Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The snapshots showed two blond girls. Each had been ***, knifed, and abandoned in a stolen truck.
Commissioner Margherita Perri had been on the case for three weeks, fo-cusing exclusively on it.
She picked up the photos from the folder she had shown to the neuropsychiatrist,
to the prefect, and to Dr. Guelfo Sabbiati, the overweight and lordly State’s Attorney who was coordinating the investigations.
She put them back in the tobacco-colored folder she had been using since her days in the university.
She and the other three had been totally unsuccessful in hypothesizing the identity of the murderer, trying to imagine a face, a name…
In spite of her barely thirty years, Margherita had had experience with death and its accouterments.
She had enrolled in the police academy as a very young girl,
and with her officer’s salary had paid her way through university,
eventually becoming a Commissioner.
Thus, it was not difficult to see that behind the delicate features and the reserved behavior,
there lay hidden a great determination,
evidenced by the almost insolent attention with which her green eyes stared down anyone who spoke.
After the *** of Sabrina Cesco, the charming cashier of a multi-cinema,
a daily newspaper received a letter written with a norm graph.
The murderer asked for seven million euros in order not to kill other girls.
It seemed, however, that the murderer was not interested in the money
and that the number requested actually hid a message:
seven were to be the days between the crime committed against Sabrina
and that of Christa Ranke, a 25-year-old German tourist freshly arrived in Italy.
The opinion of the neuropsychiatrist was that the murderer,
fully aware that he would never receive the money wanted,
with those first two crimes and the ones he would continue to commit,
to lay the guilt of the affair on the state.
Indeed, seven ritual wounds had profaned the bodies both of Sabrina and of Christa.
The newspapers had written everything and had contradicted themselves,
but there was no trace of the murderer.
Each time, the maniac had used a 15-centimeter long hunting-knife,
which he had then carefully cleaned on some article the poor victim had been wearing.
Each time there had been no witnesses.
No one who had seen any individual getting out of any of those trucks (always stolen and left in no-parking zones),
who then got on a bus or into a car parked nearby.
Then a second letter, also in featureless handwriting, was addressed to Margherita.
The murderer explained to her that he killed for the pleasure of it.
That he penetrated the young corpses, still warm,
caressing them for a long time, until his insane desire grew cold,
turning first into disgust and then into a blind and furious horror that forced him to “punish” those tragic mannequins,
by then rigid and cold, tearing them apart with his knife
and incising into their flesh the seven hieroglyphics of blood.
Margherita reread the letter.
At her course of criminology they had taught her that to investigate serial killers it was necessary to learn to think as they did.
In all other cases, the son who wanted dad’s fortune all to himself,
the business associate who didn’t want to give up a slice the pie, or the betrayed lover,
the investigations were simple, because the motive led in a straight line to the guilty party.
But when the motive was an obscure drive,
a hidden madness, perhaps even one masqueraded for years?
The only certitude was to hope the killer had planned his “job” meticulously,
and so, using the technique for telling artists apart and
studying the details in the execution of the crime,
it was possible to retrace a probable identikit both psychological
and physical of the murderer.
In those weeks of study, Margherita had come to believe that the monster picked his victims by chance,
did not frequent the scenes of the crimes, and did nothing to earn money.
The true threat was, by definition,
not the long-handled stiletto with which he flayed and martyred those poor girls,
but his contorted mind. That was where Margherita had to dig to pull him out.
The insistent ringing of the telephone brought the girl back to reality.
She answered, fearing she already knew why they were looking for her.
The meeting at WorldSat headquarters, the most important private national broadcaster,
had just begun and immediately the CEO had frozen everyone in his tracks.
The pilot episode of the new program had proved a flop.
With a budget three times the size of preceding programs the transmission got,
on its opening night, a miserable 7% audience-share rating:
any daytime talk show could do as well.
In plain words, the cutting-edge program that should have won the highest possible ratings,
simply sank without a trace.
Around the great oval table, the directors and the authors began discussions,
each trying to make the other look responsible for the failure.
-The error,- sniffs one of the production supervisors,
-lays in trying to pass off those boring kids locked in an apartment as persons of interest,
as an authentic document, as a direct take on reality.-
-Real stories of real people, that should have been the formula.- hisses back one of the authors.
-But you productions stiffs, following your precious guide-lines,
wouldn’t let it happen, that way you couldn’t lick up to the sponsors,
and you made us turn out the usual stereotypical garbage,
everything stinking of falseness and of no interest to anyone.
***. The reality was that none of them were able to anticipate the tastes of the public,
the omnivores of the small screen,
offering them something different from the usual big and little brothers,
the slick presenters, the salon debates, the quizzes with the semi-naked dancing girls,
and tight-rope walking comics, could be a gamble.
-And yet it should not be difficult to guess the public taste:
just remember that the reigning cult of our time is the trash, the ugly.-
The grey side-burned journalist, the famous talking head,
took his role as artistic consultant seriously and blabbed on about the useless paradox.
-Why the ugly is eternal and absolute, costs little,
is found everywhere and does not go out of style, like karaoke programs or gypsy fortune-tellers. The ugly is….-
-Lay off your ***!-
Carlo Cremonelli blasts his way into the office like a lion tamer entering a cage
and all fall silent and rise respectfully.
Carlo is short and stocky, about 40, determined
and cocky as only a successful self-made man can be.
His hair is coal-black, his skin swarthy,
with two absurdly piercing blue eyes and a wolf’s leer.
He returned the journalist’s evil look.
He had been wondering for months how to get rid of him
without offending the bigwigs behind him.
He couldn’t take any more of the wise man’s sonorous discourses on the abstruse esthetics of communication
and thus sought to humiliate him, thinking he would resign on his own.
No luck!
The audience-crisis, explains Carlo,
was determined by the lack of an authentically never-before-seen reality show.
With ideological emptiness and insecurity regarding the future,
he intuited that the bored public needed to be shaken by a different program as direct and pitiless as life itself.
It was time to let go of snooty group arguments, confessions in front of the TV cameras,
the meaningless little quarrels in grandma’s condo.
The moment had come to construct a show that was the mirror of a society where,
right or wrong, the strongest always prevails.
After all, in the end, the wolf always eats the sheep.
In other words, an extreme spectacle in which violence and realism are underlined by maximum power.
These were the results of research that he had commissioned
to an important American university and, based on that analysis,
Carlo believed he had found a sure-fire formula.
-We have to remember that TV, is in every house nowadays like running water or electricity,
it no longer is managed cleverly but, just like the other two resources,
is utilized more out of habit than anything, almost automatically.-
-You could even say that the public is subjected to the various programs and follows them passively.
Even the appearance of the “reality-shows” where a portion of reality is shown through the key holes,
only rekindles audience interest for a few seasons,
and that genre too seems on its way to an inevitable decline.-
-However,- he continued. -This decline involves only scripted reality shows:
the others keep on drawing massive audiences.
They are the ones we see in the news:
wars, seizures of power, murders
—the ones, in other words, rendered by human needs:
violence, sex, and money, mixed in equal parts.
Because these ingredients never tire the public.-
A feverish spark kindles and animates Carlo’s gaze.
-And these are the ingredients that will make up our new program:
VIOLENCE, SEX, and MONEY!
But I want a whole new package, fierce and upsetting.-
Then he gazes coldly at his men,
-If you want to keep your jobs find it for me…
I'll produce it at any cost!-