by Dick Francis
If I’d been HIM, I’d have been in touch with those collectors from the moment they set out . . . but then there weren’t so many radio frequencies as all that, and the possibility of being overheard was high. But there were codes and prearranged phrases. . . . And how did you prearrange a message which said the carabinieri have swarmed all over us and we’ve shot the man who brought the ransom?
If they hadn’t taken the ransom with its homing transmitter, they would probably have escaped. If they hadn’t been fanatical about taking the ransom, they wouldn’t have shot the driver to get it.
If the carabinieri had acted stupidly, so had the kidnappers, and only as long as HE didn’t decide after all to cut his losses was there any positive hope. I still thought that hope to be frail. One didn’t, however, admit it to the victim’s dad.
Cenci anyway had tears at last running down his cheeks, released, I guessed, by the brandy. He made no sound, nor tried to brush them away or hide them. Many a man would have come to that stage sooner, and in my own experience, most victims’ parents did. Through outrage, anger, anxiety, and grief, through guilt and hope and pain, the steps they trod were the same. I’d seen so many people in despair that sometimes a laughing face would jolt me.
The Paolo Cenci I knew was the man sitting opposite, who hadn’t smiled once in my sight. He had attempted at first to put up a civilized front, but the mask had soon crumbled as he got used to my presence, and it was the raw man whose feelings and strengths and blindnesses I knew. The urbane successful man-of-the-world looking out with genial wisdom from the portrait in the drawing room, he was the stranger.
For his part, after his first blink at my not being in his own age group, he had seemed to find me compatible on all counts. His cry for help had reached our office within a day of Alessia’s disappearance, and I had been on his back-doorstep the next; but forty-eight hours could seem a lifetime in that sort of nightmare and his relief at my arrival had been undemanding. He would very likely have accepted a four-armed dwarf with blue skin, not just a five-ten thin frame with ordinary dark hair and washed-out gray eyes: but he was, after all, paying for my help, and if he really hadn’t liked me he had an easy way out.
His original call to our office had been brief and direct. “My daughter has been kidnapped. I telephoned Tomasso Linardi, of the Milan Fine Leather Company, for advice. He gave me your name . . . he says it was your firm which got him safely home and helped the police trace the kidnappers. I need your help now myself. Please come.”
Tomasso Linardi, owner of the Milan Fine Leather Company, had himself been held for ransom two years earlier, and it wasn’t surprising that Paolo Cenci should have known him, as Cenci too was in the leather business, heading a corporation with worldwide trade. Half the Italian shoes imported into England, he had told me, had passed in the uncut leather stage through his firm.
The two men incidentally had proved to have a second and more tenuous factor in common, an interest in horses; Cenci of course because of Alessia’s jockeyship, and Linardi because he had owned a majority share in a racetrack. This holding in a fashionable profit-making piece of flat land had been one of the things sold to raise his ransom, much to his sorrow when on his release he found it out. In his case, although some of the kidnappers had been arrested a month later, only a small part of the million-pound ransom had been recovered. The seven million which had at first been strongly demanded would have meant losing his business as well, so on the whole he had been relieved, resigned, and obviously content enough with Liberty Market to recommend us to the next guy in trouble.
I had shared the Linardi assignment with another partner. We’d found Linardi’s wife less than distraught about her husband and furious about the cost of getting him back. His mistress had wept buckets, his son had usurped his office chair, his cook had had hysterics, his sisters had squabbled and his dog had pined. The whole thing had been conducted with operatic histrionics fortissimo, leaving me finally feeling I’d been swamped by a tidal wave.
In the Villa Francese, a much quieter house, Paolo Cenci and I sat for a further half hour, letting the brandy settle and thinking of this and that. At length, his tears long dried, he sighed deeply and said that as the day had to be faced he would change his clothes, have breakfast, and go to his office. I would drive him no doubt, as usual. And I could photograph the new ransom money, as before. He had been thinking, and of course I was right, it was the best chance of getting any of it back.
Breakfast in that formal household was eaten in the dining room: coffee, fruit, and hot breads against murals of shepherdesses à la Marie Antoinette.
Ilaria joined us there, silently as usual, assembling her own preferences onto her plate. Her silences were a form of aggression; a positive refusal, for instance, to say good morning to her father even out of good manners. He seemed to be used to it, but I found it extraordinary, especially in the circumstances, and especially as it seemed there was no animosity or discord between them. Ilaria lived a privileged life which included no gainful occupation: mostly travel, tennis, singing lessons, shopping, and lunches, thanks to her father’s money. He gave, she received. I wondered sometimes if it was resentment at this dependency that made her so insistently refuse to acknowledge it even to the extent of behaving sweetly, but she had apparently never wanted or sought a job. Her aunt Luisa had told me so, with approval.
Ilaria was a fresh-looking twenty-four, curved, not skinny, with brown wavy hair superbly cut and frequently shampooed. She had a habit of raising her eyebrows and looking down her nose, as she was now doing at her coffee cup, which probably reflected her whole view of life and would undoubtedly set into creases before forty.
She didn’t ask if there was any news of Alessia: she never did. She seemed if anything to be angry with her sister for being kidnapped, though she hadn’t exactly said so. Her reaction, however, to my suggestion that she should not go so regularly at set times to the tennis court and in fact should go away altogether and stay with friends, because kidnappers if feeling frustrated by delays had been known to take a second speeding-up bite at the same family, had been not only negative but acid. “There wouldn’t be the same agonized fuss over me.”
Her father had looked aghast at her bitterness, but both she and I saw in his face that what she’d said was true, even if he had never admitted it to himself. It would in fact have been very much easier to abduct Ilaria, but even as a victim she had been passed over in favor of her famous little sister, her father’s favorite. She had continued, with the same defiance as in her silences, to go at the same times to the same places, an open invitation to trouble. Cenci had begged her not to, to no avail.
I wondered if she even positively wanted to be taken, so that her father would have to prove his love for her, as for Alessia, by selling precious things to get her back.
Because she hadn’t asked, we hadn’t told her the evening before that that was the night for paying the ransom. Let her sleep, Cenci had said, contemplating his own wakeful ordeal and wishing to spare her. “Perhaps Alessia will be home for breakfast,” he’d said.
He looked at Ilaria now and with great weariness told her that the hand-over had gone wrong, and that another and bigger ransom had to be collected for Alessia.
“Another . . .” She stared at him in disbelief, cup stopping halfway to her mouth.
“Andrew thinks we may get the first one back again, but meanwhile . . .” He made an almost beseeching gesture with his hand. “My dear, we are going to be poorer. Not just temporarily, but always. This extra demand is a grave setback. . . . I have decided to sell the house on Mikonos, but even that will not be enough. Your mother’s jewels must go, also the collection of snuffboxes. The rest I must raise on the worth of this house and this estate, and if we do not recover the first ransom I will be paying interest on the loan out of the receipts from the olives, which will leave nothing over. The land I sold in Bologna to raise the first ransom will not now be providing us with any revenue, an
d we have to live on what I make in the business.” He shrugged slightly. “We’ll not starve. We’ll continue to live here. But there are the pensions for our retired servants, and the allowances for my uncles’ widows, which they live on. . . . It is going to be a struggle, my dear, and I think you should know, and be prepared.”
She looked at him with absolute shock, and I thought that until that moment she hadn’t realized that paying a ransom was a very cruel business.
3
I drove Cenci to his office and left him there to his telephone and his grim task with the banks. Then, changing from chauffeur’s uniform into nondescript trousers and sweater, I went by bus and foot to the street where the siege might still be taking place.
Nothing, it seemed, had changed there. The dark-windowed ambulance still stood against the curb on the far side of the road from the apartments, the carabinieri’s cars were still parked helter-skelter in the same positions with fawn uniforms crouching around them, the television van still sprouted wires and aerials, and a commentator was still talking into a camera.
Daylight had subtracted drama. Familiarity had done the same to urgency. The scene now looked not frightening but peaceful, with figures moving at walking pace, not in scurrying little runs. A watching crowd stood and stared bovinely, growing bored.
The windows on the third floor were shut.
I hovered at the edge of things, hands in pockets, hair tousled, local paper under arm, looking, I hoped, not too English. Some of the partners in Liberty Market were stunning at disguises, but I’d always found a slouch and vacant expression my best bet for not being noticed.
After a while during which nothing much happened I wandered off in search of a telephone, and rang the number of the switchboard inside the ambulance.
“Is Enrico Pucinelli there?” I asked.
“Wait.” Some mumbling went on in the background, and then Pucinelli himself spoke, sounding exhausted.
“Andrew? Is it you?”
“Yes. How’s it going?”
“Nothing has altered. I am off duty at ten o’clock for an hour.”
I looked at my watch. Nine thirty-eight. “Where are you eating?” I said.
“Gino’s.”
“O.K.,” I said, and disconnected.
I waited for him in the brightly lit glass-and-tile-lined restaurant that to my knowledge served fresh pasta at three in the morning with good grace. At eleven it was already busy with early lunchers, and I held a table for two by ordering loads of fettucine that I didn’t want. Pucinelli, when he arrived, pushed away his cooling plateful with horror and ordered eggs.
He had come, as I knew he would, in civilian clothes, and the tiredness showed in black smudges under his eyes and in the droop of his shoulders.
“I hope you slept well,” he said sarcastically.
I moved my head slightly, meaning neither yes nor no.
“I have had two of the top brass on my neck in the van all night,” he said. “They can’t make up their fat minds about the airplane. They are talking to Rome. Someone in the government must decide, they say, and no one in the government wanted to disturb his sleep to think about it. You would have gone quite crazy, my friend. Talk, talk, talk, and not enough action to shit.”
I put on a sympathetic face and thought that the longer the siege lasted, the safer now for Alessia. Let it last, I thought, until she was free. Let HIM be a realist to the end.
“What are the kidnappers saying?” I asked.
“The same threats. The girl will die if they and the ransom money don’t get away safely.”
“Nothing new?”
He shook his head. His eggs came with rolls and coffee, and he ate without hurry. “The baby cried half the night,” he said with his mouth full. “The deep-voiced kidnapper keeps telling the mother he’ll strangle it if it doesn’t shut up. It gets on his nerves.” He lifted his eyes to my face. “You always tell me they threaten more than they do. I hope you’re right.”
I hoped so too. A crying baby could drive even a temperate man to fury. “Can’t they feed it?” I said.
“It has colic.”
He spoke with the familiarity of experience, and I wondered vaguely about his private life. All our dealings had been essentially impersonal, and it was only in flashes, as now, that I heard the man behind the policeman.
“You have children?” I asked.
He smiled briefly, a glimmer in the eyes. “Three sons, two daughters, one . . . expected.” He paused. “And you?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. Not married.”
“Your loss. Your gain.”
I laughed. He breathed deprecatingly down his nose as if to disclaim the disparagement of his lady. “Girls grow into mamas,” he said. He shrugged. “It happens.”
Wisdom, I thought, showed up in the most unexpected places. He finished his eggs as one at peace with himself, and drank his coffee. “Cigarette?” he asked, edging a packet out of his shirt pocket. “No. I forgot. You don’t.” He flicked his lighter and inhaled the first lungful with the deep relief of a dedicated smoker. Each to his own release: Cenci and I had found the same thing in brandy.
“During the night,” I said. “Did the kidnappers talk to anyone else?”
“How do you mean?”
“By radio.”
He lifted his thin face sharply, the family man retreating. “No. They spoke only to each other, to the hostage family, and to us. Do you think they have a radio? Why do you think that?”
“I wondered if they were in touch with their colleagues guarding Alessia.”
He considered it with concentration and indecisively shook his head. “The two kidnappers spoke of what was happening, from time to time, but only as if they were talking to each other. If they were also transmitting on a radio and didn’t want us to know, they are very clever. They would have to guess we are already listening to every word they say.” He thought it over a bit longer and finally shook his head with more certainty. “They are not clever. I’ve listened to them all night. They are violent, frightened, and”—he searched for a word I would understand—“ordinary.”
“Average intelligence?”
“Yes. Average.”
“All the same, when you finally get them out, will you look around for a radio?”
“You personally want to know?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me assessingly with a good deal of professional dispassion. “What are you not telling me?” he said.
I was not telling him what Cenci passionately wished to keep private, and it was Cenci who was paying me. I might advise full consultation with the local law, but only that. Going against the customer’s expressed wishes was at the very least bad for future business.
“I simply wonder,” I said mildly, “if the people guarding Alessia know exactly what’s going on.”
He looked as if some sixth sense was busy doubting me, so to take his mind off it I said, “I dare say you’ve thought of stun grenades as a last resort.”
“Stun?” He didn’t know the word. “What’s stun?”
“Grenades which more or less knock people out for a short while. They produce noise and shock waves, but do no permanent damage. While everyone is semiconscious, you walk into the flat and apply handcuffs where they’re needed.”
“The army has them, I think.”
I nodded. “You are part of the army.”
“Special units have them. We don’t.” He considered. “Would they hurt the children?”
I didn’t know. I could see him discarding stun grenades rapidly. “We’ll wait,” he said. “The kidnappers cannot live there forever. In the end, they must come out.”
CENCI STARED MOROSELY at a large cardboard carton standing on the desk in his office. The carton bore stick-on labels saying Fragile in white letters on red, but the contents would have survived any drop. Any drop, that is, except one to kidnappers.
“Fifteen hundred million lire,” he said. “The banks arra
nged for it to come from Milan. They brought it straight to this office, with security guards.”
“In that box?” I asked, surprised.
“No. They wanted their cases back . . . and this box was here.” His voice sounded deathly tired. “The rest comes tomorrow. They’ve been understanding and quick, but the interest they’re demanding will cripple me.”
I made a mute gesture of sympathy, as no words seemed appropriate. Then I changed into my chauffeur’s uniform, carried the heavy carton to the car, stowed it in the trunk, and presently drove Cenci home.
We ate dinner late in that house, though meals were often left unfinished according to the anxiety level of the day. Cenci would push his plate away in revulsion, and I sometimes thought my thinness resulted from never being able to eat heartily in the face of grief. My suggestions that Cenci might prefer my not living as family had been met with emphatic negatives. He needed company, he said, if he were to stay sane. I would please be with him as much as possible.
On that evening, however, he understood that I couldn’t be. I carried the Fragile box upstairs to my room, closed the curtains, and started the lengthy task of photographing every note, flattening them in a frame of nonreflecting glass, four at a time of the same denomination. Even with the camera on a tripod, with bulk film, with cable release and with motor drive, the job always took ages. It was one that I did actually prefer not to leave to banks or the police, but even after all the practice I’d had I could shift only about fifteen hundred notes an hour. Large ransoms had me shuffling banknotes in my dreams.
It was Liberty Market routine to send the undeveloped films by express courier to the London office, where we had simple developing and printing equipment in the basement. The numbers of the notes were then typed into a computer, which sorted them into numerical order for each denomination and then printed out the lists. The lists were returned, again by courier, to the advisor in the field, who, after the victim had been freed, gave them to the police to circulate to all the country’s banks, with a promise that any teller spotting one of the ransom notes would be rewarded.