by Dick Francis
To pay too much too soon was to make kidnappers think they had underestimated the family’s resources, and sometimes resulted in the extortion of a second ransom for the same victim. I had warned him of that, and he had understood.
“Alessia is worth more to me than everything I possess. I wanted to pay. . . . You wouldn’t let me. I should have done what I thought best. I would have given everything . . .”
His fury bubbled on, and I couldn’t blame him. It often seemed to those who loved that literally no price was too great to pay for the safe return of the loved one, but I’d learned a great deal about the unexpected faces of stress over the past four years, and I’d seen that for the future health of the family’s relationships it was essential that one member had not in fact cost the rest everything. After the first euphoria, and when the financial loss had begun to bite, the burden of guilt on the paid-for victim became too great, and the resentment of the payers too intense, and they too began to feel guilt for their resentment, and could eventually hate the victim for love of whom they had beggared themselves.
To save the victims’ future equilibrium had gradually become to me as important as their actual physical freedom, but it was an aim I didn’t expect Paolo Cenci at that moment to appreciate.
The telephone at his elbow started ringing, making him jump. He put out his hand towards it and then hesitated, and with a visible screwing up of courage lifted the receiver to his ear.
“Ricardo! . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . I understand. I will do that now, at once.” He put down the receiver and rose galvanically to his feet.
“Ricardo Traventi?” I asked, standing also. “Lorenzo’s brother?”
“I must go alone,” he said, but without fire.
“You certainly must not. I will drive you.”
I had been acting as his chauffeur since I had arrived, wearing his real chauffeur’s cap and navy suit while that grateful man took a holiday. It gave me the sort of invisibility that the firm had found worked best: kidnappers always knew everything about a household they had attacked, and a newcomer too officiously visiting alarmed them. A kidnapper was as nervous as a stalking fox and tended to see dangers when they didn’t exist, let alone when they did. I came and went at the villa through the servants’ entrance, taking it for granted that everything else would be noted.
Cenci’s fury had evaporated as quickly as it had grown, and I saw that we were back to some sort of trust. I was grateful both for my sake and his that he would still at all accept my presence, but it was with some diffidence that I asked, “What did Ricardo say?”
“They telephoned . . .” No need to ask who “they” were. “They” had been telephoning to Traventi’s house with messages all along, taking it for granted that there was an official tap on the telephones to the Villa Francese. That the Traventis’ telephone was tapped also, with that family’s reluctant permission, seemed to be something “they” didn’t know for certain.
“Ricardo says he must meet us at the usual place. He says he took the message because his parents are both at the hospital. He doesn’t want to worry them. He says he will come on his scooter.”
Cenci was already heading towards the door, sure that I would follow.
Ricardo, Lorenzo’s younger brother, was only eighteen, and no one originally had intended the two boys to be involved. Giorgio Traventi had agreed, as a lawyer, to act as a negotiator between Paolo Cenci and the kidnappers. It was he who took messages, passed them on, and in due course delivered the replies. The kidnappers themselves had a negotiator . . . HIM . . . with whom Giorgio Traventi spoke.
At times Traventi had been required to pick up packages at a certain spot, usually but not always the same place, and it was to that place that we were now headed. It had become not just the post-box for proof of Alessia’s still being alive, or for appeals from her, or demands from HIM, or finally, earlier that evening, for the instructions about where to take the ransom, but also the place where Giorgio Traventi met Paolo Cenci, so that they could consult together in private. Neither had been too happy about the carabinieri overhearing their every word on the telephone and I had to admit that their instincts had been right.
It was ironic that at the beginning Giorgio Traventi had been approached by Cenci and his own lawyer simply because Traventi did not know the Cenci family well, and could act calmly on their behalf. Since then the whole Traventi family had become determined on Alessia’s release, until finally nothing could have dissuaded Lorenzo from carrying the ransom himself. I hadn’t approved of their growing emotional involvement—exactly what I had been warned against myself—but had been unable to stop it, as all of the Traventis had proved strong-willed and resolute, staunch allies when Cenci needed them most.
Indeed, until the carabinieri’s ambush, the progress of negotiations had been, as far as was possible in any kidnap, smooth. The demand for six million had been cooled to about a tenth of that, and Alessia, on that afternoon at least, had been alive, unmolested, and sane, reading aloud from that day’s newspaper onto tape, and saying she was well.
The only comfort now, I thought, driving Cenci in his Mercedes to meet Ricardo, was that the kidnappers were still talking. Any message at all was better than an immediate dead body in a ditch.
The meeting place had been carefully chosen—by HIM—so that even if the carabinieri had had enough plainclothesmen to watch there day and night for weeks on end, they could have missed the actual delivery of the message: and indeed it was pretty clear that this had happened at least once. During the period of closest continual watch, to confuse things the messages had been delivered somewhere else.
We were heading for a highway restaurant several miles outside Bologna, where even at night people came and went anonymously, travelers unremembered, different every hour of every day. Carabinieri who sat for too long over a coffee could be easily picked out.
Messages from HIM were left in a pocket in a cheap, gray, thin, plastic raincoat, to be found hanging from a coatrack inside the restaurant. The row of pegs was passed by everyone who went in or out of the cafeteria-style dining room, and we guessed that the nondescript garment was in its place each time before the collect-the-message telephone call was made.
Traventi had taken the whole raincoat each time, but they had never been useful as clues. They were of a make sold throughout the region in flat pocket-sized envelopes as a handy insurance against sudden rainstorms. The carabinieri had been given the four raincoats so far collected from the restaurant, and the one from the airport and the one from the bus station. All had been new, straight out of the packet, wrinkled from being folded, and smelling of the chemicals they were made from.
The messages had all been on tape. Regular issue cassettes, sold everywhere. No fingerprints on anything. Everything exceedingly careful; everything, I had come to think, professional.
Each tape had contained proof of Alessia’s being alive. Each tape contained threats. Each tape carried a response to Traventi’s latest offer. I had advised him to offer only two hundred thousand at first, a figure received by HIM with fury, faked or real. Slowly, with hard bargaining, the gap between demand and credibility had been closed, until the ransom was big enough to be worth HIS trouble, and manageable enough not to cripple Cenci entirely. At the point where each felt comfortable if not content, the amount had been agreed.
The money had been collected: Italian currency in used everyday notes, fastened in bundles with rubber bands and packed in a suitcase. Upon its safe delivery, Alessia Cenci would be released.
Safe delivery . . . Ye gods.
The highway restaurant lay about equidistant from Bologna and the Villa Francese, which stood in turreted idyllic splendor on a small country hillside, facing south. By day the road was busy with traffic but at four in the morning only a few solitary pairs of headlights flooded briefly into our car. Cenci sat silent beside me, his eyes on the road and his mind heaven knew where.
Ricardo on his scooter arrived before us
in the car park, though if anything he had had farther to travel. Like his brother he was assertively intelligent, his eyes full now of the aggression brought on by the shooting, the narrow jaw jutting, the lips tight, the will to fight shouting from every muscle. He came across to the car as we arrived and climbed into the back seat.
“The bastards,” he said intensely. “Lorenzo’s state is critical, Papa says.” He spoke Italian, but distinctly, like all his family, so that I could nearly always understand them.
Paolo Cenci made a distressed gesture with his hands, sparing a thought for someone else’s child. “What is the message?” he said.
“To stand here by the telephones. He said I was to bring you, to speak to him yourself. No negotiator, he said. He sounded angry, very angry.”
“Was it the same man?” I asked.
“I think so. I’ve heard his voice on the tapes, but I’ve never spoken to him before. Always Papa speaks to him. Before tonight he wouldn’t speak to anyone but Papa, but I told him Papa was at the hospital with Lorenzo and would be there until morning. Too late, he said, I must take the message myself. He said that you, Signor Cenci, must be alone. If there were any more carabinieri, he said, you wouldn’t see Alessia again. They wouldn’t return even her body.”
Cenci trembled beside me. “I’ll stay in the car,” I said. “In my cap. They’ll accept that. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ricardo said.
“No.” I shook my head. “Ricardo too might be taken for carabinieri. Better stay here with me.” I turned to Cenci. “We’ll wait. Have you any gettoni if he asks you to call him back?”
He fished vaguely through his pockets, and Ricardo and I gave him some of the necessary tokens; then he fumbled with the door handle and stood up, as if disoriented, in the car park.
“The telephones are near the restaurant,” Ricardo said. “In the hall just outside. I have telephoned from there often.”
Cenci nodded, took a grip on the horrors, and walked with fair steadiness to the entrance.
“Do you think there will be someone watching?” Ricardo said.
“I don’t know. We cannot take the risk.” I used the Italian word for danger, not risk, but he nodded comprehension. It was the third time I’d worked in Italy: time I spoke the language better than I did.
We waited a long time, not speaking much. We waited so long that I began to fear either that no call would come to Cenci at all, that the message had been a retributive piece of cruelty, or even worse, that it had been a ruse to lure him away from his house while something dreadful took place in it. My heart thumped uncomfortably. Alessia’s elder sister, Ilaria, and Paolo Cenci’s sister, Luisa, were both upstairs in the villa, asleep.
Perhaps I should have stayed there . . . but Cenci had been in no state to drive. Perhaps I should have awoken his gardener in the village, who drove sometimes on the chauffeur’s days off. . . . Perhaps, perhaps.
The sky was already lightening to dawn when he returned, the shakiness showing in his walk, his face rigid as he reached the car. I stretched over and opened the door for him from the inside, and he subsided heavily into the passenger seat.
“He rang twice.” He spoke in Italian, automatically. “The first time, he said wait. I waited . . .” He stopped and swallowed. Cleared his throat. Started again with a better attempt at firmness. “I waited a long time. An hour. More. Finally, he telephoned. He says Alessia is still alive but the price has gone up. He says I must pay two thousand million lire in two days.”
His voice stopped, the despair sounding in it clearly. Two thousand million lire was approaching a million pounds.
“What else did he say?” I asked.
“He said that if anyone told the carabinieri of the new demand, Alessia would die at once.” He seemed suddenly to remember that Ricardo was in the car, and turned to him in alarm. “Don’t speak of this meeting, not to anyone. Promise me, Ricardo. On your soul.”
Ricardo, looking serious, promised. He also said he would go now to the hospital, to join his parents and get news of Lorenzo, and with a further passionate assurance of discretion he went over to his scooter and putt-putted away.
I started the car and drove out of the car park.
Cenci said dully, “I can’t raise that much. Not again.”
“Well,” I said, “you should eventually get back the money in the suitcase. With luck. That means that the real extra is . . . um . . . seven hundred million lire.”
Three hundred thousand pounds. Said quickly, it sounded less.
“But in two days . . .”
“The banks will lend it. You have the assets.”
He didn’t answer. So close on the other collection of random used notes, this would be technically more difficult. More money, much faster. The banks, however, would read the morning papers . . . and raising a ransom was hardly a process unknown to them.
“What are you to do, when you’ve collected it?” I asked.
Cenci shook his head. “He told me. . . . But this time I can’t tell you. This time I take the money myself . . . alone.”
“It’s unwise.”
“I must do it.”
He sounded both despairing and determined, and I didn’t argue. I said merely, “Will we have time to photograph the notes and put tracers on them?”
He shook his head impatiently. “What does it matter now? It is Alessia only that is important. I’ve been given a second chance. . . . This time I do what he says. This time I act alone.”
Once Alessia was safe—if she were so lucky—he would regret he’d passed up the best chance of recovering at least part of the ransom and of catching the kidnappers. Emotion, as so often in kidnap situations, was stampeding common sense. But one couldn’t, I supposed, blame him.
PICTURES OF ALESSIA Cenci, the girl I had never met, adorned most rooms in the Villa Francese.
Alessia Cenci on horses, riding in races round the world. Alessia the rich girl with the hands of silk and a temperament like the sun (a fanciful newspaper report had said), bright, warm, and occasionally scorching.
I knew little about racing, but I’d heard of her, the glamour girl of the European tracks who nevertheless could really ride: one would have to have averted one’s eyes from the newspapers pretty thoroughly not to. There seemed to be something about her that captivated the daily scribblers, particularly in England, where she raced often; and in Italy I heard genuine affection in every voice that spoke of her. In every voice, that is to say, except for that of her sister, Ilaria, whose reaction to the kidnap had been complex and revealing.
Alessia in close-up photographs wasn’t particularly beautiful: thin, small-featured, dark-eyed, with short head-hugging curls. It was her sister, by her side in silver frames, who looked more feminine, more friendly, and more pretty. Ilaria in life, however, was not particularly any of those things, at least not in the present horrific family circumstances. One couldn’t tell what happiness might do.
She and her aunt Luisa still slept when Cenci and I returned to the villa. All was quiet there, all safe. Cenci walked straight into the library and poured a large amount of brandy into a tumbler, indicating that I should help myself to the same. I joined him, reflecting that seven in the morning was as good a time as any to get drunk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not your fault. The carabinieri . . . do what they want.”
I gathered he was referring to the anger he’d poured on me the last time we’d sat in those same two chairs. I made a vague don’t-think-about-it gesture and let the brandy sear a path to my stomach, a shaft of vivid feeling going down through my chest. It might not have been wise, but the oldest tranquilizer was still the most effective.
“Do you think we’ll get her back?” Cenci asked. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “They wouldn’t be starting again more or less from scratch if they meant to kill her. They don’t want to harm her, as I’ve told you all along. They only
want you to believe they will . . . and yes, I do think it’s a good sign they still have the nerve to bargain, with two of their number besieged by the carabinieri.”
Cenci looked blank. “I’d forgotten about those.”
I hadn’t; but then the ambush and the siege were imprinted in my mind as memories, not reports. I had wondered, through most of the night, whether the two collectors had been carrying walkie-talkie radios, and whether HE had known of the debacle at almost the moment it happened, not simply when neither his colleagues nor the money turned up.
I thought that if I were HIM I’d be highly worried about those two men, not necessarily for their own sakes, but for what they knew. They might know where Alessia was. They might know who had planned the operation. They had to know where they’d been expected to take the money. They might be hired hands . . . but trusted enough to be collectors. They might be full equal partners, but I doubted it. Kidnap gangs tended to have hierarchies, like every other organization.
One way or another those two were going to fall into the grasp of the carabinieri, either talking or shot. They themselves had promised that if they didn’t go free, Alessia would die, but apparently HE had said nothing like that to Cenci. Did that mean that HIS priority was money, that he was set on extorting only what he almost certainly could, money from Cenci, and not what he almost as certainly couldn’t, the return of his friends? Or did it mean that he didn’t have radio contact with his colleagues, who had made the threat in faith more than promise . . . or did it mean that by radio he had persuaded the colleagues to barricade themselves in and make the fiercest threats continually, staying out of the carabinieri’s clutches long enough for HIM to spirit Alessia away to a new hideout, so that it wouldn’t matter if the colleagues finally did talk, they wouldn’t know the one thing worth telling . . . ?
“What are you thinking?” Cenci asked.
“Of hope,” I said; and thought that the kidnappers in the apartment probably didn’t have contact by radio after all, because they hadn’t made any reference to it during the hour I’d listened to them via the bug. But then HE might guess about bugs . . . if HE was that clever . . . and have told them to switch off after his first burst of instructions.