“I need to know if there’s any hope for Fabio’s appeal, and if so how much.”
She’d come straight to the point. The right thing to do, from her point of view. But I couldn’t come straight to the point, and not only because I wanted to sound professional.
“It’s impossible to say right now. I have to read all the papers on the case, including the original ruling.”
And I also have to decide if I’m going to take on the case. But I didn’t say that.
“Fabio told you what this is all about.”
I was getting impatient. Did she expect me to form an opinion on the basis of what the defendant had told me in prison?
“He told me the gist of it, but as I was saying…”
“I don’t suppose there’s much hope of an acquittal, even on appeal. But I’ve been told it may be possible to plea-bargain. Fabio could get as little as six or seven years. In three or four years he could be allowed home visits… or perhaps… what is it called?”
“It’s called day release.”
I found her tone a bit irritating. I don’t generally like clients – or worse still, the relatives of clients – who’ve swotted up on the law and tell you what you can and can’t do.
“You see, signora”-I hated the self-important tone in my own voice as soon as I opened my mouth – “as I was saying, I have to study all the papers before I can express a sound opinion. To think of alternatives, including plea-bargaining, I really need to have a clearer idea of the case. There may be procedural or technical questions that a lay person might be unaware of.”
In other words, I’m the lawyer here. You stick to flower arranging, or the tea ceremony, or whatever. And I haven’t even decided yet if I’m going to defend your husband – who’s a Fascist thug and probably also a drug trafficker – because I’ve had a score to settle with him and his friends for thirty years.
Those were the very words I had in my mind. I didn’t even realize that I’d moved quickly from being sure I’d refuse the case to being undecided about whether or not I’d accept it.
She grimaced, which only made her look even more beautiful.
It had been a lawyer’s answer, and she didn’t like it. She wanted me to calm her fears in some way. Even if it meant telling her there was no alternative to plea-bargaining. People want many things from a lawyer, but what they want more than anything is for him to take away the anguish of having to deal with policemen, prosecutors, judges and court proceedings. With all the apparatus of what’s called justice. They want the lawyer to take away the anguish of thinking.
“Going on what your husband told me, this isn’t an easy case. If things happened in the exact terms” – exact terms? Why the hell was I talking this way? – “in which he told them to me, then this isn’t going to be an easy appeal. In fact, it’s going to be very hard, which means that plea-bargaining is definitely a possibility we’d have to consider seriously. On the other hand…”
“On the other hand?”
“Your husband says he’s innocent. Obviously, if he’s innocent, the idea of plea-bargaining and ending up with seven or eight years, even supposing we could get it down as much as that, is a bit hard to take. Even if there is the prospect of home visits and day release.”
She hadn’t been expecting that answer. She realized that she had kept her coat on and she unbuttoned it nervously, as if she suddenly felt hot or stifled. I asked her if she wanted to take it off and give it to me to hang up. She said no, thanks. But then she took it off and placed it over her legs.
“Do you really think he might be innocent?”
There. I’d asked for it.
“Look, Signora Paolicelli, I really can’t answer that question. In most cases we lawyers don’t know the truth. We don’t know if our client is guilty or innocent. In many ways it’s better not to know, it’s easier to defend the client in a professional way…”
“You don’t believe his story, do you?”
I took a deep breath, resisting the impulse to talk more bullshit. “I’ll be able to get a clearer idea after I’ve read the papers. But I must admit, your husband’s story is very hard to believe.”
“I don’t know if his story is true either. I don’t know if he’s been telling me the truth, even though he swears that the drugs weren’t his. He’s sworn it to me over and over. Sometimes I believe him, and sometimes I think he’s denying everything because he’s ashamed and doesn’t want to admit he was carrying drugs in the same car as me and our daughter.”
That’s what I think too. It’s the likeliest hypothesis, and it’s probably true.
I told myself these things as I looked at her in silence, my face devoid of expression. And as I looked at her I realized something.
It wasn’t true that she had doubts about her husband’s innocence. She was convinced her husband was guilty, and that, more than anything else, had been her curse since the whole affair had started.
“Fabio told me you’d have to read the file first before you decided whether or not to accept the case. Do you mind if I ask why? Does it mean that if you’re convinced he’s guilty you won’t defend him?”
That was a question I really needed. No, I don’t give a damn whether he’s guilty or not. I defend guilty people every day. It’s just that your husband-I don’t know if he ever told you this – has a past as a criminal and maybe a murderer, or at least an accomplice to murder. I say this from personal knowledge, I hope I’m making myself clear. Given all this, I don’t know if I’m capable of defending him properly.
I didn’t say that.
I told her that this was the way I worked. I had to examine the papers first. I didn’t like to take on a case sight unseen. It was a lie, but one I couldn’t help telling.
“When will you let me know if you accept?”
“It isn’t a very big file. I could look at it over the weekend and give you my answer on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest.”
She took a large man’s-style wallet out of her handbag. “Fabio told me you didn’t want an advance before deciding whether to accept or not. But you’re going to read the file, and that’s work, so…”
I raised my open hands and shook my head. I didn’t want any money for the moment. Thanks all the same, but this was the way I worked. She didn’t insist. Instead of taking money or a cheque from the wallet she took a business card and handed it to me.
Natsu Kawabata, Japanese Cuisine, it said. Beneath that, two telephone numbers, one home and one mobile. I looked up from the card, questioningly.
She told me she was a chef. Three evenings a week she worked in a restaurant – she mentioned the name of a fashionable spot – but she also made sushi, sashimi and tempura for private parties thrown by people who could afford it. Japanese food has never come cheap.
The words escaped me before I could stop them. “I’d have said you were a model or something like that, not a chef.” I regretted saying it before I’d even finished the sentence. I felt like a complete idiot.
But she smiled. It was only the hint of a smile, but it was very beautiful.
“I used to be a model.” The smile disappeared. “That was how I met Fabio, in Milan. It seems like a long time ago, so many things have changed.”
She left the sentence hanging in the air, and in the brief silence that followed I tried to imagine how their relationship had begun, why they’d moved from Milan to Bari. Other things, too.
She was the one who broke the silence and interrupted my thoughts. “But I like cooking more. Are you familiar with Japanese cuisine?”
I said yes, I was very familiar with it and liked it a lot.
In that case, she said, I ought to try her version of it some time.
It was the kind of thing you say to be polite, I thought.
But a shiver went through me, the kind you feel when you’re sixteen and the prettiest girl in the class suddenly, amazingly, stops and talks to you in the school corridor.
Natsu asked me to call her a
s soon as I’d read the papers and had decided what to do.
She left, and it occurred to me that she hadn’t said a word about having come to court and watched me at work. I wondered why, and couldn’t find an answer.
A slight scent of amber lingered in the air. With that hint of something more pungent that I couldn’t quite identify.
5
A few minutes before nine, Maria Teresa came in and asked me if I still needed anything, as she was about to leave. I asked her to order me a pizza and a beer before she left. She looked at me with an expression that said it’s Friday evening, do you think it’s right to stay in the office eating a disgusting pizza, drinking a disgusting beer and working?
I looked back at her, with an expression that said yes, I do think it’s right, especially as I don’t have anything better to do. Anyway I don’t want to do anything better.
To be honest, I don’t even want to think about it.
She looked as if she was about to say something, but thought better of it. She would order the pizza, she said, and she’d see me on Monday morning.
I ate the pizza, drank the beer, cleared up the desk, put the latest Leonard Cohen album, Dear Heather, on the CD player and settled down to look through the papers Signora Natsu Kawabata had brought in.
Kawabata – like the writer, I thought. What was the title of that story? House of the Sleeping Beauties, wasn’t it? Yasunari Kawabata. A lovely, sad story. I ought to reread it, I thought. Maybe Natsu was related to the Kawabata who’d won the Nobel Prize. She could even be his granddaughter.
What a brilliant thought, I told myself. Absolutely brilliant. Like a Japanese person meeting a Signor Rossi and thinking, “Ah, his name’s Rossi, I wonder if he’s related to the motorcyclist.”
I think it’s best if I read the file.
It didn’t take long. The story was pretty much the way Paolicelli had told it. The arrest and custody records mentioned a routine check by the customs police in the harbour area, using dogs trained to sniff out drugs. I thought the same thing I’d thought the day before, when Paolicelli had told me his story. The customs police had probably had a tip-off. On the blank sheet of paper I’d placed next to the file I jotted down: Why the check? Then I told myself it was a question that was likely to remain unanswered, and I went on.
With the records were Paolicelli’s statements.
They were headed Transcript of statements made by the accused of his own free will. Of his own free will, of course. The transcript was very short and, after a few preliminaries, the gist of it was in this sentence:
“I acknowledge that the quantity of forty kilos of cocaine was discovered in my car. Regarding this, I freely declare that the drugs belong to myself alone and that my wife Natsu Kawabata, whose full particulars have been noted in other documents, has no connection whatsoever with this illegal transportation, which is the sole responsibility of the undersigned. I placed the narcotics in the car without my wife’s knowledge. I have no intention of naming the persons from whom I acquired the aforementioned quantity of narcotics, nor those to whom I was supposed to deliver them. I have nothing to add.”
Read, confirmed and signed.
On my sheet of notes, I jotted down: Usability of statements?
That meant that there were serious doubts about the validity and usability of these statements, which had been made without a lawyer being present. It wasn’t much to go on, but considering the situation I couldn’t afford to overlook anything.
I went quickly on to the report of the customs police, which mostly reiterated what was in the arrest and custody records. Then the transcript of Paolicelli’s interrogation by the examining magistrate, in which my putative client stated that he was exercising his right to remain silent. It was here that Avvocato Corrado Macri made his first appearance.
On the sheet of notes I wrote: Avvocato Macri, who the fuck are you?
The nice thing about these personal notes is that you can write whatever you like, including obscenities. As far as I’m concerned, swear words help me to think. If I can write a few nice expletives in my notes, my ideas seem to flow more easily.
Sometimes, though, I leave these notes where I shouldn’t. Among the documents to be attached to an appeal, for example, or a lodging of a civil action.
Usually Maria Teresa checks everything, discovers these entertaining screeds, gets rid of them, and saves my reputation. Usually.
Once when she was off ill, I was forced to be my own secretary for a couple of days. One of the things I did during those two days was to file a motion for a client of mine to be placed under house arrest. This client had set up a number of paper companies and conjured away several million euros.
The Prosecutor’s Department and the customs police had started taking an interest in him, had discovered his fraud, and had thrown him in prison. A lawyer shouldn’t say such things, but they’d done their job well.
My motion referred to some documents which proved that my client – Signor Saponaro, an accountant and a well-known homosexual – was not quite as guilty as had at first appeared. It pointed out the amount of time my client had already spent in prison – three months – and asked for the custody order against him to be mitigated, since it was “not indispensable for measures as harsh as imprisonment to be applied”. The usual litany.
A few days after I had filed the motion I had a call from the clerk of the court. The judge wanted to speak to me? I’d be right there, of course, but could I possibly know what it was all about? So that I could be prepared. Oh, he hadn’t said what he wanted to see me about. All right, just give me time to leave my office and get to the courthouse.
Half an hour later I was in the judge’s office.
“Good morning, Consigliere. You sent for me.” I smiled, and gave him a politely questioning look.
“Good morning, Avvocato. Yes, I sent for you because I wanted to show you this.” He took a small sheet of paper from a red folder. “I think this is yours. Should I consider it an attachment to your motion on behalf of Signor Saponaro?”
He handed me the sheet of paper. They were the notes I had made while writing the motion. I felt a distant rumbling in my head, like a huge wave or a herd of buffalo coming closer. I went red.
The gist of what I had written revolved around the not very legal concept of “raging queen, and a thief to boot”. Anyone giving that screed even a cursory glance would have been in no doubt that the “raging queen, and a thief to boot” was Signor Saponaro and that his lawyer – who was me – wasn’t privately convinced that his client was innocent.
I tried to find something to say to the judge, to try and excuse this disaster. Of course I couldn’t find anything.
So I asked him if, for the purpose of my forthcoming disbarment, he intended to report me personally or if he preferred me to report myself. I hastened to add that it didn’t really make much difference. I did, however, beg him not to advertise the unfortunate expression I had used – “raging queen”-a cryptic allusion to my client’s sexual tastes. It was a stupid lapse, which, if known, would have done irreparable damage to my reputation, not only as a lawyer, but as a man of the left.
The judge had a sense of humour. He gave me back the sheet of paper and didn’t report me.
He didn’t accept my motion on behalf of Signor Saponaro either, but that really would have been too much to ask for.
There was not much else in the file that was of any significance.
There was a toxicologist’s report on the narcotics. The cocaine was 68 per cent pure, in other words, of high quality. It was possible, the expert wrote, to extract hundreds of thousands of doses from it for reselling.
There were Paolicelli’s mobile phone records, and his wife’s. The customs police had acquired them to see if they could identify any interesting contacts, immediately before or immediately after the car had been stopped and searched and the drugs found. Clearly they had found nothing of interest, because the records had been sent to t
he prosecutor’s department accompanied only by a brief note saying: No significant contact has emerged from the telephone records.
There was the order for Paolicelli to be remanded in custody, no more than ten lines, and there was the sentence. Even that, to tell the truth, wasn’t very long. But what else was there to write? “The guilt of the defendant has been satisfactorily proved to the required standard of evidence. He was carrying the narcotics on board his car and, moreover, freely admitted his responsibility before being arrested. On this basis it would seem literally impossible to suggest any plausible alternative hypothesis, and indeed no such hypothesis was put forward, even by the defendant himself, who, when interrogated by the examining magistrate, exercised – understandably in view of the weakness of his position – his right to remain silent.”
With my pen I circled the words plausible alternative hypothesis. That was the problem. That’s always the problem in criminal trials. Supplying a plausible alternative explanation for the evidence presented by the prosecution.
What alternative hypothesis could possibly be put forward in a case like this?
The only one was that Paolicelli had told me the truth and that someone else – God knows how, God knows when – had put the drugs in the car. But if his story was true, then Paolicelli was in deep, deep shit.
Could someone really have wanted to set Paolicelli up by planting the drugs in his car and then tipping off the customs police?
I immediately ruled this out. You don’t throw away forty kilos of cocaine just to set someone up. If you want to set someone up, you plant ten grams on him, divided into forty doses, then there’s no doubt he’s intending to sell the stuff, and you’ve achieved your aim. Efficiently and cheaply.
No, they couldn’t possibly have planted forty kilos on him just to get him arrested. Someone may well have tipped off the customs police that a consignment of top-quality cocaine was coming in from Montenegro in that car. But whoever it was couldn’t have been the owner of the drugs, or anyone else who’d planted them just to ruin Signor Fabio Rayban.
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