The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi Page A

against the decadence of the age. There were those who seized on the Monster as a way to once again declaim against Florence and its presumed moral and spiritual depravity, its middle-class greed and materialism. “The Monster,” wrote one editorial correspondent, “is the living expression of this city of shopkeepers, sinking into an orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence perpetrated by its priests, power brokers, puffed-up professors, politicians, and various self-appointed hacks. . . . The Monster is a cheap middle-class vindicator who hides behind a façade of bourgeois respectability. He is simply a man with bad taste.”
    Others thought the Monster must be, literally, a monk or priest. One wrote in a letter to
La Nazione
that the shells found at the scenes of the killings were old and discolored “because in a monastery an old pistol and some bullets could have been lying around forgotten in some dark corner almost forever.” The letter writer went on to point out something that had already been widely discussed among Florentines: that the murderer might be a Savonarola-like priest visiting the wrath of God upon young people for their fornication and depravity. He pointed out that the woody piece of a grapevine stuck into the first victim might be a biblical message recalling the words of Jesus that the “vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away.”
    Police detectives also took the Savonarola theory seriously, and quietly began looking into certain priests known to have odd or unusual habits. Several Florentine prostitutes told police that from time to time they entertained a priest with rather eccentric tastes. He paid them generously, not for normal sex, but for the privilege of shaving off their pubic hair. The police were interested, reasoning that here was a man who enjoyed working with a razor in that particular area. The girls were able to give the police his name and address.
    One crisp Sunday morning, a small group of police and carabinieri in plainclothes, led by a pair of magistrates, entered an ancient country church perched among cypresses in the lovely hills southwest of Florence. The committee was received in the sacristy, where the priest was in the act of dressing in his robes, taking up the sacred vestments with which he was about to say Mass. They showed him a warrant and told him the reason for their visit, stating their intention to search the church, grounds, confessionals, altars, reliquaries, and tabernacle.
    The priest staggered and almost fell to the floor in a faint. He didn’t try even for a moment to deny his nocturnal avocation as a barber for ladies, but he swore in the strongest terms that he wasn’t the Monster. He said he understood why they had to search the premises, but he begged them to keep the reason for their visit secret and delay the search until after he had said Mass.
    The priest was allowed to celebrate Mass before his parishioners, joined by the policemen and investigators, who sat through the service looking and acting just like city folk out enjoying a country Mass. They kept a close eye on the priest so as not to run the risk that, during the service, he might make away with some vital clue.
    The search took place as soon as the parishioners had filed out, but all the investigators carried away was the priest’s razor, and he was soon cleared.

CHAPTER 6
    D espite the huge success of his journalistic career chronicling the Monster case, all was not well for Spezi. The savagery of the crimes preyed heavily on his mind. He began to have nightmares and was fearful for the safety of his beautiful Flemish wife, Myriam, and their baby daughter, Eleonora. The Spezis lived in an old villa that had been converted into apartments high on a hill above the city, in the very heart of the countryside stalked by the Monster. Covering the case raised many unanswerable and excruciating questions in his mind about good and evil, God, and human nature.
    Myriam urged her