The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  “I tried. Once.”

  “Well?” I finally asked. “Who is it?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” Mario winked.

  “Damn it, Mario!”

  Spezi took a long drag on his Gauloise and let the smoke trickle out. “The person Salvatore Vinci denounced for breaking and entering in 1974, according to my informant, was his son, his own son. Antonio Vinci. The little baby who was rescued from the gas back in Sardinia in 1961.”

  Of course, I thought. I said, “Mario, you know what we have to do, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Interview him.”

  CHAPTER 34

  More than three decades after the murder of Barbara Locci and her lover in 1968, only two people involved in the Sardinian Trail investigation remained alive: Antonio Vinci and Natalino Mele. The rest had died or disappeared. Francesco Vinci’s body had been found hogtied and locked in the trunk of a burned car, after he had apparently gotten on the wrong side of the Mafia. Salvatore had disappeared after his acquittal. Stefano Mele, Piero Mucciarini, and Giovanni Mele were long dead.

  Before interviewing Antonio Vinci, we decided to speak with Natalino Mele, the six-year-old boy who was in the back of the car in 1968 and witnessed his mother’s murder. Natalino agreed to speak to us and chose as a meeting place a duck pond in the Cascine Park in Florence, next to a shabby Ferris wheel and merry-go-round.

  The day was overcast and dull, the air smelling of wet leaves and popcorn. Mele arrived, hands shoved in his pockets, a heavy, sad man in his early forties, with black hair and a haunted look in his eyes. He spoke in the excitable, querulous voice of a boy relating an injustice. After his mother was killed and his father imprisoned, his relatives had packed him off to an orphanage, a particularly cruel fate in a country where family means everything. He was alone in the world.

  We sat on a bench with the disco beat of the merry-go-round thumping in the background. We asked if he could remember any details of the night of August 21, 1968, the night his mother was murdered. The question set him off.

  “I was six years old!” he cried in a high-pitched voice. “What do you want me to say? After all this time, how could I remember anything new? This is what they all keep asking me: What do you remember? What do you remember?”

  The night of the crime, Natalino said, he was so terrified he couldn’t speak at all, until the carabinieri threatened to take him back to his dead mother. Fourteen years later, when the investigators established the connection between the 1968 killing and the Monster’s killings, the police took him in for questioning again. They hammered him relentlessly. He had witnessed the 1968 double murder and they seemed to feel he was holding back vital information. The questioning lasted over the course of a year. He told them, over and over, that he couldn’t remember anything of that night. The interrogators showed him graphic photographs of the Monster’s mutilated victims, yelling at him, “Look at these people. This is your fault! It’s your fault, because you can’t remember!”

  As Natalino spoke of the merciless questioning, his voice filled with anguish, rising in volume. “I told them I couldn’t remember anything. Anything. Except one thing. There is one thing I remembered!” He paused, drawing in breath. “All I remember now is that I opened my eyes in that car and I saw in front of me my mamma, dead. That’s the only thing I remember of that night. And,” he said, his voice quavering, “that’s the only memory I have of her.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Years earlier, Spezi had called Antonio Vinci on the telephone and tried to arrange an interview. He had been categorically rebuffed. In light of that rejection, we discussed how we should best approach the man. We decided not to call ahead and give him another chance to say no. Instead, we would show up at his door and use false names, to avoid a second refusal and to protect ourselves from possible retaliation after the article was published. I would be an American journalist writing a piece on the Monster of Florence, and Spezi would be a friend giving me a hand as a translator.

  We arrived at Antonio’s apartment building at 9:40 p.m., late enough to be sure of finding him at home. Antonio lived in a tidy, working-class area west of Florence. His apartment building stood on a side street, a modest structure of stucco with a small flower garden and bicycle rack in front. At the end of the street, beyond a row of umbrella pines, rose the skeletons of abandoned factories.

  Spezi buzzed the intercom and a woman answered. “Who is it?”

  “Marco Tiezzi,” said Spezi.

  We were buzzed in with no further questions.

  Antonio met us at the door dressed only in a pair of shorts. He stared at Mario. “Ah, Spezi, it’s you!” he said, recognizing him instantly. “I didn’t hear the name well. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time!”

  He seated us at the kitchen table with the air of an affable host and offered us a glass of a special Sardinian spirit called mirto. His companion, a silent and invisible older woman, finished washing spinach in the sink and left the room.

  Antonio was a handsome man with a dimpled smile; his curly black hair was peppered with gray and his body was tanned and heavily muscled. He projected a cocky air of self-confidence and working-class charm. While we chatted about the case, he casually rippled the muscles of his upper arms or slid his hands over them in what seemed an unconscious gesture of self-admiration. He had a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on his left arm and twinned hearts on his right; there was a large scar in the middle of his chest. He spoke in a low, husky, and compelling voice reminiscent of the young De Niro in the movie Taxi Driver. His black eyes were animated and at ease, and he seemed amused at our unexpected arrival.

  Spezi began the conversation, speaking casually and slipping a tape recorder out of his pocket. “May I use it?” he asked.

  Antonio flexed his muscles and smiled. “No,” he said, “I am jealous of my voice. It is too velvety, too rich in tone, to be put in that box.”

  Spezi put the recorder back in his pocket and explained: I was a journalist from The New Yorker magazine writing an article on the Monster case. The interview was part of a series, all routine, of those still alive with a connection with the case. Antonio seemed satisfied with the explanation and very much at ease.

  Spezi began asking questions of a general nature, and established a friendly, conversational atmosphere, jotting notes in longhand. Antonio had followed the Monster of Florence case closely and had an astonishing command of the facts. After a series of general questions, Spezi began to close in.

  “What kind of relationship did you have with your uncle, Francesco Vinci?”

  “We were very close. It was a friendship with a bond of iron.” He paused for a moment and then said something incredible. “Spezi, I’d like to give you a scoop. Do you know when Francesco was arrested for having hid his car? Well, I was with him that night! Nobody knew that, until now.”

  Antonio was referring to the night of the double murder in Montespertoli, near Poppiano Castle, in June of 1982. At the time Antonio was living six kilometers away. It was this crime that led to the arrest of Francesco Vinci for being the Monster of Florence, and an important piece of evidence against Vinci was that he had inexplicably hidden his car in the brush around the time of the killing. This was indeed a major scoop: if Antonio had been with Francesco that night, it meant Francesco had had an alibi that he never used—and as a result spent two years in jail needlessly.

  “But that means your friend Francesco had a witness in his favor!” Spezi said. “You could have helped Francesco avoid being accused of being the Monster and of spending years in jail! Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because I didn’t want to get mixed up in his affairs.”

  “And for that you let him serve two years in prison?”

  “He wanted to protect me. And I had faith in the system.”

  Faith in the system. A totally incredible statement coming from him. Spezi moved on.

  “And what was your relationship lik
e with your father, Salvatore?”

  The faint smile on Antonio’s face seemed to freeze a little, but only momentarily. “We never saw eye-to-eye. Incompatibility of character, you might say.”

  “But were there specific reasons why you didn’t get along? Perhaps you held Salvatore Vinci responsible for the death of your mother?”

  “Not really. I heard something said about it.”

  “Your father had strange sexual habits. Perhaps that was a reason you hated him?”

  “Back then I knew nothing about that. Only later did I learn about his . . .” He paused. “Tics.”

  “But you and he had some serious fights. Even when you were young. In the spring of 1974, for example, your father filed a complaint against you for robbing his house . . .” Spezi paused nonchalantly. This was a crucial question: it would confirm if the missing document actually existed—if Salvatore Vinci had indeed filed charges against Antonio just before the Monster killings began.

  “That’s not quite right,” Antonio said. “Since he couldn’t say if I’d taken anything, I was charged only for violation of domicile. Another time we had a fight and I pinned him, planting my scuba knife at his throat, but he managed to get away and I locked myself in the bathroom.”

  We had confirmed a crucial detail: the breaking and entering of 1974. But Antonio had, all of his own accord—almost like a challenge—added a critical fact of his own: that he had threatened Vinci with his “scuba knife.” The medical examiner in the Monster case, Mauro Maurri, had written years before that the instrument used by the Monster may have been a scuba knife.

  Spezi continued his questions, spiraling in toward our goal.

  “Who do you think committed the double murders of 1968?”

  “Stefano Mele.”

  “But the pistol was never found.”

  “Mele might have sold it or given it to someone else when he left prison.”

  “That’s impossible. The pistol was used again in 1974, when Mele was still in prison.”

  “Are you sure? I never thought of that.”

  “They say your father was the shooter in 1968,” Spezi went on.

  “He was way too much of a coward to do that.”

  Spezi asked, “When did you leave Florence?”

  “In ’74. First I went to Sardinia and after to Lake Como.”

  “Then you returned and got married.”

  “Right. I married a childhood sweetheart, but it didn’t work. We married in 1982 and separated in 1985.”

  “What didn’t work?”

  “She couldn’t have children.”

  This was the marriage that had been annulled for nonconsummation: impotentia coeundi.

  “And then you remarried?”

  “I live with a woman.”

  Spezi assumed an easy tone of voice, as if he were concluding the interview. “Can I ask you a rather provocative question?”

  “Sure. I may not answer.”

  “The question is this: if your father owned the .22 caliber Beretta, you were the person in the best position to take it. Perhaps during the violation of domicile in the spring of 1974.”

  Antonio didn’t answer immediately. He seemed to reflect. “I have proof I didn’t take it.”

  “Which is?”

  “If I had taken it”—he smiled—“I would have fired it into my father’s forehead.”

  “Following this line of reasoning,” Spezi continued, “you were away from Florence from 1975 to 1980, precisely during the time when there were no killings. When you returned, they began again.”

  Antonio didn’t respond directly to the statement. He leaned back in the chair, and his smile spread. “Those were the best years of my life. I had a house, I ate well, and all those girls . . .” He whistled and made an Italian gesture signifying fucking.

  “And so . . .” Spezi said nonchalantly, “you’re not . . . the Monster of Florence?”

  There was only a brief hesitation. Antonio never stopped smiling for a moment. “No,” he said. “I like my pussy alive.”

  We got up to leave. Antonio followed us to the door. While he opened it, he leaned toward Spezi. He spoke in a low voice, his tone remaining cordial, and he switched into the informal, “tu” form. “Ah, Spezi, I was almost forgetting something.” His voice took on a hoarse, threatening tone. “Listen carefully: I don’t play games.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Spezi and I submitted the article on the Monster of Florence to The New Yorker in the summer of 2001. My family and I went back to the States for the summer, to an old family farm on the Maine coast. I spent much of the summer working with our editor at The New Yorker, revising and fact-checking the piece. It was tentatively scheduled for publication the third week of September 2001.

  Spezi and I both anticipated a huge reaction in Italy to the publication of the article. Italian public opinion had long ago settled on the guilt of Pacciani and his picnicking friends. Most Italians had also swallowed Giuttari’s theory, that Pacciani & Co. had been working for a shadowy, powerful cult. While Americans might scoff at the very idea that a satanic sect was behind the killings, Italians did not find it unusual or unbelievable. From the very beginning, there had been rumors that a powerful and important person must be behind the killings, a doctor or nobleman. The satanic sect investigation seemed a logical extension of this idea, and most Italians believed it was justified.

  We hoped to overthrow that complacency.

  The New Yorker piece laid out a very strong case that Pacciani was not the Monster. If not, then his self-confessed “picnicking friends” were liars and Giuttari’s satanic sect theory, built on their testimony, collapsed. Which would leave only one avenue of investigation left: the Sardinian Trail.

  The carabinieri, Mario knew, had continued a secret investigation into the Sardinian Trail. A secret informant in the carabinieri, someone whose identity even I don’t know, had told Mario they were awaiting the right moment to unveil the results of their investigation. “Il tempo è un galantuomo,” the informant had told Spezi, “Time is a gentleman.” Spezi hoped that publication of the New Yorker article would spur the carabinieri into action, set the investigation back on the right track—and lead to the unmasking of the Monster.

  “Italians,” Mario said to me, “are sensitive to American public opinion. If an American magazine of the stature of The New Yorker proclaims Pacciani innocent, that will cause a furor, and I mean a furor.”

  As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, our family made preparations to fly from Boston to Florence on September 14 so the children could make the start of school on the seventeenth.

  On September 11, 2001, everything changed.

  Around two o’clock on that long and terrible day, I turned off the television in the kitchen of our old farmhouse in Maine. I had to get out of the house. Taking my six-year-old son, Isaac, with me, I went out for a walk. The day glowed with autumnal glory, the last hurrah of life before winter, the air snappish and smelling of wood smoke, the sky a vibrant blue. We crossed the freshly mown fields behind the farmhouse, past the apple orchard, and headed down an abandoned logging road into the woods. A mile in we left the road and plunged into the trees, looking for a beaver pond hidden in the deepest part of the forest, where the moose live. I wanted to get away from any trace of human existence, to escape, to lose myself, to find a place untainted by the horror of the day. We forced our way through stands of spruce and fir and slogged across bogs and carpets of sphagnum moss. Half a mile in, sunlight loomed through the tree trunks and we came to the beaver pond. The surface of the pond was utterly still and black, mirroring the forest leaning over it, here and there splashed with red from the leaves of an autumnal maple crowding the pond’s edge. The air smelled of green moss and damp pine needles. It was a primeval place, this nameless pond on an unknown brook, beyond good and evil.

  While my son gathered beaver-gnawed sticks, I had a moment to collect my thoughts. I wondered if it was right to leave the country when i
t was under attack. I considered whether it was safe to fly with my children. And I wondered how this day would affect our lives in Italy if we did return. It occurred to me then, as an afterthought, that the New Yorker article on the Monster of Florence was not likely to be published.

  Like most Americans, we decided to continue our lives as before. We flew back to Italy on September 18, soon after flights resumed. Our Italian friends held a dinner for us at an apartment on Piazza Santo Spirito, overlooking the great Renaissance church built by Brunelleschi. When we walked into the apartment, it was like arriving at a funeral; our Italian friends came forward and embraced us, one by one, some with tears in their eyes, offering their condolences. The evening was somber, and at the end, a friend who taught Greek at the University of Florence recited Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” She read it first in the original Greek and then in Italian. The poem describes the Romans of the late empire waiting for the barbarians to come, and I have never forgotten the last lines she read that evening:

  . . . night is here but the barbarians have not come.

  And some people arrived from the borders,

  and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

  And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

  Those people were some kind of solution.1

  As I expected, The New Yorker killed the Monster piece, generously paying us in full and releasing the rights back to us so we could publish it elsewhere. I made a few halfhearted attempts to place it with another magazine, but after 9/11 no one was interested in the story of a long-ago serial killer in another country.

  In the days following 9/11, many commentators on television and in the newspapers pontificated on the nature of evil. Literary and cultural lions were called upon to express their grave and considered opinions. Politicians, religious leaders, and psychological experts all waxed eloquent on the subject. I was struck by their perfect failure to explain this most mysterious of phenomena, and I began to feel that the very incomprehensibility of evil might be, in fact, one of its fundamental characteristics. You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion. Maybe, I thought, this is why Christians invented the devil and Monster investigators invented a satanic sect. They both were, as the poem goes, “some kind of solution.”