“Last month we arrested a notary in Padua. The wretch blocked his door and tried to burn his files, but he wasn’t fast enough. We recovered almost everything, including this little ledger. A list of every man, woman, and child for whom he’d made up false papers. It was locked in his safe, but few men will keep secrets with a gun to their head.”

She would not look. She would say nothing more.

“I have it here, and if I open it to just the right page . . . yes, here you are. Nina Gerardi, née Marzoli, along with the fee that was paid for your papers. Five hundred lire—a bargain for the price. And can you see, just here, at the end of the notation?”

He pushed it under her nose, but she closed her eyes. She would not look.

“A set of initials. NG. You really should look, because—and this really is very interesting—those same initials appear next to nearly fifty other names. Not their true names, mind you. The names that went along with their false papers. And one of those names was familiar to me, for it was the known alias of an escaped prisoner of war. An Englishman.”

He paused, letting it all sink in. “Now do you see? I had enough to draw a line between Niccolò, the false papers, and scores of enemies of the state—your traitorous self included. That much I knew when I put him to death, but I was sure there was more. I knew you were guilty of more.”

Why would he not stop talking? It would be so much easier if he’d just take out that pistol and shoot her.

“It took only a few days of diligent research on the part of one of my men. He was following a hunch of mine, for I knew you had to have come from somewhere. And I had another hunch—really this was so easy. Too easy, if I’m honest. I told him to begin with the census of Jews. You do remember it, don’t you?”

Zwerger set his fists on the table between them, his knuckles popping, and rose to loom over her. She sat ever straighter, refusing to cower, and still she did not look up at him.

“In that census, in the records for Venice, he found a young woman by the name of Antonina Mazin. Her parents, Gabriele and Devora Mazin, were deported in August—but she was not among those who were rounded up. She had vanished, and no one in Venice could say what had become of her.”

Zwerger sidled round the table to stand behind Nina, and though he didn’t touch her, his hot breath still fanned repulsively against her ear.

“You might as well admit it, Antonina. Else I’ll be forced to bring in the rest of the Gerardi fam—”