She was in the waiting room. I peered through the crack in the door and saw an imposing young woman, with a face both beautiful and austere. She can’t have been over thirty.
I told Maria Teresa to show her into my room in two minutes’ time. I took off my jacket, reached my desk, lit a cigarette, and the woman entered.
She waited for me to ask her to take a seat and in an almost accentless voice said, “Thank you, Avvocato.” With foreign clients I was always in doubt as to whether to use
From the way this woman said “Thank you, Avvocato” I knew I could address her as
When I asked her what the problem was she handed me some stapled sheets headed “Office of the Magistrate in Charge of Preliminary Investigations, Order for Precautionary Detention”.
Drugs, was my immediate thought. Her man was a pusher. Then, almost as quickly, that seemed to me impossible.
We all of us go by stereotypes. Anyone who denies it is a liar. The first stereotype had suggested the following sequence: African, precautionary detention, drugs. It is usually for this reason that Africans get arrested.
But straight away the second stereotype came into play. The woman had an aristocratic look and didn’t seem like a drug-pusher’s moll.
I was right. Her partner had not been arrested for drugs but for the kidnap and murder of a nine-year-old boy.
The charges stated were brief, bureaucratic and blood-curdling.
Abdou Thiam, Senegalese citizen, stood accused:
a.
b.
c.
Francesco, nine years old, had disappeared one afternoon while playing football on his own in a yard in front of the seaside villa of his grandparents in Monopoli, to the south of Bari.
Two days later the boy’s body had been found at the bottom of a well some twelve miles further north, in the countryside near Polignano.
The police doctor who had performed the autopsy had been unable either to confirm or to exclude the possibility that the child had been subjected to sexual violence.
I knew that police doctor. He wouldn’t have been up to saying whether a child – or even an adult or a senior citizen – had been subjected to sexual violence even if he had been eyewitness to the rape.
The investigations were in any case based from the first on the assumption of murder with a sexual motive. The paedophiliac track.
Four days after the discovery of the body the carabinieri and the public prosecutor had triumphantly announced at a press conference that the case was solved.
The culprit was Abdou Thiam, a 31-year-old Senegalese pedlar. He was in Italy with a valid residence permit and had a few previous convictions for dealing in counterfeit goods. In other words, apart from regular wares he sold fake Vuittons, fake Hogans, fake Cartiers. In summer on the beaches, in winter in the streets and markets.
According to the investigators, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Numerous witnesses had declared that they had seen him talking on the beach to little Francesco on more than one occasion and at some length. The owner of a bar very near the house belonging to the child’s grandparents had seen Abdou pass on foot only a few minutes before the boy disappeared, and without his usual sack of more or less fake merchandise.
Questioned by the carabinieri, the Senegalese who shared lodgings with Abdou had stated that during those days – he was not able to say on exactly
Another Senegalese, also a pedlar, had stated that the day after the little boy’s disappearance Abdou had not been seen on the usual beach. This too was considered – and rightly – a suspicious circumstance.
Abdou was interrogated by the public prosecutor and fell into numerous, grave contradictions. At the conclusion of the interrogation he was detained on the charges of unlawful restraint and murder. They did not accuse him of rape because there was no proof that the child had been violated.
The carabinieri had searched his room and found books for children, all of them in the original languages. Three books in the Harry Potter series,
In the detainment order which the woman had handed me across the desk, the books and the photograph were considered “significant facts in support of the circumstantial framework”.
When I raised my eyes to look at the woman – Abajaje Deheba was her name – she began to speak.
In his own country, Senegal, Abdou was a schoolteacher and earned the equivalent of about 200,000 lire a month. Selling handbags, shoes and wallets, he earned ten times as much. He spoke three languages, wanted to study psychology and wanted to stay in Italy.
She herself was an agronomist and came from Aswan, Nubia. Egypt. On the border with Sudan.
She had been in Bari for nearly a year and a half and was towards the end of a postgraduate course in the management of soil and irrigation resources. When she returned to her own country she would be employed by the government on a project to bring water to the Sahara and transform sand dunes into cultivable land.
I asked her what Bari had to do with the irrigation of the desert.
In Bari, she explained, there was an institute of advanced studies and research in agronomy. It was called the Centre Internationale Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Mediterranees, and it attracted postgraduate students from all the emerging countries of the Mediterranean. Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Maltese, Jordanians, Syrians, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians. They lived in a dormitory annexe of the institute, studied all day, and at night went swarming about the city.
She had met Abdou at a concert. In a nightspot in the old city – she told me the name but I didn’t know it – where Greeks, blacks, Asians, North Africans and even a few Italians gathered every evening.
It was a concert of the traditional Wolof music of Senegal, and Abdou was playing the drums, along with some compatriots of his.
She paused for a few seconds, her gaze fixed somewhere outside my room, outside my offices. Elsewhere.
Then she started again and I realized she was not really speaking to me.
Abdou was a teacher, she said without looking at me.
He was a teacher even though now he was selling handbags. He loved children and was incapable of doing harm to any one of them.
It was at this point that Abajaje Deheba’s firmly controlled voice cracked. That face of a Nubian princess contracted with the effort of fighting back tears.
She succeeded, but she was silent for a very long minute.
Immediately after the arrest they had hired a lawyer, and she gave me the name of one I knew all too well. On one occasion, chatting away, he had boasted of declaring an income of only eighteen million lire.
Ten million he had demanded simply to make the petition to the Provincial Appeals Court. Abdou’s friends had passed the hat round and put together nearly the whole sum. My so-called colleague was satisfied and pocketed the
