Roma serves two sharply different functions in the novel: it is a costly property that the Balletto family considers selling, and a center of business, criminal influence, and police administration. Its appearances connect private financial pressure to the wider movement of power and people across Italy.

Property and Financial Pressure

For the Balletto family, the apartment in Roma is not merely a residence. Ettore explains that the family business is in severe difficulty: competition from the Far East and a troubled government have contributed to an expected large loss, while he is already four hundred million lire in debt to the banks. The mill, the family house, and the apartment in Roma are all heavily mortgaged. Because Ettore needs another loan to buy machinery, he is seeking a guarantee from outside the existing business and property.

Rika proposes selling the apartment while prices are favorable, then using the proceeds to buy a home in Geneva. Her plan treats the Roma property as a source of capital that could relieve the immediate financial pressure and support a different arrangement for family life. The sale is not presented as a simple response to debt: Rika also says that Roma has become boring, and that Geneva would let her spend time near Pinta while Ettore is away or staying in Milan. The apartment consequently stands at the intersection of the family’s business difficulties, Rika’s dissatisfaction, and her attempt to reorganize where the family spends its time.

A Changing Center of Mafia Power

Roma also figures in the novel’s account of the Mafia’s changing territorial order. After Creasy and Guido Arrellio have completed twelve covert missions in Southeast Asia, suffered several wounds, and accumulated money, they decide to take a break and travel to Europe. Guido has learned that he can return to Naples without the police looking for him. He also learns that Conti, having prospered, has moved his base to Roma, leaving Naples under a viceroy who has little recollection of events from 1953.

That change places Roma within a broader contrast between a powerful figure’s new center and the subordinate authority left behind in Naples. The move suggests that the Mafia’s influence is not fixed to one city: its leadership can relocate, while local control is delegated. For Guido, this altered geography makes a return possible. He can visit his family and inspect his property in Naples in a situation where the local police are not actively searching for him and Conti is no longer based there.

The later interrogation of Giorgio Rabbia gives Roma a related but distinct role. Rabbia says that Fossella visits Conti in Roma at least once a month, while also reporting that Fossella often goes to Villa Colacci. His information connects the city to recurring contact between powerful figures, although it does not establish that every meeting or operation takes place there. Roma appears as a point in a network of movement and association, rather than as the setting for the entire criminal organization.

Police Administration and the Search for Creasy

Roma is also the location of a key administrative inquiry into Creasy. After Mario Satta and Massimo Bellu connect Rabbia and Sandri to the kidnapping and identify Fossella as its organizer, they investigate the bodyguard whom they initially regard with skepticism. They know that Creasy had been hired as a low-cost bodyguard and had struggled with alcoholism. Information from the hospital changes their assessment: he has made an excellent recovery and is determined to regain his fitness. The agency then reveals his past as a mercenary, prompting Satta to send an urgent Grade One inquiry to Paris.

Satta uses his rank, reputation, and connections to obtain further information quickly. He personally contacts the director of immigration in Roma, whose department’s computer reports that Creasy left Reggio di Calabria by ferry for Malta six days after leaving the hospital. The system has no record of his return to Italy. Roma thus enters the pursuit not as a place where Creasy is found, but as the site of an official record that establishes his departure and helps define what the investigators do not know. Satta’s subsequent call to his counterpart in Malta carries the inquiry beyond Italy, while his considered reaction signals that the information raises further questions.

Narrative Significance

The city’s separate appearances accumulate without collapsing into a single function. The mortgaged apartment belongs to the intimate scale of family finances and Rika’s proposed move; Conti’s relocated base belongs to the changing structure of organized power; and the immigration inquiry belongs to the state’s attempt to trace an elusive man. In each case, Roma matters because people and institutions act through it: property is pledged, authority shifts, meetings recur, and records are consulted.

The contrast is especially clear in the city’s relation to movement. Rika imagines selling the apartment and redirecting the family toward Geneva; Conti’s relocation transfers a center of influence from Naples to Roma; and the police use Roma to establish that Creasy has crossed from Italy to Malta. The city is therefore less a continuously described setting than a recurring junction where economic choices, criminal organization, and official investigation intersect.