They both shook their heads in unison, like a couple of plush dogs on a car’s rear dashboard. “No. Nothing. To tell the truth, I was keeping an eye on the outside of the prison. There was a car that was having mechanical problems,” said Ugo.

“I had my eye on the courtyard. But to tell the truth, I saw those inmates brawling, I sounded the alarm, and I didn’t look in the other direction where the dead man was lying. It was only Mauro, who went over with a young colleague . . .” And he looked at Marini. “Who was it? Abela?”

“Exactly,” he replied.

“All right, Dottore, it wasn’t till then that I looked over there, when Marini and Abela went over to figure out what had happened and why that guy was lying on the ground.”

“At first I thought it had something to do with the brawl,” Marini went on, biting into an apple and getting bits all over his mustache, “even if that struck me as odd. In other words, Cuntrera was just a hundred yards away from the fighting, right?”

“That’s right,” said Schiavone. “Near Wing 3. The brawl was on the other side, in front of the door to Wing 2. In any case, one thing is clear. When you went in, Cuntrera was already dead. Which means the murderer did his work earlier.”

“That’s right, earlier . . .”

They went on chewing in silence. “I need to talk to Tolotta . . .”

“Tolotta comes on duty at six . . .” said Marini. “I know that because he relieves me.”

HE EXPECTED TO HEAR SNORING, THE HEAVY BREATHING OF more than two hundred men in confinement, packed together like sardines. Compressed, ready to explode. But instead, there was nothing. From the hallway only the distant tapping of some electronic device or other. Not the sound of a car, not the noise of footsteps. And in spite of that surreal silence, he couldn’t seem to shut his eyes. He’d been tossing and turning on his cot for hours. The cot was uncomfortable, too short, with just a single blanket and a flat pillow that might as well not have been there. He got up and went over to the window. The sections were shrouded in darkness. The stars were watching from over the mountains, outdazzled by the enclosure lights that drooled their yellow glare over the fields around the prison. A car accelerated toward the city. A delivery van came puttering toward the house of detention. Who could say how many others, like him, were lying awake. The guards, certainly, weren’t sleeping. And in the sections, the inmates lying on their cots, eyes open, as they remembered well-known faces, distant and unattainable.