My first thought was that I had no particular desire to go to a gay party, but he hadn’t actually said it was a gay party, he was only trying to be nice. I felt ashamed of my reactionary mistrust, and I told myself it was a good idea to start seeing new people. In short, at the end of these few seconds of reflection, I replied thank you, I’d be happy to come. Fantastic, he said. He’d pick me up from my place around 9.30. He asked me to remind him of my address – which he’d never known, as far as I recalled – and said goodbye.

59

6

On Tuesday – after a very quick trip to Rome to present an appeal at the Supreme Court – Consuelo, Annapaola and Tancredi met with me in the office. All three of them had read the ruling and it was clear after a few minutes that all three were convinced Lorenza’s son was guilty. The worst of it was that I was inclined to think the same.

“The kid’s a lowlife,” Tancredi said when I asked him for his opinion.

“Why?”

“Have you seen his record?”

“Yes, he was put on probation as a minor, for armed robbery. In the end, the case was declared null and void.”

“My colleagues dealt with it – my former colleagues at the Squad. I dropped by and they were kind enough to give me copies of the arrest transcript and the statements of the victim, a lady who’d made a withdrawal at the post office.”

“And what emerges from that?”

“What emerges is that, like I said, your new client is a lowlife. Or at least he was when he was a minor. He and someone else who wasn’t caught, whose name he didn’t give up – which suggests he was already a fully formed criminal before he was eighteen – were apparently in the post office watching out for people who were making cash transactions or collecting their pensions. They saw this lady who’d 60withdrawn a substantial sum, followed her home, grabbed her at the front door of her building and stuck a knife to her throat. What particularly marks them down as two nasty pieces of work is what they said to her.”

“What was that?”

“‘Keep your eyes down, bitch, and don’t look us in the face. If you look us in the face you’re dead.’ Something along those lines.”

“Nice. How much did they take from her?”

“Eight hundred euros.”

“And then what happened?”

“They were unlucky. Or at least, he was unlucky, because the other guy managed to get away. Two guys from the street crimes team were passing on motorbikes. They heard screams, saw two kids running and followed them. One they caught, and that was our client. Or rather, your client.”

“What happened to the money?”