The Monster of Florence (3 page)
T
he next day, Monday morning, at eleven o’clock, Spezi drove to the Careggi district of Florence, on the outskirts of the city. It was a hundred and five degrees in the shade, with the humidity approaching that of a hot shower. Smog lay like a pall over the city. He drove down a potholed lane toward a large yellow building, a decaying villa now part of a hospital complex, the plaster flaking off in platter-sized pieces.
The reception area of the medical examiner’s office was a cavernous room dominated by a massive marble table, on which a computer sat, covered in a white sheet like a corpse. The rest of the table was empty. Behind, in a niche in the wall, a bronze bust of a bearded luminary in the field of human anatomy cast a severe gaze on Spezi.
A marble staircase went up and down. Spezi went down.
The stairway led to an underground passageway, illuminated with humming fluorescent lights and lined with doors. The walls were tiled. The last door was open and from it came the strident whine of a bone saw. A rivulet of a black liquid ran out the door and into the hall, where it disappeared down a drain.
Spezi entered.
“Look who’s here!” cried Fosco, the ME’s assistant. He closed his eyes, stretched out his arms, and quoted Dante. “
There are not many who seek me here
. . .”
“Ciao, Fosco,” Spezi said. “Who’s this?” He jerked his chin at a cadaver stretched out on a zinc gurney, being worked over by a diener. The circular saw had just opened its cranium. On the gurney, next to the white face of the corpse, stood an empty coffee cup and crumbs from a recently consumed brioche.
“This one? A brilliant scholar, a distinguished professor in the Accademia della Crusca no less. But, as you can see, tonight yet another disappointment has laid me low; I have just opened the head and what do I find inside? Where is all this wisdom? Boh! Inside it looks just like the Albanian hooker I opened yesterday. Maybe the professor thinks he’s better than her! But when I open them up, I find that they’re equal! And they both have achieved the same destiny: my zinc gurney. Why, then, did he tire himself out poring over so many books? Boh! Take my advice, journalist: eat, drink, and enjoy yourself—”
A courteous voice sounded from the doorway, silencing Fosco. “Good afternoon, Signor Spezi.” It was Mauro Maurri, the medical examiner himself, who looked more like an English country gentleman: light blue eyes, gray hair worn fashionably long, a beige cardigan, and corduroy slacks. “Shall we retire to my office upstairs? We will surely find it more congenial for conversation.”
The study of Mauro Maurri consisted of a long, narrow room lined with books and magazines on criminology and forensic pathology. He had left the window shut to keep out the heat and had turned on only a single small lamp on his desk, maintaining the rest of his office in darkness.
Spezi seated himself and slid out a packet of Gauloises, offered one to Maurri, who declined with a light shake of his head, and lit one for himself.
Maurri spoke with great deliberation. “The killer used a knife or some other sharp instrument. The instrument had a notch or tooth in the middle, perhaps a defect, perhaps not. It might have been a certain type of knife that takes that form. It seems to me, although I won’t swear to it, that it was a scuba knife. Three cuts were made to remove the organ. The first clockwise, from eleven o’clock to six o’clock; the second counterclockwise, again from eleven o’clock to six. The third cut was made from top to bottom to detach the organ. Three clean, decisive cuts, with an extremely sharp edge.”
“Like Jack.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Jack the Ripper.”
“I see, of course. Jack the Ripper. No . . . not like him. Our killer is not a surgeon. Nor a butcher. Knowledge of anatomy was not required here. The investigators have been demanding to know, ‘Was the operation well done?’ What does that mean, ‘well done’? Who has ever done an operation of this sort? Certainly it was done by someone with no hesitation, one who perhaps uses certain tools in his professional work. Wasn’t the girl a leatherworker for Gucci? Didn’t she use a cobbler’s knife? Wasn’t her father also a leatherworker? Perhaps it was someone in her orbit . . . It had to have been someone with no mean ability with a knife—a hunter or taxidermist . . . Above all, a person with determination and nerves of steel. Although he was working on a dead body, it was, after all, only
just
dead.”
“Dr. Maurri,” Spezi asked, “do you have any thoughts on what he might have done with this . . . fetish?”
“I pray you, do not ask me this question.”
When Monday afternoon sank into an ovenlike grayness and it seemed certain there would be no further developments in the case that day, a large staff meeting was held in the office of the managing editor of
La Nazione.
The publisher was there, the editor, the news director, several journalists, and Spezi.
La Nazione
was the only paper that had information on the mutilation of the corpse; the other dailies knew nothing. It would be a major scoop. The managing editor stated that the particulars of the crime had to be presented in the lead headline. The editor disagreed, maintaining the details were too strong. As Spezi read his notes out loud to help solve the dispute, a young journalist on the crime beat suddenly broke in.
“Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, “but I just remembered something. It seems to me there was a similar killing five or six years ago.”
The managing editor leapt to his feet. “Now you tell us, right before deadline! Were you waiting for the paper to be in the printing presses before you ‘remembered’?”
The reporter was cowed, not realizing the man’s fury was all show. “I’m sorry, sir, it just occurred to me now. Do you remember that double homicide near Borgo San Lorenzo?” He paused, waiting for an answer. Borgo San Lorenzo was a town in the mountains about thirty kilometers north of Florence.
“Go on, tell us!” the editor yelled.
“In Borgo, a young couple was murdered. They’d also been having sex in a parked car. Remember the one where the killer stuck a branch up her . . . vagina?”
“I seem to recall it now. What were you doing, sleeping? Bring me the files on it. Write a piece immediately—the similarities, the differences . . . Hurry up! Why are you still here?”
The meeting broke up, and Spezi went to his desk to write up his piece on his visit to the ME’s office. Before beginning, he went over the old article that told the story of the Borgo San Lorenzo killing. The resemblances were striking. The two victims, Stefania Pettini, eighteen years old, and Pasquale Gentilcore, nineteen, were killed the night of September 14, 1974, also a Saturday night with no moon. They too were engaged to be married. The killer had taken the girl’s purse and turned it upside down, scattering its contents, like the straw purse Spezi had seen in the grass. The two victims had also spent the evening in a discotheque, the Teen Club, in Borgo San Lorenzo.
Shells had been recovered from the earlier killing, and the article stated that they were Winchester series H .22 rounds, the same as used in the Arrigo murders. This detail wasn’t quite as significant as it seemed, since those were the most common type of .22 bullets sold in Italy.
The Borgo San Lorenzo killer had not excised the girl’s sex organs. Instead, he had dragged her away from the car and had pricked her body with his knife ninety-seven times in an elaborate design that went around her breasts and pubic area. The killing had taken place next to a vineyard, and he had penetrated her with an old, woody piece of grapevine. In neither case was there any evidence of sexual molestation of the victim.
Spezi wrote the lead while the other reporter wrote a sidebar on the 1974 killings.
Two days later, the reaction came. The police, having read the article, had done a comparison between the shells recovered from the 1974 killings and the current ones. Most handguns, aside from revolvers, eject shells after firing; if the shooter doesn’t go to the trouble of retrieving them, they remain at the scene of the crime. The police lab report was definitive: the same pistol had been used in both crimes. It was a .22 caliber Beretta “Long Rifle” handgun, a model designed for target shooting. No silencer. The crucial detail was this: the firing pin had a small defect that left an unmistakable mark on the rim of the cartridge, as unique as a fingerprint.
When
La Nazione
broke the news, it caused a sensation. It meant that a serial killer was stalking the Florentine hills.
The investigation that followed lifted the lid off a bizarre underworld that few Florentines knew existed in the lovely hills surrounding their city. In Italy, most young people live at home with their parents until they marry, and most marry late. As a result, having sex in parked cars is a national pastime. It has been said that one out of every three Florentines alive today was conceived in a car. On any given weekend night the hills surrounding Florence were filled with young couples parked in shadowy lanes and dirt turnouts, in olive groves and farmers’ fields.
The investigators discovered that dozens of voyeurs prowled the countryside spying on these couples. Locally, these voyeurs were known as
Indiani
, or Indians, because they crept around in the dark. Some carried sophisticated electronic equipment, including parabolic and suction-cup microphones, tape recorders, and night vision cameras. The Indiani had divided the hills into zones of operation, each managed by a group or “tribe” who controlled the best posts for vicarious sex-watching. Some posts were highly sought after, either because they allowed for very close observation or because they were where the “good cars” were most commonly found. (A “good car” is exactly what you might imagine.) A good car could also be a source of money, and sometimes good cars were bought and sold on the spot, in a kind of depraved bourse, in which one Indiano would retire with a fistful of cash, ceding his post to another to watch the finish. Wealthy Indiani often paid for a guide to take them to the best spots and minimize the risk.
Then there were the intrepid people who preyed on the Indiani themselves, a subculture within a subculture. These men crept into the hills at night not to watch lovers but to spy on Indiani, taking careful note of their cars, license plate numbers, and other telling details—and then they would blackmail the Indiani, threatening to expose their nocturnal activities to their wives, families, and employers. It sometimes happened that an Indiano would have his voyeuristic bliss interrupted by the flash of a nearby camera; the next day he would receive a call: “Remember that flash in the woods last night? The photo came out beautifully, you look simply marvelous, a likeness that even your second cousin would recognize! By the way, the negative is for sale . . .”
It didn’t take long for investigators to flush out an Indiano who had been lurking about Via dell’Arrigo at the time of the double killing. His name was Enzo Spalletti, and he drove an ambulance during the day.
Spalletti lived with his wife and family in Turbone, a village outside of Florence that consisted of a cluster of stone houses arranged in a circle around a windswept piazza, looking not unlike a cowboy town in a spaghetti Western. He was not well liked by his neighbors. They said he put on airs, that he thought he was better than everyone else. His children, they said, took dancing lessons as if they were the children of a lord. The entire town knew he was a voyeur. Six days after the killing, the police came for the ambulance driver. At the time they did not believe they were dealing with the killer, but only with an important witness.
Spalletti was taken to police headquarters and questioned. He was a small man with an enormous mustache, tight little eyes, a big nose, a chin that stuck out like a knob, and a small, sphincter-like mouth. He looked like a man with something to hide. Compounding the impression, he answered the police’s questions with a mixture of arrogance, evasion, and defiance. He said he had left the house that evening with the idea of finding a prostitute to his taste, whom he claimed to have picked up in Florence on the Lungarno, next to the American consulate. She was a young girl from Naples, in a short red dress. The girl had gotten into his Taurus and he had driven her to some woods near where the two young people were murdered. When they had finished, Spalletti brought the little prostitute in red back to where he’d found her and dropped her off.
The story was most improbable. For one thing, it was unthinkable that a prostitute would voluntarily get into an unknown person’s car and allow herself to be driven twenty kilometers deep into the countryside to a dark wood. The questioners pointed out the many holes in his story, but Spalletti wouldn’t budge. It took six hours of solid interrogation before he began to wilt. Finally the ambulance driver admitted, still as cocky and self-assured as ever, what everyone already knew, that he was in fact a Peeping Tom, that he had been out and about the evening of Saturday, June 6, and had, in fact, parked his red Taurus not far from the scene of the crime. “And so what?” he went on. “I wasn’t the only one out that evening spying on couples in the area. There were a whole bunch of us.” He went on to say that he knew well the copper Fiat belonging to Giovanni and Carmela: it came often and was known as a “good car.” He had watched them more than once. And he knew for a fact that there were other people nosing around that field the night of the crime. He was with one of those people for quite a while, who could vouch for him. He gave the police the man’s name: Fabbri.
A few hours later Fabbri was hauled downtown to police headquarters to see if he could confirm Spalletti’s alibi. Instead, Fabbri stated that there was a period of an hour and a half, right around the time of the crime, when he was not with Spalletti. “Sure,” Fabbri told investigators, “Spalletti and I saw each other. As usual we met at the Taverna del Diavolo,” a restaurant where the Indiani would gather to do business and swap information before going out for the evening. Fabbri added that he saw Spalletti again at the end of the evening, a little after eleven o’clock, when Spalletti stopped on his way down Via dell’Arrigo. Spalletti must have therefore passed not ten meters from the scene of the crime at around the time investigators estimated it occurred.
