After having – as they say – paid his debt to society, he worked as a chef in various places around Italy. Then he returned to Bari and opened a restaurant of his own. He cooks the vegetables he grows in his own kitchen garden and the fish brought to him by his fishermen friends – some of whom are former colleagues from the old days. In spite of the name, no meat is eaten at Il piede di porco – The Pig’s Trotter – on principle.

Tancredi once told me that robbers are the category of criminal with the highest reoffending rate. No sooner do they leave prison, even after long periods of detention, than they start all over again. They need the adrenaline that comes from dangerous acts; they rob for the pleasure of the sporting gesture, more even than for the money. Orazio seems to be an exception to the rule; to satisfy his need for adrenaline, he’s taken up free climbing. It isn’t clear, says Tancredi, if he 89deliberately replaced one thing with another, but from every indicator it appears that he’s stayed clean.

However, his past being known to everyone, nobody ever dreams of asking him for money by way of protection, insurance, help to prisoners’ families or anything like that. Let’s put it like this: he’s found a legal way to make use of his far from spotless track record.

The restaurant is situated over in Via Amendola, near the Mungivacca district. By the time I arrived, after an hour’s walk, Tancredi and Annapaola were already there.

“So, how did your interviews go?” Tancredi asked.

“With Marinelli, fine. We agreed that we’d go to the hearing, and in the preliminary phase I’ll make a request for an extension. He’s promised me a month. It was pretty much as I figured: he doesn’t want it to come out how badly Costamagna defended Cardace at the trial. I discovered Costamagna was actually a cousin of his wife’s.”

“And what about with your client?” Annapaola asked.

When she doesn’t like the clients, they’re my clients. In other cases, they’re ours. I didn’t respond to the provocation.

“So-so. My first impression was very bad. Then we talked and it improved.”

“Yes, when we first meet a person,” she said, “we always get a clear, irrational but reliable intuition of how they are. And then we think it over and everything gets mixed up.”

“Damn, this is high-level stuff, worthy of a psychology textbook. I must write it down. Anyway, just to satisfy you, I will say that in the final part of our interview he turned into an arsehole again.”

Having exhausted our skirmishing, we ate the raw seafood antipasto, which was very good, and then got back to the subject in hand.90

“So, did the kid tell you anything useful?” Tancredi asked.