“Actually, if you make sure we don’t ever see you again, you’d be doing me a favor!” Dottor Berguet suddenly shouted.

“Pietro!” Giuliana scolded her husband, eyes wide-open in shock.

“Go back to your mother, Max, and to that asshole father of yours! And please convey to them all my very worst wishes!”

“Dottor Berguet?!”

“You know what, Baldi? The fact that it’s all come to this? Well, I can thank the mother of that boy, right there . . . Go on, Max, get out of here, beat it!”

“I’m sorry . . . excuse me,” the young man managed to stammer out, his eyes downcast. “I never—”

“And thank your mother for me!”

Max lowered his head and slunk out of the room with his tail between his legs. Giuliana stood up, red-faced. “Pietro, what did that poor boy have to do with anything—”

“Do you want to know who suggested I get in touch with Cuntrera in the first place? To borrow money from that piece-of-shit Mafioso? Do you want to know? That poor boy’s mother! Laura Turrini, from the Vallée Savings Bank! And I’m supposed to tolerate the presence of that little shitface in my own home!” And with the arteries in his neck swelling, he turned to Baldi. “That’s where you’ll find the rot, Dottore. Right there, in those houses, among the Turrinis, their friends, in the elegant drawing rooms of this city.”

“Dottore, please, calm down . . .”

“My ass, I’ll calm down. And what do all of you do? All you’re good for is . . . is coming around here, sitting on the sofa, making sad faces and saying how sorry you are?” By this point, Pietro Berguet was a river flooding over its banks. His rage had broken the levees of his good manners, and now there was no stopping him. “If you care to know, where you’ll find them is at the Lions Club, or the Rotary Club, or else at the Ristorante Santalmasso, outside of Aosta, where dinner costs two hundred euros! That’s where you ought to cast your lines, out there! Not sitting on my sofa, in my home, drinking my coffee and saying how sorry you are!”

“Pietro!”

“Oh, go fuck yourself!” And after giving the sofa a swift kick, he stormed out of the living room.

Giuliana and Baldi sat in silence. The woman was the first to speak: “Please excuse him, Dottor Baldi. He didn’t mean to insult you.”

“Don’t worry . . . these things happen. But rather, tell me,” the judge went on, changing the subject, “do Chiara’s friends come to see her?”

Someone in the house slammed a door.

Giuliana sat down again. “To tell the truth, she receives more phone calls from journalists than from her classmates.”

Baldi set down his demitasse on the glass coffee table. “Have you considered psychological counseling?”

“She won’t hear of it.”

“You ought to insist.”