Guido Pagliarino - Personal Terror Political Terror

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 DIGOS 1office.”

"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 2to be precise. Warnings from the company owners led up to her being sacked. But under the so-called Workers' Statute 3, 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."