A Florentine Death by Michele Giuttari Read Free Book Online

react, Cinzia her flatmate in Bologna, to whom she was still connected in so many ways?
    Confused by her own emotions, cradled by the swaying motion of the train and the warmth of the carriage, she closed her eyes.
    Midnight
     
    The pages of the black notebook with the gold cross stamped on the cover were uncut.
    The hand moved rapidly and surely over the immaculately white first page. The handwriting was tiny, neat and precise.
     
    October 1st 1999
     
    In your name, Father, I have killed.
    It was easy. Liberating.
    Far more so than a Confession.
    Now at last I am born!
    I will go all the way, as you wish.
    Do not take your support from me.
    I will be the instrument of your vengeance, and mine.
     
     

PART TWO
     
    a series of murders
     
    Florence 1999-2000
     
    Michele Ferrara and his wife never got to see Placido Domingo in Cavalleria Rusticana, or the firework display that lit up Vienna.
    They left the Austrian capital a few hours before midnight, missing the long-awaited New Year celebrations that brought the old millennium to a close and inaugurated a new one full of hope.
    Two murders in a single day: there was no way Ferrara could stay out of the country. Informed of the first murder early on the morning of the 31st by Rizzo, and of the second after seven that evening by Sergeant Moschino, he had booked the first available flight, Lufthansa from Vienna to Milan. At Linate airport, a police car had been waiting for them, provided by Milan Police Headquarters, and they had reached home just before two in the morning on Saturday 1 January.
    They and the driver they had been assigned had toasted the New Year in a restaurant off the autostrada near Parma, drinking poor-quality sparkling wine out of paper cups. Ferrara had felt really bad for the driver: the poor man was doing his duty, making an effort to seem as if he was in a good mood even though he was probably thinking about his girlfriend celebrating without him.

Petra, as usual, had been wonderful. With typically feminine nonchalance, she had found out the driver's tastes in music, reading matter, drinks, even mobile phones, and had showered him with the best gifts she could find on the shelves of the service area shop.
    They did not sleep much that night, but it was more than sufficient for Ferrara.
    The ten days they had spent in Vienna had done him a world of good. Massimo had been on great form. He'd brought along his new girlfriend, a very beautiful, very pleasant Venetian woman of about forty named Lucrezia, who had even won over Petra. Naturally, they had visited the Prater, the museum district, the Imperial Palace, and Schonbrunn Palace and park, and Massimo had made everything even more fascinating and enlightening with his constant anecdotes and explanations. They had dined and danced on a boat sailing along the Danube, laughed on the bridges, joked on the streets - in spite of the fact that the weather was bitterly cold. Above all, they had been struck by the remarkable contrast between the historical town and some of the startling new architecture they came across. It was a contrast you would never see in Florence, a museum city par excellence, or in other Italian cities.
    Ferrara had realised from the start just how much he needed this break. Things had not been going well, and he had been getting into an ever more sombre mood as the year drew to its end. There was no real progress in the Monster of Florence case, no trace of the anonymous letter writer who had threatened his life, and Rizzo's investigation had reached a dead end. The Micali murder seemed destined to become one more bulging file in an already abundant archive of unsolved cases.
    And a blot on his reputation.
     
    *
    He was in his office by eight o'clock on Saturday morning.
    The newspapers were waiting for him, neatly piled between his computer screen and the printer on the left-hand table. They devoted a great deal of space to the previous morning's murder, much more than to the