“Tomorrow morning, I want to talk to the Romanian Radeanu and to Abela. And also to Tolotta, if he deigns to make an appearance.”

“He just had the day off today.”

Rocco turned off the television set. “What’s for dinner?”

“I’d recommend avoiding the pasta. And the entrées, too.”

“What’s left?”

“Side dishes and fruit. You can’t go wrong.”

“I’m laughing as hard as I can.”

“You’re in prison, Dottore, what did you expect? Rainbow trout?”

“CORRADO HAS VANISHED. I WENT TO HIS PLACE, BUT WHEN I rang he didn’t answer. His car isn’t there, either.” Tatiana was serving her husband a plate of lightly scorched Hot Pockets. The CPA Arturo De Lullo had a woolen cap on his head in spite of the springlike temperature. He coughed three times and then slowly lowered himself into the chair at the table. “They’re burned, Tatiana . . .”

But the woman didn’t even reply. “So I went to the police and I filed a missing-person report!”

De Lullo was suddenly overcome by yet another coughing fit. He turned red in the face, and seemed as if he was going to spit up his soul any second now. Once the convulsions had calmed down, he breathed in slowly and then said: “You went to the police? Aren’t you overdoing it a little? Have you tried his cell phone?”

“It’s switched off.”

The CPA had never much liked that Corrado Pizzuti, from the day he’d arrived in town from Rome three years earlier. The man had never really appealed to him. De Lullo expected him to pull some unethical move at some point, sooner rather than later, probably. Tatiana had insisted on going into business with him on the Bar Derby, in spite of the fact that De Lullo was opposed. But he couldn’t really tell her no. Tatiana was his last woman. The last woman he was ever going to make love with, the last woman he was going to kiss, the last woman who’d make him dinner, the last woman to smile at him. The woman who was going to close his eyes when he died, gently, without making a scene, as one more inevitable passage of life. If he thought about his two nephews, who hadn’t called him in months and who were incapable of doing anything but defaming Tatiana and inquiring about the market value of the tiny 1,100 square feet of his apartment, he always sank into a fit of hoarse, rheumy coughing. Tatiana was going to be his last companion before chronic obstructive pulmonary disease finally shuffled him off this mortal coil. And he certainly owed something to this last angel who had willingly taken on the task of seeing him to the end of his road.

The burned Hot Pocket was as hard as a slab of wood. “Is there dessert afterward?” he asked her.