Reasonable Doubts gg-3 Read online

  So let’s rule out the theory that whoever planted the drugs in the car was the same person who tipped off the customs police. And let’s assume that Paolicelli is telling the truth. If he really is innocent, how the hell to prove it?

  Find out who planted the drugs, I told myself.

  Well, that should be easy enough. All I have to do is uncover the network of international traffickers who planted the drugs, drag them to the appeal court to testify, and there, stricken by remorse, they confess, thus clearing my client. He’s acquitted, justice triumphs, and the legend of Avvocato Guerrieri is secure.

  If Paolicelli really was innocent, then this was the worst case that had come my way in the whole of my so-called career, I told myself as I leafed through the last pages. At the bottom of the file I found a copy of Paolicelli’s criminal record. It was pretty much as I’d expected. Some very old convictions as a minor for affray, actual bodily harm, possession of weapons. All of them during the years when the Fascist gangs were active. Nothing since 1981.

  As I looked through the record, I caught myself thinking that, until a few hours earlier, I’d been determined not to take the case.

  Until Signora Natsu Kawabata had stepped into my office.

  6

  I put my notes in order. More than that, I tried to get my ideas in order.

  For Paolicelli to have a chance of getting out of this – which was very unlikely-I would have to do a bit of investigating, and that was where the problems started.

  I’d only ever used private detectives a couple of times, with disastrous results. And that was in cases which were – how shall I put it? – a lot less problematic than the Paolicelli case. After the second time, I had sworn it would also be the last.

  I realized I’d have to talk to Carmelo Tancredi.

  Carmelo Tancredi is a police inspector who specializes in hunting down the worst dregs of humanity: rapists, sexual abusers, child traffickers.

  He has the mild, slightly downtrodden appearance of a Mexican peasant in a B-western, the kind of intuition you usually only find in fictional policemen, and the grip of a crazed pitbull.

  I’d talk to him and ask him what he thought of this whole business. If it was really possible that someone had planted the drugs in Paolicelli’s car in Montenegro with the intention of retrieving them in Italy. And I would ask him if he thought it was worth conducting an investigation to try and clear my client.

  Then I would ask around to see if anyone knew this lawyer, Macri. To find out where he fitted into the jigsaw.

  Assuming, of course, that there was a jigsaw. There could be a much simpler explanation: the drugs did in fact belong to Paolicelli and some unknown accomplices, the lawyer – as often happens in these cases – had been hired and paid by these accomplices, and his wife, of course, knew nothing about it.

  The fact that I now had a plan – talking to Tancredi, inquiring about this Macri – gave me the feeling that I’d actually got somewhere. I looked at my watch and realized it was two in the morning.

  For a moment, only for a moment, I remembered Margherita’s face. Before it dissolved into the photographic negative of that September afternoon, and then disappeared in the distance, somewhere to the west.

  Great Friday night, I thought as I left the office and headed home.

  7

  On Monday morning, I asked Maria Teresa to call Signora Kawabata and tell her that I was taking the case and that I would visit her husband in prison before the end of the week. She – Maria Teresa – would have to go to the clerk of the court’s office at the court of appeal to check if a date had been fixed for the hearing.

  At that point I hesitated, as if there was something else, something I’d forgotten. Maria Teresa asked me if she should tell Signora Kawabata to come to the office to pay an advance and I said yes, that was it, that was what I had forgotten. She had to tell her to come to the office. To pay an advance.

  Of course.

  Then I took the papers I needed for that morning’s hearings and left.

  Outside, it was freezing cold and I told myself I didn’t have to take the bicycle every time, I could actually walk. I went into the bar on the ground floor of the building where my office was, had a cappuccino, and on the way to the courtroom called Carmelo Tancredi.

  “Guido! Don’t tell me one of those maggots we arrested last night is a client of yours. Please don’t tell me that.”

  “OK, I won’t. Who did you arrest last night?”

  “A paedophile ring organizing holidays in Thailand. Vermin for export. We’ve been working on the case for six months. Two of our undercover officers infiltrated the ring, even went on holiday with these animals, and collected evidence by the barrel load. Incredibly, the Thai police cooperated.”

  “And you arrested them last night?”

  “Right. You can’t imagine the kind of stuff we found in their homes.”

  “I can’t imagine and I don’t want to know.”

  That was only half true. I didn’t want to know, but I could imagine only too well what they might have found when they searched the men’s homes. I’d occasionally been involved in paedophilia cases – always representing the victims – and had seen the kind of material taken from people like that. In comparison, photographs of autopsies are quite pleasant to look at.

  “Since, fortunately, you’re not the lawyer of one of these maggots, why are you calling me?”

  “I wanted to buy you a coffee and have a little chat. But if you worked all night and are just now going to sleep, it doesn’t matter. I realize you’re getting on in years, so…”

  He said something in broad Sicilian. I didn’t really understand the words but I could guess that he was making a gently critical comment on my sense of humour.

  Then he went back to Italian. He told me I had to wait until they’d taken statements from the people they’d arrested and done all the other paperwork. He said he’d have to check it all because the guys in his squad were very good when it came to working in the field – tailing suspects, stakeouts, knocking down doors, chasing people, grabbing them, maybe even manhandling them a little, which doesn’t come amiss sometimes – but you had to keep them under strict supervision whenever they got their hands on a computer, or had to deal with legal formalities. He would be finished around midday and so, if I wanted, I could come by and pick him up at police headquarters and buy him an aperitif.

  OK, I said, I’d pick him up at twelve-thirty.

  Then I went to the courthouse and pleaded my various cases. At my usual pace, in a kind of semi-conscious state.

  During my first years in the profession – as a trainee and then when I was already a prosecutor – what I’d liked best was arriving at the courthouse in the morning. I’d arrive twenty minutes before the start of the hearings, say hello to a few friends, go and have a coffee, smoke a cigarette – in those days they let you smoke in the corridors. Sometimes I might also meet a girl I liked and make plans for the evening.

  Little by little these rituals had become more sporadic and then disappeared. It was something physiological, the kind of thing that happens inevitably once you pass thirty. Over time, I’d gradually fallen out of love with that moment of entering the courthouse, the ritual coffee and all the rest of it. Sometimes I would look around, on the way to the bar. I would look at the young lawyers, often well-dressed, even too well-dressed. I would look at the girls – secretaries, trainees, even a few young magistrates on probation.

  They all seemed a little stupid to me, and I’d think, tritely, that when we were young we were different, and better.

  Not a very clever thought, but once you get started on something like that you can’t stop. If these people are so dumb, then there’s no reason to envy them, no reason to envy their youth, their supple joints, their infinite possibilities. They’re idiots, you can see that from the way they behave, at the bar, and everywhere. We were better, and we still are, so why envy them?

  Why, damn it?
r />   By twelve-twenty I was outside police headquarters. I called Tancredi to tell him to come down and join me. When I saw him, I thought he looked like someone who’s slept on a sofa, with his coat and shoes on. For all I knew, he probably had.

  We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so the first thing he did was to ask after Margherita. I told him she’d been away for a few months on business, and tried to look as natural and as neutral as possible as I told him this. I could tell from his expression that I didn’t quite manage it. So I changed the subject and asked him about his thesis. Tancredi had already done all his psychology exams, and only needed to finish his thesis to graduate. He said he hadn’t been working on it for a while, and from the way he said it I realized I’d touched on a sore point, too.

  We were quits. We could go and have our aperitif now.

  We chose a wine bar a few hundred yards from police headquarters, run by a friend of Tancredi’s. It was a place that tended to be busiest at night. Right now, it was deserted, and an ideal place for a quiet chat.

  We ordered oysters and a white Sicilian wine. We ate a first tray of oysters and both agreed we hadn’t had enough. So we ordered more, and drank several glasses of wine.

  After his last oyster, Tancredi put his cigar stub in his mouth – he almost always had one with him, and almost never lit it – moved his chair back and asked me what I wanted from him. I told him the whole Paolicelli story, trying not to leave out any detail. When I’d finished, I said I needed his advice.

  With the hand that was holding the cigar stub, he signalled to me to go on.

  “First of all, have you ever heard of drugs being transported to Italy by being planted in cars belonging to people who didn’t know anything about them? Have there ever been any cases in which something like that has cropped up?”

  “Oh yes, it’s cropped up. Turkish heroin traffickers used to use a system like that. They’d target Italian tourists who’d driven to Turkey by car. They’d steal the car, fill it with heroin and then make sure it was recovered before anyone went to the police to report it. And the person who recovered it even got a reward for his good deed. Then the tourists would set off back to Italy, and the Turks would follow them at a distance, to make sure nothing happened to the consignment. If the car was stopped and searched at the border, the problem was entirely the unsuspecting tourist’s. Once across the border, their Italian friends would come into the picture. At the first opportunity the car would be stolen again, the only difference being that this time it wasn’t given back. End of story.”

  “How far back are we talking?”

  “As far as I know, this modus operandi has definitely been established on two separate occasions. Once in a big investigation by the Prosecutor’s Department and Flying Squad in Trieste, and once in Bari by our own Drugs Squad. This was three, four years ago.”

  I rubbed my face, against the direction of the stubble. So, theoretically, Paolicelli could have been telling the truth, even though he hadn’t said anything about the car being stolen. The story of the hotel porter made sense.

  “And do you know about operations of this kind where the car hasn’t been stolen?”

  “What do you mean? They plant the drugs and just leave them there as a gift?”

  “Very funny. I meant, where they don’t steal the car to plant the drugs in the first place.”

  As he replied, I got the distinct impression he wasn’t telling me everything he knew.

  “I don’t know of anything like that, but it isn’t impossible. If you know where the car is and you have the time, you don’t have to steal it, you can take it and bring it back without the owner even realizing.”

  “For the sake of argument: if you were a private detective and you were given the job of clearing Paolicelli’s name, what would you do?”

  “For the sake of argument, right? First of all, I’m not a private detective. Secondly, I don’t think we’ve established that your new client is innocent. It’s possible someone’s car could be full of drugs that aren’t his, I grant you. But the fact that it’s possible doesn’t mean it happened in this case. The most realistic hypothesis-”

  “I hate logical policemen. I know, the most realistic hypothesis is that the drugs were his. If someone has a car full of cocaine, the first thing you consider is that the cocaine was his. Having said that, if you were a private detective…”

  “If I were a private detective, before I said a word or moved a finger, I’d make sure I got a big advance. Then the first thing I’d do would be to question our friend Paolicelli again. His wife, too. Who, I suspect, isn’t at all bad-looking.”

  Tancredi was capable of reading a lot of things in a person’s face. Right then, I wished he wasn’t.

  “I’d try to find out if there really is a reason to suspect the hotel porter. Though I don’t know how far we’d get.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To find out anything definite about the porter, or any of the hotel staff, there’d have to be an official investigation. We’d have to ask the police in Montenegro for cooperation. I don’t know if you remember who we’re talking about. For years, some of the police chiefs over there, and a few of their ministers, ran the international trade in contraband cigarettes.”

  I did remember.

  “Anyway, I’d ask Paolicelli and his wife if they noticed anything strange during the holiday, especially towards the end. Even insignificant details. If they met anyone, a person who was very pleasant, tried to make friends with them. If they chatted to anyone, and this person asked a lot of questions. Where are you from, when did you arrive, and especially, when are you going home? And I’d ask them to tell me everything they remember about the porter, or the owners of the hotel, or anyone on the staff-a waiter for example – who caught their attention for any reason.”

  “And then?”

  “It depends on what they answer. If it does turns out that there was someone snooping on them in Montenegro, you’d need to check if by any chance this person also travelled back on the same ferry.”

  “And how can I check that?”

  He pretended to look downhearted. “That’s just it. You can’t.”

  “Come on, Carmelo, please help me. I just want to know if he told me a pack of lies or if he’s really innocent. If he is, that’s really tough on him.”

  He didn’t reply immediately. He rolled the cigar stub between his index finger and thumb, looking at it as if it were an object of great interest, ignoring me for a few seconds, as if he was wondering what to tell me. In the end, he shrugged.

  “It’s possible your client is telling the truth. A few months ago an informant of mine told me there were some major consignments of cocaine coming in from Albania, Montenegro and Croatia, using precisely that method. Planting the drugs in a car without even stealing it.”

  “Shit.”

  “They fill the car, a day or two before their unwitting courier leaves. Then one of the gang gets on the ferry to keep an eye on the merchandise. Once past customs, they get to the final phase: at the first opportunity, their accomplices in Italy steal the car and recover the drugs.”

  “Is there an ongoing investigation into all this?”

  “No, at least not as far as I know. I passed the information on to the drugs squad. The only thing they said was that they’d like to know who my informant was so they could talk to him.”

  He made a disgusted face. A real cop never asks a colleague to tell him the name of his informant. Only amateurs or rogues do that.

  “And you told them to fuck off.”

  “But very politely.”

  “So the information was never used.”

  “As far as I know. In any case that’s not what interests us. You need to talk to your client and his lovely wife and get anything from them that they can remember. Then, depending on what they tell you, we may be able to find some way of checking it out.”

  “OK, Carmelo, I’ll talk to them and get them to tell me everythi
ng. But then you have to help me. For instance, we could get hold of the passenger list from the ferry. To see if there’s any name on it that matches your records. You won’t have to do much, just talk to some of your colleagues in the border police and-”

  “Do you want me to wash your car windows, too? Just to make sure you get the full service.”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s been a while since-”

  Again, Tancredi said something in broad Sicilian. It sounded pretty similar to what he had said a few hours earlier on the phone.

  In the end, though, he told me to call him after I’d talked to Paolicelli.

  “If anything useful comes out of your chat, we’ll see if we can take it any further. Another thing you could do in the meantime is try and find out some more about that colleague of yours who turned up from Rome. If Paolicelli and his wife are telling the truth, this guy has a connection with the owners of the drugs. Knowing who this lawyer is could give us a lead.”

  Right. Our little chat had borne fruit. I felt quite pleased.

  I stood up and went to the cash desk to pay the bill, but the owner told me that no one was allowed to pay without Tancredi’s permission.

  And I didn’t have his permission that day.

  8

  Natsu Kawabata came to the office on Tuesday afternoon.

  She was wearing the same blue coat as the last time. She looked more beautiful every time I saw her.

  It was obvious she was of mixed Japanese and European blood. As her name was Kawabata, I assumed her father was Japanese and her mother Italian. Otherwise, how could she talk such perfect Italian? She even had a slight Neapolitan inflexion. I had no idea if she’d been born in Italy or Japan. And that dark complexion must have come from her mother, as the Japanese are usually light-skinned.

  “Good afternoon, Avvocato.”

  “Good afternoon. Please sit down.”

  I found my own voice a bit over-emphatic, and that made me feel uncomfortable.