Free A Walk in the Dark by Gianrico Carofiglio

on the mobile, when from the other end I heard Margherita’s voice.
    “Yes?”
    An offhand tone, the tone of someone who’s leaving home to go to work. I was silent for a few moments, because suddenly I didn’t know what to say, and I had a lump in my throat.
    “Who is that?”
    “Me.”
    “Oh. I was just on my way out, you caught me at the door. What is it? Are you in Lecce?”
    “I wanted to tell you . . .”
    “What?”

    “I wanted to tell you . . .”
    “Guido, what is it? Are you all right? Has something happened?” There was a slight note of alarm in her voice now.
    “No, no. Nothing’s happened. I didn’t go to Lecce, the trial’s been postponed.”
    I broke off, but this time she didn’t ask anything. She waited in silence.
    “Margherita” – as I spoke, I realized I never called her by her name – “you remember that time you sent me a message on my mobile . . .”
    She didn’t let me finish. “I remember. I wrote that meeting you was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me. It wasn’t true. It was the most wonderful.”
    “I wanted to tell you the same thing. Well, not exactly the same . . . but I wanted to tell you that I can’t explain it to you now . . .” I was stammering.
    “Guido, I love you. As I’ve never loved anyone in my life.”
    I stopped stammering. “Thank you.”
    “Thank you? You’re a strange guy, Guerrieri.”
    “It’s true. Shall we eat out tonight?”
    “Your treat?”
    “Yes. Bye.”
    “Bye. See you tonight.”
    She hung up. I was standing on the corner of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Via Sparano. The shops were opening, trucks were unloading goods, people were walking with their heads down.
    Thank you, I said again, to myself, and went on my way.

15
    The next morning I went straight from home to the courthouse, for a trial. The charge: living off immoral earnings.
    My client was a former model and porn film actress, accused of organizing a prostitution ring. She and two other women were the go-betweens for the girls and their clients. She used the telephone and the Internet and took a commission on all completed transactions. She herself serviced a few very select, very wealthy clients. She didn’t run a brothel or anything like that. She simply connected supply with demand. The girls worked from home, nobody was exploited, nobody got hurt.
    With a commitment surely worthy of a better cause, the Public Prosecutor’s department and the police had spent months investigating this dangerous organization. They’d staked out the girls’ apartments, and picked up the clients on the way out. More than that, they’d intercepted phone calls and e-mails.
    By the end of the investigation, the three organizers were in custody. According to the charge,
    the very clear social danger represented by the three accused, their ability to make confident use, for the purposes of their criminal activities, of the most sophisticated tools of modern technology (mobile phones, Internet, etc.) and their inclination to repeat this antisocial behaviour
makes it essential to impose on them the severest form of custodial sentence, in other words imprisonment.
    Nadia had been in prison for two months, then under house arrest for another two months, and then she’d been released. In the early stages of the case, she’d been defended by a colleague of mine, but then she’d come to me, without explaining why she wanted to change lawyers.
    She was an elegant, intelligent woman. That morning I had to plead her case using the shortened procedure, in other words, before the judge from the preliminary hearing.
    Virtually the only evidence against her came from the telephone and e-mail intercepts. Based on these intercepts it was obvious that Nadia and her two friends had – according to the charges –
    organized, coordinated and managed an unspecified but undoubtedly large number of women dedicated to prostitution, acting as intermediaries between the