Kidnapping of Pepino Macchetti

The Kidnapping of Pepino Macchetti is the novel’s opening example of a child taken in the ordinary course of a school-day journey. In winter in Milan, eight-year-old Pepino enters the blue Mercedes he expects to take him home; the driver is not the familiar Angelo, and a heavyset stranger soon gets into the car beside him. The abduction establishes the danger that will shape the Balletto family’s decisions about Pinta, while later revelations about ransom insurance and a separate kidnapping plot give the opening a darker economic context.

The Abduction in Milan

The scene begins among expensive cars waiting outside a large building as children spill down the steps into the cold. Pepino, his head tucked into his raincoat collar, hurries to the corner where his father’s driver usually parks the blue Mercedes. The driver watches him in the mirror, leans back to open the door, and lets him into the car’s warmth. Pepino struggles out of his raincoat; only after the Mercedes has reached the next corner does he look up and realize the driver is not Angelo.

As Pepino is about to ask a question, the Mercedes pulls back to the curb and its door opens. A heavyset man gets in beside him. The driver waits for a gap in the homebound traffic and then pulls smoothly away. The scene does not describe a struggle or establish what happens to Pepino afterward; its force lies in how the familiar routine of the ride home has been turned against him. A trusted-looking car and the expected driver’s place in the routine give the boy no immediate reason to recognize the danger.

The narration places the abduction within a wider pattern: although it is only January, Pepino is already the third kidnapping victim in Italy that year. Later, Rika refers to him as having been taken in broad daylight right outside his school. Her recollection makes the incident a concrete precedent in the family’s argument over Pinta’s exposure to danger, even as the opening scene focuses on the corner and the substituted driver rather than depicting the abduction at the school gates itself.

A Warning in the Balletto Household

Rika invokes Pepino’s abduction while pressing Ettore to find a safer arrangement for Pinta. She raises the fact that the boy was taken in daylight near his school as evidence that a child can be seized in a place and at a time that might otherwise seem routine. Ettore answers that the Macchettis are among Milan’s richest families, whereas the Balletto family is not rich and its financial difficulties are becoming known. His response turns the same example into an argument about whether Pinta is a plausible target: Rika sees the abduction as proof that children are at risk, while Ettore believes the difference in their families’ wealth reduces that risk.

The incident also gives Creasy a practical framework for the protection job. He thinks in military terms, treating Pinta as an asset that an opponent might try to capture at home, at another regular destination such as school, or on the road between them. When he inspects the school, he notes its high, spike-topped walls, heavy gates, and lack of cover outside, then studies the grounds and the building’s security. His assessment extends beyond the school itself: he identifies the journey as a likely point of vulnerability and considers varying the daily route. Pepino’s abduction thus changes the question from whether a location appears secure to how a predictable routine might be exploited.

Ransom Insurance and the Price of Protection

The story’s discussion of Pepino’s abduction sits alongside an explanation of the financial arrangements surrounding kidnapping. Vico Mansutti tells Ettore that the Italian government does not permit Italian insurers to write policies covering ransom, on the grounds that such coverage might encourage kidnapping. Foreign insurers can provide it; Lloyd’s of London is presented as a major provider. The policies described require premiums to be paid outside Italy and the insured person never to disclose the coverage.

Security measures can reduce those premiums. Vico explains that a full-time bodyguard could lower the rate on a hypothetical one-billion-lire policy from five percent to three percent, a saving of twenty million lire against a bodyguard’s annual cost of thirty million. He then introduces the low-cost alternative: a “premium bodyguard” costs about seven million lire a year and, as Vico concedes, would do little to stop a kidnapping, but could still qualify the insured for a lower premium. That distinction between protection in name and protection in practice becomes relevant to Creasy’s hiring: Rika later learns he was employed for a pittance merely to appease her, and calls him a drunk unfit to protect her daughter.

The Opening’s Later Reversal

Pepino’s abduction is not the kidnapping whose scheme is eventually exposed. Later, Creasy tells Rika that Pinta’s kidnapping was arranged as an insurance job: Ettore had taken out a two-billion-lire policy with Lloyd’s of London, and Dino Fossella was to return half the ransom to him. Vico Mansutti had acted as intermediary and received a commission through his organized-crime connections. Rika’s fear, initially sharpened by the Macchetti case, is therefore set against a separate crime in which the apparent safeguards and the family’s own arrangements have been corrupted into part of the scheme.

That reversal gives the opening incident a lasting structural role without making Pepino’s fate part of Pinta’s story. The first abduction establishes the public danger that Rika fears and that Creasy approaches as a problem of routes, targets, and security. The later plot exposes how protection and insurance can be manipulated by people close to the family. The novel begins with a child’s ordinary ride home made unsafe from within; it later reveals that, in Pinta’s case, the danger was not only an outside threat but a fraud organized through the very arrangements meant to manage it.