Temporary Perfections (10 page)

“Are they teaching you, or are you teaching them?”

“They’re teaching me, believe me. It’s a whole other world. You’d find it interesting from a lawyer’s perspective, too. What are you calling about?”

“I wanted to ask you something, but it’s nothing urgent.”

“Go ahead.”

“No, really, it’s not something I can talk about on an international call. Anyway, it isn’t urgent,” I lied. “When do you get back?”

“In three weeks.”

“When you’re back, give me a call. I’ll tell you all about it in person.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me now?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Thanks, Carmelo. Enjoy your trip. Give me a call when you get back.”

“I’ll do that. I’m having a great time. I wish you could see my classmates. The one I like best is a Christian Turk who found out I’m from Bari. Ever since I told him, he keeps saying that we Baresi—and as you know, I’m not from Bari originally—stole the bones of Saint Nicholas of Myra from the Turks and should give them back. And let me tell you, you’re not allowed to smoke a damn cigar anywhere, except maybe in a garbage dump. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Ciao, Guido, I’ll call you when I get back.”

We hung up, and when I thought about Tancredi, thousands of miles away, I felt lonely. To ward off that sensation, I decided to do something useful, or at least practical. I called Fornelli.

The way a person answers the phone—at least when he doesn’t know who’s calling, and Fornelli obviously didn’t recognize my number—tells you some deep truths about
him. Fornelli’s voice, with its strong Bari accent, was quiet and bland.

“Hi, Sabino, it’s Guido.”

His voice got a little more lively. It took on a shape, and even a little bit of color.

“Hey, Guido.”

“Hi, Sabino.”

“Have you had a chance to read the file?”

I told him that I’d read the file. I didn’t tell him about my conversation with Navarra, since I’d promised I’d keep it to myself.

“What do you think? Do you think there’s anything left to try?”

“In all honesty, I doubt there’s much of a chance of finding anything new beyond what the Carabinieri found in their investigation. Still, there are a few things to check out, just to go beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

“That’s great. What exactly did you have in mind?”

Now he sounded very different from the slightly depressed gentleman who had answered the phone moments before. He sounded almost excited. Stay calm, I told him in my mind. Nothing’s going to come of this. Don’t get your hopes up, and above all, watch what you say to those poor parents.

“I thought I’d talk with Manuela’s ex-boyfriend, her two friends in Rome, and maybe the girl who drove her to the station the day she disappeared.”

I told him I’d need some help getting in touch with these people. He said, sure, he’d take care of it. He would call Manuela’s mother right away—the father, as I’d seen, was in no shape to help us—and ask her to get in touch with those
young people. He’d let me know right away what the story was. He knew he’d done the right thing when he contacted me, he said at the end, with an incongruous note of cheerfulness in his voice. Then he plunged back into the murky space he’d occupied before answering the phone.

I thought maybe now I could get to work.

Lawyer work, that is. I was through playing at being an investigator for now. The next day I would be in court for one of the most surreal trials of my so-called career. I called Consuelo, who’d been studying the file for me, and told her to come into my office to bring me up to speed.

My client was twenty-five, and he was charged with mass murder.

Put in those terms, the act sounds pretty impressive. It summons up tragic images, the bitter odor of gunpowder, ravaged corpses, screams, blood, shattered limbs, and ambulances with wailing sirens rushing to the scene.

But if you read the official charges and the file from the initial investigation, things looked different. The charges stated that Nicola Costantino was accused of the crime described in and punished under Article 422, Paragraph Two of the penal code because, with the intent of killing himself, he also committed acts liable to endanger the public safety, specifically opening the gas line in his home with the intent of filling the air with gas and causing an explosion with the potential to destroy the entire apartment building. Only the intervention of the Carabinieri stopped this wholesale destruction from taking place.

Nicola Costantino, long under medical care for psychiatric issues, tried to commit suicide by gas. He was alone in the apartment. He locked himself in the kitchen, drank half a bottle of rum, and downed a powerful dose of tranquilizers, and then he turned on the gas without lighting the burners. A neighbor with a sensitive nose almost
immediately smelled that something wasn’t right and called the Carabinieri. The paramilitary police—“promptly arriving at the site,” as the report noted—knocked down the front door and threw open the windows. They found the young man unconscious on the floor but, miraculously, still in and of this world. In other words, they saved his life. But, after checking with the magistrate on duty at the time, they also arrested him. On charges of mass murder.

If you consult a handbook of Italian criminal law, you will find that no one need die in order for charges of the crime of mass murder to be brought. There just needs to have been a clear and present danger, provided that the act or acts in question were carried out specifically to kill.

The classic case studied in the classroom is one in which a terrorist places a highly explosive device in a public place. The bomb fails to go off, let’s say because the police bomb squad intervenes, or because it malfunctions, but the terrorist can still be tried for mass murder because it was his intention to kill an indeterminate number of people, and his actions were designed to bring about that result.

My client’s story was—how can I put this?—slightly different. Nicola Costantino was no terrorist; he was just a scrawny young man, mentally disturbed and irremediably prone to failure. He had decided to kill himself, and he’d failed at that, too. This proved mostly that his ineptitude extended to the field of self-destructive behavior.

There is no doubt that by doing something as stupid as turning on the gas, he had endangered everyone else in his apartment building; there is likewise no doubt that his idiotic actions were not a reflection of his intent to kill anyone except himself.

This was the very basic argument I had tried to make to
the prosecuting attorney and the special arraignment court in an attempt to persuade them that the crime of mass murder wasn’t justified in this case, and that there was therefore no legal basis for holding my client in prison.

I hadn’t persuaded them. In rejecting the appeal, the judges wrote that “all that is required to justify a charge of mass murder is that someone should have had the intention of killing anyone, which would, of course, include the intention of killing only himself.”

That argument was powerfully paradoxical.

Hadn’t Costantino in fact threatened the public safety with his attempt—unsuccessful only because of the timely intervention of the authorities—to kill himself? If so, then he was clearly guilty of the crime of mass murder, which in his case rose to the required threshold with respect to all factors, both objective and subjective.

And since the nature of the defendant’s acts and his evidently unstable personality (this was the one point on which I tended to agree with the judges) could reasonably suggest the likelihood of a recidivistic repetition of the same kind of behavior—in other words, he was liable to do it again—the court was bound to confirm the order of preventive detention, in its most trenchant form: prison.

I was preparing my Court of Cassation appeal of this half-baked interpretation of Italian criminal law when my clients’ parents came to see me. They seemed slightly embarrassed, but after some initial hesitation, they managed to convey, with much hemming and hawing, that they didn’t want me to appeal the court’s verdict.

“Why not?” I asked, nonplussed.

The man and woman looked at one another, as if trying to decide which of the two should answer.

“If it’s a matter of my fee,” I said, trying to remember how much I’d told them the appeal would cost, “don’t worry about it, you can pay me when you have the money.”

The father answered.

“No, thank you, counselor. It’s not about the money. It’s just that Nicola seems to be doing so much better in prison. Both the guards and the other inmates treat him well. He’s socializing. He’s made friends, and when we go to visit him, he seems almost happy. Honestly, we haven’t seen him in such good spirits in years.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right. The father shrugged.

“Let’s leave him in jail for a few more months,” added the mother, with an expression that seemed to blend a sense of guilt with a sense of relief, and even a touch of cheerfulness.

“When they finally bring him to trial, we’re sure you’ll manage to win an acquittal. They’ll release him from prison, and we can help him rebuild his life. But for now, maybe we should leave him in jail for a while, since he seems to be doing so well. It’s as if he were in a treatment facility,” the father concluded, with the relieved expression of someone who has just completed a challenging task.

I was about to say that Nicola was legally an adult and therefore, for reasons of professional ethics, I would have to ask how he felt about this novel solution.

Instead, I thought it over for a few seconds and, in a decision I would prefer the ethics committee of the bar association not know about, said nothing. I only held out both hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender to the inevitable.

Now, months later, it was time for the preliminary hearing.

That morning, prior to my hearing, there was a social security fraud trial with dozens of defendants. The hall—the largest hearing room in the building—was teeming with defendants and their lawyers, and it had all the dignified sobriety of the Marrakech souk. There was every reason to suppose that this would take some time. Since I didn’t know how else to pass the time, I pulled my iPod out of my briefcase and set it on shuffle.

Suddenly, as if by magic, the scene was transformed into a spectacle of deranged, mythical, senseless beauty.

Unbeknownst to them, lawyers, defendants, the judge, court clerks, and police officers were all dancing to the syncopated rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll, in an extravaganza staged just for me.

Lawyers standing up and declaiming, saying things I couldn’t hear, defendants conferring amongst themselves, the judge dictating a statement: a sort of collective movement that, thanks to the music, seemed to take on meaning and necessity.

The best part of my private musical came when a colleague of mine whose most distinctive professional quality has always been his implacable scorn for the proper use of the subjunctive, stood up and addressed the judge, gesticulating vigorously, in perfect time—at least, that’s how it appeared to me—to the voice of Freddie Mercury singing “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

Sometimes being a lawyer isn’t bad at all, I thought, as I settled back, stretched out my legs under the bench in front of me, and enjoyed the show.

After the initial hearing in the social security fraud trial, the courtroom emptied out and I put away my earbuds. It was our turn. The only people left in the room were the judge, the court clerk, me, Consuelo—who had arrived after making the rounds of the various clerks’ offices—the prosecuting attorney, my client, and the two prison guards who had brought him to court and who continued to keep a close eye on him. You never knew—he might take it into his head to turn on the gas and murder an entire courtroom full of people.

After briskly dispensing with the initial formalities, the judge asked if there were any requests. I stood up and said that Signore Costantino wished to be questioned. The defendant had only been questioned once, when he was arraigned, two days after his arrest, I reasoned. At that time he hadn’t been perfectly lucid, to put it mildly.