I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (4 page)

Identity withheld.

Now what?

I heave a sigh and press talk.

“Hello.”

“Counselor Malinconico?”

A woman's voice.

“Who's this?”

“Is this Counselor Malinconico?” she says again, with empha­sis, annoyed.

I detest the current wave of telephonic boorishness, which has reversed the roles of caller and callee, with the advent of the cell phone. Nowadays, anyone who calls your cell phone (and therefore also on the landline, because the boundary automatically dissolves) starts the conversation by immediately pronouncing your name, followed by a question mark. Well, fuck you. You called me, why don't you tell me who this is.

“How about you tell me who's calling?”

The woman catches her breath.

“Listen carefully. This is the district attorney's office, and we really have no time to waste. There's a judicial interrogation under way, and Counselor Malinconico is the court-appointed lawyer.”

My blood pressure pinwheels.

“Judicial interrogation? Court-appointed?”

I pronounce the words as if they were the surnames of notorious Camorristi.

The district attorney's office-woman withdraws into a contemptuous silence. When she emerges, she lowers her voice almost to the level of complicity, slowly punctuating the words that follow.

“I am talking with the lawyer Malinconico, am I not?”

“Yes,” I reply, unmanned. The last criminal case I handled was three or four years ago, and it was just for writing a check without sufficient funds.

“You're on the registry of public defenders. So what'll it be, are you coming? We need a lawyer down here.”

Jesus, it's true. In that very instant I remember that I put my name down as a public defender in a moment of overweening professional ambition (they happen, from time to time, these moments of overweening professional ambition: you convince yourself, authentic idiot that you are, that you can afford the luxury of changing sector every once in a while). But I never thought they'd really call me. That'll teach me to rely on the inefficiency of the public institutions.

“Counselor, are you still there?”

“I . . . listen, do I really have to?”

My dismay must have touched a chord of pity, because her voice suddenly softens.

“Well, I'm afraid you do. We don't have time to go through the list looking for others, especially considering that we've found you. I think you'd really better come.”

I simultaneously translate the last phrase into “Abandon­ment of defense, judicial penalties connected herewith.”

“Hello?” the talking district attorney's office says, having suddenly lost the connection.

“Huh? Oh yes, sorry.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Okay, I'll be right down.”

A moment of silence. I detect hesitation, and even embarrassment, on the other end of the call.

“Counselor.”

“What.”

“Do you know where to come?”

“Sure I do, the district attorney's office.”

Another chilly pause.

“I haven't told you who the assistant district attorney is.”

I perspire.

“Ah, right, forgive me.”

I imagine her, shaking her head from side to side, on the other end of the line.

“Acampora. Fourth floor, fourth door.”

“Thanks. It'll just take me a few minutes to get there.”

“Please make it as quick as you can.”

I run to my bedroom and get dressed, in a catatonic trance. I'm a fireman who has to rush into a fire without an extinguisher. I'm a student who hasn't studied heading for the blackboard. I leave the apartment, lock the door behind me, call the elevator, push G, and look at myself in the mirror. I see somebody I know, in a jacket and tie, who hasn't got the faintest idea of what he's going to do next.

 

 

O
penly violating a prohibition that by rights he ought to be the first to respect, the assistant district attorney grabs his pack of Rothmans Ultra Lights, extracts one, lodges it firmly between his lips, and stares at us both, as if to say: any objections?

On our side of the desk, me and the guy I've been assigned to defend, a certain Domenico Fantasia, DBA Mimmo 'o Bur­zone, stare at the floor.

Whereupon the ADA lights his cigarette, fills his lungs, and expels a puff of smoke, creating a little cloud that floats over our heads, just like in a comic strip, with deep thoughts inside it.

A couple of yards away, seated at an old grey metal Olivetti typist's desk (specially made to house typewriter and typist together), the clerk of the court, a skinny guy wearing a pair of counterfeit tinted Ray-Bans and a truly revolting plaid check jacket, is hunched over the transcript form with the unmistakable body language of someone who, if you speak to him, will lose his temper.

We wait.

The ADA takes another drag and leans sharply backward in his office chair with caster wheels, but he overdoes it, shoots backward, and hits the wall behind him. The impact is such that Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, just a yard or so over his head, takes on a slight inclination to the right and the clerk of the court adjusts his bogus Ray-Bans just slightly, even though there is no need.

Mimmo 'o Burzone and I both assume sorrowful faces to express sympathy for the investigating magistrate's embarrassment—a sense of the ridiculous is wheeling over the ADA's desk like a vulture.

At that point the ADA, who shows no signs of possessing a sense of humor, with a flick of the hand that is still holding the pack of Rothmans Ultra Lights, tosses it onto the desktop like a Frisbee, but with a hint of indignation, as if throwing it symbolically in our faces, no different than if it had been our idea for him to shove his chair ingloriously against the wall like an idiot.

The half-empty cigarette pack stutters across the desktop like a flat stone spun at an angle across lake water and skids to a halt at the opposite edge of the desk, teetering at the brink.

Mimmo 'o Burzone immediately lunges to catch the pack before it can fall and there he kneels, curving forward, hands cupped together, his head pointed toward the ADA, as if he were miming the act of supplication.

“Your honor, on the heads of my children,” he says, breaking the cringe-inducing silence that ensues, “it breaks my heart to see you having to lose your temper.”

The ADA observes this further deterioration of the skit with the reluctant compliance that comes with the sense of being inducted as an involuntary straight man.

I have to say that he has my sympathy, to an extent. We seem to be stuck in a situation that smacks of semantic dementia, in which any and all efforts to shepherd the available information into an even vaguely logical schematic are inexplicably doomed to culminate in shipwreck. As if we were stubbornly repeating the standing high jump, trying to hit a mark and every time coming up a few inches short.

The problem with guys like Domenico Fantasia DBA Mimmo 'o Burzone is that they possess an inborn gift for denying things far beyond the threshold of the reasonable. They lie with a shamelessness that would drive the most methodical of investigators into a blind fury. They downplay their prior convictions, soft-pedaling circumstances that indisputably undercut their alibis, dismissing the testimony of their accomplices, openly denying blood relationships (“My mother? Who says I have a mother?”), dates (accuse them of robbing a bank last Thursday and they might very well tell you that it was last Wednesday). They're moralistic and weepy. They parade their pregnant wives, their children with health problems, the Virgin Mary Herself, the difficulties of making ends meet every month, the bad luck that has dogged their footsteps since childhood, the introduction of the euro, how their fathers beat them and their mothers had to scrub floors to bring them up. It's not that they hoodwink you, because you're as likely to believe their stories as you are to believe in a Gucci bag purchased from a Moroc­can immigrant in an underpass. The thing is that they're just so relentless in their insolent recklessness, so confident that they know the way to defraud you, that unless you're very careful you'll stumble into a matter-of-principle trap, obsessed with the idea that now you have to show them once and for all what insincere con artists they really are. They bring you down to their level, in other words. And once you're down there, you don't have a chance. You can't win. No way.

More or less consciously, this young ADA (because along with everything else, he's young, to boot) begins to sense, even though he can't prove it, much less admit it, that Mimmo 'o Burzone is wrapping him up with a Christmas bow. It's an impression that's nettling him like a nasty rumor, a piece of gossip about him that's circulating and that he just happened to overhear, though minus some of the details. It's those missing details that make you want to get straight to the bottom of things.

Which is what citizens like Mimmo 'o Burzone do: they originate rumors about you even when they're talking about something else. And if you let them get away with it, you wind up dangling from their lips.

Which is exactly what's happening right now with our ADA: he's submitting to Mimmo 'o Burzone's process of extortion, instead of slapping him in the face with the criminal charge. In other words, he's making it personal.

This fabulous intuition provokes an unexpected flush of enthusiasm deep inside me. I think I glimpse a way out.

The ADA scoots back to his desk by skating along on the wheels of his office chair, and once there, he folds his arms across his chest and circumnavigates Burzone's face with his eyes.

I shyly hold up my index finger and then immediately retract it, a move that makes me look like nothing so much as a crayfish gasping its last breath on the counter of a fish market. Unsure what to do with it now, I extend my hand toward the arm of my sometime client and grip it ever so slightly, just above the elbow, half in concealment.

Why I should indulge in that particular gesture—the truth be told—I can't even say: it's not as if Mimmo 'o Burzone is confessing or treading perilously close to some pitfall that I would be expected to foresee given my supposed experience (and I've got a pretty strong feeling that actually no one in this room supposes any such thing); all the more so given that I'm completely in the dark about what's really happening in here, to the point that I actually have no idea where to start; but I do it anyway, maybe to convince Burzone that he would be well advised to place himself entirely in my hands (it's a well-known fact that public defenders always hope to be appointed as their client's fiduciary, and to make sure that happens they are willing to promise anything), or maybe just to make myself look useful—apart from the prospect of winning a new client, something that interest me little if at all.

Mimmo 'o Burzone lowers his eyes to stare at the hand that is still hooked onto his arm and then, in slow motion, he raises them again until he's looking straight at me with an expression of deep distaste.

The attorney almost overlooks my interference and starts over.

“Tell me your name again,” he says.

“Magistrate, if I may, that line of questioning isn't admissible,” I point out. Just to be saying something.

“Admissible! I'll be the judge of what's admissible around here,” he replies. The little half-smile that he now rehearses really gives me a pain in the balls.

“You just take care of doing your job”—he glares at me with severity—“instead of making critical appraisals of what's admissible. That's my job.”

So now I take a good look at him, freeing myself of the entangling paranoia that's been engulfing me since I set foot in this room, and I perform a mental inventory.

Approximate age, thirty-five (a few years older, a few years younger), the face of the middle class, unmarked, untroubled, the kind of face you can read and commit to memory all at once, a CliffsNotes face; a pair of round gold wire-framed eyeglasses (to think that Grams wore glasses just like that!), hair close-clipped because of the early-onset vertex baldness that he must have inherited from his father (without preamble I decide that his father is a retired school principal, the kind who decided early on that he wanted his son to be a magistrate, and he got his wish, to the enormous self-satisfaction of the anointed one who now goes around living his dream come true), the taut physique of an amateur tennis player (under his jacket he's wearing a long-sleeved Lacoste shirt, WWF green), two days' worth of stubble, a contrivance that's carefully cultivated as a sign of moderate nonconformity. A cool dude. He even smokes women's cigarettes. I have absolutely no intention of allowing this kind of asshole to piss on my head.

“Buddy up on this,” I tell him, mentally.

The asshole must sense that something has just shifted, because for the first time since we began, I see a hint of respect in his eyes.

“Your honor, don't misunderstand me,” Burzone observes with a submissiveness as slithery as a lizard's belly, “but if you already know what my name is, why would you want me to tell it to you a second time?”

The kind of phrase that a defendant would never dream of uttering, if he had a real live lawyer advising him. I feel a burn of humiliation.

“Listen here, Fantasia, I'm really starting to get fed up with your arguing. In this room, I ask the questions, is that clear?” the asshole inveighs, realizing his misstep just as he finishes his little sermon.

“But you just said it yourself, eh, excuse me very much,” Mimmo 'o Burzone points out impeccably, spreading his arms at the self-evidence of the point.

While the cool dude gnashes his teeth, I find myself reflecting on the gesture that Burzone made, and I realize that the symbolic emptying of pockets that are already empty, lending itself to a depiction of both a lack of resources and a complete surrender, is a perfect metaphor for clean hands.

So that's what it means, I tell myself. That money, just like a weapon, spills blood. But the discovery is of no particular use to me, just then.

Meanwhile, the ADA is starting to fly off the handle a second time. He's not going to be made a fool of again, I can see it written on his face.

No question, Burzone is a prickly client to handle. He somehow manages—just how he does it continually eludes me—to defuse every attempt to bring him face to face with the charges. The astonishing thing is that the harder he tries to answer the questions, the more he tends to deflect them, plunging the prosecutor's office into an embarrassing state of suspension. Absurdly enough, I almost expect the asshole at any minute to get to his feet, slap Burzone on the shoulder good-naturedly, and say: “Okay, we've had our fun, you're an undertaker for the Camorra, it's not all that serious, you never actually pulled the trigger, why don't you go home and promise me you won't do it again.”

Taking advantage of the cool dude's latest impasse, I regain some semblance of consciousness and discover deep inside me a dialectical determination whose head I can plainly make out, but without even the faintest prospect of a tail.

“Now I'm the one that's had enough, magistrate. I cannot allow you to continue with this death by a thousand cuts. If you want to influence the defendant's answers, that's one thing; but in that case, we should have a written record of the conversation,” and at this point, I glare at the clerk of the court, who looks back at me uneasily. The truth is that up till now, it looked as if he were doing a crossword puzzle, so indolently had he been doodling on the preprinted interrogation form. “This is the third, let me repeat, the third time that you have asked the defendant to state his given name. And that, as you know full well, is an unconscionable interference in his freedom to respond.”

I let myself sink back into my chair, inhaling deeply in an attempt to fight down the sudden acceleration of my heartbeat that my little improvisation has engendered.

I look up at the ceiling. The plaster is pockmarked with little black marks, as if someone had spent an afternoon scorching it with the flame of a cigarette lighter.

I decorously smooth back my hair. My shirt is starting to adhere to my torso. I'm experiencing a slight dimming of my vision. My salivation is running low. Whatever it is I've just said, I have absolutely no memory of a single word of it.

Mimmo 'o Burzone turns his head in my direction with the cautious slowness of a velociraptor that has just detected prey in the surrounding foliage.

The funny thing is that I feel certain that I'm seeing the same thing as him at this exact moment in time: a defense lawyer who knows exactly what he's doing, spoiling for a fight, and even nicely dressed. A professional who may have looked like something of an underachiever up till now, but that was all part of his clever tactical plan. And it's as if I can see him rapping himself on the knuckles for having underestimated me so quickly. The same expression has suddenly materialized on the face of the cool dude, who is now scrutinizing me with a new appreciation.

And so I give my clothing a quick check, half-expecting to find a shirttail untucked or a fly unzipped.

Not a bit of it. It's all pure respect.

With a renewed surge of vigor, I take the floor again. A little more of this and I'll leap to my feet and start pacing the room.

“Can we finally get to the point? It strikes me that, aside from first and last name, address, and occupation, you have not yet charged Signore—Fantasia, right?—with any criminal act. All right, then, we've all heard his name. Could you tell us, once and for all, exactly what we stand accused of?”

A small tentative smile flutters on Burzone's lips. I used that “we” with utter nonchalance, the phraseology of old-school criminal lawyers. I don't really have a clear role. It's a rhetorical reflex. With a quiver of emotion, I ask myself whether there might really be a lawyer, buried somewhere deep inside of me.