Free Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox by Raffaele Sollecito

and on the spur of the moment, I couldn’t say. Was November 1 a Tuesday or Thursday? I asked. Because I knew she worked at Le Chic on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
    I noticed a calendar in the room and asked if I could consult it.
    “Don’t touch the calendar!” one of them said sharply. The suddenness of this startled me.
    Was November 1 the day Amanda spent the evening out and I stayed home? (I was thinking of Halloween.) Or was it the nightafter that? Somehow I had the two muddled in my head and I couldn’t sort them out. As the interrogation continued, I offered both scenarios.
    “Watch out,” they said, “you are getting yourself in trouble. You’re telling us different things. You need to understand the seriousness of the situation.”
    I thought awhile before answering. “If it was a Thursday, she probably went to work.”
    “You don’t know what she did, do you? Come on, tell us everything.”
    Napoleoni was in the room for this part of the conversation. Without warning, she turned on me with venom in her voice. “What did you do?” she demanded. “You need to tell us. You don’t know what that cow, that whore, got up to!”
    I couldn’t believe what was coming out of her mouth. I was only dimly beginning to realize what she and the others were implying. Amanda, the murderer? It seemed too crazy to believe.
    Amanda, meanwhile, was waiting for me. And waiting. She had brought some homework into the Questura but was having a hard time concentrating. She was stiff and achy from fatigue and thought she might feel better if she stretched a bit.
    She was by an elevator, away from the main waiting area, but she was seen, of course. Ivan Raffo, a young policeman who had come up from Rome, remarked how flexible she was. And Amanda, allowing herself to be charmed in the worst of all circumstances, decided to show him what she could do.
    It was a disastrous idea. When I first heard about what happened next, I understood that Amanda, being Amanda, was mostly interested in being open and friendly to the officer. But I alsorealized she had not been thinking smartly, to say the least. Later, in court, Chief Inspector Rita Ficarra described her shock at walking by and seeing Amanda doing cartwheels and splits. In a police station. In the context of a murder investigation. At least two other senior officers saw her too.
    Shortly after, Ficarra and her colleague Lorena Zugarini told Amanda they needed to have a frank conversation. And so began her own long night of the soul.
    *  *  *
    As my interrogators ratcheted up the pressure, they asked me to empty my pockets. I knew immediately this was not a good development. I pulled out a handkerchief, my wallet, my cell phone, and at last, with all eyes on me, the pocketknife.
    One of them picked it up with a piece of cloth and took it swiftly out of the room. I tried to explain that it was something I just carried around with me, but that wouldn’t wash. Even I knew things were no longer all right.
    “Don’t I have the right to a lawyer?” I asked.
    They said no.
    “Can’t I at least call my father?”
    “You can’t call anyone.” They ordered me to put my cell phone on the desk.
    People came in and out of the room in a great flurry of activity. At one point, I found myself alone with just one of the policemen. He leaned into me and hissed, “If you try to get up and leave, I’ll beat you into a pulp and kill you. I’ll leave you in a pool of blood.”
    The evening was described very differently by the police officers in court. They denied that I ever asked for a lawyer, or that I was putunder duress of any kind. Daniele Moscatelli, the cop from Rome, said, “Whatever he wanted, water or whatever, was made fully available to him.”
    But, I can assure you, I was scared out of my wits, and completely bewildered. I had been brought up to think the police were honest defenders of public safety. My sister was a member of the carabinieri, no less! Now it seemed to me