The Disappearance of Signora Giulia (7 page)

The magistrate prepared to hear a full confession. But first he waited for the court clerk to take down all the accused’s personal details as required by the State. The official was about to write ‘married with issue’ when Esengrini firmly corrected him. ‘Widower’, he said, his arched brows underscoring the word.

When the court clerk had finished writing the usual phrase, ‘The accused, charged with crimes as specified in the warrant for arrest, responds’, the prosecutor said courteously: ‘You dictate it, Esengrini.’

Esengrini agreed with a nod and began to dictate.

‘I deny having committed the first crime charged against me at A, of having somehow taken part, or of having caused others to commit it. I deny having committed the crime listed in the second charge at B.’

He then asked the clerk for a pen to sign with.

‘Just a minute!’ the magistrate exclaimed. ‘What do you mean, you deny it?’

‘I deny it.’

‘Then I have some questions to put to you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘How do you explain the fact that the cadaver’s been in your villa for three years?’

‘I’m not explaining anything,’ the detainee concluded. ‘For the time being it’s not up to me to explain. It’s up to you to demonstrate that I killed my wife and that it was my shadow armed with the club. If I have to, I will appeal during the course of the inquiry. It’s only now that I’ve learnt that there was an attempted murder in the park the other night. Now I
understand why Sciancalepre arrived at my house at one in the morning with such a face. I must reflect, sir; I’ve got to collect my thoughts. For the moment I can tell you only that I am innocent.’

In truth, the prosecution still lacked evidence. Sciancalepre’s reconstruction was based on nothing but supposition – it was reasonably logical, but that wasn’t proof. The only fruit of the painstaking search of the lawyer’s home and office for the jewellery was the confiscated club. Two safe-deposit boxes at the bank had been inspected with similar results: nothing.

Sciancalepre worked on an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the morning of the crime, and Esengrini was questioned for a second time. He explained that he had come back to the house at noon and found it in the same state as that in which the Commissario had found it two hours later. Teresa confirmed that she had been sent away from the house at nine by Signora Giulia; that she’d come back at eleven and had heard the signora in her room. She’d gone away for sure at eleven-thirty and returned only at two, when the signora was no longer there. But the door had been closed.

While the investigators scoured Rome for Luciano Barsanti, Esengrini put in a request for his own confrontation with Barsanti. The appeal was granted, and a few days after their face-to-face, he was able to set down a few facts:

1. that Barsanti had received the famous letter exactly four days before the crime;
   
2. that Barsanti did not remember having shredded or destroyed it, but in any case he hadn’t saved it and couldn’t put his hand on it;
   
3. that Barsanti had sold his furniture from the flat on viale Premuda to a shopkeeper in via Fiori Chiari, four or five days after receiving the letter;
   
4. that he’d moved to Rome the next day;
   
5. that in one of his first letters to Signora Giulia he had told her about having at last found an apartment at viale Premuda, n. XY;
   
6. that he had signed some of his letters with his Christian name, and others with both Christian name and surname.
   

After the meeting Esengrini went back to his cell, asked for paper, pen and ink, and made another appeal to the authorities. He requested an inspection of his office and a search for the Molinari file: S.I.R.C.E. In the folder a sealed yellow
envelope would be found with ‘Molinari Accounts: supporting documentation’ written on it. The envelope was to be opened by the investigators, who would find in it conclusive proof in the form of the famous letter received by Barsanti.

The magistrate couldn’t understand where Esengrini was going with this or how the letter had come into his possession. He had the feeling that he was playing a game of chess with the ablest of adversaries, to whose moves he had to submit from the moment he failed to prevent them.

He went to the lawyer’s office, found the file and the large yellow envelope inside it, and opened it seated at Esengrini’s desk. Inside, he discovered two letters in their envelopes, one of them typewritten on the Esengrini office letterhead with the old address in via Lamberti and addressed to Luciano Barsanti, viale Premuda, n. XY. He read:

It was signed by Esengrini.

The magistrate was stymied. How could the letter have come into Esengrini’s hands? He found the explanation in
the other letter. It was in an envelope with the letterhead of another lawyer, Attilio Panelli of Milan, via Marsiglia, n. XX, and was worded precisely as follows:

So, the magistrate reasoned, Barsanti had forgotten the letter at the back of a drawer. The furniture, sold by the rag-and-bone man of via Fiori Chiari, had ended up at auction and the letter, falling into the hands of the lawyer Panelli had, with the delicacy of a colleague, been returned to sender.

But of what interest was it to Esengrini to produce it now? Hadn’t he always denied having written it? The letter appeared to have been sent from M—— on a Saturday, and to have arrived in Milan on the following Monday. Three days later, on Thursday, Signora Giulia had disappeared. Barsanti’s statement regarding his encounter with the lawyer corresponded with the truth.

An idea began to take shape in the magistrate’s mind: that Esengrini was tightening the grip around Barsanti. At any rate, he’d set things up for an arrest.

While the young man, arrested in Rome, was travelling under escort towards the prison in M——, Esengrini, informed of the discovery of the yellow envelope, made another surprising request. It was his method when defending and the public prosecutor had seen it in action at other times. Begrudgingly, he had to pass the proceedings to the examining judge, presenting the case as rather complex and, as such, requesting a formal investigation.

The new petition to the examining judge demanded the seizure of Esengrini’s diary for 1955, saved in the office archives. The judge looked at the page for the Saturday when the letter to Barsanti was sent. There he found the following annotations:

Envisioning further requests from Esengrini, and curious to see him, the examining judge went to visit him in prison.

‘Sir,’ he heard Esengrini say, ‘perhaps you understand where I’m going with this; I therefore advise the utmost secrecy. Go ahead looking into things on your own. But we’re at a crucial point: just one word is all that’s needed to destroy the definitive proof. Don’t even speak with a colleague; don’t let a single
soul look at the proceedings. My liberty is at stake. The guilty man is nearby, with eyes and ears open. We need to convince him that by this point, I’m done for…

‘I’ve been studying the documents I’m putting in the file for you for years and they have revealed the truth to me. Looking through them, I’ve identified the killer, reconstructed his actions and finally, five months ago, I discovered the corpse of my wife in the cistern. (This revelation is just for you.) When I had to leave the house where I’d spent twenty-one years with my wife, I felt I was in danger, but I defied that danger. I had, and I have, a careful adversary, as able as I but more determined, capable of killing again to save himself. An adversary who’s aware of my painstaking work to reconstruct the truth.’

‘But who is he?’ asked the judge. ‘It’s time to talk, Esengrini. You don’t trust the law!’

‘Sir, if I told you that I trusted the law I’d be lying. I trust you, I trust in your intelligence, your utter rectitude, and that of all magistrates. But I don’t trust the law. Justice is a machine with neither heart nor intelligence: it acts as instructed. And the instruction is determined by the evidence. We must feed it firm evidence, documents, reliable witness statements. Then it will strike accurately. Heaven help us if we feed it with opinions! Or worse, if we stuff it with incomplete or vague evidence…’

‘So then, what’s the next move?’

‘I would ask you to seal off my office, including the internal space and the windows, and put an officer there to sleep nights. Then I’d ask you to get hold of the file containing the proceedings against Alfredo Marchionato: drawer 468/62 – it’s archived in the magistrates’ court. It concerns an action for libel, which we won. I was the defender. In the trial there’s a request from
me for provisional liberty. I drew it up that Saturday, as you saw in my diary.’

The judge looked into the Marchionato trial and found the request for provisional liberty, typewritten and signed by the lawyer. He added everything to the records.

Meanwhile the details of the investigation were coming in to him. The lawyer Panelli confirmed having found the letter in the drawer of the furniture at auction. The same bailiff remembered the details.

The results of the autopsy also came through. The forensic pathologist had immediately stated that a three-year-old cadaver would reveal nothing, and in fact his report left the cause of death as undetermined. It could have been strangulation or drowning. The internal cavities were full of sand, mould and small algae that had passed through the oral cavity during the body’s submersion, when rainfall had raised the level of the water in the cistern. There were no broken bones in the cervical region. The carotid cartilage had been destroyed by decomposition and didn’t provide any evidence. Signs of breakage could only have been preserved in the event of a natural mummification. But the effects of the water and the airless environment had subjected the body of Signora Giulia to a type of partial saponification. The facial planes were partially preserved, and thanks to their having become waxy it had been possible to identify the dead woman’s face as soon as she was discovered, an identification confirmed by the wedding ring. The cause of death had to be considered violent. Whoever had hidden that body – dead or alive – down in the cistern was the killer or his accomplice.

While the magistrate gathered the results, Sciancalepre came forward with some news. The grocer Lucchini had spontaneously
presented himself to the Commissario in order to state that he’d met Esengrini fifteen days before his arrest in via Lamberti, at one-thirty in the morning in the neighbourhood of the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti. The grocer, returning home from his shop after having finished an inventory of his goods, bumped into the lawyer. The fact made an impression on him since at M—— everyone knew that relations between the lawyer and his daughter were not good. So when he heard about the arrest and the charge, he felt it his duty to come in. He didn’t mention that he was doing it gladly, since four years before Esengrini had upheld the plaintiff against him in a trial for commercial fraud and he’d been convicted. Apart from these proceedings, the incident could have some bearing on the murder of Signora Giulia; or rather, the wife-killing, as the papers called it, so the grocer had done his duty.

The judge added Lucchini’s deposition to the record and took the opportunity to speak to Esengrini about other details. Esengrini admitted without hesitation having met the grocer that night; and so as not to tantalize him too much confided another piece of the truth to him.

‘At this stage, I must tell you, sir, that my means of entry to the park wasn’t the gate of the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti, but the one adjacent to the palazzo Sormani, to which I’d obtained the key. From the courtyard of the palazzo Sormani, I went through to the park, then climbed over the wall towards the back. I went in after midnight, when everyone in the palazzo was in bed. No one could see me go in. There’s a bend in the road there, and before entering I’d stand listening in order to be certain that there were no night-owls around. However, there was someone who saw me…’

‘Lucchini,’ the judge offered timidly.

‘Lucchini,’ the lawyer confirmed, ‘and not only Lucchini. But this is part of another revelation that I’ll make in a few days. Now I’d ask you to question all the people who came to my office that Saturday morning: the lawyer Berrini, Signor Egidio Rossinelli, his wife and sister-in-law, and the surveyor Chiodetti. That morning in my office must be reconstructed.’

It was no simple feat. The lawyer, Berrini, didn’t remember anything any more, but he didn’t rule it out: he had discussed the Bassetti file with Esengrini. He went to see his colleague frequently as their offices were so close together, and he couldn’t be precise.

The Rossinelli were more precise. In their entire lives they had fought only the one lawsuit, against some neighbours – the Scardìas, southerners – for damage and unlawful entry. A backyard squabble. That morning – and the date was confirmed by the lodging of the complaint – they’d gone to Esengrini’s office to lay out the facts and request him to act on their behalf. It wasn’t just Egidio Rossinelli; his wife and sister-in-law also remembered having been there for nearly an hour and having helped draft the complaint, which Esengrini dictated to the typist.

Egidio recalled that as he was going into the office, Berrini was coming out of it. One of those ideal witnesses who end up remembering too much, he recalled that Demetrio was in the office as well – indeed that it had been Demetrio who’d advised him to lodge the suit the day before. He then found in the recesses of his prodigious memory that there had also
been a very elegant man in the office that Saturday morning – something no one else remembered.

The surveyor Chiodetti remembered having provided Esengrini with an estimate for a property that day, and he found the evidence in his diary. Yet another one with a good memory, he managed to recall that the lawyer had been out of his office; he’d had to wait for him.

It wasn’t difficult for the intelligent magistrate to finalize the deposition by doing a little sleuthing: Esengrini had presented the Rossinelli suit in person in court that Saturday. So the lawyer had drafted the lawsuit, gone with his clients to court to present it and returned to his office, where he’d found Chiodetti waiting for him.

With these final witness examinations and his files on the investigation, the magistrate went to the prison in M—— to wring the final revelations from Esengrini.

Esengrini was satisfied and said to him in a very friendly manner: ‘I told you I have no faith in the law; in abstract justice, that is. And you – without taking offence, you had faith in me, the accused. If only it were always like this!’

The magistrate accepted the compliment. But then he sat down and told Esengrini it was time to come clean.

‘So it is,’ Esengrini accepted. ‘I’ll tell you everything, apart from the name of the killer. Prepare to have a bit more patience and another measure of faith in the accused. You should know that even before our diligent Sciancalepre, I was convinced my wife couldn’t have fled, but had been killed. I was certain of it after Sciancalepre’s famous trip to Rome, when he learnt about the letter Barsanti had received, which I was sure I’d never written.

‘It was the killer who wrote that letter. But only I could think so; as far as everyone else was concerned, the letter was written by me. So I would have had to be aware of the relationship between my wife and Barsanti, and hence the jealousy, the threats, the midday skirmish with my wife that Thursday, the murder, the faked escape. I’ve asked myself a thousand times why you didn’t arrest me! The logical proof was nearly there… I wanted to deny having written the letter! I repeat: I wondered how you could close the file.’