Kitabı oku: «Personal Terror Political Terror»
Guido Pagliarino
Personal Terror Political terror
A novel
Translation by Barbara Maher
Guido Pagliarino
P ersonal Terror Political Terror
A novel
Translation from Italian to English by Barbara Maher
Tektime Dist r ibution
Copyright © 2021 Guido Pagliarino – All rights belong to the author
Original work in Italian:
Il Terrore Privato Il Terrore Politico – Romanzo - Written between 2006 and 2009
1st Edition, in hard copy and in various electronic formats, Copyright © 2012-2013 GDS Editions
2nd Edition, in hard copy printed by Create Space, and in e-books of various formats edited by the author, Copyright © 2016 Guido Pagliarino
3rd Edition, in hard copy and in e-books of various formats, Tektime Distribution, Copyright © 2017 Guido Pagliarino
The cover of this book was designed electronically by Guido Pagliarino, Copyright © of the Author
Apart from persons appearing in news stories and history, the characters, events, people’s names and surnames, the names of organizations and businesses and their locations, which appear in the novel, are imaginary. Any references to real or judicial persons and, in general, to past and present reality are involuntary.
Index
Guido Pagliarino Personal Terror Political Terror Novel
Chapter1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Guido Pagliarino
Personal Terror Political Terror
A n ovel
Chapter 1
The Ear Monster, as the media would quickly have nicknamed him somewhat grotesquely, had committed the first murder on a morning in late September 2000. The victim was a wealthy woman, Maria Capuò Tron, a 52-year-old housewife married to a hospital doctor, killed in their hilltop villa in Turin, in Mongreno Street, while her husband Amilcare was on duty and the family’s domestic help had gone out to do some errands. The couple had no children. The housekeeper, a legal Filipino immigrant, had found the body lying on the floor of the bedroom when she returned. As the autopsy would later ascertain, the victim had not been raped or tortured in any way, but killed quickly, albeit atrociously, by a sharp blow into the ear with an ice pick, which perforated her cerebrum. There was no sign of disarray in the house.
The widower had called the police after the housekeeper had telephoned him at the hospital. He had rushed home and dialed 113.
According to the initial investigations, the murderer could have entered the house through one of the windows on the ground floor, left open on that late-September day still enjoying a taste of summer, after climbing over the wall surrounding the cottage.
The killer, and this would be the only time, had taken some jewelry from a box inside a chest of drawers in the room where the crime had taken place. According to the insurance company, it had an estimated worth of three hundred million lire, or over one hundred and fifty thousand euros today.
In view of the theft, the maid had been the prime suspect, at the very least as a possible insider. With the authorization of Dr Marcello Trentinotti, Deputy Public Prosecutor assigned to coordinate the investigation, the woman had been detained the next morning, taken to Police Headquarters and questioned by Deputy Commissioner Evaristo Sordi. He had been charged with the investigation into the crime by the head of the Homicide Department of the Squadra Mobile, Deputy Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo. As he would later report to the magistrate, Sordi had released the woman towards evening because of a total lack of evidence.
A few days later, a new crime had completely exonerated her, and the different lead of a serial killer was being explored.
Although he had retired in 1984, my dear and only friend Vittorio D'Aiazzo, Emeritus Police Commissioner, had wanted to work on the case in collaboration with the Police as an informal consultant, as he had already done for some particularly interesting cases after his retirement.
Vittorio would turn eighty-two on April 30, 2001, but age had not made him lose his verve. For him, it was not only an intriguing pastime so he could still feel active, but he was "doing a good service to others" as he had once told me, "a service that I want to continue doing to help make this amoral society a little less unjust and, perhaps, make my neighbor a little less unhappy". It was one of his ways of obeying that precept of love which he had tried to implement, I imagine, his whole life and, certainly, since I had met him in the now distant 50s of the bloodthirsty and blood-filled twentieth century that was coming to an end without the promise of any improvement for the next millennium.
I admired the existential faith of my friend, which had very little to do with religion, if with this word we conventionally mean subservience and duty, full of liturgical obligations, to a very powerful and pretentious God, immune from human suffering: it was a faith that he expressed concretely in doing good for others, following the example of his tormented evangelical Master who, according to Vittorio, had spoken about God’s loving feeling in the world. "Of course," he had said to me once, "when a person treads the path of love in regard to one's neighbor, as far as he is able, it is impossible that it doesn’t continue after death, in Eternal Love."
Unfortunately, unlike my friend, I was not and am not a believer; I say unfortunately because, being no longer a young man, I think more often of death and its putrefaction than I did in the past and, if is there is only nothing after our last breath, the tragic futility of life. In any case, it had been precisely this pessimistic feeling that, from a young age, led me to that same desire for justice that drove my friend, even if for me it was a justice that could only be earthly. Convinced as I was that in the cosmic tragedy in which I had a part, complete solidarity between humans was at least indispensable according to the ethos I considered timeless, which every person honors, I had the highest disdain for those who consciously curtailed the gift of life of others, already so brief, and towards violent people in general who caused anguish to human beings during the few years on earth which they were granted.
And I completely agreed with Vittorio when he said that, since the ‘60s of the XX century, civility had been brutalized little by little as many of the traditional philosophical-social or religious ideals weakened and were finally lost. Thus the life of those very people had become simply putting their own selfishness into practice, according to what my friend called the rule of I do as please if it’s seems convenient for me.
Vittorio had made rapid advances in his career from the early 1970s, and had been promoted to Deputy Commissioner at an early age. Then, unfairly, nothing further. He had automatically moved to a higher level only on the day he retired with the pension of Commissioner, as regulations required.
My friend had neither family nor next of kin: he had been a widower with no children for a long time. I was a bachelor who was equally alone, and we felt like brothers.
I’m Ranieri Velli - they call me Ran - journalist and writer and, in the 50s and 60s of the last century, I was a colleague with the rank of deputy sergeant of the then Commissioner Vittorio D'Aiazzo in the Public Security Guards Corp.
I was the younger of the two, just sailing along, let’s say, towards sixty-eight, with a birthday the following 1st of August 2001. Like Vittorio I was already receiving a pension, although I had not ceased my activity as a columnist in the daily press. In the distant past, when there were still no faculties of Communication Sciences and even a non-graduate could become a journalist after the usual internship, I had worked at the glorious Gazzetta del Popolo, a Turin newspaper that, after stops and starts in its last decade of life, had ceased publication altogether on December 31, 1983. So I had moved on to another newspaper, La Gazzetta Libera, founded the following year. It had nothing to do with the previous homophonic daily, even though it too had been created as counterpoint in Turin to the immortal La Stampa which, in essence, meant FIAT. Thanks to the subsidies of an economic group that had an interest in it, the new Gazzetta, even though it never reached the same circulation numbers of the previous one, was still viable at the start of the twenty-first century.
Though Vittorio was my only friend, he instead had more than one, even it they were not as close. Evaristo Sordi could also call himself one of Vittorio’s friends despite not having frequented him socially. Years before, he had been his side-kick in the Homicide Section of the Squadra Mobile after I, his predecessor and part-time writer, had tendered my resignation to devote myself entirely to writing. Evaristo had arrived at the highest career level for a non-graduate and was a senior inspector of sUPS (sostituto Ufficiale di Pubblica Sicurezza, meaning deputy Public Security Officer), commonly called "deputy commissioner" and performing those duties. Not much younger than I, and not far off retirement, the man sported an impressive grey mustache for a long time and despite his age still had a lot of hair, which was salt-and-pepper too. He was a robust figure, just like my friend Vittorio who, unlike Evaristo, was not a very tall man. I was the tallest of the three by quite a bit, almost six feet two, and I had always been very thin although, unfortunately, in recent years I had become a little hunched because of my bad habit, common in tall people, of bending down to the many interlocutors of lesser stature, starting with Vittorio himself.
Vittorio had learned of the first crime from the evening news on television and the following morning had read about it calmly in our newspaper, in an article by the chief crime editor Carla Garibaldi, an unmarried colleague in her forties. She was a woman about five feet eight tall and because of the excessive amount of body building which she "carried out daily" as she had told me, had arms and calves, and probably thighs, a little too muscular for my tastes of an old fashioned kind of man. A protruding jaw and a nose which was too small for the shape of her considerably broad face made her quite ugly. On the other hand, she was a person of great culture with a frank and self-effacing character, and I got along well with her, unlike certain entitled brats on our newspaper.
Just as for cases in the past, by way of me, there had been an exchange of information between Vittorio and Carla, and vice versa which all things considered was to her advantage because my friend was usually in possession of first-hand information, given that he often visited Sordi at Police Headquarters. He had already had crucial clues from the retired commissioner in previous cases, so it was not only out of respectful friendliness that she often welcomed Vittorio into her office and, at times, to the crime scenes themselves and listen to his opinions. In the case of the Ear Monster too, she had very willingly kept Vittorio close.
My friend sometimes went to visit another of his former employees, Deputy Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo who, after a period as Chief Commissioner leading a special department that dealt with magic, esoteric, pseudo-religious and satanic groups, the ACT, Anti Sect Team, sat in the very place that had once been D'Aiazzo’s. Although not as close a friend as Sordi, Pumpo also allowed the old policeman to extract some news out of him now and then which was useful for his parallel investigations.
Chapter 2
The second crime took place five days after Mrs Capuò Tron had been murdered, in October at that point. The victim was Giovanna Peritti Verdani, a 60-year-old widow and pensioner who lived alone in an apartment on Corso Agnelli inherited from her husband. She had a daughter but she was married and lived in Asti. She infact had discovered the body, shortly after 10:00pm of the same day of the murder.
It was her custom to phone her mother every evening, but had not had an answer that time, even though the phone had rung many, many times from 7:30pm onwards; and shortly after 9:00pm the daughter, very worried knowing that her mother never went out after dark, had jumped in the car and had come to Turin. Arriving about an hour later in front of her mother's building and after buzzing uselessly on the intercom, she had let herself in with the spare key she had with her, had gone upstairs and opened her mother’s apartment, which was closed with only a half turn of the lock, as she would later tell the police.
After turning on the light, she had made the gruesome discovery of her mother lying dead on the floor in the entry hall, with her mouth gaping in a grimace of pain, her eyes wide open, blood and brain matter spilling from one ear and a large hematoma on her head.
It would be established that the bruising had been caused by a heavy domestic vase being dropped onto the head, and on which the anatomo-pathologist would find traces of the victim's scalp. The doctor would also determine that, in all certainty, death was due to an ice pick pushed into the ear until it pierced the brain.
The dead woman’s daughter, who barely had time to drop onto a chair, had fainted. When she came to her senses around 10:10pm as she had ascertained on her wristwatch, she had managed to call 113 even though she was still in shock.
Around 11:00pm I had phoned Vittorio on my mobile phone to let him know about the new murder, fulfilling his request to inform him of any developments which might have arrived at the newpaper. Carla Garibaldi had told me about the new crime when I went past her computer station on the way to my desk. She had just had a phonecall from a colleague who, as a rule, hung out in the atrium of the Police Headquarters in the evening and into the early hours of the night, along with colleagues from the city’d other newspaper and the television stations, waiting for crime news. Carla's deputy had then rushed to the scene of the crime with the others, to give his boss any news.
Vittorio had Evaristo Sordi’s cell phone number, and had learned from him that he was at the scene of the crime. He said that the body had not yet been removed, pending the imminent arrival and authorization of the Public Prosecutor Trentinotti for transfer to the morgue for the necroscopy. Sordi had given my friend permission to enter the dead woman's apartment by mingling with the journalists.
He had never had a drivrer’s license and travelled thriftily around the city by tram, but given the hour and the urgency, he had taken a taxi that time. It had been a waste of time and money, though, as he had arrived on the landing outside the dead woman’s apartment when not just the journalists, including Carla's deputy, had moved on, but the coroner, the magistrate and the commissioner had left too. The commissioner had taken the deceased woman’s daughter with him in the service car to officially take down and record her testimony at Police Headquarters. The body was already en route to the morgue. The only people still there were two officers who were putting seals on the door and their deputy superintendent. Knowing D'Aiazzo, he had greeted him cordially; perhaps he should not have done so, but he had also offered to take him to Police Headquarters in his patrol car, an offer which he was not about to refuse, considering that it was close to his home and quite late.
The next day, during his usual stroll under the colonnades of Via Cernaia, Corso Vinzaglio, Corso Vittorio Emanuele and vice versa, he had decided to call into Police Headquarters on the way back. He had asked for Commissioner Sordi, in the hope that he would be there.
He was, and had received him.
Without any preambles, Evaristo had said to him: "I had to leave before you arrived last night... you did come, didn't you?"
"Yes siree."
"I'm sorry, Vittorio, but the magistrate had ordered us to get out and seal up before you arrived. I couldn’t wait for you, as I had to leave with others and take the witness who had found the body with me, the dead woman’s daughter, to make her statement in writing."
"No problem. If you want to, tell me something about this daughter."
"Nothing suspicious about her. In fact it seems from the testimonies of the mother’s neighbors and, furthermore, from the daughter’s neighbors who were questioned just a short time ago by our people in Asti, where she lives with her husband and two children, that the pair of them were very close; as a matter of fact, the daughter and son-in-law often invited the mother to their home, he or she would come to pick her up by car here in Turin so she didn’t have to go back and forth by train, and then they would take her back at the end of the day."
"I see. That poor woman must be feeling a lot of grief."
"Yes, she was heartbroken. Apart from that, since I couldn't wait for you last night, to make up for it I'll tell you everything I know now. First of all, unlike the Capuò Tron case, the murderer entered through the door and not a window because, as you know, the apartment is on the third floor. Furthermore, nothing was stolen this time, at least according to the dead woman’s daughter: perhaps the something disturbed the killer before he could rummage around and steal, and he slipped away quickly pulling the door closed behind him, and it was closed with only one turn (Translator’s Note: locks on doors in Italy have up to five turns and sometimes also vertical bars floor to ceiling are actioned). But perhaps the most important news concerns the victim’s profile: I checked on whether Peritti Verdani was pigeon-holed in our archives and I found records concerning her... in the DIGOS1 office.”
"Well, how about that! Hmm... whereas the first victim...?"
"No, nothing, Mrs Capuò Tron was an angel, poor woman, and had never had any dealings with us at all. But Peritti was a very different kettle of fish, at least in the past, because then she must have calmed down. In the early 1970s, before she married to Verdani, she was a blue-collar worker at FIAT and had been threatened with dismissal several times because of serious union excesses versus non-communist co-workers and against the foreman, we might also say excesses of a revolutionary kind. That Peritti woman was known by the nickname of Pasionaria in the Marxist-Leninist environment, just like the old Dolores Ibarruri of the Spanish Civil War, la Pasionaria di Mirafiori 2 to be precise. Warnings from the company owners led up to her being sacked. But under the so-called Workers' Statute3 , they had to have just cause, as it was called, meaning that if the person who’d been sacked challenged the dismissal, there had to be a reason which an employment tribunal recognised as valid."
"All things considered, it would have been a good law in normal times, but not for those revolutionary years."
"Yes, Vittorio, in fact at that time, as you know, labor judges recognized the just cause only in really extreme cases and Peritti was almost untouchable. It was only in the mid-1970s that the proprietors finally managed to throw her out after a favorable judgment, thanks to an event which was more serious than the previous ones: during one of the many violent protests at the factory gates, she had physically hit her foreman, after she and other trouble-makers had forced him to take part in it."
"Far from being new to stunts of this kind, la Pasionaria had hit him twice with the pole of the red flag she was holding, once on his shoulder and another much more serious blow on his head, that sent him to the hospital unconscious with a lacerated scalp. Unfortunately for her, that time she had carried out the daring feat in front of one of our platoons on public security duty and they had detained her, not without difficulty by the way, as is evident from the report on file, and brought her here to Police Headquarters. They had taken her personal details and she was charged with resistance."
"She had later been sued by the foreman and with one thing and another had been handed a conviction, albeit with parole. What’s more her termination payout had been seized at the request of the injured person's lawyer and had been used to compensate the victim. But above all, to their great satisfaction, the proprietors had been able to kick out that new Ibarruri.
"Our DIGOS agents had continued to keep an eye on her, of course. It was during the years of terrorism and Peritti had exactly the right profile to be suspected of sympathizing with the Red Brigade and the like. From the archive it also appears that, after a short period of unemployment, she had been hired as a warehouse worker at a company manufacturing shower doors and that a few years later she had married a wealthy itinerant fruit and vegetables merchant, and went on to assist her husband in the business. From that moment, smile! from the communist that she had been she became, as everyone knows, a Christian Democrat."
"There's not much to smile about, Evaristo, you know how ideals work in many people. But tell me one thing: would you rule out a political vendetta by someone? Maybe some former comrade, seeing that she had changed sides?"
"A deferred vendetta? Well, you can’t rule it out completely, but a political punishment postponed for so many years doesn’t seem very likely to me and, what’s more, the murder was carried out in the same way as Capuò Tron’s who instead was a tranquil middle-class housewife: it really seems to be the work of the same brain-piercing maniac."
"But you can’t rule out completely that the second killer is someone else and deliberately killed in the same way to deviate suspicions."
"I know, we’ve thought that too, but we think we’ll follow the hypothesis of only one psycho first, and if there are other similar cases, that will confirm it."
"Unfortunately, you should add."
Chapter 3
A third murder, two days after the conversation between Evaristo and Vittorio, had confirmed the suspicion that it was a homicidal maniac, and the media and therefore the public had now dubbed him The Ear Monster.
The victim, 55-year-old housewife Margherita Piccozza Ferini, was the wife of a senior bank employee. This couple too, like the first crime, had no children. They lived in an apartment which they owned in a building in Lungo Dora Voghera. The husband of the slain woman had made the gruesome discovery when he came home from work around 6:00pm and he had alerted 113. The corpse had a noticeable hematoma on the head, like in the second case; this time, however, the blunt instrument had not been found, so the killer must have taken it away with him: the coroner would establish that it was a hammer.
Shortly after 7:00pm, after a quick dinner, Vittorio had gone out to the cinema and had not seen the news on television as he usually did. He had not even watched the late night news when he returned, because he had immediately gone to bed to read a book until he fell sleep. He had therefore only heard about the crime the following morning, from an article by Carla Garibaldi that reported the details.
My friend had phoned Evaristo who was happy to receive him in his office this time too.
The Commissioner had said to him: "Unfortunately for the victim, a German Shepherd dog that the couple kept to guard their apartment and also for personal defense, actually died yesterday morning not many hours before Mrs Ferini's death which took place, according to the coroner’s initial findings, between 3:00pm and 5:00pm. As the widower told us, the animal's body had been cremated for reasons of hygiene by the family’s veterinarian, where his mistress had taken him during the morning for that very purpose. Given that I believe very little in coincidences, I suspect that the murderer had thrown a few poisoned treats to the dog when the animal was in the communal garden downstairs early that morning when the man had let him off the leash. As he sobbed for his wife, the poor man told us he always did that. Their dog Lampo had started to feel ill as they were going up in the elevator and when they went into the house he lay down prostrate on the floor with no strength left. The husband and wife then took him downstairs, with the man carrying him in his arms, and loaded him into the wife's runabout for her to take him to the vet, but at that point the dog died; then, while he certainly went to the bank in his own car in order not to arrive late, his wife took the animal to the vet in her car as planned, but only to have it cremated at that point."
"So, Evaristo, the murderer would not be in the throes of sudden raptus, but carefully prepares his crimes."
"If my idea that the dog was poisoned is true, I would agree."
"It’s bad luck that the animal's body is no longer available for an autopsy."
"That's right."
The fourth murder took place on Sunday, between midnight and 2:00 am according to the coroner. It had been carried out with the usual method of the ice pick jabbed in an ear, but the victim had been a man, a certain Alessandro Cipolla, sixty-six years old, retired, and he had been killed in the street.
My colleague Carla had found out from her deputy, who had had picked up a press release at Police Headquarters, that the dead man was a homeless drunk who in recent years had been living as a vagrant, sleeping under packing boxes in some corner of public galleries or doorways, and that he was already known to the police because of a call from a mobile phone to 113 a couple of months earlier from a woman who was very old but still clear-headed, and had previously been an English teacher. He had pestered her under the colonnade of Via Roma with a surly request for money and when he got nothing from her, he had spat at her. As soon as a patrol car had arrived, the grim teacher had asked the agents to take the particulars of her harasser, who in the meantime had continued to walk around her making raspberries and, alternately, belching foul-smelling effluvia at her.
She had subsequently made a complaint at Police Headquarters the same day but had withdrawn it, however, the following day out of compassion, "after a night of remorse like the Unnamed of Manzoni"4 it seems she had said in all seriousness to the perplexed assistant chief on duty.
The homeless Cipolla ate at soup kitchens and drank away not only his entire pension in bars and wine shops, but also what he could put together from begging, always with an aggressive manner because he was drunk from morning to night. He was a remnant of a man that no person in their right mind would be ruthless enough to strike physically in any way, let alone kill and in such an atrocious manner.
Considering the asocial status of the last victim, Deputy Police Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo, mindful that he had been the head of the Anti Sect Team, had suddenly had the idea that it was a ritual murder by fanatics of the so-called acid youth satanism, not new to attacks on defenseless sleeping bums. Some had been seriously injured, some killed, even though their actions had been performed, until then, by covering the victims with flammable liquid and setting them on fire. Dr. Pumpo had oriented Evaristo Sordi along that line too.
With my mediation, Vittorio had informed Carla Garibaldi of the new lead and she had consequently published an investigative story in La Gazzetta Libera on diabolical sects, which made reference to the Ear Monster’s crimes. My friend was anonymously described as 'a source close to Police Headquarters'.
Chapter 4
[From "La Gazzetta Libera"]
Would the Ear Monster
actually be a diabolical group?
---------------------------------------------------------------
Deputy Police Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo
has oriented investigations also towards the possibility of satanic ritual crimes
Carla Garibaldi
According to a source close to Police Headquarters, after the Ear Monster’s latest murder, the victim a homeless man named Alessandro Cipolla, as we had written previously, it seems that the head of the Homicide Section of the Squadra Mobile, Dr. Giandomenico Pumpo, has turned the investigation in the direction of the small satanic and para satanic youth groups, as it is not unusual fort these cliques to attack victims who are alone and helpless, vagrants in particular, who can easily be assaulted at night while they are sleeping rough.
The phenomenon of Satanism is quite widespread in Italy and particularly in our city, although until now it did not seem to have grown beyond alarm limits: Turin, with Prague, Lyon, London and San Francisco, is one of the princial centers of the cult of Satanism.
As CASOC, Centro Anti Sette Occulte Cattolico 5 made known some timeago, there are three major types of diabolical sectarianism: youth acid Satanism, of which an unidentified group is suspected of the Cipolla murder, historic-traditional Satanism, which is made up of adults, and psycho-sects. CASOC has been led for three decades by the canon Vincenzo Scofiani Biancon, who also performs the task of exorcist at the Curia, but it was founded in 1965, and directed for about a decade by Father Giulio Colamont. At the end of 1970 he had been moved from that role, then becoming parish priest of San Taddeo, a parish he still leads today. The priest had been moved after he was attacked by three young satanist drug addicts in February of that year – hallucinogens are commonly used by youth acid sects. He had been hospitalized with serious injuries and in a state of shock. For many months he had remained psychologically exhausted and underwent neurological therapies.
Juvenile diabolical cult worship, unlike adult and traditional cult practices, spreads propaganda about itself. Its promotion is found first and foremost in the lyrics of songs by famous rock group. These songs are in free trade and some words, if listened to in reverse, sing the praises of the Devil with a subliminal effect on listeners. Worse still, there is music circulating secretly that expressly celebrates atrocities such as rape or even the gutting of children and the killing of Jews, nomads, immigrants and vagrants with gas or fire: the so-called Nazisatanism. For some time now, there are some6 sites on the internet, that wallow in the macabre and demonic salaciousness, and they are increasing. The people influenced by this kind of propaganda practice the teachings they receive in a naïve way, and are therefore of greater danger for the public. On those websites, reviews of literary and cinematographic works of horror and satanic music intermingle with exaltation of the practice of all kinds of wickedness, and consider the various crimes against indiviuals and property as something normal.
Young people are the first to be influenced, but there is no shortage of adults. All of them are attracted by the idea of exercising absolute freedom in transgressing ordinary morality: in reality sheer license is being touted and put into practice, while freedom always presupposes, as a counterpoint, the exercise of one’s duty towards others, an indispensable condition for lasting social coexistence, according to the classical ethical teaching which, in the West, has a biblical matrix.
The step from theoretical learning to implementation is not far, with the result that many Satanists, individuals or, more often, are people in small groups; and it is precisely these people, according to the Police and Carabinieri as well as CASOC, that are the most dangerous for the physical safety of citizens. Do it yourself Satanism is composed of many more people than the official figure says, and there are at least a few thousand elements in our country.
The AST, Anti Sect Team of Police Headquarters, had told the press some time ago that the practice of young Satanists normally follows a precise process. At the beginning, they just indulge in, so to speak, desecrations of graves and other macabre rites in isolated areas where they use human remains and latex sexual simulacra, and sprinkle poultry or sometimes human blood taken intravenously at the time, or that comes from blood bags stolen from blood banks.
The small deconsecrated Santissimo Crocefisso cemetery at number 28 in Via San Pietro in Vincoli in the Aurora Rossini district had been an habitual place for this kind of nefariousness until a couple of years after the attack on Father Colamonti, which took place in that particuar area. To combat things like this, the Municipality had even used it later as an arena for cultural events on summer evenings and the devil worshippers had moved to other places, in the woods around Turin. Acid Satanists quickly switch to more criminal practices, such as carnal violence, carried out even on minors, up to the not remote possibility of ritual killings. Satanic rites can reach horrific levels.
Classical adult Satanism, instead, is much less visible than acid youth satanism and is very well organized, both ideologically and, in particular, in the theological, indeed antitheological sense seeing that the Judeo-Christian God is the object of contempt and the Devil is worshipped as god, considered a martyr of freedom, muddied with wilfullness. This planned and traditional Satanism has a very ancient even pre-Christian origin. It was hounded, mostly from the Renaissance onwards, by both the Inquisition and Protestant tribunals, and unfortunately this hunting also ended with the persecution of many innocent people who had nothing to do with Devil worship.
Classical demonism, even if it does not show itself blatantly and no longer reaches the point of ritual killings of newborns and virgins as in the past, is nevertheless ideologically responsible, because of its terrible masters, for the modern crimes of the acid Satanists and, in general, is the demonistic form most opposed to social goodness, because it broadly fights any traditional moral and civil value with psychological force and ample economic means: its members are socially elevated in unsuspected environments, and constitute lobbies of real economic, political and artistic-cultural power. Many of the intellectuals among them are strongly critical, if not actually caustic, versus Christianity and, above all, against the Catholic Church, pretending to be atheists, but in reality, in their demonic upside-down way, they firnly believe in the supernatural.
This adult demonism is also elitist in terms of the number of members. In Italy, according to CASOC, it consists of just ten groups with a few dozen members each: a few hundred people in all. It is sure that there is one such conventicle in our city, which is among the oldest, again according to CASOC.
Finally, with regard to the third typology of the satanic groups, the psychoscects, according to both Police Headquarters and CASOC they include the largest number of followers, in our country a few hundred thousand, and represent a de facto Satanism that is practiced in the psychological and economic subjugation of the members to their leaders, even as far as slavery, starting with the systematic mandatory donation of their personal patrimony to the group, meaning, in essence, to its leaders. Psychosects, however, do not present external forms of demonic adoration so, like adult Satanists, even these people can arguably be suspected of the Ear Monster’s crimes: as long as, of course, that they are indeed ritual murders as the Deputy Police Commissioner suspects.
Moreover, while on one hand we hope that the new line of enquiry indicated by Dr Pumpo will lead to a rapid end to the evil affair, we must not overlook the fact that the previous victims were assaulted in their own homes.
Chapter 5
The body of the fifth victim, again a female, had been found by the police a few days after her death, thanks to a complaint from a friend and colleague, who had become suspicious because the woman had not showed up at work and had not answered her phone calls. After obtaining authorization fron the magistrate to enter the house, the police had managed to get in by breaking down the door, closed with only half a turn, just like in the first three murders. The victim’s name was Mosca Scrofagnocca, a 58-year-old saleswoman in a maxi shop selling kitchen and bathroom accessories. Unmarried with no relatives, she lived alone, renting an old two-room apartment in Via Stampatori. The crime, according to the magistrate, must have taken place the day after the Cipolla murder. This corpse also showed the signs of a forceful knock to the head prior to the perforation of the cerebrum with an ice pick.
The day after the body was found, Vittorio had learned from Evaristo that counter-terrorism had kept an eye on Scrofagnocca in the 70s and 80s: there were notes about her at the DIGOS office at Police Headquarters, from which it appeared that Scrofagnocca’s revolutionary ideas ran in the family, her parents having been die-hard Stalinists in Togliatti’s Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, and had been known to Police Headquarters as habitual agitators and had occasionally bashed Christian Democrats bill-posters during the first election campaigns. The the two had unfortunately given their daughter the name of Mosca Stalina7 , although, after the tumultuous riots that began in '68 and then collapsed in the 80s, she had used just the name Mosca, which did not immediately recall the now defunct Soviet Union.
An intriguing detail had also emerged from the archives that could prove useful to the investigation into the Monster: the woman been a warehouse worker in the past in the same factory making shower doors where the second victim had also been employed, and more or less in the same years. This could make you think a little more attentively about the political lead, though not disregarding the leads of the demonic group and the psychopathic serial killer.
In the event that the murderer had been a serial killer, it was and interesting fact, according to criminologists and social psychologist counselors at Police Headquarters, that he had never contacted either the media or the police, unlike those serial killers who loved to grandstand with messages, challenging society, like the archetype of all serial killers, the infamous London perpetrator of at least five murders, carried out from 31 August to 8 November 1888. He had sent three letters to the press, presumed to be authentic, and in the first he had signed himself Jack the Ripper, as he would later be called in the newspapers and would go down in the annals of criminology, and in all three missives he had provided alleged clues ridiculing Scotland Yard.
In the case of the Ear Monster, the absence of postal, telephone or e-mail messages had led psychiatric experts to outline some features of his character, albeit with reservations: he, or she if it was a woman, probably suffered from a profound inferiority complex; moreover, he had to experience pleasure, both sadistic and self-damaging respectively, in looming covertly over Turin, scaring it with cruelty and, at the same time, denying himself the intimate satisfaction of revealing himself, at least a little, to the world.
For Deputy Commissioner Pumpo, on the contrary, the Monster's silence validated the idea of the demonic group that killed for ritualistic reasons and that had every interest in remaining in the shadows, like all the satanic communities.
For Commissioner Sordi, the hypothesis of a common killer was worth considering, because the fact that there had been more than one would have favored the perpetration of the murders, but it did not necessarily mean a lot of people and not necessarily a demonic environment. In his opinion it could have been, instead, one of the amateur cases that criminologists called magister-alumnus, meaning a pair of serial killers comprised of one person who conceived the murders and the way to implement them, and an apprentice pupil, the perpetrator or co-perpetrator.
At the time Vittorio considered all the conjectures important and, not being in favor of any of them, he waited for more relevant data.
Chapter 6
Two days after the murder of Mosca Stalina Scrofagnocca, my friend and I were having dinner together around 8:00 pm, like we did almost every week during our long friendship. We always ate at the same place, a restaurant in Corso Palestro not far from our apartments.
After skipping the "appetite killer" starters as he defined them in agreement with me, and after the first course of spaghetti with shellfish which was practcially an obsession for him, being Neapolitan, Vittorio had turned the conversation to the Ear Monster: "Evaristo told me that, apparently, none of the victims had ever complained to relatives or friends, and certainly had never reported receiving threats in general or, political threats in particular, thinking about the two victims who had been involved with the extreme left in the past. Think too that the four prople who were killed in their own home, or so it would seem at least, had let the murderer in: that could make you think that they had been in prior contact with the murderer or murderers."
"Look, Vittorio, it seems the Monster entered from the garden through a window for the first victim."
"I know there is this hypothesis, but that certainly can’t make us rule out that instead the victim had let the murderer into the house. All we can be sure of is that no front door was forced in any case."
"Could the Monster have had the keys to the aparrments?" I had suggested.
"From the victims themselves?"
"Well, no, I'd think of fake copies made in advance, I don't know, somehow getting a cast."
"It's not that easy, you know? It’s only in th movies tat they secretly take key prints on wax and make perfect copies of it. Locksmiths don’t work like that, they start from an original or, if there is no key, they work directly on the lock, and sometimes just replace the whole lock. If anything, I would think of a bump key that can easily open a door if there is just the half turn, apart from the fact that nowadays, as a rule, people lock up as much as possible, even if they’re inside at the time: to the right, to the left, above and below" – he had made the gesture of turning an imaginary key in an equally non-existent keyhole several times – "and I think the half-turn that the relatives found later and, in the case of Scrofagnocca the police, was the obvious consequence of the fact that the murderer had pulled the door closed behind him each time as he escaped, not that there was already just the simple turn when he arrived, except in the first case, because the maid had told Evaristo that she had left a half-turn as usual when she went out. I imagine that poor Mrs. Tron felt safe thanks to the wall surrounding the house and, on the other hand, either she or the maid had opened the windows on the ground floor to let some air inside because it was a warm day, and it would not have made sense to lock the front door with three turns.
"The determing factor, after all, is that all the victims were at home and if the killer had tinkered at the door trying to get in, they would have heard it. So, if in the Capuò Tron case he may have sneaked into the house by climbing the fence and getting through window, for the other crimes someone must have opened up to him from the inside: the victims themselves, I imagine."
"Listen, Vittorio, even if my idea is a bit like soap opera perhaps, couldn’t the murderer have been their lover, for all four women, hence each of them let him into the house without having any suspicions?"
"Their lover? All four of them? That’s an idea which is really over the top, I have to say, although it can’t be ruled out one hundred percent. But what about that old flea-ridden drunken bum? Was he the Monster’s lover, too? Let’s even say he’s bisexual, but I could believe in a relationship if the victim had been a handsome young man; but copulating with a dirty stinking..."
"Oh, if it comes to that, there are all kinds of disgusting sexual tastes, Vittorio! Think of the people who even do it with an aninal, which seems even worse than coupling with an old flea-ridden drunk."
"Yes, and incidentally, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that marriages with an animal or, I don’t know, other depravities such as paedophile sex will unfortunately be legalized in the future: there are many politicians these days with no natural morality, people immersed in weak thinking8 and all they care about is following any change in how his potential voters feel. But leaving aside moralistic concerns, let’s go back to the case of the Monster: if the murderer is always the same for all five victims, we can assume that both the vagrant and the four women had known him before: and didn’t need to have been his lovers! Nevertheless, Cipolla may have been killed not by the Monster as a serial killer, but by an admirer-imitator, or by a personal enemy who wanted to throw off the investigation by using the same method as the Monster."
"All right, Vittorio."
"It’s not unlikely, though, that the serial killer knew at least three of the victims and that they had opened the door to him, and there is another thing too: I suspect that the deceased all knew each other in the past, and indeed in two cases, according to something Evaristo told me confidentially, it’s almost certain. So tomorrow morning I’lll go and check on something in this regard myself and if I get lucky I’ll let you know for your newspaper as well, whereas if it’s a fiasco, nothing doing."
At this point he had started eating the second course, which a kind woman had already brought him a couple of minutes earlier: autumn mushrooms and breaded and fried zucchini flowers, not exactly the maximum for good digestion, especially for a stomach over 80 years old like his.
The next morning, in excellent health, Vittorio had gone to the Registry Office, asking for an executive he knew because, like himself, he was parishioner of Santa Barbara.
Knowing he was Emeritus Commissioner, and ignoring the privacy law, his acquaintance had made an archivist available to him and with his help my friend had discovered the professions of the five victims, according to their old identity cards. Little by little, he had discovered that Capuò Tron, Picozza Ferini and Cipolla had also worked in a warehouse for a long time. It remained to be seen where: had they been at the same shower door factory too?
In the afternoon Vittorio had telephoned Commissioner Sordi to let him know of the coincidence, suggesting that he investigate the archives of the Turin Employment Office to find out in which companies those three had been warehouse workers: "I’m wondering, Evaristo, whether they had been employed in the same company where Peritti and Scrofagnocca had worked."
He had also told me, as we had agreed in case of any developments, to let Carla know so she could get an article out of it.
It had been published the following morning, on the front page. At Vittorio's request, the author had taken credit for the discovery at the Registry Office, because my friend had not wanted to appear in the media; he had told me on the phone: "It isn’t so much out of modesty that I don’t want to be named, but just to be prudent because I don’t want to find the monster in my house putting a hole in my skull with an ice pick, at my venerable age. " From his tone of voice I had guessed he was smiling.
Chapter 7
[From "La Gazzetta Libera"]
All the Ear Monster’s Victims
were warehouse workers. Coincidence?
-----------------------------------------------
Did the victims know each other?
Could their former colleagues also be at risk?
Carla Garibaldi
Sadly, we know there are now five victims of the Ear Monster, all killed with a sharp ice pick planted in the brain through the ear.
We recall that their names were Maria Capuò Tron, Giovanna Peritti Verdani, Margherita Piccozza Ferini, Alessandro Cipolla and Mosca Scrofagnocca.
While the identity and psychological profile of the killer unfortunately remain unknown, a new elementl emerged yesterday from our research in the archives of the Turin Registry Office. As Police Headquarters were already aware, all the victims as well as Peritti and Scrofagnocca had been warehouse workers for years. Capuò Tron had stopped working after her marriage, which was confirmed by comparisons with her successive identity cards, which show that she is a housewife. Ferini Piccozza, also according to the documents, had left work only several years after her marriage, perhaps because her husband, later a bank executive, was still at the beginning of his career and one salary would not have been enough. Cipolla had left the warehouse job only when he retired.
As for the other two victims, Scrofagnocca was still working at the time of her death, at a warehouse for bathroom fittings, while the widow Verdani, who had been retired for about a year at the time of her death, had left her job as a warehouse worker much earlier when she married a trader and had then worked with him.
Although it may only be a suspicion, we would like to ask the investigators some questions:
Having established that all the victims had been warehouse workers, had they worked in the same company at some time in their lives?
Was this company, for all five, the factory making shower doors, which closed down some time ago and where, as Police Headquarters are already aware, the widow Verdani and Scrofagnocca had worked?
If this is the common thread that the killer has followed, could other old co-workers of the victims be in danger? That seems to be a vital question.
With regard to the satanic matrix of crimes hypothesized by Deputy Police Commissioner Pumpo, could the same victims have had anything to do with that environment in any way, in the past? If so, would it be somehow linked to the company in which they worked? And in this case, could the owners not have been aware of it?
carlgari@gazzetta.it
Chapter 8
"I read your colleague's piece," Vittorio had said to me, "and I was a little perplexed."
"Why did she take credit for what was discovered at the Registry Office?"
"No, no, you know I told you myself to ask her to do that. I meant that, at the end of the article, she ventured a little too much: even if she doesn't express herself clearly, it almost seems as if she is insinuating that the owners of the company were demonists: she could get herself sued for moral damage, you know?"
"She’s not afraid of that, she’s insured like all journalists are, myself included: with our job, isn't hard to get yourself a lawsuit, you know?"
"Yes, but doing your best to get one..."
The Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Republic, Marcello Trentinotti, perhaps prompted by Carla's article, had urged Deputy Police Commissioner Pumpo, and he urged Sordi, to get hold of the results of the checks they’d started at the Employment Office as soon as possible. In the meantime, he had asked a registrar to gather all the data relating to the shower factory, Coniugi Corona & Figlio9 , from the archives of the Chamber of Commerce.
It turned out that not only two but all five of the victims had been employees of that company and, for some time, had worked together.
The company had been a family business that had ceased operations in the mid-1980s. Mother and son, Luigia and Attilio Corona, had been owners after their respective husband and father had died of a stroke in the late 1970s.
While the woman had been dead for some time, her son, a fifty-one-year-old man on a disability pension, an architect, had been tracked down and had been summoned to Prosecutor Trentinotti’s office, to be heard as a person of interest. The appointment had been scheduled for October 18 at 10 a.m.
Attilio Corona had arrived on time that morning.
A long conversation with Dr. Trentinotti had followed, recorded by a registrar.
Thanks to her contacts in Court, Carla had heard about the interview and another of her articles had appeared the following day.
Chapter 9
[From "La Gazzetta Libera"]
Did the Ear Monster
know his victims?
---------------------------------------------------
They had all worked in the same company
Carla Garibaldi
Investigators have verified and accepted the hypothesis that the Ear Monster had been on friendly terms with his future victims, when working at the same place. From the archives of the Employment Office it appears that the victims were warehouse workers at Coniugi Corona & Figlio s.n.c., a small family company that manufactured and distributed shower stall doors. It had ceased operations in 1985, due to the illness of the owners, a mother and son.
While it appears that the woman died some time ago her son, Attilio Corona, an architecture graduate not enrolled in the register of architects, has been summoned by Magistrate Dr Marcello Trentinotti to be heard as a person of interest, and he was interviewed yesterday morning.
Dr. Corona is a person of medium height with a slim physique. He arrived dressed in an elegant double-breasted brown suit and silk tie of the same color on a cream shirt, remnants of a well-to-do past, since he claimed to live very modestly, his only income the invalidity pension granted to him following a stroke at the beginning of 1985 not long before he retired from business, not yet forty years old. He seems, however, to have overcome that brain injury well.
He told the magistrate that after the stroke his mother had liquidated the compan; she was elderly at that point and had some memory problems, so was therefore unable to continue running the company by herself.
The architect pointed out that his mother had unfortunately mismanaged the closure of Corona and Son and for this reason the two of them had been left almost in poverty, she with the artisan pension and he with the modest invalid pension, and the studio apartment in which he still lives. He added that not long after the closure, the devastating Alzheimer's disease which must have already appeared at the time of the company's liquidation, had been revealed in all its severity. Fortunately, Corona had returned to fairly good health in the meantime and had been able to assist his mother until she died in 1987 from pneumonia that had become lethal due the woman's chronic brain disease despite prompt hospitalization.
Dr. Corona had shown to be very lucid throughout the conversation with the magistrate, and at his request had then recalled and described the figures of the Ear Monsters’ five victims, all his former employees in the raw materials or the sales warehouse. He basically stated that none of them were noted for their diligence. When asked specifically by Dr. Trentinotti, he replied that he did not know whether they had enemies inside the company, adding of his own initiative that they could have had some outside of it in the environment of the extreme right, since they had been communist militants, something he had realized at the time when he had overheard their conversations.
When asked by the magistrate whether he had perhaps become perplexed of late, knowing that someone was killing his former employees, he replied that he was not aware of it because he did not read newspapers for economic reasons, and did not own a television set, because he did not like television and in any case did not want to pay the licence fee. He explained, without hesitation, that since his mother died and, with her, her pension, he had been very poor, so he was careful about how he spent his money.
Unfortunately, according to rumors at the Court, it does not seem that Attilio Corona’s deposition will be useful to the investigation regarding the Monster.
carlgari@gazzetta.it
Chapter 10
Vittorio thought it could be useful to have a conversation with Attilio Corona so he could study the case of the Ear Monster more thoroughly, so he had taken steps to get the architect's address. Obviously he had looked for him first of all in the telephone directory, but Corona must not have had a landline phone and so his name was not listed. On the other hand, Vittorio had not been able to get any information at Police Headquarters, as the privacy law in force since 1997 did not allow the investigators, and in this particular case Sordi to whom Vittorio had turned, to provide the personal details of witnesses. The Commissioner would certainly have made an exception for Vittorio who was, after all, his de facto collaborator, but Deputy Police Commissioner Pumpo had recently reminded employees of the privacy rules in a peremptory circular, so that when my friend had phoned Evaristo asking him for Corona’s address, the Commissioner had preferred not to reply.
It was Carla Garibaldi who had found the architect’s residence through, I imagine, an investigation agency which she sometimes used, and she told me. I had then immediately phoned Vittorio. In payment he had invited me to dinner at the usual restaurant.
That evening, between the first and second courses, he had told me: "Attilio Corona’s attic is located about three kilometers from here, in the parish of San Taddeo, where that Don Giulio Colamonti is parish priest the one ..."
"... the one Carla wrote about in her article on demonism."
"Yes sir, you have a good memory, he’s exactly that priest who had a nervous breakdown, to say the least, because of being attacked by those satanists."
"The demonic sects pop up again, somehow."
"Indeed. But until proven otherwise, I don’t think Don Colamonti has anything to do with those people any longer. I think he’s been a parish priest for decades and that's all. One more thing: I phoned him a couple of hours ago, and introduced myself as police commissioner, but didn’t say that I am now retired. I asked if I could see him; he accepted. I’ll try to find out what he knows about his parishioner Corona, then I’ll try to speak to him with his help."
Vittorio still had a decent step, despite being well over eighty-one, and the next morning he had walked to the meeting.
As he would later tell me, the priest had become suspicious when he found a man of obvious retirement age in front of him, and had asked him: "Are you Commissioner D’Aiazzo?" emphasizing the word commissioner and not inviting him to sit down despite three ottomans lining one of the walls of the quadrangular foyer, on the ground floor, where he had let him in.
"Yes, to be precise I am an emeritus commissioner, meaning retired, but I am still working as a police consultant."
"Ah, I see."
"As I told you on the phone, I’ve been sent to get information about Dr. Attilio Corona, your parishioner, and possibly be introduced to him after that."
"Which executive in the Police Headquarters do you report to?"
"To Deputy Commissioner Sordi."
"I see. Just a moment please, and in the meantime sit down, if you like."
Vittorio, who was rather tired from the walk, had accepted the invitation. He had realized that the other intended to verify his identity with Police Headquarters, and hoped that Sordi was in the office, regretting that he had not notified him beforehand.
The parish priest had returned about ten minutes later and had sat down smiling next to my friend. Evidently Evaristo, or someone in his office, had supported Vittorio's thesis. The priest had not said anything about it, but had reported that he had called Attilio Corona on his mobile phone suggesting that he come and talk directly to the commissioner, since he lived nearby: he must have considered it preferable to be directly involved in the conversation to be able to intervene as arbitrator if necessary, considering that they were guests in his house.
In the meantime, perhaps just to pass the required minutes but seeming a little indiscreet to Vittorio, Don Colamonti had told him that he himself had given Corona the mobile phone, and had selected it from among surplus in liquidation at a nearby shop, now obsolete because of its considerable size. He added that he also paid for the recharges, since the architect was a member of the Pastoral Council and St. Vincent de Paul and phone contacts came in handy sometimes,. The parish priest had then started speaking trivially about the weather and, shortly afterwards, the doorbell had rung.
As expected, it was Attilio Corona.
My friend had stood up and Don Giulio had made the introductions. Vittorio was a little surprised at the architect's vigorous handshake and had thought that the past stroke must be essentially a tjng of the past, even though Corona still had a permanent rictus at the left side of his mouth, testimony of the cerebral damage.
Don Giulio had commenced: "Now, Commissioner D'Aiazzo, you can question our friend Attilio personally, but if you don't mind, only in my presence."
"Of course, Reverend. As I told you I also came here to be introduced to the architect, and I thank you for making it easier."
The parish priest had nodded his approval and invited the two to sit down, then he had moved a few meters away, standing within earshot: "Please you can both speak freely."
"Listen, architect..."
"... I prefer just doctor, Commissioner D'Aiazzo: I was never enrolled in the register, because it would not have been of any use for my business activity."
"I understand. Look, Dr. Corona, the question might seem a little personal to you, but it may concern our research: you seem strong enough, but it appears you never worked again after the stroke, although you live rather... forgive me... modestly."
Silence.
"Pardon me again, but how come you hadn’t thought of working freelance with your degree, when you returned to good health? Maybe even just as an assistant in a technical studio, you know, to make ends meet?"
"I couldn't have."
"Yes, Dr. D'Aiazzo, it’s like this," Don Colamonti had interrupted, perhaps fearing who knows what suspicions towards his parishioner that he must feel was a friend and protégé. He had turned to Corona: "May I speak, Attilio?"
The other had nodded yes.
The parish priest had continued: "The stroke left after-effects even if they are not obvious, and this was exactly why Attilio obtained the disability pension. Even today he can lose consciousness without warning. It can happen in two ways, as I have seen myself: he either simply faints, with the risk of bruising himself if there is no one beside him to stop him falling to the floor, or he can remain in the state of estrangement for a certain length of time, even though he is still in his feet and continuing to interact with the world."
"Meaning he doesn’t lose consciousness, but isn’t present to himself."
"Yes, and having no memory of it later, as if he had fallen into a trance. Perhaps these are the worst cases, because he could hurt himself even more, even be killed, for example, if he ended up under a car or a tram because he was in the street."
"What do the doctors say?"
"No cure," the interested party had spoken again.
Vittorio had asked him: "After you come back to yourself, don't you remember even a little something, I don’t know, even just a flash of images or some sounds?"
"After I return from the rapture, as I call it, I don't remember anything at all. You understand that it would be impossible for me to keep a job. I tried, you know? after my mother died, I got a job with a surveyor, but... well, it was a nightmare. I resigned, so as not to embarrass the principal and his colleagues. Apart from these very personal things, Commissioner D’Aiazzo" – he had emphasized very personal as, for a moment, his eyes had turned rather ugly – "I don’t know how much use it can be for you Police people, talking to me about the crimes of that serial killer: I have already told the Prosecutor what I know about the victims. Anyway, I'm willing to answer you, but you ask me precisely": he had spoken in a confident tone, like the man accustomed to giving orders that he must have been when he was in business.
"How were your relationships with the staff?"
"They were not satisfactory. As I have already told the magistrate, the staff were neglectful, even though we did our lawful duty to the full."
"Those five people killed by the Monster were just neglectful, or insubordinate or... even something worse? We know that they were years of fierce protest in the workplace."
"Look, commissioner, maybe I’ll tell you something about my family first, so you can understand better."
"Excellent family!" the parish priest had not restrained himself.
"Thank you, Don Giulio. Well, commissioner, my father was an orphan of an craftsman father who died in an accident at work, and had had to start working at the age of twelve as an apprentice and then as a bricklayer with an uncle, a small artisan builder. But he wanted to improve and, gritting his teeth, had studied as a surveyor at an evening school. Despite the obstacles, he graduated at the age of nineteen. Then he got a municipal job by winning a competition. He had to leave it almost immediately, though, because he had been drafted into the military. The war had started and he served in Sicily in one of the coastal battalions, as a complement second lieutenant. In July 1943, during the Anglo-American landing, he was taken prisoner with his whole regiment and relegated to a camp in Texas. He had been repatriated only at the end of the war, and had resumed his job in the Municipality of Turin as was his right.
It was in early 1947 that my father met my mother, during an evening at the home of mutual friends. Mom said it was love at first sight between dad and her, and they decided to marry shortly after. Meanwhile, my father had changed jobs, hired as technical director by the small company that would become our family business. My paternal grandfather was dead by then: in the early days of the war, he was gunned down in the street by the pilot of one of those French sniper fighters that fascist propaganda mockingly called Goofy, but which did quite a lot of harm to innocent civilians. My maternal grandmother was also killed in the war, during the great bombardment of Turin on the night between 12 and 13 July 1943, when my mother had just turned twenty. Only my maternal grandfather, a bank manager, had survived the conflict, but he died of a heart attack the year after my parents married and my mother had inherited a fair amount of assets from him: it was 1947.
"Two years later, I had just been born, the owner of the company where Dad worked decided to sell it and, thanks to mom's capital and bank loans, my parents had taken over. Serious people, totally dedicated to work and incapable of squandering, they had deservedly made a good fortune, repaying the loans and then investing in the company, creating jobs and, little by little, putting money into some apartments as well.
"They had always worked hard and would have deserved praise and never, never, attacks from employees. They kept to the rules and paid them on time, unlike certain competitors. Instead, by 1976 the company had been attacked by the staff who were indifferent to my parent’s continuous sacrifices. Obviously they went against me as well, even more actually because I had been given everything on the so-called silver platter,"
"It was an injustice, Attilio," Don Giulio had sympathized with him, movoing close to him and putting his right hand on his left shoulder; so Vittorio had noticed that the priest was not left-handed.
My friend had asked the architect, "When, exactly, did you join the business?"
"At the end of 1975, I was twenty-six. I had lived the best part of my life up to then, until the time, I mean, after graduating in architecture and doing my military service, I was made a part of my parents’ business. With the worsening of social protest in general, the attacks had become hard in our business as well and, worse, they had weighed on us even further after we hired two very negative elements almost simultaneously: Maria Capuò, the dwarf as she was called among us because she was no taller than five feet five, and Giovanna Peritti, the Pasionaria di Mirafiori as she herself boasted of being called by her fellow party members.
They had soon become the ringleaders of the protesters in our vulnerable little family business. Because of these systematic attacks from the staff, the morale of we three owners became increasingly despondent. At the height of the protest within the business, the distress my mother and I were experiencing got worse, a lot worse because my father had died from a stroke which was indirectly provoked, I’m sure, by that Giovanna Peritti: the day before his death, as she had told us shortly afterwards, Dad had given her an order and without even hearing to him to the end had insulted him, saying: 'You old fool, what do you understand being the fascist that you are?!' and gave him a shove. Since he was rather old, it had knocked him to the ground. There had been no witnesses, of course, we were in the office; the woman was smart and had got away with it. With no witnesses it would have been useless to report her, even harmful, and not having reported her it was impossible to send her away, because of the Workers' Statute."
"So you had a lot of employees, then."
"No, commissioner, but we did have more than fifteen, unfortunately. With that number the Statute required us to provide the so-called just cause to be able to dismiss anyone: even family businesses like ours."
"How many staff did you have, exactly?"
"Eighteen, at that time: it was never a large company. It was my mother’s innocence that had taken us over the limit of fifteen workers. In 1976, not knowing the law or informing my father and me, my mother had hired an apprentice worker, a good boy what’s more called Piero, and three individuals who would soon turn out to be subversives, Maria Capuò, Giovanna Peritti and Ruggero Rigoletti, all at the same time and without askimg for references on them. So mother, poor woman, had irresponsibly taken our staff from fourteen to eighteen workers. Then that Rigoletti, after creating all his great disasters, had quit, and... oh, yes! years later I would find out that he had become a member of the Red Brigade and that he had been arrested and convicted, and I believe he is still in prison..."
"... hmm..."
"... that's right; but apart from that, the staff numbers did indeed decrease after his resignation, but since there were still unfortunately seventeen, and too many, the Statute remained in force; and it also established employees’ rights to internal company organization, which meant continual confrontations between us and the trade union committee."
"Who was on the committee?"
"They were actually the five killed by the Monster; no, wait, first there was that Rigoletti, not Alessandro Cipolla who had taken over from him when the other had resigned."
Don Colamonti had intervened, with a worried tone and expression: "Attilio, are all these things are really useful?"
"Because, maybe..."
"... well, yes. You're a good man, but you run the risk of having people unfairly think badly of you." The parish priest had addressed Vittorio: "I am Attilio’s confessor, and I assure you that he is a very good person and that he does not hold grudges against anyone".
"I don't doubt it, Reverend," my friend had said ignoring it, and had turned to the former entrepreneur: "Earlier you spoke about your father who died from a stroke..."
"Yes, that the day after the confrontation with Giovanna Peritti that he had suffered, he had died of a stroke. My mother and I were left alone to respond to the violence of our homegrown rebels. I was very depressed by then, my mother’s nerves were shaken almost to hysteria; and I think that's what led the poor woman to Alz... because mom was later affected by Alzheimer's disease."
"We know that."
"I think mom, like me, became ill because of those troublemakers. It was a shocking psychological situation because the business was now in financial difficulties, which would have required the staff’s full cooperation, if only to try to achieve a balanced budget, whereas those people were making the gallows for us ...
Don Colamonti coughs insistantly.
"... yes, yes, Don Giulio, you’re right, but someone who, like me, has never hurt his neighbour must not fear the truth."
"Hmm..." was all that had come from Don Colamonti, but with an expression very similar to a mask from a Greek tragedy.
"Commissioner," Corona had continued as if, on the contrary, the priest had smiled in approval "those people inflicted us with any action that could damage us, as long as they didn’t run the risk of paying for it. For example, they secretly ruined goods ready for shipment, or slandered us with customers and suppliers, and the dwarf was a specialist in this, or they deliberately arrived late for work every second day, all of them in agreement, both the two ringleaders and their followers, meaning almost everyone. Then, with futile excuses there were sporadic internal strikes, whixh were sudden and even for just a few hours, but of enormous damage especially when there were urgent orders to be fulfilled: theywanted us to lose customers.
"In the end, those troublemakers verbally abused the few colleagues who were not working against us and with pushes and shoves as well, until they humbled them into obedience, and arrived at physically assaulting one of them, Piero. Poor thing, that good young man’s surname was Mèrdon, as I pronounce it and as he would always introduce himself, with the accent on the vowel e, but his colleagues called him, sneering, Merdòn, with an emphasis on the o10 . His companions in the orphanage where he had grown up had already insulted him that way: he vented his feelings about it once with my father and since he liked the boy, he took his side, because Piero was also studying a higher education course in the evening after work, just as he had done. That young man was perhaps the only one who really was not our enemy, the best of our employees, and I remember him with pleasure: there is, thank goodness, some child of the light after all among many children of the darkness. "
Vittorio had commented: "Once he was of major age he could have asked to change his surname at the registry office; and it's strange that his parents hadn't already done it."
"They must have been poor ignorant people, certaily the family was of poor social extraction, as Piero himself had once confided bitterly to my father: his father had been a common labourer often unemployed, his mom, just think! was the caretaker of a public toilet and because of the surname she had acquired by marriage, was subjected to bad jokes by her neighbors, in a casa di ringhiera11 at Porta Palazzo, you know? uneducated people. Piero had also vnted his feelings about this too with my father, telling him they said things about her like: 'La Merdòn does honor to her name, she works in the crappers!' – 'Let's hope for her sake that she doesn’t fall inside, otherwise if they flush, goodbye Merdòn': these were things that the child had heard directly, and suffered terribly because of it. I think he wanted to get ahead by studying because of that as well.
"Even more unfortunately, he had been orphaned by both his parents very young, at the age of eleven, when a bus hit them as they were crossing Corso Regina Margherita arm in arm, near their house. It wasn’t the driver’s fault though, as they were not on the pedestrian crossing, so there had not even been any compensation to their son. The child had simply been admitted to an orphanage. When he finished eighth grade it was the mid-1970s. As was the custom, the people in charge had looked for work for him so he could maintain himself in the institution as he had to stay there until he reached the major age, which had recently been lowered from twenty-one to eighteen years. They had found a job for him as an apprentice laborer: with the eighth-grade diploma, he was allowed to start work after the age of fourteen rather than after sixteen as was the rule, with special authorization from the Employment Office. That was so as not to leave the smartest young people who did not continue school, doing nothing for two years, as idleness could do him harm.
"The young man loved culture and wanted to get ahead, so he would gladly have continued his studies full-time if the orphanage had allowed him to, but it was not foreseen by the regulations. So thanks to the salary, only part of which he had to give the orphanage, the director who had guardianship over him approved Piero’s enrolment at an evening school in a course for primary school teachers which in those years was still only four years. Apart from that, perhaps because he was accustomed to the strict discipline of the college, the young man was polite and well-behaved towards us and, as I said, always arrived on time at work, also because he had absolutely no subversive ideas at all: he had told us he was a demoliberal like his director. I think that is also why he was unpopular with our revolutionaries and, I imagine, also because he continued to study with the prospect of being promoted. Sometimes it is mere envy behind the revolutionary ideal, Mr. Police Commissioner. In return, and I sensed it from certain looks he gave those colleagues, he had a strong dislike for them as well, if he did not actually detest them,"
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