The Monster of Florence (38 page)

“You mean people knew?”

“Everybody knew. We’re sure, for a start, that the village Marshal knew. He was long dead when we started investigating the matter but the station records show that he had Silvano in and measured his thumbprint against the bruise on his wife’s neck. He knew, all right, but he didn’t stick to it and we don’t know why.”

“Could he have been afraid?”

Di Maira shrugged. “I suppose he might have been. The Vargius family was big and they were a vicious crew. Then, that village, it’s the arsehole end of the world. A Marshal in a place like that would be very much on his own. A man could meet with a nasty accident in a place like that long before any help could arrive. Anyway, we’ll never know now. There was one of his carabinieri, too, he’s still alive, or so he was when we went there in the eighties. He was the only one who actually worked on the case, if you can call it a case when nothing much was done, with the Marshal. Blasted man actually found the body and couldn’t tell us a thing. Turned tail and ran for the Marshal—not that he wasn’t right to do that, but he didn’t look at anything so that with the Marshal dead—there’s an HSA report, of course, as there has to be in any case of sudden death, but the local doctor took one look at the gas canister standing by the bed with the tube leading to the young woman’s mouth and signed a death certificate without a murmur, which meant the Marshal could only report suicide.”

“Yet people were sure it wasn’t?”

“That gas canister was empty. Not one of the people who entered the room—and the neighbours were in there within minutes—the young carabiniere, the Marshal, the young woman’s family, had any problem with gas or even remembered a smell of gas or thought to open a window. What’s more, the baby was standing up in its cot screaming the place down. It would have been dead long before the mother if the canister had been full. And if that weren’t enough, the mother had knocked at the house next
door twice that evening to ask them to warm the baby’s milk because she’d run out of gas, once at about six thirty and again at ten. She was found dead at eleven thirty.”

“By this young carabiniere, you say.”

“By Silvano,
he
says. The neighbours heard him hammering at his own door and screaming. Then he hammered at their door and when they opened up he said his wife had a man in the house and wouldn’t let him in. He made a great show of breaking the door down in their presence.”

“Had he an alibi for the time immediately before?”

“The usual Silvano-style alibi. He’d been seen in the bar and the billiard hall, and every other place in the village he frequented regularly, in the company of his brother-in-law, Giuseppe. The truth is that nobody actually saw the pair of them after about ten thirty so they had all the time in the world to do the job, but with the brother-in-law backing him up and saying they stayed out together until two minutes before Silvano started hammering at his own door … Well, you know enough about Silvano, if you’ve read the Romola report, to realize that the wife and kid were for show and the real relationship was between Silvano and the brother, Giuseppe.
That
never got out in the village so his alibi, fishy though it was, was never broken.”

“But … the dead woman’s family?”

“Yes. The family. She was only nineteen, you know. Margherita, her name was. I’m sure her mother knew exactly what had happened but she never said a word. I suppose, from her point of view, she’d lost her daughter and nothing could bring her back. If the truth had come out, she’d have lost her son, too. Plus, like everyone else, she was scared of Silvano. Then, the shame if the homosexual story came out. They’d have had to move away and they had land there. No, no, nothing would have induced her to talk then and nothing would induce her to talk even in the eighties when the famous pistol—which, incidentally, belonged to her brother and disappeared when Silvano left the village—had killed so many people. We tapped her phone since she wouldn’t open her mouth much to us. She was on the phone every day to her surviving
daughter who lived up near Como—the one the kid Amelio went to when he ran away from Silvano. You’ve got the transcripts there. I made them myself by hand and kept my copy after I’d typed them up. I hope you can read my writing …”

The Marshal unrolled the sheets of paper. The writing in ballpoint had faded a little to a brownish blue.

“I think so.” But he didn’t try for a moment. “Why? If he needed the wife and child for show, why kill her? Was there another man?”

“There was, but that wasn’t the reason—interestingly enough, the other man’s name was Amelio. I wonder if Silvano let that pass because this Amelio was her intended before she was forced into marrying Silvano. You’ll find that little story amongst the stuff I’ve given you. Even so, although she did start seeing him again before her death he wasn’t the reason. What precipitated things was that she was leaving him, not for the other man, though. She must have been sick to death of the life she was leading, half-starved and regularly beaten by that monster of a so-called husband. She’d made her decision and applied for a job as a resident maid-of-all-work in an orphanage where they would let her take her kid. She’d bought a long-distance bus ticket. She was leaving him the next day.

“Of course, now there’s nobody who can tell us about it but there’s every reason to think he’d been forcing her to join in his sexual acrobatics with her brother and when she wanted out he bumped her off. We get the same set-up in sixty-eight when Belinda Muscas wanted out of the Belinda-Sergio-Silvano triangle and got the same punishment. He probably even bragged about it when he was setting up the sixty-eight job. It was Sergio, after all, who told us: ‘He murdered his wife in Sardinia and the kid was saved that time, too.’ Who else would have told him except Silvano himself? Then in seventy-four his new wife tries to leave him and he turns murderous again. In eighty she really does leave him and all hell’s let loose. See what I mean, now?”

The Marshal couldn’t help wondering why, if he’d had no scruples about killing both the first wife and Belinda for daring to leave him, he didn’t do the same to his second wife rather than going out
to kill fourteen strangers with a pistol that was bound to leave a trail back to him. He was wise enough not to say so but he must have looked unconvinced.

“You don’t follow?”

“Oh yes … I—perhaps I’m just amazed at how simply he got away with it all. To be that simple, you’ve got to be clever, I think.”

“Well, remember, he was always hiding one thing: his homosexuality. Without knowing that, you’d never suspect him.”

“That’s true …”

“You’ll find a name and address and phone number amongst my notes. Margherita’s younger sister, the one who lives near Como now. Talk to her. She’ll tell you what Silvano is. She was only twelve when Margherita was murdered, but if you aren’t convinced that Silvano’s the Monster after you’ve talked to her …” He got up and the Marshal rose to follow him.

“There’s another thing.” Di Maira stopped on the threshold and turned. “There was a rumour going about—and the papers, of course, made the most of it—that the real Monster would never be revealed because he was some Florentine bigwig. I don’t know if you remember that?”

The Marshal thought for a bit. “Was that about the time they were saying he might be an eminent surgeon and so on?”

“That’s it. Two separate rumours rolled into one. They came from two separate sources, one of which matters, the other doesn’t. The surgeon thing came out of an autopsy report saying the excisions were so precise, etc., but so is a butcher precise when he joints chicken—all rubbish, in my opinion. I saw the bodies and I can tell you that any Sardinian who’d ever skinned a dead lamb … You know what I mean?”

“Yes, yes, I do …”

“Well, be that as it may, the other story, the Florentine VIP one, does matter so don’t get your fingers burnt.”

“But if you think it’s Silvano?”

“It is Silvano. That rumour—and I don’t know how it got into circulation—was distorted. We were checking out the Peeping Tom
brigade at the time and, I can tell you, we were all taken aback by what we found out. In the first place because it wasn’t a hobby we were dealing with but a business. Control of each section of countryside around Florence was divided between the various bands. Permission to watch had to be asked for and paid for. On top of that there were audio and video tapes made of unsuspecting couples. Now, a business has clients. Do you follow me? That’s where your Florentine VIPs came into the story and, as you might expect, that information was classified. Something leaked, as something always does, and that’s what started the rumour of the Monster being some big shot whose name would never be revealed, especially when Sassetti was arrested and wouldn’t talk. The Scandicci car was under his control and he must have accompanied a client there that night. It’s rubbish as far as it goes, but even so, keep well away from that area of enquiry. You would fall foul of some very powerful people, all of them masons, you know what I mean? And it’s not worth it. Silvano was a loner and nothing to do with those gangs.”

“Yes … unless they came across each other …”

“How d’you mean?”

“The gangs were well organized and covered every country area outside Florence, you said?”

Di Maira’s face changed. “How do you mean? We checked them all, you know. If they had come across him we’d have got wind of it.”

“Unless they had a good reason for keeping the news to themselves.”

“Like what?”

“Like profit. They were, as you said, in business.”

“Ah, you mean blackmail. There was a lot of that going on, but no. Silvano hadn’t money, not their sort of money.”

“No. But those VIP clients had. Didn’t they buy films, tapes and so on?”

“Christ Almighty! You’re not serious? You are. You could be right, at that! They were after him to film him. Do you know what a piece of film like that would fetch in certain circles?”

“I hate to think.”

“Well, the price of your snuff films going round this city now would be nothing compared to it!”

“Well, well … we might as well forget it. In fact, from what you say, we’d
better
forget it. But was that what Nenci wanted twenty percent of? Had he been left out of some deal?”

“You’re right. It’s a separate issue and you’d need a lot of power and protection behind you to tackle it. You stick to Silvano. Just get that bastard for me, will you? You’ll be doing us all a favour.”

Lorenzini buzzed the Marshal on the internal phone.

“That call you asked for: I have Ida Melis on the line.”

“Put her through.”

He put the papers to one side and picked up the other receiver.

“Signora.”

“Has something else happened? He hasn’t—?”

“No, no, signora. Nothing’s happened. I just wanted a word with you. It was Sergeant Di Maira who gave me your name. Perhaps you remember him?”

“Yes, I do.” She sounded relieved. “It’s about Silvano, then.”

“Yes, signora. He suggested I talk to you about the death of your sister Margherita. I hope it’s not too upsetting for you to talk about.”

“Upsetting? I haven’t had a day’s peace of mind or an uninterrupted night’s sleep since then. I left Sardinia as soon as I was able to and I’ve never set foot there since, except for the trial in eighty-eight, but even so … That man—”

She had a great deal to say about “that man.” As she talked, the
Marshal tried to imagine what she looked like. Twelve, she’d been in 1960 when Margherita was murdered, so she’d be forty or so. She sounded older. Perhaps because she sounded bitter.

“It wouldn’t be until eleven, eleven-fifteen.”

“I’m sorry …?” He’d been doing his usual trick of listening to her voice instead of what she was saying. “Can you hold on and I’ll get my diary? Yes, so what date?”

“The day after tomorrow. I don’t know the date without getting out the letter from the clinic. The migraine clinic, do you know it?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

“Well, it’s in Careggi, near all the other hospitals, so I can easily come in to Florence on the bus afterwards. I go there once a month and I’ve Silvano to thank for that, too. I’d never had a problem before that night but I’ve had it ever since. Do you want me to come to your office?”