The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  There were several other elements that guided Giuttari in the formation of his theory. The most important of them was Gabriella Carlizzi, an energetic little Roman lady with a big smile who ran a conspiracy theory Internet site and had self-published a string of books. Carlizzi claimed to know a great deal of hidden information about many infamous European crimes of the past decades—including the kidnapping and murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro and the Belgian pedophile ring. Behind them all, she said, was the School of the Red Rose. On the day of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Carlizzi shot a fax out to Italian newspapers: “It was them, the members of the Red Rose. Now they want to strike Bush!” The Red Rose was also behind the Monster killings. Carlizzi had earlier been convicted of defamation for claiming the well-known Italian writer Alberto Bevilacqua was the Monster of Florence, but since that time her theories on the Monster had apparently evolved. Her site was also filled with religious and inspirational stories and a section in which she detailed her conversations with the Madonna of Fatima.

  Carlizzi became an expert witness for the investigation. Giuttari and his GIDES detectives called her in and listened to her for hours—perhaps even days—as she recounted her knowledge of the activities of the satanic sect hidden in the green hills of Tuscany. The police had to give her a protective escort, she would later claim, because of the grave danger she faced from members of the sect intent on silencing her.

  In rummaging through old evidence lockers, Giuttari found physical evidence to back up his theories that a satanic sect was behind the killings. The first was the doorstop that had been collected a few dozen meters from the place where the Monster had killed a couple in the Bartoline Fields in October 1981. For the chief inspector, that stone was something far more sinister than a doorstop. He described its significance to a reporter for the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s major daily newspapers: it was, he claimed, a “truncated pyramid with an hexagonal base that served as a bridge between this world and Hell.” He dug out of an old file some photographs taken by police of some suspicious circles of stones with some berries and a cross where an old gamekeeper claimed the French tourists had camped four days preceding their murder. (Many other witnesses said they had been camping in the Scopeti clearing for at least a week.) Investigators later concluded that the stone circles had no connection with the case. Giuttari did not agree. He turned the photographs over to an “expert” in the occult. The chief inspector reported the expert’s conclusions in his book: “When the circle of stones is closed it represents the union of two people, that is to say a pair of lovers, while when it is open it signifies that the couple has been selected. The photograph of the berries and the cross show the murder of the two people; the people are the berries, while their death is represented by the cross. The photograph of the scattered stones shows the destruction of the circle after the execution of the two lovers.”

  Seeing that Pacciani & Co. were all from San Casciano, Giuttari figured that the satanic sect must be headquartered in or around that idyllic little Tuscan village, set like a jewel in the rolling hills of Chianti. Once again he delved deeply into fusty Monster files and found a startling clue. In the spring of 1997, a mother and a daughter had gone to the police with a strange story. They managed a rest home for old people in a place called Villa Verde, a beautiful old country house surrounded by gardens and a park situated a few kilometers outside San Casciano. The two women complained that a guest of the villa, a half-Swiss, half-Belgian painter named Claude Falbriard, had disappeared, leaving behind a huge mess in his room and a pile of suspicious things—things that might have something to do with the Monster of Florence, including an unregistered pistol and hideous drawings of women with their arms, legs, and heads cut off. The two women had piled all of Falbriard’s belongings in a box and delivered them to the police.

  At the time, the police had dismissed it as irrelevant. Giuttari saw the situation in a different light and launched an investigation of the two women and their villa. Right away he struck pay dirt: he discovered that Pacciani had actually worked for a while as a gardener at Villa Verde during the time of the killings!

  Giuttari and his investigators now believed that the villa might have served as the headquarters of the Order of the Red Rose, whose members commissioned the gardener, Pacciani, and his friends to collect female body parts for use in satanic rituals at the villa. In Giuttari’s scenario, the mother and daughter were actually part of the satanic cult. (Why they would have brought attention to themselves by going to the police was left unexplained.)

  Between the time of the murders and Giuttari’s investigation, Villa Verde had become a super-luxury hotel with a swimming pool and restaurant, renamed Poggio ai Grilli, Hill of the Crickets. (The sign, almost as soon as it went up, was altered by some Tuscan wag to read “Poggio ai Grulli,” Hill of the Morons.) The new owners were not at all pleased by the attention.

  The press, with La Nazione leading the way, picked up the story with ferocious glee.

  OWNERS OF NURSING HOME UNDER SUSPICION THE VILLA OF HORRORS

  ALLEGED TO HAVE HOSTED SECRETS OF MONSTER OF FLORENCE

  “After ten o’clock, the villa was sealed up against outsiders. Various people arrived and performed magical and satanic rites.” So claimed one of the ex-nurses of Poggio ai Grilli, the villa between San Casciano and Mercatale where Pietro Pacciani, once accused of committing the Monster of Florence killings, had worked as a gardener. During the period of the Tuscan murders, the “Villa of the Horrors” hosted a rest home for old people where for several months the painter Claude Falbriard lived, first investigated for illegal possession of a firearm, who then became a key witness in the investigation into the possible instigators behind the Monster’s serial killings.

  Falbriard at this time was still blithely floating around Europe, completely unaware he was a “key witness” and possibly even a mastermind behind the Monster killings. GIDES enlisted the help of Interpol and they tracked him down in a village on the Côte d’Azur near Cannes. They were disappointed to learn the painter had arrived in Tuscany for the first time in 1996, eleven years after the Monster’s final double homicide. Nevertheless, Falbriard was brought to Florence for questioning. He was a disappointing witness—an angry, unhinged, decrepit old man who harangued the police with wild accusations of his own.

  “At Villa Verde,” he testified, “I was drugged and locked up in a room. They robbed me of billions of lire. Strange things happened, especially at night.” The mother and daughter were behind it all, he claimed.

  Based on Falbriard’s statement, the two women were charged with kidnapping and fraud. La Nazione wrote a series of lurid articles on the villa. “From the depositions of the former personnel of the rest home,” ran one article, “there came many important clues. In fifty pages of testimony were hidden evidence of disturbing secrets. The old people held at Poggio ai Grilli were left abandoned among their own feces and urine without assistance. At night the aides were absolutely forbidden to set foot in the villa, which was transformed into a place where Black Masses were performed. Giuttari suspects that the genital organs and the parts of the breasts amputated from the victims of the Monster were used to conduct these satanic rituals.”

  Despite the renovation of the villa, Giuttari hoped that some trace of the Order of the Red Rose might remain, or that the sect might still be active in the villa. Old Tuscan villas have huge basements and underground areas for making and storing wine and aging prosciutto, cheese, and salami, and this is where Giuttari believed the actual room used as the temple of sacrifice might be found—and perhaps still in use.

  One fine fall day, GIDES raided Poggio ai Grilli. After searching the enormous villa, the men of GIDES entered the room that their information indicated had been the sanctum sanctorum of the cult, the temple of Satan. In the room they found some cardboard human skeletons, plastic bats hung on strings, and other decorations. The search had come a few days before Hallowee
n and a party had been planned—or so they claimed at the villa.

  “Without doubt an attempt to sidetrack the investigation,” Giuttari fumed to La Nazione.

  Giuttari and GIDES made little progress into the satanic sect investigation, and by the year 2000 it seemed to be sputtering out.

  Then, in August 2000, I arrived in Italy with my family.

  PART II

  The Story of Douglas Preston

  CHAPTER 30

  On November 4, 1966, after forty days of rain, the Arno River burst its banks and laid waste to Florence, one of the most extraordinary cities in the world.

  This was no gentle rise of water. The river flash-flooded; it boiled over the Lungarni embankments and tore through the streets of Florence at thirty miles an hour, carrying along tree trunks, smashed cars, and dead cattle. Ghiberti’s great bronze doors to the Baptistery were bashed down and knocked to pieces; the Cimabue Crucifix, possibly the greatest example of medieval art in Italy, was reduced to a mound of sodden plaster; Michelangelo’s David was fouled to his buttocks with fuel oil. Tens of thousands of illuminated manuscripts and incunabula in the Biblioteca Nazionale were buried under muck. Hundreds of old master paintings stored in the basement of the Uffizi Gallery flaked apart, leaving layers of paint chips in the mud.

  The world watched with horror as the waters receded, leaving the birthplace of the Renaissance a wasteland of ooze and debris, its art treasures devastated. Thousands of volunteers—students, professors, artists, and art historians—converged from all over the world to undertake an emergency salvage effort. They lived and worked in a city without heat, water, electricity, food, or services. After a week some rescuers had to don gas masks to protect themselves from the toxic fumes being released by rotting books and paintings.

  They called the volunteers the Angeli del Fango, the “Mud Angels.”

  I had long wanted to write a murder mystery set at the time of the Florentine flood. The novel, entitled The Christmas Madonna, involved an art historian who rushes to Florence to volunteer as a Mud Angel. He is an authority on the mysterious artist Masaccio, the young genius who single-handedly launched the Italian Renaissance with his extraordinary frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, and who then died abruptly, at twenty-six, amid rumors that he had been poisoned. My character goes to work as a volunteer in the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale, pulling books and manuscripts out of the mire. One day he discovers an extraordinary document, which contains a clue to the whereabouts of a famous lost painting by Masaccio. Called The Christmas Madonna, the painting was the central panel in a triptych described vividly by Vasari in the 1600s, which had subsequently disappeared. It is considered to be one of the most important lost paintings of the Renaissance.

  My art historian abandons his volunteer work and sets off on a mad search for the painting. He vanishes. A few days later they find his body high in the Pratomagno Mountains, dumped by the side of the road. His eyes have been gouged out.

  The murder is never solved and the painting is never found. Now, thirty-five years later, we fast-forward to the present day. His son, a successful artist in New York, hits a midlife crisis. He realizes there is something he must do: solve the murder of his father. The way to do it is to find the lost painting. So he flies to Florence and begins his search—a journey that will take him from crumbling archives to Etruscan tombs and finally to a ruined village high into the Pratomagno Mountains, where a horrifying secret lies buried, and where an even more terrifying destiny awaits him . . .

  This was the novel I came to Italy to write. I never did. Instead, I got sidetracked by the Monster of Florence.

  Living in Italy was going to be the adventure of a lifetime, for which we were singularly unprepared. None of us spoke Italian. I had spent a few days in Florence the previous year, but my wife, Christine, had never been to Italy in her life. Our children, on the other hand, were at that age of delightful flexibility in which they seemed to meet even the most extraordinary life challenges with a cheerful nonchalance. Nothing in life was out of the ordinary to them, since they hadn’t learned what was ordinary to begin with. When the time came, they boarded the plane with complete insouciance. We were a nervous wreck.

  We arrived in Florence in August 2000: myself, Christine, and our two children, Aletheia and Isaac, who were six and five. We enrolled our children in local Italian schools, Aletheia in first grade and Isaac in kindergarten, and we ourselves began taking language classes.

  Our transition to Italy was not without its challenges. Aletheia’s teacher reported that it was a joy to have such a happy child in class who sang all day long, and she wondered just what it was she was singing. We soon learned:

  I don’t understand anything she’s saying,

  She talks and talks all day long,

  But I can’t understand a word . . .

  Cultural differences quickly reared up. A few days after Isaac went off to kindergarten, he came back, wide-eyed, and told how the teacher smoked cigarettes during recess and tossed the butts on the playground— and then she spanked (spanked!) a four-year-old who tried to smoke one of them. Isaac called her “the Yelling Lizard.” We quickly transferred him and his sister to a private school run by nuns on the other side of town. Nuns, we hoped, wouldn’t smoke or spank. We were correct, at least on the former assumption, and came to accept the occasional spanking as a cultural difference we had to live with, along with smokers in restaurants, death-defying drivers, and waiting in line at the post office to pay bills. The school was located in a magnificent eighteenth-century villa hidden behind massive stone walls, which the sisters of the order of San Giovanni Battista had turned into a convent. The schoolchildren took recess in a two-acre formal Italian garden, with cypress trees, clipped hedges, flowerbeds, fountains, and marble statues of naked women. The gardener and the children were constantly at war. Nobody at the school, not even the English teacher, spoke English.

  The direttrice of the school was a stern, beady-eyed nun who needed only to fix her withering glare on someone, student or parent, to reduce the person to abject terror. She took us aside one day to advise us that our son was un monello. We thanked her for the compliment and rushed home to look up the word. It meant “rascal.” After that we brought a pocket dictionary to parent-teacher meetings.

  As we hoped, our kids began to learn Italian. One day Isaac sat down to dinner, looked at the plate of pasta we’d prepared, made a face, and said, “Che schifo!” a vulgar expression meaning “Gross!” We were so proud. By Christmas they were speaking in full sentences, and by the end of the school year their Italian was so good they began making fun of our own. When we had Italian guests for dinner, Aletheia would sometimes march around the room, swinging her arms and bawling an imitation of our atrocious American accent, “How do you do, Mr. and Mrs. Coccolini! What a pleasure it is to meet you! Won’t you please come in, accommodate yourselves, and enjoy a glass of wine with us!” Our Italian guests would be helpless with laughter.

  And so we adjusted to our new life in Italy. Florence and its surrounding villages turned out to be a delightfully small place, where everyone seemed to know everyone else. Life was more about the process of living than reaching some end result. Instead of a once-a-week, efficient trip to the supermarket, shopping became a shockingly inefficient but charming routine of visiting a dozen or more shops and vendors, each of which sold a single product. This meant exchanging news, discussing the quality of the various choices, and listening to how the shopkeeper’s grandmother prepared and served the item under discussion, which was the only way to do it despite what anyone might say to the contrary. Never were you allowed to touch the food being purchased; it was a breach of etiquette to test the ripeness of a plum or place an onion yourself in your shopping bag. For us, shopping was an excellent Italian lesson, but one fraught with danger. Christine made an indelible impression on the handsome fruttivendolo (fruit seller) when she asked for ripe pesce and fighe instead of pesche and fichi (fish and pussy i
nstead of peaches and figs). It took many months before we felt even a little bit Florentine, although we quickly learned, like all good Florentines, to look with scorn on the tourists who wandered about the city, gaping and slack-jawed, in floppy hats, khaki shorts, and marshmallow athletic shoes, with giant water bottles strapped around their waists as if they were crossing the Sahara Desert.

  Life in Italy was a strange mixture of the quotidian and the sublime. Driving the children to school in the morning in the dead of winter, bleary-eyed, I would come over the hill of Giogoli—and there, rising magically from the dawn mists, would be the cloisters and towers of the great medieval monastery of La Certosa. Sometimes, wandering about the cobbled streets of Florence, on a whim I would duck into the Brancacci Chapel and spend five minutes looking at the frescoes that launched the Renaissance, or I would take a turn through the Badia Fiorentina at Vespers to listen to Gregorian chants in the same church where young Dante gazed on his love, Beatrice.

  We soon learned about the Italian concept of the fregatura, indispensable for anyone living in Italy. A fregatura is doing something in a way that is not exactly legal, not exactly honest, but just this side of egregious. It is a way of life in Italy. We had our first lesson in the fine art of the fregatura when we reserved tickets to see Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the local opera house. When we got there, the box office informed us they could find no record of our tickets, despite our presentation of the reservation number. There was nothing they could do—the opera was completely and totally sold out. The large crowd seething in front of the box office attested to the truth of that.