The Danger

by Dick Francis

  Without any warning a young woman walked from the apartments carrying a baby and shielding her eyes against the brilliance of the sunlight. She was very disheveled and also heavily pregnant.

  Pucinelli glanced as if stung at his wristwatch, said, “They’re early,” and jumped out of the van. I watched him through the dark glass as he strode without hesitation towards her, taking her arm. Her head turned towards him and she began to fall, Pucinelli catching the baby and signaling furiously with his head to his men behind the cars.

  One scurried forward, hauled the fainting woman unceremoniously to her feet and hustled her into one of the cars. Pucinelli gave the baby a sick look, carried it at arm’s length in the wake of its mother, and, having delivered it, wiped his hands disgustedly on a handkerchief.

  The photographers and the television van came to life as if electrified, and a young plump man walked three steps out of the apartments and slowly raised both hands.

  Pucinelli, now sheltering behind the second car, stretched an arm through the window, removed a bullhorn, and spoke through it.

  “Lie face down on the road. Legs apart. Arms outstretched.”

  The plump young man wavered a second, looked as if he would retreat, and finally did as he was bid.

  Pucinelli spoke again. “Stay where you are. You will not be shot.”

  There was a long breath-holding hush. Then a boy came out; about six, in shorts, shirt, and bright blue and white training shoes. His mother frantically waved to him through the car window, and he ran across to her, looking back over his shoulder at the man on the ground.

  I switched up the volume to full on the bug in the apartment, but there was still no talking, simply a few grunts and unidentifiable movements. After a while these ended, and shortly afterwards another man walked out into the street, a youngish man this time with his hands tied behind his back. He looked gaunt and tottery, with stubbled chin, and he stopped dead at the sight of the spreadeagled kidnapper.

  “Come to the cars,” Pucinelli said through the bullhorn. “You are safe.”

  The man seemed unable to move. Pucinelli, again exposing his whole body to the still-present threat of the guns in the apartment, walked calmly across the road, took him by the arm, and led him behind the car holding his wife.

  The psychiatrists watching beside me shook their heads over Pucinelli, not approving such straightforward courage. I picked up a pair of binoculars which were lying on the bench and focused them on the opposite windows, but nothing stirred. Then I scanned the onlookers at the barriers down the street, and took in a close-up of the photographers, but there was no sign of the man from the highway car park.

  I put down the glasses, and time gradually stretched out, hot and silent, making me wonder, making everyone wonder if by some desperate mischance at the last minute the surrender had gone wrong. There was no sound from the bug. There was stillness in the street. Forty-six minutes had passed since the mother and baby had emerged.

  Pucinelli spoke through the bullhorn with firmness but not aggression. “Bring out the child. You will not be hurt.”

  Nothing happened.

  Pucinelli repeated his instructions.

  Nothing.

  I thought of guns, of desperation, of suicide, murder, and spite.

  Pucinelli’s voice rang out. “Your only hope of ever being released from prison is to come out now as arranged.”

  No result.

  Pucinelli’s hand put the bullhorn through the car’s window and reappeared holding a pistol. He pushed the pistol through his belt in the small of his back, and without more ado walked straight across the street and in through the door of the apartments.

  The psychiatrists gasped and made agitated motions with their hands and I wondered if I would ever have had the nerve, in those circumstances, to do what Pucinelli was doing.

  There were no shots: none that we could hear. No sounds at all, just more long-drawn-out quiet.

  The carabinieri behind the cars began to grow dangerously restive for lack of their leader and to look at each other for guidance, waving their guns conspicuously. The engineer in the van was muttering ominously under his breath, and there was still silence from the bug. If nothing happened soon, I thought, there could be another excited, destructive, half-cocked raid.

  Then, suddenly there was a figure in the doorway: a strong burly man carrying a little girl like a feather on one arm.

  Behind him came Pucinelli, gun nowhere in sight. He pointed to the first kidnapper, still spreadeagled, and the big man with a sort of furious resignation walked over to him and put the small child on the ground. Then he lowered his bulk into the same outstretched attitude, and the little girl, only a toddler, stood looking at him for a moment and then lay down and copied him, as if it were a game.

  The carabinieri burst like uncorked furies from behind the cars and bristling with guns and handcuffs descended on the prone figures with no signs of loving-kindness. Pucinelli watched while the kidnappers were marched to the empty car and the child returned to her parents, then came casually back to the open door of the ambulance as if he’d been out for a stroll.

  He thanked the negotiator and the psychiatrists from there, and jerked his head to me to come out and follow him. I did: across the road, in through the door of the apartments and up the stone staircase beyond.

  “The big man,” Pucinelli said, “was up there,” he pointed, “right at the top, sixth floor, where the stairs lead to the roof. It took me some time to find him. But we had barricaded that door, of course. He couldn’t get out.”

  “Was he violent?” I asked.

  Pucinelli laughed. “He was sitting on the stairs with the little girl on his knee, telling her a story.”

  “What?”

  “When I went up the stairs with my pistol ready he said to put it away, the show was over, he knew it. I told him to go down into the street. He said he wanted to stay where he was for a while. He said he had a child of his own of that age and he’d never be able to hold her on his knee again.”

  Sob stuff, I thought. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Told him to go down at once.”

  The “at once,” however, had taken quite a long time. Pucinelli like all Italians liked children, and even carabinieri, I supposed, could be sentimental.

  “That poor deprived father,” I said, “abducted someone else’s daughter and shot someone else’s son.”

  “Your head,” Pucinelli said, “is like ice.”

  He led the way into the apartment that had been besieged for four and a half days, and the heat and stink of it were indescribable. Squalor took on a new meaning. Apart from the stench of sweat and the decomposing remains of meals there were unmentionable heaps of cloth and rags and newspaper in two of the three small rooms: the baby, incontinent at both ends, had done more than cry.

  “How did they stand it?” I wondered. “Why didn’t they wash anything?”

  “The mother wanted to. I heard her asking. They wouldn’t let her.”

  We searched our way through the mess, finding the ransom suitcase almost immediately under a bed. As far as I could tell, the contents were untouched: good news for Cenci. Pucinelli gave the packets of notes a sour look and poked around for the radio.

  The owners of the apartment had one themselves, standing openly on top of a television set, but Pucinelli shook his head over it, saying it was too elementary. He started a methodical search, coming across it eventually inside a box of Buitoni in a kitchen cupboard.

  “Here we are,” he said, brushing off pasta shells. “Complete with earplug for private listening.” A smallish but elaborate walkie-talkie, aerial retracted.

  “Don’t disturb the frequency,” I said.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday. Nor was the man giving the instructions, I shouldn’t think.”

  “He might not have thought of everything.”

  “Maybe not. All criminals are fools sometimes, otherwise we’d never catch them.” He wound
the cord with its earpiece carefully around the radio and put it by the door.

  “What range do you think that has?” I asked.

  “Not more than a few miles. I’ll find out. But too far, I would think, to help us.”

  There remained the pistols, and these were easy: Pucinelli found them on a windowsill when he let up one of the blinds to give us more light.

  We both looked down from the window. The ambulance and the barriers were still there, though the drama had gone. I thought that the earlier host of official cars and of highly armed men crouching behind them must have been a fearsome sight. What with that threat ever present and the heat, the baby, the searchlights, and the stench, their nerves must have been near exploding point the whole time.

  “He could have shot you any time,” I said, “when you walked out across the street.”

  “I reckoned he wouldn’t.” He spoke unemotionally. “But when I was creeping up the stairs”—he smiled fractionally—“I did begin to wonder.”

  He gave me a cool and comradely nod and departed, saying he would arrange transit for the ransom and send his men to collect and label the pistols and radio.

  “You’ll stay here?” he asked.

  I pinched my nose. “On the stairs outside.”

  He smiled and went away, and in due course people arrived. I accompanied the ransom to the bank of Pucinelli’s choosing, followed it to the vaults and accepted bank and carabinieri receipts. Then, on my way back to collect the Cenci runabout, I made a routine collect call to my firm in London. Reports from advisors-in-the-field were expected regularly, with wisdom from the collective office mind flowing helpfully back.

  “The girl’s home,” I said. “The siege is over, the first ransom’s safe, and how are my snaps doing of the second?”

  “Lists with you tomorrow morning.”

  “Right.”

  They wanted to know how soon I’d be back.

  “Two or three days,” I said. “Depends on the girl.”

  5

  Alessia woke in the evening, feeling sick. Cenci rushed upstairs to embrace her, came down damp-eyed, said she was still sleepy and couldn’t believe she was home.

  I didn’t see her. Ilaria slept all night on an extra bed in Alessia’s room at her aunt Luisa’s suggestion, and did seem genuinely pleased at her sister’s return. In the morning she came down with composure to breakfast and said that Alessia felt ill and wouldn’t get out of the bath.

  “Why not?” Cenci said, bewildered.

  “She says she’s filthy. She’s washed her hair twice. She says she smells.”

  “But she doesn’t,” he protested.

  “No. I’ve told her that. It makes no difference.”

  “Take her some brandy and a bottle of scent,” I said. Cenci looked at me blankly but Ilaria said, “Well, why not?” and went off on the errand. She had talked more easily that morning than at any breakfast before, almost as if her sister’s release had been also her own.

  Pucinelli arrived mid-morning with a note-taking aide, and Alessia came downstairs to meet him. Standing there beside him in the hall I watched the tentative figure on the stairs and could clearly read her strong desire to retreat. She stopped four steps from the bottom and looked behind her, but Ilaria, who had gone up to fetch her, was nowhere to be seen.

  Cenci went forward and put his arm round her shoulders, explaining briefly who I was, and saying Pucinelli wanted to know everything that had happened to her, hoping for clues to lead him to arrests.

  She nodded slightly, looking pale.

  I’d seen victims return with hectic jollity, with hysteria, with apathy; all with shock. Alessia’s state looked fairly par for the circumstances: a mixture of shyness, strangeness, weakness, relief, and fear.

  Her hair was still damp. She wore a T-shirt, jeans, and no lipstick. She looked a defenseless sixteen, recently ill; the girl I’d seen undressed. What she did not look was the glossy darling of the European racetracks.

  Cenci led her to the library, and we scattered around on chairs.

  “Tell us,” Pucinelli said. “Please tell us what happened, from the beginning.”

  “I . . . it seems so long ago.” She spoke mostly to her father, looking seldom at Pucinelli and not at all at me; and she used Italian throughout, though as she spoke slowly with many pauses, I could follow her with ease. Indeed it occurred to me fleetingly that I’d soaked in a good deal more of the language than I’d arrived with, and more than I’d noticed until then.

  “I’d been racing here on our local track . . . but you know that.”

  Her father nodded.

  “I won the six o’clock race, and there was an objection . . .” More nods, both from Cenci and Pucinelli. The note-taking aide, eyes down to the task, kept his shorthand busily flowing.

  “I drove home. I was thinking of England. Of riding Brunelleschi in the Derby . . .” She broke off. “Did he win?”

  Her father looked blank. At the time, shortly after her disappearance, he’d have been unlikely to notice an invasion of Martians in the back yard.

  “No,” I said. “Fourth.”

  She said, “Oh,” vaguely, and I didn’t bother to explain that I knew where the horse had finished simply because it was she who had been going to ride it. Ordinary curiosity, nothing more.

  “I was here . . . in sight of the house. Not far from the gate. I slowed down, to turn in . . .”

  The classic spot for kidnaps; right outside the victim’s house. She had a red sports car, besides, and had been driving it that day with the top down, as she always did in fine weather. Some people, I’d thought when I’d heard it, made abduction too simple for words.

  “There was a car coming towards me . . . I waited for it to pass, so that I could turn . . . but it didn’t pass, it stopped suddenly between me and the gate . . . blocking the way.” She paused and looked anxiously at her father. “I couldn’t help it, Papa. I really couldn’t.”

  “My dear, my dear . . .” He looked surprised at the very thought. He didn’t see, as I did, the iceberg tip of the burden of guilt, but then he hadn’t seen it so often.

  “I couldn’t think what they were doing,” she said. “Then all the car doors opened at once, and there were four men . . . all wearing horrid masks . . . truly horrible . . . devils and monsters. I thought they wanted to rob me. I threw my purse at them . . . and tried to reverse to get away backwards . . . and they sort of leaped into my car . . . just jumped right in . . .” She stopped with the beginnings of agitation and Pucinelli made small damping-down motions with his hands to settle her.

  “They were so fast,” she said, her voice full of apology. “I couldn’t do anything . . .”

  “Signorina,” Pucinelli said calmly, “there is nothing to be ashamed of. If kidnappers wish to kidnap, they kidnap. Even all Aldo Moro’s guards couldn’t prevent it. And one girl alone, in an open car . . .” He shrugged expressively, finishing the sentence without words, and for the moment at least she seemed comforted.

  A month earlier, to me in private, he had said that any rich girl who drove around in an open sports car was inviting everything from mugging to rape. “I’m not saying they wouldn’t have taken her anyway, but she was stupid. She made it easy.”

  “There’s not much fun in life if you’re twenty-three and successful and can’t enjoy it by driving an open sports car on a sunny day. What would you advise her to do, go around in a middle-aged saloon with the doors locked?”

  “Yes,” he said. “So would you, if your firm were asked. That’s the sort of advice you’d be paid for.”

  “True enough.”

  Alessia said, “They put a hood of cloth right over my head . . . and then it smelled sweet . . .”

  “Sweet?” Pucinelli said.

  “You know. Ether. Chloroform. Something like that. I simply went to sleep. I tried to struggle . . . they had their hands on my arms . . . sort of lifting me . . . nothing else.”

  “They lifted you out of
the car?”

  “I think so. I suppose so. They must have done.”

  Pucinelli nodded. Her car had been found a bare mile away, parked on a farm track.

  “I woke up in a tent,” Alessia said.

  “A tent?” echoed Cenci, bewildered.

  “Yes . . . well . . . it was inside a room, but I didn’t realize that at first.”

  “What sort of tent?” Pucinelli asked. “Please describe it.”

  “Oh . . .” She moved a hand weakly. “I can describe every stitch of it. Green canvas. About two and a half meters square . . . a bit less. It had walls . . . I could stand up.”

  A frame tent.

  “It had a floor. Very tough fabric. Gray. Waterproof, I suppose, though of course that didn’t matter . . .”

  “When you woke up,” Pucinelli asked, “what happened?”

  “One of the men was kneeling on the floor beside me, slapping my face. Quite hard. Hurry up, he was saying. Hurry up. When I opened my eyes he grunted and said I must just repeat a few words and I could go back to sleep.”

  “Was he wearing a mask?”

  “Yes . . . a devil face . . . orange . . . all warts.”

  We all knew what the few words had been. We’d all listened to them, over and over, on the first of the tapes.

  “This is Alessia. Please do as they say. They will kill me if you don’t.” A voice slurred with drugs, but alarmingly her own.

  “I knew what I said,” she said. “I knew when I woke up properly . . . but when I said them, everything was fuzzy. I couldn’t see the mask half the time . . . I kept switching off, then coming back.”

  “Did you ever see any of them without masks?” Pucinelli asked.

  A flicker of a smile reached the pale mouth. “I didn’t see any of them again, even in masks. Not at all. No one. The first person I saw since that first day was Aunt Luisa . . . sitting by my own bed . . . sewing her tapestry, and I thought . . . I was dreaming.” Tears unexpectedly appeared in her eyes and she blinked them slowly away. “They said . . . if I saw their faces, they would kill me. They told me not to try to see them . . .” She swallowed. “So . . . I didn’t . . . try.”