I half listened. I was trying to put this together, trying to figure out how old this Maria Ludovica must be. Say she was about twenty during the 1922 march. That would put her in her thirties when she’d become a “prolific woman,” and in her forties during the war. Was it really credible that a forty-year-old mother of so many children would be the selection of Mussolini, who had, I supposed, the whole of Italy outside the convents to choose from? And could such a woman really have been the sex goddess glimpsed by the callow young Sergeant Casella in 1944? Was Lou somehow conflating the memories of more than one woman?—but his stories seemed detailed and sharp.

“You know, Mussolini was going to build a giant statue of Hercules, as tall as a Saturn Five rocket, with the face of Mussolini and its right hand raised in a fascist salute. All they made was a head and a foot.” He laughed. “Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! What an asshole. But still, if he made a pass at you, you didn’t turn him away. I’m pretty sure that by letting the Duce poke her, Maria Ludovica earned a lot of protection for the Order in those years.”

“What was Maria’s connection to the Order? Did she start it?”

“Hell, no. Boy, don’t you know any of the family history?”

I frowned. “The story of the Roman girl—”

“Roman British, yes. Regina.”

“Just a legend. Has to be. The records don’t go back that far.”

He sucked on his Popsicle. “If you say so. Anyhow, for sure the Order was a lot older than Maria Ludovica.”

“And when you found the Casellas you turned to Maria.”

“She, the Order, knew about the Casellas. The Order itself was based not far away. But they hadn’t known about the sickness. When I got in touch, they came—Maria, and three other women. Medically trained, apparently. They wore these simple white robes. I remember cradling one of the boys while they crowded around with their stethoscopes and such. They were all three about the same age. And all similar, all like Maria, like sisters. And the family eyes, smoky gray. It was strange looking from one face to the other. They kind of blurred together, until you couldn’t be sure who was who.”

“And they helped the children.”

“They were short of resources, like everybody else. They treated one boy. He recovered. The other boy died. They took the little girl away.”

“What?”

He turned to me. “They took her away. Into the Order.”

“But they brought her back to her parents.”

“No.” He seemed puzzled by that. “They just took her in, and that was that.”

“And the parents didn’t mind? These people they’d never seen before, relatives or not, just turn up and take their kid away—”