I barely knew her, Sandie, an abrasive character a dozen years older than him. Daughter of a sausage king, she had brought him, as a dowry, a Bentley, a blue poodle, fifteen-year-old twin daughters, and a faint smell of smoke. Graziano had treated her dismissively, but had had to stop doing that when he found himself incapable of having sex with her. That had happened during a trip to her home in Texas, when he’d realized quite how incredibly rich she was. From that point on, he’d been unable to touch her. The impotence of shock, he called it. It was the reason they traveled so much, so that Graziano should find some kind of distraction, but the more he traveled, the greater the shock.

The trip to Crete had been boring as hell. After a month in which he should have finished his novel, he’d met a Greek girl named Niarcos, and they’d gotten the hell out of there together, taking four million lire of his wife’s money with them. He’d lost it in a quarter of an hour at the casino on Corfu. The plan had been to double their capital, give Sandie her money back, and vanish to some little island in the Aegean, but Niarcos had disappeared the morning after the debacle at the casino, and he’d had to phone his wife and ask her to come spring him from the hotel, where he was being kept prisoner until he paid his bill. Sandie had arrived with the twins, and when Graziano, as his only justification, had given her encouraging news about his Inert Appendage she’d hit him with her handbag, bruising one eye. “But, Leo,” he said, taking off his glasses to show me the eye, which still bore the mark, “she was amazing! Niarcos, I mean. Really hot stuff, like you wouldn’t believe. No relation to the tycoon, you know—to the croupier, maybe.” He was silent for a moment, thinking about Niarcos. “Anyway,” he said, “what can you expect from life when the first thing they do to you as soon as you’re born is give you a slap?”

“Very profound,” I said. “And?”

“Man, she was one hell of a lay. I assumed that having made progress once, the Inert Appendage had started working again, and thinking it was the only way to calm her down—Sandie, I mean—I grabbed her and threw her down on the bed. A real macho man. If only! There she was, ready to forgive even Jesus, and nothing happened. There I was, thinking about Niarcos like a fucked-up millionaire.”

“Well,” I said, “these things happen.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said bleakly. Then he understood. “Don’t tell me it’s happened to old Manolete too?”

“Last night.”