I stayed in Rome, after withdrawing from the civil service exam. My room in the pensione was paid up for three nights, that is, for the entire period of the written examinations. And so, while my friends were struggling with criminal law and civil law, I enjoyed, to my own surprise, the most wonderful Roman holiday of my life. With nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be, I strolled for hours, bought half-price books, stretched out comfortably on the park benches in Villa Borghese, read, and even wrote. I wrote horrifying poems that, fortunately, have been lost over the years. On the Spanish Steps, I made friends with two overweight American girls. We went out for pizza together, but I politely declined an invitation to continue the evening back in their apartment, because I thought I’d glimpsed a conspiratorial glance passing between them. Reckoning that they tipped the scales at one hundred seventy-five to two hundred pounds each, I decided that, as the saying goes, to trust is good, but not to trust is better.
The world was teeming with endless possibilities in that warm and unexpected Roman February, as I teetered between the no-longer of my life as a child and the not-yet of my life as a man. It was a brief, euphoric, temporary moment in time. It was wonderful to stand, poised, in that moment. And only what is temporary can be perfect.
I remembered these things during the course of an hour that, by some strange alchemy, seemed as timeless and sweet as the days I had enjoyed twenty years earlier. I had the irrational, exhilarating sensation that the tape was about to rewind, and that I was about to be offered a new beginning. I felt a shiver, a vibration. It was beautiful.
Then it dawned on me that it was ten o’clock, and I realized that if I didn’t get moving I’d be late. I turned and walked briskly back toward Piazza dei Tribunali.
3.
When you argue before the Court of Cassation, the first thing you do is rent a black robe.
The dress code of Italy’s highest court requires that all lawyers wear a black robe, but-except for lawyers who practice in Rome-almost no one actually owns one. And so you have to rent one, as if you were acting in a play or attending a Carnival masquerade party.
As usual, there was a short line at the robe rental room. I looked around in search of familiar faces, but there was no one I knew. Instead, standing in line ahead of me was a guy who was, to judge from his appearance, the product of repeated, passionate couplings between close blood relatives. His eyebrows were very bushy and jet black. His hair was dyed an unnatural blond with red highlights. He had a jaw that jutted out in front of him, and he was wearing a forest green jacket that looked vaguely Tyrolean in style. I imagined his mug shot in the newspaper under the headline “Police Break Up Ring of Child Molesters,” or proudly posing on a political campaign poster alongside a virulently racist slogan.
I took my rented robe and forced myself to refrain from sniffing it; doing so would have resulted in suffering a queasy sense of disgust for the rest of the morning. As usual, I mused for a few seconds about how many lawyers had worn it before me and the stories they could tell. Then, also as usual, I told myself to quit indulging in cliches, and I walked toward the court chambers.
My case was one of the first. A mere half hour after the hearing began, it was my turn.
It only took the reporting advocate a few minutes to summarize the history of the case, explaining the reasoning behind the guilty verdict and then the grounds for my appeal.
The defendant was the youngest son of a well-known and respected professional in Bari. At the time of his arrest, nearly eight years earlier, he was twenty-one years old, attending law school without much to show for it. He was much more successful as a cocaine dealer. Anyone in certain circles who occasionally wanted or needed some coke-and sometimes other substances-knew his name and number. As a dealer, he was careful, punctual, and reliable. He made home deliveries, so his wealthy customers weren’t obliged to do anything as vulgar as traveling around the city in search of a drug dealer.
At a certain point, when everyone knew his name and what he was up to, the Carabinieri noticed him, too. They tapped his cell phones and followed him for a few weeks and then, when the time was right, they searched his apartment and garage. It was in the garage that they found almost half a kilo of excellent Venezuelan cocaine. At first, he tried to defend himself by saying that the drugs weren’t his, that everyone else in the building had access to his garage, and that the coke could have belonged to anyone. Then they confronted him with the recordings of the phone calls, and at last he decided, on the advice of his lawyer-me-to avail himself of his right to remain silent. It was a classic case-any further statements could have been used against him.
After a few months of preventive detention he was placed under house arrest, and a little more than a year after his initial arrest he was released, with the requirement that he remain a resident of the area and show up regularly to sign a register. The trial proceeded at the usual slow pace, and the defense theory, all other chatter aside, was based on a claim that the phone taps were not legitimate evidence. If that objection had been accepted, the prosecution would have had a much weaker case.
I had raised the issue of the legality of the phone taps in the first criminal trial. But the objection had been dismissed, and the court had sentenced my client to ten years’ imprisonment and a huge fine. I had raised the issue of the lawfulness of the recordings in our first appeal. The appeals court had once again dismissed the argument, but at least the sentence had been reduced.
I appealed to the Court of Cassation based on the illegality of those phone taps, and that morning I was there in my final attempt to keep my client-who had in the meantime found a real job and a girlfriend and was now the father of a young child-from serving a substantial prison sentence, even after various amnesties, early releases, and so on. In supreme court sessions, normally there’s no audience. The chambers have an abstract solemnity, and-most important-the discussion involves only points of law: The kinds of brutal facts discussed in criminal trials are nowhere to be found in the hushed environment of the supreme court.
In other words, you might expect the outcome and the setting to be devoid of the emotional edge typical of standard criminal trials.
That’s not true, though, for one very simple reason.
When a case is appealed to the highest court, you’re very close to the end of the judicial process. One of the possible outcomes of an appeal is for the court to deny the appeal. And if the Court of Cassation denies an appeal in a case involving a prison sentence, it’s likely that your client’s next step will be to surrender to the prison system and begin serving his time.
That means a case before this court is hardly an abstract exercise; the seriousness of the outcome transforms the rarefied atmosphere of the chambers and the hearing into a dramatic foreshadowing of things that are anything but rarefied, and frequently frightening.
The advocate general called for the dismissal of my appeal. He spoke briefly, but it was evident that he had studied the facts of the case, which isn’t always true. He made a strong argument against the basis of my appeal, and I thought that if I had been one of the justices, I would have found him persuasive and I would have ruled against the appellant.