AT THE TRIAL, Saccomani talks about himself as a cultural organizer, an “operatrice,” in the feminine gender. His path to becoming a woman in full has reached an acceptable point. The evangelical pastor Saccomani, founder of Città Futura, is in fact on the verge of a complete sex change when the murders take place. Yes, I know, that’s incredible. If a screenwriter wanted to add this touch to the plot of a film, the other writers would mutiny. “Oh, come on! The last thing we need now is for a priest to become a woman. We already have a murdering rapist who works as a psychological counselor . . . Let’s not go overboard!”
“I HAD A CHOICE, whether to take on the challenge or turn away from it . . .” (the challenge, that is, of helping Angelo Izzo to get out of prison, that interwoven web of self-interested and slightly oily friendship that, under current operating guidelines, allows one inmate to leave prison and another, less facile and practiced, to rot in his cell) “and I chose to take it on because I start from a very specific presupposition . . . a presupposition of faith . . . some might mistake that for sheer folly, for a state of religious and mystical exaltation . . . but it isn’t.”
“I am an extremely rational person . . . but I’m a believer,” says the pastor. He has signed a (fake) employment contract with Angelo for the “development and production of a newspaper,” at a monthly salary of 500 euros.
JUDGE: How much did Angelo earn a month?
Saccomani: Five hundred euros.
So he was an employee of yours?
Yes.
And how could the association afford to pay Izzo a regular salary?
Well, I was able to bring in the sum necessary to pay him thanks to donations, including one from his family . . .
Was that a regular donation?
Yes.
Monthly?
Yes.
And how much did the monthly donation from Angelo’s family amount to?
Five hundred euros.
But that’s the exact same amount as the salary you paid him!
Yes.
WHO WAS IT THAT TURNED to Città Futura in search of aid and support? “Gypsies, the jobless, lots of women who’d been dumped by their husbands for younger women, and who therefore found themselves in difficult straits,” Angelo replies. The psychological support he supplied proved effective. “I can brag a little bit that I resolved sixty, seventy percent of my cases . . .” Angelo finds work for many of those seeking help and he encourages abandoned women. He plans to defraud Maiorano and his wife by inventing a story involving a restaurant that needs to be renovated, to con him out of money; but at the same time he actually dreams of opening a real restaurant “to create jobs to give to the needy,” saying that he’s “grown sincerely fond” of his beneficiaries.
IN NOVEMBER 2004 he’s once again awarded partial release by the Palermo parole board. Oh, it was about time. (You can find the parole board’s reasoning laid out in chapter 14 in Part VI of this book.) At the end of December, Angelo is released. He gets Città Futura to hire Palaia, paying his salary of 300 or 400 euros a month out of his own funds.
ANGELO BOUGHT HIM CLOTHING, gave him a car, then he meets Maiorano’s wife, whom the convict in Palermo had so highly recommended to him, and Angelo convinces her of his intention to open an imaginary restaurant in Frasso Telesino, in a family home (“a castle”). Maiorano’s wife, Carmela Linciano, known to her friends as Antonella, lives with her daughter, Valentina, in a nearby town that has the absurd name of Gambatesa, literally, “Stretched Leg”; Valentina, not yet fourteen, was in middle school. Everyone in town shunned the woman, except for Angelo, though he has an ulterior motive; he plans to con her out of the money to renovate the restaurant (“The restaurant project was a con job, I had no intention whatsoever of opening a restaurant, it was just a way of getting her to give me ten or fifteen thousand euros and pocketing the cash”); in the end, Antonella Linciano gives him 5,500 euros, unwillingly, at the insistence of her husband, who’s behind bars.
Maiorano wrote to her that Angelo is “a person deserving of absolute trust.” There’s no need for a receipt.
“What do you want, it’s a miserable sum,” Angelo declares.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Angelo and Maiorano’s wife is a short, perverse novel, of which only the murderer’s version survives. And that murderer stacks up a vast quantity of statements, insinuations, allusions, embellishments (Angelo himself uses the term to describe them), as he had previously done in his account of the CR/M and many other episodes. By his account, Antonella Linciano pursues him tirelessly. She phones him constantly. She often goes to see him at the offices of Città Futura. She always brings that blessed daughter of hers along with her. “She wanted to do everything you can think of.” It was only when the topic turned to her producing money that she turned mistrustful and uncooperative. Angelo takes over the role of husband with her, handling family matters: dealing with the lawyer for her nephew, Daniele, who is under house arrest, an eviction, her unemployment check. And even though he claims he detests her, he starts to enjoy “being the man of the house for the two women.”
The relationships that Angelo gets tangled up in always have something hallucinatory about them. They consist of brief fanciful impulses of transport or disgust. According to him, the relationship with Antonella Linciano deteriorates because she soon shows herself to have “a greedy and extortionate nature.” She was “a witch without a drop of sensitivity.”
And always with that girl tagging along after her . . .
“EVERY TIME I LAID EYES ON THEM, a chill ran through my heart and my guts.”
“I began to hate them. God, I prayed, take these two out of my life.”
ONE DETAIL, on the other hand, of the relationship between Angelo and the utopian pastor who’s about to undergo a sex change: the photographs of Vietnamese children charred by napalm that Angelo would show Saccomani, asking him: “Can it be that God allows such a thing?” (the same question that Ivan Karamazov asked his brother Alyosha, if I may venture to note) and the evangelical pastor replied, in religious inspiration: “It’s not true that God does nothing . . . God created you precisely to put an end to these injustices.”
(GOD CREATED ANGELO to prevent this . . .!)
WHILE THE STORM RAGES IN HIS IMAGINATION, buffeting his soul, Angelo realizes that his friends Palaia and Palladino are entirely consumed by their own problems, not his. Angelo’s inner torments go unnoticed. And he finds himself alone again. He thirsts for love, to be really and truly loved, in fact, he demands it. He’s shut up in a corner, and he wants to get out of it. That’s when the idea penetrates his “damaged mind” of dragging the two wing nuts into something that will bind them to him irreversibly. “I was so terrified of being abandoned!” In a confused, blurred way, though, he begins to glimpse a possibility . . .
“THE IDEA OF A BLOOD PACT that would force them to love me forever.”
A QUARTET IS THUS CREATED which Angelo wants to direct after his own fashion. And he will succeed. Two females and two males. Antonella Linciano and Valentina, on the one hand, Luca Palaia and Guido Palladino on the other. By murdering the two females, starting with the elder (“When we were together, in a state of intimacy, I dreamed of walling her up alive in the office”), and then, if it seemed appropriate, her clingy adolescent appendage, and by so doing, tying the two men to himself, with the bonds of complicity. Just as he had thirty years earlier.
“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Now I’ll pretend to give in, I’ll pretend to go away with those two females and then I’ll get rid of them.”
THERE ARE SOME WIRETAPS.
It’s well known that wiretaps are like a trawl net: you toss the net into the water thinking you’ll catch certain fish but something else, something unexpected, always winds up getting tangled in its meshes. The Mobile Squad was investigating a drug smuggling ring. The wiretaps on Paladino and Palaia instead talk about a pistol that was used in an armed robbery . . .
GUIDO PALADINO IS DETAINED BY THE POLICE. Th
ey convince him that they know everything. He speaks of two corpses in his grandmother’s little villa. The policemen are astonished, at which point he changes his version of the facts and tells them that there are two pistols in the villa. The next day, the investigators find the pistols and then discover a well-trodden path in the backyard that leads to some recently excavated soil. They start to dig and they find some quicklime. “At this point Palladino realizes that we wouldn’t be leaving the place until we’d found out everything, and he confesses: underneath, mother and daughter are buried” (a phrase that Angelo considers a “cute invention” dreamed up by the Mobile Squad).
DIGGING DEEPER, they find Linciano’s corpse, fully dressed, her hands fastened behind her back with a pair of handcuffs.
The duct tape on the mouth and over her nose (though her nostrils weren’t completely covered over) and the handcuffs were all put on when the victim was alive and conscious. Wrapped around her head was a black nylon bag fastened around her neck with more duct tape: that’s what suffocated her, causing her death after roughly five minutes of agony.
VALENTINA WAS NUDE, her arms handcuffed behind her back and a pink-and-white sweater wrapped around her arms, a black nylon bag over her head, fastened with packing tape and sealed around her neck with surgical tubing. The body was wrapped in two green nylon bags.
“BIG WHORE AND LITTLE WHORE,” Angelo used to call them, because “all they cared about was money.”
AT THE OFFICES OF CITTÀ FUTURA, he says, “I had a customer window and I’d talk to them there. If I needed to talk about private matters, I’d go take them to the office nearby. If we were going to have sex, I’d go down to the office at the far end, which was enclosed and which we called, in jest, the room of gallantry.”
Here Angelo claims he had three-ways with the victims.
THE FIRST TIME that Angelo met Maiorano’s wife, he had kissed her hand. He employed the same gallant gesture with the female journalist who went to interview him, several years earlier, and on whom he had made such a favorable impression.
ANGELO ON THE PHONE WITH VALENTINA (a few days before killing her): “You sound a little sad . . . what’s the matter, a sad love affair? Heh, heh, heh . . .”
“HEY, you really are a wonderful daughter.”
HE SAYS THAT HE HANDED over some emeralds to Linciano. “By now she was my accomplice . . . a bad, greedy woman. She had started blackmailing me.”
ACCORDING TO THE MEDICAL EXAMINER, Valentina’s hymen was intact, fibrous in nature, such as to rule out any penetration, even a partial one.
Angelo’s DNA was found in the girl’s mouth (maybe he kissed her, or something else, before strangling her).
THE HANDCUFFS FOR EROTIC BYPLAY: who bought them? They were found to have been purchased at a shop called Cose belle, “Nice Things,” in Campobasso; Palaia had bought the surgical tubing for Saccomani, who used it for a tourniquet for the injections he was giving himself, to become a woman.
SURGICAL TUBING . . . again . . . (go back to page 468).
“I’M A PERSON WITH GENDER-IDENTITY ISSUES,” says Saccomani, as he prepares to have a sex-change operation and change his name accordingly. “My journey to this transition has been going on for ten years now.” On his PC the police found hundreds of photographs of child pornography.
ANGELO ALLUDES TO INCESTUOUS and pedophilic relations between Maiorano and Valentina. “The plaintiff has a raw nerve when it comes to this topic . . .” he says at the trial, with a brilliant flash of malevolent cunning.
SACCOMANI: “I did what I ought to have done. Those who serve God are already satisfied with their service, they have no need of any further gratification . . .” (What the fuck are you talking about, dude??).
ANGELO CLAIMS: “In 2002 I’d already had Palaia buy some quicklime to bury a pistol that had been used in a murder, so it was dirty. I didn’t give Palaia any explanations, he just did what he was told, without asking.”
According to the defense, that monster had Palaia under his thumb. Maybe he is the real Subdued. For that matter, it was Angelo who told Palaia that he reminded him a lot of his old friend from the CR/M, in fact, he’s his spitting image.
By the way, that’s not Luca Palaia’s real name: he changed his identity as a child, because his father was sentenced to life without parole and began cooperating with the prosecution. In twenty-three years, he might have seen his father once. As a boy he had served six months in the reform school of Latina for a “two-bit armed robbery” (description offered by Angelo), with a sawed-off shotgun in a pharmacy, for which he was later acquitted.
At the trial, when Luca Palaia’s father was asked, “On what terms are you with Palaia, Luca?” he chose to avail himself of his right not to reply.
MAIORANO STATES that Angelo told him he had been to Rome with Palaia and a girl: Palaia had sex with her and Angelo watched.
ANGELO IS TALKATIVE AT THE TRIAL, he enjoys telling stories, he laughs, he’s boisterous.
“I wanted to buy him a Porsche, because I loved him, I wanted to put a McDonald’s in his name.”
“Actually, it was Angelo himself who had fallen under the spell of this loveboy!” (blurts out the plaintiff’s lawyer).
“Palaia was weak, by his age, out of insecurity . . . because of his IQ . . .” (here Palaia’s lawyer calls his client an idiot to save him). “Palaia’s criminal depth? What criminal depth are we talking about?! Palaia has no depth, and I’m not just talking about criminal depth, he has no depth of any kind!”
“ANYONE WHO’S EVER HAD ANYTHING to do with Angelo has ended up trapped in his web . . .” (again, it’s Palaia’s lawyer who’s speaking).
THE PROSECUTING MAGISTRATE: “The murderer killed to teach Palaia how to kill. To train his godson.”
“ANGELO LIVES ON HIS CRIMINAL ANNIVERSARIES, Angelo battens off the evil he does!!”
OUT OF THE MISTS OF THE PAST, ghost ships reemerge . . . drifting hulks of memory . . . pieces that resemble other pieces . . . they can be disassembled and reassembled in different forms . . . the constellation of crimes can be varied ad infinitum.
“. . . WHEN WE KILLED Piero Castellani, a.k.a. the Slobberer, we went there to kill him and his wife was there, too, so we had to kill her, too . . . so now I say, gosh darn it, there are times when you’re forced to kill people who have nothing to do with it, like the girl, because it’s not like I’m a lunatic, or a serial killer, for that matter, I know she was innocent, I had to kill her because there was nothing I could do about it . . .”
22
THAT MORNING I’d made some sandwiches. I’m reminded of a rape in which I’d made sandwiches. Maybe the first rape I’d committed in my life. And I remember that that time, too, I’d made some sandwiches. We’d gone to a villa over near the Castelli Romani, taking a director’s daughter with us, and I remember this detail of the sandwiches. But this time, no one was eating. It was awkward. So I went into the kitchen, I opened my bag, and I pulled out the duct tape and the surgical tubing. Then the handcuffs. I called Antonella, “Could you come in here for a minute? I have something I want to tell you.” Then I told her to lie down, I had to search her, and not to make a lot of noise or she’d scare Valentina. I had the gun in my hand. I got her to lie down on the ground and then I told Palaia to handcuff her. He put them on. “Now gag her.” That is, duct tape over her mouth. She seemed dead already. In the meantime, the girl was in the other room. With duct tape over her mouth, Antonella was helpless. Luca was pale and shaking. I shove him aside and put a bag over the woman’s head and strangle her. How did I do it? I sit on top of her. She starts struggling. Just as I start to feel better, she starts struggling. I don’t know how long it took her to die. At first I wasn’t planning to kill her, I just wanted to knock her out. But with the bag over head, she was definitely going to die. All I wanted was to make sure that she didn’t struggle too much, because it had become clear that I couldn’t count on Luca, he was a wreck. I tell him to calm down, I help him to sit down
. The girl in the other room was relaxed. We hadn’t made any noise, and it only took a few minutes. What did I feel after strangling the woman? I felt joy. I had rid myself of a burden. In life, you have problems sometimes, even major ones, that get taken care of all at once. It was as if I’d cleaned off the filth and grime of thirty years in prison. Then I thought: I need to take care of the girl, and I went to where she was. But first I needed to calm down Luca. If he sees the girl being killed, he might raise objections. I guarantee him that I won’t do anything to her. “Stay calm and don’t move.” I tell her that there’s been a change in plans and that I’m going to have to wrap her up. I have to take her away without anyone seeing. I don’t know if she fell for it, but she had a gun trained on her, what was she supposed to do? So I put the handcuffs on her. You found her nude because at first my plan had been to strip them both naked and stick them nude in the plastic bags, get them to the grave, and then bury them after taking off the bags, so that the bodies would decompose quickly. With clothes on, it takes longer, and they can always be identified. But I’d already messed up the plan with her mother. I had Valentina sit on the sofa, I put handcuffs on her wrists and then duct tape to keep her from screaming. I put on plenty, maybe three or four pieces, I put tape over her eyes, too. Then I stripped her, but since she was already wearing handcuffs, I couldn’t get the sweater off her entirely. I took off all the rest of her clothes, I bound her legs, I put the bag over her head, and I sealed it around her neck with the surgical tubing. Then I turned away. And she suffocated to death. I had wrapped duct tape around the bag, too. How much air can there be in a bag? The girl didn’t struggle, tied up as she was, hands and feet and gagged, with a bag over her head. She didn’t struggle like her mother. I turned away because it bothered me. And I drank a Coca-Cola.
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