The Deliverance of Evil (44 page)

Corvu shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said firmly.

But Balistreri had made up his mind. “I bought you a ticket. You’re leaving tonight. Natalya’s expecting you. In two hours, my brother, Alberto, is going to come by and give you a ride to the airport.”

I have to protect you right now, Graziano, because this isn’t over. Indeed, it’s only just begun.

Corvu raised his head. He looked shaken. “Thank you, sir,” he whispered, getting up. Then the ever duty-conscious Corvu said, “I checked the list of alibis you asked for and gave it to Mastroianni. If it still matters.”

Piccolo and Mastroianni hugged Corvu. Balistreri put a congenial arm around his shoulders and walked him to the exit. He was trembling.

Out on the sidewalk, something occurred to Balistreri. He turned to Corvu and asked, “How much time did Pasquali have from the time he saw Hagi to when he tried to shoot?”

“Less than a second.”

Less than a second. He already had his gun drawn.

. . . .

In the hot afternoon, Balistreri went to Regina Coeli for the second time that day. This time, he didn’t bring Piccolo.

Attorney Massimo Morandi was waiting for Balistreri outside the interrogation room. “I’m sorry about Pasquali.”

Balistreri looked at him.

You’re only sorry about your own reputation, you son of a bitch.

“What happened was unfortunate, but it does clearly confirm what I told you last time.”

“That I should have stayed in Dubai?”

“You now have the perpetrator. My client will confess to everything.”

“Really? Will he tell me why he faked an argument in order to kill poor Camarà?”

Morandi turned pale despite his tanning-booth complexion.

“Be satisfied with what is obviously the truth,” Morandi said icily.

Balistreri resisted the temptation to lay his hands on him or else they would have relieved him of the investigation; this time he wanted to get to the truth. He congratulated himself on his self-control. He turned his back and went into the room, Morandi following.

The public prosecutor was already there. He muttered a few words to the lawyer and then turned to Balistreri.

“Mr. Morandi has already told me that his client will plead guilty to all the murders, including the murder of Camarà. He’ll give a full and detailed confession.”

Hagi was brought in wearing handcuffs. His black eyes rested calmly on those of Balistreri. He had grown thinner since he had last seen him seven months earlier and was coughing much more. But his eyes now burned even fiercer above the huge dark bags beneath. The resemblance to a demon was now complete.

After the preliminaries, the public prosecutor let Balistreri take over the questioning.

“Let’s start from the beginning, Mr. Hagi.”

“Fine. Let’s start with Samantha Rossi.”

Balistreri shook his head. “No, Mr. Hagi. The beginning was in 1982.”

Hagi nodded with a smile. “Elisa Sordi?” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

The words surprised everyone: the public prosecutor, Morandi, the corrections officers. Only Balistreri failed to react.

Hagi said with obvious contempt, “You did quite the job on that case, didn’t you, Captain Balistreri?”

“Please just answer the questions without making any extraneous comments, Mr. Hagi,” the public prosecutor said.

Morandi raised a hand. “Hold on just a minute. I need to confer with my client. I don’t know anything about the connection to the Elisa Sordi case.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hagi said placidly. “Your job is to ensure that these gentlemen don’t distort what I say. I want everything to be extremely clear, and we’ve got some people in this room who always seem to make a mess of things and have been doing so since 1982.”

“When did you meet Elisa Sordi?” Balistreri asked, ignoring Hagi’s remark.

“I don’t remember exactly—a little before the summer of 1982. I went to the residential complex on Via della Camilluccia, where Alina introduced me to a young man. Elisa was with that young man.”

“What was the man’s name?”

Hagi shrugged. “I don’t remember. I didn’t take much notice of him. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her, on the other hand.”

He’s trying to provoke you. Stay cool.

“Why did you go to Via della Camilluccia?” Balistreri asked.

“I’d gotten some work through Alina. I was hired to organize a trip to Auschwitz for a woman there.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“She was from northern Europe. Her husband was an Italian nobleman with a very long last name.”

“All right. We’ll come back to that. You met Elisa Sordi. And then?”

“What would you like to know exactly?”

Balistreri saw the public prosecutor and Morandi shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

“What happened next?”

Hagi stared at him brazenly. “Did you not get that there was an O on her left breast? You were young then, but surely you’ve figured it out by now, haven’t you?”

Morandi almost fell off his chair. The public prosecutor jumped to his feet and began pacing.

“Was that your first letter?” Balistreri asked impassively, as if they were talking about the weather.

“I took her body out into the middle of the river on a small boat. I was going to weigh it down with rocks. I figured even the rats would want a piece of her.”

The public prosecutor and the prison officers looked ready to go off. Balistreri gestured to them to calm down. Hagi’s game was clear: he wanted to drag everyone down to his level.

“And why did you hide such a work of art with so much care?” Balistreri asked.

“I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t left traces of organic material or fingerprints on the girl. So I let the river see to it.”

Balistreri came to the most complicated point. “Alina found out everything, didn’t she?”

Hagi had a coughing fit. Balistreri saw some blood on his handkerchief. Then the coughing subsided.

“I’ve already told you I have no intention of talking about my wife. I would never have hurt her.”

“I find that hard to believe, Mr. Hagi. I know what you did to the two men who killed your brother in Romania.”

Hagi shrugged. “I couldn’t care less what you believe, Balistreri.”

“How many women did you kill in the twenty-four years between the murders of Elisa and Samantha?”

“None,” Hagi said. “And I have no reason to lie to you. Alina’s death changed my life.”

“Then why did you kill Samantha a year ago?”

“Because a year ago I was diagnosed with lung cancer.”

The public prosecutor looked at Balistreri, who motioned to him to hold on and continued.

“We can verify that later. You found out you were ill, so you fell back into your bad habits? I don’t believe that.”

Hagi wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “If you want more answers, take these cuffs off me. I want a cigarette.”

The public prosecutor looked at Balistreri, who nodded consent. A corrections officer removed the handcuffs. Balistreri offered Hagi a cigarette and lit it for him with the Bella Blu lighter. Then Hagi picked up his story again.

“Alina knew the truth. She was too smart for her own good. I beat her, because she was going to report me, and for a while she let it drop. Then Anna Rossi began to interfere. She saw Alina’s bruises, and she suggested that Alina leave me and go and stay with her. That terrible evening I tried to convince her to stay, but Alina ran away on the moped to go stay with that bitch.”

Another coughing fit, more blood on the handkerchief. Hagi’s face was contorted with rage and hatred.

“I never forget a friend, but I also never forget anyone who crosses me. It gave me real pleasure to have her daughter killed by those three Roma. But what really pleases me is the thought of how Anna Rossi is going to feel when you inform her that she was responsible for her daughter’s death.”

Balistreri was extremely thankful he hadn’t brought Giulia Piccolo with him. No one could have managed to hold her back from tearing Hagi apart. Hatred filled the room as if it were a layer of poisonous gas. Morandi held his head between his hands, incredulous, while the public prosecutor was no longer even taking notes, his face parchment white. The prison officers appeared ready to jump on Hagi and take him apart right there in the room.

“Why did you kill Nadia? What did she have to do with anything?”

“Nadia could have been Alina’s identical twin. I wanted revenge on my wife, symbolically at least. She ruined my life by dying like that.”

A well-rehearsed reply, far-fetched. Don’t reply.

“Your wife ruined your life because she’d discovered you were a murderer, and she died running away from you. Whose fault was that, Mr. Hagi?”

“A wife must never betray her husband. She must remain with him come what may. It was the atmosphere at San Valente parish that turned her against me, her uncle the cardinal and the joke that is the Catholic religion.”

“You took a big risk killing Nadia after Camarà had seen you together in the private lounge and she’d taken the lighter from there—the same one I just used to light your cigarette. Why not kill someone else?”

Hagi hesitated. “She was the spitting image of Alina. I wasn’t going to find anyone who looked so much like her. Anyway, it was easy enough to cut up that fucking nigger.”

“What about Selina Belhrouz and Ornella Corona? What did your vendetta have to do with them?”

Hagi coughed for a long time, spitting blood into his handkerchief.

“You didn’t like the V and the I?”

He was avoiding certain topics. Balistreri decided to try another tactic.

“We have five letters, Mr. Hagi, beginning in 1982: O, R, E, V, and I. Can you explain what those mean?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Hagi said. “You have to take my wife, Alina, into account.”

“What’s her letter?”

“Her initial, A.”

“O, A, R, E, V, I. What does it mean?”

Hagi stared at him with malevolent eyes. “I see nothing that I say surprises you, Balistreri. I’d like to give you something new to think about.”

Balistreri understood beforehand what Hagi was about to say. In that brief moment he was certain he was facing not a simple serial killer but a merciless plot, and that they had no idea where it began and where it would end.

“You’re going to like the next letter, Balistreri.”

. . . .

Fiorella Romani, twenty-three, granddaughter of Gina Giansanti, the former concierge at Via della Camilluccia, newly graduated and recently employed by a bank, had left her home in the suburbs at seven thirty that morning, the same as every day, to take the Metro to the office. Except that she never got there. At six that evening, seeing that she wasn’t home, her mother Franca called her cell phone repeatedly, but it was switched off. After calling all her daughter’s friends, she decided to report her missing.

“Too many hours have gone by,” Mastroianni said at the start of the meeting later in Balistreri’s office. “Hagi probably kidnapped her at seven thirty, as soon as she left home, and killed her right away. Then he buried her in the woods or dumped her in the river or down a well. Then he went to Casilino 900 to kill Pasquali.”

Balistreri listened in silence, smoking and leafing through Mastroianni’s report on the search of Hagi’s house. They had found the Invisible Man’s disguises—wigs, sunglasses, hats.

“I’ve got Corvu’s list, too,” Mastroianni said. He handed over the list of alibis that Corvu had checked on Balistreri’s request.

It was the check on the alibis he’d asked for.

In order to avoid any trouble they hadn’t directly questioned the count, or his son, let alone Cardinal Alessandrini, on the murders of the previous year. Corvu had confined himself to checking the official record.

In the Nairobi newspapers were photographs of the opening of the new hospital wing, which had taken place on December 25 in the presence of Manfredi, Count Tommaso, Manfredi’s colleagues, and the local authorities. Corvu had even checked that the only direct flight from Europe that could have taken Manfredi to Nairobi in the early morning left Zurich at midnight and that the last flight from Rome to Zurich on the evening of December 24 left at six, before Nadia was kidnapped. There was no sign of Manfredi in Rome either on the passenger lists or in passport control. So while Nadia was being killed, Manfredi was in Nairobi. On the other hand, for the murders of Samantha, Selina, and Ornella, neither the count nor Manfredi had a secure alibi.

Corvu had also noted Cardinal Alessandrini’s movements in the Vatican for official events during the afternoon and evening of December 24, but it wasn’t possible to check if he had been temporarily absent. On the day of Samantha Rossi’s death he was in Madrid, but it wasn’t known when he had come back. And on the evening of Ornella Corona’s death he was at home alone.

Ajello, Paul, and Valerio had been questioned. They had seemed more worried and surprised than angered. Paul and Valerio were together in San Valente on the evening of December 24 for the orphans’ Christmas Eve dinner; from at least eight o’clock onward their movements could be traced. Ajello was certainly at the opening of an ENT nightclub in Milan the night Samantha was killed, and there were many witnesses. There was a ridiculous coincidence in that, for different reasons, all three found themselves in Ostia on the night of Ornella Corona’s death. Ajello had had sex with her, Paul had taken the orphans to the seaside and had slept over there with them, and Valerio had been out on a boat on his own and no one knew what time he’d returned. As for the case of Elisa Sordi, there was no one who could confirm Ajello’s alibi after so many years. One result was clear: Hagi alone never had an alibi. And he was the one charged with having committed all the crimes.

Balistreri was exhausted. Around him he saw looks on his colleagues’ faces that ranged from commiseration to contempt to derision.

Late in the day, he received a phone call from the chief of police.

“Balistreri, this is a disaster from start to finish, beginning with the victims and their loved ones all the way up to the media circus and the political consequences.”