I started the car and drove again towards Casteloro.
'Be patient,' I said gently. 'They'll have to count the money. To examine it for tracers. Maybe, after last time, to leave it for a while in a place they can observe, to make sure no one is tracking it by homer. They won't free Alessia until they're certain they're safe, so I'm afraid it means waiting. It means patience.'
He groaned on a long breath. 'But they'll let her go… when I've paid… they'll let her go, won't they?'
He was asking desperately for reassurance, and I said, 'Yes,' robustly: and they would let her go, I thought, if they were satisfied, if they were sane, if something unforeseen didn't happen and if Alessia hadn't seen their faces.
About ten miles from the crossroads, by a cornfield, stood a simple stone wayside shrine, a single piece of wall about five feet high by three across, with a weatherbeaten foot-high stone madonna offering blessings from a niche in front. Rain had washed away most of the blue paint of her mantle, and time or vandals had relieved her of the tip of her nose, but posies of wilting flowers lay on the ground before her. and someone had left some sweets beside her feet.
The road we were on seemed deserted, running straight in each direction. There were no woods, no cover, no obstructions. We could probably be seen for miles.
Cenci stood watching while I opened the boot, lugged out the box, and carried it to the back of the shrine. The box had just about been big enough to contain the whole ransom, and there it stood on the dusty earth, four-square, brown and ordinary, tied about with thick string to make carrying easier and cheerfully labelled with red. Almost a million pounds. The house on Mikonos, the snuff box collection, his dead wife's jewellery, the revenue forever from the olives.
Cenci stared at it blindly for a few moments, then we both returned to the car and I reversed and drove away.
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
