“No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents—your, uh, great-great-grandparents, I guess—who left Rome for the States in the first place. Hell, I don’t know what you’d call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know—you have them,” he said, looking at me. “But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an ass—well, I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was sexy like you wouldn’t believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn’t keep his hands off her.”

“Mussolini?”

“She was never a fascist—that’s what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four—but I believed her. It turns out she’d known the Duce since the thirties. She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it.”

“And she became—what, his mistress?”

“You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in ‘thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism.”

I did the math quickly. “Thirteen each?”

He grinned. “They were heroes. But we’ve always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too.” That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. “The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where Maria kissed a glass case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief—the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an assassination attempt.” He winked at me. “But that wasn’t all she kissed.”

I spluttered.

“Come on, kid. I think we need a walk.”

And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.