CONFINED TO BED IN the hospital, Balistreri had time to reflect. The seriousness of his condition gave him six days to prepare himself properly for the first round of questioning.
He asked a nurse to get him a copy of the January 5 edition of Linda Nardi’s newspaper. He had seen the title of the short article IF A POLICEMAN DIES and made his decision. Belhrouz, Coppola, Colajacono, and Tatò were dead. He didn’t want to endanger the life of anyone else, least of all Linda Nardi. And that “least of all” worried him. A woman he didn’t know had wormed her way into his thoughts against his will.
He had spent years becoming a rational adult, aware of duties, risks, and wrongdoings. This was the moment to bury the young Michele Balistreri, the adventurer who knew no fear or compromise, who was arrogant and cared only for himself. He had several deaths on his conscience other than the most recent ones. And there was no way at all he could wipe them from it. He could only try to move on, limiting the damage and asking forgiveness for his mistakes.
Truth had a price and in this case it was too high. He made a silent agreement with the Invisible Man. He would give up looking for him if the killing would stop. The manhunt was off.
The questions put to Balistreri by the public prosecutor and Pasquali were almost too easy to answer. The events had already been reconstructed and were clear. Colajacono and Tatò had their informants and had gone there to find something. They had been surprised by the four Romanians, the Lacatus cousins plus Adrian and Giorgi, the ones who had kidnapped Nadia and taken her to Vasile, who had later strangled her with the help of the other shepherd. Colajacono and Tatò had been handcuffed and killed in cold blood. The heroic and unlucky Coppola had followed Colajacono on Balistreri’s orders, and Balistreri himself had raced over there when Coppola had contacted him by phone. The questions were a mere formality, intended to confirm what they already had determined.
Neither of them asked him if he had seen anyone else in addition to the four Romanians. Besides, there appeared to be no other traces and the shots to the bodies of Coppola, Tatò, and Colajacono and the ones that had nearly killed Balistreri had all been fired from the six guns found beside the four Romanians. The public prosecutor and Pasquali complimented him on the way he had taken out Mircea. No one asked him how he had managed to save his own skin alone under those conditions.
Because the Invisible Man didn’t want to finish me off. He wanted me like that, permanently defeated.
. . . .
Linda pored over all the old newspapers she had brought home, the oldest from 1970. She knew that up to the summer of that year, Balistreri had been living in Libya, but she’d found nothing about him in that period. Then, in the fall of 1970, he showed up at the university in Rome.
A young Balistreri, looking very full of himself, appeared with groups of other equally proud young men full of conviction. Rallies about honor, loyalty, courage, the fatherland. Then the two-bladed ax, SS slogans, the Roman salute, black shirts, the wounded, police wagons, tear gas, and stones thrown inside the university and from the bridges over the Tiber. But he had never been linked directly to political crimes, atrocities, or acts of terrorism.
The Christian Democrat government disbanded the Ordine Nuovo at the end of 1973 and arrested its leaders. After 1974 there was no trace of Michele Balistreri in the newspapers or among the official records of the ministry of the interior. She could locate no home address or bank account for him during that time. Nothing.
Until June 1978—one month after Aldo Moro’s death. At that point Michele Balistreri reappeared. He finished university and graduated with a degree in philosophy. He joined the police force and passed his captain’s exam. As of 1980, he could be found in Vigna Clara, twiddling his thumbs in Rome’s quietest neighborhood.
From one perspective, she found it easy to connect today’s man to his past. Honor, loyalty, and courage were still a part of him, but they were hard to make out under the thick glue of reality. It was easy to imagine the Balistreri of 1970 with a gun in his hand, but the Balistreri of today must really have been forced to shoot at those Romanians on the hill.
She wondered if it would still be possible to lead that man back to his old nature in order to drag the evil out of hell and annihilate it.