IN A TEN-YEAR-OLD EDITION (July 15) of the German weekly Der Spiegel, there’s a short article that’s worth another glance. It’s an interview with a married couple from Stuttgart who were passing through Turin in the early morning hours of July the third. The tone of the piece is only half serious: the interviewer doesn’t much seem to believe the couple’s story. Rudholf and Ruth Förster, for these were their names, had spent the afternoon of the previous day at the Galleria Sabauda and the Egyptian Museum. After a light meal at a pizzeria they went to bed at the Hotel Sitea at half-past nine. They’d counted on waking up very early and setting off for Florence the next morning. They still had images in their eyes of mummies and basalt statues from the museum. Ruth had never seen such things before. She recalled how she’d refused to have dinner at a rotisserie with her husband; the sight of a grilled chicken put to mind the shriveled arms of an Egyptian scribe preserved behind glass.
During the night, there were strange noises in the hotel that kept them awake: the sounds of doors opening and closing over and over again, the shuffling of steps down the hallway. Rudholf snuck a glance through the door and recognized a man walking in pajamas as the hotel doorman. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes surrounded by blue circles. He clutched his arms behind his back and strained, giving out cries, like bellows, which seemed to say: “Oh, God, just to sleep!” He wasn’t the only one moving through the hall. There were four or five people, both men and women, all local people, perhaps hotel staff judging by appearances, stricken by the same madness. A woman in a very sheer blouse was making her way down the stairs.
Prompted by the interviewer to continue the story, Ruth said this: “So Rudholf and I went to the window to see what was going on outside, and even there we noticed strange movements, a bit like what you’d see in a hospital, or a prison yard during the recess hour, the same unhappy resignation. There were people wearing day clothes too, but they were so shabbily dressed that you couldn’t distinguish them from the others. There was a uniformity that made your blood curdle . . . And to say how hot it was! Rudholf and I were drenched in sweat. The water was dribbling down from the tap. ‘Rudholf, if I were you,’ I told my husband, ‘I would get out of here now.’ He said, ‘Me too, Ruth!’ Having come to this, all that remained was to get dressed, pile everything into our bags and run like the devil to Piazza Carlo Felice where we’d parked the car.”
“It was in Piazza Carlo Felice where you happened to see this . . . thing?”
“Piazza Carlo Felice,” Rudholf interjected, “seemed to be the gathering spot for all those melancholy night-walkers. They’d form little clusters here and there but these soon fell apart as if their members had nothing to say to each other. Just as one cluster disbanded, another came together at a different part of the square, only to dissolve in turn. It was a kind of undulating motion; I don’t know how else to put it . . . I had a vague feeling of danger. When we reached the car that was parked by the arcades at the opposite end of the square—a beautiful square, well lit, with trees packed with leaves and jets of water spurting from a fountain—we were still filled with horror at being forced to move through that crowd; they seemed high on Valium, or God knows what kind of downers. To follow the road signs we had to drive right around the square, a heavy task with all those vagrants getting in our way . . . We’d already done a half turn when, right there in front of us, we saw an odd character emerge from the arcades . . . Very far-fetched . . . Isn’t that true, Ruth? He was gray-colored, stiff, with a severe expression, and there was something warlike about the way he moved. We hit the brakes to avoid hitting him and he went straight past us without bothering to look. We heard the sound of his heavy footsteps, like the clattering of a horse. These steps were vigorous and decisive; they made quite a difference to the shambling of the night-walkers who filled the square. We weren’t just scared, but surprised; we couldn’t believe how indifferent the vagrants were to his arrival . . . It seemed as if they were waiting for him, like they’d gathered there just to greet him. Ah, but that’s not how the meeting went! There was no big celebration! Nobody seemed to pay attention to him, and yet, and yet . . .”
“And you, Frau Förster, what do you have to say?”
“Well . . . I must admit that I was beginning to get scared at this point. What scared me over everything else was the transformation this character was undergoing. Bit by bit, his movements seemed to get more agile. He snatched the air like he was catching flies . . . And he brought himself ever closer to those people, striding over benches, trampling flower beds . . . But rather than back away, they looked at him without batting an eyelash, like they’d all become rag dolls . . . Then suddenly one of them was grabbed . . .”
“And what happened then?”
“Ah! We didn’t want to find out how that spectacle ended! I urged Rudholf to hit the accelerator, and, weaving through a daredevil obstacle course of vagrants, we got on the main road and swung straight for the hills. I didn’t turn back to look. I’d seen enough thrills to promise myself that I’d never go back to Turin!”
So ended the interview. In the early hours of July the third, the very night Herrn und Frau Förster fled Turin, a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Rosaura Marchetti, was murdered in Piazza Carlo Felice in a way that closely resembled the killing of Bergesio. She too had her face smashed, two circular bruises around her ankles and deep bruises at the level of her midriff. With considerable force, two hands had grabbed her by the middle of her body and then—hoopla!—raised her high enough to take her by the ankles and spin her. The whirl ended with her ruthless obliteration against a solid mass. We should note that the “solid mass” into which Signora Marchetti was slammed was a monument this time, a memorial to children’s author Edmondo de Amicis. Anyone who went to Piazza Carlo Felice on the morning of July the third to observe the “scene of the crime” will remember the mustachioed face of the Piedmontese writer, jutting from a slab of marble, still fouled with blood and gray matter, gory splatters from the victim reaching high enough to lick at bas-reliefs of children and the naked feet of the muse positioned on top of the monument. Signora Marchetti’s death found possibly greater coverage in the daily papers than the demise of Bergesio. The parallels between the two crimes were immediately obvious: “A madman, a violent lunatic, prowls by night to assault our poor fellow citizens stricken by insomnia . . .” But who could that man be? From which madhouse had he broken out of? No sanatorium in Turin nor any other Italian city had any escaped inmates to report. Therefore, it could only be a case of insanity that had developed recently, and knowing this certainly didn’t smooth the work of investigators. What a moving article appeared in La Stampa to express the horror and outrage triggered by the episode! The pitiless murderer had committed an unforgivable disgrace to childhood in choosing exactly that monument, that symbol of good nature, as an outlet for his fury! This was an individual without heart, whose case called for swift and vigorous action, followed by an exemplary punishment!
Unfortunately, certain obstacles that stood in justice’s way proved thornier than expected. The autopsy attributed Signora Marchetti’s death to the mashing of her brain, but there were unsettling questions about the dynamics of the murder, unique in the annals of criminology. Whose fingertips could have made the impressions found on the ankles and pelvis of the deceased? Who could have left such deep footprints in the flower beds of the park and the asphalt of the road? Human reason retreated in the face of such bewildering evidence!
There remained an inquiry into the victim’s private life. Yet Signora Marchetti was a quiet homemaker, married, with two children (currently on exchange at a school in Switzerland). She didn’t appear to have had any lovers. Her husband owned an industrial dairy and hardly needed the trifles he would’ve inherited as her next of kin. No private drama in the background, then. True, a man had suddenly come forward claiming to know everything about the murder victim, to have read her diary cover to cover, where terrifying confessions were written. “In my view, she completely deserved it!” he said at last. But when the commissioner asked him to be more specific, he could do nothing better than shrug his shoulders and mumble incoherently. Obviously, hot weather and insomnia were the real reasons for his meddling in the case; his pint-sized stature didn’t remotely match the presumed murderer’s profile.
They ran into a more serious obstacle when it came to examining the witnesses who had undoubtedly seen the victim’s death. Anyone they found who was present in Piazza Carlo Felice at the time of the murder had no more to say than the people who were drifting along Corso Stati Uniti when Bergesio met his demise. Threats to arrest bystanders for withholding testimony came to no use. Whoever was there hadn’t seen it, or if they had seen it, their visions of the carnage were too confusing. It was insomnia that had veiled the event; memories were clouded with fatigue and everything that had happened was permanently lost to absentmindedness. Until it came to questioning everyday citizens, legal threats, as always, remained a weapon in the arsenal of justice. But when the “upholders of law and order,” the judges (and, it’s said, even the president of the Court of Appeals), suddenly found themselves, not as examiners, but among the witnesses—and still couldn’t provide the investigation with any valid leads—authorities became more willing to try the soft approach. They stooped to sweet-talk and flattery just to get a half-reliable answer they could work with. A reward of thirty million lire—with the guarantee of anonymity—was offered to anyone who finally came forward. It was no use. Only one clue was worth poring over: the places chosen by the murderer to carry out his feats. Corso Stati Uniti and Piazza Carlo Felice belonged to the “historic” zone of the city. As it later emerged much more clearly, those who committed murders in this way seemed to seek out distinctive areas deeply rooted in Turinese tradition. And it was just there, in those areas, where the greatest influx of restless citizens took place. What was the connection? Could all the facts investigators had gathered be helpful somehow?