The Monster of Florence (31 page)

The Marshal thought for a bit, wishing, as Ferrini lit up, that he’d at least wait until after their meal. He didn’t say so. “Silvano standing in the reeds … I think that’s true. I’m sure he was the one who shot them—it’s more complicated, though. That’s why you need to see the man. Good heavens … What’s this?”

‘This’ was a thick Florentine beefsteak, already carved into chunks off the bone and carried on a platter by Sandro.

“We can’t …”

“Boss’s orders,” Sandro said, putting down the platter. “There’s a green salad on its way and a few chips. Do you like baby onions, sweet and sour?”

They looked at each other. Ferrini chuckled. “We might as well give in with good grace. You don’t know Dante—I remember the first time I ate here. I was on a case …”

“Silvano,” interrupted the Marshal, stabbing firmly at a great chunk of meat, “if you ask me, had it in for Belinda for dumping
their
ménage à trois
in favour of a normal man. But I bet he never said so. It’s a feeling I have about him. I think he was pretty clever at manipulating other people and I’m willing to bet he offered to do the job as a favour to the Muscas family.”

“I think you’re right. Clever bugger and cool with it. His sexual habits are beyond me—ah, these look good, go on, serve yourself first. I was having a discreet talk to one of our chaps yesterday. You don’t know him but he was on the case in eighty-four when Silvano was the chief suspect and he told me some of the things they found out when they were following him. Jesus, he used to pick up truck drivers at the motorway exit and take them on there and then in the parked trucks. Not that I don’t know it happens, but with him it was that or something else every day. They never got to see his orgies, his other speciality, that usually happened at home. Foursomes.”

“But didn’t he have a son?”

“I’m talking about the eighties. The kid left home at fourteen or fifteen, and no wonder. Not that it mattered to Silvano. It was going on when the kid was small, too. He told us about it when he was questioned. Besides, years before that when Silvano was still with Sergio he’d set up orgies down the park and take the lot of them with him. Not just Belinda who had to perform but Sergio and the kid, Nicolino, as well. Is that a bit of fillet there …?”

“You take it. I can’t manage any more.”

The restaurant was filling up but Sandro guided the customers away from their corner, glancing their way each time he passed in case they needed something.

Silvano … It was hard to get a grip on Silvano.

“He was a good shot. Seven bullets on target close together, then one shot to be fired by Sergio so he could get himself convicted, that would be the bullet that went into Belinda’s arm from another direction. Did you ever think that Sergio liked being accused, I mean, after so many years of being laughed at for his wife’s goings-on?”

“I’m sure he did. He never seriously tried to get out of it. The only thing he was hiding was his homosexuality. Of course, he knew nobody would believe he was up to it, not by himself. That’s why he
accused Flavio. Everybody would believe that. He had a record and everybody knew all about his affair with Belinda. Poor sod, when they were after him again in eighty-three he didn’t get out of it easily, either. Even when that German couple got killed and he was inside. They reckoned his nephew had shot them just to get him out and that’s why it wasn’t a proper job. Are you giving up on that?”

The Marshal was indeed giving up his battle with the beefsteak. He felt quite exhausted with the effort.

“I don’t think I can even manage the salad.”

“Do you think we should have a
digestivo
?”

“I do.”

They did, resisting at the same time all Sandro’s efforts to overwhelm them with puddings and cakes. With only another twenty minutes’ delay, whilst Dante joined them with his glass and listened to one of Ferrini’s juicier cases, they were on their way back to the Palazzo Pitti. The night was so cold that the Marshal was glad enough as they crossed the bridge and drove along the embankment to be snug in Ferrini’s car, which was a good deal faster and more comfortable than his own. And if they did have to go all the way round the one-way system to come back over the river again and end up two minutes away from where they started, how could anyone complain when it was one of the most beautiful detours in the country? Especially in such cold, clear weather when the reflections glittered in the water and the floodlit palaces looked too good to be real. That beefsteak had been a bit much, though. The Marshal eased himself further into the passenger seat as they joined the after-cinema queue near the Ponte Vecchio. Probably keep him awake half the night.

By the time they arrived, he and Ferrini had agreed that the only real mystery in ’68 had been who accompanied Nicolino to that faraway house, and why.

The Marshal, fishing for his key as they climbed the stairs to his office, thought he might have the answer to that one.

“Salvatore Angius.”

“Who …? Oh, the lad who was Silvano’s alibi, playing billiards. That one?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Lord, Guarnaccia, it’s freezing in here.”

“It’s midnight. The heating’s off. This Salvatore Angius wants a bit of looking into. He gave a false address; his official residence in theory—he’s Sardinian, of course—was his brother’s house, but he was really living in Via Torrente, right next door to the Rossini house where Nicolino was left.”

“And nobody noticed at the time?”

“Romola did, eventually. But not knowing yet that Silvano was homosexual, he didn’t realize what their relationship was. Where will you sit?”

“I’m all right here, chair of the accused. So, he could have taken the kid, left him to ring the bell and slipped in at his own door.”

“That’s right. And he knew that lane, I’m sure. He was practically a vagrant when Silvano picked him up, out of work and penniless. Silvano gave him odd labouring jobs in Signa. That lane was a short cut from his house to Signa. He had no transport. And another thing, his was the house Sergio pointed out when they asked him to indicate the Rossini house. Nicolino said he thought somebody he didn’t know had taken him there.”

“We ought to find him, then.”

“Yes. I’ve no idea where he is now.”

“I’ll find out—he could have taken the gun, too, not just the kid. That way, if for any reason Silvano’s car was seen or stopped, there was nothing to connect it with the murder. No gun, no kid. I’ll find him. Leave it to me. Now”—he looked at Bacci’s pile of translations of FBI reports—“how did you get on with those?”

“Well, at least they’re real. I mean, we’re fumbling in the dark, they’re telling us about people who’ve confessed and told their entire life stories. They’re American, German, Swiss—some are Italian by blood though living in America—Canadian, French, English …”

“They’re bound to be different, then, aren’t they, after all …”

“To tell you the truth,” the Marshal said, “I started out thinking that, too. Now, I’m not so sure. Now, what sticks in my mind is
how they’re all the same. We weren’t shown the whole of the profile they did on our killer, that’s the trouble. I suppose that’s because it didn’t fit the Suspect.

“And I think I can guess the most important aspect that doesn’t fit. His age. Bacci wrote up the cases most similar to ours. The oldest started at twenty, the youngest at twelve. They start as soon as they’re sexually mature, not when they’re middle aged.”

“But … Where does that leave us with Silvano?”

The Marshal looked at his list. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. He was born in nineteen thirty-five, so he was fortyish when the maniac killings started in seventy-four, nearer fifty when they were at their height … I suppose he could be the only exception to the rule but it was the same with that girl …”

“What girl? What are you talking about now?”

“The Suspect’s daughter. We were asked to believe that one fine morning, years after the fact, she got up and decided to go to Police Headquarters and report that her father used to rape her. Just like that. Even though we’ve seen that she can barely get two words out about it now. Well, it could be true, but I reckon it would be the one and only case in the history of the world. And according to the statistics a serial killer who started work at fifty, as the Suspect would have had to do, would be another.”

“And Silvano?”

“Forty. Practically as bad, but there are other problems, aren’t there? I mean—like the Suspect—Silvano’s sex life, whatever your opinion of it in moral terms, was anything but impoverished. He was evidently a sexual acrobat, enjoyed women, men, groups—and he was always,
always
, in charge, directing operations.”

“I thought we were trying to accuse Silvano,” Ferrini protested, “but you’re defending him.”

“No, no …” the Marshal said. “I’m just refusing to trim the facts to fit him. There’s a difference. I suppose … I suppose what I’m trying to do is to go forward from where Romola had to leave off. This is where he was when they pushed him off the case. It doesn’t mean he would have stopped here.”

“That’s true. It was Silvano in sixty-eight, though. I reckon he’d never have budged from that.”

“No, and neither will I. A gun that’s killed can’t be sold, either. If it changed hands it had to be stolen. But it’s not just the gun, is it? It’s the other little details.”

“What details?”

“The bodies. The way they were separated after death. That’s an odd and very particular thing to repeat from sixty-eight. Then the handbags, he fiddled in their handbags, tipped stuff out—but without taking money from them. In sixty-eight, the bit of money in the woman’s handbag wasn’t taken, they were after something bigger. And then, the scene of the crime. It’s always the same.”

“Then we’re back to Silvano again! Guarnaccia, you’re going round in circles.”

“Oh no.” The Marshal spoke quietly, as if to himself. “That’s why it can’t be Silvano. It can only be someone who wants us to think so. Someone with a memory, perhaps a garbled memory of sixty-eight. Or even someone who got most of it from the newspapers and who didn’t know, since the crime has never been properly solved until now, that it wasn’t Silvano who did those things. It was probably Fabio who went through the handbag, as Nicolino said—and Silvano was already hidden in the reeds. It was Sergio who separated the bodies, or said he did, and the victims themselves chose the place where they parked and made love and where they were murdered. Serial killers, as far as I can gather, repeat themselves. They don’t repeat three or four other people. This one seems to have reconstructed the sixty-eight murder for our benefit because we let Silvano go unpunished. And when nobody noticed there was a letter to make us notice, telling us to look at the court proceedings of sixty-eight.”

“That’s pretty impressive,” Ferrini admitted, “but what about his little vice of mutilating the bodies?”

“It came later. Did you notice something? I was thinking about it this morning whilst Simonetti was going on at the Suspect … When the murderer started cutting into the girls’ pudenda he stopped bothering with their handbags from then on.”

“Oho, Guarnaccia! Very Freudian! And very unlike you, I’d have thought!”

“What d’you mean? I was thinking of my mother.”

“Even worse.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Sorry. I’m taking the mickey. So, where does your mother come into this?”

“She doesn’t, not really. It’s just that I remembered she slapped me once. She hardly ever did, so I never forgot the few occasions. It was for going through her handbag—I wasn’t stealing anything, it was just curiosity. I was convinced she had fascinating secrets in there. You know how mothers are, my wife’s the same: she’ll say to one of the boys, ‘Bring me my handbag, it’s on such and such a chair.’ But never,
never are
they allowed to go in the bag themselves and get the money.”

“It’s true, that. But what—?”

“And even as an adult, you wouldn’t dream of going through a woman’s handbag any more than you’d touch her. The same would apply to going through her pockets … anyway, I suppose I’m not making much sense. It just seemed a natural development for someone with his own sex problems.”

But they were back where they started. You couldn’t say that about Silvano. For half an hour they went round and round this circular path and found no exit. When at last they did find the exit it was when they’d stopped looking for it. If they couldn’t see Silvano as the Monster they had to give him up. If they gave up Silvano they had to give up the Beretta 22 he’d used in ’68. That was why they turned to the ballistics and autopsy reports in the vain hope of finding some loophole, some element of doubt about the gun being the same. There was no loophole, but there, before them, was the exit from the vicious circle. There, where it had always been, staring them in the face. The truth was that it was only a matter of luck and because they were frustrated and tired, that they noticed it now. Each of the crimes, starting from ’74, was listed in their files with its relevant ballistics and autopsy reports attached. But ’68 the Marshal took from Romola’s document
while Ferrini extracted ’74 from their suspect file. They both began hurriedly reading, half aloud, and suddenly they both stopped.

“Each victim was hit four times and the entry wounds are very close together with the exception of one shot fired into the woman’s arm …”

“The girl had received three bullet wounds in the arm which had not killed her. She had been killed with a knife …”

Silvano, in ’68, had been a good shot and done an efficient job, just as his decisive character would suggest. Four bullets for the man, three for the woman, entry wounds close together. On target, efficient, two victims dead without a chance to react, and a bullet left over to inculpate Sergio. The gun might have been the same in 1974, but the hand that held it was another’s. A messy job, an inefficient job, begun too late when the couple had finished making love and separated themselves. Even then, when they were in a tiny, enclosed space and totally distracted, unsuspecting, he’d made a mess of it and had to stab the girl to death. This was somebody who had been in a position to borrow or steal Silvano’s gun, somebody connected in some way with Silvano and the ’68 murder. Here, whoever he might be, was the person who would fit the psychological profile of the Monster. Someone young, capable of getting hold of a gun but not yet capable of using it properly. Someone weak, damaged and resentful who had it in for loving couples, or for the world in general. Or for Silvano.