“Have you ever represented Felice ‘Angel Face’ Maniero?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but that was twenty years ago, when he was just a kid, before he became a capo. It was for some minor crime. I don’t remember what.”
Seno’s most famous current client, Massimiliano Marchetti, arrived at Seno’s office accompanied by his father. The young Marchetti was short, solidly built, and had long blond hair, thinning on top. He was wearing a windbreaker, faded jeans, and jogging shoes. There was a small gold ring in his left ear.
“What was it like to be in isolation for forty-two days?” I asked him.
Marchetti considered the question for a moment. “You’re in there alone,” he said. “No TV, no newspaper . . . you never see anybody.”
“What did the room look like?” I asked.
“They call it the Lion’s Mouth,” he said, speaking haltingly. “It’s like . . . I mean . . . you can’t see out. . . . You only see sky.” He paused.
“Why did they put you in isolation?”
“Umm . . . they . . .” Marchetti seemed at a loss for words.
Seno spoke up. “It was a way of trying to get what they wanted out of him. But he didn’t have anything to give them, so it was really just a form of torture. I’ve seen them put some guys in isolation for eleven months. They had to be pulled out by psychiatrists.”
“Yeah, I was lucky,” said Marchetti.
“How do you think the fire started?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Really . . . I have no idea.”
“Well, how did you find out about it?”
Marchetti looked at his father and then at Seno. “I told them . . . uh . . . what I remembered, which . . . Not everything. . . . I mean . . . the times weren’t right. And I didn’t think that the fact that . . . And also, because . . . I mean . . . knowing I hadn’t done anything, you didn’t stop to think about it. . . .” Then he fell silent.
“But how did you actually find out?” I asked.
After a long pause, Marchetti said, “From my cousin. That evening . . . it was after . . . what was it? . . . Ummm . . . it was—”
“How did you find out?” Seno cut in, visibly exasperated. “Don’t be so fucking vague! He wants to know exactly how you found out! What happened! Who told you!”
Marchetti’s father gave his son a worried look. “Someone called them,” he said, trying to help.
“No!” said Seno. “Carella says that. He”—pointing to Massimiliano, “he didn’t hear the telephone call.”
“I wasn’t . . . um . . . in the same room,” said Marchetti.
Seno leaned toward me, palms up. “What can I do? That’s the way he talks. Understand? He’s trying to defend himself, and he talks like that. He pulls out one word a minute. No way can I let him testify.”
“What’s going to be your main line of defense?” I asked Seno. “What’s your most powerful argument?”
“Motive!” said Seno. “Casson hasn’t even suggested Massimiliano has a motive. How could he? Massimiliano was only an employee of Viet. Viet wasn’t his company. He had no worries about any penalty or fine. He couldn’t possibly have had a motive.
“When Casson talks about a motive,” Seno went on, “he always says it was the penalty. That’s Carella, maybe, but not Massimiliano. So Carella is really his main suspect. But there is absolutely no evidence to implicate Massimiliano at all except that he told Casson that he and his cousin were never out of each other’s sight. That ties him to Carella; so if Carella set the fire, then Casson figures Massimiliano had to be there, too. If Massimiliano hadn’t said that, Casson would have severed him from the case, and he wouldn’t be going through any of this. But, look, Massimiliano didn’t think he was a suspect until he was arrested sixteen months after the fire. He didn’t have a lawyer, me, until the day he was arrested, and by then he’d been interrogated five times.”
“So do you think Carella might be guilty?” I asked. “Or at least do you think he might know what happened?”
“I didn’t say that,” Seno said. “I only meant that of the two boys, Carella would be the more likely candidate.”
“Do you think they’ve been set up?”
“Absolutely. This whole thing stinks. It’s been very dirty from the start. The police, the press, the whole thing. When we come to trial, I’m going to show that these two kids didn’t have enough time to set the fire, between the time Casson says they were last seen in the theater and a few minutes later, when I can prove they were outside. I won’t go into all the details now, but they’d have had to run through the theater at top speed to do it, and in the dark, too.”
“But if it’s arson,” I said, “what other suspects are there?”
“Are you kidding? With all the oddball characters they had over there at the Fenice, they didn’t have to pick on these two guys. There was actually one guy working there—listen to this—who used to say, ‘Fire! Fire!’ every time he walked by. No joke! And I heard about another guy who, wherever he worked, a fire would break out. They ruled that guy out almost immediately.
“No, the only evidence Casson has is who ‘officially’ left the theater last. And ‘officially’ it was Carella and Marchetti. Now, what kind of evidence is that? What does it prove? Anybody could have walked into that theater! Anybody! No one was checking. Doors were unlocked, some doors were even left open! Nobody was standing guard. The custodian wandered off and didn’t even show up at the fire until twenty minutes later. But who needed an arsonist anyway? The place wasn’t a theater. It was a cowshed, ready to go up in flames any minute.”
DESPITE CASSON’S CONFIDENCE IN HIS CASE against Carella and Marchetti, the public remained dubious, at least as far as I could tell from casual conversations and overheard remarks.
A vendor at the Rialto food market said to a housewife buying tomatoes, “Who but a fool would believe two Venetians burned the Fenice? Venetians, no less!”
The housewife nodded. “It’s crazy.”
“And for so little money!” said the vendor. “But even if it was for a fortune. No. To burn down the Fenice? It’s unthinkable.”
The Venetian penchant for conspiracy theories was not satisfied by the notion that two young men had torched the Fenice to avoid a small penalty. There had to be something much bigger, and more secretive, behind it. The Mafia was still a prime suspect for many people, if they believed it was arson at all.
One person who did not believe it was arson was the man whose photographs had, ironically, been used by the experts to prove that it
had
been. The photographer, Graziano Arici, had been walking through Campo San Fantin on his way to dinner the night of the fire when he smelled smoke, saw flames, and ran home to get his camera. His pictures were studied not only by Casson’s experts but by the prosecutor in Bari who had compared them with pictures of the fire that had been set by arsonists at the Petruzzelli Opera House and found an eerie similarity.
“It was only because I had broken up with my girlfriend a few hours earlier that I happened to see the fire,” Arici told me. “I walked her to the vaporetto, and instead of going with her to Mestre, I came back home and was on my way to having dinner alone.”
Arici invited me to look at his photographs at his studio on the ground floor of Count Girolamo Marcello’s palace, barely one hundred yards from the Fenice. An engaging, gray-bearded man, Arici sat at a computer nimbly manipulating a keyboard and mouse, arranging and rearranging his images of the fire on his monitor, zooming in and out. The photographs showed the fire spreading rapidly from left to right.
“They claim these pictures prove arson,” Arici said, “because there was a fire wall dividing that floor in two, and it didn’t seem to slow down the ‘flashover.’ So one of the experts figured that the fire must have been set in at least two places—possibly even three places—and of course that would have meant arson. But I think that’s nonsense. What if the fire doors had been left open? What about the stacks of wood and the heaps of sawdust and wood chips? They could easily have caught fire in an accident.”
“So what do you think happened?” I asked.
“Well, maybe the electricians wanted to dry something and used a heater or a blowtorch. They had an accident. Maybe they tried to put the fire out and couldn’t, and then they got scared and ran. That would explain why they tried to make people believe they had left the theater an hour earlier than they did. Casson probably accused them of arson hoping they would tell him about the accident if there was one, and get a lighter sentence—for negligence, fleeing the fire and not reporting it. But who knows? I’m only a photographer.”
LUDOVICO DE LUIGI WAS ONLY AN ARTIST, but
he
had it all figured out. “It always comes down to money in the end,” he said, “and the end is nowhere in sight. A lot more money has to pass through many more hands before this will be over.”
I mentioned that I had been impressed by the apparent thoroughness of the scientific tests made by Casson’s experts. De Luigi’s response, after having a good laugh, was to insist that I meet a friend of his. “I’ll show you a real expert,” he said. “Come with me.”
At the rowing club on the Zattere, De Luigi introduced me to a man who was standing next to a gondola tied up at the landing dock. The man had a thick black beard without a mustache, like Abraham Lincoln’s. His name was Gianpietro Zucchetta, and he was a chemist who worked for the Ministry of the Environment. His gondola was an exact replica of Casanova’s gondola, circa 1750.
“It looks like the gondolas you see in paintings by Canaletto,” said Zucchetta, “which are noticeably different from modern gondolas.”
Zucchetta’s gondola had a removable cabin, or
felze,
attached to its midsection, and its front-to-back line was straight instead of curved at the bow, which made it necessary for two gondoliers to row it instead of one. Most tellingly, the prow rose higher out of the water, and Zucchetta said that the first time he took it out at high tide, he was surprised to find it would not fit under a number of bridges that Casanova had passed under with ease. “It was a dramatic demonstration how much the water level has risen in Venice over the past two hundred and fifty years,” he said.
Zucchetta knew more about water and Venice than most people did; he had written a history of
acqua alta
in Venice. He was also an authority on Venetian bridges, having cataloged all 443 in his book
Venice, Bridge by Bridge.
In the course of conversation, I learned also that Zucchetta had written several other books: two about the canals of Venice, one about the “lost canals” that have been filled in (the
rii terrà
), one about Casanova, one about Casanova’s gondola, one about the history of gas in Venice, and yet another about the Venetian sewer system. “When you pay a gondolier to row you on the canals,” said Zucchetta, “he’s rowing you through the sludge of Venice.”
But none of these specialties was the reason De Luigi had brought me to see Zucchetta, as I discovered when I asked, “What will your next book be about?”
“A history of fires in Venice,” he said.
De Luigi beamed. “My friend Zucchetta is an expert on fires. He’s investigated—what?—six hundred, seven hundred fires?”
“Eight hundred,” said Zucchetta, “including the fire at the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari. I’m a member of the International Association of Arson Investigators.”
“Have you been called on to consult on the Fenice fire?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but I’ve refused.”
“Why?”