Violente and Giacomo Sandri are killed

Violente and Giacomo Sandri are killed in a planned attack that converts Sandri’s familiar routine into an ambush. The scene’s arrangement points to a sequence: Violente is killed while waiting outside, and the attacker then waits inside for Sandri to emerge from the apartment.

The Attack and Its Discovery

Sandri has just unlocked the door of a small apartment and stepped onto the landing when someone calls his name. He turns and reaches beneath his jacket, but recognizes the danger only as he faces the barrels of a shotgun. The attack is immediate and fatal. The sudden shift from an ordinary departure to an armed ambush makes the doorway the hinge of the scene: Sandri has been drawn into a position where his familiar movements offer no protection.

At the scene, police investigator Mario Satta arrives to find Violente’s body in a car outside and Sandri’s upstairs. Violente has been positioned behind the wheel, with an elbow protruding from the window, so that the car could pass at a glance for an occupied vehicle. A responding officer discovered the deception when Violente did not answer and the body fell against him as he opened the door. The staging concealed the first killing long enough for the attacker to use the dark street and the apartment’s entrance as parts of the same trap.

The Investigation and the Trap’s Design

At the apartment, Mario Satta and Massimo Bellu reconstruct how the killings were arranged. Bellu explains that Sandri kept the apartment as a private meeting place, changing girlfriends regularly and visiting almost every night. Since Giorgio Rabbia had been attacked, Violente had waited outside for him. The attacker exploited that routine: Violente was killed and left behind the wheel, while the dark street and the apparently occupied car helped conceal what had happened. The killer then waited inside the apartment, likely carrying the shotgun beneath a loose coat, and attacked Sandri as he emerged.

The two deaths differ in method but belong to one coordinated ambush. Bellu identifies a shotgun fired at very close range as the weapon used against Sandri; Violente had been killed by a cut to the throat. Satta studies the scene and makes a dry remark about the pathologist’s report, but his reaction changes when he looks beneath the towel covering Violente. The brief smile that follows his inspection gives way to pallor: the professional’s sardonic manner cannot quite disguise the impact of the killing.

The Call That Interrupts Satta

Before the murders become an investigation, they interrupt an evening that has been proceeding according to Mario Satta’s own small ambitions. After dinner and gelato di tutti frutti, he is playing backgammon with an actress, eager to even the score before moving from the board to the bedroom. She has beaten him three times out of five, and he keeps delaying their departure because his pride as an expert is at stake. Just as he throws double sixes, the telephone rings. Fifteen minutes later he is at the scene, still looking as irritated as he had sounded on the call.

That abrupt change of setting gives Satta’s arrival an ordinary, almost comic prelude, then strips the evening of its private expectations. His impatience at the board has been about control over a game; at the apartment and car, he confronts a killing staged to exploit routine and appearances. The transition does not make the murders less deliberate. Instead, it places the investigator’s interrupted leisure beside the violence that has abruptly taken command of the night.

Witnesses and the Aftermath

The people nearest the ambush provide sharply different kinds of evidence. Sandri’s girlfriend hears the blast but hides beneath a pillow and stays there until the police arrive; she sees nothing of the attack. A woman in the apartment upstairs hears the shot, comes partway down the stairs, and glimpses Sandri’s body before breaking into screams. By the time Satta and Bellu are examining the scene, someone is still trying to calm her and obtain a statement. The sequence leaves the investigators with a reconstruction assembled from routine, staging, and a witness to the aftermath, while the person present in Sandri’s apartment cannot identify the killer.