The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  The questions went on like this for an hour, and I was starting to feel reassured. I even had a glimmer of hope that I might get out of there in time to join my wife and children for lunch.

  Mignini then asked me if I had ever heard the name Antonio Vinci. I felt a faint chill. Yes, I said, I knew that name. How did I know it and what did I know of him? I said we had interviewed him, and under further questioning described the circumstances. The questioning turned to the Monster’s gun. Had Spezi mentioned the gun? What were his theories? I told him our belief that the gun had always remained within the circle of Sardinians, and that one of them had gone on to become the Monster.

  At this, Mignini dropped the genteel tone and his voice became edged with anger. “You say that you and Spezi persist in this belief, even though the Sardinian Trail was closed in 1988 by Judge Rotella, and the Sardinians were officially absolved of any connection in the case?”

  I said yes, that we both persisted in this belief.

  Mignini steered the questions toward our visit to the villa. Now the tone of his voice became darker, accusatory. What did we do there? Where did we walk? What did we talk about? Were Spezi and Zaccaria always within sight of me? Was there any moment, even briefly, when they were out of my sight? Was there talk of a gun? Of boxes of iron? Was my back ever to Spezi? When we spoke, how far were we from one another? Did we see anyone there? Who? What was said? What was Zaccaria doing there? What was his role? Did he speak about his desire to be appointed minister of justice?

  I answered as truthfully as I could, trying to suppress a damnable habit of overexplanation.

  Why did we go there? Mignini finally asked.

  I said that it was a public place and we went there in our capacity as journalists—

  At the mention of the world “journalist” Mignini interrupted me in a loud voice, overriding me before I had finished. He made an angry speech that this had nothing to do with freedom of the press, that we were free to report on whatever we wanted, and that he didn’t care a whit what we wrote. This, he said, was a criminal matter.

  I said it did matter, because we were journalists—

  Again he interrupted me, drowning me out with a lecture that freedom of the press was irrelevant to this inquiry and that I should not bring up the subject again. He asked me in a sarcastic tone if I thought that, just because Spezi and I were journalists, did that mean we could not also be criminals? I had the distinct feeling he was trying to prevent anything I might say about press freedom or journalistic privilege from reaching the tape recording that was surely being made of the interrogation.

  I began to sweat. The public minister began repeating the same questions over and over again, phrased in different ways and in different forms. His face flushed as his frustration mounted. He frequently instructed his secretary to read back my earlier answers. “You said that, and now you say this? Which is true, Dr. Preston? Which is true?”

  I began to stumble over my words. If the truth be known, I am far from fluent in Italian, especially with legal and criminological terms. With a growing sense of dismay, I could hear from my own stammering, hesitant voice that I was sounding like a liar.

  Mignini asked, sarcastically, if I at least remembered speaking by telephone to Spezi on February 18. Flustered, I said I couldn’t remember a particular conversation on that exact date, but that I had talked to him almost every day.

  Mignini said, “Listen to this.” He nodded to the stenographer, who pressed a button on the computer. Through the set of speakers attached to the computer, I could hear the ringing of a phone, and then my voice answering:

  “Pronto.”

  “Ciao, sono Mario.”

  They had wiretapped our phone calls.

  Mario and I chatted for a moment while I listened in amazement to my own voice, clearer on the intercept than in the original call on my lousy cell phone. Mignini played it once, then again, and yet again. He stopped at the point where Mario said, “We did it all.” He fixed his glittering eyes on me: “What exactly did you do, Dr. Preston?”

  I explained Spezi was referring to delivering the information to the police.

  “No, Dr. Preston.” He played the recording again and again, asking over and over, “What is this thing you did? What did you do?” He seized on Spezi’s other comment, in which he had said, “The cell phone is ugly.”

  “What does this mean, ‘The cell phone is ugly’?”

  “It meant he thought the phone was tapped.”

  Mignini sat back and swelled with triumph. “And why is it, Dr. Preston, that you were concerned about the telephone being tapped if you weren’t engaged in illegal activity?”

  “Because it isn’t nice to have your phone tapped,” I answered feebly. “We’re journalists. We keep our work secret.”

  “That is not an answer, Dr. Preston.”

  Mignini played the recording again, and again. He kept stopping at several other words, repeatedly demanding to know what I or Spezi meant, as if we were speaking in code, a common Mafia ploy. He asked me if Spezi had a gun in the car with us. He asked me if Spezi had carried a gun during our visit to the villa. He wanted to know exactly what we had done there and where we had walked, minute by minute. Mignini brushed all my answers aside. “There is so much more behind this conversation than you are telling us, Dr. Preston. You know much more than you are letting on.” He demanded to know what kind of evidence the Sardinians might have hidden in the villa, in the boxes, and I said I didn’t know. Take a guess, he said. I replied perhaps arms or other evidence—jewelry from the victims, maybe pieces of the corpses.

  “Pieces from the corpses?” the judge exclaimed incredulously, looking at me as if I were a lunatic for even thinking of such a vile thing. “But the killings took place twenty years ago!”

  “But the FBI report said—”

  “Listen again, Dr. Preston!” And he pressed the button to play the call again.

  This time the police captain jumped in, speaking for the first time, his voice as tense and shrill as a cat’s.

  “I find it very strange that Spezi laughs at that point. Why does he laugh? The Monster of Florence case is one of the most tragic in the history of the Italian republic, and it is no laughing matter. So why does Spezi laugh? What is so funny?”

  I refrained from answering the question, since it hadn’t been addressed to me. But the indefatigable man wanted an answer, and he turned and repeated the question to me directly.

  “I am not a psychologist,” I answered as coldly as I could, the desired effect ruined when I mispronounced the word psicologo and had to be corrected.

  The captain stared at me, his eyes narrowing, then turned to Mignini and with the expression on his face of a man who refuses to allow himself to be fooled. “This is something I note for the record,” he shrilled. “It is very strange that he laughs at that point. It is not psychologically normal, no, not normal at all.”

  I remember at this point looking at Mignini, and finding his gaze on me. His face was flushed with a look of contempt—and triumph. I suddenly knew why: he had expected me to lie, and now I had met his expectation. I was proving to his satisfaction that I was guilty.

  But of what?

  I stammered out a question: did they think we had committed a crime at the villa?

  Mignini straightened up in his chair and with a note of triumph in his voice said, “Yes.”

  “What?”

  He thundered out, “You and Spezi either planted, or were planning to plant, a gun or other false evidence at that villa in an attempt to frame an innocent man for being the Monster of Florence, to derail this investigation, and to deflect suspicion from Spezi himself. That is what you were doing. This comment: ‘We did it all’—that’s what he meant. And then you tried to call the police. But we had warned them ahead of time—and they would have nothing to do with the deception!”

  I was floored. I stammered that this was just a theory, but Mignini interrupted me and said, “These a
re not theories! These are facts! And you, Dr. Preston, you know a great deal more about this business than you are letting on. Do you realize the utmost seriousness, the enormous gravity, of these crimes? You well know that Spezi is being investigated for the murder of Narducci, and I think you know a great deal about it. That makes you an accessory. Yes, Dr. Preston, I can hear it in your voice on that telephone call, I can hear the tone of knowledge, of deep familiarity with these events. Just listen again.” His voice rose with restrained exultation. “Listen to yourself!”

  And for maybe the tenth time he replayed the conversation.

  “Perhaps you have been duped,” he went on, “but I don’t think so. You know. And now, Dr. Preston you have one last chance—one last chance—to tell us what you know—or I will charge you with perjury. I don’t care, I will do it, even if the news goes around the world tomorrow.”

  I felt sick and I had the sudden urge to relieve myself. I asked for the way to the bathroom. I returned a few minutes later, having failed to muster much composure. I was terrified. As soon as the interrogation ended, I would be arrested and taken off to jail, never to see my wife and children again. Planting false evidence, perjury, accessory to murder . . . Not just any murder, but one connected to the Monster of Florence . . . I could easily spend the rest of my life in an Italian prison.

  “I’ve told you the truth,” I managed to croak. “What more can I say?”

  Mignini waved his hand and was handed a legal tome that he placed on his desk with the utmost delicacy, then opened to the requisite page. In a voice worthy of a funeral oration, he began to read the text of the law. I heard that I was now indagato (indicted) for the crime of reticence and making false statements.1 He announced that the investigation would be suspended to allow me to leave Italy, but that it would be reinstated when the investigation of Spezi had concluded.

  In other words, I was to get out of Italy and not come back.

  The secretary printed out a transcript. The two-and-a-half-hour interrogation had been boiled down to two pages of questions and answers, which I corrected and signed.

  “May I keep this?”

  “No. It is under segreto istruttorio.”

  Very stiffly, I picked up my International Herald Tribune, folded it under my arm, and turned to leave.

  “If you ever decide to talk, Dr. Preston, we are here.”

  On rubbery legs I descended to the street and into a wintry drizzle.

  CHAPTER 47

  We drove back to Florence in the pouring rain. Along the way, I called the American embassy in Rome on my cell phone. An official in the legal department explained they could do nothing for me since I had not been arrested. “Americans who get into trouble in Italy,” he said, “need to hire a lawyer. The American embassy can’t intervene in a local criminal investigation.”

  “I’m not some American who did something stupid and got involved in a local criminal investigation!” I cried. “They’re harassing me because I’m a journalist. This is a freedom-of-press issue!”

  That did not impress the embassy official. “Regardless of what you think, this is a local criminal matter. You’re in Italy,” he said, “not America. We can’t intervene in criminal investigations.”

  “Can you at least recommend a lawyer?”

  “We’re not in the business of rating Italian lawyers. We’ll send you a list of the lawyers known to the embassy.”

  “Thanks.”

  Above all, I had to speak to Mario. Something big was coming—my interrogation was only a shot across the bow. Even for a man as powerful as the public minister of Perugia, it was a brazen step to take into custody an American journalist and subject him to the third degree. If they were willing to do that to me, at the risk of bad publicity (which I fully intended to bring down upon their heads like a ton of bricks), what would they do to Spezi? He was the man they were really after.

  I couldn’t call Spezi on my cell phone. When I got back to Florence, I arranged a meeting through borrowed cell phones and calls from phone booths. At close to midnight, Spezi, Zaccaria, and Myriam showed up at our apartment in Via Ghibellina.

  Spezi, Gauloise stuck in his mouth, paced the elegant living room, trailing clouds of smoke. “I never would have thought they would take this step. Are you sure they charged you with perjury?”

  “I’m sure. I’m a persona indagata.”

  “Did they serve you with an avviso di garanzia?”

  “They said they would mail it to my address in Maine.”

  I related to them as much as I could remember of the interrogation. When I got to the point where Mignini accused us of planting a gun at the villa to incriminate an innocent man and to deflect suspicion from Spezi himself, Spezi stopped me.

  “He said that? ‘To deflect suspicion’ from me?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Spezi shook his head. “Porca miseria! Those two, Giuttari and Mignini, don’t just think me guilty of some journalistic shenanigans, planting a gun for a scoop. They think I was directly involved in the Monster’s murders—or at least in the murder of Narducci!”

  “In a crazy way,” I said, “their fantasy fits the facts. Look at it from their point of view. For years we’ve been insisting Antonio is the Monster. Nobody’s paid any attention. So we go to the villa, we walk around, then a few days later we call the police and say Antonio hid evidence at the villa, come and get it. I hate to say it, Mario, but it’s a believable theory that we might have planted something.”

  “Come now!” Spezi cried. “It’s a theory not only lacking all investigative logic, but all logic entirely! A moment’s thought would discredit it. If I was behind the murder of Narducci, to ‘deflect suspicion’ from myself, would I really enlist in my plot an ex-con I didn’t know, a policeman who had been one of the finest detectives in the Florentine mobile squad, and a famous American writer? Who could possibly think that you, Doug, would come to Italy and sneak around like a crook planting evidence for the police to find? You’re a best-selling author here already! You don’t need a scoop! And Nando, he’s president of an important security company. Why would he risk everything for a sordid scoop? It doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  He paced, scattering ashes.

  “Doug, you have to ask yourself: why are Giuttari and Mignini working so hard to attack us now? Is it perhaps because in just two months we’ll publish a book on this same subject, questioning their investigation? Might this be an effort to discredit our book before publication? They know what’s in the book already—they’ve read it.”

  He took a turn around the room.

  “The worst thing for me, Doug, is the accusation that I did this to deflect suspicion from myself. Suspicion of what? That I’m one of the instigators of the Narducci killing! The newspapers have all been writing the same thing, a strong indication that they have been using the same source, well informed, and certainly official. What does that make me?”

  Pace, turn.

  “Doug, do you realize what they really think? I’m not just an accessory or someone involved in the Narducci killing. I’m one of the masterminds behind the Monster killings. They think I’m the Monster!”

  “Give me a cigarette,” I said. I didn’t normally smoke but now I needed it.

  Spezi gave me a cigarette and lit another one for himself.

  Myriam began to cry. Zaccaria sat on the edge of the sofa, his long hair disheveled, his once crisp suit limp and wrinkled.

  “Consider this,” Spezi said. “I’m supposed to have planted the Monster’s gun at the villa to incriminate an innocent man. Where did I get the Monster’s gun, if I’m not the Monster myself?”

  The ash hung in a curl from the end of his cigarette.

  “Where’s the damn ashtray?”

  I fetched Spezi and myself a plate from the kitchen. Spezi stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette with violence and lit another. “I’ll tell you where Mignini gets these ideas. It’s that woman from Rome, Gabriella Carlizz
i, the one who said the cult of the Red Rose was behind the 9/11 attacks. Have you read her website? This is the woman the public minister of Perugia listens to!”

  Spezi had gone full circle, from Monstrologer to Monster.

  I left Italy the next morning. When I returned to my house in Maine, which stands on a bluff overlooking the gray Atlantic, and I listened to the rhythmic breakers on the rocks below and the seagulls wheeling above, I was so glad to be free, so happy not to be rotting in some Italian jail, that I felt the tears trickling down my face.

  Count Niccolò called me the day after my return. “So, Douglas! I see you have been making trouble in Italy! Good show!”

  “How did you know?”

  “They say in the papers this morning that you’re now an official suspect in the Monster of Florence case.”

  “It’s in the papers?”

  “Everywhere.” He laughed quietly. “Don’t be concerned.”

  “Niccolò, for God’s sake, they accused me of being an accessory to murder, they said I planted a gun at that villa, they’ve indicted me for making false statements and obstruction of justice! They threatened me if I ever return to Italy. And you tell me I shouldn’t be concerned?”

  “My dear Douglas, anyone who is anybody in Italy is indagato. I offer you my congratulations on becoming a genuine Italian.” His voice lost its cynical drawl and became serious. “It is our mutual friend Spezi who should be concerned. Very concerned.”

  CHAPTER 48

  I began to make calls to the press as soon as I got home. I was terrified for Mario; he was obviously their real target. I hoped that if I could make a big enough stink in America, it might provide Spezi with some protection against an arbitrary and capricious arrest.