A Fine Line
Authors: Gianrico Carofiglio
Award-winning, bestselling novelist Gianrico Carofiglio was born in Bari in 1961 and worked for many years as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime. He was appointed advisor of the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament in 2007 and served as a senator from 2008 to 2013. Carofiglio is best known for the Guido Guerrieri crime series:
Involuntary Witness
,
A Walk in the Dark
,
Reasonable Doubts
,
Temporary Perfections
and now
A Fine Line
, all published by Bitter Lemon Press. His other novels include
The Silence of the Wave
. Carofiglio's books have sold more than four million copies in Italy and have been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide.
Also available from Bitter Lemon Press by Gianrico Carofiglio
Involuntary Witness
A Walk in the Dark
Reasonable Doubts
Temporary Perfections
The Silence of the Wave
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London
WC1X 2ET
First published in Italian as
La regola dell'equilibrio
by Giulio Einaudi editore, 2014
© Gianrico Carofiglio, 2014
English translation © Howard Curtis, 2016
This edition published by arrangement with Rosaria Carpinelli Consulenze Editoriali srl.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN: 978â1â908524â62â1
Typeset by Tetragon, London
Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire
Contents
It was around the tenth of April. The air was cool and clean. A fragrant breeze, rare for this city, was blowing, and the sun spattered liquid light over us and the grey façade of the courthouse. Carmelo Tancredi and I were standing near the entrance, chatting.
“Sometimes I think about quitting,” I said, leaning against the wall. The plaster was flaking, and a spider's web of small cracks spread worryingly upwards.
“Quitting what?” Tancredi asked, taking his cigar from his mouth.
“The law.”
“Are you kidding?”
I shrugged. At that moment, two judges passed. They didn't notice me, and I was pleased I didn't have to greet them.
“Do you know them?” I said, nodding towards the glass door behind which the judges had just disappeared.
“Ciccolella and Longo? I know who they are, but I wouldn't say I know them. I once had to testify in court before Ciccolella, but it was all over pretty quickly.”
“A few days ago, I was in a lift with Ciccolella. There were also two trainees and that female lawyer who always dresses as if she's on her way to a Chinese New Year party.”
Tancredi laughed. He knew immediately who I was talking about. “Nardulli.”
“That's right, Nardulli. She's weird but she's a good person, I find her almost endearing. She defends all kinds of hopeless cases for free.”
“True. Whenever we need a public defender and can't find anyone, she always shows willing, even when there's no money in it for her. So what happened?”
“The lift reaches the ground floor and I step aside to let her pass â she was the only woman there. She's just about to get out, tottering on those ridiculous heels, when Ciccolella barges past her, almost knocking her down, then looks at her for a few seconds and cries
Avvocato!
in an angry tone, as if to say: you should have moved aside, you shouldn't even have tried to go before me. I'm a
judge
, in case you didn't know. Then he turns and walks off without saying goodbye to anyone.”
“Nice man.”
“He did it on purpose, barging into her like that. I felt really bad. I should have intervened, told him that was no way to behave, that he'd been rude. But of course I didn't. Just brooded over it later. In the office, they saw me talking to myself at least three times that day. That's happening increasingly often.”
“Your clients know you're crazy anyway. What came out of these broodings of yours? Is âbroodings' even a word?”
“I don't think so.”
A police car drew up, and two suspicious-looking guys got out, greeted Tancredi, who replied with a nod, and went inside.
“I was thinking how different it was before,” I resumed, “how there wasn't that rudeness, that level of vulgarity when I started, more than twenty years ago. I seemed to remember that relations in the profession were less brutal, less⦠yes, vulgar's the word. Then I stopped and pinched myself.
I told myself I was going soft, doing what I'd always found pathetic in other people.”
“Feeling nostalgic?”
“That's right. Feeling nostalgia for the past as if it were a golden age. Missing your own youth even though when you were in the middle of it you thought everything was terrible. You know the opening of that novel by Paul Nizan: âI was twenty. I won't allow anyone to say that these are the best years of our lives.'”
“I know the quotation, but I haven't read the book. What did you say the author's name was?”
“Paul Nizan, a French writer.”
I shifted a little, sliding along the wall so as to get the sun on my face. I looked for the most comfortable position I could find to support myself and half-closed my eyes.
“Sometimes I think about when I used to imagine what would happen to me in the future. Travel, graduation, marriage, my first hearing at the Supreme Court, a whole lot of things. Those moments when I imagined the future seem very close to me. Whereas the things I imagined that really happened appear very far away. My future is sunk in the past.”
“I've heard clearer explanations.”
“But you understand, don't you?”
“Only because of my superior intelligence.” He also moved his face into the sun and took a couple of puffs on his cigar.
“How would you describe the smell of a cigar?” I asked him.
“Don't tell me it bothers you. I'm constantly reducing my circle of friends through incompatibility: my incompatibility with their intolerance towards cigars.”
“It doesn't bother me. Not too much, anyway.” Tancredi lifted his hand to his face and passed it the wrong way over the short beard he'd had for a few months
now. “Experts say that the smell â or as they put it, the aroma â of a cigar is a mixture of wet leather, pepper, an old brandy keg and seasoned wood. I've heard this so many times, I've ended up convinced I'm also aware of these smells. Apart from the old brandy keg, of course. I've never seen one or smelt one.”
“Pepper, seasoned wood, brandy keg, leather⦔
“
Wet
leather.”
“Wet leather⦠That kind of thing. Like the descriptions you get from wine waiters. I always feel like an idiot when I'm having dinner and someone says things like: a fruity feel, a hint of chocolate and liquorice, tannins. I drink wine, but I can't taste these things.”
“Haven't you ever smoked cigars?”
“Never. You may remember I smoked cigarettes for many years. Then nothing. Never cigars, never a pipe, thank God.”
It felt good leaning against that wall, with that sense you're cleansing your soul that only certain spring days are capable of reawakening. How good it would be, I thought, to go somewhere in the country, lay a blanket on the grass, read, eat sandwiches, close my eyes and listen to the murmurs of nature.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
He made a gesture with his hand as if to say: sure, go ahead.
“A month ago I had some tests done. Routine stuff, my doctor says it's fine to do them every two or three years. A few days after taking the samples the doctor called me â I'd just finished a hearing and was on my way out of here â and told me he had to talk to me. There was something too neutral in his tone. I didn't like it at all. I asked him if anything was wrong and he replied that it'd be better if I came to see him. So I went to his clinic, not in a very calm state of mind.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He's a friend, he was very ill at ease. He told me some of the results were
slightly
skewed, but that there are often false alarms in this kind of check-up, so we ought to repeat the tests immediately before starting to get worried. But if the results were confirmed, I'd need an appointment with a haematologist. I asked him if he could please be a bit more specific, and as I said that I realized I'd put my hands on his desk because they'd started to shake badly.”
“And what did he say?” Tancredi asked in a thin voice.
“He beat about the bush a bit more, then told me it might be a form of leukaemia. There are many different kinds, he said, and many can be cured nowadays. But it was pointless to say anything until we'd repeated the tests.”
Tancredi didn't move a muscle, seemed almost to have stopped breathing.
“We redid the samples. He assured me he would talk to the lab to make sure the results came back within a day. He called me next morning, about eight. He couldn't find the right words, all he could think of was:
Congratulations
. âI told you there are often false alarms. Actually not so often, I exaggerated a bit, but it does happen. Fortunately, it's what happened this time. Go out tonight and raise a toast to your second birthday.' He also said a few more things, but by now his voice had become distant and I didn't hear them properly. In any case I don't remember. It was one of the most unreal situations I've ever been in.”
I heard the sound of the breath being expelled by Tancredi. “So everything's OK?”
“Yes.”
“Fucking hell. For a day you thought you had leukaemia?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Why didn't you call me?”
“I thought about it, but I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed? To call a friend? You need a psychiatrist, not a haematologist. What does that mean?”
“I felt
inferior
. Suddenly I'd ended up on the side where the sick people are, while the healthy people, those who carry on with their normal lives, who eat, drink, work, travel, make love, make plans, were on the other side, the one I'd just been excluded from. I felt inferior and I was ashamed. I know it may seem strange, but that's the way it was.”
Tancredi took a deep breath and screwed up his eyes. He made an angry grimace and shook his head as if dismissing a thought. “It can't have been easy,” he said at last.
“I don't know. I can't somehow define my memory of it. It was a day when I was suspended over a void. It was fear, more than anything. As if the fear was throbbing inside me. The actual thought that in a short while, not in some remote, abstract future, you'll cease to exist. The
world
will cease to exist. I remembered what a friend of mine â Emilio â said when he told me about the illness and death of his wife at the age of thirty-four. You think about the walks you didn't take, about the times when you were stingy with your affections. It isn't just the fear of death, it's the fact that you wish you hadn't wasted your time. Then there were moments of perfect calm. As if I'd already got used to it, as if I'd accepted my fate and was able to observe it in a detached way. Something that concerned another person. And there were moments when I thought I mustn't give up, that I should fight, beat the disease, whatever it was. A lot of people have done that. Those were the hardest moments, if you understand what I mean.”
“You didn't think about what the doctor had said, that it might have been a mistake in the tests?”
“Not even for a second. I forbade myself from doing that. I think it struck me as a cowardly thought, a way to postpone acknowledging what was happening to me. I'm not the kind of person who wins the lottery, I think I told myself.”
“And how did you spend the day?”
“That's the other strange thing. I worked, I went to the gym, I went to bed early, I even fell asleep almost immediately, and I don't remember what I dreamt about. But then I woke up again at four in the morning. I opened my eyes and felt an anxiety I'd never felt before. Like a blanket of metal. I got up, I
had
to get up because I could feel the panic starting. I went out in the dark, I walked for hours, day broke and the streets started to fill with people, and in the end the doctor's call came.”
“You must have gone crazy with happiness.”
“That's the strangest aspect of it all. For a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, I did actually feel⦠happy? Yes, I'd say happy. After that, though, it turned into a feeling I'd never have imagined.”
I tried to explain it, but it wasn't easy. I'd felt fragile. It had occurred to me that although it hadn't happened this time, it might happen in a few months, a few years. It had turned into a fear different from the one I'd felt the day before. One was a sharp pain, the other a limp fever. Both humiliating, in different ways. When the doctor had phoned to tell me that the first tests were wrong, I'd thought the clocks had been turned back and my life would resume just where it had left off. But it wasn't like that. My life had changed, irreversibly, after those twenty-four hours.
“Since then, over the past few weeks, I've asked myself all kinds of questions, some of them about my work. Whether I want to carry on doing it and for how much longer. Things like that.”
Tancredi seemed about to say something, but couldn't find anything appropriate. He relit his cigar and blew yet another dense grey little cloud up into the air. I decided it was time to drop the subject of my medical tests and my existential dilemmas.
“Why are you in court today?”
“I have an appointment with a magistrate from the Prosecutor's Department, one of the few I still like working with. How about you?”
“A hearing in the second division court.”
“What kind of trial?”
“A young guy accused of sexual assault.”
He looked at me in surprise. The reason was obvious. I don't normally take on that kind of case. I'm not judgemental, but I really don't feel up to defending people who might have committed an offence like that. I wouldn't feel comfortable and I wouldn't be able to guarantee an adequate defence. Don't get me wrong: a little bit of discomfort is indispensable to doing any job that's â how shall I put it? â morally sensitive. It's a good thing. But an excess of discomfort â the kind I'd felt the only time I'd defended a rapist â isn't good. Best to let it go. Tancredi knew my views, that's why he was puzzled.
“The guy's innocent.”
“That's what they all say.”
“No, really. Come to the hearing, if you don't believe me.”
Tancredi didn't reply. He was looking at a point behind my back.
“Your partner's here.”
I turned towards the courthouse gates and saw Consuelo hurrying towards us with her leather handbag and her elegantly clumsy stride.
“Good morning, Inspector,” Consuelo said to Tancredi, with a smile that stood out against her dark skin.
“Avvocato Favia,” Tancredi replied with a slight bow.
Consuelo Favia is Peruvian, born in some remote village in the Andes, but she's also Italian, the adopted daughter of a friend of mine. Years earlier she had come to me to learn the profession and now she was a partner in the practice. One of the few criminal lawyers I'd agree to be defended by.
“Shall we go in, boss?”
“Let's go. Bye, Carmelo.”