I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (7 page)

 

P
hone call. A number I don't recognize appears on the screen.
“Hello.”
“Is this my colleague, Counselor Malinconico?”

I look up at the ceiling with all the tolerance of a chicken farmer. When another lawyer calls me “colleague,” I assume he's about to try to chisel a discount of some sort out of me.

“Yes,” I admit, resignedly.

“Ciao colleague this is Gaetano Picciafuoco I'm calling for Fantasia okay now the situation is delicate and sure we're talking about a questionable individual and afterward of course you can tell me what you've concluded about this whole thing anyway if you ask me we can get off scot free if we just stick to the facts because okay let's say you found a hand buried in my backyard and it's obvious that the dog is how the hand got there because the license from the dog's collar wound up in the hole too but that doesn't mean it was me, what is this, guilt by association with your dog? Aside from the fact that if it
was
me, first, I wouldn't so stupid as to bury the hand right in my own backyard and second, let's say and I'm not admitting this is what happened, but if it
was
me I would have dug a much deeper hole while the shallowness of the excavation proves beyond any reasonable doubt that we are in the presence of the typical burial style of an animal concealing its prey, which brings us back to square one, which is where are you trying to take this, that I'm legally responsible for whatever my dog does? I don't think so because in that case you'd have to arrest us both don't you think?”

I hold the cordless away from my ear and I stare at it in bafflement. If I was to use a single word to describe my state of mind in the face of this verbal avalanche tumbling over me, I'd say: skeptical. Really, I don't know whether to believe it. And in the meanwhile, as I examine the problem, this guy is still talking.

“In other words a dog is a dog and after all we're talking about a pit bull not a toy poodle that stays wherever you put it, a pit bull is autonomous it's a gladiator it's a criminal it goes wandering around amusing itself, it's not like when a pit bull comes home you ask it if it brought anything with it, what do you think?”

I ought to say something, I imagine; but instead I'm surprised to catch myself in a state of astonishment.

“Wait a minute,” I manage to wedge a word in edgewise when lack of oxygen forces him to pause for half a second before resuming the relay race. “Maybe you skipped a section I don't understand. You represent this Fantasia? Fantasia Domenico, a.k.a. Mimmo 'o Burzone?”

“Of course,” replies my—let's use the term—colleague.

“Okay, but, hold on, I don't understand where I come in.”

“Why, don't you know?”

“Don't I know what?”

“That there are two of us,” he says, with an urgency that he can't contain.

I freeze. Even though I knew that Burzone had appointed me as his defense lawyer, I'm fairly troubled by the confirmation that I've just received of that fact. It's not like there's anything unusual about it. Quite the contrary: the substitution and/or addition of lawyers is a common enough practice, especially among inmates. Every day, so many appointments and dismissals stream out of the prison that it looks like a train station. When it comes to counsel for the defense, jailbirds are practically biologically predisposed to experimentation. They hire and fire with a nonchalance that verges on the offensive. They exploit their lawyers, they use them (especially the younger lawyers). At times, they even appoint one but forget to fire the other one (or else they do it intentionally, just to have an extra lawyer on hand, you can never have too many), and what happens then is that when their day in court finally comes, two lawyers show up instead of one, and amid a general sense of embarrassment they stipulate a provisional alliance in the reciprocal hope of eliminating their rival in the fullness of time.

The fact is that down here lawyers have become no different from insurance agents or realtors. There are scads of them, each one hungrier than the last. Just take a short stroll down any street, even on the outskirts of town, and count the plaques lining the street doors of the apartment buildings. A lawyer, these days, in order to get a case, even a court-appointed case, is eager and willing to perform a fanciful array of undignified pirouettes and double gainers. What's driving them isn't even a lust for money or the desire for social prestige—it's not even that anymore. Here it's a matter of maintaining just a bare minimum of logical market presence (that is, pay your expenses and take home a little extra money to live on) or quitting the profession entirely. And the true tragedy is that this general policy of survival now extends horizontally across the entire class of lawyers, shared by the nobodies and the well-connected, the privileged and the miserably poor. In the sense that the cosseted offspring of a successful lawyer is roughly as ravenously eager—if not hungrier—to drum up new cases as people who are, in professional terms, motherless bastards. This is the new culture of competition, spawned in the spirit of gluttonous real estate developers, and it perceives no difference between greed and need, establishing in its majestic equality a false parity between competitors who start out from completely different conditions. The rich and the poor are fighting over the same scraps and bones. There you have it, the demise of the principle of equality.

I've seen things you non-lawyers can't even imagine. I've seen elderly professionals shamelessly brown-nosing magistrates aged twenty-nine. I've seen lawyers, green and youthful, personally bringing trays of espressos to all the body repair shops in a neighborhood in hopes of snagging a car crash lawsuit. I've seen stakeouts at the front door of the city morgue, with ensuing leafleting of business cards at the arrival of the gurney. I've seen Camorra accountants and specialists at inflicting corporal punishment for overdue payments of protection money treated with a lavish regard and obsequiousness that you'd only expect for the highest officials of the state. I've seen colleagues lining up for an audience with the lowliest clerks of the court in the hopes of a court-appointed case, paying a commission in advance based on a fixed percentage of the honorarium. I've seen prison guards boasting of their pull with this lawyer or that to the relatives of inmates in exchange for season soccer tickets. I've seen colleagues barely thirty years old strike deals with notoriously shady clerks of the court to rig a bankruptcy auction, steering the final assignment of the goods allegedly being sold. I've seen their photos in the newspaper a few months later. I've seen car accidents so bogus that you're tempted to step in on the side of the insurance company on a pro bono basis (which is more or less the same as, say, waking up one fine morning with a vocation to become a militant anti-Semite). I've seen lawyers squabbling before the Italian supreme court over a seat on the boards of condominiums. I've seen respected university professors make phone calls to prominent persons of interest in corruption cases offering legal representation, even knowing full well that another lawyer has already been appointed, bragging about their personal friendship with the assistant district attorney assigned to the case and devaluing, between the lines, the professional competence of the colleague in question. I've seen the very same lawyer that the university professor was trying to undermine recount the scandalous professional misbehavior to a group of young colleagues and not twenty minutes later run into the university professor at the front door of the court house and, like on a sappy reality TV show, throw his arms around him as if he were a long-lost brother. I've seen that same lawyer persuade the person of interest that yes, actually, it would be a shrewd move to include the university professor in his defense team, because such a strong lineup of legal counsel would assure an acquittal with a victorious fanfare. I've seen the person of interest sit at the hearing between the court-appointed lawyer and the university professor; frankly he seemed more afraid of his defense team than of the judges. I've heard the professor, in the throes of his summation, stumble over a juridical point of such simplicity that if one of his students had fudged the point during a final exam he would have ordered him out of the lecture hall. I've seen the lawyer shrug and take it, blushing like a guilty confederate, deftly avoiding the astonished gaze of the panel of judges. I've seen the son of the lawyer become a teaching assistant to the university professor who had tried to have his father tossed off the case. I've seen this and much much more, but if I don't stop here, it'll be midnight before I run out of examples.

“Hello,” I hear him say at the other end of the line.

My interlocutor sounds irritated, like a smartypants treating you as if you were wasting his valuable time.

“I'm here,” I say, enunciating, ready for a fight. And in fact, he immediately becomes all tractable, paper hoodlum that he is.

“I didn't hear you say anything.”

“I was thinking.”

“Ah.”

“Listen, bear with me, colleague,” I ask naïvely, “but if Fantasia already had a lawyer, namely you, why didn't he call you to be present at his judicial interrogation?”

A meditative pause ensues.

“Oh, he called me,” he replies, sighing as if I'd put my thumb on a sore spot, “it's just that I had my cell phone turned off that day.”

Whereupon it dawns on me that the best thing to do now is to change the subject.

“So tell me something,” I say, “what's all this about the dog?”

“Wait, you mean you don't know?”

“Well, you hear me asking.”

“Excuse me, but haven't you read the file?”

I look like an asshole.

“No. That is, yes. I mean, I just wanted you to explain a few details.”

He replies with telegraphic haughtiness. This time, though, I don't react, considering my misstep.

“The hand. In the backyard. Was put there. By the dog. Fantasia's dog. A pit bull. Ringo.”

“Okay. Good. Now we have a name and a breed. Then what?”

“Then nothing, he took it and buried it in the garden. You know how animals do when they're on the hunt, and afterward they conceal their prey? The dog hid it right there, behind the garage. The Carabinieri show up, find the hand, and fasten up the cuffs. In the same hole, they found the dog's tags, with name and address. Ringo must have lost it while he was digging.”

“Ah,” I marvel, as I organize, then and there, an imaginary projection of the scene, with the pit bull sneaking furtively into Burzone's specially equipped autopsy room in the garage behind his detached villa, it sees the sections of cadaver spread out on the operating table, yelps in excitement, doesn't even stop to think, snatches the hand, and scampers out the door, all unbeknownst to Burzone, who had probably stepped away for some unexpected urgent errand (I don't know, to make a call on his cell phone and the reception under the stairs was no good, or else just to pee, maybe). Then I imagine Burzone coming back, counting up the limbs, and coming up one short. I have to stifle a laugh.

I can just picture him, furious, stepping out into the garden and searching Ringo's doghouse; the pit bull, off to one side, watches him with his ears lowered, fearing an imminent beating; Burzone fails to find the loot in the doghouse, wanders the immediately surrounding area in an unsuccessful search, and so he moves on to Plan B: he seizes the animal by the collar and interrogates it, Talk, you bastard, tell me where you put it; Ringo takes the beating but doesn't spill the beans (“I don't know what you're talking about,” his mournful doggy eyes seem to say); Burzone loses his temper and starts flailing clumsily away at the dog; the pit bull takes it like a worn-out boxer but never quite understands what the hell its master wants from him, and it howls brokenhearted out of a general sense of guilt. At that point, I can't help it any longer, and I break out in a nasal burst of laughter.

“Oh,” the disinterested colleague calls.

“Eh,” I reply, wiping a tear away from the corner of my right eye.

“What are you doing, laughing?”

“A little, yes, truth be told.”

“I don't see anything to laugh about. And neither does Fantasia, I'm willing to bet.”

Okay, this is when I spit right in this guy's face, I tell myself. And I'd be on the verge of losing my temper, for real, if it weren't for the fact that it all just strikes me as so ridiculous.

“So, what? You want to tell him about it?” I say.

“Oh, now, really,” he replies, with the unmistakable sound of his tail tucking between his legs.

We sit in silence for a while.

I think back to the trailer I just watched. I still feel like laughing, but this time I manage to control myself.

“So what do you want to do?” he asks me.

“What do I want to do about what?”

“About Fantasia—what do you mean what?”

Oh, here we are. The poor man finally gets to the point.

“So, you're asking if I'll accept the appointment?”

He says nothing, opting for silence as assent. So I let him dangle uncomfortably for a while, like in the elimination scenes on
Big Brother
, when the contestants slump in their chairs waiting for the presenter in the studio to drop the axe. And in the quagmire of seconds that follow, I realize that the news of Burzone's appointment is making me disgustingly happy. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I still feel gratified by this fiduciary appointment.

“I don't know,” I reply, taking my own sweet time. “I'll have to think it over.”

“Ah,” he says.

“You know, I have so many obligations these days,” I add, shivering at the sheer fabrication.

A moment of silence, after which my rival drives home a lunge that I really wasn't expecting.