The Monster of Florence (26 page)

“But why didn’t they arrest him?” The Marshal had resisted ringing Ferrini in the middle of the night—the minute he finished reading about the missing page—but even though almost twenty-four hours had passed and they were seated together in his office, he still felt stunned.

“I mean, the Prosecutor working with Romola, to have taken the enquiry that far, must have been on his side?”

“Does he name him? Remember, I haven’t read the thing.”

“No. No, he doesn’t …”

“Mm. A small point but an important one. The Prosecutor running the enquiry was suddenly, when it came to the crunch, put on another case and someone else took his place. Ask me who.”

“Who?”

“Simonetti.”

“Dear God.”

“All he had to do was lie doggo. It’s not the Instructing Judge’s job to prosecute. He signs the warrants but the Prosecutor has to request him to do it. He didn’t. And now he’s got his reward. Fame and fortune will be his.”

“If he carries it off. He did try and prosecute, Romola, whether it was his job or not. This …” The document lay on the Marshal’s desk between them. “It’s supposed to be an acquittal but it isn’t. You say you didn’t read it …”

“I had no reason to. I knew all along what was going on. Anybody
who didn’t know wouldn’t be interested. An abandoned enquiry is hardly news.”

“I know … I’m not so good at explaining myself but it’s not just what’s in it … it’s the way it’s written. I’ve not read much of this sort of thing. Our job’s over long before a case gets to this stage so I admit I’m no expert …”

The Marshal had been staring sightlessly at the map of his quarter on the wall, as he so often did when musing, but now he turned his big troubled eyes on Ferrini. “Whatever this document pretends to be it’s really an accusation. In a funny sort of way it reminded me, the way he accused Silvano, of the way Sergio Muscas accused him. ‘Silvano’s wife died in Sardinia and the kid was saved that time, too. I’m not making any allusions. Silvano Vargius had a car …’ It’s like that, you see. What the judge really means is what Sergio meant: I’m not accusing him but he did it. And then there’s so much anger in it. He’s very bitter.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“I don’t know because I don’t understand why. Why should they have done that?”

Ferrini shrugged. “I only know the gossip that was going around at the time. That they didn’t want Romola’s Monster just because he was Romola’s. Some ambitious soul I won’t name didn’t want him taking the credit, so he opened a completely new line of enquiry. That was when Flavio was in prison and—oops! Wrong again—the two Germans were killed. Then the fight for the evidence started. They had that camper removed with the bodies inside it before you could say Jack Robinson. And before any external measurements had been taken, presumably to get it out of the clutches of Romola and the carabinieri and into the custody of Simonetti and the police.”

“I just can’t believe it …”

“You can’t? Well, I was there. It was before I came to work in the city. I was out there in charge of the local station and I found the bodies.”

“You were?”

“You bet I was. I saw them drive the camper away and I knew
the measurements hadn’t been taken. So, what do you expect to happen if you drive a van along a country lane and it’s got bullet holes through the windows?”

“The glass shattered, I suppose.”

“You suppose right. There were bullet holes through the metal body, too, of course, but since they hadn’t been measured from the ground … The whole thing was a shambles.”

“But it’s not … When I said I couldn’t believe it I didn’t mean anything so specific, I just meant I couldn’t believe that even the most ambitious person … a case as serious as this …”

“For a really ambitious person, nothing’s more serious than his own career. Listen, I’ve managed without a smoke for an hour so as not to fog up your office but I can’t hold out any longer, d’you mind?”

The Marshal didn’t answer. He was staring at the map again.

“I’ll take your silence for consent. Where’s Bacci got to? I thought he was bringing us some stuff?”

“He’ll be here. He had to go home and get it. I told him after that bullet episode that he shouldn’t go about openly with those books. I’ve noticed what’s-his-name giving him odd looks … What is he called?”

“Esposito?”

“No, no, the other one. Esposito’s the one with the scar.”

“You’re right. You mean Di Maira, then.”

“Di Maira, yes. I always get the impression he’s watching us more than he’s watching the Suspect—this’ll be Bacci now.”

The Marshal got up when the bell rang and went through the darkened waiting room to look through the spy hole and open the door.

Ferrini grinned when he saw Bacci hesitate before the cloud of cigarette smoke that was rapidly filling the tiny office.

“Oh, come on in, Bacci. I won’t say ‘it won’t kill you’ because along with all the car fumes in this town it probably will. Come and give us a few subtitles on this FBI stuff of yours.”

If anyone had asked the Marshal for an explanation of why he was going where he was going, he’d have been hard put to find one. As
it was, nobody asked him because nobody knew. They’d been given half a day’s freedom after all the fuss of the search, and if the Marshal had been himself he’d have done a trip to the supermarket and given his quarters a good sweep out. But he wasn’t himself, and it was difficult enough to keep his mind on his driving. He hadn’t been on this road for years, not since being involved in that case out in the potteries. The landscape had changed. There were factories, service stations, new blocks of flats, an ugly, raw-looking sprawl. The traffic was heavy, but then it always had been … He should be coming up to where he had to make a right turn. There. Lastra a Signa. He couldn’t have said why he hadn’t told anybody, at least, not precisely why. There were some things he didn’t tell Ferrini when he might have done, perhaps because Ferrini sometimes seemed to be laughing at him. He was so cynical. Not telling Bacci anything—well, they’d agreed on that without really having to say it. There was really no point in burdening him with more doubts than he had already.

They had let him talk on without ever mentioning the document still lying on the desk.

“You see, I’ve been through all the available statistics on this type of crime and, even without taking anything else into consideration, he’s just too old. Serial killers, lust killers, they really get into their stride in their twenties, so whoever did these murders should only be in his thirties now. I did find one exception, but even he started in his thirties and that was because his mother kept him practically chained up in the house until she died. He’d have started earlier if he’d been free. Apart from him the only exceptions to the rule are those who started unusually early. This boy here killed his first victim at twelve years old, this one at fourteen and this one at fifteen had already killed four. Accusing a man in his sixties makes no sense.”

But that wasn’t all that made no sense. There was that FBI profile Simonetti had read to them in abbreviated form so as not to “bore them with a jot of jargon.” He’d taken care not to bore them with a lot of facts, either. Cruelty to the weak, such as children and animals,
he’d said, and the Suspect hit his dog with a stick. It was a far cry from the children in the FBI case notes, those who did such things as cutting off a cat’s paws and tail and then burying it alive, or dousing a horse’s tail in petrol and setting light to it. They set fire to buildings, too. Schools, for instance, when they thought they’d been ill-treated or unfairly punished, their own homes before running away, cars in the street. They robbed and burned and tortured, and when they were big enough and strong enough and had the means, they killed. The Suspect was just a foul-tempered, dirty old man like hundreds of others. He bore no relation at all to those young men in the photographs Bacci had shown them. Some were crazed and pitiful creatures, others terrifying, cold-blooded young men shown laughing as they were led into court, totally isolated from the rest of humanity which they had loathed and derided. But all of them were young, all of them came from poor backgrounds, all of them were cut off from human affection. They had, for the most part, been beaten senseless until their brains were irreparably damaged, starved, raped. Some had been tortured by their mothers, forced to watch them perform as prostitutes. Others had been orphaned as tiny children and left in the hands of people who despised and ill-treated them.

The catalogue of their crimes, the torn and mutilated bodies, the dead raw flesh eaten or “raped” or used to decorate the room, was terrifying. Yet there was something even more terrifying in the catalogue of their own sufferings, something so dark and relentlessly evil that in the end it seemed preferable to be the victim than the killer.

And their Suspect was a dirty old man. He’d killed his rival in love, killed him brutally, too. But how could you connect that with slaughtering strangers and stealing body parts? The Marshal decided that he, at least, couldn’t and that he had no intention of trying. As for the business of the daughter, that was far from being clear. But how much information might have been withheld there, too?

Disturbed and distracted as he was, he overshot the little town of Signa, where he’d meant to make his first stop, and so had to turn
back. There was a small car park in front of a bar in the square, and he stopped there and got out to look at the cinema opposite.

THE GARDE CINEMA

The façade was small and low and the tops of the trees in the garden beyond could be seen. They’d grown a lot in over twenty years. A plank had been nailed across the peeling doors and the
G
of
GARDEN
was hanging crookedly, about to fall as the
N
had done. It was so dismal, so forlorn, that it gave the impression of having been closed up on the night of that murder, avoided as a haunted place.

“We went to the pictures and it was in the war and a house went on fire and then we went up there past the cemetery.”

The rest of the little square was cheerful and busy, which made the crumbling grey cinema look like a bad tooth in a healthy smiling mouth.

The Marshal stepped into the bar and ordered a coffee. It was a clean bright place with shelves full of boxes of chocolates and fancy liqueurs. There were two small tables with pink linen cloths on them and a man in a green loden overcoat was sitting at one of them reading the local paper.

“One coffee coming up.”

“Thanks. You don’t happen to know when that cinema across the road closed down, do you?”

“I really couldn’t say. Before my time, anyway, and I took over here five or six years ago. Ask Franco there. Franco? You’ll know when the Garden Cinema shut down, you’ve been here longer than me.”

“Born here. I couldn’t tell you the exact year, not to swear to, but it’ll be a good ten years or so. Didn’t get all that much custom since they built that bigger open-air place down near the supermarket, and there was already the one at the Communist Club. I know the owner of the premises, if that’s what you’re after, but she’s in her eighties and I don’t think she’s interested in selling.”

“No, no … Just curiosity.” Not that he’d expected anyone to believe him but it didn’t matter. It mattered that he wasn’t in uniform. He’d no intention of calling to pay his respects to the local
force. It seemed to him that anybody who knew anything at all about this business was bound to have taken sides at some point, and while it seemed clear that the carabinieri had lined up on the side of Romola, that didn’t mean someone would want to get involved in crossing the Public Prosecutor’s office.

Why he should want to do it himself was a moot point. It hadn’t been by any choice of his that he was chasing a Suspect he didn’t suspect, but then that was probably what was irritating him into trying to get past the smoke screen and deal with something concrete. Like that bloodstained rag. The carabinieri had found it inside a flat straw bag hidden beneath blankets in a wardrobe. Two pieces of clean cotton printed with yellow flowers and between them the third piece, with its red and grey stains. Silvano had been there watching and he hadn’t turned a hair. When they asked him afterwards to explain the blood and gunpowder he had only shrugged.

“I know nothing about it. Never seen the bag before, though I suppose some woman might have left it here—perhaps the woman I used to live with. If you say it’s blood, it’s blood—but there can’t be gunpowder on it.”

And what sort of sense did that make? Either he knew or he didn’t know. And so Romola wanted to arrest him and the Public Prosecutor’s office refused. Romola asked for the rag to be sent to England where DNA testing was now possible. The Public Prosecutor’s office refused. The rag was sent instead for further testing in Rome and a report was finally produced in December 1987, three years and five months after the rag was found. The report said the sample was too old for significant conclusions to be drawn.

In desperation Romola managed to get Silvano arrested for the murder of his first wife and he was removed to prison to stand trial in Sardinia. And the material evidence was too old there, too. Silvano was acquitted. He was at once ordered to present himself before the magistrate in Florence to answer questions about a certain Beretta 22 L.R. Instead of which he left the country. Then the murders stopped.

The Marshal paid for his coffee and got back in the car, feeling
better, at least, for having seen with his own eyes that broken-down cinema where this whole story had begun on the hot and very dark night of 22nd August 1968.

Not that it was easy, just now, to imagine the heat. There was an icy wind blowing fit to freeze your ears off. He switched on the engine and let it warm up as he fished his notes and the rough map Lorenzini had drawn up for him out of his pocket. He decided to proceed in the same order as the original investigators. He would go back a little by the way he’d come and take the Pistoia road as far as the Rossini house.

It was a long, straight road and the traffic was moving fast. It was similar to the road he’d taken out of Florence, with the same symptoms of sleepy countryside pimpled with rashes of new building here and there. It really wasn’t possible to go slowly enough to read the house numbers. When he tried there was an angry chorus of hooting and, once again, he overshot his mark and had to turn back. Well and good. The road he then had to take was, in any case, on the other side. He made an inspired guess, stopped his car as he turned in, and then got out to look at the white house on the other side of the road. Then he waited for a gap in the traffic and crossed. There was really no need to do that. The house was clearly numbered and recognizable, anyway, by the floodlight attached to it. But he couldn’t help himself. He needed the house, not its number. He needed the real, the concrete. He had no idea whether the Rossini family still lived there but he didn’t care. He just wanted to speak to someone, anyone, establish human contact with this twenty-year-old story.