I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (5 page)

In the meanwhile, the asshole is working on his answer. Because it's obvious that I'm right. He has to bring specific charges before we all go to sleep tonight. What charges? What can he say? “Now then, Signore Domenico Fantasia, I accuse you of being a butcher of human flesh. You receive the bodies of the murder victims in your home, you carve them up in a specially equipped room under your basement stairs—as can be deduced from the long rectangular table with a marble top set in the middle of the room, with unmistakable cut-marks (oh, of course, you'd never be so stupid as to leave the tools of your trade lying around, you know, wire cutters, hacksaws, scalpels; I wonder whether you always use the same tools or change them from one corpse to the next), which you then take care to clean thoroughly with a rubber hose (now that we did find in the room under the stairs, snugly screwed onto the faucet in the wall there), with the additional use of a substantial volume of vinegar, which as we know is an effective way of eliminating even the most stubborn and persistent odors, and channeling the water out of the basement by flushing it out the drain grate located in the right-hand corner of the same room under the stairs; after which you place the hunks of human flesh in a sports bag and then personally take them out into the open countryside and bury them, taking care to scatter the limbs in deep trenches at a considerable distance one from another, so as to make it physically impossible to identify the individual corpses.”

Of course he can't say that. He has to move in gradually. Get us to say it. That is, get him to say it. Wear him down. Wait for a contradiction he can pounce on. Convince him that it's in his interest to cough up the names of the instigators to reduce the gravity of the charges. Until shortly before my peroration he was feeling pretty confident. He'd even had the good luck of a defense attorney no one had ever heard of. A stroll in the park, he was assuming.

“Don't you worry about that, Counselor Malinconico”—at least he addresses me by name, a new development that triggers an erection of my spinal cord—“the charges will be brought, and how. It's just that, if you don't object too strenuously, I'd like to do that in my own way, on my own schedule.”

“Well, it was my impression that criminal charges must be brought in the manner and according to the time limits established by law,” I argue with blinding rapidity.

I can't believe my ears. I feel as if I'm just moving my lips, as if I'm lip-synching my lines.

Nives, if you could only see me now.

“I'd advise you to change your tone of voice, Counselor. Because I might consider it indicative of contempt for the office I represent,” the asshole says, losing his temper.

“No, no, no, it's you who are overstepping the bounds of your authority. And be well aware that I intend to use every single word that you say, taken down in the minutes of this interrogation,” I add, though I haven't the faintest idea of how I can use them, “to prove that up until this moment you have illegally detained my client and that no charges have been formally brought. I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind you, since we're on the subject, that we have the full legal right not to respond”—and this time I use the lawyerly “we” intentionally and advisedly—“a right that you have taken great care to avoid bringing to the notice of the subject of your investigation, am I right?”

“You have no idea what you're saying,” the asshole replies, betraying a hint of discomfort.

“Oh, yes I do,” I rebut, shamelessly, “and I'll be even more specific if you continue giving me just cause.”

I don't even know what's come over me.

Daddy, is that you?

“We found a hand in your client's backyard. I'm not sure if I make myself clear,” the cool dude says, slightly red in the face, turning over his first card.

Oh fuck, I think to myself.

“So what?” I say out loud.

“What do you mean ‘so what?'” he says, more disappointed than indignant.

“Well, so what? What you plan to do, charge him with concealing a hand?”

Burzone shrugs, as if to say: “Yeah, right.”

The asshole jerks his head back and surveys the scene, like Predator in the jungle raising his visor and activating his victim-identification program, in consecutive order: the window, Burzone, yours truly, and the clerk of the court. His face assumes a bewildered expression, as if he were thinking he's the only one who doesn't fit in, in here.

“I'm not charging him with concealing a hand, Counselor. I'm charging him with concealing a corpse.”

An idea pops into my head.

“Then I'm afraid I'm going to have to differ with you on your very first point. First off, you have no evidence that the corpse, as you insist on calling the hand found in Fantasia's backyard, was actually concealed by Fantasia himself.” At this point, Burzone shrugs again, cockier than ever. “And second, before anyone can be charged with concealing a corpse, there has to be a corpse, a whole corpse, not just a hand, and a corpse that belongs to someone, that is, a victim, with a first name and a last name.”

I stop to catch my breath. This was such a random shot that I might have actually scored a point. Once, in court, I heard a renowned criminal lawyer, talking to his client, in shackles, say that the important thing is that something
appear
true; it matters much less whether it is or not.

The asshole says nothing, silent and bewildered. Next time, read up on the laws of evidence where concealment of corpses is concerned, why don't you.

I look at him. He's gone limp with frustration.

“Very interesting line of defense, Counselor,” he says, wearily. “Too bad that this isn't the forum to present it.”

“Oh, it isn't?” I think.

The asshole waves his hand toward himself, but the gesture is for the clerk of the court, who immediately hands over the preprinted deposition form. Then he offers the same form to Burzone.

“Sign here.”

Mimmo 'o Burzone stands up and tries to catch my gaze, clearly confused. Then, without waiting for further instructions, he leans over the desk and laboriously inks his name, following the line indicated by the magistrate's index finger.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“What do you mean: what do I mean?” the asshole fires back.

“What have you decided?” I ask, affirmatively.

“As far as I'm concerned, your client remains in jail,” he replies, as if it were the most obvious thing.

Burzone gives me a heartbroken look.

“What is your legal motivation?” I demand, indignantly.

“I can't keep anyone in jail, as you know perfectly well.”

“If only I did,” I think to myself.

“What I can do is ask,” he resumes, “and I'll ask, you can bet on that. Then the preliminary judge will make the decision.”

The grand preliminary judge, of course.

“And in any case,” the asshole continues, “with the evidence weighing against your client, what did you expect, that we'd just send him home?”

“But I just told you that you don't—”

He cuts me off. I'm thankful for the interruption. I'm pretty sure that at this point my sentence structure was about to go all discombobulated anyway.

“Listen, there'll be an arraignment where you can raise your objections. Write a brief, if you're really determined to bring them up.”

An arraignment, huh? Thanks very much for the information.

“You bet I will,” I say, feeling cocky again. Then I turn and head for the door.

“Counselor,” the clerk of the court calls to me.

I turn around. The asshole and the clerk of the court are both staring at me, mystified.

Now what?

They both go on staring at me as if they were expecting something.

But Burzone tips me off, by gesturing toward the transcript.

Jesus, I have to sign it too, that's right. It's a good thing that Burzone already signed, otherwise I'd have had to ask: “Where do I sign?”

You can picture the humiliation.

I put down my John Hancock, I straighten my jacket, and I nod farewell to the asshole.

Who nods back.

The clerk of the court stands up and opens the door for us.

Mimmo 'o Burzone walks ahead of me. I flash an idiotic smile at the two Carabinieri who have been waiting for us, on sentinel duty outside the door.

At the last minute, the asshole's investigative impulses revive unexpectedly.

“Fantasia.”

Burzone turns before I do.

“Yes sir.”

“Where on earth did you get that nickname . . . Mimmo 'o Burzone?

Burzone's lips part slightly.

“When I was younger, I was in door-to-door sales.”

The asshole rests his chin in the palm of his hand, sketching out a very intelligent little hint of a smile.

“Until next time, your honor,” I say, cutting the scene short.

I gently but firmly walk Burzone out of the room with one hand, wheeling after him as I pull the door shut behind me. When the Carabinieri take him, I tell him goodbye.

“Thanks, Counselor,” he says, all grateful. “I'll call you.”

I'll call you?

For reasons that I refuse to take under consideration just then, that phrase chills the blood in my veins.

 

W
hen your law office is a 200-square-foot room in an apartment you share with others, you have two possibilities.

Either you say:

My law office is a 200-square-foot room in an apartment in a building without a doorman. I don't have a lease, I have a contract of gratuitous bailment (in practical terms, a loan, as if my landlord were an old pal who's just doing me a favor) for tax purposes, and another undated rental agreement, which the owner, a millionaire miser who shuffles around in slippers, holds hostage, just one copy, signed only by me, so that the minute I complain or cause trouble he can date it, sign it, and hurry over to the police station to register it (and I'm certainly not going to waste your time here explaining why the figure reported in the contract is higher than the figure that I pay him on the first of every month, under the table). All my officemates are in the same legal condition: Espedito Lenza, bookkeeper (but the plaque on the door says “business advisor”); Rudy Fiumara, a wingnut who has no discernable profession and seems to make no rational use of his room, seeing as how we almost never see him (but he has a fundamentalist approach to being neighborly, and he'll have the bar downstairs deliver an espresso in a thermos demitasse even if you don't want it); and the Arethusa cooperative, a cooperative that is made up of a husband-and-wife team—he's one of those guys whose name is Roberto but every time you see him you call him Sergio (you know the ones, the Robertos that you can't help but call Sergio? Or the Giancarlos that you can't get out of your mind that they're really Antonios? You know, those guys)—while she has a refined name, like Iginia or Vitulia or Marosia. They have the most idiotic little Italian spitz, which every time the doorbell rings goes completely bonkers and starts barking, furiously, until Roberto-Sergio and Iginia-Vitulia-Marosia see that they're going to have to pound it silly to make it stop. Since it's a mezzanine apartment, there's a security issue, but instead of installing steel bars, the landlord decided to save a little money and just had holes drilled into the wall on either side of each casement window. So every night, before leaving, you have to remember to slip a steel tube five and a half feet long into the holes to keep burglars from breaking and entering (let me assure you that the sight of a window barred from the interior with an Innocenti steel tube triggers a bout of depression you can't even begin to imagine).

Or else you say:

Now, your professional office suite, these days, certainly isn't what it used to be. The authoritative law office, the office that's located on an upper floor of an impressive palazzo in the city center, with a courtyard and a doorman, a receptionist, a secretary, paralegals, five or six phone lines, a spacious waiting room, original paintings and vintage furniture; the suite of offices designed to crush the will of the client and make it clear from the very first appointment just who it is who holds the whip hand (and especially just how much he can expect to pay in hourly fees), has seen its day. Nowadays, a professional is constantly on the hunt, never in one place; then, every so often, he'll need some downtime. Let's be done with overblown struc­tural rhetoric. Let's be done with the gilded cage that only confines your thoughts and restricts your initiative within the iron bars of ostentation (plainly vulgar and even a little fascistic, if we want to call a spade a spade). Let's be done with underlings and employees who do the dirty work of photocopying and carrying briefcases, let's be done with subordinates, let's be done with the young woman who fields your phone calls and organizes your schedule. Let's be done with the tawdry cliché of the illicit affair with your secretary. Let's be done with ownership of law offices. Let's be done with ownership in general. Don't establish ties, unknot them. Today you're here, tomorrow you're somewhere else. Do you need to meet with a client who's important enough to merit a face-to-face? Tell him to call you on your cell phone and you can have lunch together (or better yet, eat a sandwich at a little table in a bar). Does your cell phone make you feel as if the world is breathing down your neck? Then you just turn it off. You're a freelancer and a professional (just listen to the way those two words chime together), so seize your freedom, do it for real, make use of it. And really, let's level with one another: these days, do you think that the average client is impressed by a handsome law office? The middle class is dead. Professionals are diving into the shark tank. You have to reinvent your career, every morning of every day.

 

It's great to have alternatives in life.

 

Anyway, at this point, it just seems right, even if there's no need for it, to swing by the office. How to put this. After a professional performance like the one I just gave, it's the very least I deserve. When you've challenged and baffled a magistrate the way I just did a few minutes ago, and when you're still radiating the afterglow of a new self-consideration, why wouldn't you take the opportunity to head back to your place of business, remove the Innocenti steel tube from its twin housings, swing open the casement windows, take a seat at your Jonas desk, spin a couple of 360s at your Skruvsta swivel office chair, turn on the answering machine, and review your twelve files, taking under due consideration the decisions that await you. To feel up to the task: that's the common man's highest aspiration.

The instant I put my key in the lock, the psychotic toy spitz breaks out into an explosion of yipping and yapping that ought to give him a little canine heart attack by any reasonable standard (the office of the Arethusa cooperative is the first door when you walk in off the landing). But Christ on a crutch, we've been officemates for two and a half years now; everyone knows that dogs memorize the footsteps of the people they know: you know my my footsteps by heart, just as sure as you have four paws, so why the fuck do you bark at me every blessed time? And what's worse, with that deranged fury, as if I'd slaughtered your whole doggy family? Because—and this is the thing that really rankles my nerves—every single time, that fucking dog catches me off guard. You know it's coming, you steel yourself and you're expecting it, but it manages to ambush you anyway, it still gives you an arrhythmia so that you have to stagger in and drink a glass of water. Plus it's mortifying, frankly; it makes you feel awkward to have a little beast barking at you like that, as if it had caught you just as you were on the verge of doing something deeply dishonest. A little self-conscious, a little defensive—that's how it makes you feel, right?

And while we're on the subject, I'd love to say to those twin manger scenes, Roberto what's-his-name and his wife, the doyenne: listen, if you have a psychopathic dog, a dog that barks (and, by the way, doesn't bite) at anyone other than the two of you, leave it at home, pay a dog-sitter, or slip it a Xanax before you leave the house. Why do you insist on inflicting on other people, with all your smarmy friendliness (“Oh,
shiao
, Vin-
shen
-ssso”), the customs of your own household? What right do you have to take your neighbor's approval for granted? Your assault on diversity is ongoing and criminal.

But today I'm in too good a mood to let myself be lured into a fight. To hell with my two subversive officemates and their argumentative nasty little dog: I have a love affair with my office waiting for me, and I'm certainly not going to let them ruin it for me.

With the furious barking in the background, I walk in and close the door behind, huffing and puffing loudly. The quadruped starts clawing the door from inside: he really wants to get out and settle matters mano a mano. Roberto-Sergio smacks him one. The dog yelps, his wife grumbles. I move on. I walk past the office of Espedito Lenza (mine is right next to his). Door half-open. I can hear him talking on the phone.

“You said that already,” he's saying.

I open the door, turn on the light (fluorescent, medical-exam­iner white), I go over to unshackle the window. There's a smell of stale air. But I don't really dislike the smell of stale air, it preserves the days (June certainly doesn't smell as bad as February, for example). I find that olfactory memory is very romantic. And then there are smells that have never repelled me, truth be told. Like the smell of horse shit, for instance. When I was little, every time I went to the train station newsstand to buy
Spider-Man
(at the station newsstand they stocked comic books before the other newsstands got them), there were carriages outside, in the piazza, and . . . oh well, who gives a damn.

I put the Innocenti steel tube away in its hiding place behind the Kvadrant curtain system. I sit down at my Jonas desk, turn on my computer, breathe in the first week of April, vacuum packed in my absence, and I go online, with a yearning for the website of the National Bar Association, just eager to know what my fellow practitioners of the law are talking about these days.

The modem emits a loud raspberry (I have dial-up) and lowers the virtual drawbridge. I type in the URL, I access the website, I pause to admire the home page as if I were somehow partially responsible for its existence, I click to the section “Results of the Elections for Officers of the Bar Association,” I navigate at random among the various items on the the pull-down menu, and I read up on the new membership of the board of directors of the bar association of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto. After that, luxuriating in the vast array of options available to me, I venture into the section devoted to services available to members of the legal profession, loitering for fifteen minutes or so among the submenus of various professional issues. I go so far as to read the first few lines of a random State Council finding concerning auto insurance liability caps and direct indemnification (anyone who happened to be watching me would get the impression that I was deeply interested), but I suddenly break off my reading when a flash of genius almost triggers a surge of cardiac arrhythmia. I quickly navigate back to the home page and eagerly search among the various options for the national online registry of Italian lawyers. I find it and I click. Up pops an electronic dialogue box. I fill in the blank spaces, hit Enter, and there I am, sixth or seventh in a not particularly lengthy list of lawyers with the same last name. I snatch at my name with the mouse and cursor, picking my name out from the competition, and I indulge in a few minutes of leisurely self-contemplation. I savor my name, letter by letter, wiping away any and all senses of ontological insecurity.

Malinconico Vincenzo, member of the bar of, membership card number, lawyer since.

I breathe in, happily.

This must be what success is like, I tell myself. A place for everyone, not just for a few. But a place where everyone looks at you as if you did them a favor by dropping by. As if your very presence brought some inestimable added value. As if after that, in that place, home values increased.

Success—I learn in this exact moment—is something that involves government property.

Once I'm done with my meditation on celebrity, I reach out for the blinking light on my answering machine.

Messages: two.

I push the playback button.

First message: Alfredo.

He's calling from the street (traffic noises in the background).

“Ciao Dad. I tried calling you at home but you weren't there. Your cell phone was turned off.”

“I was in the middle of an arraignment,” I want to tell him.

Then comes a dripping pause that smacks of: “I was just about to tell you something very personal and very important but now I'm getting the feeling that I'm about to change my mind.”

Listen, Alf, could you get a move on?

I wait, already knowing exactly what's coming next.

And in fact:

“Listen, I wanted . . . oh, never mind. It doesn't matter. Ciao.”

I look at the far wall, while the tenor of my mood plummets.

Now. There could be a number of explanations for the cold feet of a sixteen-year-old son leaving a message like that on your answering machine. Let me just lay out some alternatives:

a) maybe it wasn't important;

b) it was important but it wasn't urgent;

c) he didn't feel like saying it to an answering machine;

d) he was caught off-guard by a friend who just happened to be walking by;

e) his cell phone battery was dying.

That'll do for now.

If we explore these five options with a modicum of lucidity, we quickly come to the realization that they are nothing other than minor antibodies, pathetic attempts to ignore the obvious.

Option a) is the most threadbare of the five: if something isn't important, you don't even start to explain;

option b) is lawyerly, in the sense that it doesn't fly in the face of the truth, it just disqualifies it: it sidles over to it, but only to chomp it down more thoroughly;

option c) has a certain austere dignity, but it's basically a delaying device at best;

options d) and e) are so blatantly fake that it's not even worth discussing them.

The thing is that reality mumbles. It expresses itself in incomplete sentences. And the translations that circulate are terrible, done by incompetents. Riddled with misreadings, typos, entire lines missing. Without a modicum of professional standards, completely lacking in any sincere effort.

Which is exactly why I'm accustomed to explaining the things that happen to me. I make imperfect translations in an effort to get by until, one fine morning, I meet reality in the street—nonchalant, understated, never vulgar—and I stand there, rooted to the spot, staring as she passes me by and vanishes in the distance without bestowing so much as a glance in my direction. But it's not like I'm completely nonplussed, it's not like I've never met her before.

Same thing right now. Hard as I might try to pretend that I don't get it, this is what I really think: my son wanted to tell me something crucially important, something that's weighing on his mind, something that's causing him pain. He was at such loose ends that he even considered confiding in me (not something he'd normally do), and the one time I might have been able to be of some help to him, he couldn't reach me. So, whatever it was, it's now all my fault.