A Florentine Death

by Michele Giuttari

  'Venturi has just brought me a list of licence numbers of cars that have been seen a lot in the park. I want you to compare them with the ones that were there last night. Concentrate on those that recur most often. Then let's factor in the people whose telephone numbers are in Biagini's diary. Put them all together and we should be able to narrow it down to the one that interests us, even taking into account the fact that we may come up against a wall of silence.'

  The men stood up to get back to work.

  'Wait, Venturi,' Ferrara said. 'Seeing as you're so good with computers, could you copy for me onto a CD all the photos of the victims, starting with the Micali murder. I need them by tonight.'

  Back to square one. Starting with the victims.

  Night had fallen by the time Superintendent Ascalchi got back to Headquarters. He came straight to his chief's office.

  'So, did Don Sergio spend last night in the parish?' Ferrara asked as soon as he saw him.

  'No,' Ascalchi replied.

  Ferrara felt a brief sense of triumph. 'Does he have an alibi?'

  'You'd have to ask him that.'

  'What do you mean? Didn't you speak to him?'

  'He's not there.'

  'What do you mean?' 'I mean he's gone.'

  'What do you mean, gone? He can't be.'

  'Gone, vanished into thin air, nowhere to be found.'

  'Come on, Ascalchi, I'm not in the mood for jokes. What the hell are you trying to tell me?'

  'I'm not joking, chief. He left on February 3rd, and never came back. He's already been replaced.'

  February 3rd, Ferrara thought. The day after the Bianchi murder.

  'Did you talk to the parish priest?'

  'Of course, but he won't open up. Says he doesn't know where Don Sergio went. He left without saying a word to anyone. Not even to his relatives, apparently'

  'Impossible. A priest doesn't just vanish into thin air. The parish priest must know where he is. Why won't he say?'

  'Maybe he doesn't trust Romans. He swore over and over that he was just as surprised as anyone.'

  And did you believe him?'

  'You want the truth? Not in the slightest. But you didn't say I could use strong arm tactics ... In fact, I didn't even tell him I was a policeman, like you said. But if you want me to, I can go back tomorrow and —'

  'No, no, forget it. You did very well. If I want you to go back, I'll let you know. Or else I'll go myself. Anyway, you can go now.'

  In the corridor, Ascalchi said as he passed an officer, Who rubbed him up the wrong way?' and they both laughed.

  'Chief, chief!' Venturi came running after Ferrara.

  It was nine o'clock, and he was on his way out. The Headquarters building was almost deserted, and the inspector's steps echoed in the corridor. He was going home. It was too late to go to Greve, and besides, it might be better to proceed with caution, and not alarm the parish priest too much. After all, he was the one who'd provided Don Sergio with his alibi for the Micali murder.

  Venturi caught up with him. 'Your CD,' he said, holding out an envelope. 'The photos of Biagini are on it, too, taken in the morgue.' He smiled. 'I hurried the forensics people up a bit.'

  'Thanks, I'd forgotten.'

  'But you need them today, right?'

  'Yes.'

  He'd decided that he would have another look at the corpses that evening, try to understand what they told him, see if he could extract even the slightest shred of evidence from them.

  The positions in which they were lying, the grimaces on their faces, the way their arms were bent: anything could be meaningful if you knew how to look. Not always, but often.

  So, after dinner, he put the CD in his computer and, while Petra bustled about to the accompaniment of Bellini's Sonnambula, he started to look at the images.

  First the whole bodies: comparing the positions, superimposing the images, looking for significant similarities or divergences. It was demanding work, constantly comparing each one with all the others. Then he examined the wounds to the victims' backs, leaving aside those inflicted by bullets and concentrating on the knife marks.

  It seemed to him that there were some analogies in the shapes of two cuts on the bodies of Micali and Biagini, the first and last victims, but when he tried to enlarge the images even more, they became too grainy and it was impossible to compare them properly. He made a mental note to get the forensics people to take another look.

  He had left the faces for last, all of them slashed to pieces, apparently indiscriminately, in a kind of blind fury, almost as if the killer had wanted to erase them, while at the same time leaving them at least slightly recognisable. This, to him, was the biggest mystery of all.

  It was after midnight and Petra had already given him a goodnight kiss, knowing that it would be pointless to try and persuade him to put it off until tomorrow.

  He analysed the face of the first victim. From in front, in profile, from above, from below. He isolated the part that had borne the brunt of the blows, saved everything in the computer's memory, and went on to the second, then the third and finally the fourth. He carried out the same checks on all of them, saving characteristics, peculiarities and anomalies in the memory.

  To no avail. These were four different faces, as different as the faces of four individuals chosen at random could be, each with its own character, which had nothing to do with any of the others. The only thing they had in common was the large number of blows inflicted on them. Far too many, like an exercise book scrawled over by an angry child.

  He found a way to put all four faces together in the same frame, two on top and two on the bottom, and spent a long time studying them.

  They didn't seem to be saying anything to him, and yet he had the feeling that they wanted to speak to him, that they were screaming a message he could not catch.

  Unless it was his own desire to find something, anything, that was driving him to imagine things that weren't there.

  Disheartened by this thought, he thought of switching off the computer and going to bed.

  Instead, he lit a cigar and decided to play with the images a little. He put up Lupi's face again, filling the screen, and subjected it to a series of special effects: changing the colour, increasing the grain, going back and increasing the contrast, and so on. He had the feeling that he was getting closer, but he didn't know to what.

  He highlighted the cuts, and isolated them.

  And then he saw it.

  Vague, rough, and hidden as it was, now that he saw it, it appeared very clear.

  While almost all the cuts seemed to be scattered randomly, there were four of them, slightly deeper and more precise than the others, that were arranged in a more regular way. One long, vertical cut and three shorter, horizontal ones, at right angles to the long cut, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom.

  Taken by themselves, away from the network of other cuts, they formed the letter 'E'.

  Ferrara shivered.

  He saved the image and went on to Micali's face.

  Subjected to the same treatment, it eventually yielded a clear letter 'F'.

  It was Bianchi's turn. This one was more difficult, but in the end Ferrara managed to locate a tiny 'r', and another almost identical one on Biagini's face.

  Four letters. Following the order in which the murders had been committed: 'F', 'E', 'R', 'R' . . .

  Ferrara felt drained, like someone who finally manages to solve a theorem after long research. There was no doubt in his mind, and he was sure the Prosecutor's Department would be convinced, too.

  He felt a shudder go through him. Those four letters could mean many things, but one was the most likely: the killer was writing his, Ferrara's, name on his victims' faces.

  'Ferrara' has seven letters. Seven like the roses in the Bianchi murder. Four had been used up, and now here they were, in front of him.

  Seven letters, he thought. And then, immediately: The last will be the first.

  'Of course!'
he exclaimed, so loudly he might have woken Petra if she had not been such a sound sleeper.

  He and Massimo had been trying to find a solution to the puzzle the killer had set them, a solution connected with the number of messages. But there was another explanation they hadn't even thought of. The last letter of his name was, inescapably, the first letter of the alphabet!

  That was it: the last letter had a very special meaning for the killer, since it was the one reserved for Ferrara.

  The 'a' was the signature he would leave on his face.

  Ferrara switched off the computer, put out his cigar, and turned out the lights.

  He slipped into bed, careful not to wake Petra. Her calm, regular breathing would be his companion for a long time that night. He knew he wouldn't sleep. This was a night for settling accounts. With himself.

  He wasn't afraid of the threat. What unsettled him was the deep hatred the man - or woman — who was carving his name in the victims' flesh must feel towards him. Why him? Did the killer have a grudge against Ferrara as a policeman, a representative of authority, or against Ferrara the man, whose life was no more devoid of faults than any other man's? What skeleton in the cupboard needed to be brought out into the light of day, what ghost from the past was demanding vengeance? If this really was a serial killer, a maniac who killed at random and challenged the forces of law and order, then the theory that the killer had a grudge against him as a policeman was the right one, and he could sleep almost soundly. But he didn't believe that.

  An investigation, he knew, can force you to look inside yourself. Because, ultimately, every investigation brings you face to face with another human being, and when there's a true conflict between two human beings it's impossible not to put yourself totally on the line if you want to win.

  Confronted with his own name written by his enemy, Ferrara knew that this was one of the truest and deepest conflicts he had ever known, one that concerned him more intimately than he had suspected until that moment.

  His last thought before falling asleep was that he had forgotten to buy flowers for Petra. He hadn't even wished her a happy day, and he considered such neglect unforgivable. He added it to the long list of his doubts and torments. He would spend long hours drawing up that list, surrounded by the silence of the night.

  10

  Last Saturday's article, the English teacher wrote on the blackboard.

  'Today’ she announced, 'we're going to talk about the Saxon genitive.'

  Cinzia was following the lesson distractedly. Every now and again she threw a glance at the brunette in the denim miniskirt sitting two desks in front of her, and fantasised. She kept wondering if she ought to forget Valentina and rebuild her life.

  The girl's name was Alice and she was a secretary in a haulage firm. She was twenty-six, a bright and breezy character with none of the baggage which made Valentina's life so complicated. She wasn't married, or engaged. They had chatted amiably a couple of times.

  'Before you leave,' the teacher said at the end of the lesson, 'I want each of you to take a photocopy of the New York Times article from the pile here on my desk. Read it for homework and we'll talk about it during the next lesson.'

  They got in line and Cinzia found herself next to Alice.

  'Hi,' the girl said, smiling.

  'Hi,' she replied.

  Alice looked at her watch. 'Did you come on your moped?' she asked as they took the copies.

  'Yes,' Cinzia said, glancing at the article. 'Damn it!' She had seen Mike Ross's name at the bottom.

  'What's the matter?' Alice asked in surprise, looking at the article to see what Cinzia was upset about.

  'It's nothing,' Cinzia said, putting it away irritably.

  'Listen,' Alice said beseechingly. 'I need to get to the Piazza Martiri and I'm late. You couldn't give me a lift, could you?'

  'Sorry, I don't have an extra helmet,' Cinzia said. She was in a bad mood, and had no desire to go the long way round just for Alice. She was thinking about Valentina.

  'It's all right, I have one. A friend gave me a lift here on his motorbike and he left it with me - he didn't want to take it back with him.'

  Damn!

  Alice got on behind Cinzia. Cinzia was aware of Alice's long legs wrapped around hers, her breasts pressed against her back, her arms squeezing her waist.

  She felt nothing.

  When they arrived, Alice looked at her watch again as she got off and asked Cinzia if she'd like to go to a bar for an aperitif. 'I still have a bit of time left, you went so fast. How about it?'

  Was there something suggestive in her voice and her smile, or was that just in Cinzia's mind?

  Cinzia felt a vague sense of guilt and a sudden dismay at the thought that someone could take Valentina's place. All at once, Alice seemed ordinary, insignificant.

  'No, thanks, I really have to go,' she said, accelerating away.

  'Pity. Another time, maybe?'

  But Cinzia did not hear her. Her eyes were damp, but not because of the wind. She kept repeating Valentina's name under her breath.

  *

  Whether due to neglect by the authorities, or a deliberate policy on the part of the monks, the road which wound tortuously through the Casentine Forest for about nine and a half miles to the abbey of San Benedetto in Bosco was just a dirt road - in fact, little more than a cart track. Apart from a few farmers who sometimes used it, where it came close to the main road, to lead their flocks to pasture and helped periodically to free it from brambles and snow, few people made use of it.

  The abbey was situated to the north-east of Camaldoli, in an area between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna full of churches, hermitages and monasteries. It was built near a tributary of the Arno in 1386 on the orders of Ricci di Cambio, a Florentine banker rich enough to lend money to both the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States.

  The design complied strictly with the canons of Cistercian architecture, with a perimeter wall surrounding all the buildings, the kitchen gardens, and the grounds. To the east of the cloister the chorister monks were housed, and to the west lived the lay brothers. The two residences preserved the separation between the two groups, but they nevertheless came together to collaborate in the running of the abbey.

  The church was on the north side of the cloister, protecting the rest of the complex from the north winds and allowing light to reach the other buildings. Near the porter's lodge, within the perimeter wall, were the guest quarters, consisting of a large refectory and a dormitory.

  Until a few years earlier, the abbey complex had been used as a college, attended both by young men of the Florentine aristocracy destined for important posts in the public and private sectors, and by orphans from various parts of Italy being groomed for ecclesiastical careers. But then the abbey had gradually cut itself off from the world, reverting to its original vocation - helped by its unusual geographical position - and increasingly assuming the character of a hermitage.

  That day in March, a van was travelling along the dirt road, driven by a monk. There had been a lot of snow that year, and patches of it still clung to vast areas of the forest.

  The van jolted over the stony surface, rising and falling precipitately as the road rose and fell, but the monk didn't seem to mind too much and was whistling cheerfully.

  When, after about twenty minutes of this arduous journey, the van stopped at last in front of the porter's lodge, the monk got out and went to open the rear door.

  'I told you it'd be a bumpy ride, didn't I?' he laughed.

  Numb with cold and almost bent double, Don Sergio emerged from the back of the van. He was no longer wearing his cassock, but instead was draped in the habit of the Benedictines, just like the monk who had driven him. 'We're born to suffer,' he said.

  He picked up the bag containing his few belongings and walked towards the porter's lodge. The van drove away.

  'Welcome back, brother,' the porter greeted him. 'The prior is expecting you in the chapter room.'

  Don S
ergio knew the way. He went along the cloister until just before the church and knocked at a door.

  'Come in.'

  The large, austere chapter room was exactly as he remembered it: the bare stone walls, adorned with nothing but a single large wooden crucifix, the arched windows placed close to the ceiling. Abbot Anselmo was sitting halfway along the east wall. He was alone, the stone seats to his right and left empty. He was a short, thin man, and he seemed lost in all that space, but Sergio Rotondi knew that he could dominate it with his energy.

  'It really is true that the ways of the Lord are infinite, brother,' he said when Sergi had come closer. 'Who would ever have imagined that we would see you again?' 'How are you?' Don Sergio asked.

  'As you see me. Healthy, and happy that I'm still able to serve the Lord.'

  'I'm pleased to hear that. Is everything ready?' 'Just as His Eminence arranged.' 'Thank you.'

  'Come, I'll show you to your cell.'

  Valentina had phoned Mike from the train, but couldn't get through to his mobile. She had then tried his home number, but had only managed to speak to Nenita who had answered all her questions with the words 'No home'. At the station she had taken a taxi.

  'He's gone,' Nenita had tried to explain when she finally got to the house. Airport, New York.'

  Gone. Just like that, without saying a word.

  'When's he coming back?'

  'Sorry? No understand.'

  'Back! When Mr Ross come back?'

  The woman shrugged. 'Don't know. Didn't say'

  A week had passed, and she still had not heard from him. The days went by slowly and idly. Sometimes, in the evenings, she would get in her Panda and go down into the city to look at the shops, buy some new clothes, and check out the restaurants where she'd have liked to have dinner but wouldn't because she hated the idea of eating alone. The nights were the worst, because every now and again she would think she could hear sounds on the floor below and would cover her head with her pillow in fright, trying to blot them out.