Creasy’s vengeance-driven state

Creasy’s vengeance-driven state is the deliberate, sustained resolve to answer Pinta’s kidnapping and death with lethal retaliation. He does not describe his purpose as justice or punishment: he intends to kill those responsible, and to widen his retribution beyond the direct perpetrators. The resolve is not simply a burst of grief. It becomes a program, survives the prospect of happiness with Nadia, and ultimately displaces the life of belonging Creasy has found in Gozo.

The decision to make revenge his purpose

After dinner, sitting on the terrace with Guido, Creasy explains what he intends to do. He does not appeal to moral principle or present his plan as a crime that must be punished. The distinction is essential: Guido knows that the plan is revenge because someone precious to Creasy has been killed, and Creasy means to kill in return. Guido asks, “An eye for an eye?” Creasy rejects even that measure: “More than that. More than an eye. Every bloody piece of them.” The exchange makes his intent unmistakable. He is not proposing a balanced repayment or a limited response; he means to make the perpetrators suffer far beyond the loss they caused.

When Guido asks whether Creasy was really fond of Pinta, Creasy searches for words because he needs his friend to understand what the girl meant to him. The force of his answer comes through not as abstract grief but as a recurring, brutal image. He says he keeps seeing how Pinta was taken, abused, and left to choke in her own vomit, and imagines her eyes taped and her body held on a dirty bed for the kidnappers’ use. The imagined continuation of her suffering intensifies the present-tense force of his loss: the violence he plans is tied to images he cannot put aside. Anger and hatred radiate from him as he asks Guido to understand why he is going after them.

From perpetrators to the whole network

Creasy’s target is not confined to the two men Guido initially has in mind. He says he will pursue anyone who had a hand in Pinta’s kidnapping or profited from it, “Right to the top. The whole stinking, filthy nest.” Guido first looks astonished, then laughs as he grasps the scale of the undertaking; Creasy smiles and makes clear that this is why he needs Guido’s help. The scope of the plan changes the meaning of his revenge. It is both personal retaliation for Pinta and an attack on the wider system that made the crime possible and rewarding.

The friends discuss that system in practical terms. Guido describes authorities weakened by corruption and infiltration: the police, the Carabinieri, courts, and prisons cannot reliably oppose the Italian Mafia, which has informers, contacts within police forces, and groups in cities and towns, extending into villages farther south. He also recalls his earlier associations in Naples, particularly Conti. Creasy accepts that the campaign will be difficult but identifies advantages unavailable to ordinary law enforcement. He can use terror, he says, because those who employ it are unaccustomed to facing it themselves; as he moves from one target to the next, he expects to obtain information the police cannot get through their own methods. His objective is not to assemble evidence for a trial: he states plainly that his aim is to kill. Revenge thus takes the form of a campaign designed to penetrate an organization, gather intelligence through violence, and strike beyond its lowest-level actors.

A purpose kept closed, then reopened

Creasy’s commitment is not always outwardly active. On his last night in Gozo, he enters Gleneagles to find a crowd gathered before his departure. The fishermen, farmers, local friends, and the Schembri family absorb him into a circle of affection he has never experienced before. Nadia gives him the cable confirming that the general in Paris has honored his request. In this room, with drink and conversation flowing, Creasy feels warmth and belonging. He is not sad about leaving, and he does not question his decision to go in the morning.

That composure is not evidence that revenge has faded. Creasy understands that forgetting his purpose would mean the end of the happiness he has found: he cannot stay in Gozo while turning away from what he believes he must do. The narrative describes his will for revenge as a closed drawer. On this last night the drawer remains shut; in the morning he expects to open it, and for the coming weeks revenge will dominate his mind and exclude everything else. The image holds together two truths rather than resolving them. Creasy has found a community and a possible life, but he treats that life as incompatible with abandoning his pursuit.

Nadia, love, and an unchanged resolve

Guido later asks whether Creasy is still determined. Creasy answers that nothing has changed and describes wanting his targets as an ache. Guido wonders whether Nadia has taken away some of his hatred. Creasy says that he loves her and she loves him, but that this has changed nothing. Their child, he explains, made it possible for him to let love happen. His capacity for attachment has returned, yet it has not displaced the vengeance driving him.

Creasy has told Nadia everything. He finds it strange that she hates the men as much as he does, and describes her as being with him, urging him on. He also admits the contradiction: he tries not to think of Nadia, even as he acknowledges that he is fifty years old and falling in love. The contrast does not reduce either feeling to a disguise for the other. Love is real, and so is his unchanged desire for retaliation; the relationship becomes part of the emotional life he has recovered without becoming a reason to stop.

The state’s significance

Creasy’s vengeance is defined by its refusal of the distinctions on which legal punishment depends. He explicitly rejects justice as his stated motive, distrusts a compromised system’s capacity to act, and chooses killing rather than evidence and trial. Yet his target expands from the men who directly harmed Pinta to anyone who participated or profited, turning private grief into a campaign against an entire criminal network. That expansion is the source of both the plan’s reach and its danger: responsibility is pursued through Creasy’s own methods, with no court setting the limits or determining the consequences.

The state also persists alongside the possibilities that might have weakened it. Pinta’s suffering remains vivid in Creasy’s mind; Gozo offers belonging but cannot make him relinquish his purpose; Nadia’s love and their child open him to feeling without ending his hatred. The closed drawer gives this condition its clearest shape: revenge can wait, but it has not disappeared. When Creasy leaves, it returns not as a passing emotion but as the organizing purpose of the weeks ahead.