The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  I asked Casson if there had been a single moment or a single piece of evidence that tipped the scales and convinced him that Carella and Marchetti were guilty.

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation and again with a sly smile. “It happened on April twelfth to be exact. I summoned Marchetti and his girlfriend, Barbara Vello, to answer some questions. During the interview I handed her a notice informing her that she was under investigation for lying to us about a phone call Marchetti had made to her on the night of the fire. We had found out from a wiretap of a conversation between them that Marchetti had tried to get her to change the time of the call. He said, ‘I called you at eight-thirty that night.’ She said, ‘You called me at six o’clock,’ and he kept telling her, ‘No, eight-thirty. I called you at eight-thirty.’

  “I had purposely scheduled the interview at the Santa Chiara police station in Piazzale Roma,” Casson went on, “rather than in my office at the Rialto, because I knew they would be driving in from Salzano in Marchetti’s car. I told them they could park right in front of the police station, which is usually not allowed. What they didn’t know was that a few days earlier we had planted a tiny radio transmitter in their car. After the interview, they got back into the car, and Barbara Vello was furious because now she was under investigation for perjury. She turned to Marchetti and screamed at him in dialect, ‘For a couple of bucks, and that other one up to his ears in debt! So, to make a little money they agree to set the Fenice on fire. If only some money had come out of it, or if at least that cousin of yours had ended up with some of the cash he was supposed to get.’” (Per quattro schei e quell’altro coi debiti i se ga messo d’accordo per fare un pochi de schei e i ga dà fogo aea Fenice. Almanco che ghe fusse vegnui in scarsea quei schei, almanco che ghe fusse vegnui in scarsea a to cugin.)

  “That’s when I became certain,” said Casson. “I called her in again and asked her to explain her statement. At first she said she didn’t remember saying it, so I offered to let her listen to herself on tape. Then she became vague. She said she had been very angry. Her comment hadn’t been meant as an admission. She had merely been letting off steam, talking haphazardly.”

  The police had been listening to tapes for months without finding anything useful. When they heard this one, however, they were elated. Casson, too, was clearly pleased about it. He released Barbara Vello’s remark to the press, and it made predictable headlines. But doubts were raised in certain quarters about what the young woman had really meant to say.

  At noon one day, I stopped in Gia Schiavi, one of the wine bars frequented by the locals, near the Accademia. I found four men standing at the bar. One of them had a copy of the Gazzettino; he was reading Barbara Vello’s words aloud to the others.

  “The way it’s written,” one of the men said, “it sounds like a statement: ‘They burned the Fenice for a couple of bucks.’ But it depends on her inflection. She could have meant it as a question: ‘They burned the Fenice for a couple of bucks? meaning, ‘How could the police think anyone could be that stupid?’”

  The other men chorused their agreement. “Yes, yes. . . . Of course. . . .”

  “Then there’s the second part: ‘If at least your cousin had made some money out of it.’ She could have been saying, ‘Well, if they did do it, at least your cousin should have got some money out of it.’”

  FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE ARRESTS, both cousins were still in jail. Barbara Vello was at home in San Donà on the mainland, despondent and pregnant.

  “She’s blaming herself for what happened to Massimiliano,” said Marchetti’s mother. “She shouldn’t. It wasn’t her fault. They’re trying to twist her words.”

  Signora Marchetti and her husband were sitting at their kitchen table in Salzano, a small town half an hour north of Venice. At the end of the three-month preventive detention, Casson had asked the judge for a three-month extension, and it had been granted. He kept the pressure on, putting Marchetti and Carella in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. No one knew when they would be released.

  “I wouldn’t wish this hell on anybody,” said Signora Marchetti, her youthful face drawn and somber. She had close-cropped gray hair and wore a zippered sweatshirt over a pair of slacks. Her husband, a plant manager at a chemical company in Marghera, sat quietly by her side. She poured Coca-Cola from a plastic liter bottle.

  “The police pounded on the door at six in the morning,” she said. “They had a search warrant, but they wouldn’t tell us what they were looking for. We all sat here in the kitchen for two hours while they looked under every object and every piece of furniture in the house. They opened every drawer, every cupboard, every closet. They even searched Massimiliano’s car.”

  “They asked us if we wanted to call a lawyer,” said Signor Marchetti. “I said no, look wherever you like. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “We were thinking it might have something to do with marijuana,” said Signora Marchetti. “A year ago, Massimiliano was arrested for possession and got a one-year suspended sentence. But that’s all over and done. The police didn’t find any marijuana. They took his samurai sword, though, and they still have it.”

  Signora Marchetti daubed her eyes with a handkerchief. “Then, at eight o’clock, they asked Massimiliano to get into the squad car. They said they were going to take him to sign some papers. Just a formality. He took his tools with him, expecting to go to work afterward. We got in our car and followed them to the Questura in Marghera. Then we sat and waited. At nine o’clock, they told us he’d been arrested for setting fire to the Fenice. We were dumbfounded. We didn’t see him for two months after that. I went to court every day asking for permission to see him.”

  Signor Marchetti took his wife’s hand.

  “And to think,” she said, “the night the Fenice burned, we sat up watching it on TV and crying. We love Venice. Massimiliano loves Venice. He couldn’t have done this. He’s a good boy. He told me they were going to give him two free tickets when the renovation was finished. He asked me if I would go with him. We were hoping to see Woody Allen.”

  “How have the neighbors reacted to this?” I asked.

  “Our friends have no doubt he’s innocent, and that is a comfort to us. But I have lost faith over this. I’ve been going to church for thirty years. I don’t go very often now.”

  LUCIA CARELLA, Signora Marchetti’s older sister, worked as a housekeeper at the Cipriani Hotel. She had been divorced from Renato Carella for many years and was now married to his brother, Alberto Carella. They lived at Sacca Fisola on the Giudecca with her son, Enrico. Twenty years of exposure to the Cipriani’s high-end clientele had made Signora Carella a bit more worldly than her sister. Her face was set in defiance rather than worry, but the look in her eyes revealed an enduring sense of humor.

  “The police got us up at five in the morning and went through everything,” she said, “but they wouldn’t tell us why. I asked Enrico what they were looking for, and under his breath he said, ‘The bastards are just trying to bust my balls. They’re probably looking for drugs.’ He didn’t suspect that it had anything to do with the Fenice. He didn’t seem nervous at all.”

  “The prosecutor,” I said, “claims that Enrico was the one who set the fire, and that your nephew, Massimiliano, was merely acting as lookout for him.”

  “Casson!” she said. “Let me tell you about Casson. The first time he called me after he arrested Enrico, he asked me to come down and answer some questions. He said I had the right to refuse. But I said, ‘I’m perfectly willing to come and answer your questions.’ I went to his office and told him everything I knew and everything I was able to remember. That was that.

  “Then Casson decided to keep Enrico in jail past the three months’ detention period, and, as you can imagine, I was not only desperate but very angry. Right after that, Casson called me again and asked me to come back and answer more questions. But this time I said no. I said I had nothing more to tell him. And he said, ‘Oh? You won’t cooperat
e? Well, in that case you will not be allowed to visit your son.’ And during the seven months Enrico spent in prison, I was able to visit him only twice. My sister went to see her son every other week.”

  “Why do you think Enrico has been charged?”

  “He’s a scapegoat. Casson says he burned the Fenice to avoid paying a penalty. Really? Because of the fire, Enrico lost equipment that was worth ten times what the penalty would have cost. That alone should be enough to prove he didn’t do it.”

  “Your son had been questioned about the Fenice repeatedly before they arrested him,” I said. “Didn’t it occur to you or him that he might be a suspect?”

  “Our biggest mistake was not hiring a lawyer right away,” she said. “We underestimated the gravity of it. We underestimated Casson, that idiot who has ruined our lives.”

  “Casson says your former husband, Renato Carella, is also an arson suspect,” I said.

  “Casson! Casson is one of those people who loves to be on TV, who is never wrong, who knows everything, who always gets the guilty ones. An important person told me he knows a magistrate here in Venice who says Casson does more harm than good!”

  Signora Carella leaned toward me. “I shouldn’t repeat this,” she said, lowering her voice, “but he told me the magistrate thinks Casson is a dickhead.”

  Signora Carella suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth, aware she might have stepped over the line, but when I laughed, she did, too.

  THE INVESTIGATION WAS STILL IN PROGRESS when Casson released the two cousins—Marchetti after five months, Carella after seven. Enrico Carella went to live with his fiancée in Crespano del Grappa and was passing the time working in her ice cream shop. I gave him a call.

  “Sure, I’ll talk to you,” he said, “but you’ll have to pay me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t work that way.”

  “I’ll tell you things I haven’t told anybody else,” he said.

  “You’ve already been interviewed by the Gazzettino and Oggi,” I said. “Why would you tell me things you wouldn’t tell them?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I wished Carella well and instead called Marchetti through his lawyer, Giovanni Seno. Seno said I could talk to Marchetti in his office as long as I understood he might not be able to answer certain questions. Fine, I said. The subject of payment never came up.

  Seno’s law office was located in a shopping mall above a housewares store in the town of Spinea, a half-hour drive from Venice. He had a mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, artfully combed to disguise an encroaching baldness. Seno’s glove-leather sport jacket was, I later learned, his trademark item of apparel. It gave him a touch of natty informality, in keeping with his casual manner. He was brimming with an amiable confidence that stopped just short of a swagger. When I asked at the outset what sort of cases he usually handled, he answered matter-of-factly, “Mafia.”

  “Have you ever represented Felice ‘Angel Face’ Maniero?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but that was twenty years ago, when he was just a kid, before he became a capo. It was for some minor crime. I don’t remember what.”

  Seno’s most famous current client, Massimiliano Marchetti, arrived at Seno’s office accompanied by his father. The young Marchetti was short, solidly built, and had long blond hair, thinning on top. He was wearing a windbreaker, faded jeans, and jogging shoes. There was a small gold ring in his left ear.

  “What was it like to be in isolation for forty-two days?” I asked him.

  Marchetti considered the question for a moment. “You’re in there alone,” he said. “No TV, no newspaper . . . you never see anybody.”

  “What did the room look like?” I asked.

  “They call it the Lion’s Mouth,” he said, speaking haltingly. “It’s like . . . I mean . . . you can’t see out. . . . You only see sky.” He paused.

  “Why did they put you in isolation?”

  “Umm . . . they . . .” Marchetti seemed at a loss for words.

  Seno spoke up. “It was a way of trying to get what they wanted out of him. But he didn’t have anything to give them, so it was really just a form of torture. I’ve seen them put some guys in isolation for eleven months. They had to be pulled out by psychiatrists.”

  “Yeah, I was lucky,” said Marchetti.

  “How do you think the fire started?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Really . . . I have no idea.”

  “Well, how did you find out about it?”

  Marchetti looked at his father and then at Seno. “I told them . . . uh . . . what I remembered, which . . . Not everything. . . . I mean . . . the times weren’t right. And I didn’t think that the fact that . . . And also, because . . . I mean . . . knowing I hadn’t done anything, you didn’t stop to think about it. . . .” Then he fell silent.

  “But how did you actually find out?” I asked.

  After a long pause, Marchetti said, “From my cousin. That evening . . . it was after . . . what was it? . . . Ummm . . . it was—”

  “How did you find out?” Seno cut in, visibly exasperated. “Don’t be so fucking vague! He wants to know exactly how you found out! What happened! Who told you!”

  Marchetti’s father gave his son a worried look. “Someone called them,” he said, trying to help.

  “No!” said Seno. “Carella says that. He”—pointing to Massimiliano, “he didn’t hear the telephone call.”

  “I wasn’t . . . um . . . in the same room,” said Marchetti.

  Seno leaned toward me, palms up. “What can I do? That’s the way he talks. Understand? He’s trying to defend himself, and he talks like that. He pulls out one word a minute. No way can I let him testify.”

  “What’s going to be your main line of defense?” I asked Seno. “What’s your most powerful argument?”

  “Motive!” said Seno. “Casson hasn’t even suggested Massimiliano has a motive. How could he? Massimiliano was only an employee of Viet. Viet wasn’t his company. He had no worries about any penalty or fine. He couldn’t possibly have had a motive.

  “When Casson talks about a motive,” Seno went on, “he always says it was the penalty. That’s Carella, maybe, but not Massimiliano. So Carella is really his main suspect. But there is absolutely no evidence to implicate Massimiliano at all except that he told Casson that he and his cousin were never out of each other’s sight. That ties him to Carella; so if Carella set the fire, then Casson figures Massimiliano had to be there, too. If Massimiliano hadn’t said that, Casson would have severed him from the case, and he wouldn’t be going through any of this. But, look, Massimiliano didn’t think he was a suspect until he was arrested sixteen months after the fire. He didn’t have a lawyer, me, until the day he was arrested, and by then he’d been interrogated five times.”

  “So do you think Carella might be guilty?” I asked. “Or at least do you think he might know what happened?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Seno said. “I only meant that of the two boys, Carella would be the more likely candidate.”

  “Do you think they’ve been set up?”

  “Absolutely. This whole thing stinks. It’s been very dirty from the start. The police, the press, the whole thing. When we come to trial, I’m going to show that these two kids didn’t have enough time to set the fire, between the time Casson says they were last seen in the theater and a few minutes later, when I can prove they were outside. I won’t go into all the details now, but they’d have had to run through the theater at top speed to do it, and in the dark, too.”

  “But if it’s arson,” I said, “what other suspects are there?”