ANOTHER SEVEN HOURS ON THE ROAD, FROM ABRUZZO BACK to Aosta, chased the whole way by the night, a healthy carrier of blinding headlights, and sudden surges of sleepiness. Lupa, covered with sand, was sleeping in the back seat. Rocco received five long and intricate phone calls, and he blessed the memory of whatever mysterious engineer had invented Bluetooth, allowing him to speak directly to his car radio and hear the voice from the other end of the line right through his stereo speakers, instead of drilling through his ear out of the earbud. The first, extremely lengthy phone call with the chief of police lasted from the Teramo exit to the Ancona South exit. Costa was bitterly bemoaning the fact that Schiavone hadn’t been able to attend the press conference for the arrests. “The result of the concerted efforts of law enforcement, working together, Schiavone, including you!” Then there were the three phone calls with Baldi. The first lasted from Senigallia to Rimini North, with the judge thanking him for those documents and for the stunning revelation concerning Carlo Cutrì. “Don’t worry,” he had told him. “I won’t mention your name. You won’t be in any news articles tomorrow morning!” The second call lasted from Imola to Modena, and during it Rocco had had to explain to him every detail of what had happened in the prison, in the exercise courtyard, and the matter of the keys to Wing 3, four separate times. The third phone call with Baldi lasted the whole distance from Reggio Emilia to Milan South. In that phone call, the judge made it clear that the problem of arresting Cuntrera’s murderers needed to be solved, and quickly. Now that the masterminds had been put behind bars for other crimes, the operation had to be carried out before the subjects could take fright and flee. Finally, at Pont-Saint-Martin, ravaged by the many miles driven in a single day, at 1:30 in the morning, as his eyelids drooped and his eyes grew puffy with sleepiness, there was the fifth phone call, this time with Anna, a call made up of silences, sniffing and blowing of her nose, lines like “I don’t even know why I called you.” After an initial aggressive onslaught that verged on the hysterical, it had slowly morphed into a confession. Anna was unhappy, she felt a void, both physical and existential, she was afraid that she’d lived her whole life the wrong way around, she no longer felt so much as a crumb of self-esteem. Finally, once Rocco had managed to direct the conversation onto the dead track of the final good-bye, Anna had unleashed a new and ferociously aggressive diatribe that had ended with the words “Go fuck yourself, Rocco!” minced through clenched teeth, and then a sudden end to the call. By the time Rocco parked his Volvo outside the Vieux Aosta hotel at 2:15 a.m., he knew two things: he needed to go to sleep, and he was never going to look at another woman as long as he lived.