The Deliverance of Evil (34 page)
A burst of gunfire sounded from inside. Then he saw the silhouette of Adrian, who run off behind the old farmhouse, firing like crazy.
Balistreri came out into the open, taking advantage of the element of surprise, but his hand was moving in slow motion, a last show of resistance before he squeezed a trigger after so many years. Coppola came out from behind the tree, took two quick side steps and, holding his Beretta in two hands, opened fire as they had taught him at the police academy. Adrian fell with his arms open as Coppola quickly took shelter again.
Giorgi came running and shooting at Coppola from the other side of the building, while Mircea covered him from inside.
Balistreri felt his own hand stiffen on the trigger while Coppola shouted at him to take cover. He stood rooted to the spot in a daze, watching Coppola come out into the open. He fired a single shot that struck Giorgi in the head.
“Captain, get behind the tree!” Coppola shouted at him. Balistreri shook his head and started to run. He was almost there when Mircea’s bullet hit him in his left side, making him twist in a half-pirouette. As he limped forward, he saw Greg coming toward him under Mircea’s covering fire.
Who would have thought you’d die like this, petrified with fear?
Coppola went down on one knee and rolled toward the oak tree, firing like crazy. Greg fell face up in the mud, shot through the heart.
Your son will be so impressed. You’ll never have to wear lifts in your shoes again.
Coppola quickly got up to return to safety. The bullet hit him between the shoulders. He fell forward and began to crawl toward the oak tree.
Balistreri swung toward the spot where he thought the shot had come from. As he hesitated, another bullet from Mircea in the farmhouse hit him below his right knee. The tree was only two yards away, but he would never get there with his leg broken and his side split open. In that moment, he met Colajacono’s eyes.
“Help him,” he ordered, pointing to Coppola lying on his back on the ground. Despite being handcuffed, Colajacono dragged Coppola behind the tree as if he weighed nothing. Then he came out into the open again and with more effort dragged Balistreri behind the tree, too. Oddly, the shooting had stopped.
Coppola’s wide-open eyes were staring at him and a stream of blood was trickling from his mouth. “You’re a big man, Coppola. Ciro will be proud of you,” Balistreri told him. Coppola nodded in agreement, then closed his eyes.
Balistreri was losing a lot of blood. He knew he was going to faint at any moment. He tried not to lose consciousness and to control the savage hatred coursing through his veins.
Now I’m going to kill these fucking animals. Colajacono’s right. We need to clear this scum out of Italy.
Suddenly, he was not afraid. His mind was clear, conscious that there was only one thing he could do.
“Haul me up and hold me by the waist, without blocking my arms,” he said to Colajacono, who nodded in a daze.
The deputy captain held Balistreri upright while he leaned all of his weight on his left foot. Despite the handcuffs, Colajacono’s strong arms managed to keep him balanced.
He steadied himself. He knew he had only one shot. With Mircea hidden and himself in the condition he was in, he would have no more than one chance. He saw the flickering light in the farmhouse and Mircea’s shadow falling across the wall in the shelter of the corner next to the window. He weighed the rock, calculating the distance: twenty or twenty-five feet.
He needed a loud thud. Strength in the right hand, accuracy with the left. As a boy in Africa he had won shooting contests firing from his left hand because with his right there was no question, it wasn’t even fun.
Picture the target your mother gave you as a present when you were seven. The bear’s head appeared only for a moment in the little window. And in that moment you went pow! You only know how to shoot and punch, Michele. Just like your father used to say.
The pain was getting worse; the bleeding wouldn’t stop. He felt his head spinning and knew it was now or never. He gripped the Beretta in his left hand. He pushed forward and let fly, as he did when he was a boy to get the crows out of the eucalyptus tree. The rock drew a perfect arc in the air and hit the farmhouse wall right next to Mircea’s head. He jumped forward in surprise. The bullet went straight through his eye. Balistreri saw Mircea’s shadow totter and fall.
Colajacono could no longer hold him up. Balistreri collapsed on the ground, and in the last moments before losing consciousness he thought he saw a shadow come out of the woods and slowly approach him. His eyelids were open just a slit. Through that slit he could see Colajacono’s boots in the sloppy mud. He wasn’t sure if it was real or a dream. The deputy captain’s voice came to him from a thousand miles away.
“Get these fucking handcuffs off me.”
The other voice was a whisper. “Don’t worry, officer, it’s coming now.”
“What are you talking about? What’s coming now?” Colajacono hissed.
The whisper grew fainter as Balistreri lost consciousness. “Your death.”
Balistreri fainted before he could hear the shot being fired.
T
HE MORNING PAPERS WERE
published too early to cover the killings, but they were full of news of the city council’s decision not to move Casilino 900. There was a short article by Linda Nardi with the headline
IF
A
POLICEMAN
DIES
. It was a strange coincidence that few seemed to notice.
But the unhappy coincidence of the postponement of moving the travelers’ camp and the shootings in which three brave policemen—Colajacono, Tatò, and Coppola—met their deaths, and the head of the special team, Michele Balistreri, was gravely wounded put the mayor and his supporting majority out of the limelight. It also created more embarrassment for the Church, which had staunchly defended immigrants and their rights. Accusing voices were raised even in parliament and the Senate, which, usually silent, were now explicitly clear about the Vatican’s interference. While the Church had hoped for tolerance by conviction rather than convenience, several political groups were cynically riding the events for their own electoral ends. Someone openly floated the idea of reviewing the Concordat between the Vatican and the Italian government.
Appearing on his balcony in St. Peter’s Square for the Angelus, the pope decried the violence and put out a call for mutual understanding. When he said that he would pray for the dead and that intolerance had already been the cause of too much damage, Italians in the crowd whistled to indicate their disapproval. Italian television channels cut that moment from the footage, but CNN and the Internet broadcast it around the world.
Linda Nardi was able to see all the footage, including what was censored by Italian television. Later she heard that, after operations on his spleen and tibia, Balistreri was out of danger. At that point she bought lots of food from the supermarket and retreated to her apartment. Then she called her editor-in-chief to tell him that she would now be working from home.
At dawn she went down to the newsstand below to pick up the papers and then returned to her living room. She read all she could—picking things out, cutting out, underlining, and cataloguing. She made a sizable synthesis of everything on her computer and saved the file in a folder that already existed,
Michele Balistreri
.
She named the file “For When You’re Well.”
C
ONFINED TO BED IN
the hospital, Balistreri had time to reflect. The seriousness of his condition gave him six days to prepare himself properly for the first round of questioning.
He asked a nurse to get him a copy of the January 5 edition of Linda Nardi’s newspaper. He had seen the title of the short article
IF
A
POLICEMAN
DIES
and made his decision. Belhrouz, Coppola, Colajacono, and Tatò were dead. He didn’t want to endanger the life of anyone else, least of all Linda Nardi. And that “least of all” worried him. A woman he didn’t know had wormed her way into his thoughts against his will.
He had spent years becoming a rational adult, aware of duties, risks, and wrongdoings. This was the moment to bury the young Michele Balistreri, the adventurer who knew no fear or compromise, who was arrogant and cared only for himself. He had several deaths on his conscience other than the most recent ones. And there was no way at all he could wipe them from it. He could only try to move on, limiting the damage and asking forgiveness for his mistakes.
Truth had a price and in this case it was too high. He made a silent agreement with the Invisible Man. He would give up looking for him if the killing would stop. The manhunt was off.
The questions put to Balistreri by the public prosecutor and Pasquali were almost too easy to answer. The events had already been reconstructed and were clear. Colajacono and Tatò had their informants and had gone there to find something. They had been surprised by the four Romanians, the Lacatus cousins plus Adrian and Giorgi, the ones who had kidnapped Nadia and taken her to Vasile, who had later strangled her with the help of the other shepherd. Colajacono and Tatò had been handcuffed and killed in cold blood. The heroic and unlucky Coppola had followed Colajacono on Balistreri’s orders, and Balistreri himself had raced over there when Coppola had contacted him by phone. The questions were a mere formality, intended to confirm what they already had determined.
Neither of them asked him if he had seen anyone else in addition to the four Romanians. Besides, there appeared to be no other traces and the shots to the bodies of Coppola, Tatò, and Colajacono and the ones that had nearly killed Balistreri had all been fired from the six guns found beside the four Romanians. The public prosecutor and Pasquali complimented him on the way he had taken out Mircea. No one asked him how he had managed to save his own skin alone under those conditions.
Because the Invisible Man didn’t want to finish me off. He wanted me like that, permanently defeated.
. . . .
Linda pored over all the old newspapers she had brought home, the oldest from 1970. She knew that up to the summer of that year, Balistreri had been living in Libya, but she’d found nothing about him in that period. Then, in the fall of 1970, he showed up at the university in Rome.
A young Balistreri, looking very full of himself, appeared with groups of other equally proud young men full of conviction. Rallies about honor, loyalty, courage, the fatherland. Then the two-bladed ax, SS slogans, the Roman salute, black shirts, the wounded, police wagons, tear gas, and stones thrown inside the university and from the bridges over the Tiber. But he had never been linked directly to political crimes, atrocities, or acts of terrorism.
The Christian Democrat government disbanded the Ordine Nuovo at the end of 1973 and arrested its leaders. After 1974 there was no trace of Michele Balistreri in the newspapers or among the official records of the ministry of the interior. She could locate no home address or bank account for him during that time. Nothing.
Until June 1978—one month after Aldo Moro’s death. At that point Michele Balistreri reappeared. He finished university and graduated with a degree in philosophy. He joined the police force and passed his captain’s exam. As of 1980, he could be found in Vigna Clara, twiddling his thumbs in Rome’s quietest neighborhood.
From one perspective, she found it easy to connect today’s man to his past. Honor, loyalty, and courage were still a part of him, but they were hard to make out under the thick glue of reality. It was easy to imagine the Balistreri of 1970 with a gun in his hand, but the Balistreri of today must really have been forced to shoot at those Romanians on the hill.
She wondered if it would still be possible to lead that man back to his old nature in order to drag the evil out of hell and annihilate it.
B
ALISTRERI’S BROTHER, ALBERTO, TOGETHER
with Mastroianni, Piccolo, Corvu, and Angelo Dioguardi, had organized things so that he was never alone during visiting hours. In the middle of February they were able to convince the head nurse to allow them afternoon poker sessions in Balistreri’s room, but despite Mastroianni’s seductive powers, she would not let him smoke. They played with the window open, even though it was cold outside, so that he could sneak a few drags. No one mentioned the crimes that had been committed, ENT, or work.
Balistreri hadn’t heard from Linda Nardi, but it was as if her occasional articles were always addressed to him. Their fresh composure and irrelevance were a message. Empty articles, waiting for them to be able to talk. And on this imagined promise Balistreri built his hopes.
Take time to heal, Michele. I’ll be waiting for you.
When the doctors decided it was time for him to go home and continue with his physical therapy beyond the hospital, Balistreri felt almost lost. He had become used to the place where only muffled echoes came in from the outside world, along with the good things brought to him by his brother and friends.
The thought of going back to his apartment filled him with anxiety, as did any direct contact with the city. The hospital walls provided the ultimate cop-out. Inside them, he could do nothing. Once outside, it would be his choice alone whether or not to engage with the world and its friction.
Only one thing about leaving the hospital appealed to him, and that was that he would be able to see Linda Nardi again. His mind refused to obey: the more he told himself not to think about her, the more he came back to her. What worried him were the conversations he imagined between them and the apparent absence of physical desire. He had never felt more old.
On the morning of March 15, the date set for his discharge, he opened the windows to find a radiant day, one of those special ones that in Rome give a taste of the spring ahead. He was sitting in his armchair signing the papers for his discharge, when the nurse came in and said he had a visitor.
Linda Nardi had grown much more beautiful.
That’s because I’m seeing her for the first time with new eyes—those of a soldier coming back from war, defeated but alive.
She stood still for a moment, then held out her arms. He rose up tottering, then, leaning on his crutches, allowed himself to be embraced. It was a silent embrace, perfectly still, that emerged from somewhere far away.