فصل 17

Chapter 17

NIGHT IN the heart of Florence, the old city artfully lighted.

The Palazzo Vecchio rising from the dark piazza, floodlit, intensely medieval with its arched windows and battlements like jack-o’-lantern teeth, bell tower soaring into the black sky.

Bats will chase mosquitoes across the clock’s glowing face until dawn, when the swallows rise on air shivered by the bells.

Chief Investigator Rinaldo Pazzi of the Questura, raincoat black against the marble statues fixed in acts of rape and murder, came out of the shadows of the Loggia and crossed the piazza, his pale face turning like a sunflower to the palace light. He stood on the spot where the reformer Savonarola was burned and looked up at the windows where his own forebear came to grief.

There, from that high window, Francesco de’ Pazzi was thrown naked with a noose around his neck, to die writhing and spinning against the rough wall. The archbishop hanged beside Pazzi in all his holy vestments provided no spiritual comfort; eyes bulging, wild as he choked, the archbishop locked his teeth in Pazzi’s flesh.

The Pazzi family were all brought low on that Sunday, 26 April, 1478, for killing Giuliano de’ Medici and trying to kill Lorenzo the Magnificent in the cathedral at Mass.

Now Rinaldo Pazzi, a Pazzi of the Pazzi, hating the government as much as his ancestor ever did, disgraced and out of fortune, listening for the whisper of the axe, came to this place to decide how best to use a singular piece of luck: Chief Investigator Pazzi believed that he had found Hannibal Lecter living in Florence. He had a chance to regain his reputation and enjoy the honors of his trade by capturing the fiend. Pazzi also had a chance to sell Hannibal Lecter to Mason Verger for more money than he could imagine if the suspect was indeed Lecter. Of course, Pazzi would be selling his own ragged honor as well.

Pazzi did not head the Questura investigation division for nothing - he was gifted and in his time he had been driven by a wolfish hunger to succeed in his profession.

He also carried the scars of a man who, in the haste and heat of his ambition, once seized his gift by the blade.

He chose this place to cast his lot because he once experienced a moment of epiphany here that made him famous and then ruined him.

The Italian sense of irony was strong in Pazzi. How fitting that his fateful revelation came beneath this window, where the furious spirit of his forebear might still spin against the wall. In this same place, he could forever change the Pazzi luck.

It was the hunt for another serial killer, Il Mostro, that made Pazzi famous and then let the crows peck at his heart. That experience made possible his new discovery. But ending of the Il Mostro case was bitter ashes in Pazzi’s mouth and inclined him now toward a dangerous game outside the law.

Il Mostro, the Monster of Florence, preyed on lovers in Tuscany for seventeen years in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The Monster crept up on couples as they embraced in the many Tuscan lovers’ lanes. It was his custom to kill the lovers with a small-caliber pistol, arrange them in a careful tableau with flowers and expose the woman’s left breast. His tableaux had an odd familiarity about them, they left a sense of deja vu.

The Monster also excised anatomical trophies, except in the single instance when he slew a long-haired German homosexual couple, apparently by mistake.

The public pressure on the Questura to catch Il Mostro was intense, and drove Rinaldo Pazzi’s predecessor out of office. When Pazzi took over as chief investigator, he was like a man fighting bees, with the press swarming through his office whenever they were allowed, and photographers lurking in the Via Zara behind Questura headquarters, where he had to drive out.

Tourists to Florence during the period will remember plastered everywhere the posters with the single watching eye that warned couples against the Monster.

Pazzi worked like a man possessed.

He called on the American FBI’s Behavioral Science section for help in profiling the killer and read everything he could find on FBI profiling methods.

He used proactive measures: some lovers’ lanes and cemetery trysting places had more police than lovers sitting in pairs in the cars. There were not enough women officers to go around. During hot weather male couples took turns wearing a wig and many mustaches were sacrificed. Pazzi set an example by shaving off his own mustache.

The Monster was careful. He struck, but his needs did not force him to strike often.

Pazzi noticed that in years past there were long periods when the Monster did not strike at all - one gap of eight years. Pazzi seized on this. Painstakingly, laboriously dragooning clerical help from every agency he could threaten, confiscating his nephew’s computer to use along with the Questura’s single machine, Pazzi listed every criminal in northern Italy whose periods of imprisonment coincided with the time gaps in Il Mostro’s series of murders. The number was ninety-seven.

Pazzi took over an imprisoned bank robber’s fast, comfortable old Alfa-Romeo GTV

and, putting more than five thousand kilometers on the car in a month, he personally looked at ninety-four of the convicts and had them interrogated. The others were disabled or dead.

There was almost no evidence at the scenes of the crimes to help him narrow down the list. No body fluids of the perpetrator, no fingerprints.

A single shell casing was, recovered from a murder scene at Impruneta. It was a

.22 Winchester Western rimfire with extractor marks consistent with a Colt semiautomatic pistol, possibly a Woodsman.

The bullets in all the crimes were .22s from the same gun. There were no wipe marks on the bullets from a silencer, but a silencer could not be ruled out.

Pazzi was a Pazzi and above all things ambitious, and he had a young and lovely wife with an ever-open beak. His efforts ground twelve pounds off his lean frame.

Younger members of the Questura privately remarked on his resemblance to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

When some young smart alecks put a morph program in the Questura computer that changed the Three Tenors’ faces into those of a jackass, a pig and a goat, Pazzi stared at the morph for minutes and felt his own face changing back and forth into the countenance of the jackass.

The window of the Questura laboratory is garlanded with garlic to keep out evil spirits. With the last of his suspects visited and grilled to no effect, Pazzi stood at this window looking out on the dusty courtyard and despaired.

He thought of his new wife, and her good hard ankles and the patch of down in the small of her back. He thought of how her breasts quivered and bounced when she brushed her teeth and how she laughed when she saw him watching. He thought of the things he wanted to give her. He imagined her opening the gifts. He thought of his wife in visual terms; she was fragrant and wonderful to touch as well, but the visual was first in his memory.

He considered the way he wanted to appear in her eyes. Certainly not in his present role as butt of the press-Questura headquarters in Florence is located in a former mental hospital, and the cartoonists were taking full advantage of that fact.

Pazzi imagined that success came as a result of inspiration. His visual memory was excellent and, like many people whose primary sense is sight, he thought of revelation as the development of an image, first blurred and then coming clear. He ruminated the way most of us look for a lost object: We review its image in our minds and compare that image to what we see, mentally refreshing the image many times a minute and turning it in space.

Then a political bombing behind the Uffizi museum took the public’s attention, and Pazzi’s time, away from the case of Il Mostro for a short while.

Even as he worked the important museum bomb case, Il Mostro’s created images stayed in Pazzi’s mind. He saw the Monster’s tableaux peripherally, as we look beside an object to see it in the dark. Particularly he dwelt on the couple found slain in the bed of a pickup truck in Impruneta, the bodies carefully arranged by the Monster, strewn and garlanded with flowers, the woman’s left breast exposed.

Pazzi had left the Uffizi museum one early afternoon and was crossing the nearby Piazza Signoria, when an image jumped at him from the display of a postcard vendor.

Not sure where the image came from, he stopped just at the spot where Savonarola was burned. He turned and looked around him. Tourists were thronging the piazza. Pazzi felt cold up his back. Maybe it was all in his head, the image, the pluck at his attention. He retraced his steps and came again.

There it was a small, fly-specked, rain-warped poster of Botticelli’s painting

“Primavera.”

The original painting was behind him in the Uffizi museum.

“Primavera.” The garlanded nymph on the right, her left breast exposed, flowers streaming from her mouth as the pale Zephyrus reached for her from the forest.

There. The image of the couple dead in the bed of the pickup, garlanded with flowers, flowers in the girl’s mouth. Match. Match.

Here, where his ancestor spun choking against the wall, came the idea, the master image Pazzi sought, and it was an image created five hundred years ago by Sandro Botticelli - the same artist who had for forty florins painted the hanged Francesco de’ Pazzi’s image on the wall of the Bargello prison, noose and all. How could Pazzi resist this inspiration, with its origin so delicious? He had to sit down. All the benches were full. He was reduced to showing his badge and commandeering a place on a bench from an old man whose crutches he honestly did not see until the old veteran was up on his single foot and very loud and rude about it too.

Pazzi was excited for two reasons. To find the image Il Mostro used was a triumph, but much more important, Pazzi had seen a copy of “Primavera” in his rounds of the criminal suspects.

He knew better than to flog his memory; he leaned and loafed and invited it. He returned to the Uffizi and stood before the original “Primavera,” but not too long. He walked to the straw market and touched the snout of the bronze boar “Il Porcellino,”

drove out to the Ippocampo and, leaning against the hood of his dusty car, the smell of hot oil in his nose, watched the children playing soccer .

He saw the staircase first in his mind, and the landing above, the top of the

“Primavera” poster appearing first as he climbed the stairs; he could go back and see the entrance doorframe for a second, but nothing of the street, and no faces.

Wise in the ways of interrogation, he questioned himself, going to the secondary senses: When you saw the poster, what did you hear? . Pots rattling in a ground-floor kitchen. When you went up on the landing and stood before the poster, what did you hear? The television. A television in a sitting room. Robert Stack playing Eliot Ness in Gli intoccabili. Did you smell cooking? Yes, cooking. Did you smell anything else? I saw the poster - NO, not what you saw. Did you smell anything else? I could still smell the Alfa, hot inside, it was still in my nose, hot oil smell, hot from . the Raccordo, going fast on the Raccordo Autostrada to where? San Casciano. I heard a dog barking too, in San Casciano, a burglar and rapist named Girolamo something.

In that moment when the connection is made, in that synaptic spasm of completion when the thought drives through the red fuse, is our keenest pleasure.

Rinaldo Pazzi had had the best moment of his life.

In an hour and a half, Pazzi had Girolamo Tocca in custody. Tocca’s wife threw rocks after the little convoy that took her husband away.