“When was the last time you went shooting with your friend?”

“A few days before Gaglione’s murder.”

“What were you wearing on that occasion?”

“The jacket I had on when I was arrested.”

“You were wearing it when you fired the pistol?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Your Honour, I’ve finished.”236

Marinelli asked Gastoni if she wanted to cross-examine.

“Just a few questions, Your Honour.”

“Proceed.”

“Signor Cardace, you’ve just told us you were frequently involved in dealing drugs. Can you confirm that?”

“I dealt for a while, yes.”

“Can you tell us when you started?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Did you deal every day? Did you have a lot of customers?”

“Not every day. I sold banned substances in gyms and sometimes pills in discos.”

“Would you describe yourself as a professional drug dealer?”

At this point, an objection was inevitable.

“Your Honour, the question isn’t —”

“I withdraw the question,” Gastoni said before I could continue. She had wanted to be provocative and she’d succeeded perfectly. When she resumed she changed the subject.

“So you’re familiar with firearms?”

“I know how to shoot.”

“Have you ever committed any crimes using firearms?”

Cardace hesitated. I hoped he wouldn’t look at me in search of help. That would be worse than an admission.

“You mean a robbery?”

“Have you committed robberies?”

“Once, when I was a minor. But I wasn’t armed. I had a legal pardon.”

“And so you went to practise regularly in a quarry, with a person whose name you don’t want to tell us, but you’ve never committed any violent crimes using firearms. Is that what you want us to believe?”237

“Objection,” I said, getting to my feet.

Gastoni raised a hand; I thought I also caught an ironic smile. She said she had no further questions.

238

Lorenza

As I already said, there’s no order to my memories of those months. The events overlap and I don’t know what happened first and what later.

What’s certain is that we went to the cinema a lot, Lorenza and I. Almost always to see films she chose, first in cinemas – there were lots of them in Bari in those days – then in arenas. Often we were alone, but sometimes friends of hers came with us.

Together we saw things like Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, Liliana Cavani’s The Berlin Affair. Enough said.

We even went to the cinema on our last evening together. Although I had no idea it would be the last. The film was Runaway Train by Andrei Konchalovsky. The story was actually by Akira Kurosawa. Konchalovsky was the director of Uncle Vanya, Lorenza told me, communicating the programme for the evening.