Dick Francis - The Danger

'Naturally.'

'And of course you could tell them that if Alessia Cenci dies, they will never get out of prison.'

'The driver… they'll know they hit him…'

'If they ask, I am sure you would tell them he is alive. Even if he dies, you would of course tell them he is still alive. One wouldn't want them to think they had nothing to lose.'

A voice spluttered suddenly from one of the so far silent receivers, making both the engineer and Pucinelli whirl to listen. It was a woman's voice, gabbling, weeping, to me mostly unintelligible but, in gist, again plain enough.

The kidnapper's rough voice sliced in over hers, far too angry for safety, and then, in a rising wail, came a child's voice, crying, then another, calling 'Mama! Papa! Mama!'

'God,' Pucinelli said, 'children! There are children, too, in that flat.' The thought appalled him. In one instant he cared more for them than he had in five weeks for the girl, and for the first time I saw real concern in his olive face. He listened intently to the now-jumbled loud voices crowding through from the bug on the flat, a jumble finally resolving into a kidnapper yelling at the woman to give the children some biscuits to shut them up, or he personally would throw them out of the window.

The threat worked. Comparative quietness fell. Pucinelli took the opportunity to begin issuing rapid orders by radio to his own base, mentioning searchlights, negotiator, psychiatrist. Half the time he looked upward to the third floor windows, half down to the cluttered street outside: both, from our side of the van's darkly tinted glass, unrealistically dim. Not dark enough, however, for him not to catch sight of something which displeased him mightily and sent him speeding out of the van with a shout. I followed the direction of his agitation and felt the same dismay: a photographer with flashlight had arrived, first contingent of the press.

For the next hour I listened to the voices from the flat, sorting them gradually into father, mother, two children, a baby, and two kidnappers, one, the one who had talked on the telephone, a growling bass, the other a more anxious tenor.

It was the tenor, I thought, who would more easily surrender: the bass the more likely killer. Both, it appeared, were holding guns. The engineer spoke rapidly with Pucinelli, who then repeated everything more slowly for my benefit: the kidnappers had locked the mother and three children in one of the bedrooms, and had mentioned ropes tying the father. The father moaned occasionally and was told violently to stop.

In the street the crowd multiplied by the minute, every apartment block in the neighbourhood, it seemed, emptying its inhabitants to the free show on the doorstep. Even at two in the morning there were hordes of children oozing round every attempt of the carabinieri to keep them back, and everywhere, increasingly, sprouted the cameras, busy lenses pointing at the windows, now shut, where drama was the tenor kidnapper agreeing to warm the baby's bottle in the kitchen.

I ground my teeth and watched a television van pull up, its occupants leaping out with lights, cameras, microphones, setting up instant interviews, excitedly telling the world.

The kidnapping of Alessia Cenci had until that time been a piano affair, the first shock news of her disappearance having made the papers, but only briefly, for most editors all over the world acknowledged that reporters glued to such stories could be deadly. A siege in a public street, though, was everyone's fair game; and I wondered cynically how long it would be before one of the fawn-uniformed law-enforcers accepted a paper gift in exchange for the fact of just whose ransom was barricaded there, three flights up.

I found myself automatically taking what one might call a memory snapshot, a clear frozen picture of the moving scene outside. It was a habit from boyhood, then consciously cultivated, a game to while away the boring times I'd been left in the car while my mother went into shops. Across the road from the bank I used to memorise the whole scene so that if any bank robbers had rushed out I would have been able to tell the police about all the cars which had been parked nearby, make, colour, and numbers, and describe all the people in the street at the time. Get-away cars and drivers would never have got away unspotted by eagle-eyed ten-year-old Andrew D.

No bank robbers ever obliged me, nor smash-and-grabbers outside the jewellers, nor baby snatchers from prams outside the bakers, nor muggers of the elderly collecting their pensions, nor even car thieves trying for unlocked doors. A great many innocent people had come under my sternly suspicious eye - and though I'd grown out of the hope of actually observing a crime, I'd never lost the ability of freeze-frame recall.

Thus it was that from behind the darkened glass, after a few moments' concentration, I had such a sharp mind's-eye picture that I could have described with certainty the numbers of windows in the block of flats facing, the position of each of the carabinieri cars, the clothes of the television crew, the whereabouts of each civilian inside the police circle, even the profile of the nearest press photographer, who was hung with two cameras but not at that moment taking pictures. He had a roundish head with smooth black hair, and a brown leather jacket with gold buckles at the cuffs.

A buzzer sounded sharply inside the van and Pucinelli lifted the handset which was connected with the flat's telephone. The bass-voiced kidnapper, edgy with waiting, demanded action; demanded specifically a safe passage to the airport and a light aircraft to fly him, and his colleage and the ransom, out.

Pucinelli told him to wait again, as only his superiors could arrange that. Tell them to bloody hurry, said the bass. Otherwise they'd find Alessia Cenci's dead body in the morning.

Pucinelli replaced the handset, tight-lipped.

'There will be no aeroplane,' he said to me flatly. 'It's impossible.'

'Do what they want,' I urged. 'You can catch them again later, when the girl is free.'

He shook his head. 'I cannot make that decision. Only the highest authority…'

'Get it, then.'

The engineer looked up curiously at the fierceness in my voice. Pucinelli, however, with calculation was seeing that shuffling off the decision had seductive advantages, so that if the girl did die it couldn't be held to be his fault. The thoughts ticked visibly behind his eyes, coming to clarity, growing to a nod.

I didn't know whether or not his superiors would let the kidnappers out; I only knew that Enrico couldn't. It was indeed a matter for the top brass.

'I think I'll go back to the Villa Francese,' I said.

'But why?'

'I'm not needed here, but there… I might be.' I paused fractionally. 'But I came from there in this van. How, at this time of night, can I get a car to take me back there quietly?'

He looked vaguely at the official cars outside, and I shook my head. 'Not one of those.'

'Still the anonymity…?'

'Yes,' I said.

He wrote a card for me and gave me directions.

'All-night taxi, mostly for late drunks and unfaithful husbands. If he is not there, just wait.'

I let myself out through the cab, through the door on the dark side, away from the noisy, brightly-lit embroilment in the street, edging round behind the gawpers, disentangling myself from the public scene, heading for the unremarked shadows, my most normal sphere of work.

With one corner behind me the visible nightmare faded, and I walked fast through the sleeping summer streets, even my shoes, from long custom, making no clatter in the quiet. The taxi address lay beyond the far side of the old main square, and I found myself slowing briefly there, awed by the atmosphere of the place.

Somewhere in or near that aged city a helpless young woman faced her most dangerous night, and it seemed to me that the towering walls, with their smooth closed faces, embodied all the secrecy, the inimity and the implacability of those who held her.