I asked him what, precisely, “it” was. An uncomfortable look appeared on his face, but then he nodded in that defiantly reasonable way of his, as if to assure me I had every right to ask.

“I suppose you could call it a sort of stylized sexual aggressiveness . . . or not aggressiveness, more just a kind of playacting of confidence. Brutish confidence. You know the way gangsters in movies say ‘I got this’ when they’re volunteering to take care of some tricky situation? That was pretty much the mental attitude behind it.”

“I got this?”

He nodded.

“Yeah. As in, you don’t have to worry, I’ll make this happen, for both of us. Anyway, you ask if Renata Shenker’s lawyers are likely to find other women to corroborate Julia’s story, and the answer is, I hope not, but I’m a little afraid one of those girls might look back and decide it wasn’t all as harmless as they thought at the time. Actually I’m more than a little afraid. I’m having serious cold sweats about it.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this story. It seemed believable enough, but it smacked also of preemptive defense—calculated insinuation. I wondered if Marco’s real motive for telling it was to plant the suggestion that he, too, had been victimized in his turn—sexually manipulated by a person in power. If so, did that mean he was moving toward an admission of guilt concerning Julia, and coaching me to present his excuses for him if and when I ever got around to writing about him?

That same afternoon he took me into one of the small rooms off the corridor on the second floor of his house. It was a sort of junk room, piled high with photographic equipment and dusty old computer parts. Opening the drawer of a metal file cabinet, he lifted a stack of dog-eared papers.

“See that?”

I peered in, and flinched back.

It was a gun, a handgun, black and blocky, with a square barrel and curved indentations along the handle.

“Jesus, Marco!”

My shock seemed to please him. He gave a grim smile.

“I got it when I first moved here. The neighborhood was rougher then. There were a lot of break-ins. Joan made me buy it.” Joan was his ex-wife, Alicia’s mother. “It’s a Glock, which is what the cops here carry. Needless to say I never had any use for it, till now.”

“You’re planning to shoot someone?”

“Possibly.”

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Julia?”

“Yeah, right, I’m going to smuggle it onto a plane and shoot her through her letter box. No, dummy, guess!”

“I’ve no idea.”

He glared at me.

“I think you’re being obtuse.”