Ratking by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page A

and often cited as a glowing example of the nation’s economic resurgence. In 1967 the firm became the Società Industriale Miletti di Perugia, or SIMP for short, but this fashionably ugly acronym changed nothing. The Miletti family, which in practice meant Ruggiero himself, remained in absolute and sole control.
    The kidnap itself was described in a few pages of material copied over the teleprinter from Perugia. The contents proved to be highly predictable, but at least Zen discovered who Antonio Crepi was: the retired director of a construction company with whom Ruggiero Miletti was in the habit of spending Sunday evening playing cards. One week Crepi would motor over to the Miletti villa, the next Ruggiero would drive down to his friend’s place, overlooking the Tiber valley. On the last Sunday in October, four and a half months earlier, it had been Ruggiero’s turn to visit Crepi. He had left home as usual at eight o’clock and arrived at Crepi’s twenty minutes later. The two had played cards and chatted until about a quarter past eleven, when Ruggiero left to drive home. He had never arrived.
    The alarm had been given by Silvio, one of Ruggiero’s three sons. It was rare for Ruggiero not to be back by midnight, and since there was a hard frost Silvio began to worry that his father might have had an accident. He therefore phoned Crepi, who had already gone to bed, and learned that Ruggiero had set out on his return journey an hour earlier. But, as so often, no one thought of a kidnapping. Daniele, the youngest son, arrived home while his brother was speaking to Crepi, and instead of alerting the police the two decided to search the road themselves. When they arrived at Crepi’s villa without having found any trace of Ruggiero the police were finally informed. It was twelve thirty-seven.

    Perugia is blessed with a crime rate among the lowest in Italy, and at that hour only a skeleton staff was on duty at the Questura. It took another quarter of an hour to call out the men on standby, and it was twenty past one before a complete set of roadblocks had been set up. Meanwhile the route Miletti had taken was thoroughly examined, revealing evidence of a struggle. Ruggiero’s hat, tie and shoe were found lying on the verge, and not far away lay a muslin wad soaked in ether. But it wasn’t until daybreak that the burnt-out shell of the car Ruggiero had been driving, one of a fleet of leased Fiat Argenta saloons used by both the family and the senior management of SIMP, was finally spotted by a helicopter in an abandoned quarry some eleven miles north of the city. The front bumper was dented and one of the headlamps cracked, indicating that the gang had front-tailed Ruggiero from the villa, then deliberately braked hard on a bend to cause a minor collision, immobilizing his car. They would have got out to examine the damage, all smiles and apologies. At the last moment their victim must have realized what was happening, for he had fought and kicked and struggled. But by then it was much too late. You could only defend yourself against kidnappers before they struck, by persuading them to strike somewhere else.
    The remainder of the report on the Miletti kidnapping set out the investigators’ provisional conclusions. The gang had had about two hours altogether in which to seize Miletti, dispose of his car, and make good their escape. Assuming the first two stages took about thirty minutes, that left an hour and a half before the roadblocks went up. It was more than enough. If they had continued north they could have been on any one of a dozen remote roads high up in the Apennines within an hour. It was quite possible that they had gone to ground there, in some isolated farm or mountain hut. On the other hand they might well have left the area altogether, taking the link road west to the motorway and spending the rest of the night driving south. By dawn they could have reached the Aspromonte mountains behind Reggio di