Once we had got through the part relating to Montenegro, we went on to Macri. We briefly recapped the things Natsu had said and then concentrated on the question of what he and his counsel had talked about in the prison.
“What did Macri say when you asked him who the people were who had approached your wife?”
“He told me not to worry, some friends had asked him to help me.”
“Whose friends?”
“I don’t know. He said friends, but didn’t go into any details.”
“But did you have any idea who he was referring to?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Do you, or did you, have any friends or acquaintances in common?”
“No.”
“Did you ever tell Avvocato Macri that you were innocent?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I had the impression he knew that perfectly well.”
“What gave you that impression?”
“He often said to me, I know you’re innocent, it was a bit of bad luck but you’ll see, we’ll sort everything out. Not in so many words, but that was the sense of it.”
“What did Macri say to you before your first interrogation by the examining magistrate?”
“He told me to exercise my right to remain silent.”
“Why?”
“He said there was a risk of making the situation worse. He said I shouldn’t worry, he would sort everything out. I just had to be patient.”
“Did he tell you that he would get you acquitted?”
“No. He never said that. But he often told me that if I was patient and let him get on with it, he would get me a lower sentence. He said it in a knowing kind of way, as if he knew the right channels
… I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.”
“Yes, you’re making yourself very clear,” I said, looking at the judges. “You trusted completely in this unknown lawyer, who appeared out of the blue in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Can you explain why?”
“I felt – and still feel – as if I was in the middle of something I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Macri seemed to know what he was doing, it seemed as if he knew things… I don’t know how to put it… it seemed as if he really could do what he promised.”
“Didn’t you know any lawyers you trusted who could have worked with Macri?”
“I didn’t know anyone well enough to trust them. As I said, Macri had this knowing way about him that-”
Mirenghi broke in. “Please avoid giving us your impressions and personal feelings. If there are facts, then state them, but keep your personal opinions and conjectures to yourself.”
“With all due respect, Your Honour, the defendant was explaining why he-”
“Avvocato, I have ruled on this point. Ask another question.”
Actually, he’d already said what I’d wanted him to. How useful it would be was another matter. It was time to bring the examination to its conclusion. I asked Paolicelli to talk about his last meeting with Macri in prison and the quarrel they had had. I’d advised him to tone things down in his account of that meeting, and in particular not to mention Macri’s threats. I wanted to avoid the court refusing to allow Macri’s testimony on the – perfectly reasonable – grounds that it was impossible to summon someone as a witness and then ask him questions which might oblige him to incriminate himself. That would have brought our case to a premature halt.
Paolicelli was good. He used exactly the right tone, once again implying that there was something not quite above board about Macri’s conduct, but without exaggerating, without explicitly accusing him of anything. When his account of that last meeting was over, I told myself that so far we had done everything we could, as well as we could. The difficult part was coming up now.
Paolicelli was led back to the cage. Mirenghi looked ostentatiously at his watch and turned to me.
“We still have pending your request to call your client’s former defence counsel as a witness. Do you still wish this request to be considered, Avvocato Guerrieri?”
I got to my feet, making my usual gesture, almost a tic with me, of pulling my robe up over my shoulders. Yes, I said, I did still wish the request to be considered. Avvocato Macri’s testimony was important to us. Indeed, after the statements we had heard during this hearing, its importance should have been obvious.
Very briefly, I went over the objections the assistant prosecutor had made in the previous hearing, concerning the admissibility of the testimony, and tried to explain why those objections should not be heeded. Then the judges retired to their chamber to make their decision.
34
Mirenghi had said that they would be in their chamber for twenty minutes at the most. They took an hour and a half. I wondered – as I had often done during similar delays – if they were completely incapable of foreseeing how long their work would take them, or if they did it deliberately. As a petty and more or less conscious demonstration of power.
Mirenghi sat down, checked that the clerk of the court was in his seat, cast a glance at me and at the giant squid, just to make sure that we were also there, put on his glasses and read out the ruling.
“Regarding the defence counsel’s request to hear further testimony, and having heard the opinion of the assistant prosecutor, the court declares as follows. There are no obstacles of a formal nature to the request to call the defendant Paolicelli’s previous defence counsel as a witness. Considering the objections of the prosecution and the subsequent observations of the defence it is possible to state that:
“One. Given the version of the facts presented by the defence, to which we have adhered in evaluating the admissibility of the requests, Avvocato Macri’s testimony must not focus on the conduct of the aforesaid lawyer but on circumstances within his knowledge; within these limits his testimony is admissible;
“Two. There is no conflict of interest as defined in Article 197 of the code of criminal procedure: Avvocato Macri did not carry out any investigations on behalf of the defence and does not fall within any of the other conditions laid down in said article;
“Three. Lawyer-client confidentiality may be claimed in the course of the testimony but does not constitute a reason for the testimony not to be admitted.
“On this basis the request to call Avvocato Macri as a witness is therefore considered admissible.”
Mirenghi concluded the reading of the judges’ ruling with the date of the next hearing and a few further formalities, and then declared that the hearing was adjourned.
As the judges rose to leave I walked to the cage, feeling Natsu’s eyes on me. I told Paolicelli it had gone well, we should be pleased. I didn’t tell him the thought I’d had a little earlier, after his examination. The difficult part was just starting.
35
The phone call came in the afternoon while I was seeing a client.
Maria Teresa called me on the internal line and, before I had time to tell her that I didn’t like to be interrupted when I was seeing a client, she told me it was Avvocato Corrado Macri, calling from Rome.
I was silent for a few seconds. I remember asking myself, word for word: why the hell didn’t it occur to me that he might phone?
“All right, put him through.” I covered the receiver with my hand and asked my client – Signor Martinelli, a stolid-looking pensioner whose beautiful little villa, which he’d built without permission in the middle of a protected forest, had been seized by the forest rangers – if he would excuse me for a few minutes, I had an urgent matter to attend to. What I meant was: if he’d be so kind as to leave the room for a few minutes, but he didn’t understand. He told me not to worry, I could carry on, and stayed where he was.
“Hello?”
Pause. Noise in the background. He must have been in a car.
Then a deep, rather mellow voice. With a barely noticeable Calabrian accent, much less obvious than I would have expected from my stereotypical image of him.
/> “Avvocato Guerrieri?”
“Who is that?”
“Your colleague Macri from Rome.”
My colleague, right.
“Go on.”
Another pause, a shorter one this time.
“Listen, colleague, I won’t beat about the bush. I had a letter from the clerk of the court’s office in Bari yesterday. A summons to appear as a witness in the appeal hearing of a man named Paolicelli. I defended him, as I’m sure you know.”
Defended was a somewhat loose way of putting it, I’d say. How about saying you really fucked it up for him?
“I found out that you’re his counsel now and I wanted to ask you why they summoned me. Was it the prosecutor’s doing?”
A barely perceptible hint of anxiety in that mellow voice. He didn’t know why he’d been summoned. Which meant he didn’t yet know it was me he had to thank for it. The most amusing part of the call was still to come.
“Look, Macri, we need to clarify a number of details-”
“I’m sorry, Guerrieri, but who is ‘we’?”
The hint of anxiety had become an aggressive undercurrent.
“My client and I-”
“Your client and you? You mean Paolicelli? Are you telling me it was you who asked for me to be summoned?”
“As I was saying, we need to clarify a number of things -”
“What the fuck are you saying? You had me called? Me, a colleague?”
This was it. We’d got past the hints now. Instinctively, I pressed the receiver to my ear and glanced at my client. He was looking with vague interest at a framed reproduction of a Domenico Cantatore painting I had hung in my office a few weeks earlier.
“Look, I’m not accustomed to talking to someone who raises his voice to me” – it struck me that I was talking complete bullshit – “and anyway I don’t think it’s a good idea to continue this conversation. I’m representing my client in an appeal in which, whether you like it or not”-I felt a wicked little pleasure in uttering those words: whether you like it or not – “you have to appear as a witness. When you appear in court-”
“Appear in court? Are you completely stupid?” He was almost choking with rage now. “Have you got shit for brains? Do you really think I’m going to appear before some fucking court of appeal? Get this into your thick head. I’m fucked if I’m going to come to Bari and go through all that crap.”
For a few moments I was silent, torn between two kinds of answer. Then I took a deep breath and replied in an apparently calm tone, “I don’t think it would be a very good idea if you didn’t appear. If you’re not in court on the day of the hearing I’ll ask the presiding judge to have you brought in by the carabinieri. I hope you’ve got the idea by now.”
Silence. Background noise. I thought I heard his laboured breathing, but maybe I was only imagining it. Just as I briefly imagined the homicidal thoughts that must be passing through his head. I decided to take advantage of the situation.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m with a client.”
That woke him up. He said that I hadn’t realized who I was dealing with, and that I had to be very careful. That was the last thing I heard before I slammed the phone down on him, not entirely in control of myself. Like someone who closes the door behind him to escape a pursuer.
“Is everything all right, Avvocato?” my client asked me, with a gleam of curiosity and even a hint of anxiety on his stolid face.
“Everything’s fine,” I replied, and had to make an effort not to tell him all about it. I knew that would only be a way of putting a brave face on it.
Everything’s fine. Like hell it was. I noticed that my hands were shaking and I had to put them down on the desk and keep them there to avoid making an exhibition of myself in front of Signor Martinelli.
What the hell was I getting myself into?
36
Leaving my office that evening, I looked around. Right, left, and then a glance at the doorway of the old building opposite, just in case the killer sent by Macri was hiding inside, waiting for me to appear.
Then I shrugged my shoulders and started walking.
I was about ready for the psychiatric hospital, I said to myself under my breath in an attempt to downplay the situation. But I really wasn’t in a good mood. I hated that feeling of not being safe, of being vulnerable. But what could that bastard do to me anyway? He couldn’t really have me shot. Or could he? He’d kicked up a fuss because he was scared of getting into trouble. Obviously he had something to fear. And what do Mafiosi do when they have something to fear? They react, obviously.
These disjointed thoughts kept going through my head until I reached home, by which time I was bored with them. I’m lucky that way. I can get bored with anything. Even fear. What the hell, I thought, Macri and his friends could all go fuck themselves.
Anyway, the next day, whatever happened, I would call Tancredi.
37
Tancredi was giving evidence in court that morning. The usual kind of case: a sexual assault on a little girl.
Usual. A nice adjective for something like that.
Sometimes I wondered how Carmelo had managed to cope all this time, dealing with that kind of filth every day. On the few occasions when I’d represented abused children, I’d felt as if I was walking in the dark down corridors filled with insects and other repulsive creatures. You can’t see them, but they’re there, you can sense them moving close to your feet, you can smell them, you can feel something sticky on your face.
I’d once asked him how he did it.
When I asked the question, a kind of deep, metallic glow flashed across his face. It was a fleeting thing, barely perceptible, almost scary.
Then everything went back to normal. He pretended to think about my question and gave me a trite answer. To the effect that somebody had to do it, that not many policemen wanted to work in that squad, and so on.
I entered the courtroom. Tancredi was on the witness stand and a fat young lawyer I didn’t know was cross-examining him.
I sat down to wait for him and, incidentally, to enjoy the show.
“When you were answering the assistant prosecutor’s questions you said, among other things, that my client would lurk in the vicinity of the school. Could you explain to us what you mean by lurking? You used a very specific expression and I’d like you to justify it. What was the defendant doing? Was he hiding behind cars, was he using binoculars, or what?”
The fat man finished the question with a little smile. I’m sure he had to make an effort to stop himself casting a knowing glance at his client, who was sitting next to him.
Tancredi looked at him for a few moments. He seemed to hesitate, as if he was searching for an answer. I knew perfectly well that he was acting. That apparently innocent expression was the expression of a cat about to catch a mouse. A big mouse, to be precise.
“Yes. The suspect, that is, the defendant, always reached the school about twelve-twenty and took up a position on the opposite corner. The children would come out a few minutes later. He would watch them come out, and stay there until they’d all left.”
“Always on the other side of the street.”
“Yes, I already said that.”
“He never crossed the road and approached any of the children?”
“Not during the week we were watching him. Subsequently, we discovered other evidence-”
“I’m sorry, but for the moment we’re interested in what you saw, or didn’t see, during that week. Is there a bar near that school?”
“Yes, a bar called Stella di Mare.”
“During the time that you were watching him, did my client ever go into that bar?”
“Obviously I wasn’t personally on duty all the time, but as far as I remember, I saw him go into that bar a couple of times. Both times, he stayed there for a few minutes and left just as the children were coming out of school.”
“You do know, Inspector, that my client is a salesman, dealing with foodstuffs
and other products for bars.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know if the manager of the Stella di Mare is a customer of the defendant?”
“No.”
“Can you rule out the possibility that my client was in the vicinity of the school and the bar for reasons connected with his work, rather than those you have surmised in your report and your testimony?”
He was sure he had landed the killer blow.
“Yes,” Tancredi replied simply.
The lawyer was stunned. He seemed to have been thrown almost physically off balance. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, I can rule it out.”
“Indeed? And why is that?”
“You see, Avvocato, we followed Signor Armenise for several days. We followed him even when he was working, when he went into bars and restaurants for reasons connected with his work. He always had with him a leather briefcase and one of those binders in which you can insert and remove pages. You know, the kind that salesmen use to show the range of their products. On the occasions when we observed him outside the school he never had either his case or his binder with him.”
“I’m sorry, but when Signor Armenise entered the Stella di Mare, were you or any of your subordinates inside the bar, so that you could hear the conversations he had with the manager?”
“No. We were on the other side of the street.”
“So it’s on the basis of mere conjecture that-”
The assistant prosecutor intervened. “Objection, Your Honour. Counsel for the defence cannot make statements that are offensive to the witness.”
The fat man was about to reply but the presiding judge got in first. “Avvocato, please confine yourself to asking questions. Any comments you may wish to make you may leave for your closing argument.”
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