The Dark Heart of Florence: Number 6 in series (Michele Ferrara)
Page 1
Michele Giuttari was born in 1950 in the province of Messina. He was head of the Florence Police Force from 1995 to 2003, where he was responsible for reopening the Monster of Florence case and jailing several key Mafia figures. He is now a special adviser to the interior minister in Rome, with a remit to monitor Mafia activity.
Also by Michele Giuttari
A Florentine Death
A Death in Tuscany
Death of a Mafia Don
A Death in Calabria
The Black Rose of Florence
COPYRIGHT
Published by Little, Brown
978-1-4055-2198-7
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Michele Giuttari 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Translation copyright © Howard Curtis and Isabelle Kaufeler 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
LITTLE, BROWN
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
The Dark Heart of Florence
Table of Contents
About the Author
Also by Michele Giuttari
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE: The Last Hours
PART ONE: A Long Night
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
PART TWO: In The Dark
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
PART THREE: Hunting For Clues
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
PART FOUR: Further Mysteries
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
PART FIVE: A Curious Disappearance
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
PART SIX: A Curious Fire
70
71
72
73
74
PART SEVEN: Turning Points
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
To Christa
The measure of love is to love without measure.
Saint Augustine
PROLOGUE
The Last Hours
July 2004
These days even the bed annoyed her.
It seemed narrower and narrower. And she hated the mattress: misshapen, worn flat, covered in stains. It was filthy. She couldn’t stand it any more. Just as she couldn’t stand the food. She hated that, too. It was so awful, and it often made her feel sick.
She hated everything.
She lay on her back, wearing nothing but white knickers, her hands down by her sides, her eyes closed. Every now and then she would open them and glance distractedly at the small TV screen on the wall, her mind filled with fantasies about the coming hours.
Not much longer, she kept telling herself, and then she’d never have to see this shithole ever again.
Suddenly a voice from the TV caught her attention and her big dark eyes focused on the face of a blonde presenter, a face that had probably undergone countless rounds of plastic surgery.
Shit, were they going over all that again?
The programme was reconstructing the crime that had brought her to this damned prison fourteen years earlier, when she was only sixteen. A teenager full of life and dreams, like any other girl her age. She was a grown woman now, and she was going to make up for lost time.
Why didn’t they mind their own fucking business? Why didn’t they talk about the deaths in Iraq? The torture of civilians? World hunger? Dying children? Rape and violence against women? No, they had nothing better to do than rehash these old stories.
She watched the programme through to the end, and the final question they asked sent a wave of anger through her: ‘Can we really be sure that she’s no longer dangerous?’
Furiously, she pressed the OFF button on the remote. If she could have, she’d have thrown the TV set out of the window. She closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands and took a series of deep breaths. Then she got up and put on the usual bright red cotton overalls. She brushed her jet-black hair and tied it in a ponytail.
‘It’s time for your phone call,’ the guard said, stopping outside the door and looking in at her through the spyhole. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, then.’ The guard put the key in the lock and turned it several times, then motioned to her to follow her along the corridor. As they walked, they were hit by a strong whiff of garlic: someone must be cooking. It was always the same in this wing, at any hour of the day.
‘So, my girl, off tomorrow, are you?’ came a woman’s voice she recognised, shouting raucously. ‘What are you going to do next?’
The woman sounded as if she’d only just woken up: the same woman who usually stuck her nose into other people’s business, who hadn’t taken kindly to the news that, thanks to advantages not available to the other inmates, she was being released.
‘Bet you’re counting the hours, eh?’ the woman continued.
‘Mind your own fucking business,’ she replied, irritably, and walked faster, though not fast enough to avoid hearing the last few words: ‘You’re going to have it hard outside, sweetheart, take it from someone who knows life better than you do.’
She spun round and stared at the woman; the face, trapped behind the iron bars, seemed deformed. ‘Fuck off, you bitter old witch – don’t you dare pass judgement on me and smile with the few rotten teeth you have left!’
‘That’s enough!’ the guard yelled, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her away. ‘Let’s get a move on! As for you,’ she added, turning back to the woman in the cell, ‘just shut it. You’re always poking your nose in where it’s not wanted.’
The corridor fell silent except for the echo of their
footsteps.
They finally reached the telephone attached to the wall. She dialled the number while the guard moved about six feet away, although still keeping her in view. She knew the number off by heart. She had been given it during their last session the previous week.
The phone was answered on the first ring. ‘It’s me,’ she said, and felt an immediate sense of wellbeing. The anger had suddenly disappeared. She looked up at the ceiling. The paintwork, peeling in places, reminded her of the old villa where she had spent her childhood. A whole lot of images and sounds flashed through her mind, things she had never forgotten: the city’s chaotic traffic, the deafening noise of the discos, the excited voices of young people in the squares.
‘I’ve been waiting for your phone call, darling,’ the voice at the other end said.
‘I’ll be out of here tomorrow. You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’
‘Of course not! Call me as soon as you get out.’
‘OK. I can’t wait to see you. Until tomorrow, then. Love you.’
‘Me too.’
She hung up and walked back to her cell, barely aware of the guard, who never took her eyes off her for a moment. Her heart was beating ever faster with the thrill of freedom. She could almost smell it. She had dreamed of it and wanted it for so long, it no longer scared her. In the morning a new life would be waiting for her. In the morning she would leave the past behind, a past she wanted to erase completely, to bury.
And then you can all fuck off! she said in her mind to the short, plump guard, to that inmate who couldn’t mind her own bloody business, to the others who had either shunned her or tormented her, to the smell of garlic in her nostrils, and to the boredom, which only someone who had been in prison could understand.
Tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll be a free woman!
PART ONE
A LONG NIGHT
1
Dead silence.
A man dressed completely in black was sitting behind the big, solid desk.
In the last few hours, he had gone over and over his carefully worked-out plan until it was burnt into his mind. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake. The fateful moment was drawing near. Only a few minutes now, at most a few hours. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance, which was why he was weighing up all the things that could possibly go wrong.
All at once he took his hands away from his temples and rubbed his eyes. Maybe it was the light from the candelabra bothering him. He took a deep breath.
Abruptly, he turned his armchair towards the wall behind him and looked at the brocade curtains covering the windows, on which the light in the room seemed to throw unsettling shadows, then at the big oil painting hanging just behind the desk.
It was a portrait of a man with a thick grey beard, wearing a severe uniform and a long dark cloak over his shoulders. It had struck him immediately as soon as he had entered the room: the man seemed to be staring at the spectator, the eyes so piercing that they seemed alive. The longer he looked at the painting, the more the hate boiled up in him. He wanted to tear the man’s heart from his chest, erase all trace of him from the face of the earth for ever.
After a moment or two, he looked again at the curtains then turned and folded his hands on the desk.
Just then, the silence was broken by the creaking of the front door, a sound that was like heavenly music to his ears. He turned to the half-closed door of the room and listened. Now he could hear footsteps in the corridor. Someone was coming closer. He quickly glanced at his watch: the fluorescent hands showed 11.47.
He was really close now.
How he despised him!
After a few moments the door opened and an old man, impeccably dressed in a dark blue lightweight suit with a carefully knotted matching tie and shiny black shoes, appeared in the doorway. He was extremely thin, with a pale face and a slim moustache. When he saw the stranger, he froze, and a shudder went through him.
How could it be? he wondered. How could it possibly be him? But those hard, ice-cold eyes were unmistakable.
Calmly, the man in black raised his right arm. The old man saw the barrel of the gun pointing straight at him, and understood.
At last! the man in black said to himself.
The hour had come: his journey was about to begin. His adventure. The real thing, just as he had imagined it.
The first piece of the jigsaw.
It was the night of Saturday 28 August 2004. A night that would be long remembered. The Florence police would come to call it a night of horror, the start of a new nightmare.
A sudden cry rang out.
Just one.
‘Go to hell!’ the man in black whispered.
His finger squeezed the trigger.
2
That was just the beginning.
The man in black was outside now, beneath a starry sky, lit by a weak crescent moon. Around him, quiet and calm. All he could hear were the sounds of the night, the hum of insects, that buzz that disappeared during the day. The hill was deserted. There was nobody and nothing in sight, not even the headlights of a car.
It was so peaceful here.
He knew the place very well. Here and there he could see a few weak lights outside sleeping villas and cottages. Cautiously, keeping a safe distance, he passed a few of them, breathing in the scent of wild herbs. At the end of a narrow path he came to a security fence. It was about eight feet high, but there was no barbed wire at the top. He stretched his arms up as high as they would go and grasped the netting, at the same time bracing his feet against one of the posts. He put his left arm over, then the right, then one foot after the other, and in the blink of an eye he was on the other side. He landed on a lawn.
Then, camouflaged by the darkness, he walked along the edge of the road. For a while he was accompanied by the song of an owl. From time to time he paused amid the undergrowth to catch his breath. He calculated that the first glimmer of dawn would soon appear on the horizon; the outlines of the hills would become ever sharper, the countryside ever greener. Coming to a small clearing among the trees, he stopped for longer.