Milan

Milan is both a landscape of protected domestic routines and a center of organized-crime investigation in the novel. The city first appears in winter, amid expensive cars and children heading home, but that orderly scene is broken when eight-year-old Pepino Macchetti is kidnapped from his father’s car. Later, restaurants, family arrangements, police work, and a series of killings connect Milan’s comfortable public life to the criminal networks operating beneath it.

Setting and First Kidnapping

The opening Milan scene is suburban and affluent: expensive cars line an avenue, and children leave a large building set back behind trees to meet the warmth of waiting cars. Pepino, eight years old, hurries to the blue Mercedes in which his father’s driver usually waits. The familiar car and its apparent driver initially make the journey seem routine. Only after the car has pulled away does Pepino realize that the driver is not Angelo.

The substitution becomes unmistakable when the Mercedes stops and a heavyset stranger gets in beside the boy. Traffic continues around them as the driver waits for a gap and pulls smoothly away. The ordinary mechanics of a ride home thus provide cover for an abduction. The narration notes that Pepino was already the third kidnapping victim in Italy that year; it does not say that the other kidnappings occurred in Milan. The city’s opening image nevertheless places the danger directly beside the routines and material security of affluent family life.

Domestic and Commercial Milan

Milan also appears through the social spaces where business and private dependence meet. At Granelli’s, Ettore Balletto has lunch with his lawyer, Vico Mansutti, in the semiprivacy of an alcove. Their meal accompanies a discussion of Ettore’s financial problems: Vico reassures him that matters can be arranged and offers to speak personally with the bank managers. Ettore feels at a disadvantage beside his urbane, carefully dressed lawyer. The lunch presents commercial trouble not as an abstract matter but as a negotiation shaped by personal authority and unequal confidence.

The city’s routines also frame Creasy’s early work protecting the Balletto family. Finding a bodyguard suited to Rika’s requirements has proved less simple than Vico suggested. Once Creasy is chosen, Rika prepares a room for him at the top of the house, arranging furniture with Pinta, and assigns him meals with the household staff. His duties center on driving Pinta to and from school, with shopping and lunch engagements for Rika between those trips. The arrangement makes protection part of the family’s daily schedule rather than a role kept apart from domestic life.

On what Creasy considers his first real day on the job, he drives Rika and Pinta out before eight. At the school gates, a uniformed guard peers into the car; Rika introduces Creasy, and the guard studies his face. When Pinta is about to get out, Creasy stops her and tells her to stay where she is. Later, while Rika goes into a restaurant, Creasy watches her cross the street, parks nearby, and waits. These small acts of movement and observation give Milan’s public spaces a practical role in the family’s security: the school entrance and restaurant are ordinary destinations, but each requires attention to who is present and what may happen next.

The City and the Investigation

Milan is also the focus of Mario Satta’s patient effort to understand and prosecute organized crime. After three years of collecting and comparing information across cities and criminal enterprises, Satta has become exceptionally knowledgeable about the Mafia. For the past year, he has put that knowledge to work: he spearheads an investigation into a major steel-plant scandal in Reggio and has seen Don Mommo imprisoned for two years. In recent months, his attention has turned to the two principal Families in Milan, led by Abrata and Fossella.

Satta’s Milan investigation depends on accumulated evidence rather than a single dramatic discovery. He builds a network of telephone tapping, surveillance, and informants, gathering material on prostitution, coercion, and drugs. His aim is to obtain enough evidence to prosecute senior figures, perhaps Abrata and Fossella themselves. The work is difficult: prison sentences remain inadequate, and witnesses are hard to find and harder to protect. At the same time, public anger at criminal arrogance and apparent immunity is growing. Satta sees each especially flagrant Mafia act as an occasion that further hardens opinion against the organization.

That investigative labor meets the violence it seeks to contain. Giorgio Rabbia’s body is found face up in a drainage ditch beside an access road to the Milan-Turin motorway. Satta and his assistant, Massimo Bellu, stand beside the body as police and an ambulance gather at the roadside. Later, Bellu summons Satta to another scene: Violente is in a car, and Sandri is upstairs. Satta turns from the bodies toward the work still ahead, telling Bellu to follow him to the office for a busy night and week. The response links crime-scene examination to the slower demands of an investigation that cannot end with identifying the dead.

Violence, Publicity, and Narrative Role

After three killings in three days, Milan’s newspapers seize on the story. Reporters reach the same conclusion as Satta and Don Cantarella, and the next morning’s headlines announce a war with the Union Corse. Editorials invoke international crime and call for more law and order. The killings therefore produce not only police pressure but a public explanation of the violence—one that identifies a foreign criminal organization and turns events into a political demand. Satta, meanwhile, comes under pressure from his superior, who considers it disgraceful for Frenchmen to be killing Italian criminals.

Across these episodes, Milan’s significance lies in the sharp proximity of contrasting worlds. A child’s carefully arranged ride home can be stolen by an impostor; a family’s ordinary schedule makes protection a daily responsibility; a polished restaurant conversation carries the weight of financial dependence; and a police investigation must assemble evidence while killings command immediate attention. The city is not presented only as the setting for criminal acts. It is where comfort, vulnerability, institutional ambition, and public reaction repeatedly meet, giving the novel’s violence consequences that extend beyond the crime scene.