I agreed thankfully. Finally the intern, who didn’t look old enough for high school let alone an inner-city hospital, came over to the gurney. He asked Elton some questions about his drinking and smoking and sleeping. He listened to Elton’s heart and called for an EKG, an EEG, and an echocardiogram. And oxygen.

“He’s got some arrhythmia going on,” the intern told me. “We’ll see how serious it is. If he’s homeless and drinking, it takes a toll.”

Elton smiled at me and pressed my fingers weakly with nicotine-stained fingers. “You run on, Vic. I’ll be okay here. Thanks for—you know, God bless, all that.”

He produced a grubby green card from an inner pocket, so I knew they wouldn’t put him straight out on the street. I caught a cab back to my office and put Elton—not out of my mind, but to the bottom of it. I was exhausted from travel, but I’d been away too long to give myself decompression time before returning to work.

I’d been in Italy, with Morrell, where we’d rented a cottage in Umbria, in the hill country, near my mother’s childhood home. Morrell had finally recovered from the bullets that almost killed him in the Khyber Pass two years earlier. He wanted to test his legs, see if he was ready for journalism’s front lines—he was aching to return to Afghanistan—despite the death of some three hundred journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan since we began our endless war.

My needs were even more personal: I’d grown up speaking Italian with my mother, but I’d never visited her home. I wanted to meet relatives, I wanted to listen to music where Gabriella had learned it, see paintings in their Umbrian and Tuscan light, drink Torgiano in the hills where the grapes grew.

Morrell and I visited the remnants of Gabriella’s family, elderly Catholic cousins who exclaimed how much like Gabriella I looked but who wouldn’t talk about the years she’d had to live in hiding with her father, an Italian Jew. They claimed not to remember my grandfather, who had been denounced and sent to Auschwitz the day after someone smuggled Gabriella to the coast and a Cuba-bound freighter.

No one knew what had become of Gabriella’s younger brother, Moselio. Gabriella herself hadn’t heard from him since he joined the partisans in 1943, and I hadn’t been optimistic. My mother’s been dead a long time, but I still miss her. I was hoping for too much from her Pitigliano family.