The Monster of Florence (27 page)
In other words, I was to get out of Italy and not come back.
The secretary printed out a transcript. The two-and-a-half-hour interrogation had been boiled down to two pages of questions and answers, which I corrected and signed.
“May I keep this?”
“No. It is under
segreto istruttorio.
”
Very stiffly, I picked up my
International Herald Tribune
, folded it under my arm, and turned to leave.
“If you ever decide to talk, Dr. Preston, we are here.”
On rubbery legs I descended to the street and into a wintry drizzle.
W
e drove back to Florence in the pouring rain. Along the way, I called the American embassy in Rome on my cell phone. An official in the legal department explained they could do nothing for me since I had not been arrested. “Americans who get into trouble in Italy,” he said, “need to hire a lawyer. The American embassy can’t intervene in a local criminal investigation.”
“I’m not some American who did something stupid and got involved in a local criminal investigation!” I cried. “They’re harassing me because I’m a journalist. This is a freedom-of-press issue!”
That did not impress the embassy official. “Regardless of what you think, this is a local criminal matter. You’re in Italy,” he said, “not America. We can’t intervene in criminal investigations.”
“Can you at least recommend a lawyer?”
“We’re not in the business of rating Italian lawyers. We’ll send you a list of the lawyers known to the embassy.”
“Thanks.”
Above all, I had to speak to Mario. Something big was coming—my interrogation was only a shot across the bow. Even for a man as powerful as the public minister of Perugia, it was a brazen step to take into custody an American journalist and subject him to the third degree. If they were willing to do that to me, at the risk of bad publicity (which I fully intended to bring down upon their heads like a ton of bricks), what would they do to Spezi? He was the man they were really after.
I couldn’t call Spezi on my cell phone. When I got back to Florence, I arranged a meeting through borrowed cell phones and calls from phone booths. At close to midnight, Spezi, Zaccaria, and Myriam showed up at our apartment in Via Ghibellina.
Spezi, Gauloise stuck in his mouth, paced the elegant living room, trailing clouds of smoke. “I never would have thought they would take this step. Are you
sure
they charged you with perjury?”
“I’m sure. I’m a
persona indagata
.”
“Did they serve you with an
avviso di garanzia
?”
“They said they would mail it to my address in Maine.”
I related to them as much as I could remember of the interrogation. When I got to the point where Mignini accused us of planting a gun at the villa to incriminate an innocent man and to deflect suspicion from Spezi himself, Spezi stopped me.
“He said that? ‘To deflect suspicion’ from me?”
“That’s what he said.”
Spezi shook his head. “
Porca miseria
! Those two, Giuttari and Mignini, don’t just think me guilty of some journalistic shenanigans, planting a gun for a scoop. They think I was directly involved in the Monster’s murders—or at least in the murder of Narducci!”
“In a crazy way,” I said, “their fantasy fits the facts. Look at it from their point of view. For years we’ve been insisting Antonio is the Monster. Nobody’s paid any attention. So we go to the villa, we walk around, then a few days later we call the police and say Antonio hid evidence at the villa, come and get it. I hate to say it, Mario, but it’s a believable theory that we might have planted something.”
“Come now!” Spezi cried. “It’s a theory not only lacking all investigative logic, but all logic entirely! A moment’s thought would discredit it. If I was behind the murder of Narducci, to ‘deflect suspicion’ from myself, would I really enlist in my plot an ex-con I didn’t know, a policeman who had been one of the finest detectives in the Florentine mobile squad, and a famous American writer? Who could possibly think that you, Doug, would come to Italy and sneak around like a crook planting evidence for the police to find? You’re a best-selling author here already! You don’t need a scoop! And Nando, he’s president of an important security company. Why would he risk everything for a sordid scoop? It doesn’t make any sense at all!”
He paced, scattering ashes.
“Doug, you have to ask yourself: why are Giuttari and Mignini working so hard to attack us now? Is it perhaps because in just two months we’ll publish a book on this same subject, questioning their investigation? Might this be an effort to discredit our book before publication? They know what’s in the book already—they’ve read it.”
He took a turn around the room.
“The worst thing for me, Doug, is the accusation that I did this to
deflect suspicion from myself
. Suspicion of what? That I’m one of the instigators of the Narducci killing! The newspapers have all been writing the same thing, a strong indication that they have been using the same source, well informed, and certainly official. What does that make me?”
Pace, turn.
“Doug, do you realize what they really think? I’m not just an accessory or someone involved in the Narducci killing. I’m one of the
masterminds
behind the Monster killings.
They think I’m the Monster
!”
“Give me a cigarette,” I said. I didn’t normally smoke but now I needed it.
Spezi gave me a cigarette and lit another one for himself.
Myriam began to cry. Zaccaria sat on the edge of the sofa, his long hair disheveled, his once crisp suit limp and wrinkled.
“Consider this,” Spezi said. “I’m supposed to have planted the Monster’s gun at the villa to incriminate an innocent man. Where did I get the Monster’s gun, if I’m not the Monster myself?”
The ash hung in a curl from the end of his cigarette.
“Where’s the damn ashtray?”
I fetched Spezi and myself a plate from the kitchen. Spezi stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette with violence and lit another. “I’ll tell you where Mignini gets these ideas. It’s that woman from Rome, Gabriella Carlizzi, the one who said the cult of the Red Rose was behind the 9/11 attacks. Have you read her website? This is the woman the public minister of Perugia listens to!”
Spezi had gone full circle, from Monstrologer to Monster.
I left Italy the next morning. When I returned to my house in Maine, which stands on a bluff overlooking the gray Atlantic, and I listened to the rhythmic breakers on the rocks below and the seagulls wheeling above, I was so glad to be free, so happy not to be rotting in some Italian jail, that I felt the tears trickling down my face.
Count Niccolò called me the day after my return. “So, Douglas! I see you have been making trouble in Italy! Good show!”
“How did you know?”
“They say in the papers this morning that you’re now an official suspect in the Monster of Florence case.”
“It’s in the papers?”
“Everywhere.” He laughed quietly. “Don’t be concerned.”
“Niccolò, for God’s sake, they accused me of being an accessory to murder, they said I planted a gun at that villa, they’ve indicted me for making false statements and obstruction of justice! They threatened me if I ever return to Italy. And you tell me I shouldn’t be concerned?”
“My dear Douglas, anyone who is anybody in Italy is
indagato
. I offer you my congratulations on becoming a genuine Italian.” His voice lost its cynical drawl and became serious. “It is our mutual friend Spezi who should be concerned.
Very
concerned.”
I
began to make calls to the press as soon as I got home. I was terrified for Mario; he was obviously their real target. I hoped that if I could make a big enough stink in America, it might provide Spezi with some protection against an arbitrary and capricious arrest.
When Spezi had had his house searched, the American press could not have cared less about an Italian journalist who had his papers taken away. But now, because an American was the target, the press picked it up. “Trapped in His Own Thriller” ran the front-page headline in the
Boston Globe
. “Life was fine for Douglas Preston as he worked on his latest book. Then he became part of the story.” The
Washington Post
ran a piece: “Best-selling thriller author Douglas Preston entangled in probe of Tuscan serial killings.” Stories went out on the AP wire, and news items appeared on CNN and ABC News.
Back in Italy, the papers were also full of my interrogation. A headline in the
Corriere della Sera
read:
MONSTER CASE: DUEL BETWEEN PUBLIC MINISTER AND AMERICAN WRITER
Serial killings of Florence. Thriller writer indicted for perjury. His colleagues mobilize.
A report went out over ANSA, the Italian news agency: “The prosecutor’s office of Perugia interrogated the American writer Douglas Preston as a material witness, and then indicted him for perjury. Preston and Mario Spezi have written a book on the case, which will be published in April, entitled
Dolci Colline di Sangue
, which Spezi has called a kind of counterinvestigation to the official one. Two years ago, Spezi was investigated for being an accessory to the murder of Narducci, and subsequently he was accused of participating in the murder.” Other articles contained information that appeared to have been leaked from Mignini’s office, claiming that Spezi and I had tried to plant the infamous .22 Beretta—the Monster’s pistol—at the villa, in order to frame an innocent man.
But the bright light of press scrutiny and publicity, if anything, seemed to make Giuttari and Mignini more aggressive. On February 25, two days after I left Italy, the police raided Spezi’s apartment yet again. He was placed under intense police surveillance, followed whenever he left his house and secretly videotaped. His phones were tapped and he assumed his apartment had also been bugged and his e-mail was being intercepted.
In order to communicate, Spezi and I arranged for the use of various e-mail addresses and borrowed phones. Spezi managed to send an e-mail to me from an Internet café after losing his police tail. In it he proposed a system: when he sent me an e-mail from his regular account saying “
salutami a Christine
” (“say hi to Christine for me”), it meant he wanted me to call him on a borrowed telephone number the following day at a certain time.
Niccolò regularly sent me news stories about the case, and we spoke often by telephone.
On March 1, Spezi finally took his car to a neighborhood mechanic to fix the broken door and put in a new radio. The mechanic emerged from the car holding a fistful of sophisticated electronic equipment from which dangled red and black wires. It consisted of a black box the size of a cigarette package, with a piece of tape covering the LCDs indicating “On” and “Off,” wired to a second mysterious device, two inches by five, which had been connected to the old radio’s power supply wires.
“I don’t know a lot,” said the mechanic, “but this looks like a microphone and recorder to me.”
He went around and opened the hood. “And that,” he said, pointing to another black cigarette pack tucked in a corner, “must be the GPS.”
Spezi called
La Nazione
, and they sent a photographer to take pictures of the journalist holding up the electronic equipment in both hands, like a pair of prize fish.
That very day Spezi went to the prosecutor’s office in Florence and filed a legal complaint against persons unknown, seeking damages for the wrecking of his car. He presented himself to a prosecutor in Florence, a man he knew, with the complaint in hand. The man didn’t want to touch it. “This business, Dr. Spezi, is far too delicate,” he said. “Present your complaint in person to the head prosecutor.” So Spezi carried it into the office of the head prosecutor, where, after having to wait, a policeman came and took the complaint, saying the prosecutor would accept it. Spezi heard nothing more about it.
On March 15, 2006, Spezi received a call from his local carabinieri post, inviting him down to the barracks. He was received in a tiny room by an officer who seemed strangely embarrassed. “We’re giving you back your car radio,” the man explained.
Spezi was flabbergasted. “You’re . . .
admitting
you took it and wrecked my car doing it?”
“No, not us!” He fiddled nervously with his papers. “We were given the job of returning it by the prosecutor’s office of Perugia, by Judge Mignini, who gave the orders to Chief Inspector Giuttari of GIDES to return your radio.”
Spezi with difficulty tried to stifle a laugh. “That’s incredible! You mean they actually put it in an official document that they wrecked my car to steal my radio?”
The carabinieri officer shifted uncomfortably. “Sign here, please.”
“Well,” Spezi said triumphantly, “what if they broke it? I can’t possibly take it back without knowing!”
“Spezi, will you just sign, please?”
Spezi quickly filed a second complaint for damages, this time against Mignini and Giuttari, now that they had (unaccountably) provided him with the very proof he needed.
In that same month, March 2006, Giuttari’s new book on the Monster of Florence was published by RCS Libri,
The Monster: Anatomy of an Investigation
, and it became a huge best-seller. In the book, Giuttari took several shots at Spezi, accusing him of being an accessory to Narducci’s murder and darkly hinting that he was involved in some way in the Monster killings.
Spezi promptly filed a civil lawsuit against the chief inspector for libeling him in the book and for violating the laws of judicial secrecy relating to the Monster case. The lawsuit was filed in Milan, where Giuttari’s book was published by Rizzoli, another imprint of our publisher, RCS Libri. (In Italy libel suits must be filed in the place of publication.) It asked for the seizure and destruction of all copies of Giuttari’s book. “It is no pleasure for a writer to call for the seizure of a book,” Spezi wrote, “but this is the only remedy that will limit the damage to my reputation.”
Spezi wrote most of the lawsuit himself, every word perfectly pitched to infuriate his foe:
For more than a year, I have been the victim not just of half-baked police work, but of what could be said to be authentic violations of civil rights. This phenomenon—which pertains not just to me, but to many others—brings to mind the most dysfunctional societies, such as one might expect to find in Asia or Africa.
Mr. Michele Giuttari, a functionary of the State Police, is the inventor and indefatigable promoter of a theory, according to which the crimes of the so-called Monster of Florence are the work of a mysterious satanic, esoteric, and magical sect, an organized “group” of upper-middle-class professionals (bureaucrats, police and carabinieri, magistrates—and in their service, writers and journalists) who commissioned individuals from the very poorest levels of society to commit serial killings of pairs of lovers, paying handsomely to gain possession of female anatomical parts with the goal of using them in certain inscrutable, undetermined, and otherwise improbable “rites.”
According to the fantastic conjectures of this self-described brilliant and diligent investigator, this criminal assembly of seemingly upstanding persons dedicated itself to orgies, sadomasochism, pedophilia, and other vile abominations.
Spezi then proceeded to deliver an uppercut to Giuttari’s soft underbelly—his literary talent. In the lawsuit, Spezi quoted extract after extract from Giuttari’s book, savaging his logic, ridiculing his theories, and mocking his writing ability.
The suit was dated March 23 and filed a week later, on March 30, 2006.