One day he learned from a beat cop that investigators had questioned and released an odd character who had been pa.s.sing himself off as a medical examiner. Spezi found the story charming and pursued it for the paper. The man was "Dr." Carlo Santangelo, a thirty-six-year-old Florentine, of pleasing appearance, a lover of solitude, separated from his wife, who went about dressed in black wearing eyegla.s.ses with smoked lenses, gripping a doctor's bag in his left hand. His card read: Prof. Dr. Carlo Santangelo Prof. Dr. Carlo SantangeloMedical ExaminerInst.i.tute of Pathology, FlorenceInst.i.tute of Pathology, Pisa Forensic Section In the ever-present doctor's bag were the tools of his profession, a number of perfectly honed and glistening scalpels. Instead of maintaining an established residence, Dr. Santangelo preferred to pa.s.s his days in various hotels or residences in small towns near Florence. And when he chose a hotel, he made sure it was near a small cemetery. If there was a room with a view of the tombstones, so much the better. Dr. Santangelo's face, eyes covered with thick dark lenses, had become familiar to the staff of OFISA, the most prominent funeral establishment in Florence, where he often pa.s.sed his hours as if on important business. The doctor with the dark lenses doled out prescriptions, saw patients, and even ran a psychoa.n.a.lysis business on the side.

The only problem was, Dr. Santangelo wasn't a medical examiner or pathologist. He wasn't even a physician, although he seems to have taken it upon himself to operate on live people, at least according to one witness.

Santangelo was unmasked when a serious car accident took place on the autostrada south of Florence, and somebody remembered that in a hotel nearby there lived a doctor. Dr. Santangelo was fetched to provide first aid, and all were amazed to hear that he was none other than the medical examiner who had performed the autopsies on the bodies of Susanna Cambi and Stefano Baldi, the Monster's latest victims. At least that was what several employees of the hotel said they had heard directly from Dr. Santangelo himself, when he had proudly opened his bag and showed them the tools of his profession.

Santangelo's peculiar claim got back to the carabinieri, and it didn't take them long to find out that he was no doctor. They learned of his predilection for small cemeteries and pathology rooms, and, even more alarming, his penchant for scalpels. The carabinieri promptly hauled Santangelo in for questioning.

The phony medical examiner freely admitted to being a liar and spinner of tall tales, although he wasn't able to explain his love for cemeteries at night. He hotly denied as libel, however, the story his girlfriend told of how he had broken off a night of pa.s.sionate lovemaking by taking a dose of sleeping pills, saying this was the only way he could resist the temptation to leave his bed of love to take a turn around the tombstones.

The suspicion that Dr. Santangelo was the Monster lasted only a moment. For every night of a double homicide, he had an alibi from the employees of the hotel where he was staying. The doctor, witnesses confirmed, went to bed early, between eight-thirty and nine, in order to rise at three in the morning when the cemeteries called. "I know I do weird things," Santangelo told the magistrate who questioned him. "Sometimes it's occurred to me that I might be a little bit crazy."

The Santangelo story was just one of the many delightful pieces Spezi wrote as the paper's official "Monstrologer." He wrote about the many channelers, tarot card readers, clairvoyants, geomancers, and crystal-ball gazers who offered police their services-and some of whom were actually hired by the police and deposed, the transcripts of their "readings" duly witnessed, notarized, and filed. In middle-cla.s.s living rooms across the city, an evening would sometimes end with the host and his guests seated around a three-legged table with a small gla.s.s upside down on top, questioning one of the Monster's victims and receiving his or her cryptic replies. The results were often sent to Spezi at La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione, to the police, or circulated feverishly among groups of believers. Next to the official police investigation, there developed a parallel one into the world beyond, which Spezi covered to the great amus.e.m.e.nt of his readers, as he told of attending readings and seances in graveyards with clairvoyants intent on speaking to the dead.

The case of the Monster so shook the city that it even seemed to revive the long-dead spirit of the dark monk of San Marco, Savonarola, and his thunderings against the decadence of the age. There were those who seized on the Monster as a way to once again declaim against Florence and its presumed moral and spiritual depravity, its middle-cla.s.s greed and materialism. "The Monster," wrote one editorial correspondent, "is the living expression of this city of shopkeepers, sinking into an orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence perpetrated by its priests, power brokers, puffed-up professors, politicians, and various self-appointed hacks....The Monster is a cheap middle-cla.s.s vindicator who hides behind a facade of bourgeois respectability. He is simply a man with bad taste."

Others thought the Monster must be, literally, a monk or priest. One wrote in a letter to La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione that the sh.e.l.ls found at the scenes of the killings were old and discolored "because in a monastery an old pistol and some bullets could have been lying around forgotten in some dark corner almost forever." The letter writer went on to point out something that had already been widely discussed among Florentines: that the murderer might be a Savonarola-like priest visiting the wrath of G.o.d upon young people for their fornication and depravity. He pointed out that the woody piece of a grapevine stuck into the first victim might be a biblical message recalling the words of Jesus that the "vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away." that the sh.e.l.ls found at the scenes of the killings were old and discolored "because in a monastery an old pistol and some bullets could have been lying around forgotten in some dark corner almost forever." The letter writer went on to point out something that had already been widely discussed among Florentines: that the murderer might be a Savonarola-like priest visiting the wrath of G.o.d upon young people for their fornication and depravity. He pointed out that the woody piece of a grapevine stuck into the first victim might be a biblical message recalling the words of Jesus that the "vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away."

Police detectives also took the Savonarola theory seriously, and quietly began looking into certain priests known to have odd or unusual habits. Several Florentine prost.i.tutes told police that from time to time they entertained a priest with rather eccentric tastes. He paid them generously, not for normal s.e.x, but for the privilege of shaving off their pubic hair. The police were interested, reasoning that here was a man who enjoyed working with a razor in that particular area. The girls were able to give the police his name and address.

One crisp Sunday morning, a small group of police and carabinieri in plainclothes, led by a pair of magistrates, entered an ancient country church perched among cypresses in the lovely hills southwest of Florence. The committee was received in the sacristy, where the priest was in the act of dressing in his robes, taking up the sacred vestments with which he was about to say Ma.s.s. They showed him a warrant and told him the reason for their visit, stating their intention to search the church, grounds, confessionals, altars, reliquaries, and tabernacle.

The priest staggered and almost fell to the floor in a faint. He didn't try even for a moment to deny his nocturnal avocation as a barber for ladies, but he swore in the strongest terms that he wasn't the Monster. He said he understood why they had to search the premises, but he begged them to keep the reason for their visit secret and delay the search until after he had said Ma.s.s.

The priest was allowed to celebrate Ma.s.s before his paris.h.i.+oners, joined by the policemen and investigators, who sat through the service looking and acting just like city folk out enjoying a country Ma.s.s. They kept a close eye on the priest so as not to run the risk that, during the service, he might make away with some vital clue.

The search took place as soon as the paris.h.i.+oners had filed out, but all the investigators carried away was the priest's razor, and he was soon cleared.

CHAPTER 6.

Despite the huge success of his journalistic career chronicling the Monster case, all was not well for Spezi. The savagery of the crimes preyed heavily on his mind. He began to have nightmares and was fearful for the safety of his beautiful Flemish wife, Myriam, and their baby daughter, Eleonora. The Spezis lived in an old villa that had been converted into apartments high on a hill above the city, in the very heart of the countryside stalked by the Monster. Covering the case raised many unanswerable and excruciating questions in his mind about good and evil, G.o.d, and human nature.

Myriam urged her husband to seek help, and finally he agreed. Instead of going to a psychiatrist, Spezi, a practicing Catholic, turned to a monk who ran a mental health practice out of his cell in a crumbling eleventh-century Franciscan monastery. Brother Galileo Babbini was short, with c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses that magnified his piercing black eyes. He was always cold, even in summer, and wore a shabby down coat beneath his brown monk's habit. He seemed to have stepped out of the Middle Ages, and yet he was a highly trained psychoa.n.a.lyst with a doctorate from the University of Florence.

Brother Galileo combined psychoa.n.a.lysis with mystical Christianity to counsel people recovering from devastating trauma. His methods were not gentle, and he was unyielding in the pursuit of truth. He had an almost supernatural insight into the dark side of the human soul. Spezi would see him for the duration of the case, and he told me that Brother Galileo had saved his sanity, perhaps his life.

The night of the killing in the Bartoline Fields, a couple driving through the area had pa.s.sed a red Alfa Romeo at a bottleneck in one of the narrow, walled roads so common to the Florentine countryside. The two cars had to inch past each other, and the couple had gotten a clear look at the occupant of the other car. He was a man, they told police, so nervous that his face was contorted with anxiety. They furnished a description to a forensic Identi-Kit team, which used it to create a portrait of a hard-faced man with coa.r.s.e features. A deeply scored forehead surmounted a strange face with large, baleful eyes, a hooked nose, and a mouth as tight and thin as a cut.

But the prosecutor's office, fearful of the climate of hysteria gripping Florence, decided to keep the portrait secret for fear it would unleash a witch hunt.

A year went by after the murder in the Bartoline Fields, and the investigation made no progress. As summer 1982 approached, anxiety gripped the city. As if on schedule, on the first Sat.u.r.day of summer with no moon, June 19, 1982, the Monster struck again in the heart of the Chianti countryside south of Florence. His two victims were Antonella Migliorini and Paolo Mainardi. Both were in their early twenties and they were engaged to be married. They spent so much time together that their friends teased them with the nickname Vinavyl, a popular brand of superglue.

The couple came from Montespertoli, a town legendary for its wines and white truffles, as well as for several stupendous castles that crowned the surrounding hills. They spent the early part of the evening with a large gathering of young people in the Piazza del Popolo, drinking c.o.kes, eating ice cream, and listening to pop music that on warm Sat.u.r.day nights blared from the ice-cream kiosk.

Afterwards, Paolo managed to persuade Antonella to take a drive in the countryside, despite her oft-stated terror of the Monster. They headed off into the velvety Tuscan night, taking a road that paralleled a rus.h.i.+ng torrent that poured from the hills. They pa.s.sed the gates of the gigantic crenellated castle of Poppiano, owned for nine hundred years by the counts of Gucciardini, and turned into a dead-end lane, the crickets shrilling in the warm night air, the stars twinkling overhead, two dark walls of fragrant vegetation on either side providing privacy.

At that moment, Antonella and Paolo were in the almost exact geographical center of what might be called the map of the Monster's crimes, past and future.

A reconstruction of the crime detailed what happened next. The couple had finished making love and Antonella had moved into the rear seat to put her clothes back on. Paolo apparently became aware of the killer lurking just outside the car, and he stamped on the accelerator and reversed the car at high speed from the dead-end track. The Monster, taken by surprise, fired into the car, striking Paolo's left shoulder. The terrified girl threw her arms around her boyfriend's head, gripping so tightly that later the clasp of her watch was found tangled in his hair. The car backed out of the lane, shot across the main road, and went into the ditch on the opposite side. Paolo threw the car into forward and tried to drive out, but the rear wheels were firmly stuck in the ditch and spun uselessly.

The Monster, standing on the opposite side of the road, was now bathed in the full glare of the car's headlights. He coolly took aim with his Beretta and shot out each headlight, one after the other, with two perfectly placed rounds. Two sh.e.l.ls remained by the side of the road to mark the point where he had taken aim. He crossed the road, threw open the door, and fired two more rounds, one into each of the victims' heads. He yanked the boy out of the car, slipped into the driver's seat, and tried to rock the car out of the ditch. It was stuck fast. He gave up and, without committing his usual mutilation, fled up a hillside next to the road, tossing the car keys about three hundred feet from the car. Near the keys, investigators found an empty medicine bottle of Norzetam (piracetam), a dietary supplement sold over the counter, which was popularly believed to improve memory and brain function. It couldn't be traced.

The Monster took an enormous risk committing the crime next to a main road on a busy Sat.u.r.day night, and he had saved himself only by acting with superhuman coolness. Investigators later determined that at least six cars had pa.s.sed in the hour in which the crime had occurred. A kilometer up the road, two people were jogging, taking advantage of the cool night air, and next to the turnoff to Poppiano Castle another couple had parked by the side of the road and were chatting with the interior light on.

The next pa.s.sing car stopped, thinking there had been a road accident. When medics arrived, the girl was dead. The boy was still breathing. He died in the hospital without regaining consciousness.

The next morning, a prosecutor on the case, Silvia Della Monica, called Mario Spezi and a few other journalists into her office. "You've got to give me a hand here," she said. "I'd like you all to write that the male victim was taken to the hospital alive and that he may have said something useful. It might be a waste of time, but if it frightens someone and causes him to make a false move, who knows?"

The journalists did as requested. Nothing came of it-or so it seemed at first.

That same day, after a long and contentious meeting, the magistrates in charge of the case decided to release the Identi-Kit portrait of the suspect drawn up after the previous double homicide in the Bartoline Fields. On June 30, the brutal face of the unknown suspect appeared on front pages across Italy along with a description of the red Alfa Romeo.

The reaction boggled investigators. Sacks of mail and countless phone calls flooded the offices of the police, carabinieri, prosecutors, and local newspapers. Many people saw in that crude and vicious face a rival in business or love, a neighbor, a local doctor or butcher. "The Monster is a professor of obstetrics, ex-chief of the Department of Gynecology of the Hospital of--," went one typical accusation. Another was certain it was a neighbor whose "first wife left him, then a girlfriend, and then another girlfriend, and now he lives with his mother." The police and carabinieri were paralyzed trying to follow up every lead.

Dozens of people found themselves the object of scrutiny and suspicion. The day the portrait was published, a menacing crowd formed in front of a butcher shop near the Porta Romana of Florence, many clutching newspapers with the portrait. When a new person joined the crowd, he would go into the butcher shop to see for himself, then join the crowd milling in front. The butcher shop had to close for a week.

On that same day, a pizza-maker in the Red Pony pizzeria also became the target of suspicion because he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Identi-Kit. A group of boys began making fun of him by coming into the pizzeria with the portrait, putting on a show of comparing it to him, and then rus.h.i.+ng out as if in terror. The next day, after lunch, the man cut his own throat.

The police received thirty-two phone calls identifying a certain taxi driver from the old San Frediano quarter of Florence as the Monster. A police inspector decided to check the person out; he called the taxi company and contrived for the driver to pick him up and take him to police headquarters, where his men surrounded the cab and ordered the driver out. When the taxi driver emerged, the men were astonished: the man matched the Identi-Kit portrait so perfectly that it could have been a photograph of him. The inspector had the cabbie brought to his office, and to his surprise the man heaved a great sigh of relief. "If you hadn't brought me down here," he said, "I'd have come myself just as soon as my s.h.i.+ft was over. Ever since that picture was published it's been total h.e.l.l. I've had nothing but clients who suddenly want to get out of the cab in the middle of the ride." An investigation quickly determined that the taxi driver could not have committed the crimes-the resemblance was a coincidence.

A huge crowd attended the funeral of Paolo and Antonella, the two victims. Cardinal Benelli, the archbishop of Florence, gave the homily, turning it into an indictment of the modern world. "Much has been said," he intoned, "in these recent tragic days of monsters, of madness, of crimes of unimaginable viciousness; but we know well that madness does not arise out of nowhere; madness is the irrational and violent explosion of a world, a society, that has lost its values; that every day becomes more inimical to the human spirit. This afternoon," the cardinal concluded, "we stand here, mute witnesses to one of the worst ever defeats of all that is good in mankind."

The engaged couple were buried one next to the other, the only photograph ever taken of them together placed between their tombs.

Among the avalanche of accusations, letters, and telephone calls that arrived at carabinieri headquarters in Florence, one odd letter stood out. Inside an envelope was nothing more than a yellowed, tattered clipping from an old article published in La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione, which told of a long-forgotten murder of a couple who had been making love in a car parked in the Florentine countryside. They had been shot with a Beretta pistol firing Winchester series H rounds, the sh.e.l.ls having been recovered at the scene. Someone had scrawled on the clipping, "Take another look at this crime." The most chilling thing about the clipping was the date it had been published: August 23, 1968.

The crime had been committed fourteen years before.

CHAPTER 7.

Due to a serendipitous bureaucratic error, the sh.e.l.ls collected from that old crime scene, which should have been tossed out, were still sitting in a nylon pouch in the dusty case files.

Each one bore on the rim the unique signature of the Monster's gun.

Investigators reopened the old case with a vengeance. But they were immediately confounded: the 1968 double murder had been solved. It had been an open-and-shut case. A man had confessed and was convicted of the double homicide, and he could not be the Monster of Florence, as he had been in prison during the first killings and had lived since his release in a halfway house, under the watchful eye of nuns, so feeble he could barely walk. There was no possible way for him to have committed any of the Monster's crimes. Nor was his confession false-it contained specific, accurate details of the double homicide that only a person present at the scene could have known.

On the surface, the facts of the 1968 killing seemed simple, squalid, even ba.n.a.l. A married woman, Barbara Locci, had been having an affair with a Sicilian bricklayer. One night after going to the movies, they had parked on a quiet lane afterwards to have s.e.x. The woman's jealous husband had ambushed them in the middle of the act and shot them to death. The husband, an immigrant from the island of Sardinia named Stefano Mele, was picked up a few hours later. When a paraffin-glove test indicated he had recently fired a handgun, he broke down and confessed to killing his wife and her lover in a fit of jealousy. He was given a reduced sentence of fourteen years due to "infirmity of mind."

Case closed.

The pistol used in the killing had never been recovered. At the time Mele claimed to have tossed it in a nearby irrigation ditch. But the ditch and the entire area had been thoroughly searched the night of the crime and no pistol had been found. At the time, n.o.body had paid much attention to the missing gun.

Investigators converged on the halfway house near Verona where Mele was living. They questioned him relentlessly. They wanted to know, in particular, what he had done with the gun after the killings. But nothing Mele said made any sense; his mind was half gone. He constantly contradicted himself and gave the impression he was hiding something, his demeanor watchful and tense. They could get nothing of value from him. Whatever secret he was hiding, he was hiding it so tenaciously that it looked like he would take it to the grave.

Stefano Mele was housed in an ugly white building on a flat plain near the Adige River, outside the romantic city of Verona. He lived with other ex-convicts who, having discharged their debt to society, had nowhere to go, no family, and no possibility of gainful employment. The priest running this goodly inst.i.tution suddenly found himself, among his other pressing concerns, with the additional duty of protecting the diminutive Sardinian from packs of hungry journalists. Every red-blooded journalist in Italy wanted to interview Mele; the priest was equally determined to keep them away.

Spezi, the Monstrologer of La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione, was not as easily deterred as the rest. He arrived there one day with a doc.u.mentary filmmaker, on the pretense of shooting a doc.u.mentary on the halfway house's good work. After a flattering interview with the priest and a series of fake interviews with various inmates, they finally ended up face-to-face with Stefano Mele.

The first glimpse was discouraging: the Sardinian, although not old, paced about the room, taking tiny, nervous steps with rigid legs, almost as if he was about to topple over. To move a chair was almost a superhuman feat for him. An expressionless smile, frozen on his face, revealed a cemetery of rotten teeth. He was hardly the picture of the cold-blooded killer who, fifteen years before, had murdered two people with efficiency and sangfroid.

The interview, at the beginning, was difficult. Mele was on guard and suspicious. But little by little he relaxed, and even began to warm to the two filmmakers, glad to have finally found sympathetic listeners in whom he could confide. He finally invited them back to his room, where he showed them old photographs of his "missus" (as he called his murdered wife, Barbara) as well as pictures of their son, Natalino.

But whenever Spezi approached the old story of the crime of 1968, Mele became vague. His answers were long and rambling, and he seemed to be spouting out whatever came into his head. It seemed hopeless.

At the end, he said something odd. "They need to figure out where that pistol is, otherwise there will be more murders...They will continue to kill... will continue to kill...They will continue..." will continue..."

When Spezi left, Mele gave him a gift: a postcard showing the house and balcony in Verona said to have been the place where Romeo confessed his love to Juliet. "Take it," Mele said. "I'm the 'couple man' and this is the most famous couple in the world."

They will continue...Only after he left did the peculiar use of the plural p.r.o.noun strike Spezi. Mele had repeatedly used "they" as if referring to more than one Monster. Why would he think there were several? It seemed to imply that he had not been alone when his wife and her lover were killed. He had accomplices. Mele evidently believed that these accomplices had gone on to murder more couples.

That was when Spezi realized something that the police had also learned: the 1968 killing had not been a crime of pa.s.sion. It had been a group killing, a clan killing. Mele had not been alone at the scene of the crime: he had accomplices.

Had one or more of those accomplices gone on to become the Monster of Florence?

The police began to investigate who might have been with Mele on that fateful night. This stage of the investigation delved deeply into the strange and violent Sardinian clan to which Mele belonged. It became known as the Pista Sarda Pista Sarda, the Sardinian Trail.

CHAPTER 8.

The Sardinian Trail investigation illuminated a curious and almost forgotten corner of Italian history, the ma.s.s emigration in the 1960s from the island of Sardinia to the Italian mainland. Many of these immigrants ended up in Tuscany, changing the character of the province forever.

To go back to Italy in the early sixties is to make a journey much longer and deeper than a mere forty-five years. Italy was another country then, a world that has utterly vanished today.

The unified country had been created in 1871, cobbled together from various grand duchies and fiefdoms, ancient lands awkwardly st.i.tched into a new nation. The inhabitants spoke some six hundred languages and dialects. When the new Italian state chose the Florentine dialect to be official "Italian," only two percent of the population could actually speak it. (Florentine was chosen over Roman and Neapolitan because it was the language of Dante.) Even in 1960, fewer than half of the citizens could speak standard Italian. The country was poor and isolated, still recovering from the ma.s.sive destruction of World War II, mired in hunger and malaria. Few Italians had running water in their homes, owned cars, or had electricity. The great industrial and economic miracle of modern Italy was just beginning.

In 1960, the poorest, most backward area in all of Italy was the barren, sunbaked interior mountains of the island of Sardinia.

This was a Sardinia long before the Costa Smeralda, the harbors and yacht clubs, the rich Arabs and golf courses and million-dollar seaside villas. It was an isolated culture that had turned its back on the sea. Sardinians had always been afraid of the sea, because in centuries past it brought them only death, pillage, and rape. "He who comes from the sea, robs," went an ancient Sardinian expression. From the sea came s.h.i.+ps bearing the Christian cross of the Pisans, who cut the Sardinian forests to build their navy. From the sea arrived the black feluccas of Arab pirates who carried off women and children. And many centuries ago-so the legends went-also from the sea came a giant tsunami that wiped out the seaside towns, driving the inhabitants forever into the mountains.

The police and carabinieri charged with investigating the Pista Sarda Pista Sarda, the Sardinian Trail, went back into those mountains, back in time to the town of Villacidro, where many of the Sardinians connected to the Mele clan had originated.

In 1960, almost n.o.body in Sardinia spoke Italian, using instead a language all their own, Logudorese, considered to be the oldest and least contaminated of all the Romance languages. The Sardinians lived with indifference to whatever law happened to be imposed by sos italianos sos italianos, as they referred to the people of the mainland. They followed their own unwritten laws, the Barbagian code, born out of the ancient region of central Sardinia called La Barbagia, one of the wildest and least populated areas in Europe.

At the heart of the Barbagian code was the man known as the balente balente, the wily outlaw, the man of cunning, skill, and courage, who takes care of his own. Stealing, particularly of livestock, was an exalted activity under the Barbagian code when it was committed against another tribe, because, aside from mere gain, it was a heroic act, an act of balenta. balenta. The thief, by stealing, demonstrated his cunning and his superiority to his adversary, who paid a just price for his incapacity to take care of his own property and flocks. Kidnapping and even murder were justified under similar rules. The The thief, by stealing, demonstrated his cunning and his superiority to his adversary, who paid a just price for his incapacity to take care of his own property and flocks. Kidnapping and even murder were justified under similar rules. The balente balente had to be feared and respected. had to be feared and respected.

Sardinians, especially shepherds who lived most of their lives in nomadic isolation, despised the Italian state as an occupying power. If a shepherd, by way of the code of balenta balenta, transgressed the laws inflicted by "foreigners" (Italians), instead of bearing the shame of prison he became an outlaw, joining groups of similar fugitives and brigands who lived in the mountains and raided other communities. Even as an outlaw, he could continue to live secretly in his community, where he was given protection, a welcome, and, beyond that, admiration. To the community, in return, the bandits distributed a share of their spoils, always keeping their depredations away from the home territory. The people of Sardinia viewed the brigand as a person who valiantly defended his rights and the honor of the community against the foreign oppressor, investing in him an almost mythic esteem, a figure of romance and courage.

It was into this clannish environment that the investigators delved as they followed the twists and turns of the Sardinian Trail, prying open an antique culture that made the Sicilian concept of omerta omerta seem almost modern. seem almost modern.

The village of Villacidro was isolated even by Sardinian standards. Lovely despite its great poverty, it sat on a high plain, divided by the river Leni, ringed by craggy peaks. Deer roamed the oak forests beyond the village and royal eagles soared above its red granite cliffs. The great waterfall of Sa Spendula outside the town, one of the natural wonders of Sardinia, was the inspiration for the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio on a visit to the island in 1882. As he gazed in wonder at the series of falls, tumbling down among boulders, he spied one of the local inhabitants: In the lush valley a watchful shepherd,wrapped in animal skins,stands poised on the steep limestone cliffs,like a bronze faun, silent and still.

The rest of Sardinia, on the other hand, considered Villacidro a cursed land, a "country of shadows and witches," as an old saying went. Everyone said that the witches up at Villacidro, is cogas is cogas, covered themselves with long dresses that swept the ground, to hide their tails.

Villacidro was home to a family named Vinci.

There were three Vinci brothers. The oldest, Giovanni, had raped one of his sisters and was shunned by the community. The youngest, Francesco, had a reputation for violence and was known for his ability with a knife-able to kill, skin, gut, and butcher a sheep in record time.

The middle one was named Salvatore. He had married a teenage girl, Barbarina, "Little Barbara," who had given him a baby, Antonio. One night, Barbarina was found dead in her bed, and her death was ruled a suicide by propane gas. But the rumors in Villacidro about this supposed "suicide" were ugly. There were whispers that someone had removed Antonio from his mother's bed after the gas bottle had been turned on, thus saving his life-and leaving the mother to die. Most of the townspeople believed Salvatore had murdered her.

The death of Barbarina was the final straw against the Vinci brothers. The town of Villacidro united against them, and they were compelled to leave. One fine day in 1961 they boarded a ferry for the mainland, joining the great emigration from Sardinia. They landed in Tuscany to begin a new life.

On the other side of the sea, another Barbara awaited them.

CHAPTER 9.

When the three Vinci brothers arrived at the docks in Livorno, they were not typical Sardinian immigrants to Tuscany, stepping off the ferry, clutching their cardboard suitcases, with dazed looks on their faces, the first time out of their small mountain village with scarcely a lira in their pockets. The Vincis were self-a.s.sured, adaptable, and surprisingly sophisticated.

Salvatore and Francesco were the two brothers who would play a major role in the Monster of Florence story. Physically they resembled each other: short and robust, good-looking, with curly, raven-black hair, their restless eyes peering out of the deep fissures in their rough, arrogant faces. Both were blessed with an intelligence far greater than might be expected from their limited background. But despite their resemblance, the two brothers couldn't have been more different. Salvatore was quiet, reflective, introverted, given to reasoned arguments and discussions that he pursued with a mellifluous, Old World courtesy. He wore a pair of spectacles that gave him the air of a professor of Latin. Francesco, the youngest, was extroverted and c.o.c.ky, the man of action with a macho swagger, the true balente balente of the two. of the two.

Naturally, they hated each other.

Once in Tuscany, Salvatore found work as a bricklayer. Francesco spent most of his time in a bar outside of Florence that was an infamous hangout for Sardinian criminals. It was the unofficial headquarters of three famous Sardinian gangsters who had exported to Tuscany a cla.s.sic Sardinian business: kidnapping for ransom. These men were partly responsible for the rash of kidnappings that plagued Tuscany in the late sixties and seventies. In one instance, when a ransom was slow in coming, they killed the victim, who was a count, and disposed of the body by feeding it to man-eating pigs-a detail Thomas Harris used to great effect in his novel Hannibal. Hannibal. Francesco Vinci, as far as we know, never took part in these kidnappings. He dedicated himself to petty holdups, theft, and another venerable Sardinian tradition, rustling livestock. Francesco Vinci, as far as we know, never took part in these kidnappings. He dedicated himself to petty holdups, theft, and another venerable Sardinian tradition, rustling livestock.

Salvatore rented a room in a run-down house occupied by a Sardinian family named Mele, where Stefano Mele lived with his father, siblings, and wife, Barbara Locci. (In Italy, the wife traditionally keeps her maiden name after marriage.) Barbara Locci was slinky and sloe-eyed, with a flattened nose and thick, well-shaped lips. She favored skintight red skirts that showed off a full-bodied figure. When she was a teenager back in Sardinia, her deeply impoverished family had arranged for her to marry Stefano, who came from marginally better circ.u.mstances. He was much older than she, and on top of it uno stupido uno stupido, a simpleton. When the Mele family had immigrated to Tuscany, she went along.

Once in Tuscany, the very lively young Barbara set about ruining the Mele family's honor. She often stole money from her in-laws and went out on the town seeking men, giving them money, and sneaking them back into the Mele home. Stefano was completely unable to control her.

In an effort to put an end to her nocturnal adventures, the patriarch of the Mele family, Stefano's father, put iron bars on the first-floor windows and tried to keep her locked in the house. It didn't work. Barbara soon took up with their lodger, Salvatore Vinci.

Barbara's husband was no obstacle to the affair. He even encouraged it. Salvatore Vinci testified later, "He wasn't jealous. He was the one who invited me to live in their house when I was looking for a place to live. 'Come live with us!' he said. 'We've got a free room.' 'What about money?' 'Give whatever you can.' So I moved into Mele's house. And right away he brought me to meet his wife in bed. Then he urged me to take her to the movies. He said that it didn't matter to him. Or he would go play cards at his social club and leave me alone with her in the house."

At one point Stefano's motorbike was. .h.i.t by a car and he was laid up in the hospital for several months recuperating. The following year Barbara bore him a son, Natalino, but anyone with the ability to count to nine could see that the paternity of Natalino was in grave doubt.

Fed up with this blight on their honor, the patriarch of the family threw Stefano and his wife out of the house, along with Salvatore. Stefano and Barbara rented a hovel in a working-cla.s.s suburb west of Florence, where she continued to see Salvatore, with the complete (and indeed enthusiastic) cooperation of her husband.

"What was her attraction?" Salvatore testified later about Barbara. "Well, when she made love she certainly wasn't a statue. She knew what kind of game it was, and she knew how to play it."