Involuntary Witness (6 page)

He declared his innocence? So did they all.

He thought of me as a serious person and was sure I would not conceive any wrong ideas, such as going to the Assizes in the absurd hope of getting an acquittal. Abdou Thiam would be found guilty anyway, and a court of judges and jury would tear him to shreds. In any case he – Cervellati – had no intention of wasting weeks or even months in the Assize Court.

 

 

The shortened procedure is one of the things which in the trade are known as special procedures. As a rule,
when the public prosecutor concludes the inquiries in a murder case he asks the judge for the preliminary hearing to commit the accused for trial.

The preliminary hearing serves to verify whether there are sufficient prerequisites for a trial, which, in the case of murder, falls within the competence of the Court of Assizes, composed of both professional judges and a sworn-in jury. If the judge for the preliminary hearing considers that these prerequisites exist, he orders the committal for trial.

The accused, however, has an opportunity to avoid being sent up to the Court of Assizes and to get himself a simplified trial, and this is the shortened procedure.

At the preliminary hearing he can ask, either directly or through his defending counsel, that the trial be determined within what is called the state of the acts. This means that the judge for the preliminary hearing, basing his judgement on the documents provided by the public prosecutor, decides whether there is sufficient evidence to convict the accused. If he finds that such evidence exists, he finds the accused guilty.

It is a far swifter procedure than a normal trial. No witnesses are heard and, except in rare instances, no new evidence is acquired. The public is not admitted and the case is decided by one judge sitting alone. In short, it is an abbreviated procedure that saves the state a great deal of time and money.

Of course, the accused also has an interest in choosing this kind of trial. If convicted, he has the right to a considerable reduction in his sentence. To put it in a nutshell, the state saves money and the accused saves years in prison.

This shortened procedure has another advantage. It is ideal when the accused hasn’t much money and cannot afford long hearings, witnesses, experts,
examinations and cross-examinations, summings-up, lengthy harangues and so on and so forth.

Opting for the shortened procedure, the accused clearly loses numerous chances of being acquitted, because everything is based on the documents provided by the public prosecutor and the police, who, as a rule, work to get their man, not to let him go.

However, when for the accused the chances of acquittal are few or none even in a normal trial, then the reduced sentence is a really attractive prospect.

From all points of view, therefore, the shortened procedure seemed ideal for Abdou Thiam, who truly had very slim chances of being acquitted.

“Read the indictment and you’ll see that it’s better for all concerned to do it the short way,” concluded Cervellati, dismissing me.

Outside it was raining. A fine, dense, perfectly odious rain.

I was just getting to my feet when Cervellati said it: “Nasty weather, this. I have no trouble with dry cold, perhaps with a fine sunset thrown in. It’s this
damp
cold that gets into your bones ...” He looked at me. I could have said quite a number of things, some of them even amusing from my point of view. Instead I gave a sigh: “It’s the same as with heat, Mr Prosecutor. It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.”

After the meeting with Cervellati I attended a hearing and negotiated a settlement for a woman accused of fraudulent bankruptcy.

In point of fact, the woman had nothing to do with the bankruptcy, the insolvency, the firm or the law. The real owner of the firm was her husband, who had already gone bust once and had a record of swindling, embezzlement and indecent behaviour.

He had registered his fertilizer business in his wife’s name, had made her sign masses of promissory notes, had not paid his workers, had not paid his electricity bills, had not paid his telephone bills, but
had
raided the till.

Naturally the firm had gone bust and the titular owner had been accused of fraudulent bankruptcy. The husband had chivalrously allowed justice to take its course and his wife to be found guilty, albeit with plea-bargaining.

I had been paid the week before, without submitting an invoice. With the money from the till or acquired from goodness knows what other swindle on the part of Signor De Carne.

One of the first things you learn as a criminal lawyer, especially when dealing with types like De Carne, is to get paid in advance.

Obviously you are almost always, or at least very often, paid with money obtained by criminal means.

It shouldn’t really be mentioned, but when you
defend a professional pusher who pays you ten, twenty, even thirty million if you manage to get him out of prison, well, you’re bound to have some vague doubt about the source of that money.

If you are defending a man arrested for persistent extortion in complicity with persons unknown, and his friends come to the office and tell you not to worry about the fee, they’ll take care of it, here too you can make a guess that
that
fee will not be composed of spotlessly clean money.

Let me make it clear that I was no better than the rest of them, even if I did sometimes try to retain a morsel of dignity. Not with types like De Carne, however.

In short, I had in any case been paid in advance with money from an unknown – and dubious – source, I had concluded a decorous plea-bargaining that at least guaranteed the poor woman a suspended sentence, and as far as that morning was concerned I could go home.

I took advantage of a lull in the rain, did my shopping, reached my apartment and had hardly begun to make myself a salad when my mobile rang.

Yes, I was Guido. Of course I remembered her, Melissa. Yes, at dinner with Renato. It had been a very pleasant evening. Liar. No, I didn’t mind that she’d got hold of my mobile number, far from it. Did I know who Acid Steel were? Sorry, I didn’t. Ah, well there was a concert of this Acid Steel lot in Bari this evening. Well, near Bari anyway. Would I like to go along with her? Yes, but what about tickets? Ah, she had two tickets, in fact two invitations. Fine. Then it’s agreed, tell me your address and I’ll pick you up. You’ll come here? Very well. Ah, you already know where I live. Very good, this evening at eight, yes, don’t worry, I won’t dress like a lawyer. Ciao. Ciao.

I remembered Melissa very well. About ten days previously my friend Renato, a former hippie now working in the art side of advertising, was celebrating his fortieth birthday. Melissa had arrived in the company of a stumpy little chartered accountant wearing black trousers, a black elasticated pullover, a black Armani-style jacket, and black hair long over the ears, non-existent on top.

She had not passed unobserved. Levantine face, five foot eight, quite unsettling curves. Even an apparently intelligent expression.

The accountant thought he had picked an ace that evening. But instead he had the two of spades with clubs as trumps. No sooner had she entered than Melissa was on friendly terms with practically every male at the party.

She had chatted with me too, no more and no less than with the others, it seemed to me. She had shown interest in the fact that I boxed. She had told me that she was studying biology, that she was going to do postgraduate studies in France, that I was a charming fellow, that I didn’t seem like a lawyer at all and that we’d certainly be meeting again.

Then she went on to the next one.

Time was – a year before – when I would have dashed to retrieve her from the jungle of illintentioned males who populated the party. I would have thought up something, given her my mobile number, tried to invent excuses for meeting again as soon as possible. And the inky-cloaked accountant could drop dead. He, however, was actively engaged in knocking back one cocktail after another, so he would soon be dead of cirrhosis anyway.

But that evening I did nothing about it.

When the party ended I’d gone home and gone to
bed. When I woke up after the usual four hours, Melissa was already far, far away, practically invisible.

Now, ten days later, she called me on my mobile to invite me to a concert by Acid Steel, who were playing in Bari. Or rather, near Bari. Just like that.

I had an odd feeling. For a moment I was tempted to ring back and say no, I unfortunately had another engagement. Sorry, it had slipped my mind, perhaps some other time.

Then I said out loud, “Brother, you’re going
really
mad.
Really
mad. You go to this bloody Acid Steel concert and let’s put an end to this nonsense. You’re thirty-eight years old and have a pretty long life-expectancy. D’you think you’re going to spend it all like this? Go to this bloody concert and be thankful.”

Melissa arrived punctually a few minutes after eight. She was on foot and her attire was an incitement to crime.

She said that her car wouldn’t start but that she’d come into the centre anyway, and was wondering if we had time to get mine. We did. We got the car and set off in the direction of Taranto.

The concert was in a small, disused industrial warehouse out in the country between Turi and Rutigliano. I’d never have been able to get there on my own.

The atmosphere in the place was semi-clandestine. Some of the audience looked clandestine without the semi.

Luckily, one was not forbidden to smoke.

One was not forbidden to smoke
anything
.

And in fact they were smoking everything and drinking beer. The air was dense with the stench of smoke, beer, beery breath and sweaty armpits. No one was laughing and many seemed absorbed in a dark, mysterious ritual from which I – fortunately – was excluded.

I began to feel uneasy, and the impulse to make a run for it grew and grew.

Melissa talked to everyone and knew everyone. Or maybe she was simply doing a repeat performance of Renato’s party. In that case, I thought, I was in the accountant’s shoes. The impulse to cut and run redoubled. Worry. Worry. I felt prying eyes on me. More worry.

Then, luckily, Acid Steel started to play.

I have no wish to talk about the two hours of uninterrupted so-called music, partly because my most intense recollection is not the sounds but the smells. The beer, the cigarettes, the joints, the sweat and I don’t know what else seemed more and more to fill the air of that gloomy warehouse. For a moment I even had the absurd notion that from one minute to the next it would explode, hurling that deadly cocktail of stenches off into space. The positive aspect of this eventuality was that Acid Steel – whose visible perspiration led one to suppose that they made a determining contribution to the fetor – would also be hurled into space and no one would hear of them ever again.

The warehouse did not explode. Melissa drank five or six beers and smoked several cigarettes. I am not sure that they were only cigarettes, because it was pesky dark and the source of the smells – including that of joints – was indefinable. At a certain point I seemed to see her wash down a few pills with her beer.

I confined myself to smoking my cigarettes and drinking the occasional sip of beer from the bottles Melissa handed me.

When the concert came to an end I refrained from buying the Acid Steel CD on sale at the exit.

Melissa greeted a bunch of characters with whom I feared we might have to spend the evening, but then
she took my hand. In the darkness of the churned-up field that served as a car park I felt the blood rush to my face, and elsewhere.

“Shall we go and have a drink?” she gurgled in a strangely suggestive voice, meanwhile stroking the back of my hand with her thumb.

“Maybe we could
eat
something too.” I was thinking of the pints of beer already swilling about inside her and of the other unspecified psychoactive substances circulating in her blood and among the neurones.

“You bet. I really feel like something sweet. A crêpe with Nutella or with cream and a dark chocolate sauce.”

We returned to Bari and went to the Gauguin, where they made very good crêpes, were polite and nice, and had beautiful photographs on the walls. It was a place I had often been to when I was with Sara, and had not visited since. That evening was the first time.

No sooner inside than I was sorry I’d come. Familiar faces at every table. Some I had to greet, all knew who I was.

Between the tables, the owner and the waiters staring at us. Staring at
me
. I could hear the wheels turning in their heads. I
knew
they’d gossip about me now. I felt like a squalid forty-year-old who takes out teenagers.

Melissa, meanwhile, was relaxed and talking non-stop.

I chose a crêpe with ham, walnuts and mascarpone, plus a small bottle of beer. Melissa had two sweet crêpes, the first with Nutella, hazelnuts and banana, the second with ricotta, raisins and melted chocolate. She drank three glasses of Calvados. She talked a lot. Two or three times she touched my hand. Once, while talking, she suddenly stopped and gave me an intense look, almost imperceptibly biting her lower lip.

They’re shooting with a hidden camera, I thought. This girl is an actress, there’s a TV camera somewhere, now I’ll say or do something ridiculous and someone will pop out and tell me to smile at the audience.

No one popped out. I paid the bill, we left, reached the car and I started up. Melissa said we could round off the evening by having a drink at her place.

“No thanks. You’re an alcoholic and maybe something worse. I shall now take you home,
I won’t come up
, and then I’ll go home to bed.” That’s what I should have said.

“I’d love to. Maybe just a drop and then we’ll get some sleep because tomorrow is a working day.” I said exactly that: “maybe just a drop”.