I really did try to study during those few months, secretly cherishing the hope of a stroke of luck, a shortcut, a magical solution. The lazy man’s dream.

Then, one February morning, in the middle of the stupid decade of the 1980s, Andrea Colaianni, Sergio Carofiglio, and Guido Guerrieri set off in Andrea’s father’s old Alfa Romeo. They headed to Rome to take a battery of written examinations for the position of entry-level magistrate in the Italian judiciary.

I remember bits and pieces of that trip to Rome, an assortment of images-gas stations, an espresso and a cigarette and a piss, half an hour of impressively hard rain high in the Apennines-but the only memory I have of the whole episode is a feeling of lightness, an absence of responsibility. I had studied a little, but I hadn’t really made an investment, not the way my friends had. I had nothing to lose, and if I failed to pass, as was all too likely, no one could call me a failure.

“Why are you doing this, anyway, Guerrieri?” Andrea asked me again as we drove, after turning down the car stereo. We were listening to a mix tape I’d made for the trip; songs like “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” “I Don’t Want to Talk About It,” “Love Letters in the Sand,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Time Passages.” When Andrea asked me that question, I believe Billy Joel was playing “Piano Man.”

“I don’t really know. It’s a shot in the dark, a game, whatever. Of course, even if I luck out, I don’t think I’ll see being a magistrate as my mission in life. I don’t have your burning ambition.”