Chapter 1
Chapter 1
He had been detained by the officers of a Public Security patrol wagon in the late evening of September 26, 1943, suspected of killing a certain Rosa Demaggi, an attractive peroxide blonde in her thirties, a wealthy prostitute and a retail blackmarketer: the man, strong Neapolitan accent, square face, robust build but not fat, looked to be about forty. He was five feet eight tall, an above average stature in those times of widespread malnutrition, going bald at the forehead and temples and the top of his head, and across the nape of his neck had a semicircle of brown hair kept very short and shaved high. He was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt, both deep blue in color, and light greenish-gray wool gloves.
It was well-known at the Vice Squad in Naples that Rosa Demaggi turned tricks for wealthy men in her home, in Piazzetta del Nilo. Until July 25, she had also conceded her favors to fascist leaders and, after the armistice, when the city fell under the German heel, she had granted herself to officers of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. From previous investigations carried out jointly, it was common knowledge in the Vice Squad and Commercial Offenses departments, the latter created after the start of the conflict to combat the black market, that since the summer of 1940 Demaggi had asked to be compensated, preferably, with groceries, cigarettes and liquor, so she could do low-level trafficking on the black market; and it was known that, very quickly, she had expanded the business with purchases from wholesalers linked to the camorra.
As a result, the patrol teams had been ordered to also keep an eye on her dwelling along with others; but discreetly, because of Demaggi's s****l contacts with occupying officers and considering that, after July 25, when the OVRA had been dissolved1 and the secret archive had been opened, it had been discovered that the woman had been a bribed confidant and had reported political information which escaped customers berween the sheets, the heriarchy included. It was therefore assumed that, after the armistice and the German occupation, she had started selling information to the Gestapo officers she went to bed with.
Shortly before the suspect was detained, about 8.30 pm with only half an hour to curfew, as the police wagon was passing through Piazzetta del Nilo, the corporal in command had seen that individual in shabby clothes enter the house where the woman lived, in the only apartment on the ground floor. He didn’t ring and went in through the door which had been left ajar. Since he had his back to the vehicle, the man had not noticed the arrival of the patrol.
After entering, he had not closed the door completely behind himself, but had left it pulled to. The officer had assumed that he, like Demaggi, was involved in the clandestine market and had left it open for other colluders who were on the way. The door left unlocked made it unlikely that he was a s*x customer, not counting his roustabout’s clothing and the prostitute’s notoriously high rates. The corporal had ordered the driver to pull over outside the house. The officers had got out, except for the driver, and had let themselves into the apartment.
The suspect had been surprised in the entrance, just beyond the door, standing next to Rosa Demaggi. She was moaning weakly semi-unconscious, and was lying on the ground with a bloody hematoma on the nape of the neck, obviously the consequence of having fallen against a console, to the left entering, which had a blood stain on it. Rosa Demaggi had died a few seconds after the officers had entered. Considering him guilty of assaulting the woman, the man in overalls had been handcuffed. The patrol chief had said to him: "You came in here with the intention of killing her and it took you just a few seconds to hit her on the head: she was in the entrance waiting for you, she trusted you because she had left the doot open. But you, unexpectedly, without giving her time to escape, slammed her head hard against the furniture to kill her. You were counting on getting away immediately afterwards, in fact you hadn’t closed the door when you came in, so as not to waste time reopening it as you went out: you would have pulled it behind you as soon as you were outside and toodle-loo, who knows who and when the body would be found. You hadn't imagined that we would arrive: you wanted to make it look like an accident, but it went wrong."
The officer had assumed that the individual had killed with premeditation for reasons related to the black market, perhaps becauase of his own direct interest, perhaps on behalf of third parties. That it was voluntary murder was supported by the fact that the man was wearing wool gloves even though it was already warm: so as not to leave prints, it had been spontaneous to think. At the time the suspect, in full mental reshuffle because of the unexpected intervention of the police officer, had not known what to say.
Since up close you could see that not only was he wearing workman’s clothes, but that they were worn and rather dirty, the corporal was convinced that he could not be one of the woman’s s*x clients, and besides, the man had no money on him as he had ascertained by frisking him. He did not even have an identity card, but he did have a driving license which showed he was born in Naples forty-two years earlier, lived in Vicolo Santa Luciella and was called Gennaro Esposito, name and surname, however, that were very common in Campania and especially in Naples, which could have been false, as too could the driving licence. It was in fact well-known in Police Headquarters that the delinquency, and in particular the camorra, availed themselves of printers who were very skilled in forgeries. The patrol leader had not given much weight to the document.
He had called the operations room of the Station with the truck’s radio and reported the incident. The Violent Crimes Section had telephoned the switchboard of the morgue to alert them, asking them to send the anatomopathologist on duty to the victim’s home, for the initial investigations. Dr. Giovampaolo Palombella was on duty, a sixty-year-old with long thick gray hair which was always disheveled, tall, wiry and a little stooped, perhaps due to bending over the corpses to be dissected for more than thirty years.
At the same time a warrant officer had been sent to the victim's home. It was Bruno Branduardi, a short, obese and quiet man close to retirement and he was to carry out an inspection, listen to the patrol officers and the doctor, write everything down in his notebook and report to the superior on duty upon his return,
The non-commissioned officer had arrived in Piazzetta del Nilo on his slow motorbike, The Little Italian2 which, small as it was, looked as if it could barely support the heavy weight of that enormous man. First of all he had first listened to what the officers had to say, then the coroner who had arrived a little after him, in a van for the transport of the corpses, with two orderlies. The anatomopathologist had ruled out suicide, he had considered an accident possible, since at first glance the blow did not seem to him to have been very violent. He had not ruled out murder, however, reserving the right to be more precise after the autopsy. The warrant officer had taken note of it, adding a comment in his notebook that in his opinion it was not misfortune but murder and that the arrested man, in his view, was the murderer.
In reality, he had simply aligned himself with what the corporal had assumed and reported to him. The corpse had been removed and loaded onto the van to be taken to the morgue for the autopsy. Branduardi, on his part, after having quickly inspected the apartment and found that there was no one there, had ordered the officers to affix the seals on the front door, to take the arrested man to the Police Headquarters and put him in the holding cell, while waiting to be handed over to a commissioner for interrogation. At that time the law did not call for the intervention of a magistrate neither at the scene of the crime, nor during the police officer’s investigative interview with the suspect, which took place without the presence of his lawyer. The investigating judge took over if the investigating commissioner, using the autopsy report and having questioned the suspect, had considered it to be murder and had sent a report to the Public Prosecutor's Office. In the event of misfortune, the dossier, endorsed by the Deputy Commissioner, was simply archived without judicial follow-up.
Branduardi had followed the truck, but lost ground because the motorbike’s engine was now old and worn out. When he arrived, with the detained man already in the holding cell, the warrant officer had gone up to his office in the Violent Crimes Section on the second floor which he shared with a sergeant and a typist. He had calmly prepared himself a war coffee, a surrogate, with his own Neapolitan coffee maker that he kept in the closet along with an electric incandescent stove. He had sipped it boiling hot after sweetening it with saccharin, not because he was diabetic but because since the start of the war, sugar was unobtainable for ordinary mortals. He had then smoked a Serenissima Zara cigarette with equally heavenly calm, savoring it almost to the end of the butt that, for the last two puffs, he had held by skewering it with a pin. In those times of famine and filterless cigarettes, a lot of smokers used to do that. And finally, at a leisurely pace, he had taken the sheet of paper with the report no more than fifty feet away on the same floor, to one of the deputy commanders of the Violent Crimes Section, a certain chief commissioner Riccardo Calvo who was on duty that night until twenty-four hundred hours. At zero hours and a few seconds Branduardi had gone home to sleep and, shortly after, Calvo did the same after leaving the warrant officer’s report on the desk of his incoming peer, Dr. Giuliano Boni.
The man in overalls had remain locked in the holding cell.
Finally, following the orders of chief commissioner Boni, the Rosa Demaggi case had been foisted onto an almost beardless Deputy Commissioner who had come on duty at midnight, Dr. Vittorio D'Aiazzo. He had been in Public Safety for just under a year and had been assigned to the difficut Violent Crimes Section from the very first day.
It was about 3 o'clock in the morning of September 27, 1943 and the insurrection that history remembers as The Four Days of Naples was about to begin: the cauldron of the oppressed city was bubbling and the temperature had now risen to such a degree that it would be impossible for the occupying German to prevent its fiery eruption.
