Then the man arrived on a small boat. A man dressed all in black and accompanied by a very large white dog. Bruno saw the boat come motoring to a deserted section of beach just as the last of the day’s light was dying like embers on the wave tops. Despite his age, Bruno saw very well, and besides, his great-great-grandson had sent him a very fine telescope four Christmases ago. For bird-watching and stargazing, the boy had said; though everyone in the family knew that Bruno was a little bit of a snoop. That was not how he saw himself, of course. He considered himself a people-watcher, a perpetual student of human activity. Otranto was merely one of the people he watched, because Bruno was intrigued by the clandestine nature of those secret backyard meetings.

He spotted the man nearly by accident, and had he gone inside a few minutes sooner to use the bathroom, he would not have seen him at all. However, one of the benefits of being very old was that he didn’t need to use the bathroom with any real urgency anymore. When he got there, it would be time enough.

So, he saw the big man and the big dog get out of the black boat. Bruno watched him through his Kowa spotting scope as the man unzipped a duffel bag and removed a kind of suit of armor that looked like what the Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza wore on news stories about dangerous police raids. Body armor. The man also put on a helmet and a strange pair of oversize goggles. Then he removed weapons from the bag. Handguns and a rifle, but Bruno did not know modern makes and models. After the war—his war of more than seventy-five years ago—Bruno had only ever used a shotgun, and that was for rabbits. He could not remember the last time he’d even held a firearm—1970, perhaps, or a few years later. The guns he saw through his telescope looked like something from TV or one of those movies about Special Forces. Ugly things, lacking any aesthetics.

Bruno watched him attach some of the armor around the dog’s body and even a kind of skullcap over the dog’s head, but which left the animal’s eyes, ears, and snout free. It was a strange thing to watch. Very much like television. And nearly as entertaining, though it also filled him with a growing sense of unease. There were no movie cameras down there on the beach.

His unease grew as the man left the beach and hiked, with his dog, up a sheep path into the hills toward Otranto’s compound. For nearly five full minutes, Bruno argued with himself about whether to call the police. But a voice—very much that of his late wife—spoke in his head and told him not to get involved.