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 Mostró
’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 Mostró
for a short while.
Even as he worked the important museum bomb case,
Il Mostró
’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.
T
OCCA WAS
a dream suspect. As a young man, he had served nine years in prison for the murder of a man he caught embracing his fiancée in a lovers’ lane. He had also faced charges of sexually molesting his daughters and other domestic abuse, and had served a prison sentence for rape.
The Questura nearly destroyed Tocca’s house trying to find evidence. In the end Pazzi himself, searching Tocca’s grounds, came up with a cartridge case that was one of the few pieces of physical evidence the prosecution submitted.
The trial was a sensation. It was held in a high-security building called the Bunker where terrorist trials were held in the seventies, across from the Florence offices of the newspaper
La Nazione
. The sworn and besashed jurors, five men and five women, convicted Tocca on almost no evidence except his character. Most of the public believed him innocent, but many said Tocca was a jerk and
well jailed. At the age of sixty-five, he received a sentence of forty years at Volterra.
The next months were golden. A Pazzi had not been so celebrated in Florence for the last five hundred years, since Pazzo de’ Pazzi returned from the First Crusade with flints from the Holy Sepulchre.
Rinaldo Pazzi and his beautiful wife stood beside the archbishop in the Duomo when, at the traditional Easter rite, these same holy flints were used to ignite the rocket-powered model dove, which flew out of the church along its wire to explode a cart of fireworks for a cheering crowd.
The papers hung on every word Pazzi said as he dispensed credit, within reason, to his subordinates for the drudgery they had performed. Signora Pazzi was sought for fashion advice, and she did look wonderful in the garments designers encouraged her to wear. They were invited to stuffy teas in the homes of the powerful, and had dinner with a count in his castle with suits of armor standing all around.
Pazzi was mentioned for political office, praised over the general noise in the Italian parliament and given the brief to head Italy’s cooperative effort with the American FBI against the Mafia.
That brief, and a fellowship to study and take part in criminology seminars at Georgetown University, brought the Pazzis to Washington, D.C. The chief inspector spent much time at Behavioral Science in Quantico and dreamed of creating a Behavioral Science division in Rome.
Then, after two years, disaster: In a calmer atmosphere, an appellate court not under public pressure agreed to review Tocca’s conviction. Pazzi was brought home to face
the investigation. Among the former colleagues he had left behind, the knives were out for Pazzi.
An appellate panel overthrew Tocca’s conviction and reprimanded Pazzi, saying the court believed he had planted evidence.
His former supporters in high places fled him as they would a bad smell. He was still an important official of the Questura, but he was a lame duck and everyone knew it. The Italian government moves slowly, but soon the axe would fall.
I
T WAS
in the awful searing time while Pazzi waited for the axe that he first saw the man known among scholars in Florence as Dr. Fell….
Rinaldo Pazzi, climbing the stairs in the Palazzo Vecchio on a menial errand, one of many found for him by his former subordinates at the Questura as they enjoyed his fall from grace. Pazzi saw only the toes of his own shoes on the cupped stone and not the wonders of art around him as he climbed beside the frescoed wall. Five hundred years ago, his forebear had been dragged bleeding up these stairs.
At a landing, he squared his shoulders like the man he was, and forced himself to meet the eyes of the people in the frescoes, some of them kin to him. He could already hear the wrangling from the Salon of Lilies above him where the directors of the Uffizi Museum and the Belle Arti Commission were meeting in joint session.
Pazzi’s business today was this: The longtime curator of the Palazzo Capponi was missing. It was widely believed
the old fellow had eloped with a woman or someone’s money or both. He had failed to meet with his governing body here in the Palazzo Vecchio for the last four monthly meetings.
Pazzi was sent to continue the investigation. Chief Inspector Pazzi, who had sternly lectured these same gray-faced directors of the Uffizi and members of the rival Belle Arti Commission on security following the museum bombing, must now appear before them in reduced circumstances to ask questions about a curator’s love life. He did not look forward to it.
The two committees were a contentious and prickly assembly—for years they could not even agree on a venue, neither side willing to meet in the other’s offices. They met instead in the magnificent Salon of Lilies in the Palazzo Vecchio, each member believing the beautiful room suitable to his own eminence and distinction. Once established there, they refused to meet anywhere else, even though the Palazzo Vecchio was undergoing one of its thousand restorations, with scaffolding and drop cloths and machinery underfoot.
Professor Ricci, an old schoolmate of Rinaldo Pazzi, was in the hall outside the salon with a sneezing fit from the plaster dust. When he had recovered sufficiently, he rolled his streaming eyes at Pazzi.
“La sólita arringa
,” Ricci said, “they are arguing as usual. You’ve come about the missing Capponi curator? They’re fighting over his job right now. Sogliato wants the job for his nephew. The scholars are impressed with the temporary one they appointed months ago, Dr. Fell. They want to keep him.”
Pazzi left his friend patting his pockets for tissues, and went into the historic chamber with its ceiling of gold
lilies. Hanging drop cloths on two of the walls helped to soften the din.
The nepotist, Sogliato, had the floor, and was holding it by dint of volume:
“The Capponi correspondence goes back to the thirteenth century. Dr. Fell might hold in his hand, in his
non-Italian
hand, a note from Dante Alighieri himself. Would he recognize it? I think
not
. You have examined him in medieval Italian, and I will not deny his language is admirable. For a
straniero
. But is he familiar with the personalities of pre-Renaissance Florence? I think
not
. What if he came upon a note in the Capponi library from—from Guido de’Cavalcanti, for instance? Would he recognize it? I think
not
. Would you care to address that, Dr. Fell?”