Later, Spezi would learn from a source that what was said on the tape was much less specific: We'll do to you like the dead doctor at the lake. We'll do to you like the dead doctor at the lake. No mention was made of Narducci or Pacciani. A little digging uncovered the existence of another doctor, a man who had lost more than two billion lire gambling, whose body had been found on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Trasimeno with a bullet in the brain not long before the threatening telephone call. The phrase " No mention was made of Narducci or Pacciani. A little digging uncovered the existence of another doctor, a man who had lost more than two billion lire gambling, whose body had been found on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Trasimeno with a bullet in the brain not long before the threatening telephone call. The phrase "at the lake" as opposed to the earlier " the lake" as opposed to the earlier "in the lake" seemed to point to this doctor, and not to Narducci, who, after all, had died fifteen years before the call was made. the lake" seemed to point to this doctor, and not to Narducci, who, after all, had died fifteen years before the call was made.

But by the time this new information came out, the investigation into the dead Dr. Narducci had become a juggernaut, unstoppable. Giuttari and his elite squad, GIDES, looked for-and found!-many links between Narducci's death and the Monster of Florence killings. The new investigative theories offered up succulent gothic scenarios that were leaked to the press. Dr. Narducci, the press reported, had been the guardian of the fetishes cut from the women. He had been killed to keep from spilling the beans. Some of the richest families in Perugia were involved in sinister cults, perhaps under the cover of Freemasonry, a brotherhood to which both Narducci's father and father-in-law belonged.

Giuttari and his investigators from GIDES painstakingly pieced together the final day of Narducci's life, looking for clues.

Dr. Francesco Narducci came from a rich Perugian family, a young man blessed with brains and talent who at age thirty-six was the youngest medical professor in the field of gastroenterology in Italy. In photographs, he is strikingly handsome in a boyish way, tanned and smiling, fit and elegant. Narducci had married Francesca Spagnoli, the beautiful heiress to the fortune of Luisa Spagnoli, the maker of high-fas.h.i.+on clothing for women.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its power and wealth, the Narducci family was not well liked in Perugia. Behind that facade of wealth and privilege there was, as is not unusual, unhappiness. For some time, and in ever-increasing doses, Francesco Narducci had been taking meperidine (Demerol). According to a medical report, by the time of his death he was taking it every day.

The morning of October 8, 1985, was hot and sunny. The doctor made his rounds at the Policlinico di Monteluce in Perugia until about 12:30, when a nurse called him to the telephone. After that, the facts become confused. One witness said that after the call, Narducci cut short his rounds and seemed nervous and preoccupied. Another claimed he finished his rounds in regular order and left the hospital uneventfully, asking a colleague if he wanted to take a spin on Lake Trasimeno in his boat.

At one-thirty he arrived home and ate lunch with his wife. At two o'clock, the owner of the marina where Narducci had a villa received a phone call from the doctor, asking him if his motorboat was ready to go out on the lake. The man answered it was. But as Narducci left his house, he lied to his wife, saying he was going back to the hospital and would be home early.

Narducci took his Honda 400 motocross bike and set off for the lake, but not directly to the marina. First he went into his family's house in San Feliciano. There were rumors, which investigators could not substantiate, that he wrote a letter there and left it on a windowsill, sealed in an envelope. The letter, if it ever existed, never came to light.

At three-thirty the doctor finally arrived at the marina. He jumped in his motorboat, a sleek red Grifo, and fired up the seventy-horsepower engine. The owner of the marina advised him not to go too far, since the gas tank was half empty. Francesco told him not to worry and pointed the boat toward Polvese Island, a kilometer and a half offsh.o.r.e.

He never returned.

At around five-thirty, when it began to grow dark, the marina owner became alarmed and called Francesco's brother. At seven-thirty the carabinieri launched a boat to help with the search. But Lake Trasimeno is one of the largest in Italy, and it wasn't until the next evening that they found the red Grifo empty and adrift. On board were a pair of sungla.s.ses, a wallet, and a packet of Merit cigarettes, Narducci's brand.

Five days later, they found the body. A single black-and-white photograph was taken of the scene when the body was brought to sh.o.r.e, showing the corpse stretched lengthwise on a dock, surrounded by a group of people.

Carlizzi had told the public minister that the body of Narducci had been subst.i.tuted for another, which had been tossed in the lake as a decoy. To investigate that statement, Giuttari commissioned an expert a.n.a.lysis of the photograph. Taking as a standard unit of measurement the width of a plank on the dock, the experts concluded that the cadaver in the photograph belonged to a man four inches shorter than Narducci. They also calculated that the dead man's waist was far too large to be that of the trim Narducci.

Other experts disagreed. Some pointed out that a body floating in water for five days does tend to swell. Planks of a dock are not all equal in width, and the dock in question had been replaced. Who knew the width of the planks seventeen years ago? All those in the crowd who were actually standing around the body, including the medical examiner himself, swore the body was Narducci's. At the time, the medical examiner listed the cause of death as drowning, which he estimated had occurred about a hundred and ten hours previously.

Contrary to Italian law, no autopsy had been performed. Narducci's family, led by his father, had managed to bypa.s.s the legal requirement. At the time, people in Perugia quietly understood that it was because the family feared that an autopsy would have shown that Narducci was up to his gills in Demerol. But to Giuttari and GIDES, the lack of an autopsy was most significant. They said the family had finagled their way out of an autopsy because it would have shown the body was not that of Narducci at all. The family was somehow complicit, not only in his murder, but in the subst.i.tution of his body with another to cover up the crime.

Francesco Narducci-or so Giuttari theorized-had been murdered because he was a member of the satanic sect behind the Monster of Florence killings, to which his father had introduced him. He had been named custodian of the grisly fetishes taken by Pacciani and his picnicking friends. Shaken by the reality into which he had fallen, the young doctor became indecisive, unreliable, prey to depression, and difficult to trust. The leaders of the sect decided he had to be eliminated.

The satanic cult investigation, led by Chief Inspector Giuttari, once moribund, was revived. Giuttari had now identified at least one member of the invidious sect behind the Monster killings-Narducci. All that remained was to find his killer and bring the other members of the sect to justice.

CHAPTER 38.

As the Monster investigation heated up, the phone calls from Mario became a regular occurrence. "Did you read the papers this morning?" he would ask me. "Stranger and stranger!" And we would enjoy another coffee up at my place, poring over the news, shaking our heads. At the time, I found it all amusing, even charming.

Spezi was not so charmed. He wanted, more than anything, for the truth in the Monster case to come out. His dedication to unmasking the Monster was a pa.s.sion. He had seen the dead victims; I had not. He had met most of the families and seen the damage to them. I had wiped away a few tears on leaving Winnie Rontini's dark house, but Spezi had been wiping away tears for more than twenty years. He had seen the lives of innocents ruined by false accusations. What I found deliciously peculiar and even quaint, he found deadly serious. To see the investigators wandering ever deeper into a wilderness of absurdity pained him greatly.

On April 6, 2002, with the press standing by, the coffin of Francesco Narducci was exhumed and opened. His body was inside, instantly recognizable even after seventeen years. A DNA test confirmed it.

This blow to their theories did not stop GIDES, Giuttari, and the public minister of Perugia. Even in the lack of a subst.i.tuted corpse they found evidence. The body was too too recognizable for someone who had spent five days in the water and then another seventeen in a coffin. Giuttari and Mignini promptly concluded that the body had been subst.i.tuted recognizable for someone who had spent five days in the water and then another seventeen in a coffin. Giuttari and Mignini promptly concluded that the body had been subst.i.tuted again. again. That's right-Narducci's real body, hidden for seventeen years, had been put back in the coffin and the other body removed, because the conspirators knew ahead of time that the exhumation was coming. That's right-Narducci's real body, hidden for seventeen years, had been put back in the coffin and the other body removed, because the conspirators knew ahead of time that the exhumation was coming.

The body of Narducci was s.h.i.+pped off to the medical examiner's office in Pavia to see if it showed signs of murder. That September, the results came in. The medical examiner reported that the left horn of the laryngeal cartilage had been fractured, which made it "more or less probable" that death resulted from a "violent mechanical asphyxiation produced from the constriction of the neck (either from manual strangulation or from strangulation by other homicidal means)."

In other words, Narducci had been murdered.

Once again the newspapers had a field day. La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione trumpeted: trumpeted: MURDER IS THEORIZED BURNING SECRETS.

Was Narducci murdered because he knew something or had seen something that he must not see? Almost all the current investigators are by now convinced of the story of secret sects and masterminds behind the double homicides executed by Pacciani and his picnicking friends....A group of persons, around ten, ordered the killings by henchmen composed of Pacciani and his picnicking friends....The search into secret, deviant, and esoteric groups dedicated to horrendous "sacrifices" has even drawn in investigators from Perugia.

Once again, Spezi and I marveled at the banquet of half-baked and ill-formed speculations that const.i.tuted press coverage of the case, printed as the wide-eyed truth by journalists who knew absolutely nothing of the history of the Monster of Florence, who had never heard of the Sardinian Trail, and who merely parroted whatever investigators or the prosecutor's office leaked. The conditional tense was hardly ever used, as were qualifiers such as "alleged" and "according to." Question marks were thrown in only for sensationalistic effect. Spezi once again bemoaned the sorry state of Italian journalism.

"Why," he said, "would Narducci's killers concoct such an elaborate scheme of murder? Haven't these journalists asked themselves that obvious question? Why not just drown him and make it look like suicide? Why subst.i.tute bodies once, and then yet again? And where on earth did the second body come from? The original ME who examined Narducci's cadaver, along with his family, friends, and all the people in that photograph who saw the dead body insist it was Narducci. They still still insist it was Narducci! Were insist it was Narducci! Were all all these people in on the conspiracy?" He shook his head sadly. these people in on the conspiracy?" He shook his head sadly.

I read the rest of the article with growing disbelief. The credulous reporter at La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione never explored any of the obvious discrepancies with the story. He went on to write that the "saponification of the cadaver (internal organs, skin, and hair were in a good state of preservation) was not compatible with immersion in water for five days." More support for the subst.i.tution theory. never explored any of the obvious discrepancies with the story. He went on to write that the "saponification of the cadaver (internal organs, skin, and hair were in a good state of preservation) was not compatible with immersion in water for five days." More support for the subst.i.tution theory.

"What does this mean, 'not compatible'?" I asked Spezi, putting aside the paper. It was a phrase I had seen again and again in the Monster investigation.

Spezi laughed. "Compatible, not compatible, and incompatible are the baroque inventions of Italian experts who don't want to take responsibility. Using 'compatible' is a way to avoid admitting they haven't understood anything. Was the bullet in Pacciani's garden inserted into the Monster's pistol? 'It is compatible.' Was that laryngeal break inflicted by someone who intended to kill? 'It is compatible.' Was the painting done by a monstrous psychopath? 'It is compatible.' Perhaps yes, perhaps no-in short, we don't know! If the experts are chosen by the investigators, they say their results are 'compatible' with the theories of the prosecution; if they are chosen by the defendants they say that their results are 'compatible' with the theories of the defense. That adjective should be outlawed!"

"So where's this going?" I asked. "Where will it end up?"

Spezi shook his head. "The very thought scares me."

CHAPTER 39.

Meanwhile, in the picturesque little town of San Casciano, Giuttari opened up yet a new front in the search for the masterminds behind the Monster killings. San Casciano seemed to lie at the very heart of the satanic sect; it was only a few kilometers from Villa Verde, the Villa of Horrors; it had been home to the hapless postman, Vanni, and the village idiot, Lotti, convicted as Pacciani's accomplices.

Spezi called me one morning. "Have you seen the paper? Don't bother buying it, I'm coming over. You won't believe this."

He entered the house, visibly upset, the paper clutched in his hand, Gauloise dangling from his lip. "This is a bit too close to home." He slapped the paper on the table. "Read this."

The article announced that the home of a man named Francesco Calamandrei, the ex-pharmacist of San Casciano, had been searched by GIDES. Calamandrei was suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the Monster killings.

"Calamandrei is an old friend of mine." Spezi said. "He's the man who introduced me to my wife! This is utterly absurd, patently ridiculous. The man wouldn't hurt a fly."

Spezi told me the man's story. He had met Calamandrei back in the mid-sixties, when both were students, Spezi studying law and Calamandrei studying pharmacology and architecture. A brilliant student, Calamandrei was the son of San Casciano's only pharmacist, which in Italy is a well-paid and high-status profession, all the more so for the Calamandrei family, because San Casciano was a wealthy town with only one pharmacy. Calamandrei cut quite a figure in those days, tooling around Florence in a sleek Lancia Fulvia Coupe, tall, elegant, and handsome, impeccably dressed in the Florentine style. He had a dry, cutting Tuscan sense of humor and always seemed to have a new girlfriend more beautiful than the last. Calamandrei introduced Mario to his future wife, Myriam ("I've got a nice Belgian girl for you, Mario"), at a famous restaurant; afterwards they all piled into Calamandrei's car and set off on a crazy trip to Venice to play baccarat in the casino. Calamandrei was an expression of that brief period in Italian history known as La Dolce Vita La Dolce Vita, captured so memorably on film by Fellini.

At the close of the sixties Calamandrei married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She was a small, high-strung woman with red hair. They had a grand wedding in San Casciano, which Mario and Myriam attended. A few days later the newlyweds stopped by Spezi's house while heading off on their honeymoon. Calamandrei was driving a brand-new cream-colored Mercedes 300L convertible.

That was the last Spezi saw of him for several decades.

He ran into him by chance twenty-five years later and was shocked by the change in his friend. Calamandrei had become morbidly obese and suffered from a deep depression and declining health. He had sold the pharmacy and taken up painting-tragic, anguished pictures, not created with paintbrushes and canvas, but with objects such as rubber hoses, sheet metal, and tar, sometimes putting real syringes and tourniquets in his paintings, and often signing them with his social security number, because, he said, that's all people were in modern Italian society. His son had become a drug addict and then a thief to support his habit. Desperate and not knowing what else to do, Calamandrei had gone to the police and denounced his own son, hoping a stint in prison might shake him up and lead to a turnaround. But the boy continued to take drugs after his release, and then disappeared completely.

What had happened to his wife was equally tragic. She had succ.u.mbed to schizophrenia. Once, at a dinner party at a friend's house, she began screaming and breaking objects, stripped off all her clothes, and ran naked into the street. She was hospitalized after that, the first of many such hospitalizations. She was finally declared mentally incompetent and committed to a sanatorium, where she remains to this day.

In 1991, Calamandrei divorced her. She then wrote a letter to the police accusing her husband of being the Monster of Florence. She claimed to have found pieces of the victims hidden in the refrigerator. Her letter-which was completely mad-was duly checked out by investigators at the time and dismissed as absurd.

But Chief Inspector Giuttari, sorting through old police files, came across the wife's handwritten statement, in a strange orthography that sloped ever upward toward the top of the page. To Giuttari, "pharmacist" was close enough to "doctor." The fact that Calamandrei had once been a wealthy and prominent resident of San Casciano, the presumed center of the satanic cult, only whetted Giuttari's interest. The chief inspector opened an investigation of him and several other leading citizens of the town. On January 16, 2004, Giuttari asked for a warrant to search the pharmacist's house; he received it on the seventeenth; on the eighteenth at dawn Giuttari and his men rang the buzzer of the door on Piazza Pierozzi in San Casciano.

On the nineteenth the story of the Monster of Florence was once again all over the news.

Spezi could only shake his head in wonder. "I don't like the way this is moving at all. Mi fa paura. Mi fa paura. It makes me afraid." It makes me afraid."

Back in Perugia, the inquiry into Narducci's death moved along at a brisk pace. The investigators realized that in order for the bodies to have been switched twice, a large and powerful conspiracy among influential people must have taken place. The public minister of Perugia, Judge Mignini, was determined to unmask it. And in short order he did. Once again, the newspapers, including even the sober Corriere della Sera Corriere della Sera, dedicated entire pages to it. The news was sensational: the exchief of police of Perugia at the time of Narducci's death had, it was alleged, conspired with a colonel in the carabinieri and with the family's lawyer to prevent the truth of Narducci's death from coming out, all working in concert with the father of the dead doctor, his brother, and the doctor who had signed the death certificate. Among their crimes were conspiracy, racketeering, and destruction and hiding of a human corpse.

Beyond the conspiracy to cover up the Narducci murder, the investigators also had to show that Narducci had a connection to Pacciani, his picnicking friends, and the village of San Casciano, where the satanic cult seemed to be centered.

They succeeded in this as well. Gabriella Carlizzi made a statement to the police a.s.serting that Francesco Narducci had been initiated into the Order of the Red Rose by his father, who was trying to resolve certain s.e.xual problems in his son-the same diabolical sect, Carlizzi claimed, active for centuries in Florence and its environs. Police and prosecutors seemed to accept Carlizzi's statements as solid, actionable evidence.

As if on cue, Giuttari and his GIDES squad produced witnesses swearing to have seen Francesco Narducci hanging around San Casciano and meeting with Calamandrei. It took a while for the ident.i.ty of these new witnesses to come out. When Spezi first heard the names, he thought it was a bad joke: they were the same algebraic witnesses, Alpha and Gamma, who had been the surprise witnesses at Pacciani's appeal trial many years before-Pucci, the mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded man who claimed to have witnessed Pacciani killing the French couple, and Ghiribelli, the alcoholic prost.i.tute who would turn a trick for a gla.s.s of wine. And then a third witness popped out of the woodwork-none other than Lorenzo Nesi! This was the same fine fellow who had so conveniently remembered Pacciani and a companion in a "reddish" car a kilometer from the Scopeti clearing on Sunday night, the alleged night of the murder of the French tourists.

These three witnesses had earth-shaking new information to impart, which all of them had forgotten to mention eight years earlier when they had first stunned Italy with their extraordinary testimony.

Ghiribelli claimed that the "doctor from Perugia," whose name she did not know, but whose face she recognized as Narducci's from a photograph, came to San Casciano almost every weekend. How could she forget it? She proudly told investigators she had had s.e.x with him four or five times in a hotel and "for each trick he gave me three hundred thousand lire."

In the offices of GIDES, they showed the mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded Pucci photographs of various people and asked him if he had ever seen them before and where. Pucci's recall was phenomenal, crystal clear even when reaching back twenty years, even if he didn't know their names. He recognized Franceso Narducci, "tall and thin, kind of f.a.ggoty." He recognized Gianni Spagnoli, brother-in-law of the drowned doctor. He recognized one of the most notable physicians of Florence arrested for child molestation, who had been included in the photo lineup because investigators believed the satanic sect was into pedophilia. He recognized a respected dermatologist and a distinguished gynecologist of San Casciano, both of whom had also fallen under suspicion for being members of the cult. He recognized Carlo Santangelo, the phony ME who liked to wander around cemeteries at night. He recognized a young African-American hairstylist who had died several years before in Florence from AIDS.

But most crucially to the investigation, he recognized the pharmacist of San Casciano, Francesco Calamandrei.

Pucci wasn't stingy with the particulars. "I saw all these people together in San Casciano, in the Bar Centrale under the clock. I can't say if on every occasion I saw them together because it happened that I would see them separately, but anyway these were people who saw each other a lot."

Lorenzo Nesi, the serial witness, also recognized these people and added another. He had seen, palling around with this motley crowd, none other than Prince Roberto Corsini, the n.o.bleman killed by a poacher, who, like Narducci, had been the subject of rumors that he was the Monster.

Gamma, the prost.i.tute Ghiribelli, told another story, one that involved the Villa Sfacciata, near where I lived in Giogoli, across the lane from where the two German tourists had been killed. "In 1981," she said, as recorded in an official statement taken by the police, "there was a doctor who was doing experiments in mummification in the villa...Lotti also talked about this place on many occasions and always in the eighties, when we went there. He told me that inside, without saying where, there were murals covering entire walls with paintings just like those done by Pacciani. Lotti always told me that this villa had a laboratory underground, where the Swiss doctor did his mummification experiments. I'll explain it better: Lotti said that this Swiss doctor, following his travels in Egypt, got hold of an old papyrus that explained how to mummify bodies. He said the papyrus was missing a piece relating to the mummification of the soft parts and, I mean, among them the s.e.x organs and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He told me this was why the girls were mutilated in the murders of the Monster of Florence. He explained to me that in 1981 the daughter of this doctor was killed and the death was not reported, so much so that the father had said that he had to go back to Switzerland to explain her absence. The mummification process required that he keep the body of his daughter in that underground laboratory."

Perhaps remembering the embarra.s.sment of the plastic bats and cardboard skeletons, investigators decided not to search the Villa Sfacciata for the Pacciani frescoes, underground laboratory, and mummified daughter.

CHAPTER 40.

Dietrologia," said Count Niccol. "That is the only Italian word you need to know to understand the Monster of Florence investigation."

We were having our usual lunch at Il Bordino. I was eating baccala baccala, salt cod, while the Count enjoyed stuffed arista. arista.

"Dietrologia?" I asked.

"Dietro-behind. Logia Logia-the study of." The count spoke grandly, as if still in the lecture hall, his plummy English accent echoing in the cavelike interior of the restaurant. "Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro dietro. It isn't quite what you Americans call conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory theory, something uncertain, a possibility. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really really is is. Aside from football, dietrologia is the national sport in Italy. Everyone is an expert at what's really going on, even...how do you Americans say it?...even if they don't know jack s.h.i.+t." Aside from football, dietrologia is the national sport in Italy. Everyone is an expert at what's really going on, even...how do you Americans say it?...even if they don't know jack s.h.i.+t."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it gives them a feeling of importance! This importance may only be confined to a small circle of idiotic friends, but at least they are in the know in the know. Potere Potere, power, is that I I know what know what you you do not know. Dietrologia is tied to the Italian mentality of power. You do not know. Dietrologia is tied to the Italian mentality of power. You must must appear to be in the know about all things." appear to be in the know about all things."

"How does this apply to the Monster investigation?"

"My dear Douglas, it is the very heart of the matter! At all costs, they have to find something behind the apparent reality. There cannot not not be something. Why? Because it is not possible that the thing you see is the truth. Nothing is simple, nothing is at it seems. Does it look like a suicide? Yes? Well then it must be murder. Somebody went out for coffee? Aha! be something. Why? Because it is not possible that the thing you see is the truth. Nothing is simple, nothing is at it seems. Does it look like a suicide? Yes? Well then it must be murder. Somebody went out for coffee? Aha! He went out for coffee He went out for coffee...But what was he really really doing?" doing?"

He laughed.

"In Italy," he continued, "there is a permanent climate of witch-hunting. You see, Italians are fundamentally envious. If somebody makes money, there must be a fiddle there somewhere. Of course Of course he was in cahoots with someone else. Because of the cult of materialism here, Italians envy the rich and powerful. They're suspicious of them and at the same time want to be them. They have a love-hate relations.h.i.+p with them. Berlusconi is a cla.s.sic example." he was in cahoots with someone else. Because of the cult of materialism here, Italians envy the rich and powerful. They're suspicious of them and at the same time want to be them. They have a love-hate relations.h.i.+p with them. Berlusconi is a cla.s.sic example."

"And that's why the investigators are looking for a satanic sect of the rich and powerful?"

"Precisely. And at all costs they have to find something. Once they've started, to save face they have to go on. For the sake of this idea, they will do anything. They cannot give it up. You anglosa.s.soni anglosa.s.soni do not understand the Mediterranean concept of do not understand the Mediterranean concept of face face. I was doing historical research in an ancient family archive and I came across some interesting little thing that a distant ancestor had done three hundred years ago. Nothing very bad, just a naughty thing that was already largely known. The head of the family was aghast. He said, 'You can't publish this! Che figura ci facciamo Che figura ci facciamo! What shame it would cast upon our family!"

We finished and rose to pay at the counter. The count as usual insisted on picking up the tab ("They know me," he explained, "and give me lo sconto lo sconto, the discount").

As we stood on the cobbled street outside the restaurant, Niccol gazed at me gravely. "In Italy, the hatred of your enemy is such that he has to be built up, made into the ultimate adversary, responsible for all evil. The investigators in the Monster case know that behind the simple facts hides a satanic cult, its tentacles reaching into the highest levels of society. This is what they will prove, no matter what. Woe to the person"-he eyed me significantly-"who disputes their theory because that makes him an accomplice. The more vehemently he denies being involved, the stronger is the proof."

He laid a large hand on my shoulder. "Then again, perhaps there is some truth to their theories. Perhaps there is is a satanic sect. After all, this is Italy..." a satanic sect. After all, this is Italy..."

CHAPTER 41.

During 2004, our last year in Italy, the Monster investigation picked up a major head of steam. It seemed that almost every month another wildly improbable story would break in the papers. Mario and I continued to work on our book, outlining and gathering information and acc.u.mulating a file of newspaper clippings on the latest developments. Mario also continued his own freelance investigative journalism, regularly plying his contacts in the carabinieri for fresh information, poking around, always looking for a new scoop.

Mario called me one day. "Doug, meet me in Bar Ricchi. I've got some splendid news!"

We met once again in our old haunt. My family and I had now been living in Italy for four years, and I was well enough known in Bar Ricchi not only to greet the owner and his family by name, but sometimes to get lo sconto lo sconto myself. myself.

Spezi was late. He had, as usual, parked his car illegally in the piazza, putting in the window his "JOURNALIST" sign, next to the special journalist permit that allowed him to drive into the old city.

He strode in, trailing smoke, and ordered an espresso "stretto stretto" and a gla.s.s of mineral water. A heavy object weighed down his trench coat.

He tossed his Bogart fedora on the banquette, slid in, and removed an object wrapped in newspaper, which he placed on the table.

"What is it?"

"You shall see." He paused to shoot down his coffee. "Ever seen the television program Chi L'ha Visto? Chi L'ha Visto? [Who Has Seen Him?]." [Who Has Seen Him?]."

"No."

"It's one of the highest-rated programs on Italian television-a rip-off of your show America's Most Wanted America's Most Wanted. They've asked me to collaborate on a series of programs that would reconstruct the entire history of the Monster of Florence case, from the beginning to today."

Spezi wreathed himself in a triumphant cloud of blue smoke.