Involuntary Witness

nasty look, seemed about to say something, but then let it go.

I leaned against the doorpost, half in and half out of the room. I took out a cigarette but didn’t light it. Too hot even for that.

I felt the shirt sticking to my back with sweat, and into my brain burst a thought straight from the recesses of my childhood.

What you need is talcum powder.

When we were sweaty as children, they sprinkled us with talcum powder. If you made a fuss, because you thought you were too grown up for talcum powder, you were told that you might catch pleurisy. If you asked what pleurisy was, you were told that it was a serious illness. The tone in which they said this put paid to any wish to ask again.

Thinking thus, I realized that it was the second time in as many days that I had remembered childhood things. This was odd, because usually I never thought about my childhood. Whenever anyone asked how my childhood had been, I always answered at random, sometimes saying I’d had a happy childhood, sometimes that I’d been a sad little boy. Sometimes, when I wanted to make an impression, I said I’d been a strange child. It gave me an aura of glamour, I thought. We special people have often been strange children, was the implication.

The truth was that I remembered next to nothing of my childhood and had no wish to think about it. I had occasionally tried really hard to remember, and it made me sad. So I gave up. I didn’t care for sadness, I preferred to avoid it.

Now I looked with amazement at these fragments of memory popping out from goodness knows where. They made me slightly melancholy and gave me a sense of astonishment and curiosity. But not sadness, not what had previously made me look away.

I meditated on this further change in me, and a really cold shiver ran up my spine to the roots of the hair on the nape of my neck and down my arms. Even in that heat.

I lit that cigarette.

I saw Abdou arriving from way down the corridor.

He came up to me and gave me his hand, with a motion of his head that looked to me like a little bow. It seemed only natural to reply in kind, but then I felt embarrassed.

He had a newspaper with him, and stood aside for me to enter the room.

We sat down, both of us avoiding the ever-present, broken-seated armchair. Abdou handed me the newspaper with a kind of smile.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It talks about you, Avvocato.” The tone of his voice had changed.

I took the paper. It was three days old. It mentioned the hearing of the previous Monday and there was even a photo of me. I hadn’t seen it, let alone read it: for a year now I hadn’t bought the papers.

KEY WITNESS WAVERS IN LITTLE FRANCESCO’S DEATH TRIAL

A dramatic hearing yesterday in the trial of Senegalese citizen Abdou Thiam for the kidnap and murder of little Francesco Rubino. Evidence was given by several of the key witnesses for the prosecution, including Antonio Renna, owner of a bar in Capitolo, the seaside district of Monopoli from which the child disappeared.

In the course of the preliminary inquiries Renna stated that he had seen the accused passing his bar, very close to the scene of the disappearance and only a few minutes before the disappearance itself. Interrogated in court by the public prosecutor, the witness confirmed these statements with a great show of confidence.

The sensation occurred in the course of the spectacular cross-examination conducted by the counsel defending the Senegalese, Avvocato Guido Guerrieri. After putting a number of apparently innocuous questions, from the answers to which there emerged, however, a patently hostile attitude on the part of Renna towards non-European immigrants, Avvocato Guerrieri showed the witness a number of photographs of black men, asking him if they portrayed anyone he recognized. The bar owner said no, and it was then that the defence counsel played his trump card: two of those photographs were in fact of the defendant, Abdou Thiam. The very person whom the witness Renna had with such confidence declared having seen pass his bar on that tragic afternoon. The photographs were attached by the court as documentary evidence.

Public Prosecutor Cervellati was forced to re-examine the witness with a view to explaining the details of his deposition. The witness explained that he had not seen the accused since the year before, when the events took place, that he was certain about his statements and had not recognized the accused in the photos because it was so long ago and the photographs were badly printed. The latter were, in fact, imperfectly reproduced colour photocopies.

The re-examination conducted by the public prosecutor to some extent repaired the damage, but it is unquestionable that in the course of this trial Avvocato Guerrieri has scored several points in his favour in what is undoubtedly a very difficult trial for the defence.

Interrogated before the bar owner were the police doctor and Sergeant-Major Lorusso, the detective who conducted the inquiries. The cross-examination of Lorusso also had its tense moments, when the defence hinted at shortcomings and oversights in the course of the searches carried out at the lodgings of the Senegalese.

The trial continues tomorrow with the parents and grandparents of the little boy. Fixed for next Monday is the interrogation of the accused and then, except in the event of eventual applications to produce fresh evidence, the trial will proceed to the closing argument.

I read the article twice. Spectacular cross-examination. I could not suppress a feeling of childish pleasure at reading those words and seeing my photograph in the paper. Occasionally during other trials I had got a mention and even had my photograph printed.

But in this case it was different. I was the protagonist of the whole article.

When had they taken that photo? It wasn’t very recent, perhaps a couple of years old, but I couldn’t remember the occasion. I looked fairly good in it, even though, all told, I thought I looked better in real life.

After a second or two of such reflections I felt a complete idiot, put down the paper and turned to Abdou.

He was watching me. From his expression it was clear that now he was convinced that we would pull it off. He had read the paper and was now thinking that perhaps he had been lucky, that he was in the hands of the right lawyer. I asked myself whether I had better tell him that despite the fact that things had gone well in the hearing, the odds were still heavily against us. I concluded that there was no reason to do so. I therefore only nodded and gave a slight shrug. It could mean anything or nothing.

“Right, Abdou. We must now put our minds to the next hearing. Your interrogation.”

He nodded and said nothing. He was attentive but it was not up to him to talk. It was up to me.

“I am now going to tell you how the thing works, and how you must behave. If something I say is not clear to you, please interrupt me and tell me so at once.”

Another nod. “Of course.”

“You will first be examined by the public prosecutor. While he is asking you questions, look him in the face. Attentively, not with an air of challenge. Do not answer until he has finished the question. When he has finished, turn towards the bench and speak to the court. Never get into an argument with the public prosecutor. Is that clear?”

“When the prosecutor is speaking I look at him, when I am speaking I look at the judges.”

“OK. Obviously the same thing holds true when you are questioned by the counsel for the civil party, or when I question you myself. You must make it clear to the court that you are listening to the questions before answering them. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Wait for the questions to end before answering. Especially when I am doing the questioning. We must not seem to be putting on an act, with every question and answer memorized. You see what I’m trying to say?”