44
That week passed very quickly. Before I knew it, it was nearly over.
The day before the hearing, as I was looking through the papers and trying to jot down an outline of what I was going to say in my closing argument, a strange, incongruous thought came into my head. I had the idea that time was a spring inside me that had been squeezed as far as it would go and was now at last to be released. And it would project me somewhere unknown.
I wondered what this image that had appeared so suddenly, so mysteriously and so vividly in my head could possibly mean, and couldn’t find an answer.
At eight o’clock that evening Natsu came to the office. Just a flying visit to say hello and to find out how my preparations for next day were going, she said.
“You look tired. Worn out.”
“Do you mean I’m less handsome than usual?”
A not very good attempt to be witty.
“You’re even more handsome this way,” she replied, seriously. She was about to add something else but then decided it was better not to. “Do you still have a lot of work to do?”
“Yes, I do. We’re on a knife-edge. There are several arguments I could use, and the problem is to select the right ones. The ones that will sway the judges. In an appeal like this it’s not at all clear what those arguments are.”
“What are the possibilities of an acquittal?”
Ah, yes, that was just the question I needed, with my closing argument still to be written, and these incomprehensible, slightly unsettling images popping into my head.
There are cases in which you know for certain that the client will be found guilty, and your work is just a question of damage limitation. There are others in which you know for certain that he will be acquitted however good or bad your work was, and would be acquitted even if he didn’t have a lawyer at all. In these cases your job is to make the client believe that acquittal depends on your amazing skills, in order to justify your fee.
In all other cases it’s better, much better, not to risk making predictions.
“It’s hard to say. The odds certainly aren’t on our side.”
“Sixty to forty against? Seventy to thirty?”
Let’s say ninety to ten. Being optimistic.
“Yes, I’d say seventy to thirty is a realistic forecast.”
Maybe she believed me, maybe she didn’t. From her face there was no way of knowing.
“May I smoke?”
“Go ahead. But on your way out, tell Maria Teresa it was you. Because of the smell, you know. Ever since I quit, she’s been checking up on me like a Salvation Army officer.”
She gave a hint of a smile, then lit her cigarette and smoked half of it before she spoke again.
“I often find myself thinking how things might have been for the two of us. If circumstances had been different.”
I said nothing, tried to keep my face as expressionless as possible. I don’t know if I succeeded, but it was a pointless effort anyway, because she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking somewhere inside herself, and outside that room.
“And I often think of that night when you came home with me. When Midori had nightmares and you held her hand. It’s strange, you know. When I think of you, that’s what I remember most of all. Much more than the times we were together, at your place.”
Great. Thanks for telling me that. It does wonders for my male pride.
I didn’t say that.
I told her that I often thought of that night, too, but that the other thing I particularly remembered was that Sunday morning in the park. She nodded, as if I had told her something she already knew. Something that neither of us could add anything to.
“I have to ask you another question, Guido, and you must tell me the truth.”
I told her to go ahead and ask me the question, thinking as I did so how relative the truth is.
“Is Fabio innocent? Forget about the appeal hearing, the papers, your investigations, your line of defence. I want to know if you’re convinced of his innocence. I want to know if he’s been telling me the truth.”
No, you can’t ask me that. I can’t answer that question. I don’t know. He’s probably been telling the truth, but I can’t completely rule out the possibility that he was in league with Romanazzi, Macri and God knows who else in the drugs racket. I can’t even rule out the possibility that your husband did even worse things than that, a long time ago when he was a young Fascist.
I should have answered her like that. I should have told her it wasn’t part of my job as a lawyer to find out if a client is telling the truth. But there were other things I’d done that weren’t part of my job as a lawyer either.
“He’s been telling you the truth.”
At that precise moment, I saw our paths, which had touched for that brief time, separate and go off in different directions, getting further and further away from each other. A few minutes passed, and neither of us said a word. Maybe she too had had a vision similar to mine, or perhaps she was only thinking about the answer I had given her.
“So I’ll see you tomorrow in court?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Tomorrow in court,” I said, out loud, once I was alone.
45
The assistant prosecutor that morning was Montaruli.
We’d twice had the worst magistrate in the Department of Public Prosecutions and twice had the best, I thought, without any particular effort at originality.
It should have been a bad sign. If Porcelli, or someone like him, had been there, I wouldn’t have worried, even about his closing argument. Some assistant prosecutors stand up when the presiding judge gives them the floor, say, “I ask for the sentence to be upheld,” and consider they have earned their salary.
Some even have the nerve to complain that they work too hard.
Tired and disillusioned as Montaruli might be, he wasn’t a member of that club. It should have been a bad sign that it was him, but instead I was pleased.
“You’ve done an excellent job in this case,” he said, walking up to my bench.
I stood up.
“I read over the transcripts yesterday,” he went on, “and that’s what I thought. An excellent job. I’ll ask for the sentence to be upheld, but I wanted you to know that I really had to think long and hard about it. Much more than I usually do in cases like this.”
As the judges came in, he gave me his hand, and for some reason his grip conveyed a slight sadness, an inscrutable nostalgia. Then he turned and went back to his seat, and so he didn’t see the gesture I made, nodding slightly so that my head touched my closed fist. A greeting and a mark of respect, which Margherita had taught me.
Where was she at that moment?
For a few seconds, as I thought about that question, things around me went out of focus and the voices became a blur. By the time I’d come back to my senses, Montaruli had already started speaking.
“… so we appreciate the efforts made by counsel for the defence. Efforts which have shown a rare degree of commitment, and it is only right to acknowledge them. These rare efforts notwithstanding, no evidence has been produced during this hearing which substantially helps the defendant’s case.
“Confronted with one overwhelming piece of evidence – the discovery of drugs in the defendant’s private car – counsel for the defence has succeeded only in presenting us with a series of conjectures, insufficient in themselves to invalidate the body of evidence on which the original sentence was based. Needless to say, it is not enough to suggest some vague alternatives to the hypothesis put forward by the prosecution for this hypothesis automatically to fall apart.
“If that were the case, no one would ever be found guilty. It is always possible to formulate hypothetical alternatives to the version of the facts which has led to a defendant being sentenced. For these alternatives to constitute a valid basis for a request for acquittal, let alone an actual acquittal, they must at least be somewhat plausible.