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 the 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.
So let’s rule out the theory that whoever planted the drugs in the car was the same person who tipped off the customs police. And let’s assume that Paolicelli is telling the truth. If he really is innocent, how the hell to prove it?
Find out who planted the drugs, I told myself.
Well, that should be easy enough. All I have to do is uncover the network of international traffickers who planted the drugs, drag them to the appeal court to testify, and there, stricken by remorse, they confess, thus clearing my client. He’s acquitted, justice triumphs, and the legend of Avvocato Guerrieri is secure.
If Paolicelli really was innocent, then this was the worst case that had come my way in the whole of my so-called career, I told myself as I leafed through the last pages. At the bottom of the file I found a copy of Paolicelli’s criminal record. It was pretty much as I’d expected. Some very old convictions as a minor for affray, actual bodily harm, possession of weapons. All of them during the years when the Fascist gangs were active. Nothing since 1981.
As I looked through the record, I caught myself thinking that, until a few hours earlier, I’d been determined not to take the case.
Until Signora Natsu Kawabata had stepped into my office.
6
I put my notes in order. More than that, I tried to get my ideas in order.
For Paolicelli to have a chance of getting out of this – which was very unlikely-I would have to do a bit of investigating, and that was where the problems started.
I’d only ever used private detectives a couple of times, with disastrous results. And that was in cases which were – how shall I put it? – a lot less problematic than the Paolicelli case. After the second time, I had sworn it would also be the last.