“He said it didn’t matter if I was guilty or innocent,” he went on. “The problem was that it looked as if I was guilty. Trials aren’t about innocence or guilt, he kept saying. They’re about who wins and who loses.”

Precisely. I felt as if I could hear this refrain of Costamagna’s. Innocence doesn’t interest us, and the same is true of guilt. A phrase that could also be understood in a technical sense: that what counts in trials is the algebra of the evidence. If it’s right, there’s a guilty verdict; if it’s wrong, there’s an acquittal. Except that for Costamagna, the phrase summed up a conception of our profession and, more generally, of the world. Moral categories and dilemmas don’t interest us. What matters is winning.

“Okay. You didn’t kill Gaglione. Without sharing the opinion of your previous counsel, I do have to tell you that the evidence produced at the trial is very serious. The ruling is quite persuasive and we’ll have to find something concrete to propose to the appeal court as an alternative. I want you to tell me about the nature of your relationship with Gaglione and then, in detail, how you spent the day of the murder.”

He nodded, and his eyes grew a little less empty, came back to life. He started speaking and continued for half an hour.

The two of them had met in a gym. Both practised mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, violent disciplines that are now mostly seen on television and in tournaments. Gaglione had started supplying Cardace with synthetic drugs, which he pushed in discos around the province, and banned bodybuilding substances, sold in gyms to stupid kids who wanted to see their muscles grow in a few weeks.72

Cardace had never known who Gaglione got his supplies from. That isn’t the kind of question you ask in that world. You know what the other person decides to tell you, he said in the vaguely sententious tone of someone who wants to show he follows a system of adult rules.

In the days preceding the murder, there had been a problem with some substances sold to bodybuilders by Cardace (who had got them from Gaglione). The owner of a gym had complained, claiming that he’d had the substances analysed and had ascertained that their composition didn’t correspond to what he’d paid for. So he’d asked for his money back. That morning Cardace had called Gaglione to complain in his turn and find out what had happened.