The Monster of Florence (24 page)
P
olizia
!
Perquisizione
! Police! This is a search!”
At 6:15 on the morning of November 18, 2004, Mario Spezi woke to the sound of his door buzzer and the raucous voice of a police detective demanding entrance.
Spezi’s first clear thought, on rousing himself from bed, was to hide the floppy disk that contained the book we were writing together. He leapt out of bed and ran up the narrow staircase to his garret office, where he yanked open the plastic box containing the diskettes for his ancient computer, took the one with “Monster” written in English on the label, and shoved it down into his underwear.
He reached the front door just as the police came pouring in. There seemed to be no end to them, three . . . four . . . five. In the end Spezi counted seven. Most of them were fat and their big jackets of gray and brown leather bulked them up even more.
The oldest one was a commander from Giuttari’s GIDES squad. The others were carabinieri and policemen. “Graybeard,” the commander, wished Spezi a dry “
buongiorno
” and shoved a piece of paper at him.
“
Procura della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di Perugia
,” read the letterhead—Office of the Public Prosecutor in the Tribunal of Perugia—and below that, “Search Warrant, Information and Guarantee to the Accused on the Right of Defense.”
It had come straight out of the office of the public minister of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini.
“The person named above,” the document read, “is hereby under official investigation for having committed the following crimes: A), B), C), D) . . .” They were listed up to the letter R. Nineteen crimes, none of them specified.
“What are these crimes, A, B, C, etcetera?” Spezi asked Graybeard.
“It would take volumes to explain them” was the man’s response. Spezi could not know what the crimes were—they were under a judicial order of secrecy.
Spezi read with incredulity the reason for the search. It said he had “evinced a peculiar and suspicious interest toward the Perugian branch of the investigation” and that Spezi “demonstrated a zealous effort in attempting to undermine the investigation through the medium of television.” This, he figured, must refer to the
Chi L’ha Visto?
program of May 14, in which Professor Introna had completely cut the legs off the satanic sect investigation and Spezi had waved around the doorstop, making Chief Inspector Giuttari look like a fool.
The warrant authorized the search of the house but also of the “persons present or who may arrive” in search of any object that might have something to do with the Monster case, even peripherally. “There is sufficient reason to believe that such objects may be present in the premises of the person above indicated and on his own person.”
Spezi went cold when he read this. It meant they could search his body. He could feel the angular plastic case of the diskette digging into his flesh.
Meanwhile, Spezi’s wife, Myriam, and twenty-year-old daughter, Eleonora, stood in the living room in their bathrobes, alarmed and confused.
“Tell me what you’re interested in,” Spezi said, “and I’ll show you, so you won’t trash my house.”
“We want everything you have on the Monster,” said Graybeard.
Which meant not only the entire archive Spezi had accumulated over a quarter of a century of researching and reporting on the case, but all the material that we were using to write the Monster book. Spezi was custodian of all the research; I had only copies of the most recent documents.
It suddenly occurred to him what this was about. They wanted to prevent publication of the book.
“Shit! When will you give it back to me?”
“As soon as we have checked through it,” said Graybeard.
Spezi brought him up to his garret and showed him the masses of files that constituted his archive: packages of yellowed newspaper cuttings, mountains of photocopies of legal documents, ballistic analyses, ME reports, entire trial transcripts, interrogations, verdicts, photographs, books.
They began to load it all into big cardboard boxes.
Spezi called a friend of his at the news agency ANSA, the Italian equivalent to the Associated Press, and had the luck to catch him. “They’re searching my house,” he said. “They’re taking away everything that I need to write my book with Douglas Preston on the Monster. I won’t be able to write another word.”
Fifteen minutes later the first story about the search broke on the computer screens of every newspaper and television station in Italy.
Meanwhile Spezi called the president of the Order of Journalists, the president of the Press Association, and the director of
La Nazione
. They were more scandalized than surprised. They told him they would raise hell with the story.
Spezi’s cell phone began to ring like mad. One after another his colleagues called, even as the search plodded on. They all wanted to interview him. Spezi assured them that as soon as the search was over, he would meet with them.
The journalists began arriving under the house even while the search was still in progress.
The police didn’t content themselves to taking only documents that Spezi had showed them. They began to rummage through drawers, pull books off the shelves, and open up CD holders. They went into his daughter’s room and searched her closet, her files, her books, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and photographs, scattering stuff on the floor and making a mess.
Spezi put his arm around Myriam. His wife was trembling. “Don’t worry, this is just routine.” Myriam was wearing a jacket and at the opportune moment he dove for the diskette, extracted it, and slid it into one of her pockets. He then gave her a kiss on the cheek as if to console her. “Hide it,” he whispered.
Several minutes later, pretending to be upset, she sagged into a low ottoman that was coming apart at one of the seams. When the police had their backs turned she quickly slid the floppy disk into the ottoman.
After three hours of searching, they seemed to be finished. They strapped the loaded cartons onto luggage carriers and asked Spezi to follow them to the carabinieri barracks, where they would make an inventory, which he would be required to sign.
In the barracks, while he was seated on a brown Naugahyde chair waiting for the list to be ready, he received a telephone call on his cell phone. It was from Myriam, who was trying to put the house back in order, and who unwisely spoke to her husband in French. Spezi and his wife habitually spoke French in their home, as she was Belgian and they were a bilingual family. Their daughter had gone to French schools in Florence.
“Mario,” she said in French, “don’t worry, they didn’t find what really interests you. But I can’t find the documents about the scagliola.” A scagliola is a type of antique table, and Spezi owned an extremely valuable one dating back to the seventeenth century, which they had just had restored and were thinking of selling.
It wasn’t the most felicitous thing to say at that moment, in French, when it was obvious their cell phone was being tapped. He cut her off. “Myriam, this really isn’t the time . . . not now . . .” Spezi flushed as he closed the phone. He knew his wife’s comment was completely innocent, but that it could be interpreted in a sinister light, particularly since it had been spoken in French.
Not long after, Graybeard came in. “Spezi, we need you in here for a moment.”
The journalist rose from the chair and followed them into the next room. Graybeard turned and stared at him, his face hostile. “Spezi, you’re not cooperating. This isn’t working at all.”
“Not cooperating? What’s that supposed to mean, cooperate? I left my entire house at your disposal so you could put your grubby hands wherever you pleased, what the hell more do you want?”
He stared at Spezi with his hard, marblelike eyes. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Don’t feign ignorance. It would be much better for you if you would only cooperate.”
“Ah, now I understand . . . It’s about what my wife said in French. You think she was trying to tell me something in code. But you see, that’s my wife’s language, and it’s normal for her to speak French, we often speak French at home. As for the contents of what she said”—Spezi figured that Graybeard wasn’t bilingual—“if you didn’t understand it, she was referring to a document that you didn’t see, which was my contract with the publishing house for my book on the Monster. She wanted to tell me that you hadn’t taken it. That’s all.”
Graybeard continued to fix him with narrowed eyes, his expression unchanging. Spezi began to think that the problem might be with the word “scagliola.” Not many Italians outside the antiquarian field knew what it meant.
“Is it the scagliola?” he asked. “Do you know what a scagliola is? Is that the problem?”
The policeman didn’t respond, but it was clear that this was, in fact, the problem. Spezi tried to explain, to no avail. Graybeard was not interested in explanations.
“I regret to say, Spezi, that we’re going to have to start all over again.”
They turned around. The policemen and carabinieri got back into their vehicles, and they all drove back to the apartment with Spezi. For four more hours they turned the place upside down—and this time they trashed it for real.
They didn’t miss anything, not even the space behind the books in the library. They took the computer, all the floppy disks (except the one still hidden in the ottoman), and even the menu of a Rotary Club dinner where Spezi had attended a conference on the Monster. They took his telephone book and all his letters.
They were not in a good humor.
Spezi was also beginning to lose his temper. When he passed through the door to the library, he gestured to the stone doorstop that he had borrowed from his German friend, the one he had waved about on the television show. It was sitting behind the door, doing what it was supposed to do—being a doorstop. “You see that?” he said sarcastically to the detective. “It’s like the truncated pyramid found at the scene of one of the crimes which you insist on claiming is an ‘esoteric object.’ There it is, take a good look: can’t you see it’s only a doorstop?” He gave a mocking laugh. “You find them everywhere in Tuscan country houses.”
It was an extremely serious mistake. The detective seized the doorstop and packed it away. And thus was added to the evidence against Spezi an object identical to the one that GIDES and Giuttari believed to be of prime importance to their investigation, something the
Corriere della Sera
had written about in a front-page story, calling it, without a trace of irony, “an object that served to put the earthly world in contact with the infernal regions.”
In the report prepared by the police of the items taken from Spezi’s house, the doorstop was described as a “truncated pyramid with a hexagonal base concealed behind a door,” the wording implying that Spezi had made a special effort to hide it. The public minister of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, justified the retention of the doorstop in a report that stated the object “connected the person under investigation [i.e., Spezi] directly with the series of double homicides.”
In other words, because of that doorstop, Spezi was no longer suspected of merely obstructing or interfering with the Monster of Florence investigation. Now they believed that an object discovered in his house tied him directly with one of the crimes.
The
Chi L’ha Visto?
program and the June 23 article had fixed Giuttari’s hatred and suspicion of Spezi. In a book Giuttari published about the case,
The Monster: Anatomy of an Investigation
, the chief inspector explained how his suspicions developed. It is an interesting look into the way his mind worked.
“On June 23,” Giuttari wrote, “one of [Spezi’s] articles came out in
La Nazione
, an ‘exclusive’ interview with the lifer Mario Vanni, entitled
I Will Die as the Monster but I Am Innocent
.”
In the story, Spezi mentioned that he had encountered Vanni once, many years before the Monster killings, in San Casciano. This struck Giuttari as an important clue. “I was mildly surprised that the two had known each other since the days of their youth,” he wrote. “But I was struck even more by the curious coincidence that the bitter public foe of the official investigation into the Monster case and the strenuous defender of the ‘Sardinian Trail’ had not only revealed himself as having excellent rapport with the indicted ex-pharmacist [Calamandrei] . . . but now stood revealed as a longtime friend of Mario Vanni.”
Giuttari went on to say that Spezi had “participated in a television series” that attempted to focus attention back on the Sardinian Trail, “recycling the same old tired and unverified theories” that had been discredited long ago.
“Now,” Giuttari wrote, Spezi’s “interfering presence was beginning to look suspicious.”
With the doorstop in hand, Giuttari and Mignini had the physical evidence they needed to connect Spezi to one of the actual crime scenes of the Monster.
When the policemen had left, Spezi slowly walked up the staircase to his garret, afraid of what he might find. It was even worse than he’d feared. He fell into the chair that I had given him upon my departure from Florence, in front of the empty space where his computer had been, and stared for a long time at the wreck all around him. In that moment, he thought back to that crystal-clear morning of Sunday, June 7, 1981—twenty-three years earlier—when his colleague had asked him to take the crime desk, assuring him that “nothing ever happens on a Sunday.”
Never in a million years could he have imagined where it would end up.
He wanted to call me, he told me later, but by that time it was late at night in America. He couldn’t write an e-mail—he didn’t have a computer. He decided to leave the house, walk around the streets of Florence, and look for an Internet café where he could e-mail me.
Outside the apartment, a crowd of journalists and television cameras awaited. He said a few words, answered questions, and then got into his car and drove into town. In Via de’ Benci, a few steps from Santa Croce, he went into an Internet café, full of pimply American students talking to their parents through VOIP. He seated himself in front of a machine. From somewhere, a little muted, came the sad trombone of Marc Johnson playing “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” by Charlie Mingus. Spezi connected to his mail server, entered the information for his mailbox, and saw that there was already a message from me, with an attachment.
