The Danger

FOUR

For the rest of that day, Saturday, and all Sunday, Cenci walked slowly round his estate, came heavily home, drank too much brandy and lost visible weight.

Ilaria, silently defiant, went to the tennis club as usual. Luisa, her aunt, drifted about in her usual wispy fashion, touching things as if to make sure they were still there.

I drove to Bologna, sent off the films, washed the car. Lorenzo still breathed precariously on his machines and in the meagre suburban street the two kidnappers remained barricaded in the third-floor flat, with talk going on from both sides, but no action, except a delivery of milk for the baby and bread and sausage for the others.

On the Sunday evening Ilaria came into the library where I was watching the news on television. The scene in the street looked almost exactly the same, except that there was no crowd, long discouraged from lack of excitement, and perhaps fewer fawn uniforms. The television coverage had become perfunctory: repetitive as-you-were sentences only.

'Do you think they'll release her?' Ilaria said, as the screen switched away to politicians.

'Yes, I think so.'

'When?'

'Can't tell.'

'Suppose they've told the carabinieri they'll keep her until those men in the flat go free? Suppose the ransom isn't enough?'

I glanced at her. She'd spoken not with dread but as if the question didn't concern her beyond a certain morbid interest. Her face was unstudiedly calm. She appeared really not to care.

'I talked to Enrico Pucinelli this morning,' I said. 'By then they hadn't said anything like that.'

She made a small, noncommittal puffing noise through her nose and changed the television channel to a tennis match, settling to watch with concentration.

'I'm not a bitch, you know,' she said suddenly. 'I can't help it if I don't fall down and kiss the ground she walks on, like everyone else.'

'And six weeks is a long time to keep up the hair-tearing?'

'God,' she said, 'you're on the ball. And don't think I'm not glad you're here. Otherwise he would have leant on me for everything he gets from you, and I'd have ended up despising him.'

'No,' I said.

'Yes.'

Her eyes had been on the tennis throughout.

'How would you behave,' I said, 'if you had a son, and he was kidnapped?'

The eyes came round to my face. 'You're a righteous sod,' she said.

I smiled faintly. She went resolutely back to the tennis, but where her thoughts were, I couldn't tell.

Ilaria spoke perfect idiomatic English, as I'd been told Alessia did also, thanks to the British widow who had managed the Cenci household for many years after the mother's death. Luisa, Ilaria and Alessia ran things between them nowadays, and the cook in exasperation had complained to me that nothing got done properly since dear Mrs Blacken had retired to live with her brother in Eastbourne.

The next morning, during the drive to the office, Cenci said, 'Turn round, Andrew. Take me home. It's no good, I can't work. I'll sit there staring at the walls. I hear people talk but I don't listen to what they say. Take me home.'

I said neutrally. 'It might be worse at home.'

'No. Turn round. I can't face a new week in the office. Not today.'

I turned the car and drove back to the villa, where he telephoned to his secretary not to expect him.

'I can't think,' he said to me, 'except of Alessia. I think of her as she was as a little girl, and at school, and learning to ride. She was always so neat, so small, so full of life…' He swallowed, turned away and walked into the library, and in a few seconds I heard bottle clink against glass.

After a while I went after him.

'Let's play backgammon,' I said.

'I can't concentrate.'

'Try.' I got out the board and set up the pieces, but the moves he made were mechanical and without heart. He did nothing to capitalise on my shortcomings, and after a while simply fell to staring into space, as he'd done for hour after hour since we'd left the money.

At about eleven the telephone at his elbow brought him out of it, but sluggishly.

'Hello?… Yes, Cenci speaking…' He listened briefly and then looked at the receiver with an apathetic frown before putting it back in its cradle.

'What was it?' I said.

'I don't know. Nothing much. Something about my goods being ready, and to collect them. I don't know what goods… he rang off before I could ask.'

I breathed deeply. 'Your telephone's still tapped,' I said.

'Yes, but what's that…" His voice died as his eyes widened. 'Do you think…? Do you really?'

'We could see,' I said. 'Don't bank on anything yet. What did he sound like?'

'A gruff voice.' He was uncertain. 'Not the usual one.'

'Well… let's try, anyway. Better than sitting here.'

'But where? He didn't say where.'

'Perhaps… where we left the ransom. Logical place.'

Hope began swelling fast in his expression and I said hastily, 'Don't expect anything. Don't believe. You'll never be able to stand it, if she isn't there. He may mean somewhere else… but I think we should try there first.'

He tried to take a grip on things but was still hectically optimistic. He ran through the house to where the car stood waiting near the back door, where I'd parked it. Putting on my cap I followed him at a walk, to find him beckoning frantically and telling me to hurry. I climbed behind the wheel stolidly and thought that someone had known Cenci was at home when he was normally in the office. Perhaps his office had said so… or perhaps there was still a watcher. In any case, I reckoned that until Alessia was safely home, a chauffeur in all things was what I needed to be.

'Do hurry,' Cenci said. I drove out of the gates without rush. 'For God's sake, man…'

'We'll get there. Don't hope…'

'I can't help it.'

I drove faster than usual, but it seemed an eternity to him; and when we pulled up by the shrine there was no sign of his daughter.

'Oh no… oh no.9 His voice was cracking. 'I can't… I can't

I looked at him anxiously, but it was normal crushing grief, not a heart attack, not a fit.

'Wait,' I said, getting out of the car. 'I'll make sure.'

I walked round to the back of the shrine, to the spot where we'd left the ransom, and found her there, unconscious, curled like a foetus, wrapped in a grey plastic raincoat.

Fathers are odd. The paramount emotion filling Paolo Cenci's mind for the rest of that day was not joy that his beloved daughter was alive, safe, and emerging unharmed from a drugged sleep, but fear that the press would find out she had been more or less naked.

'Promise you won't say, Andrew. Not to anyone. Not at all.'

'I promise.'

He made me promise at least seven separate times, though in any case it wasn't necessary. If anyone told, it would be Alessia herself.

Her lack of clothes had disturbed him greatly, especially as he and I had discovered when we tried to pick her up that her arms weren't through the sleeves of the raincoat, and the buttons weren't buttoned. The thin grey covering had slid right off.

She had the body of a child, I thought. Smooth skin, slender limbs, breasts like buds. Cenci had strangely been too embarrassed to touch her, and it had been I, the all-purpose advisor, who'd steered her arms through the plastic and fastened her more discreetly inside the folds. She had been light to carry to the car, and I'd lain her on her side on the rear seat, her knees bent, her curly head resting on my rolled-up jacket.

Cenci sat beside me in front: and it was then that he'd started exacting the promise. When we reached the villa he hurried inside to reappear with a blanket, and I carried her up to her half-acre bedroom in woolly decency.

Ilaria and Luisa were nowhere to be found. Cenci discarded the cook as too talkative and finally asked in a stutter if I would mind very much substituting clothes for the raincoat while he called the doctor. As I'd seen her already once, he said. As I was sensible. Astonished but obliging I unearthed a shift-like dress and made the exchange, Alessia sleeping peacefully throughout.

She was more awkward than anything else. I pulled the blue knitted fabric over her head, fed her hands through the armholes, tugged the hem down to her knees and concentrated moderately successfully on my own non-arousal. Then I laid her on top of the bedclothes and covered her from the waist down with the blanket. Her pulse remained strong and regular, her skin cool, her breathing easy: sleeping pills, probably, I thought; nothing worse.

Her thin face was calm, without strain, long lashes lying in half-moon fringes on taut cheeks. Strong eyebrows, pale lips, hollows along the jaw. Hair tousled, clearly dirty. Let her sleep, I thought: she'd have little peace when she woke up.

I went downstairs and found Cenci again drinking brandy, standing up.

'Is she all right?' he said. 'Fine. Just fine.'

'It's a miracle.'

'Mm.'

He put down the glass and began to weep. 'Sorry. Can't help it,' he said.

'It's natural.'

He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, 'Do all parents weep?'

'Yes.'

He put in some more work with the handkerchief, sniffed a bit, and said, 'You lead a very odd life, don't you?'

'Not really.'

'Don't say she had no clothes on. Promise, me, Andrew.'

'I promise.'

I said I'd have to tell Pucinelli she was safe, and, immediately alarmed, he begged for the promise again. I gave it without impatience, because stress could come out in weird ways and the return of the victim was never the end of it.

Pucinelli was fortunately on duty in the ambulance, though presumably I could have spread the news directly via the wire-tappers.

'She's home,' I said laconically. 'I'm in the villa. She's upstairs.'

'Alessia?' Disbelief, relief, a shading of suspicion.

"Herself. Drugged but unharmed. Don't hurry, she'll probably sleep for hours. How's the siege going?'

'Andrew!' The beginnings of exasperation. 'What's been going on?'

'Will you be coming here yourself?'

A short pause came down the line. He'd told me once that I always put suggestions into the form of questions, and I supposed that it was true that I did. Implant the thought, seek the decision. He knew the tap was on the telephone, he'd ordered it himself, with every word recorded. He would guess there were things I might tell him privately.

'Yes,' he said. I'll be coming.'

'And of course you'll have a great lever now with those two kidnappers in the flat, won't you? And - um - will you bring the ransom money straight here when you lay your hands on it? It does, of course, belong to Signor Cenci.'

'Of course,' he said dryly. 'But it may not be my decision.'

'Mm. Well… I photographed all the notes, of course.'

A pause. 'You're wicked, you know that?'

'Things have disappeared out of police custody before now.'

'You insult the carabinieri!' He sounded truly affronted, loyally angry.

'Certainly not. Police stations are not banks. I am sure the carabinieri would be pleased to be relieved of the responsibility of guarding so much money.'

'It is evidence.'

'The rest of the kidnappers, of course, are still free, and no doubt still greedy. The money could be held safe from them under an official seal in a bank of Signor Cenci's choosing.'

A pause. 'It's possible that I may arrange it,' he said stiffly, not quite forgiving. 'No doubt I will see you at the villa.'

I put the telephone down with a rueful smile. Pucinelli himself I trusted, but not all law-enforcers automatically. In South American countries particularly, where I had worked several times, kidnappers regularly bribed or threatened policemen to look the wrong way, a custom scarcely unknown elsewhere. Kidnappers had no scruples and seldom any mercy, and many a policeman had had to choose between his duty and the safety of wife and children.

Within ten minutes Pucinelli was back on the line,

'Just to tell you… things are moving here. Come if you want. Come into the street from the west, on this side. I'll make sure you get through.'

'Thanks.'

The partners wouldn't have approved, but I went. I'd studied many case-histories of sieges and been to lectures by people involved in some of them, but I'd never been on the spot before at first hand: too good a chance to miss. I changed from Spanish chauffeur to nondescript onlooker, borrowed the family's runabout, and was walking along the Bologna street in record time.

Pucinelli had been as good as his word: a pass awaiting me at the first barrier saw me easily through to the still-parked ambulance. I went into it as I'd left, through the nearside passenger door, and found Pucinelli there with his engineer and three men in city suits.

'You came,' he said.

'You're kind.'

He gave me a small smile and briefly introduced me to the civilians: negotiator, psychiatrist, psychiatrist.

'These two medical gentlemen have been advising us about the changing mental state of the kidnappers.' Pucinelli spoke formally; they nodded gravely back.

'Mostly their mental state has been concerned with the baby,' Pucinelli said. 'The baby has cried a lot. Apparently the milk we sent in upset its stomach even worse.'

As if on cue the bug on the flat produced the accelerating wail of the infant getting newly into its stride, and from the faces of the five men in front of me it wasn't only the kidnappers who were finding the sound a frazzle.

'Forty minutes ago,' Pucinelli said, turning down the baby's volume, 'the deep-voiced kidnapper telephoned here and said they would come out if certain conditions were met. No aeroplane - they've abandoned that. They want only to be sure they aren't shot. In about twenty minutes… that's one hour from when they telephoned… they say the mother will leave with the baby. Then one of the kidnappers will come out. There are to be no carabinieri anywhere in the flats. The stairs must be clear, also the front door and the pavement outside. The mother and baby will come out into the road, followed by the first kidnapper. He will have no gun. If he is taken peacefully, one of the children will leave, and after an interval, the father. If the second kidnapper is then sure he will be safe, he will come out with the second child in his arms. No gun. We are to arrest him quietly.'

I looked at him. 'Did they discuss all this between themselves? Did you hear them plan it, on the bug?'

He shook his head. 'Nothing.'

'They telephoned you very soon after Alessia was home.'

'Suspiciously soon.'

'You'll look for the radio?' I said.

'Yes.' He sighed. 'We have been monitoring radio frequencies these past few days. We've had no results, but I have thought once or twice before this that the kidnappers were being instructed.'

Instructed, I thought, by a very cool and bold intelligence. A pity such a brain was criminal.

'What do they plan to do with the money?' I asked.

'Leave it in the flat.'

I glanced at the screen which had shown the whereabouts of the homer in the ransom suitcase, but it was dark. I leant over and flicked the on-off switch, and the trace obligingly appeared, efficient and steady. The suitcase, at least, was still there.

I said, 'I'd like to go up there, as Signor Cenci's representative, to see that it's safely taken care of.'

With suppressed irritation he said, 'Very well."

'It's a great deal of money,' I said reasonably.

'Yes… yes, I suppose it is.' He spoke grudgingly, partly, I guessed, because he was himself honest, partly because he was a communist. So much wealth in one man's hands offended him, and he wouldn't care if Cenci lost it.

Across the street the flat's windows were still closed. All the windows of all the flats were closed, although the day was hot.

'Don't they ever open them?' I asked.

Pucinelli glanced across at the building. 'The kidnappers open the windows sometimes for a short while when we switch off the searchlights at dawn. The blinds are always drawn, even then. There are no people now in any of the other flats. We moved them for their own safety.'

Down on the road there was little movement. Most of the official cars had been withdrawn, leaving a good deal of empty space. Four carabinieri crouched with guns behind the pair still parked, their bodies tense. Metal barriers down the street kept a few onlookers at bay, and the television van looked closed. One or two photographers sat on the ground in its shade, drinking beer from cans. On the bug the colicky crying had stopped, but no one seemed to be saying very much. It was siesta, after all.

Without any warning a young woman walked from the flats carrying a baby and shielding her eyes against the brilliance of the sunlight. She was very dishevelled 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 signalling 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 flats and slowly raised both hands.

Pucinelli, now sheltering behind the second car, stretched an arm through the window, removed a loudhailer, 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 on the flat, 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 loudhailer. '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 flat, 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 motorway 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 loudhailer 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.9

No result.

Pucinelli's hand put the loudhailer 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 flats.

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 flats 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 doors 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 lie 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 ail 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 flat 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 Set 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 flat 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 Buttoni 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. And 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 on 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.'