He broke off, but resumed almost immediately, as if he’d just remembered something.
“Oh, and don’t worry about your fees. Find a way to get out of the case, and whatever you’re owed for the work you’ve already done, we’ll take care of it. You’re a good lawyer. More than that, you’re a smart fellow. Don’t do anything stupid when you don’t have to. This is just a petty squabble between a misguided fool and an unbalanced girl. It’s not worth it.”
Without waiting for my reply, he said goodbye and hung up.
The first time it happened, one summer morning, I was nine.
My mother had gone to work. He had stayed at home with me and my sister, who was three years younger. He was at home because he’d been fired from his job. We were at home because the summer holidays had started, but we had nowhere to go. Except for the yard of the apartment block where we lived.
I remember it as being very hot. But now I’m not so sure it was as hot as all that.
We were in the yard, my sister and I and the other kids. It’s odd. I remember we were playing football and I’d just scored a goal.
He appeared on the balcony and called me. He was in beige shorts and a white vest.
He told me to come up, he needed something.
I asked if I could finish playing and he told me to come up for five minutes and then I could go back down. I told the other kids I’d be right back and ran up the two flights of stairs that led to our flat. There were no lifts in those blocks.
I reached the landing and found the door ajar. When I went in, I heard him call me from their bedroom at the end of the corridor. The door of that room was also ajar.
Inside, the bed was unmade. The room stank of cigarettes. He was lying with his legs wide open, and he told me to come closer.
Because he had something to tell me, he said.
I was nine years old.
13
After Delissanti’s phone call, I told Maria Teresa I didn’t want to be disturbed for the next ten minutes. I always felt a bit stupid telling my secretary I didn’t want to be disturbed, for any reason, but sometimes it was necessary. I put my feet up on the desk, crossed my hands behind my head, and closed my eyes.
An old method, when I start to feel panicky and don’t know what to do.
I opened my eyes again about ten minutes later, looked through my papers, found the sheet with the mobile number, and called Sister Claudia. The phone rang about ten times without any answer and in the end I pressed the red button to end the call.
I wondered what to do next. When I call a mobile phone and there’s no answer, I always have the unpleasant sensation that they’ve done it on purpose. I mean, they’ve seen the number, realized it’s me, and are deliberately not answering. Because they don’t want to talk to me. A throwback to my childhood insecurities, I suppose.
My mobile rang. It was Sister Claudia. Clearly, if she was calling me back a few seconds after my call, she hadn’t deliberately avoided answering.
“Hello?”
“I had a call from this number. Who is that?”
“Avvocato Guerrieri.”
A puzzled silence.
I said I needed to talk to her. Without Martina being present. It was quite urgent. Could she come to my office, maybe this afternoon?
No, she couldn’t come this afternoon, she had to stay at the refuge. None of her assistants was there and she couldn’t leave the place unattended. Some of the girls were under house arrest and someone always had to be there, in case the police or carabinieri checked. How about tomorrow morning? Same thing tomorrow morning. But what was the problem? No problem. Or rather, there were a few problems, but I wanted to talk about them in person, not over the phone.
I don’t know what made me think of it, but I told her I could come to the refuge myself, tomorrow morning, as I didn’t have to be in court.
A long silence followed, and I realized I’d put my foot in it. The location of the refuge was a secret, Tancredi had said. With my spontaneous – and quite unprofessional – suggestion, I’d put Sister Claudia in a difficult position. She could either tell me we couldn’t meet at the refuge, because I wasn’t allowed there, and even though the fault was mine she’d be forced to say something unpleasant. Or, reluctantly, in order not to offend me, she could tell me to come.
Or she’d give me a good excuse, which was probably the best solution.
“All right, I’ll see you here.” She said it calmly, like someone who’s weighed up the situation and has decided to be more trusting. Then she told me how to get there. It was outside the city, and her directions were so elaborate as to verge on the paranoid.
I set out at ten o’clock the next morning. What with the city traffic and the wrong turnings I took once I was out in the country, the journey lasted nearly an hour. I’d put The Ghost of Tom Joad in the CD player when I left. By the time I got there, the disc had finished and I’d just started listening to it again. Before my eyes, the dirt road along which I was slowly advancing became confused with nocturnal images of the American highways, populated by desperadoes.
Shelter line stretchin’ round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin’ in their cars in the Southwest
No hope no job no peace no rest.
At last, I came to a rusty gate, held closed with a rusty chain and a huge padlock. There was no entry phone, so I gave her a ring on her mobile to come and open up for me. Soon after, I saw her coming round a bend in the avenue, between rows of shabby-looking pines. She opened the gate, and gestured me beyond the bend and the trees, towards where she’d come from, where there was space to park. Then she carefully closed the gate and padlock, while I drove along the avenue of beaten earth, keeping an eye on her in the rear-view mirror.
I had only just parked behind the house – which was actually a farmhouse – and was getting out of the car when I saw Sister Claudia coming back.
We entered the farmhouse. It smelled clean, a mixture of unscented soap and something else, something herbal that I couldn’t put a name to. We were in a large room, with a stone fireplace opposite the entrance, a table in the middle, doors on the sides. Sister Claudia opened one of them and made way for me. We went along a corridor, at the end of which there was a kind of square box room, with three doors on each of its sides. Behind one of these doors was Sister Claudia’s office. It was a spacious room, with an old desk of light-coloured wood, a computer, a telephone, a fax machine. A bulky old stereo unit, with a turntable. Two small black leather armchairs, both quite old, with cracks everywhere. An acoustic guitar, propped up in a corner. A very slight smell of sandalwood incense.
And there were shelves of books and discs. The shelves were full but tidy. I managed to glance at them just enough to read a few titles in English. Why They Kill was one of them. Patterns of Criminal Homicide another. I wondered what that was all about, and why a nun would read that kind of book.
No crucifixes on the walls, or at least I didn’t see any. Certainly there weren’t any behind the desk. There was a poster there, with a sentence printed in joined-up letters, in imitation of a child’s handwriting.
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not for of such is the Kingdom of God.
Luke 18:16.
In a corner of the poster was a drawing. A child seen from the back, his hands over his head, as if to protect himself against blows from someone you couldn’t see. In the foreground, a teddy bear lay abandoned. It was a very sad drawing, and below it something was written. It looked like a kind of logo, but I couldn’t read it.
Sister Claudia gestured to me to take a seat in one of the small armchairs and she slid into the other, with a sinuous movement.
In the refuge that morning, apart from her, there were only three girls, two of them under house arrest. They were well hidden, I thought: the place seemed completely deserted.
Well? her eyes were asking.
Obviously. But at tha
t moment I didn’t know where to start. It would have been easier in my office. And there was an extra problem: I wasn’t sure I really knew why I’d come all the way here.
“There’s . . . something more I need to know about Martina. Given that the trial is starting, as you know, in a few days.”
“In what sense: something more?”
In what sense, indeed? In the sense that Martina may be unbalanced, mad, a compulsive liar, and we’re about to get into even more of a mess than we thought at the start?
“I mean . . . as far as you know, has Martina ever had psychiatric problems?”
“What do you mean?” Her tone was much less cooperative now.
“Has she ever been in therapy, ever suffered from depression, ever had a nervous breakdown, that kind of thing?”
Is she crazy?
“Why are you asking me these things? What do they have to do with the trial?” The same kind of tone. Or even a bit worse.
All right, you don’t want to cooperate. Which means I’m going to make a fool of myself in court, and then when it’s all over I’ll become the kind of lawyer who deals only with road accidents. If I’m lucky.
I paused for a long time, breathing deeply through my nose. As if to say, I’m being very patient here, but damn it, you have to let me do my job. She said nothing, just waited. She was making me nervous.
“Listen to me, Sister Claudia. Trials are tricky things, they can be quite complicated. That’s what lawyers are there for, basically. The fact that a man or woman may be right is almost never enough. In a trial, witnesses are examined and cross-examined, and when a defence attorney cross-examines a prosecution witness, he uses every legitimate means at his disposal to try to discredit that witness. Sometimes illegitimate means too. If we’re bringing a civil action, I have to know what Scianatico’s lawyer is going to dig up. I have to know if they’re going to try and claim that Martina is unbalanced, unreliable, or whatever, so that I can be ready to disprove it.”
“I don’t follow you. If it can be proved that the man did certain things, isn’t that enough? What have Martina’s health problems got to do with it?”
“I’m trying to make this as clear as possible, but obviously I’m not succeeding. That’s precisely the point: we have to prove that he did certain things. And the only evidence we have is Signorina Fumai’s statements. There’s not much else to her case. Everything turns on her reliability. Or her unreliability. It’s in the interests of a defendant in a case like this, if he has a good lawyer – and in this case he has a very good lawyer, and a dangerous one – to spring a surprise and reveal that the presumed victim—”
“Presumed victim?”
“Until it’s demonstrated in court that someone has committed an offence, that person is presumed innocent. And if he’s presumed innocent, then his victim is nothing more than a presumed victim. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way it works in this country.”
I hadn’t raised my voice, but my tone was decidedly tense.
“Martina has had psychiatric problems,” Sister Claudia finally said.
“What kind of problems?”
“I don’t know if I’m authorized to talk about them. I don’t know if Martina wants these things to be known.”
“They’re already known. I mean: Scianatico knows them and his lawyer knows them. He phoned me yesterday afternoon. He more or less threatened me, and told me my client is crazy. I can’t not know these things. I could talk to her directly, of course. In fact I’ll have to talk to her some time. Even if only to tell her what to expect in court. But when I talk to her, it’s better if I know what I’m talking about. Do you follow me?”
She leaned her elbow on the armrest of her chair and propped her head on her open hand. She remained in that position for about a minute, without looking at me. Without looking at anything in the room.
“Martina had problems as a child. I’m sure they don’t know anything about that. As an adult, she’s suffered in the past few years from a form of depression, combined with anorexia nervosa. That must be what they know about.”
“When did this happen?”
“Maybe five years ago, maybe more. As far as the anorexia is concerned, the doctors said it was a particularly severe form. She was admitted to hospital and for a few days they had to feed her artificially. With a stomach tube.”
“Had she already met Scianatico?”
“No. After she left hospital she was in therapy for a long time. By the time she met that . . . that man, she was cured. Insofar as you can be cured of that kind of problem.”
“You mean she had relapses?”
“No. At least not in the sense of being admitted to hospital again. When she’s going through a hard time, she has eating difficulties, but that’s something she can keep under control. She managed that even at the most difficult moments of her relationship with that man. But there’s a doctor following up on her case.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“A psychiatrist.”
I paused. For personal reasons. A sudden fissure opening on to my past: memories I dismissed, though I couldn’t free myself entirely from all the cacophony that went with them.
“And Scianatico knows all about this.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think he does now.”
There wasn’t much else to add. I’d feared worse. I mean: Martina wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever. She’d suffered from depression and eating disorders, but had recovered. More or less. That was something I could handle in court. Clearly, it wasn’t ideal, but I’d feared worse.
“Now all I need is for Martina to tell me about these things herself. Firstly, because I need more details, papers, medical records. The lot. And secondly, because it’s the right thing to do. She’ll tell me what her problems are – or were – and I’ll tell her what we’re likely to come up against in court. In the end she’s the one who has to decide.”
Sister Claudia said all right, she’d come to my office in a few days with Martina. Before that, she’d explain to her what I needed and why I needed it.
There followed a few moments of tense silence. Then we both stood up, almost simultaneously. Time to go.
“Can I ask you something?”
She looked me in the eyes for a few moments, then nodded.
“Why did you let me come here?”
After looking at me some more, she shrugged and didn’t reply.
We left the farmhouse and walked back the way we’d come. There was no trace of the girls who lived there. There was nobody. Around us, the wind shook the branches of the olive trees, dislodging the leaves, which were changing colour, brown on one side, a mysterious silvery grey on the other.
We walked slowly until we reached my car.
“Sometimes I’m aggressive. For no reason.”
I looked at her without replying, because clearly she hadn’t finished.
“It’s just that I find it difficult to trust people. Even those who are on the right side. It’s a problem of mine.”
“I try to get rid of my aggression with my fists.” The words just came out, and immediately I’d said them I realized she might take them the wrong way. “I mean I do a bit of boxing. It helps, I think. Like martial arts.”
Claudia looked up, slightly surprised. “Strange.”
“Why?”
“I teach Chinese boxing.”
Well, that was a turn-up for the books.
“Chinese boxing? You mean kung fu?”
“The expression ‘kung fu’ doesn’t mean anything. Or rather it means a lot of things, but doesn’t describe any martial art in particular. Roughly translated, kung fu means hard work.”
The conversation was slightly surreal. We’d gone from Martina’s psychiatric problems to martial arts and Chinese philosophy, with a bit of philology thrown in.
I asked Sister Claudia what kind of Chinese boxing she taught. She told me it was a discipline called wing tsun, wh
ich according to legend had been developed in China by a young nun in the sixteenth century. Sister Claudia gave lessons twice a week, in a gym where they did dance and yoga.
I said I’d like to watch one of her lessons. She looked straight at me for a moment – as if to make sure I was serious and not just making conversation – and said she’d invite me along some time.
We’d reached the end of our conversation. So I made a rather clumsy gesture of farewell with my hand, got in my car and started it, while she went and opened the gate to let me out.
Moving away slowly along the dirt road, I looked in the rear-view mirror. Sister Claudia had not gone inside yet. She was standing next to the gatepost and seemed to be watching as my car drew away.
Or maybe she was watching something else, in some place I didn’t know and couldn’t even imagine. There was something in the way she stood there, alone, against the background of that solitary, unreal landscape, which gave me a sudden twinge of sadness.
After ten minutes spent in a kind of semi-consciousness, I found myself on an asphalt road, back in the outside world.
14
The following morning I had a trial in Lecce. So I got up early and after a shower and a shave put on one of the serious suits I wore whenever I was working out of town. Wearing a serious suit, usually dark grey, was a habit I’d adopted when I was a very young lawyer. I’d passed my exams at the age of twenty-five, when I still looked like a first-year college student. To look like a real lawyer I had to become older, I thought, and a dark grey suit was perfect for that.
A Walk in the Dark Page 5
