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lawyer?”
    “Guess.”
    “Delissanti?”
    “Congratulations. You’ll see, we won’t be bored in this trial.”
    Delissanti was a bastard. But good, bloody good. A kind of 240-pound pitbull. Nobody was keen to have him as an opponent. I’d seen him cross-examine prosecution witnesses, making them say one thing and then immediately afterwards the exact opposite. Without their even realizing it. For a few seconds I had a disturbing vision of my frail client struggling with Delissanti. It occurred to me we were really in the shit.
    I asked if I could see the papers and Alessandra told me they were in the secretariat. I could go along there, take a look at the file, and whatever I needed I could get photocopied.
    After all this good news, I stood up to shake off my unease.
    “Wait,” she said, and started rummaging in her desk drawers. After a while she took out a small wad of photocopies pinned together. She put them in an envelope and held it out to me.

    “For copies of the documents, go to the secretariat and pay the fees. These I’m giving you for free. They make for interesting reading, I think. If you want to get an idea what kind of man our friend is.”
    I took the envelope and put it in my briefcase. We said goodbye and I went off to the secretariat to make copies of the file. Thinking that everything was going really wonderfully.

10
    I went to the secretariat, started selecting the documents I might need, and after a while realized I was wasting time, just to save a bit of money on photocopies and chancery fees. So I told the clerk I wanted a complete copy of the file and I needed it before the end of the morning. I paid the fees, with a supplement to get it done quickly, and that reminded me that I hadn’t even got an advance from Signorina Fumai and her friend Sister Claudia.
    I went back to the office at lunchtime, with a whole folder full of photocopies.
    I told Maria Teresa to order me a couple of rolls and a beer for lunch from the bar on the ground floor, and when they arrived I started working and eating.
    There was nothing of particular interest in the file. I already knew the gist of it.
    As Alessandra had said, the evidence against Scianatico consisted basically of my client’s statements. There were some corroborating testimonies, two medical reports, and the phone records. In a normal trial that might even have been enough. But this wasn’t a normal trial.
    It took me no more than an hour to examine the whole file. Then I opened my briefcase, took out the yellow envelope and looked at what it contained.
    The photocopies were of a book on criminology by an American psychiatrist, about a kind of criminal I’d
never had to deal with since becoming a lawyer. Or maybe I had, without realizing it. The stalker.
    In the first pages, the author, quoting US laws, a large number of studies, and the FBI manual of criminal classification, defined a stalker as
    a predator who furtively and obstinately follows a victim according to a specific criterion and acts in such as way as to cause emotional distress and arouse a reasonable fear of being killed or suffering physical abuse, or who in a constant, voluntary and premeditated fashion follows and harasses another person.
    In essence, the author wrote, stalking is a form of terrorism directed at a single individual, with the aim of obtaining contact with that individual and dominating him. It is often an invisible crime, until it erupts into violence, or even murder. That’s when the police intervene, but by then it’s usually too late.
    The book went on to explain that many men classified as stalkers hide their own sense of dependency behind a stereotypical, ultra-masculine image, and are chronically oppressive in their dealings with women.
    Many stalkers of this kind have suffered traumas in childhood. The death of a parent, sexual, physical or psychological abuse, etc. In other words, stalkers usually have an affective imbalance, reflecting situations