Gianrico Carofiglio - Reasonable Doubts

She smoked it in silence. Savouring every mouthful and letting the smoke waft away into the surrounding darkness. When she’d finished, she closed the window and shivered, as if only just becoming aware of the cold.

“I’m hungry, but I don’t want to be cooped up in a restaurant.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Of course, like all men who live alone, your larder is full of tins and crap like that.”

I told her she shouldn’t believe the stereotypes. No, I didn’t have a larder full of tins. I had fresh, healthy food in the fridge and if I wanted I could even whip up a quick dinner.

So she said all right, let’s go to your place. Ruthlessly suppressing the qualms of my conscience, it struck me that, when you got down to it, there was nothing wrong with the idea. Nothing had to happen. And anyway, it wasn’t my fault. I mean, she’d made all the moves. She’d waited for me outside my office, taken me for a drive, suggested coming to my place. It really wasn’t my fault. If it had been up to me, nothing would have happened.

A heap of bullshit that stayed with me all the way to my apartment.

“What’s that?” It was the first thing she said as soon as she stepped inside the door. She was referring to the punchball hanging in the middle of the room which served as both the hall and the living room. A somewhat bizarre thing to have as part of the furnishings, I admit.

“One of my neuroses. Every evening I come home and punch it for half an hour. Look at it this way. It’s better than getting drunk, taking drugs or beating the wife and kids. Which I don’t have anyway.”

“It’s nice here. Do you like books or are you just a messy person?”

She was referring to the books piled around the sofa and strewn all over the room. I’d never thought about it, but I told her I liked to have them on the floor because they kept me company.

She spotted the kitchen and headed straight for it.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m looking to see what’s in the fridge. I’ll make something.”

With a certain self-importance, I said I’d already sampled her cooking and now, whether she liked it or not, it was her turn to sample mine. She had accepted the risk when she came to my apartment. If she liked, she could stay with me in the kitchen while I was cooking but it was strictly forbidden for her to touch anything.

There wasn’t very much there. I’d exaggerated a bit when I mentioned having lots of fresh food. But I had what I needed to make my speciality. I called it spaghetti al fumo negli occhi. Meaning the cook – in this case, me – throws smoke in people’s eyes, tries to appear more skilful than he really is.

“I’ll make pasta. That’s the most I can rustle up without advance warning.”

Even with advance warning, to tell the truth. But I didn’t say that.

“Pasta and wine are fine. What are you making?”

“You’ll see,” I said, and immediately felt ridiculous. Who the hell do you think you are, Guerrieri? This woman is a professional chef, you idiot. Just get on with it and cook the food.

I fried garlic, oil and chillies in a pan. While the spaghetti was boiling I grated some pecorino, chopped some basil, and stoned and sliced a few black olives. I put the pasta, very al dente, into the frying pan and added the pecorino and the rest.

Natsu said she liked watching me cooking, which made me tingle all over. A nice but dangerous sensation. I didn’t reply, quickly laid the table, told her to sit down, and carried over the brimming plates.

We ate, drank and chatted about nothing, with the punchball standing guard over us.

When we had finished eating, I put on Shangri-la by Mark Knopfler. Then I took my glass and went and sat down on the sofa. She stayed on her chair. When she realized what the disc was, she said she liked ‘Postcards from Paraguay’ a lot. I put the glass down on the floor, reached for the controls and fast-forwarded to track 10.

She came and sat down next to me, on the sofa, just as the song was starting.

One thing was leading to the next, the voice sang.

Spot on, I thought.

It was the last rational thought I had that night.

I didn’t have to be in court the next day. I sent Maria Teresa to the courthouse to get some things sorted out at the clerk of the court’s office. Not that any of them were urgent, but I needed to be alone.

I had a few things to think over. Quite a few things.

In the first place, I felt like a shit for what had happened last night. It wasn’t that I’d been taken by surprise, or that I hadn’t had a pretty good idea what might happen. If I’d had a modicum of moral sense, I told myself, I wouldn’t have taken Natsu home with me.

I wondered what I would have said if someone had told me a story like that and asked me what I thought. I mean: what I thought about a lawyer who fucked the wife of one of his clients while that client was in prison.

I would have said that lawyer was a piece of shit.

Part of me was looking for excuses for what had happened, and even finding a few. But overall, my inner prosecutor was winning this case hands down. He was so far out in front that I felt like asking him where the hell he’d been last night when I needed him.

I remembered an after-dinner conversation with some colleagues, some years earlier. We’d had a lot to eat and drink. Some of us were little more than boys, others older, people we’d trained with.

I don’t know who told the story. It was a true story, he said, which had happened a few years earlier.

There was this guy in prison, accused of murder. An almost hopeless case. He needed a lawyer. A very good one, considering the situation he was in.

But he didn’t have the money to pay for a good one. In fact he didn’t even have money to pay for a bad one. What he did have was a beautiful wife. One evening she went to see an old, famous and very good lawyer, who was also a notorious womanizer. She told him she wanted him to defend her husband but didn’t have the money to pay him. So she suggested payment in kind. He accepted, fucked her – repeatedly, in the office and outside – defended the guy and managed to get him acquitted.

End of story, start of discussion.

“What would you have done?”

Various answers. There were some who thought it hadn’t been very good form to do it in the office. Good manners mattered, damn it, whatever the situation. It would have been better to go to a hotel or somewhere else. Others, though, considered that fucking her on the desk was consistent with the nature of the contract they’d entered into. A few timidly expressed ethical qualms, and were howled down.

The young Guerrieri said he would have defended the prisoner for free, without payment in kind, and someone told him he was an idiot and would sing a different tune if something like that ever happened.

Whoever said that was right.

And then I thought of Macri, and the idea that had come to me the night before. On how I could use the information Colaianni had passed on to me to help Paolicelli out of the mess he was in. Gradually, with my mind going back and forth like a ping-pong ball between these two thoughts – what a shit I was, and what to do with my honourable colleague Macri to save my oblivious client Paolicelli – the professional side gained the upper hand.

My idea was to call him as a witness.

It was a crazy idea, because you don’t call a lawyer as a witness for the defence. Apart from the fact that there could be an objection on the grounds of lawyer-client confidentiality, calling a lawyer is something that just isn’t done, and that’s it.

I’d never actually seen it done. I didn’t even know if having previously been the defendant’s counsel constituted a formal impediment to being a witness – what they called a conflict of interest.