“I’ll make pasta. That’s the most I can rustle up without advance warning.”
Even with advance warning, to tell the truth. But I didn’t say that.
“Pasta and wine are fine. What are you making?”
“You’ll see,” I said, and immediately felt ridiculous. Who the hell do you think you are, Guerrieri? This woman is a professional chef, you idiot. Just get on with it and cook the food.
I fried garlic, oil and chillies in a pan. While the spaghetti was boiling I grated some pecorino, chopped some basil, and stoned and sliced a few black olives. I put the pasta, very al dente, into the frying pan and added the pecorino and the rest.
Natsu said she liked watching me cooking, which made me tingle all over. A nice but dangerous sensation. I didn’t reply, quickly laid the table, told her to sit down, and carried over the brimming plates.
We ate, drank and chatted about nothing, with the punchball standing guard over us.
When we had finished eating, I put on Shangri-la by Mark Knopfler. Then I took my glass and went and sat down on the sofa. She stayed on her chair. When she realized what the disc was, she said she liked ‘Postcards from Paraguay’ a lot. I put the glass down on the floor, reached for the controls and fast-forwarded to track 10.
She came and sat down next to me, on the sofa, just as the song was starting.
One thing was leading to the next, the voice sang.
Spot on, I thought.
It was the last rational thought I had that night.
23
I didn’t have to be in court the next day. I sent Maria Teresa to the courthouse to get some things sorted out at the clerk of the court’s office. Not that any of them were urgent, but I needed to be alone.
I had a few things to think over. Quite a few things.
In the first place, I felt like a shit for what had happened last night. It wasn’t that I’d been taken by surprise, or that I hadn’t had a pretty good idea what might happen. If I’d had a modicum of moral sense, I told myself, I wouldn’t have taken Natsu home with me.
I wondered what I would have said if someone had told me a story like that and asked me what I thought. I mean: what I thought about a lawyer who fucked the wife of one of his clients while that client was in prison.
I would have said that lawyer was a piece of shit.
Part of me was looking for excuses for what had happened, and even finding a few. But overall, my inner prosecutor was winning this case hands down. He was so far out in front that I felt like asking him where the hell he’d been last night when I needed him.
I remembered an after-dinner conversation with some colleagues, some years earlier. We’d had a lot to eat and drink. Some of us were little more than boys, others older, people we’d trained with.
I don’t know who told the story. It was a true story, he said, which had happened a few years earlier.
There was this guy in prison, accused of murder. An almost hopeless case. He needed a lawyer. A very good one, considering the situation he was in.
But he didn’t have the money to pay for a good one. In fact he didn’t even have money to pay for a bad one. What he did have was a beautiful wife. One evening she went to see an old, famous and very good lawyer, who was also a notorious womanizer. She told him she wanted him to defend her husband but didn’t have the money to pay him. So she suggested payment in kind. He accepted, fucked her – repeatedly, in the office and outside – defended the guy and managed to get him acquitted.
End of story, start of discussion.
“What would you have done?”
Various answers. There were some who thought it hadn’t been very good form to do it in the office. Good manners mattered, damn it, whatever the situation. It would have been better to go to a hotel or somewhere else. Others, though, considered that fucking her on the desk was consistent with the nature of the contract they’d entered into. A few timidly expressed ethical qualms, and were howled down.
The young Guerrieri said he would have defended the prisoner for free, without payment in kind, and someone told him he was an idiot and would sing a different tune if something like that ever happened.
Whoever said that was right.
And then I thought of Macri, and the idea that had come to me the night before. On how I could use the information Colaianni had passed on to me to help Paolicelli out of the mess he was in. Gradually, with my mind going back and forth like a ping-pong ball between these two thoughts – what a shit I was, and what to do with my honourable colleague Macri to save my oblivious client Paolicelli – the professional side gained the upper hand.
My idea was to call him as a witness.
It was a crazy idea, because you don’t call a lawyer as a witness for the defence. Apart from the fact that there could be an objection on the grounds of lawyer-client confidentiality, calling a lawyer is something that just isn’t done, and that’s it.
I’d never actually seen it done. I didn’t even know if having previously been the defendant’s counsel constituted a formal impediment to being a witness – what they called a conflict of interest.
So first of all I took a look at the code. It turned out there was no a priori conflict of interest. It could be done, theoretically anyway.
It was the kind of situation in which you really need a second opinion. Not for the first time, I realized I didn’t have a single colleague I could turn to. I didn’t trust many of them, and none of them were really my friends. For something like this, I needed a friend who knew what he was talking about. And could keep his mouth shut.
I could only think of two people. Curiously, both were prosecutors. Colaianni and Alessandra Mantovani.
I didn’t really want to call Colaianni again, but it struck me that this was a good opportunity to talk to Alessandra again after all this time. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d left Bari to work in the Prosecutor’s Department in Palermo. She’d been escaping from something, like many people. Only she had done it more decisively than most.
She answered after a lot of rings, just when I was about ready to hang up. We exchanged a few jokes, the kind you tell to re-establish contact, to revive the old familiarity.
“It’s nice to hear from you, Guerrieri. I sometimes think you and I should have got together. Things might have gone better for me. Instead, the only men I meet are losers, which starts to be a bit of problem when you’re already forty.”
I am a loser. I’m a bigger loser than any of the men you go out with. I’m also an idiot and if you knew what I did last night you’d agree with me.
I didn’t say that. I said we still had time, if she really liked lawyers with a dubious past and an uncertain future. I’d go to Palermo, she could dismiss her police escort, and we’d see how it worked out.
She laughed. Then she repeated that it was nice to hear from me, and maybe it was time to tell her the reason I was calling. I told her. She listened carefully, stopping me only to ask if I could clarify a few points. When I’d finished, I asked her what she thought of my idea.
“It’s true that in theory a defence counsel’s testimony is admissible. In practice, I very much doubt they’ll allow you to call him unless you can give them a good reason-a very good reason – to do so. And your suspicions aren’t a very good reason.”
“I know, that’s my problem in a nutshell. I need to find a way to get that testimony admitted.”
“You need to put the defendant on the stand first, and his wife. Let them tell the story of how this lawyer came to be involved. Then you can try, though I wouldn’t bet on the result. Appeal court judges don’t like to go to too much trouble.”
“Let’s suppose they admit the testimony. In your opinion, can he refuse to answer on the grounds of lawyer-client confidentiality?”
She thought for a few moments before replying. “In my opinion, no. Lawyer-client confidentiality is there to safeguard the interests of the client. He could claim it if he thought his testimony would be prejudicial to his former client. When you put it like that… I don’t know if there are any precedents.”