Free The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi Page B

cardboard suitcases, with dazed looks on their faces, the first time out of their small mountain village with scarcely a lira in their pockets. The Vincis were self-assured, adaptable, and surprisingly sophisticated.
    Salvatore and Francesco were the two brothers who would play a major role in the Monster of Florence story. Physically they resembled each other: short and robust, good-looking, with curly, raven-black hair, their restless eyes peering out of the deep fissures in their rough, arrogant faces. Both were blessed with an intelligence far greater than might be expected from their limited background. But despite their resemblance, the two brothers couldn’t have been more different. Salvatore was quiet, reflective, introverted, given to reasoned arguments and discussions that he pursued with a mellifluous, Old World courtesy. He wore a pair of spectacles that gave him the air of a professor of Latin. Francesco, the youngest, was extroverted and cocky, the man of action with a macho swagger, the true
balente
of the two.
    Naturally, they hated each other.
    Once in Tuscany, Salvatore found work as a bricklayer. Francesco spent most of his time in a bar outside of Florence that was an infamous hangout for Sardinian criminals. It was the unofficial headquarters of three famous Sardinian gangsters who had exported to Tuscany a classic Sardinian business: kidnapping for ransom. These men were partly responsible for the rash of kidnappings that plagued Tuscany in the late sixties and seventies. In one instance, when a ransom was slow in coming, they killed the victim, who was a count, and disposed of the body by feeding it to man-eating pigs—a detail Thomas Harris used to great effect in his novel
Hannibal.
Francesco Vinci, as far as we know, never took part in these kidnappings. He dedicated himself to petty holdups, theft, and another venerable Sardinian tradition, rustling livestock.
    Salvatore rented a room in a run-down house occupied by a Sardinian family named Mele, where Stefano Mele lived with his father, siblings, and wife, Barbara Locci. (In Italy, the wife traditionally keeps her maiden name after marriage.) Barbara Locci was slinky and sloe-eyed, with a flattened nose and thick, well-shaped lips. She favored skintight red skirts that showed off a full-bodied figure. When she was a teenager back in Sardinia, her deeply impoverished family had arranged for her to marry Stefano, who came from marginally better circumstances. He was much older than she, and on top of it
uno stupido
, a simpleton. When the Mele family had immigrated to Tuscany, she went along.
    Once in Tuscany, the very lively young Barbara set about ruining the Mele family’s honor. She often stole money from her in-laws and went out on the town seeking men, giving them money, and sneaking them back into the Mele home. Stefano was completely unable to control her.
    In an effort to put an end to her nocturnal adventures, the patriarch of the Mele family, Stefano’s father, put iron bars on the first-floor windows and tried to keep her locked in the house. It didn’t work. Barbara soon took up with their lodger, Salvatore Vinci.
    Barbara’s husband was no obstacle to the affair. He even encouraged it. Salvatore Vinci testified later, “He wasn’t jealous. He was the one who invited me to live in their house when I was looking for a place to live. ‘Come live with us!’ he said. ‘We’ve got a free room.’ ‘What about money?’ ‘Give whatever you can.’ So I moved into Mele’s house. And right away he brought me to meet his wife in bed. Then he urged me to take her to the movies. He said that it didn’t matter to him. Or he would go play cards at his social club and leave me alone with her in the house.”
    At one point Stefano’s motorbike was hit by a car and he was laid up in the hospital for several months recuperating. The following year Barbara bore him a son, Natalino, but anyone with the ability to count to nine could see