A Fine Line (19 page)

“You never know, these girls are unpredictable.”

“It's true they would have dropped the case anyway, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm part of the mechanism that will lead to Larocca becoming president of the court, even though he's a crook.”

“Maybe you're taking his guilt too much for granted, just as before you took it for granted that he was innocent. What do you actually have on him? What you were told by Tancredi, what he was told by an informant of his who he says is very reliable. With all due respect: Tancredi's good, but he isn't infallible.”

Maya reappeared with our spritzes and placed them on the table together with the bill. She passed close by me. She smelt of white musk, and it wasn't hard to imagine what kind of fantasies she aroused in the bar's night-time customers.

“Would you like me to ask around?” Annapaola asked me after sipping at her drink.

“About Larocca?”

She nodded.

I didn't reply immediately. I thought it over for a while. It didn't seem a good idea. Why on earth make those kinds of inquiries, without any reason or objective? The proceedings
were going to be dropped, I would continue to practise as a lawyer and he as a judge, and the rest was none of my business.

The guilt or innocence of a defendant is none of your business, Guerrieri. It makes no sense for you to accept her suggestion. Drop it.

“Yes.”

“All right.”

That was all. For now.

Half an hour later, we were again outside my office, saying goodbye.

“I told a girlfriend of mine that I went out with you, and she asked me if I was interested in you.”

“Excuse me?”

“She said that if I'm not interested she'd like me to introduce you.”

“And what does she know about me?”

“I don't know. She knows who you are. Should I arrange it?”

“That depends. What's she like?”

“You really are a bastard.”

“I get by.”

“Why did you never call me over these past few days?”

“You didn't call me either.”

“Was it a competition?”

“I've got my hands burnt a bit too often recently. I'm a timid creature. What are you doing this evening?”

“This evening, I have something to do. But you owe me dinner. I'll get in touch in the next few days. My friend is very pretty and I wouldn't even dream of getting the two of you together.”

She gave me a kiss on the lips, turned and walked away without adding anything else.

I went back to the office with my yellow, purple and orange whirligig.

25

I had a hearing at the court of appeal. My client was a wholesale shoe merchant who, together with his partner, had been correctly sentenced to five years for fraudulent bankruptcy.

The partner was being defended by an old colleague of mine, Avvocato D'Amore, a man who smelt of mothballs and liked to express radical opinions on every subject under the sun: from the selection of the national football team to the government's foreign and economic policies, and from the state of justice in Italy to the quality – which was in fact questionable – of the coffee in the cafeteria of the appeal court. When he was feeling particularly sociable, he even told jokes – two of them, always the same ones – about people with intestinal problems. I enjoyed the company of D'Amore and his mothball smell about as much as a headbutt to my nasal septum.

The judges were in their chambers, deciding on our hearing. I had asked for my client's acquittal or else a reduction in his sentence, but if I'd been in the judges' place I would have confirmed the sentence without a moment's hesitation.

I was trying to take advantage of the waiting time, searching for a point of law on my tablet for an appeal that I would have to write the following week.

“What are you doing with that, Guerrieri?” D'Amore asked. “Playing video games?”

“I'm looking for a judgment,” I said, trying to give my reply a tone of polite disinclination to engage in dialogue. In vain.

“I hate those things. I like paper codes, manuals, law books the size of encyclopaedias.”

You also like mothballs, I thought, catching an unusually strong whiff of them.

“The world is getting worse every day, and they call it progress. I hate progress. I wish we were back in the time when lawyers and judges were cultivated people, when school was serious and educated children, when doctors cured their patients. When kids played football in their gardens, not on computers, and for a snack ate bread and tomatoes, or else, if there were no tomatoes, bread with oil and salt. All our problems started with the coming of computers.”

The connection between the presumed end of bread and tomatoes and the coming of computers was obscure, but I took care not to ask him to explain it.

Just then, my phone vibrated in my pocket, which gave me permission to escape from the courtroom, beyond the reach of D'Amore, in order to reply. It was Annapaola.

“Hi, boss, I'm in a hurry. I need a piece of information.”

“Go on.”

“When you told me about the search of Larocca's apartment, you said there was a dressing gown from Claridge's in the bathroom, isn't that right?”

“No, I don't think it was from Claridge's. It was probably from a Mandarin, or the Plaza Athénée. Why?”

“But you did mention something from Claridge's, I'm sure of it.”

“Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?”

“Bye for now, boss. I may have something to tell you in a few hours.”

She hung up. I stayed outside the courtroom, to avoid being buttonholed again by Mothball Man. A few minutes later, the judges emerged from their chambers and the presiding judge read the decision confirming, correctly, the sentence on the two defendants.

Annapaola called again that afternoon. “I have a couple of things to tell you.”

“Shall we meet?”

“I'm going out of town, on business. The usual divorce thing; I can't bear it any more. Maybe I'll become a journalist again, or else I'll look for something else. I could be a softball coach.”

“Or else train people to fight with baseball bats.”

“Right, that might be an idea. Sometimes I feel so bored. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“All right, let's get to the point.”

I didn't say anything. There was something strange about her tone.

“Last night I talked about your client with a friend of mine who's a carabiniere. A good man, I trust him. He used to pass me excellent information when I was a journalist. He thinks Larocca
is
on the take, but when I asked him why, he couldn't tell me anything more. Just rumours going around. The same things Tancredi told you, but with less precision and less certainty.”

“Okay, let's leave it at that. Basically, it's none of my business, and it's none of yours either.”

“Let me finish. I hate dead ends. So I started going over what I knew about this business. After a while, I remembered what you told me about the search of Larocca's apartment.”

My trainee Federico, the one with a face like a psychotic pigeon, put his head round the door of my office. I raised my finger to tell him to come back later. In four or five years, maybe. It struck me that I ought to find a way to dismiss him, without offending him and without offending my old teacher.

“I told you that when I was in London I worked in a hotel, didn't I?”

“Yes.”

“It was a very good hotel. Not famous like the ones your client stays in, but very good. I learnt a whole lot of things and met a whole lot of people there.”

I held back from asking her any questions. I couldn't figure out where she was going with this, but I knew she'd tell me when she wanted to. I just had to wait.

“Among the people I got friendly with when I was there was a Pakistani guy. One of the nicest men I've ever met, by the way. Aren't you going to ask me what this has to do with Larocca?”

“I'm trying hard not to, but if you're hoping to arouse my curiosity, you're doing a really good job.”

“Good, I like self-control. Hamed – that's my friend's name – works at Claridge's now. I phoned him and asked him if Larocca stayed there often. He told me I shouldn't be asking him for information like that, and he shouldn't be giving it to me. I replied that I knew that. Then he told me that Larocca has stayed there seven times in the last four years.”

“I don't in any way want to detract from your inquiries, but the fact that he'd stayed there could be guessed from the objects he had in his home.”

“Could you also guess how he paid his bills there?”

“What?”

“Hamed was more reluctant about that. I told him I needed the information for a divorce case, that it was important, and that he owed me one. Which isn't true: he doesn't just owe me one, he owes me lots. In the end he said he'd try to check, but couldn't guarantee anything. He'd call me back.”

“What did he tell you when he called you back?”

“The payment always comes by transfer from a bank in Switzerland. Every time it's a large amount, because he charges to the hotel not just the cost of the room and meals – which is a lot in itself – but even his shopping, the rent of a chauffeur-driven car, restaurants, everything.”

She didn't add anything else.

I sat there in silence, trying to assimilate the information. It's one thing to imagine something unpleasant in a general, undefined way, it's quite another to hear it described in detail in all its nastiness.

“What made you think of checking this?” I said at last, noticing that my voice had gone down a couple of tones.

“I remembered how the manager of that hotel in London once told me how some guests paid with transfers from coded accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg or other countries. These accounts are where people put funds from tax evasion, money laundering – and corruption.”

“Do you know which bank the payments came from?”

“Yes. I even have the dates of the transfers. No documents, obviously. I took a few notes as I was talking to my friend on the phone. Since I don't trust emails, I'll leave a paper for you in your office letter box. I'll drop by in half an hour, just before I leave.”

With this information, I thought, the Prosecutor's Department would be able to issue letters rogatory, and sooner or later it would emerge that a judge being investigated
for corruption in Italy had a bank account in Switzerland, and that this account contained sums incompatible with the salary of the said magistrate – or any magistrate – and it might also emerge that fifty thousand euros had been deposited in it in the days following Ladisa's release.

I felt nausea rising inside me. “What do you think I should do?”

“I don't know. The bastard is your client. It's up to you to decide.”

“You're right.”

Another long pause.

“I'll drop by and leave that paper.”

“Thanks.”

26

The important events of my life have happened by chance. If there was a design, I never noticed it. I studied law by chance, or as a stopgap, or because I hadn't had the courage to ask myself what I really wanted to do, maybe fearing that
choosing
involved a responsibility I wasn't quite up to. In the same way, I found myself working as a defence attorney: swept along by the current, telling myself that, basically, I liked the work, and that in any case life is a journey partly made up of compromises, and that it's an adult thing to accept this truth. Justifications, most of them, which are like certain rocks just below the surface of the water. You can lean on them, you can grab hold of them, but you can also hit them and hurt yourself very badly.

I had dealt with my unease about my job – a job I had never really chosen – by constructing for myself the character described by Annapaola. She had said things that I knew perfectly well but which I'd been determined never to admit.

I had an image of myself and tried to live up to it. One way or another. Whenever there was a clash with reality, it was reality that had to adapt. But that's a mechanism that can't last forever. Gradually, you lose your sense of balance.

I left my work hanging and walked out of the office. I passed a bakery from which the aroma of freshly baked focaccia emanated. I bought a schoolboy slice – in other words,
a big one. I had a cold beer at a bar frequented by habitual drunks who looked at me as what I was: a foreign body.

Then I took my bicycle and started riding with no particular aim, but with the intention of not stopping too soon. I was very, very confused.

Try to simplify, Guerrieri, otherwise you'll never get through this and it'll be another sleepless night. So: a client of yours is accused of judicial corruption. You defend him, convinced of his innocence, then you discover that he's guilty. What to do? Keep defending him or give up the brief? Basically, it's quite a simple question.

Maybe not
so
simple, though. To start with: would you have the same dilemma if you discovered that a client of yours accused of robbery had indeed committed that robbery and maybe had also committed many others? If you actually discovered that he was a professional robber? No, you wouldn't.

Why not?

Because of what Tancredi said.

Because there's a distance between you. He, the robber, isn't part of your world, the world of trials, rules and justice. But a corrupt judge is. A corrupt judge – not his existence, but the fact that he's your client, that his fate depends partly on you – undermines the system, the structure, the whole theatre where you've played your role until now.

Corruption – and in particular judicial corruption – is different from robbery, because it has to do with power. The power of a judge is monstrous, when you think about it. He can decide on a person's freedom, a person's life. I don't want to sound rhetorical, but that's the way it is. Power – any form of power – is acceptable only if it's transparent and clean, if it's exercised in a way that is equal for everybody.

Article 3 of the Constitution: equality and things like that. All right, you're not giving a lecture. But what the hell. With corruption, power gets out of control and becomes unacceptable. Unbearable. Dirty. There, that's the crux of it. If this fellow gets away with it, he'll continue to exercise his dirty power undisturbed.

But there's always been judicial corruption. Pointless to get worked up about it; it's a problem for prosecutors and the police, not you. The imperfection of the world isn't your problem.

Yes, there's always been corruption, but this is different. This is too close. We know a lot of ugly things happen in the world and we can't allow ourselves to get indignant about all of them. We have limited reserves of indignation. But when the events are so close, when they touch you personally, what must you do? It's one thing not being able to do anything – you know something isn't right, but you can't do anything about it – it's quite another when you have in your own hands the possibility of reacting in some way.

Reacting? Reacting how? Maybe you're forgetting that you're a lawyer and he's your client, maybe you're forgetting that there are duties linked to your profession, for as long as you continue to exercise it. You have obligations to that client, and to anyone who trusts you. The client is sacred. If you question that principle, it's over.

And what about justice? Bloody justice? If that man continues to be a judge, how can I continue to be a lawyer?

What has justice got to do with
you
? You said it yourself, you're a
lawyer
. Your duties are simple ones: to defend your client to the best of your ability, not to commit mistakes, not to breach professional ethics. That's it. You want justice? You should have become a magistrate if you wanted justice, if you wanted to change the world. Then the world would have
done everything it could to make you change your mind, but that's another matter.

Everything you're saying is just a smokescreen, a way to escape the responsibility of taking a difficult decision. A way of lying to yourself. You say that there are rules of ethics, the protection of the client, the lawyer's obligations, but that's just to avoid the responsibility that comes from knowing certain things. Aren't you hiding behind your presumed professional duties in order to avoid bother, to avoid having to choose? To escape the effort of making distinctions? What was that line from that wonderful film by Renoir –
The Rules of the Game
? “I want to disappear down a hole, so that I no longer have to distinguish between what's good and what's bad.” Is that what you want to do? Disappear down a hole in order not to have to distinguish between good and bad? How will you feel about that in ten years' time? What will you wish you'd done, when you look back in ten years' time?

I can't bear these ethical discussions, they're like something from a cheap magazine. Then let's get down to brass tacks, let's drop the abstract chatter. You want to report him? You want to tell the Prosecutor's Department in Lecce everything? Is that what you're thinking? Do you remember article 380 of the criminal code? It's the rule on disloyal advocacy.
The advocate who, becoming disloyal to his professional duties, harms the interests of the party defended by him is punished with imprisonment of three to ten years, if the offence is committed to the detriment of a person suspected of a crime for which the law imposes imprisonment of more than five years.

A prison sentence of three to ten years, is that clear? Just tell them you instituted an unlawful investigation into a client of yours and now you want to bury him. That's an excellent move. You'll be put on trial
and
have to undergo a disciplinary procedure. You'll be found guilty and, most
likely, be struck off. If your idea is to quit being a lawyer, it's the perfect choice.

That kind of argument is a moral anaesthetic. You're exploiting the formal rules to escape your responsibilities and your duty to choose. It's an old trick you've been using for ages. You fill yourself with lies to justify your own cowardice to yourself.

Everybody lies. Anyone who says they doesn't is either an idiot or a bigger liar than anyone else. Mental health consists in finding a point of balance between truth and lies. To think you have to always tell the truth – and that you
can
– is the hallucination of a madman.

You're partly right. Lying to your fellow man is often ethical, and healthy, and excessive honesty frequently conceals – or exhibits? – the worst intentions. Lying to yourself, though, is quite another matter. It may happen – sometimes it's necessary in order to survive – but if it becomes a rule it's just a way to divorce yourself from reality, to protect yourself from the world, to avoid being reached. Yet, sooner or later, the world and reality catch up with you.

You see, there's no question that Larocca is a bastard. The only question is what you can do. You can't bear to keep defending him? Fair enough, that's legitimate. Give up the brief, and leave it at that. Forget this business. The rest isn't up to you. Don't do anything stupid. Behave like a well-balanced adult.

A well-balanced adult.

I didn't know if I was a well-balanced adult, I didn't know if I'd ever been one. Did I even understand the meaning of the words? I asked myself as I got off my bicycle and tied it to a lamp post near my building. I had ridden beyond the San Francesco pinewoods, got all the way to the end of the San Girolamo seafront, then come back across the city as far
as Punta Perotti Park and returned to the centre. No more than about twenty kilometres, but I was as exhausted as if I had done a hundred.

As I got into bed, I decided I would call Larocca the next morning, or maybe I would go and see him at the courthouse. And maybe I would also do something else, something that seemed to me as crazy as it was reassuring. Crazy, I repeated, sinking into a sudden sleep.