Reasonable Doubts (5 page)

Half an hour later I was in the judge’s office.

“Good morning, Consigliere. You sent for me.” I smiled, and gave him a politely questioning look.

“Good morning, Avvocato. Yes, I sent for you because I wanted to show you this.” He took a small sheet of paper from a red folder. “I think this is yours. Should I consider it an attachment to your motion on behalf of Signor Saponaro?”

He handed me the sheet of paper. They were the notes I had made while writing the motion. I felt a distant rumbling in my head, like a huge wave or a herd of buffalo coming closer. I went red.

The gist of what I had written revolved around the not very legal concept of “raging queen, and a thief to boot”. Anyone giving that screed even a cursory glance would have been in no doubt that the “raging queen, and a thief to boot” was Signor Saponaro and that his lawyer - who was me - wasn’t privately convinced that his client was innocent.

I tried to find something to say to the judge, to try and excuse this disaster. Of course I couldn’t find anything.

So I asked him if, for the purpose of my forthcoming disbarment, he intended to report me personally or if he preferred me to report myself. I hastened to add that it didn’t really make much difference. I did, however, beg him not to advertise the unfortunate expression I had used - “raging queen”-a cryptic allusion to my client’s sexual tastes. It was a stupid lapse, which, if known, would have done irreparable damage to my reputation, not only as a lawyer, but as a man of the left.

The judge had a sense of humour. He gave me back the sheet of paper and didn’t report me.

He didn’t accept my motion on behalf of Signor Saponaro either, but that really would have been too much to ask for.

There was not much else in the file that was of any significance.

There was a toxicologist’s report on the narcotics. The cocaine was 68 per cent pure, in other words, of high quality. It was possible, the expert wrote, to extract hundreds of thousands of doses from it for reselling.

There were Paolicelli’s mobile phone records, and his wife’s. The customs police had acquired them to see if they could identify any interesting contacts, immediately before or immediately after the car had been stopped and searched and the drugs found. Clearly they had found nothing of interest, because the records had been sent to the prosecutor’s department accompanied only by a brief note saying:
No significant contact has emerged from the telephone records
.

There was the order for Paolicelli to be remanded in custody, no more than ten lines, and there was the sentence. Even that, to tell the truth, wasn’t very long. But what else was there to write? “The guilt of the defendant has been satisfactorily proved to the required standard of evidence. He was carrying the narcotics on board his car and, moreover, freely admitted his responsibility before being arrested. On this basis it would seem literally impossible to suggest any plausible alternative hypothesis, and indeed no such hypothesis was put forward, even by the defendant himself, who, when interrogated by the examining magistrate, exercised - understandably in view of the weakness of his position - his right to remain silent.”

With my pen I circled the words
plausible alternative hypothesis
. That was the problem. That’s always the problem in criminal trials. Supplying a
plausible
alternative explanation for the evidence presented by the prosecution.

What alternative hypothesis could possibly be put forward in a case like this?

The only one was that Paolicelli had told me the truth and that someone else - God knows how, God knows when - had put the drugs in the car. But if his story was true, then Paolicelli was in deep, deep shit.

Could someone really have wanted to set Paolicelli up by planting the drugs in his car and then tipping off the customs police?

I immediately ruled this out. You don’t throw away forty kilos of cocaine just to set someone up. If you want to set someone up, you plant ten grams on him, divided into forty doses, then there’s no doubt he’s intending to sell the stuff, and you’ve achieved your aim. Efficiently and cheaply.

No, they couldn’t possibly have planted forty kilos on him
just to get him arrested. Someone may well have tipped off the customs police that a consignment of top-quality cocaine was coming in from Montenegro in that car. But whoever it was couldn’t have been the owner of the drugs, or anyone else who’d planted them just to ruin Signor Fabio Rayban.

So let’s rule out the theory that whoever planted the drugs in the car was the same person who tipped off the customs police. And let’s assume that Paolicelli is telling the truth. If he really is innocent, how the hell to prove it?

Find out who planted the drugs, I told myself.

Well, that should be easy enough. All I have to do is uncover the network of international traffickers who planted the drugs, drag them to the appeal court to testify, and there, stricken by remorse, they confess, thus clearing my client. He’s acquitted, justice triumphs, and the legend of Avvocato Guerrieri is secure.

If Paolicelli really was innocent, then this was the worst case that had come my way in the whole of my so-called career, I told myself as I leafed through the last pages. At the bottom of the file I found a copy of Paolicelli’s criminal record. It was pretty much as I’d expected. Some very old convictions as a minor for affray, actual bodily harm, possession of weapons. All of them during the years when the Fascist gangs were active. Nothing since 1981.

As I looked through the record, I caught myself thinking that, until a few hours earlier, I’d been determined
not
to take the case.

Until Signora Natsu Kawabata had stepped into my office.

6

I put my notes in order. More than that, I tried to get my ideas in order.

For Paolicelli to have a chance of getting out of this - which was very unlikely-I would have to do a bit of investigating, and that was where the problems started.

I’d only ever used private detectives a couple of times, with disastrous results. And that was in cases which were - how shall I put it? - a lot less problematic than the Paolicelli case. After the second time, I had sworn it would also be the last.

I realized I’d have to talk to Carmelo Tancredi.

Carmelo Tancredi is a police inspector who specializes in hunting down the worst dregs of humanity: rapists, sexual abusers, child traffickers.

He has the mild, slightly downtrodden appearance of a Mexican peasant in a B-western, the kind of intuition you usually only find in fictional policemen, and the grip of a crazed pitbull.

I’d talk to him and ask him what he thought of this whole business. If it was really possible that someone had planted the drugs in Paolicelli’s car in Montenegro with the intention of retrieving them in Italy. And I would ask him if he thought it was worth conducting an investigation to try and clear my client.

Then I would ask around to see if anyone knew this lawyer, Macrì. To find out where he fitted into the jigsaw.

Assuming, of course, that there was a jigsaw. There could be a much simpler explanation: the drugs did in fact belong to Paolicelli and some unknown accomplices, the lawyer - as often happens in these cases - had been hired and paid by these accomplices, and his wife, of course, knew nothing about it.

The fact that I now had a plan - talking to Tancredi, inquiring about this Macrì - gave me the feeling that I’d actually got somewhere. I looked at my watch and realized it was two in the morning.

For a moment, only for a moment, I remembered Margherita’s face. Before it dissolved into the photographic negative of that September afternoon, and then disappeared in the distance, somewhere to the west.

Great Friday night, I thought as I left the office and headed home.

7

On Monday morning, I asked Maria Teresa to call Signora Kawabata and tell her that I was taking the case and that I would visit her husband in prison before the end of the week. She - Maria Teresa - would have to go to the clerk of the court’s office at the court of appeal to check if a date had been fixed for the hearing.

At that point I hesitated, as if there was something else, something I’d forgotten. Maria Teresa asked me if she should tell Signora Kawabata to come to the office to pay an advance and I said yes, that was it, that was what I had forgotten. She had to tell her to come to the office. To pay an advance.

Of course.

Then I took the papers I needed for that morning’s hearings and left.

Outside, it was freezing cold and I told myself I didn’t have to take the bicycle every time, I could actually walk. I went into the bar on the ground floor of the building where my office was, had a cappuccino, and on the way to the courtroom called Carmelo Tancredi.

“Guido! Don’t tell me one of those maggots we arrested last night is a client of yours. Please don’t tell me that.”

“OK, I won’t. Who did you arrest last night?”

“A paedophile ring organizing holidays in Thailand. Vermin for export. We’ve been working on the case for six months.
Two of our undercover officers infiltrated the ring, even went on holiday with these animals, and collected evidence by the barrel load. Incredibly, the Thai police cooperated.”

“And you arrested them last night?”

“Right. You can’t imagine the kind of stuff we found in their homes.”

“I can’t imagine and I don’t want to know.”

That was only half true. I didn’t want to know, but I could imagine only too well what they might have found when they searched the men’s homes. I’d occasionally been involved in paedophilia cases - always representing the victims - and had seen the kind of material taken from people like that. In comparison, photographs of autopsies are quite pleasant to look at.

“Since, fortunately, you’re not the lawyer of one of these maggots, why are you calling me?”

“I wanted to buy you a coffee and have a little chat. But if you worked all night and are just now going to sleep, it doesn’t matter. I realize you’re getting on in years, so ...”

He said something in broad Sicilian. I didn’t really understand the words but I could guess that he was making a gently critical comment on my sense of humour.

Then he went back to Italian. He told me I had to wait until they’d taken statements from the people they’d arrested and done all the other paperwork. He said he’d have to check it all because the guys in his squad were very good when it came to working in the field - tailing suspects, stakeouts, knocking down doors, chasing people, grabbing them, maybe even manhandling them a little, which doesn’t come amiss sometimes - but you had to keep them under strict supervision whenever they got their hands on a computer, or had to deal with legal formalities. He would be finished
around midday and so, if I wanted, I could come by and pick him up at police headquarters and buy him an aperitif.

OK, I said, I’d pick him up at twelve-thirty.

Then I went to the courthouse and pleaded my various cases. At my usual pace, in a kind of semi-conscious state.

During my first years in the profession - as a trainee and then when I was already a prosecutor - what I’d liked best was arriving at the courthouse in the morning. I’d arrive twenty minutes before the start of the hearings, say hello to a few friends, go and have a coffee, smoke a cigarette - in those days they let you smoke in the corridors. Sometimes I might also meet a girl I liked and make plans for the evening.

Little by little these rituals had become more sporadic and then disappeared. It was something physiological, the kind of thing that happens inevitably once you pass thirty. Over time, I’d gradually fallen out of love with that moment of entering the courthouse, the ritual coffee and all the rest of it. Sometimes I would look around, on the way to the bar. I would look at the young lawyers, often well-dressed, even too well-dressed. I would look at the girls - secretaries, trainees, even a few young magistrates on probation.

They all seemed a little stupid to me, and I’d think, tritely, that when
we
were young we were different, and better.

Not a very clever thought, but once you get started on something like that you can’t stop. If these people are so dumb, then there’s no reason to envy them, no reason to envy their youth, their supple joints, their infinite possibilities. They’re idiots, you can see that from the way they behave, at the bar, and everywhere. We were better, and we still are, so why envy them?

Why, damn it?

By twelve-twenty I was outside police headquarters. I called
Tancredi to tell him to come down and join me. When I saw him, I thought he looked like someone who’s slept on a sofa, with his coat and shoes on. For all I knew, he probably had.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so the first thing he did was to ask after Margherita. I told him she’d been away for a few months on business, and tried to look as natural and as neutral as possible as I told him this. I could tell from his expression that I didn’t quite manage it. So I changed the subject and asked him about his thesis. Tancredi had already done all his psychology exams, and only needed to finish his thesis to graduate. He said he hadn’t been working on it for a while, and from the way he said it I realized I’d touched on a sore point, too.