A Man Erased

The rain had started just as Jessica left the bookshop, a fine mist settling over the narrow streets of San Remo. The scent of wet stone and sea salt clung to the air, mixing with the faint traces of espresso drifting from shuttered cafés.

She walked slowly, her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket, turning the name over in her mind.

Orlando Sacchetti.

A name that meant nothing to most people. But to Marco Bellanti, the journalist who died trying to uncover something, that name had been enough to get him killed.

Jessica reached a small piazza and ducked under the awning of a closed newspaper stand. She pulled out the note again, running her thumb over the ink, her mind already piecing things together.

Sacchetti had been an extra in Pasolini’s films, a forgettable face in the background of something larger than himself. And yet, the week Pasolini was murdered, Sacchetti vanished too. Not arrested. Not questioned. He simply disappeared, almost like he was erased. And if Bellanti had been hunting him, that meant he had uncovered something that tied Pasolini’s murder to a deeper truth.

Jessica exhaled slowly, leaning against the wall as the rain pattered against the cobblestones.

Paolo Pasolini was a filmmaker. A poet. A radical. He had never belonged to one world. Born in 1922, he had grown up watching Italy transform, watching fascism rise and fall, watching the world carve itself into new shapes. By the 1960s, he had become one of Italy’s most controversial voices, a filmmaker who refused to look away from the grotesque realities of power, corruption, and the broken promises of revolution.

His films weren’t entertainment. They were indictments.

Accattone (1961) had dragged audiences into the underworld of Rome’s forgotten poor.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) had painted Christ as a radical, a man against the system.

Teorema (1968) had torn apart the bourgeoisie, showing a family destroyed by their own desires.

And then came Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Released in 1975, just weeks before his murder, it was a film so brutal, so relentless, that it was banned almost everywhere.

Jessica had seen it. Once. It wasn’t a film you could ever forget. Set in the dying days of Mussolini’s fascist regime, it depicted absolute power unrestrained, a world where the rich and powerful consumed and discarded human lives without consequence. It was a warning.

Weeks later, Pasolini was dead. The official story? Pasolini was killed by a teenage hustler, Pino Pelosi, in a robbery gone wrong. But that story never made sense. His body had been beaten beyond recognition, run over multiple times by his own car.

Pelosi’s confession had been inconsistent. Evidence suggested more than one person had been involved. Over the years, rumors had swirled like smoke. The Mafia killed him. The government silenced him. The police covered it up. He had known something. Take your pick of conspiracies. And now, Jessica was standing in the rain, chasing the ghost of another man who had vanished the same week.

* * *

Jessica pulled out her phone, wiping the mist from the screen. She ran a search: Orlando Sacchetti, 1975. At first, she found nothing. Then buried several pages into her search, there was a single mention. A missing persons report, filed in Rome, November 1975.

There was no follow-up. No resolution. Just a man who had walked into history and never walked back out. Jessica frowned, scrolling further. She found a second mention, an address to an old boarding house. Still standing.

She exhaled, the rain rolling off the awning above her. If Sacchetti had disappeared from history, then she was going to bring him back.

* * *

The boarding house sat in the older part of San Remo, a crumbling yellow façade tucked between two taller buildings. The windows were dark, the paint peeling from years of neglect.

Jessica pressed the buzzer. Nothing. She tried again. Still nothing.

She was about to turn away when she heard a rustle of movement. Then, the door cracked open. A man, old, frail, his face a map of lines carved by time, peered at her with sharp, cautious eyes.

Jessica held up the note. Bellanti’s note. “I’m looking for someone,” she said, her voice steady. “Orlando Sacchetti.”

The man stared. Jessica watched his grip tighten on the door.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he muttered.

And before she could say another word, he slammed the door shut.