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 sex 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.
What the Partenope people were feeling had been unclear to the contemptuous Nazi invader and the fear that they had intentionally spread in the city had resulted in hearts at boiling point and in the mood for rebellion. Facimmo 'a uèrra a chilli strunzi zellosi3 was now the feeling of many Neapolitans, under the impression that, San Genna' ajutànno4 ! they would free themselves and, at last, peace would become real, very real and no longer the stillborn illusion of a couple of months before:
On July 25, Italy had rejoiced at the fall of the regime during the night, seemingly definitive with Mussolini defenestrated by the Grand Council of Fascism and the king having him arrested, and with the new Badoglio government which was no longer fascist, even though not democratically elected; but above all it had been the mistaken idea that the conflict had ended that made the nation rejoice. In any case, there were soon laments throughout the entire nation which, in Naples, had presented picturesque overtones in the alleyways and the bassi5 , such as: Chillo capucchióne d'o nuvièllo Càpo 'e Guviérno, 'o maresciallo d'Italia Badoglio Pietro, 'o gran generalone! ha fatto di' a 'a ràdio, tòmo, tòmo: "The war continues": strunz' e mmèrda!6 Then there had been those who had pointed out: Nossignori, strunzi noi ati a penzà che 'nu maresciallone vulisse 'a pace! Ma va ' ffa 'n 'c...7
With the armistice of Cassibile signed between Italy and the Anglo-Americans on September 3 and which should have remained secret until the Italian armed forces had been reorganized to hold back the vindictive former ally, but had been made known on September 8 by vainglorious victorious generals, a worse evil than before had landed on Italy, through the Brenner Pass8 Many new, combative and vindictive Germanic divisions had joined the German units already present in Italy. "Why on earth," wondered the most prepared Italians, "hadn’t our rulers and military leaders been able to prepare an emergency plan in time? When surrender to the enemy had been likely for a long time? With the forces of the relentless former ally already here?"
After September 8, the only thing the king and his ministers had done was flee to the south, to Brindisi, taking advantage of the fact that the 1st English Airborne Division was about to take that city which, unlike the others, was almost free of German troops, and counting on the fact that the Anglo-Americans, having conquered Sicily, were invading the rest of the southern regions of the Peninsula9 . Breathless, the Sovereign, his Secretaries of State and General Mario Roatta, failed defender of