The Monster of Florence (27 page)
The green shutters of 154 were closed. At 154A a woman was peering out from between tight lace curtains. 152, the other half of the building, housed a trattoria. An elderly woman there was sweeping the steps and the last late luncheon customers were getting into their cars in the cindered space beside the whitewashed building.
“Good afternoon.”
She carried on sweeping and looked up at him.
“We’re closed. It’s almost half past three.”
“That’s all right. It was just some information I wanted. That lane across the road … If I’m not mistaken it’s a short cut to Signa. Only I haven’t been around these parts for years and I’m sure it sometimes used to be impassable. I thought, living here, you might know …”
She’d barely paid him any attention once she’d established that it was too late to eat, but now her lips tightened and she stopped her sweeping to stare at him.
“You can get through.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” She gave him a black look and turned her back on him, starting to sweep again. When he was getting into his car he caught her watching him, peeping round from the side entrance, thinking, no doubt, that she was invisible. He sensed those lace curtains twitch slightly, too, and he felt the glittering eyes of the old woman trained on him as he started the engine. They were old enough to remember the story. Perhaps they thought he was a nosy journalist. Or perhaps he was becoming paranoid. For all he knew, they thought he was a tax inspector and they hadn’t even lived there long enough to know anything about the ’68 murder. Next to the big white house was a stone farmhouse building with three doors. In one of those, Salvatore Angius had been living, and nobody had ever found out. Why hadn’t they? Why hadn’t they knocked at every door in the block that night and asked, “Did you see a small child cross the road alone? Did you see a man watching him?” It was easy enough to criticize, of course, from this distance. Nevertheless, he was quite sure he’d have done it, and in doing it he’d have seen this Angius and broken Silvano’s alibi then instead of sixteen years later.
The woman with the sweeping brush came round to the front of the white building and stared across at him defiantly. He turned into the lane and drove down it, staying in second gear. He was being foolish. He wouldn’t have broken Silvano’s alibi because Silvano would never have given such an alibi if he hadn’t felt safe to do it. Angius had given his official address as being his brother’s
house and before anybody could give the matter any thought Sergio Muscas had changed his story and the hue and cry was all for Flavio.
This stony lane was clear enough, all right, probably because a couple of small factories, little more than long sheds, had been built in the fields. There was no sign of the boulders which had demonstrated that the child couldn’t have arrived by car and that he’d have torn and dirtied his socks if he’d walked.
Even so, something was wrong. There was no sign of the Vingone which would have been running beside the road behind a screen of tall reeds. He slowed down more, looking about him. There was a line of reeds in the distance to his right but that was neither here nor there since they should have been to his left. The road was curving and rising now. It met another, wider country road that petered out to his right and became a tarred road to his left where there were a number of houses. This was all wrong. He stopped, wondering what to do. An old man with a stick appeared from the direction of the tarmac road and sat down on a low wall to get his breath, despite the cold which had reddened his hands and face.
“Excuse me! I’m looking for the road that comes out near the cemetery!”
The old man sat motionless and gave no sign of having heard, perhaps because of the wind. The Marshal got out of the car and approached him.
“Excuse me? I’m looking for the cemetery. I thought this was a short cut. An old friend of mine’s buried there …” He really was getting paranoid, but he couldn’t help imagining Di Maira, who always seemed to be watching him, following in his tracks.
“He was looking for the lane where that couple were killed …”
“He had a Sicilian accent …”
“The cemetery?”
“Yes, I thought this road led there.”
“You’re miles away.”
“But can’t I cut across these fields?”
“You’re miles off. This is Signa from here on. You’ll have to go up that road there into the centre. Then go back a mile or so till you get
to the town hall and take the road to Castelletti. It’s about two miles, maybe a bit more, further on than that. You can’t miss it.”
“But … the Vingone—doesn’t the Vingone pass by here?”
“No, no. It’s beyond the town centre. If you turn left you’ll cross it. The traffic goes over the bridge.”
“But it’s only a stream, the one I’m talking about. I understand it crossed these fields.”
“I don’t know about that. The river’s all I know. You’ll see when you cross it.”
The Marshal got back in his car. How could he possibly have gotten so lost? The lane started right opposite the Rossini house and came straight here. Then he remembered: somewhere in the judge’s report there had been that episode where Sergio, having confessed to the murder, said he had accompanied his son. They’d asked him to show them the way, starting from the Rossini house, and he’d ended up near Signa over a mile away from the scene of the crime. So he hadn’t known the road either. They had both made the same mistake.
From the other end, then. He fished out Lorenzini’s sketch again. The cinema, the town hall, the road to Castelletti, the cemetery …
He set off again with the sketch propped against the windscreen.
Lorenzini had done a good job. After a couple of miles, just as the old man had said, he passed the marble pillars and wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, with its rows of black cypresses. Next there should be a fork … there … then the first lane off to the right. He signalled but couldn’t turn. The chain Lorenzini had mentioned as having been put up all those years ago was still closing the lane. He pulled in and got out of the car to check it. There was nothing to be done. The chain was thick and heavy and rusty and the padlock held firm. He locked his car, climbed over, and set off down the lane on foot. This was all right. A high bank topped by tall reeds hid the stream on the right from his view. About twenty, twenty-five yards … A curve that would have hidden the car from anyone passing on the road. And the car that followed? That too would have had to be hidden from the road. Had it slid down here with the engine cut and the lights out? It was probable.
To his left were open fields. The grass was long and thick because the weather had been so mild and wet until Christmas. But now the freezing wind coming from the mountains, faintly visible on the purplish horizon, was howling across the fields so that the grass was billowing in green and silver waves. The Marshal stood still, his ears and face burning and his fingers, even in thick leather gloves, beginning to ache.
The fierce iciness of the wind, whipping his cheeks and taking his breath away, was so cleansing, so exhilarating an antidote to his accumulated tiredness and stress, that he stood there for some time without thinking of anything.
It was that small voice from long ago that brought him back.
“Silvano was standing in the reeds.”
He turned to look. The reeds were dead now, their canes dry and broken. They wouldn’t hide anyone. But in August they would have been thick and rustling with leaves.
“There was a noise and he was in the reeds.”
The black night had been windless and hot. Seven shots and one shot. That was the only safe way. Silvano had to make sure they were dead before he could risk letting the incompetent Sergio fire at them so as to inculpate himself. Seven shots entering the bodies close together, centre target. One shot, thought to have come from another direction, only just hitting her arm and grazing her side. And by then Silvano was hidden in the reeds as the child awoke and his dad pulled him out of the car. He’d seen his uncle, too, going through his mum’s handbag.
“Get moving!”
That had to be Silvano’s voice. There was no other way. He would never have been fool enough to risk being seen driving Sergio and the child back to Signa. Sergio had to take the child away himself and perhaps be picked up on the Pistoia road. But how had Sergio found his way in the darkness if he wasn’t familiar with the road? Who was familiar with the road? Angius. Salvatore Angius, young and penniless friend and lover of Silvano, who lived at the other end of that road and maybe used it as a short cut to Signa because he had no vehicle.
“Was anyone else with your dad?”
“I think there was a man only I don’t know who he was.”
That was probably true. He didn’t know—and what interest could it have for a child whose mother has just been murdered?
It was as clear as it would ever get unless Sergio one day told the truth. An unlikely event.
The immediate problem was to get his car on to this lane so as to try and come out on the Pistoia road. He wasn’t intending to try it on foot. It took an hour or so each way and the cold winter afternoon was already darkening. He walked on a little and saw a decently maintained track coming from the direction of a cluster of houses beyond the fields further forward to his left. Beyond that he saw a car going by and felt pretty certain that the track was simply the next turning along the road to the one he’d come in by. He walked back to his car. It was true, thank goodness for that. A half-mile or so further along the main road he found the cluster of houses and the beginning of the lane, and within a few minutes he was joining the lane of the murder scene and proceeding in the direction of the Rossini house.
“Ah …” There ahead was the explanation of his mistake. The lane curved right, and there in front of him was the tiny bridge over the stream where Nicolino said he’d been set down. You had to cross the bridge to pick up another little road coming from Signa, the one he’d driven down without noticing the bridge and the deviation at all. There was, in fact, nothing odd or contradictory about Sergio’s mistakes at all. He’d been driven to the scene of the crime in Silvano’s car and taken no notice in the thick darkness of where the lane began. He’d probably then been accompanied to this end where you couldn’t go wrong anyway, there was no way forward other than the right one.
There was no way forward now, though, at all, because across the front of the bridge hung yet another heavy rusting chain and padlock.
“Blast …” The Marshal was about to give up and go back when he thought he might take a bit of his own advice.
“Check everything. Don’t take anything for granted.”
He said it often enough to the
young carabinieri in his care. Without any real hope he climbed out of the car and approached the bridge.
“Which just goes to show …”
The padlock was hanging open. All he had to do was to drop the chain to the ground. At a quickened pace the Marshal returned to his car and drove across, careful to stop again and replace the chain behind him, always feeling Di Maira’s steely gaze on his back.
There! Ahead, the last little stretch of the lane hit the Pistoia road. And right facing him was the big white house with its floodlight. Number 154.
With a little grunt of satisfaction he signalled and turned on to the main road back in the direction of Florence. This was his world, the real world, where you checked things and they were true or not. His satisfaction was out of all proportion to what he had obtained. It had to do with his putting an end to any attempt at believing the unbelievable, and with a deep conviction that if he checked out a few more confused routes from both ends he might find the right road at last.
PART SEVEN
-THE BLOODSTAINED RAG-
7.1. THE RAG
On 30 July ’84, the day after the Vicchio murder, which was, if possible, even more horrifying than the previous ones, house searches were made of anyone who had for any reason been suspected up to now. Among these was Silvano Vargius.
The search of his house brought to light a flat, round, straw bag lying underneath heavy blankets in a cupboard. The bag contained three pieces of cloth, assumed to be cotton. Two of these pieces were printed with yellow flowers and sandwiched between them was the third piece which was plain white and stained with grey and blood-red marks. Suspecting that the red stains might indeed be blood, the carabinieri removed the bag and its contents. Silvano was present and showed no concern whatsoever. A report was made and consigned to the Public Prosecutor’s office, along with the bag, and Silvano was asked to produce an alibi for the previous night.
Some months then passed but the consignment of the rag and the accompanying report produced no response from the Public Prosecutor’s office. Eventually,
in April
1985, the rag was sent to be tested. The results of these tests showed that the red stains were blood and that the rag also had traces of gunpowder.
Silvano Vargius was unable to furnish a convincing alibi and
this office suggested that the Prosecutor should ask that the accusation against him be formalized. The suggestion was rejected.
The reason given was that the bloodstained rag could not be the basis of a specific formal accusation since it was evidence in a preliminary, generic enquiry into the whole series of murders and the said enquiry was not under instruction.
This office then requested the relative documentation. The Chief Prosecutor delivered this, together with a letter expressing doubts as to the value of the material evidence concerned and on the basis of these doubts requested the acquittal here presented.
Such a request, whilst preventing the enquiry here documented from proceeding, does not alter the fact that until further tests prove evidence to the contrary, the bloodstained rag remains a piece of evidence which is, in however limited a way, of value.
The rag was discovered in the home of a suspect against whom other significant evidence had already been gathered with regard to the ’68 murder. It was found the morning after a double homicide had been committed with the same gun used in ’68. The suspect could produce no alibi.
However little was known about the origins and reasons for the presence of the rag in the suspect’s home, it seems evident that the proper enquiries and tests should have been made, even considering these as being of positive value to the accused in defending himself from suspicion.
The Public Prosecutor’s refusal to proceed with the tests even at an informal level was defended in his accompanying letter as follows: “…
it seems to me incredible that Vargius, who had already been searched (after the previous murder) should, while still under suspicion in this same enquiry, keep a bloodstained rag, which could connect him with the murder, in his bedroom.”
A fact is a fact. A piece of material evidence remains such regardless of whether we are capable at this stage of understanding the whys and wherefores of it. In the absence of scientific proof any suppositions about its positive or negative value remain just that: suppositions.
7.2. PROVENANCE
Silvano maintained, not unreasonably, given the nature of the object, that the straw bag belonged to one of the women who had frequented the house. He attributed it, rather uncertainly, to his ex-partner. This woman, however, had ceased to cohabit with him a year previously. Shown the bag, she denied its being hers.
Vargius’s second wife had left him even earlier (in 1981) and she denied ever having seen the bag.
His present partner, likewise, had never seen the bag before. The only person who claimed to recognize the bag was the cleaner who said she’d seen it around the house during the previous winter and spring but had no idea what it might contain.
Obviously, ownership of the straw bag is of relative unimportance compared to what it contained. The bag was in the house at Silvano’s disposition no matter who first owned it, which is all that counts.
To the Public Prosecutor’s comment that it is incredible that Silvano, under suspicion, should keep such damaging evidence in the house, one could well respond that it is equally incredible that such a piece of cloth should be kept between two other clean pieces, carefully placed in a bag and hidden under blankets in a cupboard, if it were nothing more than a dirty rag. It is not improbable that suitable tests carried out immediately would have solved the mystery.
7.3. THE BLOODSTAINS
Preliminary tests carried out in Florence showed the rag to be stained with human blood group O. Further tests carried out in Rome in May 1986, a
year and ten months after the evidence was delivered by the carabinieri to the Prosecutor’s office
, revealed that there were stains of two different blood groups, B and O Rh positive. The identification of the B group was less certain than the O because of the rag being polluted by other substances previously (such as washing powder).
The final report, deposited in December 1987,
three years and five months after the evidence was delivered
, stated that the
bloodstains were rather old and that such conclusions as had been drawn were insignificant because of this.
At this point in history, scientific progress had made DNA matching possible. Whilst such tests were not yet being used in this country, they could have been carried out in Great Britain where the inventor of the tests himself assured us that he could work on a sample as small as that available. Whilst the victims of all the homicides had been buried without the conservation of samples, it would at least have been possible to match the DNA to samples taken from Vargius and his current partner.
The DNA tests were not carried out.
There remained only the evidence of the blood groups. The Prosecutor’s statement that the rag carried only one blood group, and that it was the group to which Silvano’s partner belonged, is unacceptable. Two groups were identified when the evidence was fresh. It was Silvano’s ex-partner who was blood group B and she had been gone a year. Carlo Salvini, victim of the Vicchio murder, was blood group O, which was first identified on the rag, but so was Silvano himself. Since half the population of Italy is blood group O and a large part is group B there seemed little point in proceeding with blood tests on other members of Silvano’s family, who might have had some connection with the rag.
In the absence of scientific evidence, the bloodstained rag cannot be used against Silvano Vargius
but its existence remains a cause of suspicion against him
, because if it cannot be accepted, at a merely hypothetical level, as proof against him, by the same token it cannot be used as hypothetical evidence in his defence as suggested by the Public Prosecutor (“It is incredible that Vargius who had already been searched”, etc …).
7.4. THE GUNPOWDER
About the presence of gunpowder on the rag there are no scientific doubts. We can only agree with the Public Prosecutor’s comment, “Who could reasonably assert that the traces are residue from the Beretta 22 pistol used to commit the crimes?”
Nobody could, of course. The ballistics report states:
“Currently available scientific tests do not allow us to identify the ammunition from which this gunpowder came.”
The fact remains that the gunpowder, from whatever ammunition, is present, and no explanation has been offered for it. Silvano Vargius stated clearly under questioning that the blood on the rag might well be human blood but it was impossible that there was also gunpowder on it. A statement which must leave us perplexed, since he also states that the bag and its contents are not his and he knows nothing about them.
The fact remains that the experts’ reports provided on the bloodstained rag offer no judicially valid proof that the rag is in any way connected to the crimes in question.
7.5. ALIBI AND SEARCH
Checks on the alibi offered by Silvano Vargius for the night of the Vicchio murder are remarkable chiefly for their resemblance to the same checks carried out after the ’68 murder. According to Vargius, he left the house at about nine-thirty and returned an hour later. The purpose of the outing was to take his current partner and her little girl for an ice cream in the centre of Florence. The woman, when questioned, stated that such an outing occurred so rarely that it would be memorable and that she had no recollection of it as regards that date. They had, she said, gone out once for an ice cream. She remembered it well and it was on another evening. The mechanics of this alibi are easily recognized from ’68 when Vargius claimed he had been playing billiards with a friend who later realized that, though they had played billiards one evening that week, it was not on that date.
Silvano Vargius went out a second time on the night of the Vicchio murder, in order to find his dog, between ten and half past ten. He then left the house a third time between three and three-thirty in the morning “to go jogging.”
As in ’68, Vargius’s companion at first confirmed the part of the alibi which involved her, but she later recounted that he had
insisted that she do so and that, on attempting to reconstruct that evening for herself, she found that no such outing occurred on that date. The result of the checks made indicates that there was nothing to prove that Silvano could not have driven to Vicchio to commit the murders that night.
When Silvano was subsequently asked to provide an alibi for the 1985 murder, the same situation repeated itself in that Silvano had the time and opportunity to commit the murder. However, no conclusions could be drawn since there was some argument as to when the murder was committed (during the night of Saturday/Sunday or Sunday/Monday). The bodies were not discovered until Monday afternoon.
7.6. CONCLUSION
The information collected about Silvano Vargius was extremely suggestive: the death of his young wife in 1960, his strange sexual relationships with men and women, couples and groups, his manic depressive states which resulted in hospitalization in 1981, his probable part in the ’68 murder and the ambiguity of his relationship with his brother Flavio, all serve to build up an image of an altogether remarkable personality.
However, none of the evidence listed above can be translated into proof such as would be acceptable in court. The evidence, such as it is, was considered sufficient to warrant Silvano’s being ordered to present himself before the carabinieri to answer accusations by Sergio Muscas of his responsibility for the ’68 murder and by his ex-partner, who claimed he’d always kept a pistol in the bedroom during the time she was living with him.
However, when Silvano was released from prison on being acquitted of murdering his first wife, he not only failed to present himself before the authorities in Florence as ordered but he left the country.
THEREFORE:
At the request of the Public Prosecutor’s office—
IT IS HEREBY DECLARED:
That no further proceedings will be taken against—
1) VARGIUS FLAVIO
2) VARGIUS SILVANO
3) MUSCAS FABIO
Florence, 13 December 1989
The Instructing Judge
Michele Romola