A Noble Radiance Read Online Free PDF Page B

in to ransom demands. Only by blocking
any attempt to give the kidnappers what they demanded could they be dissuaded
from future crimes. Most times, he told the Count, the person was never
returned, often never found.
    Count Ludovico
insisted that there was no reason to believe that this was a kidnapping. It
could be a robbery, a prank, a case of mistaken identity. Brunetti was well
familiar with the need to deny the horrible and had often dealt with people who
could not be made to believe that a member of their family was endangered or,
often, dead. So the Count's insistence that it was not, could not be, a
kidnapping was entirely understandable. But Brunetti wondered, again, at the
suggestion that it could be some sort of prank. What sort of young man was
Roberto that the people who knew him best would assume this?
    That it was not was
proven two days later, when the first note arrived. Sent express from the
central post office in Venice, probably dropped into one of the slots outside
the building, it demanded seven billion lire, though it did not say how the
payment was to be arranged.
    By then the story was
splashed all over the front pages of the national newspapers, so there could
have been no doubt on the kidnappers' part that the police were involved. The
second note, sent from Mestre a day later, dropped the ransom to five billion
and said that the information about how and when to pay it would be phoned to a
friend of the family, though no one was named. It was upon receipt of this note
that Count Ludovico made his televised appeal to the kidnappers to release his
son. The text of the message was attached to the report. He explained that there
was no way he could raise the money, all of his assets having been frozen. He
did say that, if the kidnappers would still contact the person they intended
calling and tell him what to do, he would gladly exchange places with his son:
he would obey any command they gave. Brunetti made a note on the envelope,
telling himself to see if he could get a tape of the Count's appearance.
    Appended was a list
of the names and addresses of everyone questioned in connection with the case,
the reason the police had questioned them, and their relationship to the
Lorenzonis. Separate pages held transcripts or summaries of these
conversations.
    Brunetti let his eye
run down the list. He recognized the names of at least a half dozen known
criminals, but he was unable to see any common thread connecting them. One was
a burglar, another a car thief, and a third, Brunetti knew, having put him
there, was in prison for bank robbery. Perhaps these were some of the people
the Treviso police used as informers. All led nowhere.
    Some other names he
recognized, not because of their criminality, but because of their social position.
There was the parish priest of the Lorenzoni family, the director of the bank
where most of their funds were held, and the names of the family lawyer and notary.
    Doggedly, he read
through every word in the file; he studied the block printing on the
plastic-covered ransom notes and the lab report that accompanied them, saying
that there were no fingerprints and that the paper was too widely sold to be
traceable; he examined the photos of the opened gate to the villa taken both
from a distance and close up. This last included a photo of the rock that had
blocked the gate. Brunetti saw that it was so large that it could not have
fitted through the bars of the gate: whoever had put it there would have to
have done so from inside. Brunetti made another note.
    The last papers
contained in the file had to do with the finances of the Lorenzonis and
included a list of their holdings in Italy, as well as others they were known
to possess in foreign countries. The Italian companies were more or less
familiar to Brunetti, as they were to every Italian. To say 'steel' or 'cotton'
was pretty much to pronounce the family name. The foreign holdings were more
diverse: the Lorenzonis owned a