The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  Despite police assurances, some of Stefani’s friends doubted that his death could have been a straightforward suicide. Stefani was physically inept, they said. He could not manage the simplest practicalities of daily life. As one friend put it, he would not have known how to hang a painting, much less himself.

  Maria Irma Mariotti, a journalist who wrote for the cultural newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, had known Stefani for thirty-five years and was perplexed that he had been found in a state of virtual undress. “Mario was always concerned about his appearance,” she said. “If he had planned this suicide himself, knowing that his body would be seen by any number of strangers, he would have wanted to be found in a more presentable state.”

  Shortly after Stefani’s death, his publisher, Editoria Universitaria, released a fifty-page book of his most recent poetry, A Silent Desperation. The cover image was a black-and-white photograph of Stefani looking weary, and the mood of the poems inside was equally grim. He spoke of having a smile on his face but a heavy heart. He was tired of living; life was an unbearable weight. Death was waiting for him at the end of a solitary train ride.

  I found a copy of an earlier book of his poetry, Secret Poems. It had been published three years before his death, and even then his frame of mind could not have been more clear. “I continue to live,” he wrote, “but wish to die.”

  It was obvious to me that most of the people who knew Mario had not read his poetry. I sat down and read for an afternoon. At least half of his poems were about life, death, searing memories, and the pain of love and longing.

  At this point, I decided to pay a call on Stefani’s publisher. I had assumed, from the sound of its name—Editoria Universitaria—that it was an august academic press, but I could not find it in the phone book. After many queries, I discovered that it was a one-man operation belonging to Albert Gardin, who ran it out of his wife’s antique-clothing and costume shop in a narrow side street, Calle del Scaleter, not far from Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio.

  When I looked through the window of the tiny shop, I saw a floor-to-ceiling jumble of antique hats, dresses, coats, capes, scarves, umbrellas, dolls, and bolts of cloth—bunched, piled, strewn, draped, and hanging—but no sign of anything resembling a publishing enterprise. I stepped inside and asked a woman with light brown, shoulder-length hair if she could lead me to Albert Gardin. At that moment, a short, bearded man rose into view from behind a bunker of hats. It was Albert Gardin.

  I introduced myself and said I was interested in learning more about Mario Stefani. Signor Gardin said he would be happy to tell me what he knew about his friend’s poetry, which was plenty, and his death, which was not very much. He pointed to a stool, and I sat down.

  “The police tell us nothing,” he said. “We don’t even know what Mario wrote in his suicide note. My best sources of information have been leaks. A friend in the fire department told me that Mario was found with a noose around his neck and his feet touching the floor. So he didn’t die instantly from a snap of the neck but by a long, slow strangulation. His face had turned black. He used mountain-climbing rope, made of some sort of plastic, and it stretches. I think it’s possible, though, that he died some other way and that his body was strung up afterward to make it look like suicide.”

  “You think it was murder?”

  “It’s possible. Maybe the autopsy will tell us something.”

  “But the police say there is no evidence of foul play,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “They say there isn’t any sign of robbery either. Money, paintings, and objects of value were all in their places.”

  “They may have found money, paintings, and objects of value, as they say. But how would they know nothing was missing?”

  “But weren’t there plenty of signs that Mario Stefani was suicidal?” I asked. “I mean, this new book you just published. It’s almost a road map to suicide.”

  “Mario talked to me about death and suicide more than once,” said Gardin. “But I didn’t think he was suicidal, and there are things about his death that don’t seem right to me.”

  “What sort?”

  “The day before he died, he called to tell me to save the date of March thirtieth. He was planning an event on the Lido. I can’t remember what—a reading involving children or old people. Whatever it was, he was enthusiastic about it. Why would he be making plans if he intended to kill himself?”

  “Maybe the final urge came over him suddenly, without warning,” I said. “I understand that can happen, especially to someone struggling with a suicidal impulse.”

  Gardin shook his head. “I knew Mario very well. Friendship meant a lot to him. I’m sure he would have come to see me one last time to say good-bye in person. That would have been more like him. Mario was—” Gardin caught himself. He closed his eyes. Then, after a moment, he blinked away tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to saying ‘Mario was.’ I was starting to say that Mario was a true friend, that’s all. He’d been depressed, but he was not at the point of killing himself.”

  “Why was he was depressed?”

  Gardin paused and looked down at his hands before answering. “I think he was being blackmailed.”

  “Why?”

  “Mario always prided himself on buying people drinks and dinner. He’d say, ‘I want to humiliate you with my wealth.’ Then, last summer, he stopped doing that. He would say that he was in financial trouble and could no longer pay, and if he did pay, it was only for his part of the bill. He’d see someone walking by a bar in a hurry and offer him a drink, knowing that the person would not have the time to accept.

  “I knew there had to be a reason for his financial problems, and I became concerned. Finally I just asked him if he was being blackmailed. He said, ‘No, no, no!’ But then he thanked me for asking the question and said, ‘Maybe one day I’ll explain everything.’”

  “Why would somebody blackmail him? He was very open about his homosexuality.”

  “Yes, but he kept that part of his life separate. He paid for sex. The boys were working-class, and some of them had criminal records. Some were drug addicts. They would come up to him in the street and say they needed money to pay the electric bill, and he would say, ‘Come by my house tonight.’ To the boys, it was a matter of sex for money, but Mario would often fall in love, and it made him vulnerable. He’d give them whatever they wanted, and what they always wanted was money. That’s the kind of blackmail I’m thinking of.”

  Gardin was concerned about the disposition of Stefani’s estate. “Seventeen artists drew portraits of Mario, including Giorgio de Chirico. Mario told me he wanted all his paintings, his writings, and his collection of thousands of books to go to the Querini Stampalia Foundation museum.”

  Gardin was especially worried about the fate of Stefani’s unpublished poetry. “He was always jotting down poems,” said Gardin. “There have to be dozens of them in notebooks, on scraps of paper, finished, unfinished. To the untrained eye, they might not look like anything. They could get thrown away.”

  It was assumed at first that Stefani’s heir would be his closest relative, a distant cousin who knew him only slightly. She had made his funeral arrangements and was the sole person allowed by the police to enter his apartment. But soon after his death, two nonprofit organizations came forward, both claiming that Stefani had told them he had named them in his will as beneficiaries—a cancer-research organization in Milan and the Waldensian Church in Venice. The Waldensian Church bequest was the more recent, and therefore it seemed to be the valid heir.

  A month later, however, a headline in the Gazzettino trumpeted, “The Mystery of the Third Will.” The police had found a third will in Stefani’s apartment, and it bore a later date than the other two. They would not reveal the identity of the beneficiary, except to say that it was someone not named in either of the two previous wills. There was one catch, however: This third will was only a photocopy, so it was not valid by itself. The original would have
to be found. The public prosecutor said he would interrogate Stefani’s notary to determine whether the original copy of the will had been suppressed, hidden, or destroyed.

  The most surprising revelation in this news story was that Stefani’s estate included not only his house but six rental apartments in Mestre and two magazzini in the Rialto. The total worth was more than a million dollars.

  The next day, Stefani’s notary found the original of the third will stuck into a book of poems that Stefani had given him several months earlier. He also found a fourth will in the book, dated a month later, which simply reiterated the terms of the third. The identity of the heir was still not divulged.

  The story took another unexpected turn six weeks later with the surprising announcement that the heir was a one-year-old girl. Stefani had adored the child as if she were his daughter. According to the Gazzettino, Stefani had made the girl’s father his heir because the girl was a minor, and if he had left his estate in her name, the courts would have taken control until she was eighteen. Still the names were not revealed. The girl’s parents were described as working-class people who were amazed and incredulous at the bequest.

  This latest development mystified everyone who knew Stefani, especially Albert Gardin. Toward the end of June, I was walking by his storefront and saw the top of his head behind a pile of hats. I went into the shop.

  “Have you found out anything more about the little girl?” I asked.

  “There is no little girl,” he answered.

  “What?”

  “Mario left everything to a thirty-two-year-old man. That’s all it says in his will. No mention of a baby girl.”

  “How did you find that out?” I asked.

  Gardin reached into a drawer and took out a single sheet of paper. It was a copy of Mario Stefani’s third will. It was handwritten, as all Italian wills are required to be. The “sole and universal” heir was listed as Nicola Bernardi.

  “Who is he?”

  “A fruit-and-vegetable dealer,” said Gardin. “He works in his family’s shop in St. Marks. He and his wife have a baby girl. Her name is Anna. Mario wrote a poem about her.”

  I remembered then that I had heard Stefani speak twice on his television program about a beautiful baby girl who had helped him come out of a deep depression. Gardin handed me a copy of Stefani’s last book of poetry and opened it to the poem about her. Anna had given him hope, he wrote, and the will to go on living.

  “The Gazzettino got something else wrong, too,” said Gardin. “They said the notary found the will in a book of poems. But when the notary registered the will, he reported that it was given to him by Nicola Bernardi’s lawyer, Cristina Belloni. I’ve got the registration documents, too.”

  “What do you make of it?” I asked.

  “I am more suspicious than ever. Let me show you something really strange. Look at the wording of the will. It’s full of grammatical errors. Mario would never have written anything like this. For example, he switches from the first person to the third, then back to the first: ‘I, Mario Stefani, being in full control of his mental faculties, leaves all his worldly goods and properties and all my financial assets . . .’

  “If it isn’t an outright forgery, then Mario had to be under tremendous strain at the time he wrote it. It might have been dictated to him. If Mario wrote this will intentionally, then he committed suicide a second time—a literary suicide. I mean, what does this fruit-and-vegetable dealer know or care about poetry? How will he know the difference between a piece of paper with a poem scribbled on it and a piece of paper that can be safely thrown away? Will he be making decisions about literary rights and translations? Will he negotiate with publishers?”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “how does this affect you as Stefani’s publisher? I notice that in his books Editoria Universitaria is identified as the holder of the copyright.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “First I want to have this mystery cleared up. I’m going to petition the public prosecutor to launch an honest, open investigation, and I’ll send copies to the newspapers.”

  A week later, Gardin did just that.

  The following day, the Gazzettino duly reported that Gardin’s petition “puts in doubt the news published here about the suicide of the Venetian poet.” The newspaper quoted Stefani’s will verbatim, including the grammatical mistakes, but omitting Bernardi’s name. It was clear that no baby girl had been mentioned. The paper also cited Gardin’s complaint that in registering the will the notary said it had been given to him by an attorney, not that he had found it between the pages of a book, as the Gazzettino had reported. The paper gave no reason for the discrepancies.

  Two days after this story appeared in the Gazzettino, my telephone rang shortly before noon. It was Gardin. He sounded shaken.

  “Something very serious has happened,” he said. “Can you come to the shop? The police have already been here.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in front of Gardin’s office, which is to say outside his wife’s clothing shop. Scrawled with a blue felt-tip marker on the shop window was the warning DON’T GO BREAKING BALLS OVER MARIO STEFANI’S WILL.

  Once I had read and absorbed it, Gardin wiped it off with a rag. “The Gazzettino and La Nuova were here an hour ago,” he said. “They took pictures. I’ve filed a complaint with the police.”

  “Whoever this fruit-and-vegetable dealer is,” I said, “he must be awfully dense not to realize he’d be the obvious suspect.”

  “It could be him,” said Gardin. “Or a friend of his, or a member of his family.”

  The next day, both newspapers published stories about the threatening scrawl accompanied by photographs of Gardin standing next to the window. “Someone is not happy about my petition to the public prosecutor,” Gardin told La Nuova, “but I intend to get to the bottom of this.” He had filed a petition with the police asking for increased nighttime patrols around his wife’s shop. Still neither paper revealed Bernardi’s identity.

  That happened three weeks later, at the end of July, when Nicola Bernardi stepped forward publicly and identified himself as Stefani’s heir. Through his lawyer, Cristina Belloni, he said he intended to safeguard Mario Stefani’s legacy by donating all of his manuscripts, books, correspondence, and paintings to the Querini Stampalia Foundation. He had hired specialists to catalog everything in Stefani’s house by the end of summer.

  Belloni insisted that there was no mystery behind the will. Her client found out that he was the heir only after Stefani’s death, when he was summoned by the police.

  Albert Gardin was not satisfied. Three days later, he held a news conference in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel and introduced sensational new charges. “The last relationship of Mario Stefani,” he said, “turned into a dangerous erotic game that got out of control and cost him his life.

  “I would describe his death as pasoliniana,” he went on, referring to the brutal murder in 1975 of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini for which a hustler was convicted. “Mario paid for sex with the boys he wrote about in his erotic poems. The police should investigate Mario’s bank account, because there was movement in it right before his death, and when he died, the account was empty.”

  A reporter pointed out to Gardin, “Many people think you have a personal motive for calling attention to this case even though it seems to be resolved.”

  “It is absolutely not resolved,” Gardin replied. “Only the lawyer for the heir thinks it is.”

  The next morning, a second warning appeared on Gardin’s shop window. This one, like the first, was written with a blue felt-tip marker: HAVEN’T YOU READ THE NEWSPAPERS? THERE’S NO MYSTERY ABOUT STEFANI’S WILL. IF YOU KEEP TALKING, THERE WILL BE TROUBLE FOR YOU.