He didn’t finish the sentence. The blow, a very fast one that came from nowhere and was practically unstoppable, caught him on his left cheek. It produced a noise like a sink being unblocked – in a comic book, they would have put a balloon with SPLAT in bold type. In other words, it was a strong, sudden, loud slap. Cardace was stunned. The last thing he would have expected was being slapped in the lawyers’ room of the prison, by a woman, in front of his own counsel. The only thought that went through my head was that if a prison officer had come in just then, we would have been in trouble. That didn’t seem to bother Annapaola.

“Listen to me, arsehole, and listen good. I don’t know if you killed your friend Gaglione. I don’t know and I prefer not to know. If I still have a doubt, maybe I can continue to work on this case. But you need to get one thing clear: we’re your only hope. Read my lips: we’re your only hope. If the gentleman you have in front of you,” she said, pointing at me with a gesture I would normally have considered somewhat theatrical but which now seemed perfectly appropriate to the situation, “shows up in court without anything to show, for you it’ll be like going in front of a firing squad. Obviously, if you killed Gaglione, and don’t have the guts to admit it but want to atone for your crime, well, then you’ve made the right choice: you’ll have all the atonement you want. If you want to make an appointment outside this place, consider dates after 2030.”106

Cardace had turned serious. He looked alert now. It was as if the slap had aroused him from his lethargy. Maybe it really had.

“Smoking’s not allowed in here,” he said incongruously, after a sigh. His face was two different colours: pale on one side, bright red on the other.

“Do you have cigarettes?” she asked him.

“I quit.”

“I roll them. If you like, I can make two and we’ll stand by the window.”

He nodded. Annapaola took out tobacco and papers and prepared the cigarettes with rapid gestures, like a conjuror. They stood up, went to the window, opened it and smoked together, in silence, for a couple of minutes. It was Cardace who spoke first.

“If I tell you who the person is, I’ll get him in trouble. The gun even has the serial number rubbed away. Plus, we did … things together.”

“We’re not the police, we’re not magistrates, we don’t have to put anything in writing and we don’t have to report to anyone. You tell us, and we’ll decide, together with you, what to do with the information, in case it’s useful to your defence.”