Dick Francis - The Danger

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.'

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.