Apart from the things she said, what almost hypnotized me was her tone of voice. Calm, reassuring – hypnotic, in fact.
“Do you want to put on a bulletproof vest?” Tancredi asked. She looked at him without even replying.
“OK. Before you go up, I’ll call you on the mobile, and you answer straight away and then leave the line open. That way at least we can hear what you’re saying and we’ll know what’s happening.”
He turned to two guys in their thirties, who looked like housing-estate drug dealers. Two officers from his squad.
“Cassano, Loiacono, you two come with me. We’ll go up together and stay on the stairs, just below the landing.”
“I’m going with you,” I heard myself saying, as if my voice had a will of its own.
“Don’t talk bullshit, Guido. You’re a lawyer, you do your job and let us get on with ours.”
“Wait, wait. If Claudia can get the negotiation started, I could go in after her, I could help her. He knows me, I’m Martina’s lawyer. I can tell him some nonsense – we’ll call off the trial, withdraw the charges, that kind of thing. I can be of help, if the negotiation goes ahead. If on the other hand you have to go in, obviously I’ll get out of the way.”
The deputy head of the Flying Squad said that in his opinion it might work. The important thing was to be careful. Great advice. He didn’t give any indication that he might come too. To avoid a bottleneck, I presume. His ideal policeman wasn’t Dirty Harry.
In my memory, what happened next is like a blackand-white film shot through a dirty lens and edited by a madman. And yet vivid, so vivid I can’t tell it in the past tense.
The three policemen are in front of me, on the last flight of stairs before the landing. As far as we can get without running the risk of being seen. We are very close, almost on top of each other. I can smell the pungent sweat of the taller one: Loiacono maybe, or maybe Cassano. The doorbell makes a strange, out-oftime noise. A kind of ding dang dong, with an oldfashioned echo that’s quite unsettling. There’s a voice from inside the apartment, and Claudia says something in reply. Then silence, a long silence. I assume he’s looking through the spyhole. Then a mechanical noise: locks, keys turning. Then silence again, apart from the sound of our held breaths.
Tancredi has his mobile stuck to his left ear. With his other hand he’s holding his pistol, like the other two. Against his leg, the barrel pointed downwards. I remember the action all three of them performed before coming in. Slide pulled back, round in the chamber, hammer cocked gently to avoid accidental firing.
I look at Tancredi’s face, trying to read in it what he can hear, what’s happening. At a certain moment, the face distorts and before I need to think what it means, he cries, “Shit, all hell’s breaking loose. Smash the door down, damn it, smash the door down right now.”
The bigger of the two officers – Cassano, or maybe Loiacono – gets to the door first, lifts his knee almost to his chest, stretches his leg and kicks the door with the sole of his foot, at the height of the lock. There’s a noise of wood splitting, but the door doesn’t yield. The other policeman does exactly the same. More splitting wood, but still the door doesn’t yield.
Another two, three, four very violent kicks, and it opens. We all go in together. Tancredi first, the rest of us behind. Nobody tells me to wait outside and do my job while they get on with theirs.
We pass through a number of rooms, guided by Scianatico’s cries.
When we get to the kitchen, the scene that meets our eyes looks like some terrible ritual.
Claudia is sitting astride Scianatico’s face: she’s gripped him between her legs, keeping him immobilized, and with one hand she’s pinned his throat, her fingers digging into his neck like daggers. With the other hand clenched in a fist, she’s striking him repeatedly in the face. Savagely and methodically, and as I watch, I know she’s killing him. The frame widens to include Martina. She’s on the floor, near the sink. She isn’t moving. She looks like a broken doll.
Cassano and Loiacono seize Claudia under her armpits and pull her off Scianatico. Once her feet are on the ground, she does what the two officers are least expecting: she attacks them so quickly they don’t know what hits them, they don’t even see the punches and the kicks. Tancredi takes a step back and aims the pistol at Claudia’s legs.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Claudia. Don’t let’s do anything stupid.”
She’s deaf to his cries and takes a couple of steps towards him. I don’t think she’s even seen me, even though I’m very close to her, on her left.
I don’t actually make a conscious decision to do what I do. It just happens. She doesn’t see me, doesn’t even see my right hand as it comes towards her and strikes her on the chin, from the side. The most classic of knockout blows. You can be the strongest man in the world, but if you’re hit by a good straight jab, delivered the correct way, right on the tip of your chin, there’s nothing you can do. Your lights go out and that’s it. It’s like an anaesthetic.
Claudia falls to the floor. The two policemen are on top of her, twisting her arm behind her back and handcuffing her, with the automatic, efficient movements of people who’ve done it many times before. Then they do the same with Scianatico, but with him there’s no need to hurry. His face is unrecognizable from all the blows, he’s uttering monosyllables, and he can’t move.
Tancredi goes to Martina and places his index finger and middle finger on her neck. To see if there’s still any blood circulating. But it’s a mechanical gesture, a pointless one. Her eyes are staring, her face is waxen, her mouth is half open, showing her teeth, and there’s a trickle of blood, already dry, from her nose. The face of death, violent death. Tancredi has seen it many times. I’ve seen it too, but only in photos, in the files of homicide cases. Never, until now, so concrete, so vivid, so terrifyingly banal.
Tancredi passes his hand over her eyes to close them. Then he looks around, finds a coloured dishcloth, takes it, and covers her face.
Cassano – or Loiacono – makes as if to go out and call the others, but Tancredi stops him and tells him to wait. He goes up to Claudia, who’s sitting on the floor with her hands cuffed behind her back. He crouches and talks to her in a low voice for a few seconds. Finally, she nods her head.
“Take the handcuffs off.”
Cassano and Loiacono look at him. The look he gives back doesn’t need interpreting: it means he has no wish to repeat the order and that’s it. When Claudia is once again free, Tancredi tells us all to leave the kitchen and comes out with us.
“Now listen to me carefully, because in a few seconds there’ll be chaos in here.”
We look at him.
“Let me tell you what happened. Claudia went in. He attacked her and a scuffle started. We heard it all over the phone, and that’s when we broke in. When we got to the kitchen they were fighting. Both of them. We intervened, he resisted, and obviously we had to hit him. We finally managed to immobilize him and handcuff him. That’s it. That’s all that happened.”
He pauses, and looks at us one after the other.
“Is that clear?”
Nobody says anything. What can we say? He looks at us again for a few moments and then turns to Cassano, or maybe Loiacono.
“Call the others, without making too much fuss. Don’t go out shouting, there’s really no need. And send in the ambulance people too. For that piece of shit.”
The officer turns to go. Tancredi calls him back.
“Hey.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to see any journalists in here. Is that clear?”
By the time we left, the apartment was filling with policemen, carabinieri, doctors, nurses. The deputy head of the Flying Squad resumed command, so to speak, of the operation.
Tancredi told me to take Claudia away, make sure she calmed down, and call him again in an hour. We had to go to police headquarters for Claudia’s statement, and he wanted to be the one to take it, obviously.