When we left the pizzeria she asked me if I fancied another beer, at her place. I searched for an answer that was brilliant but not too brilliant, and couldn’t think of one. So I just said yes, of course, I’d love a beer.
She parked on Corso Italia, almost on the corner of Via Sagarriga Visconti. It wasn’t, at the time, the ideal area for a woman alone.
“Where do you live?” I asked, getting out of the car.
“Via Eritrea.”
I didn’t know Via Eritrea, even though we weren’t far from where I lived. I discovered it was the name of the little street going from Corso Italia to Via Crisanzio. One of those places that, as a child, I thought was inhabited only by dangerous people.
“I live near the Casa delle Rose.”
“The Casa delle Rose?” I had no idea what that was.
“The Casa delle Rose was the most luxurious brothel in Bari until 1958. Then they passed the Merlin Law and the brothels were closed.”
“How do you know? I mean that it was the most luxurious brothel in Bari.”
“I was choosing where to live and I had a couple of options, both in the area. I told my parents. My father said it was best to avoid Via Eritrea. I asked why and he explained. At that point it became obvious I had to choose this apartment.”
“But why didn’t your father want you to?”
“He was afraid the reputation of the place might rub off on his daughter, even though it was more than thirty years ago and nobody remembers it.”
We went in. It was a small but attractive apartment. She quickly showed me around. You went straight into a living room filled with shelves, lots of books and a table with a Lettera 32 typewriter in the middle; on either side of the typewriter, two reams of extra-strong paper: blank pages on one side, on the other, pages already written on and placed face down.
In the only other room, a bed with a brightly coloured Peruvian blanket.
The apartment was tidy, but not obsessively so, there was a nice smell in the air, and yet – I know I run the risk of applying to the memory a judgement I only formed later – there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something that produced a kind of dissonance. As if the place wasn’t really inhabited. Used, but not inhabited. I don’t know what it was, I’m not capable of saying what produced that feeling in me, nor can I say for sure that I actually had it at that moment. The fact remains that my memory of the episode is associated with a subtle but tangible unease. Almost a sense of latent danger.
“Do you mind if we don’t waste time playing at being polite and have the beer and a cigarette later?”
“I’ve never been polite,” was all I managed to say.
Later, she asked me if I wanted a lift home.
“Thank you, I’ll walk, I don’t live far.”
“Then I’m going to sleep,” she said, turning over in bed. “It’s been a rough day, and I’m very tired.”
She might already have been asleep by the time I closed the door behind me.
10
I went back to the prison, this time with Annapaola.
When they brought Cardace into the lawyers’ room she was leaning against the window. She didn’t move, either to say hello or to introduce herself. Cardace looked around, nodded at me and came and sat down opposite me. Only at that point did Annapaola take her place at the table, next to Cardace.
“Are you a lawyer too?” he asked, hesitantly. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to.
“Do I look like a lawyer?” Annapaola replied before I could intervene.
“No.”
“Actually I’m not a lawyer.” It was an apparently neutral phrase, but it had been uttered in an obvious tone of menace. Cardace looked at me, ever more perplexed.
“Signorina Doria is a private investigator. She’s going to help us find some new evidence we can present at the appeal hearing.”
“Actually, our idea is that you help us find something to help you.”
“What can I tell you? I —” Iacopo said. He was about to continue, but Annapaola interrupted him.
“There are two things you have to tell us. One: who you went shooting with in the quarry, if you really did go there. Two: when the fight at Chilometro Zero took place, provided that story isn’t more bullshit, and who the people involved were. I’m not asking you for my own pleasure. If you want us to try and help you, this is information we need. So don’t play games.”
“I’m not playing games. All Gaglione told me was that he’d beaten up a guy who belonged to a powerful family. I asked him what family and he wouldn’t tell me. When someone doesn’t want to tell you a thing like that, you don’t insist. And anyway, he didn’t seem worried that somebody might want to kill him. He seemed worried that somebody wanted to harm him, beat him up, not shoot him.”
“How do you know that?”
“That he didn’t think they wanted to kill him? I don’t know. When we talked I didn’t get the feeling he was afraid of being killed. He was nervous, not terrified, if you know what I mean. He half intended to leave Bari for a few days, to wait for things to calm down. Maybe he wanted to try and get in touch with these people to clear things up and apologize.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“He said he was thinking of going away for a few days. That he was thinking of trying to explain things to these people. No, that’s what I assumed, but only because of everything he said. I don’t remember exactly what —”
“And you don’t know who these people are?”
“No.”
“When did the fight take place?”
“I don’t know that either. A few weeks before the murder, maybe.”
Again I had the feeling he was telling the truth about this. Annapaola must have had the same impression as me.
“All right. Let’s assume things are the way you say. Gaglione tells you about this problem he’s got with some dangerous people, he doesn’t go into detail and you don’t ask him. But the name of the guy you went shooting with in that quarry – that’s something you have to tell us. Now.”
“I can’t tell you a fucking thing. It would be like —”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The blow, a very fast one that came from nowhere and was practically unstoppable, caught him on his left cheek. It produced a noise like a sink being unblocked – in a comic book, they would have put a balloon with SPLAT in bold type. In other words, it was a strong, sudden, loud slap. Cardace was stunned. The last thing he would have expected was being slapped in the lawyers’ room of the prison, by a woman, in front of his own counsel. The only thought that went through my head was that if a prison officer had come in just then, we would have been in trouble. That didn’t seem to bother Annapaola.
“Listen to me, arsehole, and listen good. I don’t know if you killed your friend Gaglione. I don’t know and I prefer not to know. If I still have a doubt, maybe I can continue to work on this case. But you need to get one thing clear: we’re your only hope. Read my lips: we’re your only hope. If the gentleman you have in front of you,” she said, pointing at me with a gesture I would normally have considered somewhat theatrical but which now seemed perfectly appropriate to the situation, “shows up in court without anything to show, for you it’ll be like going in front of a firing squad. Obviously, if you killed Gaglione, and don’t have the guts to admit it but want to atone for your crime, well, then you’ve made the right choice: you’ll have all the atonement you want. If you want to make an appointment outside this place, consider dates after 2030.”
Cardace had turned serious. He looked alert now. It was as if the slap had aroused him from his lethargy. Maybe it really had.
“Smoking’s not allowed in here,” he said incongruously, after a sigh. His face was two different colours: pale on one side, bright red on the other.
“Do you have cigarettes?” she asked him.
“I quit.”
“I roll them. If you like, I can make two and we’ll stand by the window.”
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He nodded. Annapaola took out tobacco and papers and prepared the cigarettes with rapid gestures, like a conjuror. They stood up, went to the window, opened it and smoked together, in silence, for a couple of minutes. It was Cardace who spoke first.
“If I tell you who the person is, I’ll get him in trouble. The gun even has the serial number rubbed away. Plus, we did … things together.”
“We’re not the police, we’re not magistrates, we don’t have to put anything in writing and we don’t have to report to anyone. You tell us, and we’ll decide, together with you, what to do with the information, in case it’s useful to your defence.”
He didn’t raise any further objections. They came back and sat down again and Iacopo told us who the gun belonged to – a petty criminal like him, one Giovanni Cipriani – where they had gone shooting and what things they had done together, he and Cipriani. Armed robberies. Mostly of pharmacies and supermarkets.
God knows if Lorenza had imagined any of this, I wondered.
“When you and Cipriani went shooting at the quarry, did you leave the cartridges there?” I asked him.
“No. We collected them so there was no trace left and also because he took them to someone who has the equipment to recharge and reuse them.”
“Was Cipriani ever arrested?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not while I was still free. I don’t know if since then … but no, I would have known. They would have brought him here.”
“Were you ever stopped together?”
“How do you mean?”
“Did the police or the carabinieri ever stop the two of you when you were together? Even just to check your papers when you were in the car?”
He shook his head. “No. But what difference would that make?”
“If there was a police report in which you appeared together we could get hold of it and use it to pull in Cipriani without you being the one to tell us his name. Well, it was an idea. Were there others involved in the things you did together? The robberies, I mean.”
“No.”
“Or anybody who went shooting with you?”
“We always went alone.”
“When did you last see Cipriani?”
“When we went shooting, a few days before Gaglione was murdered.”
“What does Cipriani do for a living, apart from the robberies of course?”
“He’s enrolled at the university, although he hasn’t done any exams for ages.”
A pleasant couple, I thought. Your parents’ pride and joy.
“You haven’t forgotten anything that might be useful to us?” Annapaola asked.
“No. I don’t think so…” He hesitated a few seconds, then added: “Maybe one thing. I don’t know if it’s important, but when I had coffee with Sabino I gave him a couple of the pills I’d been given by Gaglione.”
“Did you tell this to the other lawyer?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Apart from the fact that it only just occurred to me, he kept saying that I had to keep quiet, talk as little as possible. That the more defendants say, the worse they make things for themselves.”
“All right,” Annapaola said, putting her cigarette end in a piece of paper which she then carefully screwed up and threw in the waste basket.
“What are you going to do now?” Iacopo asked, again looking at me.
“I don’t know. We have to think about what you’ve told us. Of course, we won’t make any use of it without first agreeing it with you.” I became aware that my tone was a lot friendlier now. “In any case, what’s for sure is that at the appeal hearing you’ll have to go on the stand and be examined, not just make statements. In other words, I’ll question you and then the prosecution will cross-examine you. We’ll have to prepare for that. We’ll decide together what to say and what not to say.”
Ten minutes later we were outside the prison.
“Will you ride in front?” Annapaola said, almost chirpily, when we got to the motorbike.
“The next time you decide to beat up one of my clients,” I replied, “I’d appreciate it if you let me know in advance.”
“Come on, don’t be so serious. We played good cop, bad cop. Nobody got hurt and now we know more than we did. You should be pleased.”
“It’d be interesting to hear Cardace’s opinion of the statement ‘nobody got hurt’. In any case, you played both the good cop and the bad cop. You kindly allowed me to watch your little number. By the way: thank you.”
“It was just a slap, it saved us a lot of time.”
I looked for something biting to say in reply, but couldn’t think of anything.
“What do we do now, boss?” she said, with the most fake air of submissiveness I’d ever seen in my life.
“I thought you’d taken command of operations. I assume you’d also like to decide on the defence strategy. Maybe you can go to court instead of me and, if the need arises, give the assistant prosecutor a slap, too. Or maybe the judge.”
“Yes, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it?”
“Anyway, I don’t know what we’re doing. Let’s see if we can track down this Cipriani, though, frankly, I don’t see how we’d be able to persuade him to come to court and testify. He’d have to accuse himself at the very least of the unauthorized possession and carrying of a gun with its serial number rubbed away. Even supposing – which is completely unrealistic – that he agrees to talk to us, owns up to what he did and comes to tell all in court, after he’d said just a couple of words the court would have to cut the testimony short, according to article 63 of the code.”
“Sorry, boss, remind me of article 63.”
“If before a legal authority a person other than the accused or a suspect makes statements which indicate criminality on his part, the aforesaid authority interrupts the examination, informs him that as a result of such statements he himself may be investigated and encourages him to appoint a defence counsel.”
“Oh, that rule.”
“Yes, that rule.”
“Okay. Let’s face one problem at a time. In the meantime, let’s see if we can find out who he is, what’s become of him, etc. Who knows? If we’re lucky, he might even have been arrested for possession of that gun. That would simplify things a bit.”
“Yes, it’d be a real stroke of luck. So it’s bound not to happen. I’ve never had a stroke of luck like that. And anyway, no.”
“No, what?”
“I don’t want to ride in front. The bike makes me nervous in town. And sometimes not just the bike.”
11
I had been asked to give a talk to young trainee magistrates. Their official title is “ordinary magistrates in apprenticeship”. When I was young, they were known by a term that’s rather archaic but that I liked: “legal auditors”. Obviously, this nostalgic observation is an unmistakable symptom of galloping senility.
The title of the lecture was “Verification of the facts and function of the defence in criminal proceedings”. The morning they called me from the offices of the appeal court to tell me about it and ask if I was available, I was surprised and even quite flattered: it was some kind of recognition, I thought. Immediately afterwards, though, the thought hit me that they were calling me because, having passed the age of fifty, I was classified as a senior lawyer, and it’s the seniors who usually get assigned such tasks. At this point, I stopped thinking, which is often a good idea.
In my odd moments of free time, though, I had pondered how to transform a vague title into the starting point for a talk of an hour or slightly more about something worthwhile.
I arrived a few minutes early and, outside the lecture hall where the talk was due to take place, I discovered that one of the magistrates in charge of coordinating the traineeships of these young people, and the person who would introduce me, was Cotturri. That is, the assistant prosecutor who had supervised the Cardace investigation and handled the prosecution in his original trial. He was a man of about forty
– I find it a little disturbing that these days courtroom prosecutors are all younger than me – intelligent-looking, slightly overweight, smartly dressed. We had met a few times in court, but always for minor cases.
Once we’d greeted each other, it was he, to my surprise, who brought up the subject.
“I hear you’ve taken on the Cardace appeal.”
I was about to ask him how he knew, until it struck me as a really stupid question to ask an assistant prosecutor.
“He wasn’t very well defended at his trial,” he went on.
“I’m afraid he wasn’t,” I agreed cautiously. “Costamagna wasn’t well, he didn’t have the clarity and edge he used to have.”
“I have to tell you, I kept wondering about that all through the trial. Nobody doing my job feels very comfortable when the defence, for one reason or another, is inadequate. I always feel better if the accused has a good lawyer who’s doing their job well.” Then he thought for a moment about what he’d just said and gave a slight smile. “Okay, not everyone who does my job thinks like that. Some of us – how can I put this? – some of us like an easy victory.”
“You’ll think I’m asking a stupid question if I ask you your opinion on Cardace’s guilt.”
“No. There are times when you obtain a guilty verdict because the evidence against the accused is sufficient, in some cases technically unassailable, and yet have doubts yourself. Moral doubts, I mean. Not technical doubts. Those are the most unpleasant situations, but it wasn’t the case with the Cardace trial.”
“So you’re totally convinced of his guilt?”
“Yes, but all the same it bothered me that he was so badly defended. Actually, I’m pleased you’ve agreed to handle his appeal. I don’t envy you, though. If he wasn’t guilty of the murder, and I can’t imagine how that could even be possible, it’d be such an unfortunate combination of circumstances, it gives me the shivers.”
The Measure of Time Page 9
