The Deliverance of Evil (53 page)
Balistreri shut his eyes. It was premeditated murder. Even with all the extenuating circumstances the sentence would be many years for both of them.
But Balistreri set it aside for a moment. Whatever different kind of justice Manfredi deserved, God would see to it, if he existed. And whatever injustice he’d suffered in his life, including that dished out by Balistreri, Linda Nardi, and Angelo Dioguardi, Manfredi had in any case lived twenty-four years too many, killing many people. Angelo Dioguardi and Linda Nardi had done what he should have done if he’d still had the stomach for it.
Balistreri and Corvu told them what they should and should not say to the police. Then they called Floris, and only after Balistreri and the chief of police had had a chance to talk did they call in the police.
No one asked Balistreri and Corvu what they had talked about with Angelo Dioguardi and Linda Nardi for a half-hour before calling the chief. There was no record of that half-hour in any report. Despite the clear conflict caused by Balistreri and Corvu knowing Nardi and Dioguardi personally, Floris and the public prosecutor allowed the two officers to take their statements. No one else questioned them; the public prosecutor simply recorded their replies.
The story Dioguardi told was very simple. He had been a member of a shooting range for years and had even been there that Sunday morning with his lover, Linda Nardi. There were witnesses. Then he’d been to lunch at Linda’s and preferred not to leave the bag containing his earphones, gloves, and pistol in the car, which was parked on the street.
At six twenty he’d gone out to buy some cigarettes, but as soon as he drove off in the car he realized he’d left his wallet containing his driving license in the bag in Linda’s kitchen. He’d gone back in through the rear entrance in the garage. Linda was out on the terrace, so he’d gone straight into the kitchen to look for the bag.
Then he heard Manfredi’s voice, the threats to Linda, his confession about having killed all those women, and the phone call with Balistreri. He’d pulled his Beretta out of the bag and walked onto the terrace. Manfredi had his back to him. Angelo told him to drop his gun and put his hands in the air, but Manfredi turned with his own gun drawn instead. Angelo had no choice but to shoot him, which he did five times.
Evening
At a late evening meeting between the chief of police and the head of the team, no objections were raised about any of the incredible coincidences: that Dioguardi entered through the garage, was in possession of a loaded gun, and that he reacted so quickly to Manfredi. It was almost as if Dioguardi had been mentally prepared to shoot him dead.
There were no grounds for excessive use of self-defense or premeditation.
The reconstruction of Manfredi’s movements was equally straightforward. He’d left Via della Camilluccia on the Saturday evening after his meeting with Balistreri and joined Ajello at his villa in Sabaudia, where the lawyer had been entrusted with guarding Fiorella Romani. On Sunday morning, he’d given Ajello a sleeping pill and tied him up. When he woke up, Manfredi disemboweled him. One less inconvenient witness, dispatched along with Colajacono and Pasquali.
Then he had eaten lunch in a Sabaudia restaurant—the receipt was in his wallet—and left town. Next, as the telephone company’s records showed, he’d called Father Paul on his cell phone.
He arrived at San Valente parish church a little after five. Paul was alone; the children were all at the beach with the volunteers. He’d forced him to call Angelo Dioguardi and ask to see him. Then he’d taken him down to the basement, shot him, and left his body in the locked storeroom where the police would find it later. Finally, he had gone to Linda Nardi’s apartment.
Ramona identified Manfredi in the photo sent via e-mail to Bucharest. He was the client who had wasted her time because he couldn’t get it up. Hagi had handed Nadia over to him in the Giulia GT and had come back to pick him up with Adrian’s bike at Vasile’s farmhouse after Manfredi killed Nadia. Then they’d left the bike in Hagi’s garage and taken the rental car Manfredi had used to pick up Ramona.
Hagi had taken him to Rome’s Urbe airport, where they handed back the rental car and where the ENT aircraft was waiting for Manfredi to take him to Zurich in time for the Nairobi flight. In this way, despite the two-hour difference in the time zone, he’d arrived in time to open the hospital. They still had to clarify why Manfredi’s name didn’t appear on any passenger list, but Balistreri had his answer for that.
This was all purely investigative reconstruction; there wasn’t even any proof of Manfredi’s presence at the crime scenes, not even in the cases of Ajello and Paul. In regard to Giovanna Sordi, it was probable that he’d approached her on the Sunday morning after Mass. Manfredi was with Elisa when her mother called, therefore he knew the subject of that conversation and so had persuaded her. But this was only more investigative speculation.
The only hard fact was the attack on Linda Nardi. During that long evening meeting on the evening of July 23, the government, the chief of police, the prosecutor’s office. and the police all chose to keep the matter quiet. Manfredi’s tragic end was minimized and set apart from the rest. An old Charlemagne School friend who was showering his attention on Linda Nardi. An argument with her actual lover, and then his tragic death. Nothing about a serial killer, nothing about scalpels, nothing at all.
The torture and deaths of the young women were all attributed to Hagi, who had been present the entire time—the perfect scapegoat. Hagi had been killed in an exchange of fire with the police during Fiorella Romani’s dramatic rescue. Francesco Ajello had been his accomplice, and Hagi had killed him while he was alone in the villa. How he came to do this, given that he was handcuffed and unarmed, was never explained.
Count Manfredi dei Banchi di Aglieno was informed of the tragic accident in which his son lost his life by an apologetic chief of police, while he was in Nairobi and embarking on the night flight to Frankfurt.
Balistreri accepted everything without objection. He was able to make sure that the name of Linda Nardi’s lover who accidentally killed Manfredi dei Banchi di Aglieno remained hidden away in the archives of the prosecutor’s office. It was a feeble secret, but one that nevertheless would enable him to buy a little time.
Sunday night–Monday morning, July 23–24, 2006
B
ALISTRERI SHUT HIMSELF IN
his office alone for the night. He thought again of Marius Hagi’s words:
A lightning war requires soldiers and allies, Balistreri. They used me and I used them. We gave each other a helping hand.
Somewhere along the line, Marius Hagi had met Manfredi, one of those allies. Had it been a chance meeting? Highly unlikely. Someone had brought them together. Someone who knew them both very well and knew their hatred and their desire for revenge. Hagi wanted revenge against the Catholic circles that had turned Alina against him. Manfredi hated the young women who had humiliated him.
First Linda, then Elisa: he had desecrated them, but he hadn’t killed them.
So he and Hagi had chosen their first victim. A young woman, Samantha Rossi: perfect for Manfredi and even more meaningful for Hagi, as she was the daughter of Anna Rossi, who had alienated Alina from him. But that wasn’t enough. There were other personal enemies: Linda Nardi, the source of all Manfredi’s misery. Michele Balistreri, who had caused Manfredi’s mother’s suicide and let Elisa’s real killer go free. Their destinies had been entwined from then on.
Corvu had been his usual efficient self. He had mobilized the right contacts and had a photocopy of the minister of the interior’s appointments register for Sunday, July 11, 1982.
It showed that Count Tommaso dei Banchi di Aglieno had entered the ministry at six fifty and come out at seven thirty five, as Balistreri knew twenty-four years ago—nothing new there.
But it was another signature in that register that Balistreri wanted to check. The signature that countersigned the times—that of a young ministry assistant in 1982, Captain Antonio Pasquali.
He leafed through Pasquali’s calendar, the one Antonella had given him containing the dates and a few cryptic notes in English.
The meaning of these notes was opaque, but of course Pasquali had made them for himself. He was marking down what the voice told him to do.
It was a perfect plan, one that only Manfredi’s card to Linda had rendered null and void. But for Manfredi, the terrorizing of Linda Nardi and Balistreri’s eternal remorse were indispensable, worth much more than the murdered and disfigured girls.
Nonetheless, Balistreri recognized something else in that plan, something grandiose, which had to do with a philosophy of life—an authentic personal signature.
Everything had been expertly planned, brought together, and carried out. Hagi’s vendetta against the Catholic world that had taken Alina from him and Manfredi’s against women had been ably inserted into a much wider plan to destabilize democracy in Italy. A plan that took advantage of the growing racism toward the Roma and Romanians, and of the Italians’ fear of the barbarity coming from Eastern Europe. Young girls raped, tortured, and killed, as always by the Roma in the travelers’ camps, up to the point where the people would turn and attack them. And then the police wouldn’t have been enough—the army would have been needed. And, along with help from the friendly part of the secret intelligence service, a new strong political leader would emerge, who wasn’t involved in the catastrophe and was incorruptible. A man of honor.
Everything had been corralled in the service of this plan.
ENT’s nightclubs and arcades were used to launder money of dubious provenance; the purse of the secret inteeligence service’s rogue element that financed the whole operation, and unfortunately became caught up in it thanks to the lighter Nadia took from Bella Blu; the accomplices who became superfluous or dangerous—Belhrouz, Colajacono, Pasquali, and Ajello—abused, and their guts torn out. Accusers from the beginning—like Giovanna Sordi, Valerio Bona, Father Paul—forced into suicide or silenced. And the necessary sacrificial victims—Samantha, Nadia, Selina, Ornella—slaughtered without mercy. Accidental obstacles, like Camarà, eliminated immediately.
The most atrocious part of the vendetta had been reserved for the two greatest enemies, Linda Nardi and Michele Balistreri, who had ruined Manfredi’s life when he was still a teenager. And also the unscrupulous use of the Romanians, Hagi and the others, and the exploitation of the Roma and the travelers’ camps; fodder that was indispensable for extending the plan beyond the limits of personal vendetta and developing it against the whole democratic political class, both government and opposition, and the Vatican, too.
The effects had been seen: crimes rightly or wrongly attributed to the Roma, camps like Casilino 900 roiling the emotions of Italians, hostile graffiti on the walls, the growing number of public statements that confused the Roma and the Romanians, the growing tension with the government in Bucharest, and the Vatican as the sole defender of the rights of people who were under siege.
Pasquali had been working to effect change in Rome’s city council. But above him there was someone who was aiming higher, much higher: if a famous Italian journalist had been attacked, tortured, and killed in her own home near St. Peter’s and the murder had been attributed to the Roma by means of the false evidence planted by Manfredi, the situation in Italy would have exploded. With the secret intelligence service’s help, a witch-hunt would have been set in motion. There would have been calls for ethnic cleansing, a diplomatic crisis with Romania, and increased tension with the European Community that would call upon the Italian government to arrest and put on trial any Italians who attacked Roma and Romanians.
At that point, Italian democracy would have teetered on the edge of the abyss, and somebody wanted to push it. If Italy hadn’t obeyed, it would have been kicked out of the European Community. If it had obeyed, Italians would have taken to the streets to topple the government. And the Vatican, marginalized, would have kept quiet.
In either scenario, the head of the special team was certain a solution had been waiting in the wings: a strong man with an impeccable image who would have arrived to put things right.
Balistreri recognized the absolute conviction of someone’s rights and the wrongs they suffered, the use of the lives of others as if they were pawns in a game, the defense of one’s honor as an absolute right. Balistreri recognized the style; in the end it was his own adolescent point of departure.
There remained one last aspect of Hagi and Manfredi’s vendetta: Who really killed Elisa Sordi? In their absurd and twisted logic, this person was the true culprit of all their troubles and couldn’t remain unpunished. Hagi and Manfredi had died without knowing the name that Balistreri had just barely glimpsed when he’d attacked Linda Nardi.
Now that everything was clear and he had all the answers, he wondered what the young Balistreri would have done.
A shot in the back of the skull. But then his accomplices would have taken revenge. They would have slaughtered Angelo, Linda, me, Alberto and his family, Corvu, Piccolo, Mastroianni.
He wondered what the adult Balistreri would do.
Charges and an arrest. A well-organized trial, a just sentence. Same outcome as above. Or rather, worse, because with the support the man had it would be difficult to have him found guilty.
He racked his brains the whole night. The count would have thought the same as he did, not like the cardinal. He wouldn’t wait for divine justice. But where was the happy medium between the two?
Morning
A
T DAWN, UNDER THE
pretense of identifying Manfredi and taking advantage of the fact that the count was still traveling, Balistreri had the count’s personal secretary, the domestic staff, and the residential complex’s concierge brought into the station. They were taken to the mortuary. Before they entered the room, they were ordered to hand over all metal objects, including keys.
“Keep them busy filling out forms until I get back,” Balistreri ordered Piccolo. He took a set of the penthouse keys.
Corvu and Mastroianni accompanied him. They arrived at seven thirty and entered the deserted apartment. They went immediately to Manfredi’s room, where Balistreri and Teodori had questioned the boy back in 1982. It was unchanged, apart from the addition of a laptop computer and a new full-length mirror in the attached bathroom. The heavy curtains had been stripped from the windows.
The walls were still covered in heavy metal posters. The one Balistreri remembered was in the dark corner where Manfredi had taken shelter during his stormy exchange with himself and Teodori.
A man dressed as Satan and ten women, each one wearing a T-shirt with a letter painted in dripping blood. The ten letters made up the album title:
YOU
ARE
EVIL
.
He opened all the drawers, then rummaged under the sweaters piled in the wardrobe. It was all there: Elisa Sordi’s missing earring, the blouse with the initials S.R., Nadia’s sweater with holes at the elbows, the glasses worn by nearsighted Selina Belhrouz, Ornella Corona’s winking watch.
They photographed it all.
Tucked below some underwear in a drawer, he found a crumpled sheet of paper. On it was a drawing in pencil. He recognized the view—it was from the terrace. The picture showed a window and a withered flower and beneath it were a few sentences in Manfredi’s handwriting.
Afternoon
Pasquali’s state funeral was held in the afternoon in a church in the historic center. The president of the republic, the prime minister and many other ministers, politicians, civil servants, and policemen were in attendance. Hundreds of ordinary citizens gathered outside in the churchyard and the square beside it. Television vans lined the street.
After the public ceremony, the coffin was taken to Verano. Pasquali’s wife held a private mass for his closest colleagues, friends, and relatives from the small town in Abruzzo where Pasquali had been born and raised.
Balistreri was the last to arrive. He sat near the door, enjoying the smell of incense. The church was cool, while outside it was sweltering and humid. Corvu, Piccolo, and the others sat in the pews further down.
I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned.
Balistreri was brought up short by the words. The ceremony went on.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
.
The words he’d rebelled against in 1970. The words that had slowly caught up with him like a nemesis, paralyzing the rest of his existence.
Count Tommaso dei Banchi di Aglieno materialized beside him. He was not in a penitent mood but had accepted the meeting Balistreri had asked for.
And here he was, the supreme evil, the single architect of the grand design, whose voice on the telephone terrorized Pasquali. The man who hadn’t hesitated to exploit his son’s private vendetta to aid his program of destabilization, the man who had littered his path with corpses not for money but for power, out of the total and blind conviction of his own ideas.
The man who for once should have given up, faced with the impossibility of knowing who had finished Elisa Sordi off after his son had beaten and disfigured her and left her unconscious in that room.
. . . .
They went outside into the open, without waiting for the Mass to end, and took a last stroll among the graves in the sunshine.
Balistreri was sweating heavily, while the count was his usual impeccable self. Not a drop of sweat stained his dark suit.
His first-class overnight flight from Africa hadn’t tired him; the crow’s feet around his eyes were only slightly deeper.
He’s a father who just lost his son. His Achilles’ heel. My life insurance policy.
“I only have a few minutes, Balistreri. I must pay my respects to the widow of my very dear friend Pasquali and see the minister of the interior, who wants to extend his condolences to me. Then, before I return to Africa, I have to see my legal team about transferring Manfredi’s body to Kenya. I don’t want him buried in Italy. Kenya was his real home.”
Balistreri was ready to say what he had to say, but this man was something more than a mere enemy.
He is the supreme evil, not Hagi or Manfredi
.
It was pointless to tell the count what had happened. He knew it all, and the little he didn’t know he’d figure out in the next few days. It was pointless as well to threaten him by talking about his calls to Pasquali recorded in a simple diary. There was no proof; the Count would have squashed him like a bug.
“I want to propose a pact,” said Balistreri at last.
Walking in silence and showing little interest, the count listened to the description of the absolutely certain proof of Manfredi’s guilt. He didn’t appear to be surprised, let alone worried.
“I’ll proceed in such a way that no one will know a thing. In everyone’s memory, your son will remain a benefactor of the poor. In exchange, I want your word that you will not kill or have anyone killed anymore.”
The count fixed him with his gaze. There was no anger, no threat, but only again that same subtle contempt of 1982.
“It’s a pity you’ve turned out this way, Balistreri. I know your résumé. As a young man I shouldn’t have disliked you—you had promise, you rebelled against the forces of obscurantism and corruption. A real pity. Quite a wasted life, yours.”
“Don’t you want your son to be remembered as a benefactor rather than a killer?”
The count stood among the graves.
“Manfredi was a murderer. He became a murderer because of the preconceptions of Western society and its bourgeois hedonism and Catholic hypocrisy. He was a kind, polite young man. Women rejected him because of his face. You accused him of a crime he didn’t commit for the same reason. And then he was manipulated by me, his father. I introduced him to Marius Hagi.”
“Manfredi didn’t know that Hagi and Ajello had thrown Elisa Sordi’s body into the Tiber?”
“He didn’t know Hagi or Ajello. But my brother told me what Manfredi was doing in Africa—killing, disfiguring. I knew my son had an illness, and it wasn’t his fault. Then a year ago, Hagi told me he had lung cancer and that he planned to kill Anna Rossi before he died. Manfredi was in Rome. We spoke on the terrace, the three of us. We were there all night. And we decided it would be better to kill Samantha Rossi. But everything has a beginning, Balistreri, and you were a fundamental part of that beginning.”
The count stretched his arm and pointed to three headstones side by side.
In the center was Elisa Sordi’s grave, with those of Amedeo and Giovanna on either side.
“There’s only one thing that has always escaped me: the truth, the name of Elisa’s real killer. Can you disinter it? Then I’ll honor our pact.”
The count stared at him for a moment, then turned his back and walked away.
Balistreri looked at the three graves. It was very hot out there, but the flowers on all three were fresh.
