A Fine Line (14 page)

“I'm no expert, but I think it's very good,” I said after tasting it.

“I should hope so, too.”

“Why?”

“Because that bottle was another gift from a client. When he gave it to me, he told me it was
very
special. Being a
very
unrefined girl, I looked for the price on the Internet.”

“And how much does it cost?”

“About seven hundred euros, maybe a little more.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me the first time.”

“Now I won't be able to drink it.”

“Are you crazy? I was just waiting for the opportunity to open it. That's what taste is: knowing how much it costs
and drinking it all the same. Of course I'd never buy it, but once it's there I think it's completely immoral to keep it. I remember those bottles of spirits in my grandparents' house, preserved intact for decades until they were undrinkable. It made me very sad.”

She broke off for a few seconds and, maybe without even realizing it, made a gesture with her hand as if to dismiss an unpleasant thought or memory.

“No, no,” she concluded. “Let's drink it without mercy.”

Absolutely.

Beyond the window, the lights of the airport and the ones further away flickered like earthly constellations. Annapaola told me she had played softball in the first division for three years, that she had graduated in archaeology and that she still had her press card – which had proved useful in her work as a private detective. She added that she didn't want to this evening, but another time she would tell me why she had stopped writing for newspapers.

“How come you're not smoking?” I asked after a while.

“You know the last cigarette I smoked was the one in your office?”

“Why?”

“I don't know. When I left, it occurred to me that you'd been very kind to let me smoke – you
are
a kind person, which is something I like in a man – and that I'd been rude to take advantage of your kindness. I told myself that I'd been thinking of quitting for ages, and to cut a long story short – I never follow a rational progression in anything – when I left your office I threw away my tobacco, my filters and my papers. It doesn't even bother me very much. I guess the time had come.”

We were silent for a while. It was better to stop with the whisky: I wasn't sure I had the situation under control. I
sighed, assuming a judicious expression. “I did the right thing not to bring my car,” I said. “With what I've drunk, I'd risk a life sentence if the traffic police got hold of me. I'll call a taxi and go, because it's late and—”

“Stay a while longer,” she cut in, and before I could reply she stood up and sat down astride my legs, resting her arms on my shoulders. It isn't at all common for a beautiful woman to be even more beautiful from so close up. “I know what you're thinking.”

“Oh yes?”

“You're thinking about what I told you in the office a few hours ago. That thing about sex.”

“Actually, that too—”

“I've changed my mind.”

19

The evening before the pretrial hearing I got a call from Antonio Lopedote, my colleague who was defending Ladisa and his wife. He's a good boy (a sign of the passing years is when you call someone who, like you, is pushing fifty a boy), a dignified lawyer and a genuinely nice person, always polite and well disposed towards his fellow man despite being the size of a bear. At the time, he was mainly defending Mafiosi, and I would occasionally wonder how he reconciled his mild disposition and his courtesy with the type of clients who frequented his office.

“I'm sorry, Guido, I'm calling you about tomorrow's hearing.”

“I bet you're not looking forward to it either.”

“It's not just that I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not sure I can even be there. Two or three things have come up in the last few hours and I can't get away from Bari tomorrow. You're going, aren't you?”

“I have to.”

“In that case, could you deputize for me? I like what you do very much.”

I let a few seconds pass. It wasn't a good idea to mix positions. It might create some conflicts of interest in the defence, and above all it might further damage Larocca's image. I thought about how to tell Lopedote, without offending him, that he'd made a bit of a gaffe in asking me that.

“Antonio, maybe it's best not. Your clients' positions might theoretically be in conflict with mine. I don't think he'd appreciate it.”

It was his turn to pause for a few seconds. When he spoke, he sounded slightly embarrassed. “You're right. I shouldn't even have asked you. I didn't think it through.”

“Don't worry. Look for a colleague in Lecce who can deputize for you officially. I'll see to the rest.” I didn't think it was appropriate to go into detail about the evidence I'd be using for the cross-examinations, or how I'd got hold of it.

“All right, I'll make a couple of phone calls. I'm sure I'll find someone.”

“Antonio?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever seen Capodacqua in court?”

“A couple of weeks ago. The Prosecutor's Department brought him out to testify in that trial of the prison guards who were dealing drugs in cahoots with the inmates. I think it was the first time he'd appeared in public as a prosecution witness. I don't know if you remember the trial.”

“Yes, I do. And how did he handle himself?”

“He's a tough nut. He has a good memory, he isn't stupid, and as far as I can see he tells the truth. I didn't cross-examine him because what he said didn't concern my client, but I heard how he answered my colleagues. What's your opinion of this case?”

“What do your clients say?”

“I never ask my clients what they've done and haven't done. I sleep easier if I don't know. Ladisa and his wife say Capodacqua is a rat, that he makes things up to get the benefits. The usual thing. The woman told me once that Capodacqua had brought the judge into dishonour, but
you know as well as I do that can mean whatever you want it to mean.”

“You're right. I find it hard to believe that Larocca is corrupt. He may not be very pleasant, and I'm sure that the Prosecutor's Department and the police hate him, maybe even with good reason, but I'd be surprised if he'd taken a bribe to throw a decision. I find it equally unrealistic, though, to imagine that it's all an invention of Capodacqua's.”

“So what do you think?”

“Did you know Salvagno well?”

“We did a few trials together. We weren't exactly friends, but he was a sociable guy. I felt bad when I heard about the accident.”

“Did you ever hear him boast about his friendships with judges?”

Lopedote thought this over for a while. “Actually, he boasted of knowing a whole lot of people.”

“Did he ever name any names?”

“No.” I seemed to see him slowly shaking his big bear head as that unpleasant idea took shape. “Do you think he might have asked his clients for money, saying he had to pay the judges?”

“That would explain everything. Although, of course, it wouldn't be right to pin the blame on someone who's dead and can't defend himself.”

“Strange, though, that they haven't petitioned for a custody order.”

I was about to reply: oh, but they did. At the last moment, with the words already emerging from my mouth, I realized he didn't know that and I shouldn't have known it either.

“You're right,” I said. “I hope I'll get a better idea of their strategy tomorrow.”

*

I woke up with a headache. A dull pain between temple and eye, the kind I hadn't had for quite a while. The kind that makes it impossible to stay in bed. You have to get up, even though it's early in the morning (this time it really was early in the morning; 5.30 to be precise), eat something, take a couple of pills and wait for it to pass. That usually works, but all day you carry a feeling of menace with you, like a shadow hanging over you.

What's more, even the atmospheric conditions joined in.

When I'd gone to Lecce two weeks earlier, the weather had been wonderful. Now it was May, but looking outside it seemed like late October, maybe even November. It was cold, the sky was grey and dirty, there was a blustery wind and intermittent rain. The air was opaque. The spring was sick, and it looked as if nothing would be as it was before.

Consuelo was supposed to be coming with me, but at 7.30 she phoned to say she had a fever and was aching all over. It happens, in winter, I replied, advising her to take care and thinking all the while that I really didn't feel like driving nearly a hundred miles and handling that hearing all by myself.

I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of the
pasticciotti
, but it wasn't the right morning for that.

Just to have some company, I was on the verge of calling Larocca and telling him that I'd changed my mind, that it'd be better if he was there, too, that I could pick him up from his apartment within fifteen minutes, and so on. But then I dismissed the idea, took from the wardrobe the raincoat that I'd been convinced I'd put away for the summer, now that May was here, and even grabbed an umbrella. By the time I left home, I was in a foul mood.

After half an hour on the road, the wind dropped and the rain came pouring down, heavy and regular. I had to
set the windscreen wipers going at maximum speed. It was November, there could be no more doubt about it. I listened to a news bulletin in which the weather expert informed me that it would rain in the morning over the southern Adriatic. I thanked him for the confidential information and switched to a local radio station that was broadcasting a programme of Italian music from the 1970s evocatively entitled
Elephant's Foot
: a wretched potpourri of culture and customs.

The presenter's name was Cosimo. He spoke an elementary, hypnotic language characterized by a radical and ruthless avoidance of the rules of grammar. There were dedications, including one I'll never forget: “This song is dedicated to little Lady Diana, who was born yesterday, and to her lovely parents Vito and Maddalena. We have her dad Vito on the phone. What's the child's real name, Vito?” A stunned pause, as if the man was thinking his questioner must be a bit dumb and that was why he asked stupid questions, then: “Lady Diana. That's her name. Lady Diana Recchimurzo, because I'm Vito Recchimurzo.”

Vito Recchimurzo, I want to be like you when I grow up, I said out loud. One of the symptoms of my unbalanced state of mind is my habit of talking to presenters and participants in radio programmes that I listen to when I'm alone in my car. Well, sometimes also when I'm not alone, as some of my girlfriends could tell you, and even my ex-wife.

Listening to that wonderful programme distracted me from the bad weather, external and internal, partly because I started thinking hard about the lyrics of the songs.

One song had been haunting me more than any other since my teenage years: “I untie the plaits of the horses, they run.” This is hard to figure out. Firstly, do horses have plaits, which can then be untied? Secondly, do these particular horses in the song run
after
their plaits have been
untied, or do the songwriter or the singer, both experienced riders, untie the horses' plaits
while
the animals are running? In another song, the story of a love affair that went wrong, the lyrics ended with a desperate plea from the abandoned male to the abandoned female (who, it was clear, wasn't the subtlest of women, having among other things “the body of someone who's said yes too often”): “My darling, in your room the bed is just as you left it.” Does that mean, I used to wonder, that the sheets have never been changed? Which would give a dark, decadent – and somewhat dirty – feel to the whole thing. Or is the singer just referring to the position of the bed, in which case, what's so romantic about that?

Then in a peerless crescendo, DJ Cosimo put on the string intro before the first lines of
Ti amo
by Umberto Tozzi.
The Da Vinci Code
is an easy crossword puzzle in comparison with the incomprehensible lines of that song. For the umpteenth time, I wondered about the meaning of “The love we make is like a butterfly beating its wings as it dies”, and for the umpteenth time I was troubled by an image that seems to refer to an ancient Egyptian curse: “Open the door to a tissue-paper warrior”. By the time I changed stations, in search of news and better grammar, my headache had passed and my mood, despite the rain that kept stubbornly falling, had improved quite a bit.

So I started to think about the work awaiting me. Cross-examining ex-Mafiosi who've turned state's evidence is something I rarely do, because I rarely appear for the defence in trials dealing with organized crime. This is no reflection on my colleagues who do it regularly – some are very good and perfectly respectable – but the type of defendants you get in those trials are the kind of people I prefer not to have in my office.

In any case, cross-examining one of these people isn't easy: it requires balance and detachment. Usually they're telling the truth, by and large, and going straight on the attack, as many defence lawyers do, is almost always pointless: it gets a harsh reaction from prosecutors and conveys the unpleasant impression that the defender is very close to his clients' mindset and the criminal culture to which they belong. You have to be surgical. You have to isolate the parts that are questionable, so that in the end the judge can say that
those
specific statements are unreliable, without being forced to state that the witness is unreliable
in toto
.

Just before Brindisi, the rain eased off, and after about ten minutes stopped altogether. The sky was still grey and hostile, but at least I no longer had the feeling I was a prisoner in my car. Being slightly ahead of schedule, I decided to stop at a service station cafeteria for a cappuccino.

It had recently been renovated, and yet it looked scruffy and neglected. Counter, shelves, chairs and tables seemed to have just come out of their wrapping after being sent to the wrong place. The barman was a man a few years older than me, sad-looking, badly shaved, with a purple uniform and a cap of the same colour, worn askew. The place was half-empty. There was a labourer having coffee at the counter and a couple in their thirties who seemed as out of place as the furniture. The two of them were sitting at a table, dressed in inappropriately light clothes given the atmospheric conditions, as if they had been surprised by the winter on the way to their holiday destination. The woman was doing most of the talking, in a noticeable Roman accent and – how shall I put it? – not exactly under her breath.

“I told you, darling, that it was stupid to come here in May. The weather in spring is changeable, that's only natural, and you can't be sure of getting any sun. But it's always
the same, we always have to do what your mother says, and frankly I'm fed up with it, because it seems to me you're big enough now not to ask her what we should do and where we should go if we want to take a week's break, because—”

“I'm sorry, darling, but—”

“Don't interrupt me, darling, you always do that, just like your mother, always talking and never letting other people talk, it's a question of respect, which I think that if a couple are going to work that's what they need, respect, and their own space without mothers interfering, it's just politeness, but I don't think your mother is—”

“Darling—”

“Dammit, darling, I told you not to interrupt me, dammit, it's just a question of politeness, I almost feel like giving her a video call, your mother, and letting her see the weather we have here in Puglia, she says go to Puglia where it's always lovely, you eat well, and don't spend so much, and then—”

“Darling, please don't raise your voice, people can hear.”

“I'M NOT RAISING MY VOICE and if you don't shut up I'll headbutt you because you're pissing me off, too, making me talk like this, I'm not used to using this kind of language.”

I exchanged a glance with the labourer as he walked out. I would have liked to go up to the poor husband and pat him on the back, but then it struck me that wasn't such a good idea, because then the woman might give me the headbutt she'd just mentioned, and that it was best to finish my cappuccino, pay and continue on my way.

It was about 9.15 when I walked into the small courtroom, which smelt of paper and dust. The hearing was due to start at 9.30.

For some time now I'd been getting to places early. There must have been some complex psychological explanation, but I wasn't capable of grasping it.

The only people there were two stenographers, who were setting up their equipment and who stared at me for a few moments, slightly puzzled. The atmosphere of criminal courts is like a village club. When a newcomer arrives he sticks out like a sore thumb.

I looked around. The decor was bare: the judge's bench, the bench for the prosecution and the bench for the defence, a few seats, a TV monitor for the long-distance examination of Capodacqua.