bodyguard for Pinta, the daughter of a wealthy businessman in the textiles industry.
Actually, Creasy is being hired as a “premium” guard, not expected to be perfectly fit but
in place to reduce insurance costs (50).
Creasy comes to love the girl; caring for her teaches him to want to live again
(indeed, the child, for him, “made” love “possible,” he explains in the book, 255); yet,
she is kidnapped, held for ransom. Creasy, wounded in the kidnapping and lying in
hospital, learns that the girl has been found, choked to death on her gag. Evidence
shows she had been abused sexually. The descriptions in the book are brutally terse
(e.g., 143-44).
Creasy, who owes her his desire to live, will take revenge on a system that
allows for such corruption that the girl’s suffering would seem inevitable—a system
exposed as venal and evil by the narration’s Dickensian subplots involving Mafia
intrigue and police lethargy. First, however, Creasy must rebuild himself as a warrior.
He travels to Gozo, where, through a sort of pastoral interlude after hospital surgery, he
regains strength through farm work, swimming, eating well, and falling for a local
woman. She becomes pregnant, and the avenger must leave her behind as he rains
death on everyone who he can discover had anything to do with Pinta’s suffering.
Creasy shoots, explodes, even parachutes in to slaughter, the Mafia chain of command.
In process, he is again sorely wounded and is given a public funeral. A final short
chapter, though, describes a mysterious limping figure’s being delivered back to Gozo
and into the waiting arms of a woman who looks “bulky” and “heavy” in her coat (370).
In sum, here readers engage, full panoply, the revenger’s tale. A broken man,
facing a corrupt system, skirts its limits and dares to right wrongs violently, and, having
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