Gianrico Carofiglio - Temporary Perfections

That means a case before this court is hardly an abstract exercise; the seriousness of the outcome transforms the rarefied atmosphere of the chambers and the hearing into a dramatic foreshadowing of things that are anything but rarefied, and frequently frightening.

The advocate general called for the dismissal of my appeal. He spoke briefly, but it was evident that he had studied the facts of the case, which isn’t always true. He made a strong argument against the basis of my appeal, and I thought that if I had been one of the justices, I would have found him persuasive and I would have ruled against the appellant.

Then the chief justice addressed me, saying, “Counselor, the panel of judges has read your appeal as well as your brief. Your point of view has been set forth quite clearly. Therefore, in oral argument, I’d ask you to stick to the fundamental aspects of the law or to matters that were not treated in the appeal or the brief.”

Very courteous and very clear. Please be quick, refrain from repeating the things we already know, and above all, don’t waste the court’s time.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll try to be concise.”

I was quite concise. I went back over the reasons why I believed those wiretaps should be excluded as evidence, and the verdict should be overturned, and in a little more than five minutes, I was done. The chief justice thanked me for having kept my promise to be brief, courteously told me I was free to go, and called the next case. The decision would be announced that afternoon. In the Court of Cassation, the judges hear oral arguments for all the appeals first, and then they retire for deliberations. They emerge, sometimes quite late in the day, and read all the decisions, one after the other. Usually, they read them to an empty courtroom because no one wants to wait for hours and hours in the hallways, surrounded by unsettling marble statues, amidst the echo of lost footsteps. For lawyers, especially those like me who are only in town for the day, this is how it works: You ask one of the clerks to inform you of the decision in your case, and you hand him a folded sheet of paper with your cell phone number written on it, folded around a twenty Euro bill.

Then you leave the court building, and from that moment on, every time your cell phone rings, your stomach lurches, because it might be the clerk, calling to inform you of the verdict in a chilly, bureaucratic tone.

It happened while I was in the airport; the plane was already boarding, and I was about to turn off my phone.

“Counselor Guerrieri?”

“Yes?”

“The court’s verdict on your appeal is in. The appeal was denied, court costs to be paid by the appellant. Good evening.”

“Good evening,” I said, though only my cell phone heard me-the clerk had already hung up, and was already phoning someone else to dispense his own personal verdict for a (modest) fee.

On the plane, I tried to read, but couldn’t. I thought about having to tell my client that in just a few days he would be walking into a prison and staying there for many years. The prospect of that conversation put me in a grim mood of sadness mixed with a brooding sense of humiliation.

I know. He was a drug dealer, a criminal, and if they hadn’t caught him, he might have gone on selling drugs and profiting from them. But in the years between his arrest and the verdict, he’d become another person. It struck me as intolerable that the past should just leap up, in the form of a cruel, clear-cut verdict, and wreak havoc like that.

I thought it was a travesty for this to happen so many years after the fact, and it seemed even more senseless because there was no one to blame.

With these thoughts racing through my mind, I dropped off into a troubled sleep. When I opened my eyes again, the lights of the city were looming close.

When I got home I called my client and did my best to ignore the heavy silence that slowly solidified between us, once I’d given him the news. I tried to ignore the human life that was being torn to pieces in that silence. I hung up and thought that I was getting too old for this kind of work.

Then I attempted to throw together a dinner out of what I had in my fridge, but instead I basically drained almost an entire bottle of 29-proof Primitivo wine. I slept only fitfully and the whole weekend was a slow, dull, exhausting trudge. On Saturday I went to the movies, but I picked the wrong film, and I exited into a relentless drizzle. It rained all day and was still raining on Sunday, which I spent at home, reading, but I picked the wrong books, too. The highlight of the day was watching a couple of Happy Days reruns on a satellite channel.

When I got up on Monday morning and looked out my window, I saw some rays of sun poking through the remaining clouds. I was happy the weekend was over.

I spent the whole morning at the courthouse, dealing with insignificant hearings and running around to various clerks’ offices.

In the afternoon I went over to the office. My new office. I’d been working there for more than four months, but every time I pushed open the heavy burglar-proof door the architect had insisted on installing, I felt the same sense of bewilderment. And each time I asked myself the same thing: Where the hell am I? And then: Why on earth did I leave my old, small, comfortable office to move into this alien, antiseptic place, reeking of plastic, leather, and wood?

In reality, there had been a number of excellent reasons for the move. First of all, Maria Teresa had finally earned her law degree and asked to continue on at the firm, moving up from secretary to apprentice lawyer. I hired a gentleman in his sixties, named Pasquale Macina, to take over Maria Teresa’s secretarial duties. He had worked for many years for an elderly colleague of mine who had recently passed away.

Around the same time, a law professor friend of mine asked me to hire his daughter. She had finished school and passed the bar, but she wanted to become a criminal lawyer. She’d practiced civil law in her father’s office, and it wasn’t to her taste.

Consuelo had been adopted from Peru. She has a dark, chubby face, with cheeks that at first sight give her a faintly comical appearance-she looks a little like a hamster. If you meet her gaze at certain times, however, you realize that funny is not the right word at all, to describe her. When Consuelo’s dark eyes stop smiling, they transmit a very straightforward message: The only way to get me to stop fighting is to kill me.

I hired her, which meant that in just a few months, the law firm grew from a staff of two to a crowd of four, shoehorned into a work space that had been small to begin with, but which then was completely untenable.

So I looked for a new office. I found a large apartment in the old part of town, very nice indeed, but it would have to be completely renovated, from top to bottom. I liked doing renovations more or less as much as I liked going to the proctologist. I found an architect who considered himself an artist and didn’t want to bother listening to the trivial opinions of his client or waste time quibbling over such silly questions as the cost of materials or furniture, or his own fee.

The work took three long months. I should have been satisfied, but I just couldn’t get used to the new space. I couldn’t see myself as the kind of professional who had this kind of office. Before I had an office like mine, if I walked into an office like mine, I always assumed the owner was a clueless asshole. Now I was the clueless asshole, and I was having a hard time getting used to it.

I shut the heavy armored door, said good afternoon to Pasquale, said good afternoon to Maria Teresa, said good afternoon to Consuelo, and went to hide in my office. I turned on my computer, and in a few seconds the screen displayed my calendar with the appointments for that afternoon, three of them. The first was with a surveying engineer who worked for the city zoning office and had the unfortunate habit of demanding tips in order to move projects off his desk. Technically, this is known as extortion, and it’s a pretty serious crime. The financial police had conducted a search of the engineer’s office, and now he was in a state of complete panic, convinced-not without reason-that a warrant would be issued for his arrest any minute. The second appointment was with the wife of an old client of mine, a professional burglar, who had been arrested for what seemed like the thousandth time. My last appointment of the day was with my fellow lawyer Sabino Fornelli and his clients, to discuss the case that he had been unwilling to tell me about over the phone.