Manfredi leaned against a wall, as far away from us as possible. Then he turned directly to me.
“So, what else do you want to know?” he asked me.
“Just if and when you spoke to Elisa Sordi before Sunday, July 11,” Teodori said meekly.
“Of course I spoke to her. So did everybody around here, everybody our age, at least. Even the young priest with the red hair spoke to her. Or do you think I’ve got less right than a priest to talk to a pretty girl?”
Terrified, Teodori mumbled something incomprehensible. Now he really was in a painting on the living room wall, aboard a sinking ship.
“You had as much right as any of us,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “As for hoping it would go beyond talking, well, that’s another story.”
His biceps flexed and his pectorals swelled. I watched the open palms of his hands. There were posters of martial arts movies on the walls, too, and I had no doubt the kid had more than a passing knowledge of the subject.
He told us calmly how he had first met Elisa Sordi. He knew what time she arrived in the morning. On that particular morning it had been raining, and through his binoculars he saw that she didn’t have an umbrella. His account matched the story Elisa had told Valerio Bona.
“What did you talk about?”
“She asked me what I was studying. I told her I was doing classical studies at a private school. We just talked for a minute. She had work to do.”
“Four Saturdays ago you went to see her in her office.”
“She told me I could come by anytime.”
He spoke as if this was the most normal thing in the world. As if a monster like that could hold any interest for a young goddess like Elisa Sordi. Perhaps the boy thought his family status gave him a special right over any peasant woman admitted into that paradise. A kind of modern ius primae noctis.
“Are you saying Elisa Sordi wanted your company?”
I put all the irony and incredulity I could into the question. He looked at me a long time while the only sound in the room was Teodori’s labored breathing. This kid was going to hate me forever, whether he was guilty or not.
“I’m telling you what happened. If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem.”
“All right. And what did you talk about?”
His smile made his face look even more grotesque.
“About true and false emotions. About love.”
The little monster was trying to palm me off as if I was a child.
“You talked about love? Could you be more specific, please? It’s important. Who said what?”
“There was something preying on Elisa’s mind; she was upset. I think there were problems with that guy who followed her around.”
“Did she say so?” Teodori asked hopefully.
“Not really. She did say that anyone who kept seeking the impossible in love would only end up unhappy.”
My thoughts went back to the autopsy results. Signs of termination of pregnancy carried out in the previous fifteen days. A relationship that had been going on for some time—her period was late, a pregnancy test, then abortion. The conversation with Manfredi probably happened when the pregnancy was already discovered, several days before the abortion.
“Did you have sexual relations with Elisa Sordi?” I asked him point-blank.
Strangely, he had to stop and think. “I assume you’ve already considered that and determined it was impossible,” he replied sarcastically.
“You could always have raped her,” I said brutally.
“Captain Balistreri, that’s enough! I don’t approve of these tactics,” Teodori said. Then he turned to Manfredi in an attempt to seem impartial.
“Ignore that comment, please. But you do need to answer Captain Balistreri’s question.”
“No,” said Manfredi, “I don’t need to do anything. I’m not answering anymore questions. I didn’t kill Elisa Sordi. Whoever did was luckier than I am.”
What on earth did that mean? Was he just referring to his face? There was no way of knowing. We took our leave with many apologies on Teodori’s part. The count and Ulla were nowhere to be seen. The count’s personal secretary saw us out, like a bouncer hustling a drunk customer out of a bar.
. . . .
We went back to Homicide in the car, myself at the wheel. Neither of us said a word. Then I saw the tears flowing silently from under Teodori’s dark glasses.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. I was used to women’s tears, and no longer gave them any thought, but coming from a grown man they got on my nerves.
“I’ve been on the force more than thirty years, Balistreri. And now, at the age of sixty, I find myself in this terrible situation: my hands are tied, and a young guy like you treats me like a fucking piece of shit.”
His words contained both rage and humiliation. In a flash I realized that this was the pain of an ordinary, decent man reduced by circumstances.
“Don’t worry, I won’t say a word to anyone and Coccoluto will help your daughter out.”
“Right, Coccoluto will help her out—if I look the other way in this investigation,” he said bitterly.
So doubt had crept into his mind as well, after seeing Manfredi—his face, those muscles, that room with its violent posters, Mein Kampf—and hearing about his sweet little talks with Elisa.
“That’s the price your conscience has to pay if you want Coccoluto to invent an imaginary dealer to save your daughter from the charge of murder.”
“But he really exists, damn it!” he exploded in rage. “Claudia told me his name, but I swore not to tell anyone because she’s afraid of what this animal will do. He hangs out with a dangerous crowd.”
I looked at him in silence. Yellow tears. We only suffer like this for our children. I thought back to my father and what he went through because of me. And what I went through because of him. And Elisa Sordi’s parents expecting justice. I was an insensitive shit, but I could sort this problem out. I didn’t give a damn about any dangerous drug dealer, having seen far worse. And all of a sudden I felt sorry for Teodori and his yellow eyes.
I rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Teodori, why don’t you pretend I’m not the police and tell me the name of this dealer?”
. . . .
After talking to Teodori, I found out more from a former colleague in the secret intelligence service. Claudia Teodori’s dealer was a small fry by the name of Marco Fratini. He came from a good family. A drop-out from a private religious university, he was a handsome guy from one of Rome’s wealthy neighborhoods and fond of the club scene. Except that one day, after skipping yet another exam, the father hits the roof and cuts him off completely. The good little bourgeois kid isn’t studious but he’s clever, so he immediately comes up with an alternative source of income. Given his clean appearance and excellent social contacts, he becomes the perfect pusher of amphetamines in the most fashionable clubs. He then discovers that some of those pills, dissolved in beer on the sly, make the girls easier to bend to his desires.
I could easily have picked him up and beaten the truth out of him. The only real danger was the gang that supplied him with the merchandise. To have them lose an important sales channel purely on account of saving Claudia Teodori could have led to even more serious consequences for the girl. I needed a plan.
. . . .
“Once you’re in the car, don’t take more than a minute, Vanessa. I don’t want you putting yourself into any danger.”
She laughed. “He’ll be the one in danger. But please explain, Captain—what can I do in a minute?”
I told her, running my fingernails from her knee up her thigh: “Anything to get it over with in a minute.”
She gave me a malicious look. “Captain, for years I had a boring boyfriend, especially in bed. So I learned a couple of tricks to speed things up. Should I describe them, so you can choose exactly what I should do to this little prick?”
“Theoretical discussions of sex a
ren’t my thing. Just be careful.”
The Striscia di Mare club in Ostia was packed with the youth of Rome and the surrounding area, all of them there to dance on the sand to Olivia Newton John. I arrived around midnight with three trusted colleagues, chosen for their impressive builds and beat-up faces. We made our way through the sea of mopeds parked outside the entrance. The bouncer had been notified beforehand and let us jump the line to a chorus of muttering and curses.
The dance floor on the sandy beach held an ocean of writhing figures. The guys were stripped to the waist, the girls mainly in shorts and tank tops or bikini tops. Many were stunning, but Vanessa naturally stood out, her magnificent legs shooting out from a pair of black leather shorts. She was the only one wearing ankle boots on the sand, and the tightly clinging top advertised her toned and muscular shoulders and arms. Her hands were decked with rings and ended with very long, black-polished nails. It was a costume I had suggested myself.
Fratini spotted Vanessa as soon as she hit the dance floor. He watched her dance alone, drinking beer from a bottle. She looked promising to him, I could tell. Of course, the extra handful of pills the guy from Marseilles gave him as a tip for his services as a dealer would come in handy for softening up this unbelievably hot girl.
He moved in with his gleaming smile as Vanessa was getting another beer from the bar by the dance floor.
“I’d pay anything for a private dance with you,” he said, leaning close to her at the bar. Vanessa looked at him and gave a laugh.
“Maybe, but first let’s see how you do in public.”
They danced for nearly half an hour before he succeeded in dropping two yellow tablets in her beer. I was at the other end of the bar and gave her the sign that everything was going according to plan.
Vanessa began to behave exactly as Fratini expected her to. She was uninhibited, wild. When he invited her to go for a walk, she accepted readily.
They went out into the dark parking lot, where a cool breeze was coming in from the sea. Fratini was ecstatic. No little yellow pills for him, of course—that stuff made you lose control, like that idiot Claudia Teodori who had crashed her car.
As usual, he’d parked a little way off. He opened the back door of his BMW to reveal its white leather seats.
“Get in,” he ordered.
Vanessa was laughing giddily.
“Get in yourself,” she said teasingly. Then she pushed him down onto the seat and crouched between his knees.
Fratini laughed and tried to undo her shorts, but she brushed her long black fingernails from his knees up to his crotch.
“Ladies first,” she said in a promising tone.
She pulled his jeans and his underwear down to his knees and began to stroke his penis. Her ten black painted nails were pin points of pleasure. Then she took him into her mouth.
“Damn, you’re driving me crazy,” Marco Fratini groaned.
He came in less than half a minute. Immediately after he did, Vanessa herself began to moan, but in a different way. Then she threw up in his lap. Fratini drew back, looking, horrified, at his penis—covered in a mixture of vomit and sperm, which was now dripping all over the BMW’s white leather seats. Vanessa collapsed in a heap, heaving, froth bubbling from the side of her mouth. A moment later the other rear door of the car opened and two strong hands grabbed him by the armpits and lifted him from the car. A shove made him trip over the jeans that were still around his ankles. He fell half-naked to the ground.
Terrified, he found himself facing me and my three accomplices, who looked more like ex-cons than policemen. Trembling, he tried to stand and pull up his jeans, but another, more forceful shove was enough to send him back to the ground.
I bent over Vanessa, who gave me a wink.
“It’s bad,” I said to my accomplices seriously, “but no ambulances. If the boss finds out, we’re fucked. Take her to the car. Her stomach needs to be pumped.”
“She’ll tell her father,” one of my three guys said, playing his part.
“No, I’ll talk to her later. She’ll keep her mouth shut. If she doesn’t, her father will have her hide and then ours. He’ll rip the balls off this fucker here and feed them to him.”
Lying half-naked on his back on the cobblestones, scared shitless, Fratini began to sob. One of my guys carried Vanessa to another car and took her away.
“Who are you?” Fratini mumbled, trembling all over.
I gave him a pitying look. “You just drugged and raped the only daughter, the underage daughter, of a capo in the Magliana gang. We were supposed to keep an eye on her, but the little bitch gave us the slip and hooked up with you, dickhead.”
Marco Fratini saw that he was already dead. He’d always been unlucky; now he’d drugged the underage daughter of a dangerous criminal. Him, a former university student from a good family! They’d tear him to pieces.
“But I didn’t did do anything to her,” he whimpered.
I ripped the jeans brutally from his ankles and pulled out the yellow tablets. His sobs turned desperate.
“You’re in the deepest shit possible. Even if we do everything we can to keep that spoiled little slut’s mouth shut, she’s used to doing just whatever the fuck she wants. And if there’s a guy who turns her on she keeps coming back for more.”
“But I’ll disappear. I’ll leave, I swear!”
He was on his knees, pulling up his briefs.
“Like we’re going to fucking run that risk,” I said to the two gorillas on either side of me.
“If we beat him to death here in the parking lot, they’ll think it was just a fight outside a club,” one of them observed.
“That way he’d be out of our hair forever,” added another, totally calm.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking the blackjack I’d taken from my pocket, “but we don’t have much choice. To be on the safe side, we either put you six feet under or in prison. But we can’t send you to prison, so that only leaves one choice.”
Fratini had pissed himself and was trembling like a leaf. He raised his hand like a kindergartener. “But maybe I can send myself to prison,” he said.
In great detail he told us about how he’d drugged Claudia Teodori and the accident that followed. A girl had died. If he confessed to having put pills in her glass without her knowing, then they’d give him a good few years in jail. He wouldn’t ask for any extenuating circumstances.
After consulting briefly with my two accomplices, I advised him that we also had important friends in the police, that we would check his story and if he was lying we’d be back to rip his balls off ourselves.
When we deposited him in front of the police station in Ostia, he thanked us with tears in his eyes.
A short time later, while Fratini was making a full confession about the pills he’d secretly put in Claudia Teodori’s beer, Vanessa and I were alone on a boat moored in Ostia’s harbor. It belonged to a wealthy uncle of hers.
The sea breeze provided a bit of relief from the suffocating heat. We sat on the deck drinking ice-cold beer.
“What was the most difficult part?” I asked her.
She laughed, now a little drunk.
“Having to swallow that pill you gave me to make me throw up. Shit, Michele, it made me really sick.”
“Without my little pill you’d have had to swallow something a lot worse.”
She picked up a rope and held it out to me. “Do you know how to tie knots? It’s important on a boat.”
She wrapped the rope around my wrists, rapidly tied it into a double knot to secure me, and then knotted the rope tightly to the rudder.
“Good,” she said, sitting back down. “Now you won’t fall into the sea.”
She took off one ankle boot. Her toenails were painted black to match her fingernails. She stretched out her leg and began to run her foot up my thigh.
Tuesday, July 20, 1982
TEODORI LOOKED LESS PALE and less swollen, and his eyes were a little less yellow. He had shaved
and his jacket, tie, and shirt matched. He was bursting with energy and optimism. His office was covered with photos of Elisa Sordi, the autopsy report, and, the biggest surprise of all, the possible alibis of not only Valerio Bona but also the inhabitants of Via della Camilluccia.
“We checked,” he said, beaming. “Valerio Bona is the only one who isn’t covered for the whole afternoon; then, after eight, he’s got witnesses who say he was at home, although with all the chaos after the game we can’t be sure.”
“Father Paul?”
“The other volunteer, Antonio Orlandi, has confirmed his whole story.”
“And Manfredi?”
“Same thing. His personal trainer at the Top Top is a Polish guy named Jan Deniak. He says Manfredi was with him for at least an hour, from a 6:45 to 8:00, doing weight training in the gym.”
The rejuvenated Teodori had even very discreetly verified the count’s movements: first at his party’s meeting, then at the minister of the interior’s. Everything had been confirmed, except there were no witnesses to Ulla’s shopping expedition. Then from eight fifteen onward they were all at home with friends. And there was no doubt about Manfredi. Teodori had even double-checked when Cardinal Alessandrini arrived at and left the Vatican.
Almost apologetically, he continued, “We also ascertained that Dioguardi was with his girlfriend all day. Then he came to get you at five, and then the two of you were together after leaving Via della Camilluccia.”
So you even checked my alibi.
“And the telephone records for the Sordi house?”
“The girl had nothing arranged for Sunday, so she didn’t tell anyone she was going into the office. She was supposed to spend the day with her parents, going to mass, and then come home before the game.”
The Deliverance of Evil Page 11