Rika Balletto—Ettore Balletto

Rika Balletto and Ettore Balletto’s marriage is shattered when Rika learns that Ettore helped arrange Pinta’s kidnapping as an insurance fraud and expected to profit from the ransom. The revelation changes the meaning of their shared bereavement: what Rika had understood as mutual grief and consolation becomes, in retrospect, a concealment of his complicity. When Creasy confronts them with the truth, her response is not merely to reject Ettore but to claim the choice of what should happen to him.

The Scheme Behind the Marriage’s Rupture

Before the fraud is exposed, Vico Mansutti explains to Ettore how kidnapping insurance could be made financially attractive to wealthy families. Italian insurers were barred from covering ransoms, while Lloyd's of London offered such policies, subject to offshore premium payment and strict secrecy. Security measures could lower the premium, and Vico describes a cheap, largely ineffectual bodyguard as a way to qualify for that reduction: a so-called premium bodyguard might cost about seven million lire a year. In a hypothetical example, the saving on a billion-lire policy would exceed that expense.

Ettore initially objects that he does not want insurance against a kidnapping that will not happen, then grasps Vico’s implication. Later, Rika discovers that Creasy had been hired for a pittance to appease her. Her anger at this inadequate protection—she calls him a drunk and says even a boy scout could have done better—reveals how little she knew about the arrangement around her daughter’s safety. The mismatch between the appearance of protection and its actual purpose becomes central to the couple’s eventual rupture.

Shared Grief and the Revelation

When Creasy returns to the Balletto home by the lake, Rika and Ettore are seated opposite one another at dinner. The scene sets their altered circumstances against their composed domestic setting: Rika is thinner but still beautiful, while Ettore appears unchanged. Creasy’s arrival interrupts that quiet surface, and he tells Rika what he has learned from Fossella. Ettore had taken out a policy with Lloyd's of London for two billion lire; Fossella was to return half the ransom to him, and Vico Mansutti had acted as intermediary for a commission.

Rika watches Creasy as he speaks, then turns to her husband. Her hatred is described as almost physical. Ettore slumps in his chair, opens and closes his mouth, and looks away. His silence and collapse contrast with the earlier image of an apparently unchanged husband: the composed figure at dinner cannot withstand the disclosure of what he did.

Consolation Recast as Betrayal

Rika asks whether Creasy has killed the people responsible. When he says that he intends to kill everyone who profited, including the boss in Rome and the powerful figure in Palermo, her attention returns to Ettore. She recalls that he had comforted her and told her that they still had each other, that life went on. The recollection gives the betrayal its intimate force. His words had offered the possibility of a shared life after Pinta’s death; once she knows of the scheme, that consolation appears inseparable from his concealed role in the crime.

Her question about whether Creasy means everyone marks a shift from listening to judging. She does not simply receive the facts as information about a criminal arrangement: she measures them against the memory of her husband’s comfort and recognizes that their grief was not shared on equal terms. The emotional change is registered in her gaze, which no longer reflects memory but hardens toward him.

Creasy’s Intervention and Rika’s Demand

Creasy picks up the pistol from the table and tells the Ballettos that he came to kill Ettore. He then puts the pistol away and offers to leave Ettore to Rika. She answers at once, asking him to leave her husband to her. The exchange does not establish what Rika later does; it establishes that Creasy yields the immediate decision to her rather than carrying out his stated intention in that room. Her request gives her a decisive voice in the confrontation after the scheme has deprived her of any meaningful choice in the events surrounding Pinta.

The marriage’s reversal is therefore expressed through a change in who controls the encounter. Ettore, exposed and looking away, no longer directs the story of their family or their loss. Rika, who had been consoled by him, determines whether Creasy will act against him at that moment. Her demand is not reconciliation, and the evidence does not resolve its eventual outcome; it makes her hatred and her claim over the decision unmistakable.

The Confession’s Aftermath

Satta later recalls the interview with the Ballettos at the lakeside house. Ettore had first refused to speak until his lawyer arrived, but news of Vico Mansutti’s sudden death broke his resistance. He turned to Satta as if to a priest, father figure, and protector, and poured out a disjointed account in a plea for understanding. Satta listened sympathetically, clarifying points only occasionally, while Bellu took notes and Rika remained silent and cold, watching her husband with evident disgust.

That later scene confirms the enduring division between them after Creasy’s confrontation. Ettore seeks protection and understanding from Satta; Rika offers neither. Satta is also astonished to learn that Creasy intends to continue after Conti and Cantarella, having assumed that the killing of Fossella had ended the revenge. In this wider aftermath, the marriage stands as one of the personal costs of the fraud: Pinta’s death has destroyed not only Rika’s trust in Ettore but also the possibility that their bereavement can still bind them together.