The Dark Heart of Florence

Book 6: Michele Ferrara

by Michele Giuttari

Genres: Historical Fiction; Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

'It was a night that would be long remembered. The Florence police would come to call it a night of horror, the start of a new nightmare . . .' After enduring years at the mercy of an infamous serial killer, the people of Florence rejoice at news of his death - until a senator is found brutally murdered. To Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara the case is very much alive. But, with a powerful adversary conspiring against him, he is trapped in a spiral of corruption and deadly speculation. As the truth comes to light, Ferrara is left standing face-to-face with something truly rotten at the heart of the city . . . The Dark Heart of Florence is an evocative, gripping work of detective fiction, and a major bestseller across Europe. Originally published in Italian as I Sogni Cattivi di Firenze. 'A crime author with impeccable credentials: Giuttari is no less than the former head of the Florence police force, where he was on the case of the notorious serial killer The Monster of Florence. Who better to write about the dark undercurrents beneath the surface of the city?' Booklist

Release date: July 18, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

These days even the bed annoyed her.

It seemed narrower and narrower. And she hated the mattress: misshapen, worn flat, covered in stains. It was filthy. She couldn’t stand it any more. Just as she couldn’t stand the food. She hated that, too. It was so awful, and it often made her feel sick.

She hated everything.

She lay on her back, wearing nothing but white knickers, her hands down by her sides, her eyes closed. Every now and then she would open them and glance distractedly at the small TV screen on the wall, her mind filled with fantasies about the coming hours.

Not much longer, she kept telling herself, and then she’d never have to see this shithole ever again.

Suddenly a voice from the TV caught her attention and her big dark eyes focused on the face of a blonde presenter, a face that had probably undergone countless rounds of plastic surgery.

Shit, were they going over all that again?

The programme was reconstructing the crime that had brought her to this damned prison fourteen years earlier, when she was only sixteen. A teenager full of life and dreams, like any other girl her age. She was a grown woman now, and she was going to make up for lost time.

Why didn’t they mind their own fucking business? Why didn’t they talk about the deaths in Iraq? The torture of civilians? World hunger? Dying children? Rape and violence against women? No, they had nothing better to do than rehash these old stories.

She watched the programme through to the end, and the final question they asked sent a wave of anger through her: ‘Can we really be sure that she’s no longer dangerous?’

Furiously, she pressed the OFF button on the remote. If she could have, she’d have thrown the TV set out of the window. She closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands and took a series of deep breaths. Then she got up and put on the usual bright red cotton overalls. She brushed her jet-black hair and tied it in a ponytail.

‘It’s time for your phone call,’ the guard said, stopping outside the door and looking in at her through the spyhole. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on, then.’ The guard put the key in the lock and turned it several times, then motioned to her to follow her along the corridor. As they walked, they were hit by a strong whiff of garlic: someone must be cooking. It was always the same in this wing, at any hour of the day.

‘So, my girl, off tomorrow, are you?’ came a woman’s voice she recognised, shouting raucously. ‘What are you going to do next?’

The woman sounded as if she’d only just woken up: the same woman who usually stuck her nose into other people’s business, who hadn’t taken kindly to the news that, thanks to advantages not available to the other inmates, she was being released.

‘Bet you’re counting the hours, eh?’ the woman continued.

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ she replied, irritably, and walked faster, though not fast enough to avoid hearing the last few words: ‘You’re going to have it hard outside, sweetheart, take it from someone who knows life better than you do.’

She spun round and stared at the woman; the face, trapped behind the iron bars, seemed deformed. ‘Fuck off, you bitter old witch – don’t you dare pass judgement on me and smile with the few rotten teeth you have left!’

‘That’s enough!’ the guard yelled, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her away. ‘Let’s get a move on! As for you,’ she added, turning back to the woman in the cell, ‘just shut it. You’re always poking your nose in where it’s not wanted.’

The corridor fell silent except for the echo of their footsteps.

They finally reached the telephone attached to the wall. She dialled the number while the guard moved about six feet away, although still keeping her in view. She knew the number off by heart. She had been given it during their last session the previous week.

The phone was answered on the first ring. ‘It’s me,’ she said, and felt an immediate sense of wellbeing. The anger had suddenly disappeared. She looked up at the ceiling. The paintwork, peeling in places, reminded her of the old villa where she had spent her childhood. A whole lot of images and sounds flashed through her mind, things she had never forgotten: the city’s chaotic traffic, the deafening noise of the discos, the excited voices of young people in the squares.

‘I’ve been waiting for your phone call, darling,’ the voice at the other end said.

‘I’ll be out of here tomorrow. You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’

‘Of course not! Call me as soon as you get out.’

‘OK. I can’t wait to see you. Until tomorrow, then. Love you.’

‘Me too.’

She hung up and walked back to her cell, barely aware of the guard, who never took her eyes off her for a moment. Her heart was beating ever faster with the thrill of freedom. She could almost smell it. She had dreamed of it and wanted it for so long, it no longer scared her. In the morning a new life would be waiting for her. In the morning she would leave the past behind, a past she wanted to erase completely, to bury.

And then you can all fuck off! she said in her mind to the short, plump guard, to that inmate who couldn’t mind her own bloody business, to the others who had either shunned her or tormented her, to the smell of garlic in her nostrils, and to the boredom, which only someone who had been in prison could understand.

Tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll be a free woman! 







Dead silence.

A man dressed completely in black was sitting behind the big, solid desk.

In the last few hours, he had gone over and over his carefully worked-out plan until it was burnt into his mind. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake. The fateful moment was drawing near. Only a few minutes now, at most a few hours. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance, which was why he was weighing up all the things that could possibly go wrong.

All at once he took his hands away from his temples and rubbed his eyes. Maybe it was the light from the candelabra bothering him. He took a deep breath.

Abruptly, he turned his armchair towards the wall behind him and looked at the brocade curtains covering the windows, on which the light in the room seemed to throw unsettling shadows, then at the big oil painting hanging just behind the desk.

It was a portrait of a man with a thick grey beard, wearing a severe uniform and a long dark cloak over his shoulders. It had struck him immediately as soon as he had entered the room: the man seemed to be staring at the spectator, the eyes so piercing that they seemed alive. The longer he looked at the painting, the more the hate boiled up in him. He wanted to tear the man’s heart from his chest, erase all trace of him from the face of the earth for ever.

After a moment or two, he looked again at the curtains then turned and folded his hands on the desk.

Just then, the silence was broken by the creaking of the front door, a sound that was like heavenly music to his ears. He turned to the half-closed door of the room and listened. Now he could hear footsteps in the corridor. Someone was coming closer. He quickly glanced at his watch: the fluorescent hands showed 11.47.

He was really close now.

How he despised him!

After a few moments the door opened and an old man, impeccably dressed in a dark blue lightweight suit with a carefully knotted matching tie and shiny black shoes, appeared in the doorway. He was extremely thin, with a pale face and a slim moustache. When he saw the stranger, he froze, and a shudder went through him.

How could it be? he wondered. How could it possibly be him? But those hard, ice-cold eyes were unmistakable.

Calmly, the man in black raised his right arm. The old man saw the barrel of the gun pointing straight at him, and understood.

At last! the man in black said to himself.

The hour had come: his journey was about to begin. His adventure. The real thing, just as he had imagined it.

The first piece of the jigsaw. 

It was the night of Saturday 28 August 2004. A night that would be long remembered. The Florence police would come to call it a night of horror, the start of a new nightmare.

A sudden cry rang out.

Just one.

‘Go to hell!’ the man in black whispered.

His finger squeezed the trigger.







That was just the beginning. 

The man in black was outside now, beneath a starry sky, lit by a weak crescent moon. Around him, quiet and calm. All he could hear were the sounds of the night, the hum of insects, that buzz that disappeared during the day. The hill was deserted. There was nobody and nothing in sight, not even the headlights of a car.

It was so peaceful here.

He knew the place very well. Here and there he could see a few weak lights outside sleeping villas and cottages. Cautiously, keeping a safe distance, he passed a few of them, breathing in the scent of wild herbs. At the end of a narrow path he came to a security fence. It was about eight feet high, but there was no barbed wire at the top. He stretched his arms up as high as they would go and grasped the netting, at the same time bracing his feet against one of the posts. He put his left arm over, then the right, then one foot after the other, and in the blink of an eye he was on the other side. He landed on a lawn.

Then, camouflaged by the darkness, he walked along the edge of the road. For a while he was accompanied by the song of an owl. From time to time he paused amid the undergrowth to catch his breath. He calculated that the first glimmer of dawn would soon appear on the horizon; the outlines of the hills would become ever sharper, the countryside ever greener. Coming to a small clearing among the trees, he stopped for longer.

He had planned this, too.

He took off the black tracksuit, from which he had removed the label. It was splattered with fresh blood in several places. From his backpack, he took a change of clothes and shoes and put them on. He dug a hole in the ground with a small stick and hid the clothes he had been wearing, and then, in a separate hole a short distance away, the shoes and the gun. He was not the least bit concerned that the police might find them, assuming they were capable of doing so. He took another gun from his backpack, a Beretta 7.65 semi-automatic, which, like the first gun, had had its serial number filed off, and tucked it into the back of his jeans. Then he tied his long fair hair into a ponytail and set off again. The only sound was the noise of his steps on the little cobbled road.

His one aim was to get away from here as quickly as possible. That was all that mattered. He was sure he had left no clues behind: no prints, no traces of DNA. Nothing at all. The police would be driven crazy. Their investigations would lead them nowhere, he was sure of that. The most dangerous part was behind him.

And as he continued walking at a steady pace, he had to hold back a laugh. He had really enjoyed himself, more than he had done for a long time.

He had watched the bastard die!

He went over the whole sequence of events in his mind, from the beginning, as if it were a horror film. Down to the smallest detail, the slightest gesture. It hadn’t been a fleeting, elusive dream. It hadn’t been the death scene he’d imagined every time he’d closed his eyes to sleep over the last few days. No, this time, it had all been real. No longer a fantasy, but pure reality, the realisation of his evil dreams.

One of many.

He would remember tonight as one of the most beautiful of his life. He was as sure of this as he was that nobody would stand in the way of his plans.

The man had collapsed at his feet, arms dangling like a puppet’s, imploring him with his eyes, moving his lips once or twice, but to no avail. He knew why, he knew what had been going through the man’s mind. Then the final touch: the blood spurting from his head like water from a fountain.

He had been patient, and he had been rewarded for his patience.

He suddenly heard a noise and turned. It was only a night bird. He watched it as it disappeared into the woods.

He felt free. Incredibly free.







Ferrara was enjoying the slight coolness of the morning. It wouldn’t last long: in a few hours the summer heat would descend on Florence, as it had in the past few days. Even though summer was coming to an end, this infernal heat seemed to be holding on for as long as possible. And today, as every day, time would move as slowly as the people in the streets.

He had been back in Florence for a couple of weeks. While he was away, he had really missed this view – from the Ponte Vecchio to San Miniato al Monte and beyond, as far as the wonderful hills – which he enjoyed from the roof terrace of his apartment on the Lungarno degli Acciaioli. He had bought the apartment ten years earlier, when the property market in the city, as in the rest of the country, was in crisis, and the prices were affordable. Both he and his wife Petra considered this one of the most beautiful spots in the historic centre.

The city would soon come to life. In Florence, Sunday was a day like any other. You could already see the first street vendors pushing their stalls towards the nearby Uffizi Gallery, where in just a few hours’ time the usual queue, made up of visitors from every corner of the earth, would form, drawn by the museum’s outstanding collection of Tuscan and European art.

The street artists and performers would also be showing up soon: painters, portrait artists, mimes. The bars had already started to serve their first coffees and the few shops that opened on Sundays would shortly be ready to welcome tourists, mostly Japanese and American, devoted customers of those fashion brands that could boast the prestige of a branch in Florence.

Ferrara glanced at the hills, where the morning mist was evaporating in the sunshine.

As he waited for the usual hearty breakfast that Petra was lovingly preparing in the kitchen, he opened the newspaper. The front page headline announced twenty-one deaths on the Italian roads the previous day. Another bloody Saturday: all too common at this time of year, he thought, shaking his head. The most serious accident had occurred on the autostrada between Salerno and Reggio Calabria, the notorious A3 with its endless roadworks. A family of four, husband, wife and two teenage children, had burned to death after a terrible collision with a speeding four-by-four. There had also been tailbacks and long delays on the roads to the major northern cities and around the border areas.

So staying at home at this time of year wasn’t such a bad idea after all, he thought.

‘My parents send their love,’ Petra said with a smile, putting the tray down on the Caltagirone tiled table.

‘Did they ring again?’ he said, his voice tinged with gentle sarcasm, as he folded the newspaper. His parents-in-law had phoned the night before and talked to him for nearly half an hour, as well as to Petra.

‘Ja, die Mutti rief an,’ Petra replied: the odd sentence in her native German slipped out from time to time in spite of the many years she had spent in Italy.

‘Your mother again? Has something happened?’

‘No, Michele. She wanted to know how you’d slept. That’s all.’

‘That’s nice of her.’

Ferrara had just returned from a period of convalescence after receiving a bullet wound to his left shoulder during a shootout in Germany, which was why his parents-in-law, who saw him as a son, were so worried about him.

They started eating. On the table were slices of locally produced cured ham, fresh cheese, butter, blackcurrant jam, and sliced Tuscan bread, one of those baguette-style loaves, in their opinion the best thing their local baker sold, the only kind that kept its flavour right through to the evening.

Just five minutes later, as Ferrara was buttering a slice of bread, the telephone rang.

It was the inspector from the Operations Room at Headquarters, calling to tell him that a body had been found.

It looked like a homicide.

‘I have to go,’ he told his wife once he had hung up.

Same as usual, Petra thought, nothing ever changed. She looked at her husband anxiously. These days, she didn’t make any attempt to conceal how worried his work made her, especially since he had been wounded in a shootout with Leonardo Berghoff, the crazed killer who had terrorised Florence earlier in the summer.

Ferrara had already gone back inside, carrying in his nostrils the scent of the rambling roses and jasmine that Petra grew in the greenhouse which occupied a small area of the terrace. It was her favourite hobby and kept her busy for a good part of each day.

He got dressed, gave his wife a goodbye kiss on the lips, and went out. He never left home in the morning without that loving gesture.

Never a moment’s peace, he thought to himself as he hurried down the stairs.







‘Well?’ Ferrara asked. ‘Did he say anything else? The victim’s name?’

They were crossing the city, the blue light rotating slowly on the car roof. The driver, Giancarlo Perrotta, had just summarised what he had learnt from the Operations Room.

A man had phoned 113 to report, his voice shaking with emotion, that he had just found his employer dead.

‘No, he didn’t say anything else. He hung up straight after giving the address and directions how to get there.’

The driver spoke with a noticeable Neapolitan accent. He had joined the force a couple of years ago and had only recently been transferred to the Squadra Mobile here in Florence, one of the most sought-after postings for young police officers eager to experience the glamour of detective work.

They drove along the Via San Domenico towards Fiesole and its surrounding hills. Having left the built-up area they drove in silence for a few miles. Then the radio began to crackle.

‘Car One calling Central,’ they heard.

‘Come in, Car One!’

It was the team that patrolled south of the city. They had been the first on the scene.

An officer communicated the victim’s particulars, gathered from his identity card.

As soon as Ferrara heard the name, he swore and instinctively grabbed the microphone to tell the team to make sure they didn’t specify their location in case anyone was listening in. It was now common knowledge that journalists, criminals and even curious members of the public tuned into the frequencies used by the State Police and the Carabinieri.

Then he put the microphone back and started thinking, eyes fixed on the strip of asphalt stretching ahead of him. Apart from the sound of the air-conditioning, which wasn’t working very well, it was quiet in the car.

Coming to the turning they had been told to take, the driver steered left off the main road onto a narrow but paved private road. They drove along it for about half a mile until they came to a heavy iron gate. For a moment, Ferrara’s gaze lingered on the rectangular slab of Tuscan sandstone on which the owner’s name was carved in capital letters. They drove through and found themselves on a tree-lined avenue surrounded by flowerbeds and manicured lawns. At the end of it, they could see a large, austere classical villa, like some Medici residence from the Renaissance. The driver stopped the grey Alfa Romeo 156 in the space set aside for parking. The crunch of gravel could be heard beneath the tyres.

There were already a few police cars there, some white and blue, some unmarked, together with an ambulance. Next to the ambulance, two paramedics stood talking. They both looked nauseous and were inhaling great lungfuls of smoke from their cigarettes. There was a stretcher on the ground by the back door, but it was too late for them to do anything. They were only waiting for someone to give them the green light to leave.

At least there weren’t any journalists, Ferrara thought.

‘Good morning, Chief Superintendent!’

A uniformed police officer had seen Ferrara arrive and had rushed up to greet him, pausing first to grab his regulation cap from the dashboard of one of the cars and put it on. He had a boyish face, which was perhaps why he had grown the beginnings of a beard. He must have been twenty-one or twenty-two at the most.

A short distance from him stood his female colleague. She too was quite young. She wore her long blonde hair in a plait and her face was as white as a sheet. Ferrara thought about the feelings the young policewoman must be experiencing. Fear? Anxiety? Horror? Something she had probably never thought about before, at least not seriously. When she saw Ferrara she tried to pull herself together, quickly checking her uniform to make sure it was neat and tidy, and assuming an alert stance. She didn’t want Ferrara to think she was just a woman who got scared easily: you needed strength and determination to work in the presence of death.

As he returned his greeting, Ferrara realised the young male officer was looking just as nauseous as the two paramedics and the young policewoman. Maybe they’re just tired, he thought as he walked towards the solid wooden door, his footsteps crunching on the gravel.

At that moment, Teresa Micalizi, the senior officer on duty, appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a cotton jacket over a crumpled T-shirt, a worn pair of jeans and a pair of plimsolls. Her face, too, bore unmistakable signs of disgust. After a moment’s hesitation, Teresa approached the young policewoman, who was holding a tissue pressed to her mouth, and tried to reassure her, glancing from time to time at Ferrara, then at Superintendent Rizzo, the deputy head of the Squadra Mobile, who had come out of the villa just after her and was now conferring with Ferrara in a corner of the parking area. Teresa wondered why Ferrara had not gone straight in to look at the crime scene.

There was, in fact, a good reason.

 

‘All right, Francesco, give me your first impressions.’

Ferrara knew his deputy well: down to earth, a man of few words, in many people’s opinion the perfect embodiment of what a detective should be. He was of average height and solid build, but over the past few months he seemed to have aged rapidly. His greying hair bore testimony to that. He had been working at Ferrara’s side for several years now and their understanding was so great that they each knew what the other was thinking with a mere exchange of glances.

That was why Ferrara had decided to trust in his colleague’s intuition rather than immediately ascertain the facts, which he would learn soon enough anyway. To him, intuition – the first impression – was the most reliable interpretation of what was observed at a crime scene, and he had almost always found that indulging that intuition had set him on the right path.

‘Definitely the work of a professional, I’d say, chief. It has all the characteristics. We could be looking at a revenge killing.’

Ferrara nodded.

‘He may well have got rid of anything that could connect him to the murder,’ Rizzo went on. ‘We’ll have to check every dustbin in the area.’

‘Let’s get every available man on it,’ Ferrara said. ‘And we’ll need to go over the lawns carefully with a metal detector. I think we should also interview the staff at the restaurant near here and the residents of the neighbouring villas – in fact, any potential witnesses we can track down.’

It was highly likely that, before committing his crime, the killer would have reconnoitred the area, presumably at the same time of day that he intended to strike. It must indeed have been a professional, with such careful planning, but they could not rule out the possibility that someone might have noticed him.

‘I’ll get right on it, chief. We’ll speak to the owner and staff of the restaurant as soon as it opens, and the neighbours as soon as we can.’

They both knew that most of the residents in the area were doctors, lawyers, engineers and well-known businessmen. In other words, the upper–middle class and nouveaux riches who had abandoned the centre of Florence, where they no longer felt safe, and taken refuge in the hills around Fiesole, protected by high walls and hedges, convinced they could live a more peaceful life there. They were bound to feel a lot more vulnerable now.

‘Have the pathologist and the deputy prosecutor arrived yet?’ Ferrara asked Rizzo.

‘Only th. . .