A Fine Line (10 page)

He seemed uncertain, and said nothing. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, passed his hand across his forehead again and pinched one of his cheeks. I realized that these rather obsessive gestures were making me feel uncomfortable and I resumed speaking.

“Maybe you could tell me something about your relationship with Salvagno. I only knew him a little. Was he really your friend? Did you see each other often?”

“
Friend
is an overstatement. We played tennis sometimes, and sometimes I was a guest on his boat.”

“Did you meet regularly?”

“A couple of times a month, no more.”

“Lunches, dinners together?”

“Every now and again, and always with other people.”

“Obviously he appeared before you in court.”

“Of course. He dealt a lot with organized crime, he often had clients who were in prison.”

“Please don't be annoyed by my next question. Did you ever think of abstaining in cases where he was counsel for the defence?”

“No. There were no grounds to do so, which you know as well as I do. I saw Corrado Salvagno occasionally, but no more than I did other lawyers. If I had to abstain in all cases defended by someone I've played tennis or been to dinner
with, I might as well quit this job. Same for many colleagues. Anyway, Corrado Salvagno was an excellent lawyer and an honest person. He never asked me for anything. He appeared before me and always argued his cases well. When he was right we agreed with him. When he was wrong we rejected his appeals. Just like with anyone else. Just like with you, for example.”

Actually, things weren't quite the way he said. It wasn't at all clear, for example, that there had never been any grounds for abstention. According to the code, a judge is obliged to abstain in a number of different circumstances: in particular,
if there are serious conflicts of interest
. One of these serious conflicts of interest is when the judge is a friend of a lawyer and sees him regularly outside the courtroom. Larocca had just told me that he didn't see Salvagno more than occasionally, but I had the impression that things weren't so cut and dried. It was a subject we would do well to go into in more depth before the Prosecutor's Department brought it up.

“Listen, Pierluigi, I'd like one thing to be clear. I'm your lawyer until you decide to brief someone else. To do my job, which is in your interest, I need to ask you questions and to acquire information. So please try not to react so irritably. It doesn't make the situation any easier.”

Maybe I wanted to add something more, or maybe I'd finished. At that moment the barman with the gaunt face appeared. Larocca ordered another Prosecco. Putting on my health fanatic guise again, I settled for an orange juice. We sat in silence until our drinks arrived. I tried to remember what there had been on the walls, now bare, when I used to come here as a boy. Posters? Stiff boards propped on the floor? A mirror with advertisements for Campari, Martini or Peroni?

He drank half a glass in one gulp. I sipped at my juice. Somewhere, a defective machine was buzzing.

“I'm sorry, Guido, you're right. You're only doing your job. It's just that this business is eating me up inside. I can't believe it's happening to me. It's a nightmare.”

He rubbed his forehead again with his hand and finished the Prosecco in another gulp. If he ordered another, I'd tell him it was better not to.

“What else do you want to know?” he said.

“Something about Salvagno. What kind of man was he? Did he talk a lot, or not very much? Was he someone who might have boasted about his friendships, including his friendship with you?”

“He was an honest person. I find it really hard to believe he could have—”

“Do you think Capodacqua made up the things that are in that transcript? Or worse still: that someone suggested to him that he make false statements against you? In other words, that it was a case of slander, which the police and even the prosecutor may have been a party to? Do you think it's feasible to construct our line of defence on that hypothesis? Personally, I don't. We have to figure out why he made those statements. I repeat the question: insofar as you knew him, was Salvagno the kind of person who might have boasted, perhaps saying more than he should have done, about your friendship?”

Larocca sighed. “It's true that sometimes he talked too much. He had a tendency to… as you say, to boast: about his boat, his villa, his women, his professional successes. And now that I come to think about it, yes, he had a tendency to talk a little too much about the people he knew. Prefects, members of parliament, judges, actors.” He paused for some time, as if trying to retrieve a piece of information that was
re-emerging from a shadowy area of his memory. “But to go from that to imagining that he—”

“Do you know if he had financial problems?”

“He was always complaining about his expenses. That he needed a lot of money to maintain the boat, the houses, the ex-wife, the girlfriends. But I always thought he was just saying that. It was another way of boasting, part of his character. I never knew if he really did have problems with money.”

“Because if he was struggling financially, the hypothesis that he peddled influence in order to get his clients to pay him more, on the pretext that he had to pay you or other judges, might make sense. It wouldn't be the first time. We'll have to run some checks on his finances.”

“All right. What I find incredible is the idea that Corrado could have implicated me in something like that. But you're right, we have to figure out what happened and why this Capodacqua said those things.”

“What about his fatal accident? I remember reading about it in the newspapers, but I don't know any of the details.”

“A German lorry driver dozed off at the wheel, and skidded into the other lane. That's all. Pure chance.”

“Was he travelling alone?”

“Yes, he was on his way back from Rome. He'd gone there for a hearing at the Supreme Court.”

“Was the lorry driver hurt?”

“Not seriously, as far as I remember.”

“Were there any suspicions about what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did anybody suggest any kind of criminal intent? In other words: were things the way they seemed?”

He looked at me in surprise. “Do you seriously think someone might have…” He couldn't finish the sentence. The idea must have struck him as much too far-fetched.

“I have no reason to suppose so. But trying to find out what happened to Salvagno, who may have talked a bit too much – maybe even to the wrong people – could be useful to us. I think it's something else it might be worth investigating.”

I told myself that I was ready to go into politics, since I'd just come up with a perfect
non-
answer. Larocca seemed to be on the verge of replying. Then he dropped it, as if he'd said to himself, in some kind of inner dialogue, that it really was too absurd to contemplate.

“Another couple of questions, and then we can go. The question of the wine: is it true that Salvagno sent you bottles of wine?”

For a moment, an almost imperceptible grimace of impatience appeared on his face, but he suppressed it. “Sometimes. He had a client who produced a respectable Primitivo. He sometimes gave me a few bottles.”

I couldn't have looked too convinced.

“We're talking about ten-euro bottles,” Larocca said, unable to avoid a defensive tone.

How on earth had Capodacqua known about that? Or in other words, how had Ladisa known about it, in order to be able to tell Capodacqua? Whether or not there was any mystery behind his death, Salvagno had clearly been someone who talked too much. It was likely that his death really had been an accident and that there was no reason to let my imagination run away with me.

But.

But I would ask Annapaola to include the accident on the list of things to be checked out. If only to get it off my mind.

Soon afterwards, we left the café and stopped on the street to say goodbye.

“Careful with your phones, Pierluigi.”

“Do you think they might be tapping them again? Or that they never stopped?”

“The first is more likely. In all probability they stopped tapping your phones when they petitioned for the custody order. They might start again closer to the notification of the appeal, to record any possible reactions to the news that proceedings do indeed exist. Assuming that the examining magistrate agrees to it, which is by no means certain. Given that we don't know for sure, don't say anything on the phone that might lend itself to being misinterpreted. In other words, say as little as possible. As soon as you get any kind of notification, call me and tell me what happened and ask to meet without making any comments and without any reference to these conversations of ours. Sorry to be pedantic, but is that quite clear?”

“Yes, quite clear.”

13

We didn't have long to wait. The following Tuesday, at seven in the morning, I was woken by a telephone call from Larocca. His voice was cracked and even a little breathless, as if he'd just been running or making some other physical effort.

“There are men from the customs police in my home, with a search warrant from the Prosecutor's Department in Lecce. I told them I want my lawyer to be present. Do you think you could come?”

“Give me a quarter of an hour and I'll be there.”

To hurry things up I took my bicycle, and about a quarter of an hour later I was at Larocca's home, at the end of Via Dalmazia, in the Madonnella area, not far from the RAI offices. An ambiguous part of the city, between early twentieth-century apartment buildings with spectacular views over the blue and green of the Adriatic and the streets of Rione Japigia, which had been – and maybe still were, despite the many arrests, trials and sentences – the uncontested kingdom of powerful criminal gangs. Ruthless bosses with nicknames, lookouts posted at the borders of the neighbourhood to give the alarm when the police arrived, rivers of drugs of every kind sold wholesale to buyers from all over the region, or exchanged for other illegal goods – arms, stolen cars, sometimes even human beings. A lot of money had changed hands in that area. In quantities it's hard to imagine, if you have a normal job. When many of those people had ended up in
prison, very little of the money had been found. It had been channelled into activities that were beyond suspicion, or had disappeared into the pockets of greedy advisers abroad, transported God knows how, intended for God knows whom.

I seemed to remember that even as a boy Larocca had lived around there. What did his father do? I wasn't sure I'd ever known. I wondered if the anonymous Seventies condominium I was entering now was the same one he'd grown up in.

There were no names next to the entryphone. I rang number four, as I had been told to do, and went up to the second floor. There wasn't any nameplate on the door either, but he was in the doorway waiting for me. His hair, usually well combed, was falling over his forehead and curled a little pathetically at the sides of his head. He hadn't shaved – when would he have had a chance to do so? – and, as happens in such cases to men who don't have much of a beard, he looked like a mixture of the scruffy and the forlorn.

“Thanks for coming, Guido. This business is driving me mad. It's a good thing I don't have to be in court today.”

I couldn't find any appropriate words of comfort, so I limited myself to a slight smile and a gentle pat on the shoulder.

“Where are they?”

“There, in the living room.”

As I walked into the apartment I felt a slight but immediate sense of anxiety. There was an artificial smell, of detergent, of synthetic lemon. Everything was perfectly tidy. In the entrance there was a series of framed lithographs. All of the same size, with the same frames, perfectly equidistant one from the other. The living room was divided in two. On one side, a sofa, two armchairs, a large TV set and a stereo; on the other, a bookcase, with a couple of encyclopaedias and rows of books arranged strictly by order of height, an Eighties walnut table and a large abstract painting hanging
exactly in the middle of the wall. It gave the impression that it had been done to commission, specifically to decorate that particular stretch of wall.

There were three officers from the customs police: a lieutenant-colonel and two marshals in jackets and ties, with well-cut clothes that showed no bulges where they carried their guns. They were modern policemen, looking more like managers or bank officials. They greeted me politely, almost cordially, as if trying to apologize for causing so much bother.

One of the marshals was sitting at the table in the living room, in front of a laptop computer to which he had connected a small printer. The complete text of the record appeared on the screen. The lieutenant-colonel, a tall, slightly overweight man in his forties with a noticeably receding hairline and intelligent eyes, asked me if I wanted to read the search warrant. As I skimmed through it – there was nothing in the stated grounds that I didn't already know – he noticed my plasters, which were still there and quite visible.

“What happened to you, Avvocato? A dissatisfied client?”

“Unfortunately I got into a fight with some hooligans in the street.”

He gave a little smile. That morning he had an unpleasant chore to dispatch, but at least he'd ended up with a pleasant lawyer. “I think we can start,” he said, dismissing the subject of my plasters.

I replied that it was fine by me. Larocca did the same, but he seemed like someone who has taken an overdose of prescription drugs. His voice was shaky, his eyes were glassy, even his posture had something bedraggled about it. That can happen, when someone comes into your home and claims the right to rummage among your things.

I asked myself for a moment how I would behave in the same situation. I couldn't find an answer – usually
the case when I ask myself that kind of question – and I moved on.

The three officers proceeded calmly and methodically, inspecting every room from top to bottom. A textbook job. Whenever they had to open drawers or cupboards or look behind pictures, they asked permission. Whenever they plunged their hands into piles of clothes and underwear or when they searched the safe in the bedroom, they apologized. They were so nice about everything that I started to get nervous and felt the impulse to tell them to just get on with their work without being so obsequious.

After finishing in each room, we would come back to the living room, where the lieutenant-colonel would dictate the respective part of the record. From time to time he would break off and ask us if we had any objections or clarifications to make. Larocca would shake his head, and I would say no, thanks, there was nothing I wanted to add. Partly because, as was to be expected, the search wasn't producing any results. They rarely do. Either when the object of a search is something specific, or when the warrant refers in general terms to “objects, documents or anything pertaining to the offence being investigated”, as in this case. There are many reasons for this, including the objective difficulty of actually finding anything in an inhabited house or apartment, where there are enormous quantities of objects and clothes and cubbyholes and hiding places. Carrying out a truly effective search, one that really checks out what there is and what there isn't in a given place, takes much more time than police officers can devote to it. Sometimes, in searches as in life, you pass by something crucial and don't notice it. Because you don't know what to look for, or maybe because what you're looking for is so obvious, you don't see it. In searches, as in life, it isn't a matter of technique, it's a matter of eyes and time.

I watched the lieutenant-colonel and the other two officers proceed conscientiously – emptying and then refilling the cupboards, beating on the walls in search of possible secret cavities, opening the books and leafing through them in search of hidden papers – and it struck me that, good and professional as they were, the only way they would find anything (assuming there was anything to find) would be through a stroke of luck. So I lost interest in their operations and started looking around to get a better understanding of the apartment and its occupant.

I knew that Larocca had been separated for several years and that he had no children. I couldn't remember his wife's face at all.

I opened the windows and looked out onto Via Dalmazia. The RAI sign was just opposite. I came back inside and examined the books – mainly stuff about current affairs and American bestsellers. Larocca joined me while I was browsing among the shelves.

“What do you think, Guido?”

“Professionals, very correct, partly or wholly unconvinced of the point of this search.”

“Why do you think those bastards in the Prosecutor's Department in Lecce decided to order it?”

“So that nobody can tell them in future that they should have done it and forgot. Plus, they don't know we were already aware that proceedings were under way. So even though this search is late, it isn't completely meaningless from an investigative point of view.”

He nodded absently. He would have liked a different answer, but didn't know what.

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“In the bathroom.”

“Let's join them. We don't want them to feel lonely.”

The bathroom was spacious and aseptic. I noticed a white dressing gown hanging on a coat hanger, with the words
Plaza Athénée
on it. A very expensive hotel in Paris. I had stayed there once, many years ago, when I was still married to Sara, because we'd decided to do something crazy. And when we saw the bill we knew we'd achieved our objective.

I wondered if Larocca had bought that dressing gown, or if he had stuffed it into his suitcase as an unauthorized souvenir of his stay. I took a closer look at the contents of the drawers that the officers were opening, checking and closing again, and realized that the dressing gown wasn't the only thing that had come from a grand hotel. There were towels from the Mandarin and the Ritz, bottles of shampoo and bath gel from Claridge's.

Judge Larocca clearly liked luxury and had a slight – slight? – obsession with objects from big hotels. I remembered an uncle of my father's. Uncle Michele. A really respectable person, a good doctor, someone who would never have jumped his place in a queue – just one example of how strictly he obeyed the rules. He was a Dr Jekyll, and like every Dr Jekyll there were times when he turned into Mr Hyde. Those times were when he stayed in a hotel, either on business or on holiday. Then an uncontrollable predatory impulse would well up in him. Anything that could be taken away without hiring a removal van, he would take. Towels, dressing gowns, ashtrays, bars of soap, shampoo, bath gel, notebooks, pencils, small cartons of jam, snacks, tubs of Nutella and even an entire set of plates, glasses and cups. Whenever my parents talked about it, they referred to it as if it was an illness – a kind of kleptomania, my mother said once, looking at my father with a suspicious expression, as if speculating on the possible genetic nature of the condition.

Well, I thought, Larocca must have a similar problem to Uncle Michele's.

The officers didn't pay any attention to it. Why should they? I wondered if I would have noticed if I'd been in their shoes.

The last room to be searched was Pierluigi's study. They didn't find anything there either, even though they leafed through law books and codes, opened drawers and lifted the rug on which the desk stood, exactly in the middle. Larocca didn't keep case files at home – or at least there weren't any that morning. I wondered how he managed to write his rulings: it struck me as unlikely that he only worked in his office. I told myself that in all probability he used the digital versions of the documents.

The officers made copies of the hard disk from the computer and of a few memory sticks, then said that as far as the apartment was concerned they had finished.

The record was printed and read out loud, with particular emphasis on the statement that no damage had been caused in the course of the operation, and we all signed it in triplicate.

“I'm sorry, Your Honour,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “but we have to go to your office now. It's included in the prosecutor's warrant.”

Larocca seemed to have regained his self-control. “Very well, colonel. All I ask is that you… keep this as discreet as possible. We don't want it to become public knowledge.”

“Don't worry. If you can make sure that nobody comes in, we'll get through it in half an hour. As discreetly as we can.”

We decided that I wouldn't be present at the search of the office. My presence there, along with three strangers, might have generated suspicion and speculation. I would drop by in an hour, as if by chance.

I went to the clerk of the court's office to check the registers of proceedings or the release of copies, had a burnt coffee, and chatted in a corridor with a female colleague who had been a noted beauty in her youth and who all at once, without warning, declared that she had no objection to extramarital relations. I replied that if I were married I would share her opinion, but she didn't seem to appreciate the joke.

One way or another, the hour passed, and I went to Larocca's office.

They hadn't found anything there either.

“They also gave me these,” Larocca said, handing me a few sheets of paper.

They were a petition for an extension of the period for the preliminary investigation and a petition for a pretrial hearing. In other words, a request to bring the examination of witnesses, which would usually be done during the public trial, forward to the investigative phase.

The prosecutor wanted to proceed with the examination of Capodacqua and Marelli. In the case of the former, who had turned state's evidence, no specific grounds were required.

In Marelli's case, the reason cited was that he was not in good health. There was a strong possibility he wouldn't make it through to the trial, and so needed to be examined as soon as possible. My first reaction was that there wasn't much point in objecting.

“Was there anything else?”

“No. I think that's quite enough to be getting on with.”

“No date for the appeal of the custody order?”

He shook his head.

“They're taking their time,” I said. “Or else the prosecutor has given up on the idea.”

“Why should he?”

“I don't know. A change of strategy, perhaps. Maybe they think they can acquire more evidence, so there's no point carrying on with an appeal they probably won't win.”

“Do you think they're tapping my phones?”

“It's quite likely. They do an apparently pointless search just to rock the boat, hoping that the suspect then says something untoward on the phone or calls the wrong person. Or the right person, depending on your point of view.”