I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (19 page)

And she snorts in annoyance.

“Bubbly or still?” the cavern-dweller prompts helpfully.

“It makes no difference to me,” I say. And I glare at the rude waitress, who misses it, turns on her heels, and heads back to the front room.

“Aren't you having anything?” I ask my host.

“She already knows,” he replies, tilting his head toward the oafish waitress.

We sit in silence for a while, pretending to watch the television shopping channel, which continues with a series of testimonials by miraculously fit young women who give all credit to the Ab Swing crunch. By the time the second woman breaks into an emotional lament, I can't take it anymore and I come to the point.

“Listen, can I ask you something?”

“Of course you can.”

“Were you following me?”

No answer.

“You were following me,” I state.

He looks at me, doing his best to refrain from making a comment that he'd prefer to spare me. A demonstration of delicacy that I would never have expected from a plantigrade of his kind, truth be told.

“It's a good thing I was following you, Counselor. Otherwise they'd be trying to put you back together right now.”

For a split second I see myself, stretched out on a filthy gurney in an emergency room, half-conscious, while a couple of rough male nurses slap me in an attempt to bring me around, shouting into my face, demanding that I tell them my name.

“That may be,” I admit, sensing the advent of a light facial sunburn, “but I don't remember asking for a police escort.”

The cavern-dweller raises both hands. It's a gesture that makes me think of the tossing of the bone in the opening sequence of
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

“Not a problem,” he says.

And I translate: “This one's on the house.”

“I have to say I enjoyed it,” he adds.

“In what sense?” I ask.

“In the sense that you weren't afraid of that runt.”

“No, in fact I wasn't,” I confirm, with a lavish dose of vanity.

The bad-mannered waitress returns with our beverages; she sets her tray down on the café table, offering an involuntary glance down her shirt front to the cavern-dweller (who I notice, to my astonishment, is no lecher), turns on her heel, and leaves.

I lift my left hand in the direction of her receding back, as if to say: “What, are you just going to leave the tray here?” but I immediately realize that I'm the only one who's noticed the oafishness of the service, because the cavern-dweller happily picks up his drink (one of those eighties-style cappuccino drinks), toasts me with a hoist in my direction, and takes a generous gulp, frothing his mustache with a coating of cream and some undefinable granulated substance.

“Do you think she attended hospitality school?” I ask, indicating the yokel-ette with a jerk of my head.

He turns to look in the direction I indicated, and stops to think about my observation. He thinks for a good long while. In any case, when he answers, he doesn't smile.

“Don't think that, she's always like that when new people come in.”

“I imagine that's why the place is empty.”

The guy keeps his cool. I can't tell if he's just not interested in the things I say, or if he doesn't understand them.

“Anyway, I haven't introduced myself, sorry,” he says suddenly, remembering, “Tricarico. Amodio.”

I wonder which is the first name and which is the last.

He puts down his drink and holds out his hand.

I shake his hand.

“I guess there's no need for me to tell you mine, right?”

He smiles. That one he understood.

I take a sip of water, pour some sugar into my espresso, stir it with the demitasse spoon.

“So what's that you're drinking?” I ask.

He replies, enthusiastically.

“This? It's a Bailès on the rocks. It's made with vodka, cream, nutmeg, cinnamon, ice, and of course, Bailès. But why are you laughing?”

I almost choke on my espresso.

Invent something, and don't waste any time doing it.

“Oh, it's nothing, I was just thinking about how the waitress left without taking the tray with her,” I improvise, as I contract my lip muscles in a spasm and do my best not to choke.

He lowers his gaze to take in the tray and he sits there, contemplating it, wondering what's funny about the tray. Then he evidently gets tired of that, and shrugs.

I exhale a deep inner sigh, relieved to have dodged that bullet.

We go back to watching the Ab Swing show, and after a while I decide it's time to get up and get out of this local edition of “Candid Camera.”

“Listen, I want to thank you, really very much. It was so kind of you to beat that guy up for me; I enjoyed the coffee too, but now I have to go.”

I start to get to my feet.

“So, you're really not interested,” whatshisname, Tricarico, catches me off guard.

I stand there, bowed over the café table, or actually over the tray, as if I'd just thrown my back out. I utter the next sentence in a tone of self-justification that I don't know where it comes from.

“No, look, don't take it personally, but I just can't do it.”

He looks into the middle distance and shakes his head.

“That's too bad. That's really just too bad.”

“And why is it too bad, if I may ask?” I say, even more of an idiot than before.

“It could have been a nice opportunity for you.”

“How do you mean?”

He gazes at me compassionately.

“It's not like you've got much work.”

I flush red.

“And what do you know about how much work I have?”

He waves his left hand, as if to brush away an annoying fly.

“No, that's okay, let's forget about it, if you're not interested there's no point talking about it.”

I get stubborn.

“No, no, let's not forget about a damned thing.
What. Do. You. Know. About. How. Much. Work. I. Have?
”

Which is of course a completely moronic question. As if it were difficult to gather information about a lawyer. As if no one knows which lawyers are successful and which are just scraping by. As if you needed to hire a private detective to find out who's doing fuck-all. There's lots of us, that's how I comfort myself when I feel bad about my lack of work. We are the new invisible poor. The ones who'll never admit it openly. We're devastated by our professional sense of dignity, in the name of which we're ruining our lives. Give it a try yourself sometime, if you have nothing better to do: you will never find a lawyer or any other freelance professional, however desperately they're actually struggling in the market saturation of contemporary society, willing to tell you: “I make less than a waitress; if it wasn't for my family I'd shut down my law office tomorrow morning, but instead I walk around in a jacket and tie and pretend nothing's wrong.” No two ways about it. No one'll spit out the truth. We're a majority locked in a conspiracy of silence. We have no union, we have no demands for better conditions. We're not dangerous. We live in a tepid bath of awkwardness and guilt complex. And all we do is grow in number.

“Well?” I ask, since the guy seems to be taking his time.

“Do you think that we don't know who we're talking to, Counselor?”

I take the point and recoil.

“Fine,” I reply indignantly, “maybe I don't have a lot of work, as you say, but that doesn't mean I drop my pants the minute the first Camorrista who happens along decides that he wants me to work for him.”

I lean back in my chair, resigned to the reaction that I imagine is going to follow this little volley of mine. But instead the cave-dweller looks at me as if I'd just passed some test with flying colors.

“That's exactly why we want you, Counselor.”

Alessandra Persiano, I think, you're a genius.

“Meaning?” I ask, obscenely gratified at the idea that I've just enhanced this thug's opinion of me.

“That you're somebody who, when the time comes, really shows that you've got a pair of balls on you. You're a first-class lawyer, but nobody knows it. You just need an opportunity, that's all.”

I couldn't agree more.

“What of it?” I say, continuing my lofty, indifferent act.

“Why should you miss this opportunity? Here you can make money, get into a river of work that just never stops; are you any lousier than the others, excuse me very much? Why shouldn't you profit from it yourself?”

I agree by saying nothing.

“And what would I have to do?”

A rhetorical question.

“Practice your profession. Be a lawyer.”

Impeccable answer.

“I don't care much for your manners,” I say primly, rapping knuckles at random.

“I do what they tell me, Counselor,” he says, disarmingly.

“Why the cell phone?” I ask, now disgustingly accommodating.

“I don't know why.”

“Ah, that you don't know! But you do know exactly how much work I have, don't you? What's going on here, you're intermittently knowledgeable?”

“There are lots of things I don't know, Counselor, believe you me. I do what they tell me, as I told you.”

I don't know why, but I believe him.

“Now listen to me,” he resumes, “this is the last time we're going to bother you. After this, we won't ask you again. We're looking for new lawyers, fresh, untested, so we don't have to put up with the same old ones.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they charge too much, and they never lift a finger.”

Whereupon I imagine a plenary working session of Mafia capos, maybe sitting around an oval conference table, making a collective decision. “Sure,” they say, “let's get some young blood into the organization, we should recruit young lawyers.” So they send out Tricarico to do some scouting.

“If you accept, we'd treat you with the utmost respect and courtesy. We've always been professionals with our lawyers, just ask around. Give it a try, what would it cost you? If we get along, it's a win-win.”

“But what if we don't get along? What if, let's say, you're not happy with my work?”

He stretched both arms out wide.

“I don't see what you're getting at, Counselor. What are you afraid of? If we're not happy with your work, we'll just hire someone else. We're not idiots, we're not going to try to hold on to someone who loses cases, excuse me very much.”

I sit there saying nothing, rendered speechless by his impeccable argumentation, to the point that I wonder how I could have failed to see things in such a clear and uncomplicated light before this. But what truly overwhelms me, because it qual­itatively alters my state of mind, is the fact that a tough little hitter verging on dwarfism, who pronounces Bailey's “Bailès” and works as a PR advance man for the Camorra, is actually putting his trust in me. I hate to admit, but I get a thrill out of it. Jesus, am I really that desperate? Does it take so little to win me over?

“So, what's it going to be?” Tricarico sums up.

I wonder to myself why it is that decisions always have to be made on the spot. The answer's simple: because that's how decisions are made. People who take more time to make a decision are just putting it off, and when the time comes, they'll still have to decide on the spot.

“I have to think it over,” I say after a short while, well aware that I'm on the verge of accepting.

“We can't wait any longer, Counselor, the hearing is tomorrow.”

“What do you mean, tomorrow?”

“Eh. Look: they arrested Mimmo on Monday; you attended the judicial interrogation the next day, that is, within twenty-four hours; the ADA asked the preliminary judge to validate the grounds for detention within the following forty-eight hours, and in the next forty-eight hours after that, the preliminary judge scheduled the hearing, which will be tomorrow morning. What with one forty-eight-hour deadline and another forty-eight-hour deadline, you get to the maximum time frame of ninety-six hours, right? You get the same numbers, don't you?”

There you are. The first embarrassing oversight.

“Ah, certainly, of course I do. You know, after all this time, I'd completely forgotten, seeing as how I'd turned down the case the first time.”

Pause.

Tricarico smiles with satisfaction.

I hadn't even meant to put that clause into the pluperfect tense. “The first time.”

I swear.

 

 

I
spend the evening poring over a handbook on the code of criminal procedure, like one of those students who think they can pick up, maybe not the entire curriculum, but at least the fundamentals, the night before finals.

Clearly, the idea that you can pick up the fundamentals at the last minute, as if they were lying there waiting for anybody who happens along, ready for a one-night-stand, reveals a vulgar and opportunistic concept of fundamentality.

Only somebody who believes they are a genius—which is to say, only an idiot—can hope to perform that order of mental acrobatics. Because you don't know in advance just what the fundamentals are. And most importantly, you don't know exactly where to find them. They shift around, is what the fundamentals do: it's why they're so tricky. It's my very frequent experience, for instance, that I set out to look for something fundamental where I left it last time, and it's just not there anymore.

And to make a long story short, long live sincerity, I spent the evening, and well into the night, hunting down those fundamentals of criminal procedure that I ought to know before the hearing to determine whether or not Mimmo 'o Burzone's detention would be confirmed. At this point, I don't even know when the hearing is supposed to begin, since we've already been sitting here waiting for an hour and ten minutes (Burzone, escorted by prison guards, hasn't been waiting anywhere near as long) and nobody seems to be calling us.

To be fair and to be truthful, I should point out that my search for fundamentality was rendered considerably easier by the fact that I could restrict that search to the field of activity in which we are about to engage, that is, the confirmation of detention. So, even in the bookstore, literally then and there, I went straight to the letter C in the index of the handbook that I then purchased, but the entry for “confirmation of detention” was conspicuous by its absence.

Whereupon I experienced an onset of panic (theories that are confirmed in practice almost always result in an onset of panic), because there I was, in the actual presence of a case of the self-concealment of a fundamental that refuses to be found where you would logically think to look for it. You read: “co-conspirator,” and directly below it, “contempt of court.” Between them, nothing. Where the fuck has confirmation of detention gone, you start to ask heatedly; is this or is this not a list in alphabetical order, after all? Obviously, at this moment, you are simply encountering the cold hard reality of your own profound ignorance. Later, when you do find it, the confirmation of detention (because, after extensive rummaging through the index, you do find it), you feel like telling yourself: “Ah, why certainly, of course.” The truth is that you're a donkey and you know it perfectly well, because your initial instinct guided you to look for it in the wrong place, the place that all the donkeys who take the easy way inevitably wind up, not to put too fine a point on it.

And anyway, when I finally did find it—the confirmation of detention, that is—(it was a short inset under the longer block of entries in a chapter devoted to precautionary measures of the judicial police), I concluded with a considerable sense of relief that a few hours of hard concentration ought to get me through this after all. If you want to know the whole story, I even had the vague impression that details and notions were starting to come back to me.

In fact, after a couple of hours of full immersion, my criminal law joints were starting to creak a little less. At a certain point, I even realized that the fingers of my left hand were holding the placket of my shirt front, just beneath the collar—the ancestral posture of the Roman jurisprudent, a pose that Italian criminal lawyers assume when they grip the lapel of their judicial robes, their hand roughly over their heart: a detail that when you notice it, you're not sure whether it inspires a note of anthropological appreciation or a Bronx cheer.

Around 9:40
P.M.
, I had developed a preliminary working reconstruction of the procedural state of affairs, noting the following points:

1) we were still in a phase of preliminary judicial investigation;

2) the preliminary judicial investigation was under the supervision of the assistant district attorney, to whom the judicial police reported directly;

3) the judicial police, who had probably been keeping an eye on Burzone for some time already, or else perhaps were operating on a tip, must have caught him red-handed in the unearthing of a hand in the backyard, arrested him, and taken him before the assistant district attorney within the initial twenty-four-hour period required by law;

4) the ADA had questioned Burzone (represented by me as court-appointed counsel because it had been impossible to track down Picciafuoco), and had then requested within forty-eight hours from Burzone's arrest a confirmation of detention from the preliminary judge and now, that is to say, in the forty-eight-hour period following the ADA's request, the preliminary judge would have to issue a finding concerning the confirmation of detention—every step of this process falling within the span of ninety-six hours as prescribed by Article 13 of the Italian Constitution, a point that had been cogently and brilliantly underscored by Tricarico during our meeting in the Love Café;

5) the hearing for the confirmation of detention would take place in the deliberation room, that is, in an office, without an audience, with the preliminary judge and the required presence of the defendant's legal representation, which is to say, me, at least at this point. The ADA could just stay home as far as the procedure was concerned, simply forwarding his requests in written form. If he wanted, Burzone could skip the hearing as well. In the case that Burzone was present (and I hoped he would be, since I had accepted his case), the preliminary judge would question him, then he or she would listen to my points in all cases (that's exactly what the code of criminal procedure says: “in all cases,” as if it was reluctant to leave that up to the discretion of the judges), and then proceed to issue a finding, either confirming the detention or declaring the arrest illegitimate and setting Burzone free (this second hypothesis was one that I felt I could safely rule out).

That takes care of the procedural aspects.

As for the matters of fact, I wondered on the other hand exactly what Burzone was being charged with. All right, they'd found a human hand in his backyard. So what? Exactly what crime was Mr. Cool ADA planning to try to pin on him? Murder? Concealment and/or elimination of a corpse? Article 416-
bis
, seeing that Burzone was working for the Camorra? And even if they chose to pursue the theory of Article 416-
bis
, is it enough to catch somebody with a human hand buried in their backyard to charge them with association with the Mafia? Or were there other elements of evidence pending against Burzone that were far more incriminating but about which I knew nothing? It was all pretty muddy.

According to Article 388 of the code of criminal procedure (which I now knew), when an ADA interrogates an arrestee, he must inform the suspect of the crime under investigation, the reasons for his arrest, the evidence or testimony against him, and even the sources of that evidence or testimony, unless so informing him might undermine the investigation. But now, thinking back, I could no longer say whether the ADA had done those things or not during the judicial interrogation. I was too focused on finding a way to get out of that office as quickly as possible. The one thing I know he did, Mr. Cool, was to ask Burzone over and over what his name was. In fact, when I objected that he was hammering at Burzone with this continual repetition of first and last name instead of telling him what he was accused of, I think that instinctively I was referencing Art. 388. Maybe I even remembered it, who can say? There are so many different ways of remembering things.

Anyway, I'd had nothing in my hands, no paper, no photocopy, no document, that stated the crime of which Burzone was being charged. At the end of the interrogation, this I remember clearly, I had signed the transcript (in fact the clerk of the court had called me back to sign it, since I was walking out of the office blithely forgetting that detail), but I hadn't stayed long; in fact, I hadn't even bothered to read what was written on it. So I had to study up on the concealment of corpses, the elimination of corpses, murder, and, as long as I was at it, Article 416
bis
, which can always come in handy. I had only crude approximations to work from, in other words.

One thing struck me as certain: Burzone must have found the hand that the dog had made off with only after getting rid of the cadaver, because if he had interrupted his butchering to go out into the backyard in search of the hand and then been arrested, the police would have found the
corpus delicti
, or maybe I should say the dead-body
delicti
, or better still, all-that-remained-of-the-dead-body
delicti
, in his little, let us say, basement autopsy workshop, and in that case he would have been well and truly fucked.

This evidence of far-sighted planning proved two things: one, Burzone was no fool, and two, the prosecution had nothing other than the hand that was found in the backyard.

I was feeling a rush of reassurance at this second conjecture when, at exactly 10:12
P.M.
, I received a text message from Alessandra Persiano:
THIS IS STARTING WELL
, it said. Whereupon I immediately tried to call her, but her cell phone was turned off. It serves me right, I said to myself, what an oafish pig I am.

I walked back and forth in my bedroom for a while, talking to myself and continually losing the thread. Then I went back to studying, and after rereading the hearing for the confirmation of detention for the eleventh time I said, Enough is enough, Vincè, you've learned the hearing for the confirmation of detention, you've even repeated the hearing for the confirmation of detention aloud from memory, you're going to dream about the hearing for the confirmation of detention tonight, don't you think you've done enough? I was heading for the kitchen with the general idea of poking around in the fridge when my cell phone rang, so I ran back into the bedroom, all excited at the thought that Alessandra Persiano had seen my phone calls and was calling me back; I was so impatient that I didn't even look at the display and when I said hello, who did I hear at the other end of the line? Not Alessandra Persiano but Nives, who said, “Ciao, I didn't think I'd find you home at this time of night.”

“Where did you think I'd be?” I replied. Baffled and more than a little confused, I have to admit.

“I don't know,” she said, all sugary. “I don't have any idea of what you do with your evenings since we stopped living together, Vincenzo.”

At that point I got my bowels all in a twist. What the fuck, I thought to myself, where is all this sweetness coming from? My emotions crossed their arms and put down their tools, as if to turn to me and say: “Uh, what are we supposed to do now, boss?”

Listen here, Nives, I should have told her at this juncture, I should tell you that
probably
, and I ask you to note that I qualified that with a
probably
, I'm at the very beginning—I really don't even want to say this, you know—the beginning of a relationship with another woman, and guess what? I like her, in fact I like her a lot, we made love for the first time this afternoon, in fact, and how was it you ask? Great, in fact, better than great, if you really want to know. What? you can't think of anything to say now? And after I left her apartment a PR executive for the Camorra with arms longer than his legs beat some hooligan bloody on my behalf, after which he invited me to come have a drink with him in an absolutely ghastly bar where he tried to convince me to represent one of their employees who specializes in the butchering and disposal of dead bodies (before that, he had also given me a cell phone as a gift, a cell phone that I took to the police, but we can skip over that part of the story). I'm not even going to try to explain it all to you, but in the end I took the case, it would just be too long and complicated to explain, anyway I agreed, and I've just spent the last two hours studying up on hearings for confirmation of detention and in the midst of all this confusion, as you can easily imagine, I forgot to call up the woman I was telling you about, and by this point she is well and truly pissed off at me, and in fact she's turned off her cell phone, and who can blame her, so to top off the day that I just described to you, what do you do? You call me? You act all jealous? You ask me how I spend my evenings? You hint (oh, it's the second time that you've tried this, what do you think, that I don't notice?) that you want me, do you think this is the time for that? After I told you off in the middle of a therapy session, among other things? Why do you have to make my life more complicated, when I'm already plenty confused without any help from you, thanks very much? Why is it that you never take these initiatives when they would do some good? Where are you when I'm banging my head against the wall in despair and I feel as lonely as a coyote so that I practically start howling at the moon? And when these waves of disquiet come over you, instead of destabilizing ex-husbands, why don't you just wrap your arms around your monumentally insipid architect and go out to dinner with him in one of those minimalist restaurants that serve curled ribbons of tuna in an orange mousse or fagottini with hazelnut butter in an amarone wine sauce or whatever? Maybe you should go plan a weekend in Cortina or Cortona, why don't you take your pick, and just let me try to forget what's happening with this other woman?

But what I said was, “No, I don't go out nights.”

She waited a little while before asking the next question, nasty thing that she is.

“Are you alone?”

Now you're going just a bit too far, I thought to myself.