ANTONIO PASQUALI CAME FROM Tesano, a small town halfway up the mountains in Abruzzo. A photo of the place hung on the wall behind his desk at a respectful distance from the rigorously symmetrical ones of the pope and the president of the Republic. His office was a solemn place. It was an office worthy of one of the highest-ranking officers in the Italian police force. Not the highest ranking of all, but the most influential in the circles that counted.
As a boy, Pasquali had shown a marked talent for acting and for politics, and there was a great deal of overlap between the two fields. Young Pasquali divided his time between drama school and the local branch of the Christian Democratic party. His academic progress suffered a little as a result, but he made up for it with a lively intelligence and the help of his father, who had been mayor of Tesano for almost eight years. His teachers looked favorably and with understanding at the bespectacled boy, who was serious but sharp and witty when he needed to be. With his personal gifts and those of his family, it was clear to everyone that Antonio Pasquali would make a career for himself.
After graduating from high school, he spent several months in London studying acting. Then his father insisted he return to the real world. He earned a degree in political science in Rome and passed the police department entrance exam. After completing two years of the course for the rank of detective, his father spoke to the minister of the interior, who was also from Abruzzo and a fellow party member, who was able to confirm that the young Pasquali was a hard worker, decidedly on the ball, and a good communicator.
And so, in 1980, the Minister brought him to Rome as his assistant on secondment from the police and there Pasquali built the network of political contacts that would support him for his entire career. He had friends everywhere, from neo-fascists to the extreme Left, but he remained strictly a man of the center, a man for all seasons, ready to dialogue with everyone.
In the early 1990s, the prosecutor’s office in Milan sprang into action with the mani pulite corruption trials. The Christian Democrats and the Socialists disbanded, and Italy’s political system was left rudderless. One evening in 1993, Pasquali’s father and his friend the minister were sitting in the drawing room of the family home in Tesano in front of an open fire, drinking a glass of the local liqueur. The two older men were discussing the by now obvious necessity of repositioning themselves politically. The Christian Democrats were splitting into two parties—one center-left, the other center-right—in order better to navigate the new majoritarian system that was being implemented. Young Antonio, who was rising quickly through the ranks of the rapid response team, proffered a solution.
“You should split up, one in each party.”
The two looked at him in amazement. It was so simple. They agreed that would be best. They’d each join one of the newly formed parties, and then they’d wait to see which was going to dominate the new system. Everyone was well aware that the local electoral system of political favors, which had developed in the postwar period and had ruled for forty-five years, was now at risk of falling apart under the attack of the “Communist” magistrates in Milan and the new power of the media, and they had to find a place in both of the new alliances.
They discussed briefly who should go with whom, but the personal and political histories of the minister and Pasquali’s father were identical. But here too the young Antonio found the solution. He took a coin from his pocket, turned to the minister—who, after all, outranked his father and was also the elder of the two—and said, “Heads or tails, Mr. Minister?”
Then his father asked, “What about you, Antonio? The police rely on political contacts, too.”
Antonio was evasive. He said that in any future scenario it wouldn’t be appropriate for a policeman to have any direct membership in a party; it would be more useful to have a simple sympathetic leaning. Nevertheless, he would think about it. What he didn’t say was that he had it on good authority that there was a new political party brewing. It was going to be a party with limitless funds, and it would incorporate sizable numbers of both Christian Democrats and Socialists and sweep the field. Antonio Pasquali wanted to keep his hands free: his youthful gifts as an actor would be appreciated in the new televised world of politics.
In 2000 he was transferred from the rapid response team to the organized crime division, where he conducted several brilliant busts that led to the arrest of longtime Mafia fugitives whose positions had been filled by other Mafiosi in the meantime. He was careful that no politician, present or past, of whatever persuasion, came to be involved. He was honestly convinced he was serving his country’s true interests.
By the end of 2002, crimes committed by immigrants had become a high-profile political issue. Urged on by popular sentiment and various political parties, the government decided to create a special force to support the rapid response teams in the regional capitals in handling crimes committed by foreigners. The idea of naming Pasquali to oversee all the regional captains was suggested to the then-current minister of the interior by both members of the majority coalition and members of the opposition. He was a candidate with support on both sides: a capable and well-balanced man, an excellent policeman who was attentive to the political world’s demands.
Andrea Floris, Rome’s chief of police, had been appointed to his position by those on the left. He was familiar with Michele Balistreri’s neo-Fascist history, but he also knew that Balistreri—who was the same age as Pasquali—was better qualified for the post, having run Homicide successfully for the previous three years. He asked to speak to the minister of the interior but was passed to the relevant undersecretary who in turn shifted him to his first assistant, a young man not yet thirty with a degree from a prestigious university, who maintained that, given his distant past as far-right activist working with the secret intelligence service, Balistreri’s candidacy would cause incomprehension precisely among the center-left where the chief of police had his political support. Floris countered by saying these were events that went back thirty years and Balistreri had more than redeemed himself for them by serving and risking his life for the state, as well as keeping his distance from all political factions. But this was insufficient for the young man; indeed, keeping his distance from politics actually made him “suspicious.” Balistreri still used terms like fatherland, honor, loyalty. This was baggage from the past, an obsolete language, and was indicative of an older generation, the young man concluded. Used to Rome’s political theatrics by now, the chief of police gave in: the politicians didn’t want anyone like Balistreri for the position—a man who didn’t speak to them, didn’t go to their dinners on terraces or in the most exclusive clubs, a man who never spoke to journalists, a kind of maverick already in decline.
But Floris did manage to secure one condition in return for his support for Pasquali: the special team on immigrants in Rome would be the most active one, and he wanted Michele Balistreri to run it. Pasquali didn’t think much of Balistreri, but he agreed in order to ingratiate himself with Floris, whose support was certain to come in handy. At the same time, this meant he could take the opportunity to see that Balistreri did not move to the rapid response team’s fourth section, which dealt with crimes involving property and where the most politically sensitive investigations into fraud, corruption, and false accounting were under way. So he entrusted Rome’s unit dealing with crimes by foreigners to him in the hope that he would go up in flames, after which Floris could replace Balistreri with a more trustworthy person. But Balistreri’s performance had been impeccable for two and a half years.
And then along came the case of the letter R.