The Dark Heart of Florence: Number 6 in series (Michele Ferrara)

by Michele Giuttari

  Hard rock was his favourite kind of music. Hard music, as hard as he was. Before long, though, he became aware of the usual pain and lifted his hands to his head. Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar seemed to be trying to burst his eardrums.

  ‘Damn!’ he whispered, opening his eyes. The beast he could not tame, no matter how he tried, was attacking him. He took some Rohypnol, a powerful drug he had recently discovered, from the side table and swallowed it with a little water. It would take effect within fifteen minutes, and then he would be fine for at least six hours. He would relax and fall into a deep sleep.

  16

  Yorkshire, England

  Sir George Holley had called an urgent meeting in the private study of his castle near Fountains Abbey. There were important issues that needed to be discussed, issues that could not wait.

  After a long pause, the white-haired, impeccably dressed Sir George, the owner of this fairy-tale building, resumed speaking. The eyes of his guests, who were sitting in comfortable green leather armchairs, were all on him.

  ‘Things haven’t gone according to plan,’ he said, ‘and we need to understand why before we take any further steps.’

  The youngest person present, who was tall, with chiselled features, asked for the floor. From his appearance, most people would have assumed him to be of aristocratic stock. But although everyone knew him as a wealthy investor in the world’s financial markets, he was actually a major drugs trafficker who resided officially in the United States; a true gangster, whose main business was laundering dirty money with the support of people who were above suspicion. When Sir George nodded his permission for him to speak, he said, ‘Well, in any case, he got what he deserved. He’s paid for his mistakes. We should soon know exactly what happened.’

  The others nodded.

  ‘I know that Enrico had a Swiss bank account,’ Sir George said. ‘In Lugano, to be precise. We need to get there before the police do, assuming they even find out about it. We’ll have to get in touch with his informer to see what they’re up to.’

  The others agreed again.

  ‘Will you take care of it, Richard?’ Sir George asked the young man who had spoken.

  ‘It’d be an honour. I’ll get on to it right away. I’ll take the first plane. And I’ll make Enrico’s informer an offer he can’t refuse.’

  He sounded absolutely sure of himself. What he was really thinking was that Costanza’s murder suggested they should be looking for other, more reliable sources of information.

  ‘Excellent, you take care of it then. But be careful. We can’t afford to make any mistakes. I’m leaving for Tuscany on Tuesday. We’ll meet again there.’

  ‘Of course, Sir George,’ Richard said. He already had a very clear idea of what needed to be done.

  Sir George handed him an envelope. ‘You’ll find all the details in here.’

  Richard took it and slipped it into the inside jacket pocket of the hand-tailored linen suit that he wore with total nonchalance. He would destroy it later, once he had read it.

  He got up, said goodbye to everyone and left without staying for the rest of the meeting: he was sure it would continue late into the night.

  He needed to get down to work immediately.

  17

  It was impossible for Ferrara to get to sleep that night. He was unable to shake off the terrible images that had shocked Florence over the past three months.

  He looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. It was 1.46 a.m. and there was no chance he would fall asleep now.

  The bedside lamp was still on. He looked tenderly at Petra, who was fast asleep, her blonde hair spread across the pillow and her mouth slightly open. He switched off the lamp, got up and went into the living room, a fairly large room split into two. On one side were the sofas, the armchairs and a desk, at which he sometimes spent entire nights working. On the other, a long, narrow eighteenth-century table, which served as a surface for his work when necessary.

  He sat down at the desk, opened the drawer and took out a file. The first document in it was the letter Leonardo Berghoff had written to him shortly before his death.

  In the past few days he had re-read it several times in search of some meaning hidden between the lines. Now, though, he realised this letter was a problem in itself. The fact that he had kept it to himself, without informing the Prosecutor’s Department, could cost him dearly.

  How could he justify his conduct to his superiors? How could he explain that he had not followed up on the letter? Would they hold him morally responsible for the double murder as a consequence?

  No, he reassured himself. But he was far from certain, given how little he trusted certain people in the Prosecutor’s Department.

  Leonardo Berghoff had met his end the previous month, on 5 July at Marienbrücke in Bavaria. On the same wooden suspension bridge over the river where Ludwig II had often gone at night to gaze at the castle of Neuschwanstein illuminated by hundreds and hundreds of candles. At the same spot, Ferrara had been wounded in the left shoulder from a shot Berghoff had fired at him before being killed. A sniper, hidden in the vegetation on the other side of the bridge, had killed Berghoff before he could fire at Ferrara again, and had then disappeared into the darkness of the mountains without leaving a single trace.

  He re-read the letter.

  In it, Berghoff explained the reason for the vendetta he had planned against the man who had wronged him: Alvise Innocenti, his natural father, who had abandoned him immediately after his birth. A plan so diabolical, he had had to wait many years to carry it out.

  Ferrara lingered over the last part:

  A group which has been hindering your every move from behind the scenes, and which could take drastic action against you if its secrecy were to be endangered. I don’t know the leaders, but I know for certain that they represent the blackest evil.

  But I will give you two names connected to them, though in different ways. One is that officer of yours they call Serpico. The other is former senator Enrico Costanza, who has the rank of prince and who has now reached the end of the line because of the cancer that’s killing him. He’s my godfather. It was he who introduced me into the secret world of the hooded men and the black rose. It was also he who ordered the murder of Madalena after she had seen him with his face uncovered during a ceremony. But it’s all too complex to explain in detail. I’ll only tell you that they intend to destroy the Bartolotti family, which is why the killing was carried out on their property. A word of advice: look into the past of that family and leave the Black Rose alone. It will never die.

  Farewell!

  Leonardo Berghoff

  It will never die.

  Had the lodge been hindering him from behind the scenes? If so, why?

  Having killed Leonardo Berghoff, had the Black Rose really decided to eliminate his godfather, Enrico Costanza, to punish him for allowing his face to be seen by Madalena and putting them all in danger?

  Suddenly he remembered the words of Angelo Duranti, who had been the Commissioner when he first came to Florence, and with whom he had struck up a close friendship: Be careful, Chief Superintendent. In this city, if you put your finger in shit, you’ll usually end up with your hands full of it.

  And he had not been mistaken.

  Florence was a city with two faces, as he had discovered to his cost. A city where hidden powers, deviant lodges, worked secretly. As this letter seemed to prove.

  As he sat at his desk, the question that had been nagging away at him for several hours came back: Could he and his men have prevented this double murder? His answer was a decisive one: No!

  Recovering from his wound far from Florence, in Germany, had prevented him from carrying out the necessary investigations in person. But Rizzo had done so in his place. They had talked about it that very morning in front of Costanza’s villa.

  He knew he would have to inform the Prosecutor about the letter, although he wasn’t sure how. For the moment, he told himself, he had to con
centrate on its contents. Somewhere in those lines, he might be able to find a motive for the murder of Enrico Costanza. Then, and only then, would he decide how to inform the Prosecutor’s Department.

  The letter, written by Berghoff shortly before he died, could be a genuine piece of evidence, the key to everything. It was of primary importance to look into the victim’s life to discover its secrets, its hidden aspects.

  They would also need to clarify the exact role of Inspector Sergi, known as Serpico, who was one of Ferrara’s best men, a man who had even saved his life.

  He remembered the raid a few years earlier on a small house in Montecatini Alto used by a dangerous gang of Albanian drug traffickers. With a shove in the back, Sergi had thrown him to the floor and the shot fired by the leader of the gang had grazed the officer behind him. The criminal had then been killed by a perfectly timed burst of submachine gunfire by Serpico.

  Could he really be a mole in the service of the Black Rose? A traitor? A corrupt cop? Could he, Ferrara, who prided himself on knowing his colleagues, have been wrong about him all these years?

  It suddenly occurred to him that Sergi hadn’t called him once during the day. That was strange, not like him at all.

  Where had he gone for his leave?

  He got up from the desk and went back to bed, taking care not to disturb Petra’s sleep.

  It was now 3.32 a.m. by the clock on the bedside table.

  He couldn’t move.

  He was defenceless, watching the figure approach him from the distance. Gradually, as the figure came closer, its features became more and more distinct. It was wearing men’s clothes and towered above him. When it was just a few steps away, he was able to make out its face. It was anonymous. No distinguishing features. Nothing. Suddenly it burst into loud laughter.

  Then the figure came even closer and opened one of its hands, revealing a long, sharp knife. Terrified, he watched the knife glimmer in the light of the lamp on the bedside table. Then he saw it come down towards him and into his eyes…

  His cry woke Petra.

  ‘Schatzi, darling…’ she said, shaking him gently.

  Tossing and turning in the bed, he struggled to return to reality. At last, still terrified, he opened his eyes.

  Petra’s voice had inserted itself into a lake of blood.

  He saw her.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing, Michele,’ she replied, stroking his clammy cheek with her hand. ‘You were delirious, that’s all. You were flailing around. I’d hoped the nightmares were over…’ She held him tight in her arms, whispering, ‘It’s time to let go, you can’t carry on like this.’ It was not the first time recently that she had asked him to make that decision. ‘You were also talking in your sleep, Schatzi.’

  ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘I didn’t understand any of it, it was just disjointed words. But your voice was sad.’

  They got out of bed, and he went straight to the bathroom – a hot shower would do him the world of good – while Petra headed to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

  A new day had started.

  PART TWO

  IN THE DARK

  18

  Monday 30 August

  She opened her eyes and looked towards the window.

  Pitch black.

  The luminous figures on the face of the digital clock on the bedside table said 5:46. She passed her hand over her forehead. It was damp with sweat, as was the pillow. She had been delirious all night, tormented by recurrent nightmares, recalling the words her parents exchanged after a kiss on the lips as her father left home each morning, always at the same time.

  Be careful, darling!

  Don’t worry!

  As a teenager, she had watched them tenderly, clutching her school satchel in her hand. She had already realised that her father’s work was quite risky, and a bit more complicated than the way they had described it to her: ‘Daddy makes sure the bad people stop doing bad things.’

  She remembered the day she had got home from school – unusually, a family friend had come to collect her – and heard the news. In the living room she had found a man in uniform with lots of stripes on the jacket and her mother in tears. She had thrown herself into her mother’s arms and hugged her tight and cried. She had cried a lot. Her father had been killed by some of those ‘bad people’ in a shootout near the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, the city where they lived. Later, she had seen her father’s photograph on television, the one from his ID, which she had sometimes held in her hand. In an emotional voice, the newsreader had announced his name, his age and his rank: police marshal, one of the old ranks from before the shake-up. That day she had sworn to herself that her father would be her model. That was why she had chosen to join the police.

  Now Teresa lay in the dark, waiting for the dawn.

  When a faint light started to filter through the curtains, she decided to get up. She walked wearily to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t at all happy with her appearance. Her eyes seemed to have shrunk, and there were circles round them. She turned her head sideways and saw the marks from the pillow on her face. She sighed, climbed into the shower and turned on the tap. She shivered at the first jet of cold water, but that only lasted a couple of seconds.

  When she came out and saw her reflection again, it seemed to her that she was looking better already.

  She wrapped herself in her bathrobe and went into the kitchen, furnished unremarkably, like the rest of her two-room apartment. In the corridor, Mimì, her black and grey tabby cat with eyes as big as coins, jumped down from a chair and followed her, meowing. She had brought the cat with her from her mother’s house just a few days earlier, when she had found this apartment in the Piazza del Mercato Centrale and moved out of her room at the police barracks. Ten years earlier, Teresa had saved Mimì’s life, pulling her out of a dustbin in the neighbourhood where she lived. And the cat had immediately become attached to her, like a faithful friend.

  She put her Neapolitan coffee pot on the gas, all the while thinking of the image of Enrico Costanza’s body in the bathtub. She poured some kibble into a plastic bowl. ‘Look how thin you are, eat up!’ she said to Mimì, stroking her little head.

  She leant against the sink while she waited for her coffee to be ready. It seemed to be taking for ever to come to the boil. She needed to drink at least two cups straight away in order to feel ready to face the day. She was sure it was going to be a tough one.

  Eventually she heard the coffee bubbling. She inhaled the pleasant aroma as it spread through the air. She looked at the wall clock. It was seven on the dot: still early. She decided she’d do a bit of shopping. The fridge was half empty.

  She put on jeans and a white T-shirt and went out.

  The only thing on her mind now was that she had to tell Ferrara what she had discovered working on the material taken from the villa.

  She crossed the Piazza del Mercato Centrale, walked up the few steps, and went in through the door on the right-hand side.

  Almost all the stall-holders were finishing arranging their wares on their stalls. You could buy meat, fish, fruit and vegetables at more reasonable prices here than in the shops. And everything was top quality, sourced not just from Tuscany but in other Italian regions too.

  The hustle and bustle was constant. Most of the people who shopped here refused to patronise the new supermarkets or big shopping centres. Many had grown fond of this nineteenth-century covered market. Although, to tell the truth, some of the produce that had been appearing on the stalls recently was anything but local.

  This morning Teresa made a quick round of the stalls. She was early, but she wanted to get to the office as soon as possible. She bought the absolute minimum: milk, Tuscan ham, turkey breast and some fresh fruit. She left with her hands full of plastic bags.

  She was only just outside when she heard shouting and saw a tall, solid-looking man running after a young girl. From h
er clothes – a long, loose skirt, a multicoloured low-cut top, sandals on her feet and a shawl around her waist – Teresa guessed she was a gypsy. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. After a hundred yards or so, the man gave up the chase, and when he turned back Teresa recognised him. He was a fruiterer whose stall she had often frequented. A good person, always friendly, smiling, and well turned-out. Now, with his check shirt hanging out of his trousers, sweating profusely, and especially with that angry look in his eyes, he seemed like a different person.

  ‘What happened?’ Teresa asked, going up to him.