Revenge

Revenge is the force that turns Creasy’s grief over Pinta Balletto into a deliberate campaign against the people responsible for her kidnapping and death. He does not present that campaign as a substitute for justice or as an effort to restore a functioning law; he calls it retaliation, insists on answering killing with killing, and sets his sights on a wider network than the immediate perpetrators. The novel’s treatment of revenge is therefore both intimate and strategic: it begins in the loss of someone precious to him and expands into a challenge to the criminal order that, in his view, conventional institutions cannot effectively confront.

Revenge Rather Than Justice

When Creasy explains his intentions to Guido Arrellio, he does not appeal to moral principle or to the prospect of a crime being properly punished. The distinction matters: his proposed violence is not framed as a lawful sentence, and he makes no claim that it will repair the harm. Guido knows him well enough to recognize the motive without needing it dressed up as justice. They have killed someone precious to Creasy; he means to kill in turn.

Guido tests that logic by asking whether Creasy means an eye for an eye. Creasy rejects the language of equivalence. His answer is that the response will be more than an eye, extending to every part of those responsible. The exchange establishes a defining imbalance in his conception of revenge: it does not seek a measured exchange or a return to the state that existed before Pinta’s death. It is intended to exceed the injury, because for Creasy no proportionate penalty can undo what happened.

Pinta’s Death as the Personal Cause

Creasy’s motive is grounded in a vivid recollection of Pinta’s fate, not in abstract hostility toward crime. He remembers her abduction, abuse, and death, imagining her held captive, restrained, and subjected to further violence before she choked on her own vomit. He says that he keeps seeing it. This recurring mental image makes revenge inseparable from the persistence of the loss: the crime is not finished for him simply because its immediate violence has ended.

A birthday present from Pinta gives the conversation a tangible point of connection to her. Creasy explains that she gave him a cross and told him to hold it up if he ever met the devil. As he recalls her words, he first smiles; the smile fades when he turns back to what was done to her. The object’s presence does not soften his purpose. Instead, the contrast between the child’s gift and the remembered brutality clarifies what the campaign means to him: he is acting from attachment to Pinta and from an anger renewed by the image of her suffering.

Guido understands this grief through his own loss of Julia. He says he wanted revenge when she died, but could not make it meaningful: the driver was a young man, and the accident had unbalanced him. Guido believes Julia would not have wanted revenge either, yet he recognizes the feeling Creasy describes. Their comparison connects the men without making their situations identical. Guido’s grief had no culpable enemy against whom retaliation could answer; Creasy believes that Pinta’s killers and their collaborators can be identified and reached.

The Campaign’s Scope and Method

Creasy refuses to limit his target to the two men Guido initially imagines he might pick off. He intends to pursue anyone who had a hand in the crime or profited from it, all the way to the top of what he calls the criminal nest. The enlargement of the target is central to his idea of retaliation: responsibility extends beyond the person who directly commits violence to those who enable or benefit from it. The campaign is not a single act of reprisal but a search through connected layers of culpability.

His plan is shaped by his judgment that the authorities are poorly equipped to confront organized crime. Guido describes police, the Carabinieri, courts, and prisons as corrupt or infiltrated, while acknowledging that some police officers, prosecutors, and judges are brave. He also recounts how the Mafia returned stronger after Mussolini’s rule, with informers and contacts inside police forces, local groups, and armed men across towns and villages. Against that background, Creasy argues that he can use methods unavailable to the police, including terror, and obtain information as he moves from one target to the next. He does not aim to gather evidence for a trial. His stated aim is to kill those he considers responsible.

Creasy also contrasts his motivation with that of a police officer or judge. In his account, officials must consider their families, careers, and ordinary lives; he believes he has none of those restraints. This is his explanation for why he can confront his targets in a way they have not experienced. The argument exposes the campaign’s double character: it is presented as a response to institutional weakness, but its means deliberately abandon legal judgment and replace it with Creasy’s own decision about guilt and punishment.

The Closed Drawer and the Decision to Leave

Revenge does not occupy Creasy’s consciousness with equal force at every moment. On his last night before leaving Gozo, he is surrounded at Gleneagles by fishermen, farmers, friends, and the Schembri family. Nadia Schembri gives him a cable confirming that the general in Paris has honored his request. Creasy experiences warmth and belonging in a community where he had not previously known friendship, and he does not regret his decision to leave in the morning.

The scene gives his resolve a distinct rhythm. He recognizes that he has found happiness in Gozo, but believes that abandoning his purpose would ultimately destroy that happiness because he could not live with the thoughts of what he had turned away from. The will for revenge, he reflects, has never slackened; it has been like a closed drawer. That night the drawer remains shut. In the morning it will open, and revenge will dominate the weeks ahead, excluding other concerns. The image marks a chosen transition: the desire is present even during a moment of community and ease, but Creasy postpones its full command until he leaves.

Love Without Absolution

Creasy’s relationship with Nadia Schembri changes the emotional conditions around revenge without cancelling it. When Guido asks whether Nadia has taken away some of his hatred, Creasy confirms that he loves her and that she loves him, but says nothing has changed in his determination. He links the child to this new capacity: the child made it possible for him to let love happen. His account makes attachment a change in his emotional life, not a conversion away from retaliation.

Creasy has told Nadia everything, and he says she hates those responsible almost as much as he does, as though she is with him and urging him on. He admits that he finds this difficult to understand, while also acknowledging the contradiction of trying not to think of her as he prepares to pursue revenge. At fifty, he is falling in love; yet the love does not displace the purpose that preceded it. The concept’s tension lies in that coexistence: Creasy can recover the ability to love and belong, but he does not interpret those bonds as reasons to forgive, withdraw, or entrust punishment to the institutions he distrusts.