Involuntary Witness Read Online Free PDF

Senegalese, also a pedlar, had stated that the day after the little boy’s disappearance Abdou had not been seen on the usual beach. This too was considered – and rightly – a suspicious circumstance.
    Abdou was interrogated by the public prosecutor and fell into numerous, grave contradictions. At the conclusion of the interrogation he was detained on the charges of unlawful restraint and murder. They did not accuse him of rape because there was no proof that the child had been violated.
    The carabinieri had searched his room and found books for children, all of them in the original languages. Three books in the Harry Potter series, The Little Prince , Pinocchio , Doctor Dolittle and others. Most important of all, they had found and confiscated a photograph of the boy on the beach in swimming trunks.
    In the detainment order which the woman had handed me across the desk, the books and the photograph were considered “significant facts in support of the circumstantial framework”.
    When I raised my eyes to look at the woman – Abajaje Deheba was her name – she began to speak.
    In his own country, Senegal, Abdou was a
schoolteacher and earned the equivalent of about 200,000 lire a month. Selling handbags, shoes and wallets, he earned ten times as much. He spoke three languages, wanted to study psychology and wanted to stay in Italy.
    She herself was an agronomist and came from Aswan, Nubia. Egypt. On the border with Sudan.
    She had been in Bari for nearly a year and a half and was towards the end of a postgraduate course in the management of soil and irrigation resources. When she returned to her own country she would be employed by the government on a project to bring water to the Sahara and transform sand dunes into cultivable land.
    I asked her what Bari had to do with the irrigation of the desert.
    In Bari, she explained, there was an institute of advanced studies and research in agronomy. It was called the Centre Internationale Hautes Études Agronomiques Méditerranées, and it attracted postgraduate students from all the emerging countries of the Mediterranean. Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Maltese, Jordanians, Syrians, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians. They lived in a dormitory annexe of the institute, studied all day, and at night went swarming about the city.
    She had met Abdou at a concert. In a nightspot in the old city – she told me the name but I didn’t know it – where Greeks, blacks, Asians, North Africans and even a few Italians gathered every evening.
    It was a concert of the traditional Wolof music of Senegal, and Abdou was playing the drums, along with some compatriots of his.
    She paused for a few seconds, her gaze fixed somewhere outside my room, outside my offices. Elsewhere.

    Then she started again and I realized she was not really speaking to me.
    Abdou was a teacher, she said without looking at me.
    He was a teacher even though now he was selling handbags. He loved children and was incapable of doing harm to any one of them.
    It was at this point that Abajaje Deheba’s firmly controlled voice cracked. That face of a Nubian princess contracted with the effort of fighting back tears.
    She succeeded, but she was silent for a very long minute.
    Immediately after the arrest they had hired a lawyer, and she gave me the name of one I knew all too well. On one occasion, chatting away, he had boasted of declaring an income of only eighteen million lire.
    Ten million he had demanded simply to make the petition to the Provincial Appeals Court. Abdou’s friends had passed the hat round and put together nearly the whole sum. My so-called colleague was satisfied and pocketed the money. In cash and in advance. No receipt, of course.
    The petition was refused. To go to appeal again would cost twenty million. They didn’t have twenty million so Abdou had remained in prison.
    Now that the trial was approaching they had decided to come to me. A young member of the Senegalese community knew me – the