'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 expressly against the customer's 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 semi-conscious, 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 for ever. 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 arranged 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 boot, and presently drove Cenci home.
We ate dinner late at the villa, 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 non-reflecting glass, four at a time of the same denomination. Even with the camera on a tripod, with bulk film, cable release and 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 soned them into numerical order for each denomination and then printed out the lists. The lists 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.
It was a system which seemed to us best, principally because photography left no trace on the notes. The problem with physically marking them was that anything the banks could detect, so could the kidnappers. Banks had no monopoly, for instance, in scans to reveal fluorescence. Geiger counters for radioactive pin dots weren't hard to come by. Minute perforations could be seen as easily by any eyes against a bright light, and extra lines and marks could be spotted by anyone's magnification. The banks, through simple pressure of time, had to be able to spot tracers easily, which put chemical invisible inks out of court. Kidnappers, far more thorough and with fear always at their elbows, could test obsessively for everything.
Kidnappers who found tracers on the ransom had to be considered lethal. In Liberty Market, therefore, the markings we put on notes were so difficult to find that we sometimes lost them ourselves, and they were certainly unspottable by banks. They consisted of transparent microdots (the size of the full stops to which we applied them) which when separated and put under a microscope revealed a shadowy black logo of L and M, but through ordinary magnifying glasses appeared simply black. We used them only on larger denomination notes, and then only as a back-up in case there should be any argument about the photographed numbers. To date we had never had to reveal their existence, a state of affairs we hoped to maintain.
By morning, fairly dropping from fatigue, I'd photographed barely half, the banks having taken the 'small denomination' instruction all too literally. Locking all the money into a wardrobe cupboard I showered and thought of bed, but after breakfast drove Cenci to the office as usual. Three nights I could go without sleep. After that, zonk.
'If the kidnappers get in touch with you,' I said, on the way, 'you might tell them you can't drive. Say you need your chauffeur. Say… um… you've a bad heart, something like that. Then at least you'd have help, if you needed it.'
There was such an intense silence from the back seat that at first I thought he hadn't heard, but eventually he said, 'I suppose you don't know, then.'
'Know what?'
'Why I have a chauffeur.'
'General wealth, and all that,' I said.
'No. I have no licence.'
I had seen him driving round the private roads on his estate in a jeep on one or two occasions, though not, I recalled, with much fervour. After a while he said, 'I choose not to have a licence, because I have epilepsy. I've had it most of my life. It is of course kept completely under control with pills, but I prefer not to drive on public roads.'
'I'm sorry,' I said.
'Forget it. I do. It's an inconvenience merely.' He sounded as if the subject bored him, and I thought that regarding irregular brain patterns as no more than a nuisance was typical of what I'd gleaned of his normal business methods: routine fast and first, planning slow and thorough. I'd gathered from things his secretary had said in my hearing that he'd made few decisions lately, and trade was beginning to suffer.
When we reached the outskirts of Bologna he said, 'I have to go back to those telephones at the motorway restaurant tomorrow morning at eight. I have to take the money in my car. I have to wait for him… for his instructions. He'll be angry if I have a chauffeur.'
'Explain. He'll know you always have a chauffeur. Tell him why.'
'I can't risk it.' His voice shook.
'Signor Cenci, he wants the money. Make him believe you can't drive safely. The last thing he wants is you crashing the ransom into a lamppost.'
'Well… I'll try.'
'And remember to ask for proof that Alessia is alive and unharmed.'
'Yes.'
I dropped him at the office and drove back to the Villa Francese, and because it was what the Cenci chauffeur always did when he wasn't needed during the morning, I washed the car. I'd washed the damn car so often I knew every inch intimately, but one couldn't trust kidnappers not to be watching; and the villa and its hillside, with its glorious views, could be observed closely by telescope from a mile away in most directions. Changes of routine from before to after a kidnap were of powerful significance to kidnappers, who were often better detectives than detectives, and better spies than spies. The people who'd taught me my job had been detectives and spies and more besides, so when I was a chauffeur, I washed cars.
That done I went upstairs and slept for a couple of hours and then set to again on the photography, stopping only to go and fetch Cenci at the usual hour. Reporting to his office I found another box on the desk, this time announcing it had been passed by customs at Genoa.
'Shall I carry it out?' I asked.
He nodded dully. 'It is all there. Five hundred million lire.'
We drove home more or less in silence, and I spent the evening and night as before, methodically clicking until I felt like a zombie. By morning it was done, with the microdots applied to a few of the fifty-thousand lire notes, but not many, through lack of time. I packed all the rubber-banded bundles into the FRAGILE box and humped it down to the hall to find Cenci already pacing up and down in the dining-room, white with strain.
'There you are!' he exclaimed. 'I was just coming to wake you. It's getting late. Seven o'clock.'
'Have you had breakfast?' I asked.
'I can't eat.' He looked at his watch compulsively, something I guessed he'd been doing for hours. 'We'd better go. Suppose we were held up on the way? Suppose there was an accident blocking the road?'
His breathing was shallow and agitated, and I said diffidently, 'Signor Cenci, forgive me for asking, but in the anxiety of this morning… have you remembered your pills?'
He looked at me blankly. 'Yes. Yes, of course. Always with me.'
'I'm sorry…'
He brushed it away. 'Let's go. We must go.'
The traffic on the road was normal: no accidents. We reached the rendezvous half an hour early, but Cenci sprang out of the car as soon as I switched off the engine. From where I'd parked I had a view of the entrance across a double row of cars, the doorway like the mouth of a beehive with people going in and out continually.
Cenci walked with stiff legs to be lost among them, and in the way of chauffeurs I slouched down in my seat and tipped my cap forward over my nose. If I wasn't careful, I thought, I'd go to sleep…
Someone rapped on the window beside me. I opened my eyes, squinted sideways, and saw a youngish man in a white open-necked shirt with a gold chain round his neck making gestures for me to open the window.
The car, rather irritatingly, had electric windows: I switched on the ignition and pressed the relevant button, sitting up slightly while I did it.
