Enzo Tortora’s demon

First and foremost, it is a matter of assigning roles. Job’s tribulations began when God, the Judge, authorised the Accuser – which is precisely what ‘Satan’ means in Hebrew: an adversary in court, a public prosecutor – to put the faithful servant to the test: ‘Here he is in your hands!’ He told his Vyšinskij. Yet it is rare, in Hell as on earth, for the chief prosecutor to lead the prosecution; it is customary for him to entrust the case to one of his countless deputies. Which of the demons was tasked with persecuting Enzo Tortora?

There is an apocryphal tale on this subject. When Saint Michael cast Lucifer down to earth, as recounted by the German philologist Rudolf Kleinpaul in his 1886 satirical work Der Druckfehlerteufel, he banished all the rebellious angels along with him, who then took up residence on earth according to their various inclinations: “Of these, one ended up in the distilleries: he was the demon of spirits. Another went to the gambling dens: he was the demon of gambling. And so the demons of the forest, of plants, of borders, of war and of the theatre came into being. Finally, one went to the workshops where books were printed, and this was the so-called demon of misprints”.

In our case, the choice was, in fact, quite obvious. Tortora was virtually teetotalling, even though he had lent his face to an advert for grappa, and he did not frequent gambling dens. Neither the demon of spirits nor the demon of gambling could get the better of him. He did, however, own a vast number of books – so many as to astound Sebastiano Vassalli, who interviewed him at his Milanese home in Via dei Piatti (“you have more books than I do, and I’m a writer by trade”). It was inevitable that his file would end up on the desk of the demon of misprints, to whom an ancient monastic tradition had even given a name: Titivillus. He was depicted with a sack brimming with letters – the letters omitted in the transcriptions of careless copyists; the letters skipped, to save time, in the mumbled prayers of slothful monks; perhaps even the letters mistaken for others in the reports of hasty policemen.

The demon crept between the lines of Tortora’s life – whilst he was still blissfully unaware – on 15 March 1983, during a search carried out by the Lecce Mobile Squad. Not even two months earlier, in Rome, TNT had blown up Vincenzo Casillo’s car; he was known as ’o nirone because of his raven-black hair. Casillo was Raffaele Cutolo’s right-hand man, but he was certainly not the only one: the big boss had more than one Hindu deity at his disposal. The search of the flat in Lecce was part of the investigations that stemmed from the attack. The report by the Mobile Squad noted the discovery, amongst the paperwork, of a page from a small diary on which were noted, amongst other things, the name and telephone numbers of Enzo Tortora.

After this opening prank, Titivillus retreated, satisfied, to his Tartarian abode to enjoy the spectacle. And it was no short spectacle. Months, even years, had to pass before the typo was corrected, and it was established that the name written in the little notebook was not Tortora but Tortona, with an ‘n’, and that the notebook did not even belong to the Camorra boss Giuseppe Puca, known as ‘o Giappone’ – another of his right-hand men – but to his mistress Assunta Catone; Months, even years, had to pass before it was established that those numbers – on which the investigators, in the grip of a Pythagorean-Kabbalistic inspiration instilled in them by Pandico, had tried all manner of combinations in a vain attempt to link them to Tortora – belonged to a small businessman from Campania. The dénouement, when it comes, will be comical. When the judges ask Mr Tortona to prove that he, and not Enzo Tortora, is the account holder, he will bring the house down with a quip: ‘Your Honour, dial the number, and I’ll answer it.’

Meanwhile, the transposition of a single letter had irrevocably altered the course of events, diverged lives and destinies, and forcibly thrust an intruder into a sordid tale to which he did not belong. From the Lecce Police Headquarters, in fact, the inaccurate transcript had made its way to the Preliminary Investigations Office of the Court of Naples, and in the last ten days of March 1983 it had finally landed beneath the thick spectacles of the man who, more than anyone else, knew what to do with it, because Tortora’s name had been marked for years in the dense catalogue of his vendettas awaiting execution. This man was Giovanni Pandico.