For the next hour I listened to the voices from the flat, sorting them gradually into father, mother, two children, a baby, and two kidnappers, one, the one who had talked on the telephone, a growling bass, the other a more anxious tenor.
It was the tenor, I thought, who would more easily surrender: the bass the more likely killer. Both, it appeared, were holding guns. The engineer spoke rapidly with Pucinelli, who then repeated everything more slowly for my benefit: the kidnappers had locked the mother and three children in one of the bedrooms, and had mentioned ropes tying the father. The father moaned occasionally and was told violently to stop.
In the street the crowd multiplied by the minute, every apartment block in the neighbourhood, it seemed, emptying its inhabitants to the free show on the doorstep. Even at two in the morning there were hordes of children oozing round every attempt of the carabinieri to keep them back, and everywhere, increasingly, sprouted the cameras, busy lenses pointing at the windows, now shut, where drama was the tenor kidnapper agreeing to warm the baby's bottle in the kitchen.
I ground my teeth and watched a television van pull up, its occupants leaping out with lights, cameras, microphones, setting up instant interviews, excitedly telling the world.
The kidnapping of Alessia Cenci had until that time been a piano affair, the first shock news of her disappearance having made the papers, but only briefly, for most editors all over the world acknowledged that reporters glued to such stories could be deadly. A siege in a public street, though, was everyone's fair game; and I wondered cynically how long it would be before one of the fawn-uniformed law-enforcers accepted a paper gift in exchange for the fact of just whose ransom was barricaded there, three flights up.