private planes.”

  “And today?”

  “Things have become more complicated. In Switzerland now they’re no longer so… tolerant. No more smugglers. Every time I can do a transfer from one foreign bank to another, I do it… or rather, I have it done. Otherwise you need to sort out the cash.”

  He carried on for a while, eating and drinking as he spoke. With a hint of smugness, he also told me about the luxury hotels, and I found it hard to restrain myself from telling him that he could spare me the details, because I already kne
w.

  I realized I was getting bored. Weary and bored to death. He was talking about money, about that bank in Switzerland, about how he would reward my valuable work, and I was thinking I’d rather be somewhere else. I half closed my eyes, sure that he wouldn’t notice, and in fact he didn’t. I could hear the sound of his voice more clearly, not what he was saying, which no longer interested me. That’s how I became aware of something that had escaped me. A kind of obscene, unhealthy self-importance. It was as if that tone – much more than the words, the concepts, the arguments – sucked away all meaning, all distinctions, all possibility of separating right from wrong. I don’t know how much time passed before I started actually listening to him again.

  “Now that I’ve told you everything, I think we should put our heads together and decide on a strategy. First, we need to have a better idea of what exactly they’ve found out about the account. It may be necessary to get in touch with a lawyer in Zurich. What do you suggest?”

  I let his words hang in the air between us for a long time. It wasn’t calculated, I was simply looking for a way to say what I had to say.

  “I’m sorry, Pierluigi,” I said finally, “but I’m going to have to give up the brief.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m giving up the brief. You’ll have to find another lawyer.”

  “Have you gone mad?”

  “Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless you resign from the bench.”

  He looked at me as if I’d suddenly spoken in a completely unfamiliar language. My hand went to my jacket pocket, where I had put the two envelopes. I ran my fingers over the short side of the rectangle and pushed the tips of my thumb and middle finger into the sharp edges. Unconsciously, I must have been looking for a sense of strength and security, but it actually made me feel weak, lost and alone. At that moment, I realized I wouldn’t be capable of sending those two envelopes.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t feel I can continue to represent you. I don’t think I’d be able to guarantee an effective and unconditional defence after hearing the things you’ve told me. I can’t conceive how you can continue to do your work, in the way you do it, thanks partly to me. It’d be quite different if you handed in your resignation, but I know you won’t do that.”