The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  “My dear Douglas, it is the very heart of the matter! At all costs, they have to find something behind the apparent reality. There cannot not be something. Why? Because it is not possible that the thing you see is the truth. Nothing is simple, nothing is at it seems. Does it look like a suicide? Yes? Well then it must be murder. Somebody went out for coffee? Aha! He went out for coffee . . . But what was he really doing?”

  He laughed.

  “In Italy,” he continued, “there is a permanent climate of witch-hunting. You see, Italians are fundamentally envious. If somebody makes money, there must be a fiddle there somewhere. Of course he was in cahoots with someone else. Because of the cult of materialism here, Italians envy the rich and powerful. They’re suspicious of them and at the same time want to be them. They have a love-hate relationship with them. Berlusconi is a classic example.”

  “And that’s why the investigators are looking for a satanic sect of the rich and powerful?”

  “Precisely. And at all costs they have to find something. Once they’ve started, to save face they have to go on. For the sake of this idea, they will do anything. They cannot give it up. You anglosassoni do not understand the Mediterranean concept of face. I was doing historical research in an ancient family archive and I came across some interesting little thing that a distant ancestor had done three hundred years ago. Nothing very bad, just a naughty thing that was already largely known. The head of the family was aghast. He said, ‘You can’t publish this! Che figura ci facciamo! What shame it would cast upon our family!”

  We finished and rose to pay at the counter. The count as usual insisted on picking up the tab (“They know me,” he explained, “and give me lo sconto, the discount”).

  As we stood on the cobbled street outside the restaurant, Niccolò gazed at me gravely. “In Italy, the hatred of your enemy is such that he has to be built up, made into the ultimate adversary, responsible for all evil. The investigators in the Monster case know that behind the simple facts hides a satanic cult, its tentacles reaching into the highest levels of society. This is what they will prove, no matter what. Woe to the person”—he eyed me significantly—“who disputes their theory because that makes him an accomplice. The more vehemently he denies being involved, the stronger is the proof.”

  He laid a large hand on my shoulder. “Then again, perhaps there is some truth to their theories. Perhaps there is a satanic sect. After all, this is Italy . . .”

  CHAPTER 41

  During 2004, our last year in Italy, the Monster investigation picked up a major head of steam. It seemed that almost every month another wildly improbable story would break in the papers. Mario and I continued to work on our book, outlining and gathering information and accumulating a file of newspaper clippings on the latest developments. Mario also continued his own freelance investigative journalism, regularly plying his contacts in the carabinieri for fresh information, poking around, always looking for a new scoop.

  Mario called me one day. “Doug, meet me in Bar Ricchi. I’ve got some splendid news!”

  We met once again in our old haunt. My family and I had now been living in Italy for four years, and I was well enough known in Bar Ricchi not only to greet the owner and his family by name, but sometimes to get lo sconto myself.

  Spezi was late. He had, as usual, parked his car illegally in the piazza, putting in the window his “JOURNALIST” sign, next to the special journalist permit that allowed him to drive into the old city.

  He strode in, trailing smoke, and ordered an espresso “stretto stretto” and a glass of mineral water. A heavy object weighed down his trench coat.

  He tossed his Bogart fedora on the banquette, slid in, and removed an object wrapped in newspaper, which he placed on the table.

  “What is it?”

  “You shall see.” He paused to shoot down his coffee. “Ever seen the television program Chi L’ha Visto? [Who Has Seen Him?].”

  “No.”

  “It’s one of the highest-rated programs on Italian television—a rip-off of your show America’s Most Wanted. They’ve asked me to collaborate on a series of programs that would reconstruct the entire history of the Monster of Florence case, from the beginning to today.”

  Spezi wreathed himself in a triumphant cloud of blue smoke.

  “Fantastico!” I said.

  “And,” he added, his eyes twinkling, “I’ve got a scoop for the show that nobody knows about, not even you!”

  I sipped my coffee and waited.

  “You remember when I spoke to you of the detective who told me the French tourists must have been killed on Saturday night, because they had larvae on them as big as cigarette butts? Well, I managed to get my hands on the photographs taken by the forensic team that Monday afternoon. Printed in the corner was the actual time the photographs were taken, around five o’clock, three hours after the bodies were discovered. Blowing them up you can see the larvae very well, and they are truly big. I did some research and discovered the top Italian expert on forensic entomology, internationally known, who with an American colleague ten years ago developed a technique for establishing the time of death based on the development of larvae. His name is Francesco Introna, director of the Istituto di Medicina Legale in Padova, director of the Laboratorio di Entomologia Forense at the Istituto di Medicina Legale of Bari, where he teaches; he’s got three hundred scientific publications in medical journals and he’s an expert consultant for the FBI! So I called him, sent him the photographs, and he gave me the results. Beautiful results. Here’s the definitive proof we’ve always sought, Doug, that Pacciani was innocent, that Lotti and Pucci were liars, and that his picnicking friends had nothing to do with the killings!”

  “Fabulous,” I said. “But how does it work? What’s the science behind it?”

  “The professor explained it to me. The larvae are fundamentally important for arriving at the time of death. The calliforidi, the so-called blue flies, deposit on the cadaver a large number of eggs in a cluster. They lay eggs only during the day, because the flies don’t fly at night. The eggs require between eighteen and twenty-four hours to hatch. And then they develop on a rigid schedule.”

  He pulled out the report. “Read it for yourself.”

  It was short and to the point. I parsed my way through the dense, scientific Italian. The larvae in the photographs of the French victim, the report stated, “had already passed the first phase of development and were in the second. . . . They could not have been deposited on the remains less than thirty-six hours previously. As a result, the theory that the homicide could have been committed the night of September 8 [Sunday night] and that the deposition of the eggs could have taken place at dawn on the ninth, with the photographs taken twelve hours later—at five o’clock in the afternoon—finds no support in the entomological data. The data places the time of death in the preceding day, at the minimum.”

  In other words, the French tourists must have been killed Saturday night.

  “You understand what this means?” Spezi asked.

  “It means the self-confessing eyewitnesses are damned liars— because they all claimed to have witnessed the killings on Sunday night!”

  “And Lorenzo Nesi’s testimony putting Pacciani near the scene of the crime Sunday night is irrelevant! If that’s not enough, Pacciani had an alibi for his whereabouts Saturday night—the actual night of the murder. He had been at a country fair!”

  This was absolutely decisive. The entomological evidence proved (as if more proof were needed) that Pacciani and his alleged accomplices had nothing to do with the Monster of Florence killings. It also, therefore, demolished the satanic sect theory—which had been built entirely on the guilt of Pacciani, the false confession of Lotti, and the testimony of the other algebraic witnesses. They were exactly what Judge Ferri had called them in his book: “coarse and habitual liars.”

  This new evidence, Spezi said, would force investigators to reopen the Sardinian Trail. Somewhere in the murky depths of the
Sardinian clan, the truth would be found and the Monster unmasked.

  “This is incredible,” I said. “When this is broadcast, it’ll cause one big beautiful uproar.”

  Spezi nodded silently. “And that’s not all.” He unwrapped the object on the table, to reveal a peculiar stone, carved in the shape of a truncated pyramid with polished sides, old and chipped, weighing perhaps five pounds.

  “What is it?”

  “According to Chief Inspector Giuttari, this is an esoteric object used to communicate between this world and the infernal regions. To everyone else it is a doorstop. I saw this one behind a door at the Villa Romana in Florence, now the German Cultural Institute. The director, Joachim Burmeister, is a friend of mine and he lent it to me. It looks almost identical to the stone collected in the Bartoline Fields near the scene of a Monster killing in 1981.

  “Chi L’ha Visto?” Spezi went on, “will be shooting a segment in the Bartoline Fields, at the scene of the crime. I’ll be standing at the very spot where the earlier doorstop was found, holding this one—proof that Giuttari’s ‘esoteric object’ was merely a doorstop.”

  “Giuttari won’t like it.”

  Spezi cracked a small, wicked smile. “I can’t help that.”

  The program aired on May 14, 2004. Professor Introna appeared, presented his data, and explained the science of forensic entomology. Spezi appeared with his doorstop in the Bartoline Fields.

  Instead of one fine, big, beautiful uproar, absolutely nothing happened. Neither the prosecutor’s office nor the police showed a crumb of interest. Chief Inspector Giuttari dismissed out of hand Professor Introna’s results. Police and prosecutors had no comment on the doorstop. As for the murder convictions of Lotti and Vanni, Pacciani’s so-called picnicking friends, officials issued a bland statement that the Italian judicial system had reached verdicts in those cases and saw no need to revisit them. In general, officialdom carefully avoided commenting on the program. The press let them get away with it. The great majority of Italian newspapers ignored it completely. This was science—not another sexy story on satanic sects—and it wouldn’t sell papers. The investigation into satanic sects, hidden masterminds, bodies exchanged in tombs, conspiracies among powerful people, and doorstops mistaken for esoteric objects continued unabated.

  Spezi’s appearance on television did have one definitive effect. It seemed to inspire Chief Inspector Giuttari’s undying hatred.

  On our last night in Florence before moving back to America, we joined Mario and Myriam with other friends for a farewell dinner in their apartment, on the terrazzo overlooking the Florentine hills. The date was June 24, 2004. Myriam had prepared an extraordinary dinner, starting with crostini with sweet peppers and anchovies served with a spumante from the Alto Adige; wild pheasant and partridge, shot by a friend the day before, wrapped in grape leaves; a Chianti classico from the Viticchio estate; wild field greens served with the spicy local olive oil and an intense twelve-year-old balsamico; fresh pecorino cheese from Mario’s village of Sant’Angelo; and zuppa inglese.

  The morning before, on June 23, Spezi had published an article in La Nazione, in which he had interviewed Vanni, the ex-postman of San Casciano, convicted of being Pacciani’s accomplice. Spezi regaled us with the story of how he had encountered Vanni, by sheer chance, at a nursing home while pursuing an unrelated story. Nobody knew Vanni had been released from prison, for reasons of ill-health and advanced age. Spezi recognized him and seized the opportunity to interview him on the spot.

  “I Will Die as the Monster But I Am Innocent,” ran the headline. Spezi got the interview because, he said, he reminded Vanni of the “good old days” in San Casciano, when he and Vanni had briefly encountered each other during a festival, long before the poor postman became one of Pacciani’s infamous picnicking friends. They had ridden around together in a car full of people, Vanni waving the Italian flag. Vanni remembered Spezi and waxed nostalgic—and that was how Spezi got him to talk.

  The sun set over the Florentine hills as we ate dinner, filling the landscape with a golden light. The bells of the nearby medieval church of Santa Margherita a Montici tolled out the hour, answered by the bells of other churches hidden in the hills around us. The air, warmed by the sinking rays of the sun, carried up the scent of honeysuckle. In the valley below, the crenellated towers of a large castle cast long shadows across its surrounding vineyards. As we watched, the hills sank from gold to purple and finally disappeared into the evening twilight.

  The contrast between this magical landscape and the Monster that once stalked it struck me particularly hard at that moment.

  Mario took the occasion to bring out a present for me. I unwrapped it to find a plastic Oscar statue, with a base that read, “The Monster of Florence.”

  “For when the film is made from our book,” Mario said.

  He also gave me a pencil drawing he had made many years earlier of Pietro Pacciani, sitting in the dock during his trial, on which he had written, “For Doug, in memory of a vile Florentine and our glorious labor together.”

  When we returned to the house we had built in Maine, I hung the drawing on the wall of my writing hut in the woods behind our house, along with a photograph of Spezi in his trench coat and fedora, Gauloise stuck in his mouth, standing in a butcher shop under a rack of hog jowls.

  Spezi and I spoke frequently as we continued to work on the Monster book. I missed my life in Italy, but Maine was quiet, and with the frequent foul weather, fog, and cold, I found it a marvelous place to work. (I began to understand why Italy produced painters while England produced writers.) Our little town of Round Pond has five hundred and fifty residents and looks like something out of a Currier and Ives lithograph, with a white steepled church, a cluster of clapboard houses, a general store, and a harbor filled with lobster boats, surrounded by forests of oak and white pine. In the winter, the town is buried under a thick blanket of glittering snow and sea smoke rises from the ocean. The crime rate is almost nonexistent and few bother to lock their homes even when they go away on vacation. The annual bean supper at the local Grange is the front-page news in the paper. The “big town,” twelve miles away, is Damariscotta, population 2,000.

  The culture shock was considerable.

  We continued to work on the book by e-mail and telephone. Spezi did most of the actual writing, while I read and commented on his work, adding some chapters in my miserable Italian, which Spezi had to rewrite. (I write Italian at what might generously be called a fifth grade level.) I wrote additional material in English, which was kindly translated by Andrea Carlo Cappi, the translator of my novels, who had become a good friend during our years in Italy. Spezi and I spoke on a regular basis and made excellent progress with the book.

  On the morning of November 19, 2004, I went into my writing shack and checked my voice mail, to find an urgent message from Mario. Something shocking had happened.

  CHAPTER 42

  Polizia! 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.

  “Pr
ocura 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.