Synopsis

The rope, instead of immobilizing her, freed Alice and she collapsed at Eva's feet: flop. Eva fixed her mischievous eyes like nails on Iano's sweaty face. And Iano, starting over, not only no longer felt the sense of triumph his uncle Gino had predicted during their mafia bondage lessons, but he felt increasingly out of place and more and more awkward, an incomplete delinquent. And he began to whistle, or rather, to whistle, to banish the thought of the inadequacy that gnawed at him, and he whistled what he loved to whistle most, he whistled the Fisherman as De André whistles him: And he asked the old man, give me bread/I have little time and too hungry/and he asked the old man, give me wine/I'm thirsty and I'm a murderer. Cristiano had two guns pointed, one at Eva and the other at Alice, who remembered an old game... So, unexpectedly, he responded to Iano's whistle by whistling 'Don't worry, be happy,' perhaps better than Bobby McFerrin does it, and the whistle became music, and it truly would have been a mood-lifting medicine if the aggressive intention hadn't turned into an aggressive tone. Alice, in fact, slowed down to calm down and sped up to confuse, and Iano felt booed, he felt fooled. Even violence can become comical, and noir can flirt with sophisticated comedy: two kidnapped women, a secret pro-Palestinian organization inspired by the wild life of the world's longest ant, the dinoponera, Arab sheiks who pay in diamonds for the caresses of European beauties, a Sicilian criminal who seeks to apply the rules of etiquette to crime, and his accomplice who manages not to stammer only when quoting Dante's tercets... At the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, in a room besieged by secret services from around the world, a new literary genre is born: the picaresque thriller.