Chapter Excerpt

The morning of June 7, 1981, dawned brilliantly clear over Florence, Italy. It was a quiet Sunday with blue skies and a light breeze out of the hills, which carried into the city the fragrance of sun-warmed cypress trees. Mario Spezi was at his desk at La Nazione, where he had worked as a reporter for several years, smoking and reading the paper. He was approached by the reporter who usually handled the crime desk, a legend at the paper who had survived twenty years of covering the Mafia.

The man sat on the edge of Spezi's desk. "This morning I have a little appointment," he said. "She's not bad-looking, married . . ."

"At your age?" Spezi said. "On a Sunday morning before church? Isn't that a bit much?"

"A bit much? Mario, I'm a Sicilian!" He struck his chest. "I come from the land that gave birth to the gods. Anyway, I was hoping you could cover the crime desk for me this morning, hang around police headquarters in case something comes up. I've already made the calls, nothing's going on. And as we all know"—and then he spoke the phrase that Spezi would never forget—"nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning."

Spezi bowed and took the man's hand. "If the Godfather orders it, I shall obey. I kiss your hand, Don Rosario."

Spezi hung around the paper doing nothing until noon approached. It was the laziest, deadest day in weeks. Perhaps because of this, a feeling of misgiving that afflicts all crime reporters began to take hold— that something might be happening and he'd be scooped. So Spezi dutifully climbed into his Citroën and drove the half mile to police headquarters, an ancient, crumbling building in the old part of Florence, once an ancient monastery, where police officials had their tiny offices in the monks' former cells. He took the stairs two at a time up to the office of the chief of the mobile squad. The loud, querulous voice of the chief, Maurizio Cimmino, echoed down the hall from his open door, and Spezi was seized with dread.

Something had happened.

Spezi found the chief in shirtsleeves behind his desk, soaked with sweat, the telephone jammed between chin and shoulder. The police radio blared in the background and several policemen were there, talking and swearing in dialect.

Cimmino spied Spezi in the door and turned to him fiercely. "Jesus Christ, Mario, you here already? Don't go busting my balls, all I know is there's two of them."

Spezi pretended to know all about whatever it was. "Right. I won't bother you anymore. Just tell me where they are."

"Via dell'Arrigo, wherever the fuck that is . . . somewhere in Scandicci, I think."

Spezi piled down the stairs and called his editor from the pay phone on the first floor. He happened to know exactly where Via dell'Arrigo was: a friend of his owned the Villa dell'Arrigo, a spectacular estate at the top of the tiny, twisting country road of the same name.

"Get out there quick," his editor said. "We'll send a photographer."

Spezi left the police headquarters and tore through the deserted medieval streets of the city and into the Florentine hills. At one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, the entire population was at home after church, getting ready to sit down to the most sacred meal of the week in a country where eating in famiglia is a hallowed activity. Via dell'Arrigo climbed up a steep hill through vineyards, cypresses, and groves of ancient olive trees. As the road mounted toward the steep, forested summits of the Valicaia hills, the views became expansive, sweeping across the city of Florence to the great Apennine Mountains beyond.

Spezi spotted the squad car of the local carabinieri marshal and pulled off next to it. All was quiet: Cimmino and his squad hadn't arrived, nor had the medical examiner or anyone else. The carabinieri officer guarding the site knew Spezi well and did not stop him as he nodded a greeting and walked past. He continued down a small dirt path through an olive grove to the foot of a lonely cypress. There, just beyond, he saw the scene of the crime, which had not been secured or sealed off.

The scene, Spezi told me, would be forever engraved in his mind. The Tuscan countryside lay under a sky of cobalt blue. A medieval castle, framed by cypress trees, crowned a nearby rise. In the vast distance, in the haze of early summer, he could spy the terra-cotta vault of the Duomo rising above the city of Florence, the physical embodiment of the Renaissance. The boy seemed to be sleeping in the driver's seat, his head leaning on the side window, eyes closed, face smooth and untroubled. Only a little black mark on his temple, which lined up with a hole in the spiderwebbed window, indicated that a crime had occurred.

On the ground, in the grass, lay a straw purse, wide open and upside down, as if someone had rummaged through it and flung it aside.

He heard the swish of feet in the grass and the carabinieri officer came up behind him.

"The woman?" Spezi asked him.

The cop gestured with his chin behind the car. The girl's body lay some distance away, at the foot of a little embankment, amid wildflowers. She had also been shot and lay on her back, naked except for a gold chain around her neck, which had fallen between her parted lips. Her blue eyes were open and seemed to be looking up at Spezi with surprise. Everything was unnaturally composed, immobile, with no signs of struggle or confusion—like a museum diorama. But there was a singular horror: the pubic area below the victim's abdomen simply wasn't there anymore.

Spezi turned back and found the cop behind him. The man seemed to understand the question in Spezi's eyes.

"During the night . . . the animals came . . . And the hot sun did the rest."

Spezi fumbled a Gauloise out of his pocket and lit it in the shade of the cypress. He smoked in silence, standing halfway between the two victims, reconstructing the crime in his head. The two people had obviously been ambushed while making love in the car; they had probably come up here after an evening dancing at Disco Anastasia, a hangout for teenagers at the bottom of the hill. (The police would later confirm this was the case.) It was the night of the new moon. The killer would have approached in the dark, silently; perhaps he watched them make love for a while, and then struck when they were at their most vulnerable. It had been a low-risk crime—a cowardly crime—to shoot two people imprisoned in the small space of a car at point-blank range, at a time when they were completely unaware of what was going on around them.

The first shot was for him, through the window of the car, and he may never have known what happened. Her end was crueler; she would have realized. After killing her, the murderer had dragged her away from the car—Spezi could see the marks in the grass—leaving her at the bottom of the embankment. The place was shockingly exposed. It lay right next to a footpath that ran parallel to the road, out in the open and visible from multiple vantage points.

Spezi's musings were interrupted by the arrival of Chief Inspector Sandro Federico and a prosecutor, Adolfo Izzo, along with the forensic squad. Federico had the easygoing manner of a Roman, affecting an air of amused nonchalance. Izzo, on the other hand, was in his first posting and he arrived wound up like a spring. He leapt out of the squad car and charged up to Spezi. "What are you doing here, sir?" he asked angrily.

"Working."

"You must leave the premises immediately. You can't remain here."

"Okay, okay . . ." Spezi had seen all he wanted to see. He shoved his pen and notebook away, got in his car, and drove back to police headquarters. In the hallway outside Cimmino's office he ran into a police sergeant he knew well; they had been able to do each other favors from time to time. The sergeant slipped a photograph out of his pocket and showed it to him. "You want it?"

It was a picture of the two victims, in life, sitting on a stone wall with their arms around each other.

Spezi took it. "I'll bring it back to you later this afternoon, after we've copied it."

Cimmino gave Spezi the names of the two victims: Carmela De Nuccio, twenty-one years old, who worked for the Gucci fashion house in Florence. The man was Giovanni Foggi, thirty, employed by the local electric utility. They were engaged to be married. A policeman on his day off, enjoying a Sunday morning walk in the country, had found the two bodies at ten-thirty. The crime had occurred a little before midnight, and there was a witness of sorts: a farmer who lived across the road. He had heard a tape of John Lennon's "Imagine" coming from a car parked in the fields. The song had been interrupted all of a sudden, in the middle. He hadn't heard any shots from what was evidently a .22 pistol, judging from the shells that were left at the scene of the crime—Winchester series "H" rounds. Cimmino said the two victims were clean, they had no enemies, excluding the man Carmela left when she began dating Giovanni.

"It's frightening," Spezi said to Cimmino. "I've never seen anything like it around here . . . And then, to think what the animals did—"

"What animals?" Cimmino interrupted.

"The animals that came during the night . . . That bloody mess . . . in between the girl's legs."

Cimmino stared at him. "Animals my ass! The killer did that."

Spezi felt his gut freeze. "The killer? What did he do, stab her?"

Inspector Cimmino answered matter-of-factly, perhaps as a way to keep the horror at bay. "No, he didn't stab her. He cut out her vagina . . . and took it away."

Spezi didn't immediately understand. "He took her vagina away? Where?" As soon as the question was out he realized how stupid it sounded.

"It's simply not there anymore. He took it away with him."

Copyright © 2008 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. and Mario Spezi