The nationwide manhunt for Creasy

The nationwide manhunt for Creasy is a contest over visibility: Don Cantarella makes Creasy’s face impossible to miss, hoping public recognition will bring a killer within reach, while Mario Satta and Guido Arrellio can only wonder how Creasy can remain unseen. The campaign gives the pursuit a national audience, but produces an outcome Cantarella cannot control: the wanted man becomes a popular hero even as the publicity makes him easier to identify and kill.

Publicity as a weapon

Don Cantarella studies an enlarged passport photograph clipped inside a dossier. The close examination turns the image into more than a practical lead: the scars and eyes make Creasy, in Cantarella’s view, distinctive enough to be recognized among thousands. Cantarella concludes that there will be no end to the problems Creasy causes while he remains alive, and promises that the man who kills him will want for nothing. The search is thus explicitly lethal, not simply an effort to locate a fugitive.

Cantarella’s next move is to send the photograph into public circulation. He orders that it appear on the front page of every newspaper in the country the following morning. Maurizio Dicandia objects that this will expose the whole story, but Cantarella argues that the authorities already know most of it and that Mario Satta’s effort to keep his department silent has merely delayed its spread. Rather than distribute the image themselves, Cantarella’s people will let the newspapers perform that work for them.

The tactic depends on the very scale that makes it dangerous. Cantarella says that thousands of people are looking for Creasy, and that distributing the picture by other means would take days. The press can reproduce the face quickly across the country, converting a private dossier image into a mass search tool. Cesare Gravelli warns that the publicity will make Creasy a hero. Cantarella accepts that consequence, dismissing it on the assumption that a dead hero will soon be forgotten. His plan treats public attention as a means to an end; it cannot dictate what the public will make of the image.

From wanted face to public emblem

The papers do what Cantarella intends: Creasy’s face appears on the front page of a dozen newspapers. Wally Wightman encounters the display at a newsstand and is transfixed by it. The scene makes the campaign’s reach concrete: the photograph is no longer confined to police or criminal networks but confronts people in an ordinary public place. An hour later, Wally argues that they should take the money and passports in their bag, travel to the railway station, buy what they need on the way, and catch a boat to Greece. The image’s sudden ubiquity makes flight seem urgent.

Yet recognition does not produce simple public hostility. Mario Satta reports that in the capital and the north, girls are wearing T-shirts bearing Creasy’s photograph and the slogan GO CREASY! He is astonished by the response and uneasy about it; the same face that makes Creasy easy to identify is being worn as a declaration of support. The newspapers, meanwhile, are profiting from the story. Publicity has escaped the control of the man who initiated it: the image serves the hunt, but also circulates as an emblem of admiration.

Massimo Bellu offers a reason for that response. People are tired of the bosses’ power and arrogance, he says, while the government has failed to act; they therefore make a hero of one man. The reaction places Creasy’s personal pursuit within a wider conflict over authority. The public does not merely see a man sought by powerful enemies and the police. In Bellu’s account, Creasy becomes a focus for anger at the impunity of those bosses and at official inaction. Satta’s reservation that the enthusiasm may be unhealthy registers the danger in turning a fugitive into a public cause.

Police, pursuers, and the limits of the search

The manhunt involves both Creasy’s criminal enemies and the authorities. When Guido is with him, Satta calls Carabinieri headquarters and issues detailed instructions. Afterward, however, he tells Guido that the call was not necessary: if Cantarella has not found Creasy by now, Satta doubts that the police will do better. He looks at the newspapers and acknowledges that Creasy has little chance now that his face is so readily recognized, while hoping the authorities will find him before Cantarella does. The call demonstrates police activity, but Satta’s explanation exposes its limits and the grim competition over who reaches Creasy first.

The public image does not answer the question that troubles Satta most: where Creasy is staying. He believes Creasy must be completely isolated and unseen, and asks Guido whether Creasy had a safe house after leaving the capital. Guido says he knows of none and that Creasy never discussed his plans after that point. The information gap is not repaired by the nationwide distribution of the photograph. The campaign makes Creasy’s appearance common knowledge while leaving his whereabouts unknown.

The pursuit’s unresolved paradox

By the time Satta reflects on the public reaction, he calls Creasy probably the best-known face in the country. That fame is a tactical success for Cantarella in one narrow sense: a recognizable face can be reported wherever it appears, and the newspapers have multiplied the number of people who may recognize it. But the T-shirts and public support make the image politically charged rather than merely useful to pursuers. The campaign intended to enlist the country in finding a target; it also displays the depth of public resentment toward the powerful figures pursuing him.

The manhunt therefore ends this episode of the pursuit in uncertainty, not capture. Creasy’s face has reached newspapers and clothing, the police have been mobilized, and Cantarella has made clear that he wants Creasy dead. Still, Satta can only ask how a man so widely recognized can remain hidden, and Guido has no safe house to offer as an answer. Visibility expands the danger around Creasy without revealing the place where he is concealed.