The City of the Living

THE CITY

OF THE LIVING

PART I

Man’s Dining Companions

Rome is the only Middle Eastern city that doesn’t have a European quarter.

—FRANCESCO SAVERIO NITTI

Let’s not attribute Rome’s problems to overpopulation. When there were only two Romans, one killed the other.

—GIULIO ANDREOTTI

March 1, 2016, a nearly cloudless Tuesday, and the gates of the Colosseum had just opened, letting the tourists in to admire the most famous ruins in the world. Thousands of bodies were walking toward the ticket booths. Some stumbled on the stones. Some rose on tiptoe to measure the distance from the Temple of Venus. The city, above, was stoking rage in its own traffic, in the buses that already at nine in the morning were having engine trouble. Forearms punctuated insults from open windows. On the edge of the street traffic cops wrote tickets that no one would ever pay.

Yeah, sure . . . go tell it to the mayor! The clerk at ticket window 4 burst into a mocking laugh, provoking hilarity among her colleagues.

The elderly Dutch tourist looked at her in bewilderment from the other side of the glass. In his fist he brandished two fake tickets that two fake employees of the archeological site had sold him shortly before.

The line about protesting to the mayor was among the most frequently repeated remarks of recent weeks. It had originated in the municipal offices, and had spread among taxi-drivers and hotel owners and garbage men and grattachecca sellers, from whom, in the absence of a more obvious authority, tourists asked for help amid the infinite number of civic malfunctions.

The Dutch tourist frowned. Was it possible that even the real authority, the one in official uniform, was making fun of him? Behind him the crowd got louder.

Next!

The Dutch tourist didn’t move.

The clerk at the ticket window observed him, a cold smile painted on her face.

"Next in line!"

Many of those tourists had spent the night in cheap hotels in Monti, in seedy bed-and-breakfasts around Porta Maggiore. Looking up to admire an angel, they found themselves face down on the ground. They’d tripped on a bag of garbage, or the uprooted pole of a traffic signal. Above, the white marble, on the street the rats. And the seagulls ate the rats. The ill-informed had waited in vain for a bus, then headed on foot to the Colosseum. Now they were there. They could have been angry at the slow-moving line, but the dead beauty loomed over all of them: the sky over the travertine arches, the two-thousand-year-old columns, the basilica of Massenzio. Threat echoed in the splendor, as if invisible powers had the ability to drag those who crossed them into the kingdom of the shadows. A danger the Romans couldn’t care less about.

The ticket seller took care of another tourist. As did her colleague in the adjacent booth. The crowd before them was impressive, but they had seen worse. The Jubilee of Mercy had begun badly. A flop, wrote journalists hostile to the Pope. The year of remission of sins, of reconciliation, of sacramental penitence was not attracting any more celebrating pilgrims than the year of libations had, or the year of unpunished anarchy, or the year of shifting blame.

The elderly Dutch tourist abandoned the line. He walked toward Piazza dei Cinquecento. Next to him was a boy. They reached street level, disappeared among the oleanders.

Hey, what’s that stink? the ticket seller burst out. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, her hand was on the mouse.

A Chinese tourist was waiting for his tickets.

The ticket seller pressed Print, then looked at her hand. And then she started. Next to the mouse pad were two reddish-brown spots. She barely had time to blink when there were three. And now on the desk there were four spots.

"Madonna!"

The Chinese tourist stepped back. The ticket seller jumped to her feet, frightened, in the grip of the worst sensation that an inhabitant of this city can possibly feel: a visitation of bad luck that spares everyone else. She looked up. Drops were dripping from the ceiling. So the ticket seller did what anyone in Rome would do when blood drips from the walls of a government office. She called her supervisor.

A few hours later, two of the four ticket windows at the Colosseum had been closed.

The blood of a dead rat," said the superintendent of archeological sites.

A rat? said someone in the back rows. The crowd sniggered.

Wednesday, March 2. The press conference had been called to celebrate the end of the renovations around the Colosseum. But a reporter asked point blank why in the world two ticket windows had remained closed for the entire day preceding.

The superintendent was forced to get down to details. A large gray rat had been stuck in the air space above the ceiling of the ticket booth. It must have been impaled on a spike and had then struggled to get free, making the situation worse. The woman working at the time saw blood dripping on her desk. The ticket windows were closed for extermination.

The rat emergency ended up on the front pages of the dailies. The rodents had been coming out of the sewers constantly in recent days. Rats in the area around Termini station. Rats in Via Cavour. Rats right outside the Teatro dell’Opera. They crossed the street heedless of the traffic. They entered the souvenir shops and scared off the tourists.

The papers noted that there were more than six million rats in Rome. Not that there was any shortage of rats in New York or London, but in Rome they’d become kings of the city.

It’s what happens after years of poor administration, said an urban planner.

The main problem is the way garbage is managed, said one of the exterminators. Let’s not forget that rats are man’s dinner companions.

In Rome the sanitation department was going through dire times. Garbage was everywhere. The garbage trucks advanced slowly. Giant bags of garbage besieged the streets. The paramedics at Sant’Eugenio—there were rats cavorting even in the hospitals—told the press that that was the ultimate outrage, the slap in the face that would force the city to wake up. Many agreed. Right afterward, however, they were assaulted by the suspicion that they themselves were still asleep. The wing of a gigantic seagull shadowed the city. Again the Romans found themselves laughing.

Yeah, sure . . . go tell it to the mayor!

The remark was so successful because Rome, at the time, had no mayor. The city was being administered by a special commissioner. A judicial investigation, christened Mondo di Mezzo, or world in between, and signifying the nexus of politics and business with organized crime, had turned the city upside down. On trial were council members, consultants, prominent citizens, municipal administrators, public officials, fixers, entrepreneurs, an astonishing number of common criminals. Rarity of rarities: in Rome there were two Popes.

In moments of such confusion the inhabitants of Rome, faithful to ancient custom, scanned the sky in expectation of a sign. But even this—searching the clouds for a secret code—might sound, in 2016, like a fraudulent operation.

On Friday, March 4, the murder was committed.

The next day Rome was inundated with rain.

On Sunday, March 6, Mario Angelucci, who’d been working all week, was sprawled on his couch watching TV.

He was a man of fifty-four, thin, and bald at the temples. He worked at a local radio station. The job had made him sensitive to the sound of voices. When he was in the studio, at the console, he didn’t need to follow the speaker’s argument: he could hear the tail of the radio speech, put his finger on the black button, and the cutoff would start half a second after the voice stopped speaking.

Mario changed the channel. He huffed. He tried to find a new position among the cushions. Something he’d heard a little earlier was making him restless. He hadn’t given the words the proper attention, but he knew it was important. He switched to the news on RAI 1. The anchorwoman was saying that a twenty-year-old youth had been barbarically killed in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome.

The camera showed an orange apartment building that stood out among the late-winter trees. Mario Angelucci widened his eyes. The murder had been committed in Rome, and he was from Rome. It had been carried out between Collatino and Colli Aniene, which was where he was. But the TV was showing from the outside the same window that he could have opened from the inside if he had just stood up and walked over to it. Angelucci was seized by one of the strangest sensations of his life. It seemed to him that God was looking at him. And what usually happens when God opens his Eye wide upon you?

Via Igino Giordani 2.

Proving that he wasn’t going mad, the anchorwoman on the news had just uttered the address of his building. Mario Angelucci jumped up. He headed rapidly into the hall. His heart was pounding. His son was twenty, he had last seen him the night before, he and his wife had said goodbye when he went out and hadn’t heard him come home. Saturday night. The night of the week when kids get in trouble.

Mario Angelucci reached the end of the hall. He opened the door. An unpleasant odor of stale air hit him. Then the light illuminated the interior. Towels, comic books, balled-up socks, a roll of toilet paper. Mario Angelucci saw the covers flung every which way on a bed where anything could have happened, and, on the bed, a six-three beast, boorishly snoring.

A week later, when no one in Italy was talking about anything but the murder, Mario Angelucci discussed it with his colleagues.

Guys, worse than a panic attack. My imagination just ran away with me.

His colleagues at the station asked him how he could have believed that his son was involved in such a story.

What can I tell you, I can’t even explain it myself.

The papers said the murder was committed in an apartment on the tenth floor.

Did you know the owners? one colleague asked Angelucci.

Just to say hello to, he answered.

But while you were panicking did you think your son was the dead kid or the killer?

As far as I’m concerned, he said, it could have been either one. In this city anything can happen.

And at that point Angelucci, whose hollowed face and thin lips gave him a somewhat severe expression, brightened into a magnificent smile. Relief. Relief at having been spared, at having been ignored: no one knows in advance on whom the Eye will open, and although certain tragedies strike one person out of a hundred thousand, that unlucky one does have to exist. In him the illusion that certain things will never happen to us is shattered—so that for others it can remain intact.

At one-thirty in the afternoon on Sunday, March 6, Mario Angelucci knew that his family was safe.

A few hours later, on the other side of the city, a lawyer named Andrea Florita received a phone call. Florita was forty-four years old. He had a lean physique, an open and intelligent gaze, and, like many of his fellow-lawyers, had opened an office in Prati. Power and marvels were equally distributed on the two banks of the Tiber. On the right the Imperial Forums, the Quirinale, the national government. On the other the courts, television, the Sistine Chapel. That Sunday Florita had spent the day with his son: My son is young. When I’m with him I avoid turning on the television. When I answered the phone I had no idea what had happened.

At the other end of the line the lawyer heard the voice of an adult man.

Good evening, my name is Giuseppe Varani. My son has been murdered.

Not until late that evening did Florita understand that he had become the lawyer for the plaintiff in one of the most sensational criminal trials of recent years. On the way home after talking to Giuseppe Varani, he met an acquaintance. This man asked what he thought about the homicide even before the lawyer managed to say who his new client was.

Everyone asked for opinions about the murder. But mainly they wanted to have their own say. In a few hours the crime had become the main topic of conversation in Rome. Taxi-drivers at Termini discussed it, baristas in Piazza Bologna, kids in Monti and Testaccio. Not to mention what was happening inside the houses. Fathers who quarreled with children. Wives who warned husbands about the consequences of an upbringing that was too liberal or, on the contrary, too strict.

Have you read? Have you heard? "Have you seen what happened?"

Horror on the outskirts of Rome. A twenty-three-year-old boy was killed in an apartment in Collatino after being tortured for hours. The crime has no apparent motive."

La Repubblica, March 6, 2016

On Saturday, March 5, Manuel Foffo left his apartment at a little after seven in the morning.

He was supposed to meet his mother, his brother Roberto, and his maternal grandparents. The day promised to be anything but fun. His uncle Rodolfo had died. They would have to make a stop at the Gemelli hospital, at the funeral chapel, and then they would go on to Bagnoli del Trigno, the town in Molise his uncle came from, and where the funeral was to be held.

Rodolfo was the brother of Daniela, Manuel and Roberto’s mother. He had died of cancer at fifty-eight. Signora Daniela had stayed with him in the hospital during the night between Wednesday and Thursday. Roberto had gone to get her at three-thirty in the morning, and had driven her home. As soon as she came in, she sat down in the kitchen and remained there, in silence, surrounded by the solitude that that building conjured so well. Then she went to bed. A few hours later the phone started ringing. It was her son Roberto again. Uncle Rodolfo’s condition had deteriorated, he said.

Signora Daniela then looked for her shoes, put on her coat, and left the house again. She headed over to see her elderly parents, who lived in the building opposite. They had to be prepared. But that very evening she would be forced to verify personally that, no matter how prepared a mother may be, there is no limit to the bad news that can be learned about her own children.

Manuel was outside the building. He was a tall, robust young man. He had a receding hairline, and his cheeks were edged by a fuzz that betrayed indecision: too thick for a goatee, too thin for a beard. He appeared older than twenty-nine, the age he’d reach at the end of the month, and although that morning he had a distraught look—his face was puffy, his eyes sunken—the first thing his mother noticed was his pants. A pair of torn, light-colored jeans. Not exactly the ideal clothing for a funeral. But the reasons that mothers find their children’s choices inappropriate are always a bit startling.

I told him to change because it’s cold in Bagnoli, Manuel’s mother told the police.

Manuel nodded, disappeared through the entryway of the building, returned a few minutes later in a different pair of pants. Also jeans, but not torn.

I don’t know if he had changed at his house or mine. That’s where I keep his clean clothes.

Daniela’s apartment was on the ninth floor, Manuel’s on the tenth. Signora Pallotto had keys to her son’s apartment, and she went up periodically to clean it, especially when Manuel was going to be there with a girlfriend. Naturally Manuel also had male visitors. His mother was always around, ready to help out. Straighten the rooms. Polish the floors. These were activities Manuel detested. He didn’t even have a washing machine; his mother also washed his clothes.

Signora Daniela checked her watch. Roberto would be there soon, and they would all get into his car, leaving behind the trees and the flowerbeds and the church and the imposing orange building that, Manuel alone knew, guarded what would change their lives forever.

At one time, the Foffo family had all lived together in the apartment on the ninth floor: mother, father, and two sons. When Roberto turned eighteen he had had the privilege of using the apartment upstairs. A few years later, the parents’ marriage had collapsed. They separated. The father, Valter, left home. Then Roberto left, and now was married and had two children. Manuel had moved upstairs.

Valter was the owner of several restaurants in Collatino. He also had a vehicle-licensing agency well known in the neighborhood. Roberto worked with him. It wasn’t easy keeping up with everything. If you’re not born rich, being an entrepreneur in Italy means living in a state of constant worry. You don’t sleep at night. One wrong move is enough to go bust. But Valter Foffo hadn’t gone bust. He and Roberto worked hard, they weren’t frightened by difficulties, and when possible they didn’t say no to the rewards. They dressed well. They drove nice cars.

At seven-thirty Roberto Foffo arrived in Via Igino Giordani. He parked the car. Signora Daniela and the grandparents sat in the back, Manuel got in next to his brother. The car started off again. Half an hour later they crossed the Tor di Quinto bridge, beneath which the waters of the Tiber run dark and slow.

Roberto drove with concentration. Manuel had to be careful not to fall asleep. Brothers. There’s always something awkward about seeing them next to each other. Unless the age difference explains all the other differences, there’s the risk of spotting, in the offspring of the same blood, the divergence between who wins the battle of life and who loses.

Roberto was four years older than Manuel and had graduated from the university with a degree in insurance management. He worked. He had a family. Manuel had studied law but never graduated, he had a messy romantic life, and it wasn’t easy to figure out how he spent his days. Roberto was taking them all to say their last goodbye to a relative who had just died, and even in that banal occupation—gripping the steering wheel of a car—the brothers’ roles couldn’t have been reversed. Manuel had lost his license for drunk driving. In addition to excessive alcohol, traces of Xanax and Klonopin had been found in his blood. But who today doesn’t take benzos?

The truly slippery terrain was work.

What do you do, in life?

Rome is a city that tolerates vagueness when it comes to such subjects. Past a certain point, however, forbearance becomes a sneer. Thus Manuel, asked about his professional life, might feel pressed to use the first person in an adventurous way.

I manage some restaurants with my family. I’m also working on various digital projects. I’m developing a startup.

When the same question was put to his brother, the answer was: Manuel comes to the restaurant to eat. He’s a fan of marketing, he reads a lot, every so often he tries out an idea on us. But in fact he doesn’t do any work.

Valter emphasized Manuel’s character traits when he talked about his younger son. He’s a well-behaved, well-brought-up young man, very meek and reserved. At school he never got into fights. Also according to his father, Manuel was very intelligent, lived a regular life, had a thirst for culture (He can buy two books to read in one night), but had never shown much interest in the vehicle-licensing agency, which would have guaranteed him a future (I tried to get him involved, the way I did with Roberto. It was hopeless). His son eagerly attended marketing and IT courses (I give him the money for the courses), and in recent months he had in fact worked intensely on a startup. It was a project for the Italian Olympic committee, thanks to which—Valter always said—he could have turned things around. But the project, he added, wasn’t successful.

He could have turned things around. It wasn’t successful.

When fathers speak of male children like this, it’s never clear if their intention is to praise or denigrate them or subject them to that unpunishable exercise in humiliation that is excessive praise.

But the oddest statement regarding Manuel came from his mother: Manuel doesn’t tell me if he goes to the restaurant to work or not. I don’t even know precisely what sort of relations he has with his father.

When they crossed Via della Pineta Sacchetti, the gigantic silhouette of the Gemelli Polyclinic came into view.

Roberto parked. The five got out of the car and entered the hospital complex.

Manuel was now dragging his feet, feeling his brother’s eyes on him. Two days before, at an hour that for Roberto was seven in the morning and for Manuel any point on a crazed time line, Roberto had received a text message that was ludicrous to say the least. In the text Manuel invited him to join him. As an incentive he promised a trans woman and cocaine.

"Ciao Roberto, want to join us? I met a trans. We’ve also got some bamba."

Apart from the content, the choice of words was strange. Roberto couldn’t say that Manuel never snorted a line, but considered it unlikely that he hung around with trans women, and was sure he would never have used the word bamba to refer to cocaine. Was it really he who’d written it? Maybe Manuel had spent the night with some lowlife and they’d decided to amuse themselves at the expense of people who had to get up early to go to work the next day. Were they making fun of him? Irritated, Roberto had called Manuel, yelled at him on the phone for a few seconds, and then told him to go to hell, without giving him a chance to explain.

Signora Daniela also reported a rather bizarre episode that had taken place the evening before. Around nine-thirty, Manuel had called her.

Listen mamma, in about fifteen minutes I’m coming by with a friend to get the car keys.

The fact that Manuel wanted to make her complicit in a violation of the law had upset Signora Daniela. And then who was this friend? I’m not giving you anything, she answered. Uncle Rodolfo had died, there were other things to think about. Anyway, Daniela told the police, my son’s request seemed so absurd that the whole conversation went on between us as if it were some sort of harmless joke. Signora Daniela had stood her ground. Manuel hadn’t insisted.

Manuel entered the funeral chapel under Roberto’s severe scrutiny and his mother’s forgiving gaze. To forgive, however, is to judge. Stooped shoulders bear witness to the struggle that at certain moments of life we endure in order not to let our identity—or what we consider our identity—be overwhelmed by the false image others have of us.

Manuel made his way between his relatives, reached his uncle’s coffin. Pausing to observe the body, he promised himself to make a decision by evening. To know. To know while the others didn’t. The sensation was new. Manuel knew when his mother had told him to change his pants, he knew in the car sitting next to his brother, he knew now in the funeral chapel. He knew what they couldn’t even imagine. He was used to submitting to the decisions of others, and now he was the one who would decide. A few words. All he had to do was utter them to upend all their lives.

But as soon as they left the hospital, Manuel found that he had said nothing. He was tired, confused, he followed Roberto to the car. They waited for their mother and grandparents and the car started up again.

The funeral was scheduled for early afternoon. The car turned onto Via Flaminia. In a hundred kilometers they would stop. They were meeting Valter at the San Vittore exit. Things between him and Daniela were tense. There was an ongoing legal battle. In spite of that, Valter had decided to attend the funeral of his former brother-in-law.

Rain clouds thickened on the horizon. They passed Torre Spaccata, Cinecittà; the meadows of the Roman countryside rolled by. Manuel fell asleep.

Give your place to grandpa, that way we’ll have a little more room.

He was awakened by his brother an hour later. He heard birds chirping. They had stopped at a service station. In front of them was a snack bar. After a few minutes he arrived. They saw the car make a half circle before coming to a halt, then the man stood up on the asphalt. Valter Foffo had only to appear to focus the relatives’ attention on himself. Manuel, giving his seat to his grandfather, got out of Roberto’s car and headed toward his father’s.

As soon as he got in, the young man felt an electric shock. Between certain fathers and sons storm clouds can gather even when nothing has happened: so imagine if one considers the other lacking in respect toward him. In this case it was Valter who was irritated. Manuel thought he knew why. Valter said nothing and started the car.

A few minutes later they were on the road. Every so often Valter observed his son, then his own head in the rearview mirror. He was a good-looking man of sixty. White hair, fleshy mouth, a nose that in ancient times could have been a consul’s. That day he was wearing a black jacket over a white shirt, striped tie and dark pants. Looking at him, so well groomed and elegant, you’d find it hard to imagine how stressed he was. Work gave him no respite, the family wasn’t any better. Finally he began.

You want to tell me what happened?

In public Valter spoke of his son as a shy young man, incapable of lying. But when he was with him, what in the eyes of outsiders were supposed to be fine moral qualities took on a different meaning. Sincerity could be a sign of weakness, reserve of secretiveness.

Are you going to tell me what you were up to?

He had tried to reach him all day the day before. He’d made phone call after phone call without getting the slightest response. As always he was reduced to chasing after his son in order to do him a favor: he had to pay an installment for one of the many courses Manuel took, he needed some information for the bank transfer.

Manuel, in the passenger seat, was silent. His eyes were swollen. This didn’t escape his father; as soon as he saw him at the gas station he’d realized that something wasn’t right. The young man was strange. The person who, according to Manuel, was more likely than anyone else in the world to misunderstand him was also the only one who had intuited that his son, that day, might cause more problems than the death of an uncle.

So? I called you a bunch of times. Why didn’t you answer?

Manuel had promised himself to make a decision by evening, but when his father started with the interrogation he was capable of ripping the words out of him.

So, what did you do? Were you drinking? Were you drunk? Manuel!

Dad, I was high on cocaine.

They passed a dairy, then an awning factory. A small group of poplars rose solitary amid the fields, caressed by the afternoon light. Valter came out of the stupor his son’s words had thrust him into.

What do you mean, cocaine! His voice was angry. How could you go so low?

Stock phrases, in certain situations, are helpful.

Dad, really I went even lower.

Now Valter was disoriented. He found on the tip of his tongue a question that was really too ingenuous: What could be worse than cocaine?

We killed someone.

The car continued to travel along the state road. They passed a gas pump, a viaduct, a billboard inviting local entrepreneurs to buy advertising space.

"What does we killed mean?"

Valter was stunned, stupefied, incredulous, he felt something flare up in his stomach, but the blow didn’t keep him, instinctively, from looking for a way out. The use of the plural. The presence of another person could reduce, if not exclude, his son’s responsibility. Valter felt his heart race. Looking for something to grab on to in the confusion, the tangle, the absurdity into which he realized, second by second, he had been cast, he found himself aiming at a traffic death. Manuel had been drinking. He had done it before. Despite the loss of his license, he had been driving half drunk. That’s what had happened. Manuel had really fucked up. Assuming that he had been the driver.

Dad, there wasn’t any traffic accident.

Then how would this person have been killed?

I think stabbed. And hit with a hammer.

Valter looked carefully at the road to be sure he was still there, lucid, on the same planet where he had awakened that morning. He heard his own voice asking Manuel the name of his accomplice.

Someone called Marco. I’ve seen him maybe a couple of times in my life.

And when would this thing have happened?

I don’t remember, Manuel answered. Two, four, five days ago.

Two, four, five days ago?

How could he not know? Was there still the possibility that it was all a stupid joke? On the infinite scale of misunderstandings that link fathers to sons, and that lead certain sons to consider themselves offended, if not irreparably damaged, by the behavior of fathers whose goal is simply to make men of them, could this be an absurd type of revenge? Was it a story that Manuel had invented out of whole cloth to punish him for sins that even the psychologist Valter had once sent him to would have had a hard time attributing to him?

Valter asked his son the name of the victim.

Manuel said: I don’t know. He had tears in his eyes.

Then Valter asked where was the person his son claimed to have killed.

This Manuel knew. At home, he said. The body was in his apartment on Via Igino Giordani.

Roberto Foffo heard his cell phone ring. He checked the name on the display, his father was calling him from the car in front. They were a few kilometers from Bagnoli del Trigno.

Roberto, please, pull over.

His father’s voice was very strange. After the call Roberto saw him slow down and stop on the side of the road.

What’s going on? asked Signora Daniela.

In obedience to a code that he and his father had agreed on with no need for words, Roberto avoided explanations. He also stopped and got out.

He joined his father in the parking area.

Valter gestured with his hand, the two walked away. When he was sure no one could hear them, Valter said: We have a dead man at home.

"What?" Roberto’s eyes widened.

Trying to stay calm, Valter tried to summarize the situation. He presented the problem of the nameless corpse that might be in the apartment on Via Igino Giordani, saying they’d better return to Rome as soon as possible, then added that it was a possible murder. Finally he revealed the identity of the presumed murderer.

Roberto had his first moment of relief.

But dad, he said, Manuel always talks a load of bullshit!

Manuel had gone to see a psychologist. He suffered from mood swings. Those details at the moment led Roberto to believe that his brother could be claiming responsibility for a murder he hadn’t committed.

You’ll see it’s not true. Who knows what actually happened.

Valter was increasingly anxious. If they had to bring up Manuel’s peculiarities, he said, they needed to focus on the most unusual of all: Remember that your brother always tells the truth. He pointed to the parked car. Manuel was standing near the guardrail, doing nothing.

Go over and talk to him, said Valter.

When Roberto returned to his father, he wore a different expression. He was pale, drawn. Dad, he said, maybe something really did happen.

In a world that we consider to be constructed on concrete foundations, we struggle to believe that the word preserves its magical powers. And yet a few simple sentences, uttered by Manuel, had hurled them into a nightmare. They were two hundred kilometers from home, stopped in a roadside parking area. At any moment the hearse carrying the uncle’s body might pass by. The cold wind lashed them. Manuel had just confessed to murder. And a few steps away, ignorant of everything, were the grandfather, grandmother, and mother of the presumed murderer.

From that moment on, Signora Daniela’s memories became confused. On the one hand, stopped on the side of the road, she had understood that something alarming was happening. On the other, the truth—when, that evening, it was disclosed—began working in her in reverse, distorting details, corrupting her memory and the normal succession of events.

When we got to the town, all I remember is going into the church, she told the police. "I don’t know if they also came in. I mean Valter and my two sons. At a certain point Roberto said: Mamma, we’ll stay here for a bit. Then we have to go to Rome, I’m sorry. I was dumbstruck. I didn’t understand why they had to leave, I thought that at least they would come to the cemetery. But no."

Valter and Roberto left Daniela out of the management of the problem. When the Mass was over, Valter went up to his ex-wife’s cousins and handed them the car keys, asking them to take her home. He mentioned a problem they had to deal with right away. Something unexpected. Then he, Manuel, and Roberto got in Roberto’s car and left. They took the state road, an hour and a half later they were on the highway. Roberto’s foot pressed down on the accelerator. Rome, beaten by the rain, was again before them.

When all is lost, there’s always a lawyer to call.

Michele Andreano had three thriving law offices, one in Milan, one in Rome, a third in Ancona. He was fifty, born in Foggia, and had graduated from Bologna in bankruptcy law. His clients were mainly businesses, companies operating in the iron and steel and shoe industries. He also represented private individuals suing the tax authorities. Finally, he had clients accused of very serious crimes, the type who roused in people that feeling of revulsion mixed with curiosity which has always been reserved for fantastic creatures. The so-called monsters.

That Saturday Andreano was in Ancona, where he was working on the Boettcher case. In the early afternoon he received a phone call from Valter Foffo. The two knew each other.

Hello, Valter, how are you? he said, without taking his eyes off the trial documents.

Alexander Boettcher was a thirty-two-year-old