The Monster of Florence (21 page)
S
pezi and I submitted the article on the Monster of Florence to
The New Yorker
in the summer of 2001. My family and I went back to the States for the summer, to an old family farm on the Maine coast. I spent much of the summer working with our editor at
The New Yorker
, revising and fact-checking the piece. It was tentatively scheduled for publication the third week of September 2001.
Spezi and I both anticipated a huge reaction in Italy to the publication of the article. Italian public opinion had long ago settled on the guilt of Pacciani and his picnicking friends. Most Italians had also swallowed Giuttari’s theory, that Pacciani & Co. had been working for a shadowy, powerful cult. While Americans might scoff at the very idea that a satanic sect was behind the killings, Italians did not find it unusual or unbelievable. From the very beginning, there had been rumors that a powerful and important person must be behind the killings, a doctor or nobleman. The satanic sect investigation seemed a logical extension of this idea, and most Italians believed it was justified.
We hoped to overthrow that complacency.
The New Yorker
piece laid out a very strong case that Pacciani was not the Monster. If not, then his self-confessed “picnicking friends” were liars and Giuttari’s satanic sect theory, built on their testimony, collapsed. Which would leave only one avenue of investigation left: the Sardinian Trail.
The carabinieri, Mario knew, had continued a secret investigation into the Sardinian Trail. A secret informant in the carabinieri, someone whose identity even I don’t know, had told Mario they were awaiting the right moment to unveil the results of their investigation.
“Il tempo è un galantuomo
,” the informant had told Spezi, “Time is a gentleman.” Spezi hoped that publication of the
New Yorker
article would spur the carabinieri into action, set the investigation back on the right track—and lead to the unmasking of the Monster.
“Italians,” Mario said to me, “are sensitive to American public opinion. If an American magazine of the stature of
The New Yorker
proclaims Pacciani innocent, that will cause a furor, and I mean a
furor.
”
As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, our family made preparations to fly from Boston to Florence on September 14 so the children could make the start of school on the seventeenth.
On September 11, 2001, everything changed.
Around two o’clock on that long and terrible day, I turned off the television in the kitchen of our old farmhouse in Maine. I had to get out of the house. Taking my six-year-old son, Isaac, with me, I went out for a walk. The day glowed with autumnal glory, the last hurrah of life before winter, the air snappish and smelling of wood smoke, the sky a vibrant blue. We crossed the freshly mown fields behind the farmhouse, past the apple orchard, and headed down an abandoned logging road into the woods. A mile in we left the road and plunged into the trees, looking for a beaver pond hidden in the deepest part of the forest, where the moose live. I wanted to get away from any trace of human existence, to escape, to lose myself, to find a place untainted by the horror of the day. We forced our way through stands of spruce and fir and slogged across bogs and carpets of sphagnum moss. Half a mile in, sunlight loomed through the tree trunks and we came to the beaver pond. The surface of the pond was utterly still and black, mirroring the forest leaning over it, here and there splashed with red from the leaves of an autumnal maple crowding the pond’s edge. The air smelled of green moss and damp pine needles. It was a primeval place, this nameless pond on an unknown brook, beyond good and evil.
While my son gathered beaver-gnawed sticks, I had a moment to collect my thoughts. I wondered if it was right to leave the country when it was under attack. I considered whether it was safe to fly with my children. And I wondered how this day would affect our lives in Italy if we did return. It occurred to me then, as an afterthought, that the
New Yorker
article on the Monster of Florence was not likely to be published.
Like most Americans, we decided to continue our lives as before. We flew back to Italy on September 18, soon after flights resumed. Our Italian friends held a dinner for us at an apartment on Piazza Santo Spirito, overlooking the great Renaissance church built by Brunelleschi. When we walked into the apartment, it was like arriving at a funeral; our Italian friends came forward and embraced us, one by one, some with tears in their eyes, offering their condolences. The evening was somber, and at the end, a friend who taught Greek at the University of Florence recited Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” She read it first in the original Greek and then in Italian. The poem describes the Romans of the late empire waiting for the barbarians to come, and I have never forgotten the last lines she read that evening:
. . . night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
1
As I expected,
The New Yorker
killed the Monster piece, generously paying us in full and releasing the rights back to us so we could publish it elsewhere. I made a few halfhearted attempts to place it with another magazine, but after 9/11 no one was interested in the story of a long-ago serial killer in another country.
In the days following 9/11, many commentators on television and in the newspapers pontificated on the nature of evil. Literary and cultural lions were called upon to express their grave and considered opinions. Politicians, religious leaders, and psychological experts all waxed eloquent on the subject. I was struck by their perfect failure to explain this most mysterious of phenomena, and I began to feel that the very incomprehensibility of evil might be, in fact, one of its fundamental characteristics. You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion. Maybe, I thought, this is why Christians invented the devil and Monster investigators invented a satanic sect. They both were, as the poem goes, “some kind of solution.”
During that time I began to understand my own obsession with the Monster case. In twenty years of writing thrillers involving murder and violence, I had tried and largely failed to understand evil at its core. The Monster of Florence attracted me because it was a road into the wilderness. The case was the purest distillation of evil I had ever encountered, on many levels. It was, first of all, the evil of the depraved killings of a highly disturbed human being. But the case was about other kinds of evil as well. Some of the top investigators, prosecutors, and judges in the case, charged with the sacred responsibility of finding the truth, appeared to be more interested in using the case to leverage their power to greater personal glory. Having committed themselves to a defective theory, they refused to reconsider their beliefs when faced with overwhelming contradictory evidence. They cared more about saving face than saving lives, more about pushing their careers than putting the Monster behind bars. Around the Monster’s incomprehensible evil had accreted layer upon layer of additional falsehood, vanity, ambition, arrogance, incompetence, and fecklessness. The Monster’s acts were like a metastasized cancer cell, tumbling through the blood to lodge in some soft, dark corner, dividing, multiplying, building its own network of blood vessels and capillaries to feed itself, swelling, expanding, and finally killing.
I knew that Mario Spezi had already struggled with the evil expressed by the Monster case. One day I asked him how he had dealt with the horrors of the case—the evil—which I felt was starting to affect me.
“Nobody understood evil better than Brother Galileo,” he told me, referring to the Franciscan monk turned psychoanalyst he had turned to for help when the horrors of the Monster case began to drag him under. Brother Galileo had since died, but Mario credited him with saving his life during the time of the Monster’s killings. “He helped me understand what is beyond understanding.”
“Do you remember what he said?”
“I can tell you exactly, Doug. I wrote it down.”
He dug out his notes of the session where Brother Galileo spoke about evil and read them to me. The old monk began by making a powerful play on words of the fact that the Italian word for “evil” and “sickness” is the same,
male
, and that the word for “speech” and “study” is also the same,
discorso.
“ ‘Pathology’ can be defined as
discorso sul male
[study of sickness (or evil)],” Brother Galileo said. “I prefer to define it as
male che parla
[evil (or sickness) that speaks]. Just so with psychology, which is defined as the ‘study of the psyche.’ But I prefer ‘the study of the psyche struggling to speak through its neurotic disturbances.’
“There is no longer true communication among us, because our very language is sick, and the sickness of our discourse carries us inevitably to sickness in our bodies, to neurosis, if not finally to mental illness.
“When I can no longer communicate with speech, I will speak with sickness. My symptoms are given life. These symptoms express the need for my soul to make itself heard but cannot, because I don’t have the words, and because those who should listen cannot get beyond the sound of their own voices. The language of sickness is the most difficult to interpret. It is an extreme form of blackmail which defies all our efforts to pay it off and send it away. It is a final attempt at communication.
“Mental illness lies at the very end of this struggle to be heard. It is the last refuge of a desperate soul who has finally understood that no one is listening or ever will listen. Madness is the renunciation of all efforts to be understood. It is one unending scream of pain and need into the absolute silence and indifference of society. It is a cry without an echo.
“This is the nature of the evil of the Monster of Florence. And this is the nature of the evil in each and every one of us. We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
Spezi was crushed by the failure of our article to see print. It was a great blow in his lifelong effort to unmask the Monster. With his disappointment and frustration, his obsession with the case, if anything, deepened. I moved on to other things. That year I began work on a new thriller,
Brimstone
, with my writing partner, Lincoln Child, with whom I had created a series of best-selling novels featuring an investigator named Pendergast.
Brimstone
was set partly in Tuscany and it involved a serial killer, satanic rituals, and a lost Stradivarius violin. The Monster of Florence was dead and I began dissecting the corpse for my fiction.
One day, as I was strolling through Florence, I passed a tiny shop that made hand-bound books. It gave me an idea. I went home and printed out our Monster article in octavo book format and carried it into the shop for binding. The shopkeeper created two handmade volumes, covered in full Florentine leather, with marbled endpapers. Each cover was stamped in gold leaf with the title, our names, and the Florentine lily.
THE MONSTER
SPEZI
&
PRESTON
It was a signed, numbered edition of two. During our next dinner at Spezi’s house, sitting at the table on his terrazzo overlooking the hills of Florence, I presented him with copy number one. He was impressed. He turned it over in his hands, admiring the gold tooling and fine leather. After a while, he looked up at me, his brown eyes twinkling. “You know, Doug, with all this work we’ve already done . . . we
should
write a book about the Monster.”
I was immediately smitten with the idea. We talked about it and decided that we would first publish the book in Italy, in Italian. Then we would rework it for an American readership and try to get it published in the United States.
For years my novels had been published in Italian by Sonzogno, a division of RCS Libri, part of a large publishing conglomerate that included Rizzoli and the
Corriere della Sera
newspaper. I called my editor at Sonzogno and she was intrigued, especially after we sent her the ex–
New Yorker
article we had written. She invited Mario and me to Milan to discuss the idea. One day, we took the train to Milan, pitched the idea, and walked away with a handsome contract.
RCS Libri was particularly interested in the idea because they had recently published another book about the Monster case, which had been a major best-seller. The author of the book? Chief Inspector Michele Giuttari.
M
eanwhile, Giuttari’s investigation, which had stalled badly after the business of the “Villa of Horrors,” had began to revive. In 2002, a new line of investigation erupted in the neighboring province of Umbria—in the ancient and beautiful hill town of Perugia, one hundred and fifty kilometers from Florence. The first sign of it was an odd telephone call that Spezi got early that year from Gabriella Carlizzi. Carlizzi, you may recall, was the crank who claimed the cult of the Red Rose had not only ordered the Monster killings but was also behind 9/11.
Carlizzi had quite a story to tell Spezi, the Monstrologer. One day, while providing assistance to the inmates of Rebibbia prison near Rome, she had received an alarming confidence from an inmate who had been a member of the infamous Italian Gang of Magliana. The man had said that a Perugian doctor who drowned in 1985 in Lake Trasimeno had not met his end through accident or suicide, as the inquest had concluded at the time, but had been murdered. He had been killed by the Order of the Red Rose, which the doctor himself belonged to. The other members of the order had eliminated him because he had become unreliable and was about to expose their nefarious activities to the police. To hide the evidence of crime, his body had been substituted for another before dumping it in the lake. Therefore, buried in the doctor’s grave wasn’t his body, but that of the other person.
Spezi, who had a great deal of experience dealing with conspiracy theorists, had thanked Carlizzi very much and explained that, most regrettably, he was not interested in pursuing the story. He got her off the phone as quickly and politely as possible.
Nevertheless, Spezi vaguely remembered the story of the drowned doctor. One month after the last Monster killing in 1985, a handsome young man from a wealthy Perugian family, Francesco Narducci, had drowned in Lake Trasimeno. Rumors circulated at the time that he had killed himself because he was the Monster, rumors which were routinely investigated and dismissed.
In early 2002 the indefatigable Carlizzi, turned down by Spezi in her quest for publicity, brought her story to the public minister of Perugia, a man named Giuliano Mignini, whose jurisdiction covered the province of Perugia. (The public minister is the public prosecutor of a region, a position similar to a U.S. attorney or a district attorney. The public minister represents the interests of the state and argues the case in court, as the advocate for the state.) Judge Mignini
was
interested. The story seemed to mesh with another case he was pursuing involving a group of loan sharks who lent money to shopkeepers and professionals at stratospheric interest rates and who, if they didn’t get repaid, exacted a brutal revenge. A small shopkeeper who was behind in her payments decided to expose them. She recorded one of their threatening telephone calls and sent the tape to the public minister’s office.
One morning, while working in my farmhouse office in Giogoli, I got a call from Spezi. “The Monster’s in the news again,” he said. “I’m coming up to your house. Put the coffee on.”
He arrived clutching a stack of that morning’s newspapers. I began to read.
“
Be careful or we’ll do to you the same as that dead doctor in Lake Trasimeno
,” the papers quoted the loan shark as saying in the tape recording of the threatening call. That was it: no names or facts. But Public Minister Giuliano Mignini read a great deal into those words. He concluded, apparently based on information given him by Carlizzi, that Francesco Narducci had been murdered by the loan sharks, some of whom might be in contact with the Red Rose or another diabolical sect. Therefore, the loan sharks and the Narducci killing might be connected in some way with the Monster of Florence murders.
Judge Mignini, the public minister, informed Chief Inspector Giuttari of the connection to the Monster case, and Giuttari and his GIDES squad embarked on a determined effort to prove that Narducci hadn’t committed suicide. He had been murdered, to silence him and the terrible secrets he knew. Mignini had ordered the reopening of the Narducci case as a murder investigation.
“I can’t follow this at all,” I said, trying to read the paper. “It makes no sense.”
Spezi nodded, smiling cynically. “In my day they never would have printed this
merda
. Italian journalism is going downhill.”
“At least,” I said, “it’s more fodder for our book.”
A while later, more news about the story broke in the papers. This time, still quoting unnamed sources, the papers printed a new version of the so-called tape recording. Now the loan shark was reported to have said, “
Be careful or we’ll do to you the same as we did to Narducci and Pacciani
!” This version of the recording directly connected the dead doctor Narducci with the so-called murder of Pacciani—and thus with the Monster case.
Later, Spezi would learn from a source that what was said on the tape was much less specific:
We’ll do to you like the dead doctor at the lake.
No mention was made of Narducci or Pacciani. A little digging uncovered the existence of another doctor, a man who had lost more than two billion lire gambling, whose body had been found on the shore of Lake Trasimeno with a bullet in the brain not long before the threatening telephone call. The phrase “
at
the lake” as opposed to the earlier “
in
the lake” seemed to point to this doctor, and not to Narducci, who, after all, had died fifteen years before the call was made.
But by the time this new information came out, the investigation into the dead Dr. Narducci had become a juggernaut, unstoppable. Giuttari and his elite squad, GIDES, looked for—and found!—many links between Narducci’s death and the Monster of Florence killings. The new investigative theories offered up succulent gothic scenarios that were leaked to the press. Dr. Narducci, the press reported, had been the guardian of the fetishes cut from the women. He had been killed to keep from spilling the beans. Some of the richest families in Perugia were involved in sinister cults, perhaps under the cover of Freemasonry, a brotherhood to which both Narducci’s father and father-in-law belonged.
Giuttari and his investigators from GIDES painstakingly pieced together the final day of Narducci’s life, looking for clues.
Dr. Francesco Narducci came from a rich Perugian family, a young man blessed with brains and talent who at age thirty-six was the youngest medical professor in the field of gastroenterology in Italy. In photographs, he is strikingly handsome in a boyish way, tanned and smiling, fit and elegant. Narducci had married Francesca Spagnoli, the beautiful heiress to the fortune of Luisa Spagnoli, the maker of high-fashion clothing for women.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its power and wealth, the Narducci family was not well liked in Perugia. Behind that façade of wealth and privilege there was, as is not unusual, unhappiness. For some time, and in ever-increasing doses, Francesco Narducci had been taking meperidine (Demerol). According to a medical report, by the time of his death he was taking it every day.
The morning of October 8, 1985, was hot and sunny. The doctor made his rounds at the Policlinico di Monteluce in Perugia until about 12:30, when a nurse called him to the telephone. After that, the facts become confused. One witness said that after the call, Narducci cut short his rounds and seemed nervous and preoccupied. Another claimed he finished his rounds in regular order and left the hospital uneventfully, asking a colleague if he wanted to take a spin on Lake Trasimeno in his boat.
At one-thirty he arrived home and ate lunch with his wife. At two o’clock, the owner of the marina where Narducci had a villa received a phone call from the doctor, asking him if his motorboat was ready to go out on the lake. The man answered it was. But as Narducci left his house, he lied to his wife, saying he was going back to the hospital and would be home early.
Narducci took his Honda 400 motocross bike and set off for the lake, but not directly to the marina. First he went into his family’s house in San Feliciano. There were rumors, which investigators could not substantiate, that he wrote a letter there and left it on a windowsill, sealed in an envelope. The letter, if it ever existed, never came to light.
At three-thirty the doctor finally arrived at the marina. He jumped in his motorboat, a sleek red Grifo, and fired up the seventy-horsepower engine. The owner of the marina advised him not to go too far, since the gas tank was half empty. Francesco told him not to worry and pointed the boat toward Polvese Island, a kilometer and a half offshore.
He never returned.
At around five-thirty, when it began to grow dark, the marina owner became alarmed and called Francesco’s brother. At seven-thirty the carabinieri launched a boat to help with the search. But Lake Trasimeno is one of the largest in Italy, and it wasn’t until the next evening that they found the red Grifo empty and adrift. On board were a pair of sunglasses, a wallet, and a packet of Merit cigarettes, Narducci’s brand.
Five days later, they found the body. A single black-and-white photograph was taken of the scene when the body was brought to shore, showing the corpse stretched lengthwise on a dock, surrounded by a group of people.
Carlizzi had told the public minister that the body of Narducci had been substituted for another, which had been tossed in the lake as a decoy. To investigate that statement, Giuttari commissioned an expert analysis of the photograph. Taking as a standard unit of measurement the width of a plank on the dock, the experts concluded that the cadaver in the photograph belonged to a man four inches shorter than Narducci. They also calculated that the dead man’s waist was far too large to be that of the trim Narducci.
Other experts disagreed. Some pointed out that a body floating in water for five days does tend to swell. Planks of a dock are not all equal in width, and the dock in question had been replaced. Who knew the width of the planks seventeen years ago? All those in the crowd who were actually standing around the body, including the medical examiner himself, swore the body was Narducci’s. At the time, the medical examiner listed the cause of death as drowning, which he estimated had occurred about a hundred and ten hours previously.
Contrary to Italian law, no autopsy had been performed. Narducci’s family, led by his father, had managed to bypass the legal requirement. At the time, people in Perugia quietly understood that it was because the family feared that an autopsy would have shown that Narducci was up to his gills in Demerol. But to Giuttari and GIDES, the lack of an autopsy was most significant. They said the family had finagled their way out of an autopsy because it would have shown the body was not that of Narducci at all. The family was somehow complicit, not only in his murder, but in the substitution of his body with another to cover up the crime.
Francesco Narducci—or so Giuttari theorized—had been murdered because he was a member of the satanic sect behind the Monster of Florence killings, to which his father had introduced him. He had been named custodian of the grisly fetishes taken by Pacciani and his picnicking friends. Shaken by the reality into which he had fallen, the young doctor became indecisive, unreliable, prey to depression, and difficult to trust. The leaders of the sect decided he had to be eliminated.
The satanic cult investigation, led by Chief Inspector Giuttari, once moribund, was revived. Giuttari had now identified at least one member of the invidious sect behind the Monster killings—Narducci. All that remained was to find his killer and bring the other members of the sect to justice.
