Involuntary Witness (4 page)

One day he could stand it no longer. He had plucked up the courage to leave home and had denounced her, asking for a separation and damages.

She had chosen me to represent her, and that afternoon I was expecting her for us to settle the details of the defence.

When I got to the office Maria Teresa told me that the harridan had not yet arrived. On the other hand a black woman had been waiting for me for at least half an hour. She didn’t have an appointment but – she said – the matter was very important. As always.

She was in the waiting room. I peered through the crack in the door and saw an imposing young woman, with a face both beautiful and austere. She can’t have been over thirty.

I told Maria Teresa to show her into my room in two minutes’ time. I took off my jacket, reached my desk, lit a cigarette, and the woman entered.

She waited for me to ask her to take a seat and in an almost accentless voice said, “Thank you, Avvocato.” With foreign clients I was always in doubt as to whether to use
tu
or
lei
. Many of them do not understand the
lei
form, and the conversation becomes surreal.

From the way this woman said “Thank you, Avvocato” I knew I could address her as
lei
without any fear of not being understood.

When I asked her what the problem was she handed me some stapled sheets headed “Office of the Magistrate in Charge of Preliminary Investigations, Order for Precautionary Detention”.

Drugs, was my immediate thought. Her man was a
pusher. Then, almost as quickly, that seemed to me impossible.

We all of us go by stereotypes. Anyone who denies it is a liar. The first stereotype had suggested the following sequence: African, precautionary detention, drugs. It is usually for this reason that Africans get arrested.

But straight away the second stereotype came into play. The woman had an aristocratic look and didn’t seem like a drug-pusher’s moll.

I was right. Her partner had not been arrested for drugs but for the kidnap and murder of a nine-year-old boy.

The charges stated were brief, bureaucratic and blood-curdling.

Abdou Thiam, Senegalese citizen, stood accused:

Francesco, nine years old, had disappeared one afternoon while playing football on his own in a yard in front of the seaside villa of his grandparents in Monopoli, to the south of Bari.

Two days later the boy’s body had been found at the bottom of a well some twelve miles further north, in the countryside near Polignano.

The police doctor who had performed the autopsy had been unable either to confirm or to exclude the possibility that the child had been subjected to sexual violence.

I knew that police doctor. He wouldn’t have been up to saying whether a child – or even an adult or a senior citizen – had been subjected to sexual violence even if he had been eyewitness to the rape.

The investigations were in any case based from the first on the assumption of murder with a sexual motive. The paedophiliac track.

Four days after the discovery of the body the carabinieri and the public prosecutor had triumphantly announced at a press conference that the case was solved.

The culprit was Abdou Thiam, a 31-year-old Senegalese pedlar. He was in Italy with a valid residence permit and had a few previous convictions for dealing in counterfeit goods. In other words, apart from regular wares he sold fake Vuittons, fake Hogans, fake Cartiers. In summer on the beaches, in winter in the streets and markets.

According to the investigators, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Numerous witnesses had declared that they had seen him talking on the beach to little Francesco on more than one occasion and at some length. The owner of a bar very near the house belonging to the child’s grandparents had seen
Abdou pass on foot only a few minutes before the boy disappeared, and without his usual sack of more or less fake merchandise.

Questioned by the carabinieri, the Senegalese who shared lodgings with Abdou had stated that during those days – he was not able to say on exactly
which
day – the subject under inquiry had taken his car to be washed. As far as he remembered, that was the first time it had happened. Evidently, the prosecution considered this useful evidence: to eliminate every possible trace, the man had had his car washed with a view to frustrating the investigation.

Another Senegalese, also a pedlar, had stated that the day after the little boy’s disappearance Abdou had not been seen on the usual beach. This too was considered – and rightly – a suspicious circumstance.

Abdou was interrogated by the public prosecutor and fell into numerous, grave contradictions. At the conclusion of the interrogation he was detained on the charges of unlawful restraint and murder. They did not accuse him of rape because there was no proof that the child had been violated.

The carabinieri had searched his room and found books for children, all of them in the original languages. Three books in the Harry Potter series,
The Little Prince
,
Pinocchio
,
Doctor Dolittle
and others. Most important of all, they had found and confiscated a photograph of the boy on the beach in swimming trunks.

In the detainment order which the woman had handed me across the desk, the books and the photograph were considered “significant facts in support of the circumstantial framework”.

When I raised my eyes to look at the woman – Abajaje Deheba was her name – she began to speak.

In his own country, Senegal, Abdou was a
schoolteacher and earned the equivalent of about 200,000 lire a month. Selling handbags, shoes and wallets, he earned ten times as much. He spoke three languages, wanted to study psychology and wanted to stay in Italy.

She herself was an agronomist and came from Aswan, Nubia. Egypt. On the border with Sudan.

She had been in Bari for nearly a year and a half and was towards the end of a postgraduate course in the management of soil and irrigation resources. When she returned to her own country she would be employed by the government on a project to bring water to the Sahara and transform sand dunes into cultivable land.

I asked her what Bari had to do with the irrigation of the desert.

In Bari, she explained, there was an institute of advanced studies and research in agronomy. It was called the Centre Internationale Hautes Études Agronomiques Méditerranées, and it attracted postgraduate students from all the emerging countries of the Mediterranean. Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Maltese, Jordanians, Syrians, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians. They lived in a dormitory annexe of the institute, studied all day, and at night went swarming about the city.

She had met Abdou at a concert. In a nightspot in the old city – she told me the name but I didn’t know it – where Greeks, blacks, Asians, North Africans and even a few Italians gathered every evening.

It was a concert of the traditional Wolof music of Senegal, and Abdou was playing the drums, along with some compatriots of his.

She paused for a few seconds, her gaze fixed somewhere outside my room, outside my offices. Elsewhere.

Then she started again and I realized she was not really speaking to me.

Abdou was a teacher, she said without looking at me.

He was a teacher even though now he was selling handbags. He loved children and was incapable of doing harm to any one of them.

It was at this point that Abajaje Deheba’s firmly controlled voice cracked. That face of a Nubian princess contracted with the effort of fighting back tears.

She succeeded, but she was silent for a very long minute.

Immediately after the arrest they had hired a lawyer, and she gave me the name of one I knew all too well. On one occasion, chatting away, he had boasted of declaring an income of only eighteen million lire.

Ten million he had demanded simply to make the petition to the Provincial Appeals Court. Abdou’s friends had passed the hat round and put together nearly the whole sum. My so-called colleague was satisfied and pocketed the money. In cash and in advance. No receipt, of course.

The petition was refused. To go to appeal again would cost twenty million. They didn’t have twenty million so Abdou had remained in prison.

Now that the trial was approaching they had decided to come to me. A young member of the Senegalese community knew me – the woman gave me a name that meant nothing to me – and also knew that I wasn’t one to make a fuss about money, and that in any case, to be going on with, they could give me two million, which was what they had managed to collect.

Abajaje Deheba opened her bag, drew out a bundle of banknotes fastened with an elastic band, laid it on the desk and pushed it towards me. There was no question of my being able to refuse or discuss the
matter. I said I would get my secretary to make out a receipt for that advance. No thank you, she didn’t want a receipt, she wouldn’t know what to do with it. What she wanted was for me to go at once and see Abdou in prison.

I told her I couldn’t do that, that Signor Thiam would have to appoint me, if only by making a declaration in the prison register. Very well, she said, she would tell him when they next spoke. She rose to her feet, held out her hand – she hadn’t done so when she came in – and looked me in the eye. “Abdou didn’t do what they say he did.”

Her handshake was as firm as I expected it to be.

When I opened the door I heard my secretary trying to explain to a Signora Cassano distinctly annoyed at having to wait that the Avvocato had had an emergency visit and would see her just as soon as possible.

I could imagine my client’s thoughts when she saw Abajaje Deheba pass by, and realized that she had been made to wait on account of a
nigger
.

She entered the room and gave me a look of disgust. I’m sure she would have spat in
my
face if she could have.

The next day she was found guilty, and for the appeal she went to another lawyer. Naturally she didn’t pay the remainder of my fee, but maybe she had a point: I hadn’t exactly done my best to get her off.

I parked the car illegally, as usual on a Friday. On visiting days you can’t find a legal space anywhere near the prison.

Friday is visiting day.

However, this isn’t a problem, because you are unlikely to get fined. No traffic warden is too keen on having words with relatives visiting the prisoners; as a rule, no traffic warden is too keen on being on duty at all in the prison neighbourhood.

So I parked illegally on a pavement, climbed out of the car, straightened my tie, took a cigarette from the packet, put it in my mouth without lighting it and set off for the entrance.

The warder at the door knew me, so I didn’t have to show my lawyer’s card.

I went through the usual metal gates, then the gratings, then still more gates. Finally I reached the room reserved for lawyers.

I am convinced that in all prisons they go out of their way to choose the room that is coldest in winter and hottest in summer.

It was winter, and even though outside the air was mild, in that room, furnished with a table, two upright chairs and a broken-down armchair, there was a mortifying chill.

Lawyers are not much loved in prisons.

Lawyers are not much loved in general.

While they were off fetching Abdou Thiam I lit the
cigarette and, just for something to do, rummaged in my bag and pulled out the precautionary detention order.

Once again I read that “the impressive probative material acquired against Abdou Thiam forms a reassuring picture serving not only to justify the restraint of personal liberty at the present stage of proceedings but also, in prospect, to allow for reasonable predictions of a conviction in the forthcoming trial.”

In plain words: Abdou was up to his neck in evidence against him, must be arrested and kept in custody, and when the trial came up would certainly be found guilty.

While I was reading, the door opened and a warder ushered in my client.

Abdou Thiam was a strikingly handsome man, with the face of a film star and liquid eyes. Sad and far away.

He remained standing near the door until I went up, gave him my hand and told him I was his lawyer.

A person’s handshake says a lot of things, if one takes the trouble to pay attention to it. Abdou’s handshake told me he didn’t trust me, and that perhaps he no longer trusted anyone at all.

We sat ourselves down on the two chairs and I realized almost at once that it was not going to be an easy conversation.

Abdou spoke Italian well, even if not in the well-nigh perfect, accentless manner of Abajaje. In any case, it came naturally to me to address him as
tu
, and he replied in kind.

We hurried over the matter of how they were treating him and whether there was anything he needed. Then, since I had not yet examined the file, I tried to persuade him to give me his version of the whole story, with a view to starting to get my bearings.

He was not collaborative. He spoke apathetically, without looking at me, giving vague answers to my questions. It almost seemed as if the matter was of no concern to him.