Milan serves as both a domestic setting and a strategic center in the novel’s kidnapping plot. The city is where Rika Balletto fears that Pinta may be taken, where Creasy plans protection around the vulnerabilities of ordinary routes, and where he later locates two leading Mafia bosses within the chain of responsibility for Pinta’s death.

Family Life and the Fear of Kidnapping

Rika’s anxiety about Pinta’s safety takes concrete form in Milan. She points to the Macchetti child, abducted in broad daylight just outside his school, as evidence that a kidnapping can happen in a place and at a time that should feel ordinary. Her appeal is personal as well as practical: she insists that Pinta is at risk and demands that Ettore find a way to protect their daughter.

Ettore answers that the Macchettis are among Milan’s richest families, whereas the Balletto family is not wealthy enough to attract the same attention. His reassurance does not settle the dispute. Rika’s fear persists, and the danger associated with the Macchetti kidnapping becomes the measure by which she judges the arrangements made for Pinta.

The disagreement is set against financial pressure. Ettore says that the apartment in Rome is mortgaged and that selling it would send the proceeds to the bank; he also argues that Geneva property costs roughly twice as much as property in Rome. The proposed move would therefore not provide an easy escape from Rika’s concerns. Meanwhile, Ettore knows that his problems are becoming known in Milan’s financial circles, adding a separate source of unease to the family’s circumstances.

Security Planned Around the City’s Routes

Creasy approaches his new protective assignment as a military problem. He thinks of Pinta as an asset that an enemy might try to capture, and divides the possible danger into attacks at the family home or away from it, especially at a regularly visited place such as the school or along the road. His experience leads him to assess the likely attacker’s options rather than treat the job as simple companionship.

On the drive to Pinta’s school, he studies the road between Milan and Como for bends where a vehicle would have to slow, particularly where buildings would not provide cover. At the school, he notes the high walls topped with spikes, the heavy gates, and the absence of cover outside them. Inside the grounds, he surveys the playing field, running track, and copse before judging the school itself reasonably secure. The inspection shows how the city’s everyday geography—roads, gates, and routine destinations—becomes part of the contest between a potential kidnapper and a bodyguard.

That planning proves insufficient when the attack comes. As Pinta approaches Creasy’s car, a black car mounts the curb onto the grass, carrying four men. Creasy recognizes the abduction attempt and shouts for her to run. Pinta ducks under a man’s reaching arm and tries to get around the car, but one attacker catches and lifts her. Another fires at Creasy; unable to shoot while Pinta is between them, he waits until she is seized, then shoots the gunman twice in the chest. The scene turns the dangers Creasy had mapped in advance into an immediate crisis, and exposes the limits of protection once the attackers have reached their target.

A Kidnapping and Its Aftermath

The kidnapping ends not with Pinta’s release but with her death in captivity. Guido tells Creasy that the ransom had been paid two days before Pinta was due to be released. She did not appear, and the police found her the next morning in the trunk of a stolen car. During a major police sweep for a Red Brigades gang, the kidnappers had apparently become nervous and hidden for several hours. With Pinta’s hands and mouth taped, she vomited, probably from petrol fumes, and choked to death.

The account binds the city’s security and policing to the tragedy without suggesting that the police sweep itself caused her death: the kidnappers’ decision to go to ground delayed her release, while the conditions of confinement proved fatal. After hearing the explanation, Creasy’s expression remains fixed, but his eyes now glitter with hatred. The narration then places him on the overnight train from Milan to Naples in the middle of June, marking his departure from the city after the loss and the beginning of a changed purpose.

Milan in the Criminal Network

Milan is also the base of two principal Mafia bosses in Creasy’s account: Fossella and Abrata. He explains that Fossella arranged the kidnapping and therefore belongs near the top of the sequence of people he intends to pursue, after Rabbia and Sandri. The proceeds and responsibility extend beyond the city: Conti in Rome receives a share, and Cantarella in Palermo takes a portion of everything. Creasy’s final formulation makes the consequence unmistakable: Cantarella now has a share in the killing as well.

This account makes Milan more than the place where Pinta is endangered. It is a point of origin for an operation whose profits and culpability travel through a wider criminal hierarchy. The novel’s movement from Rika’s anxious focus on a school route to Creasy’s reckoning with the bosses gives the city two connected meanings: the vulnerable everyday setting of the threatened family, and the organizational center of a kidnapping system whose consequences reach far beyond it.