“We’ll try. Listen, my husband and I have never had a chance to thank you and the people at police headquarters for everything you did for us . . .”

With a brisk wave of the hand, the judge put a halt to Giuliana Berguet’s saccharine serenade. “Please. I’m not here to get thank-yous. And in any case the only person you ought to thank is Dottor Schiavone. If it hadn’t been for him, there’s a good chance that Chiara would no longer be among the living.”

“We wish we could, but we can’t get in touch with him at police headquarters. Nobody seems to know how to find him.”

“You don’t have to tell me!”

THE DEPUTY CHIEF WAS WATCHING A POLITICAL TALK SHOW. With the sound off. The guests on the panel looked like so many fish in an aquarium. Their mouths were opening and closing. Their teeth were almost constantly bared. But the thing that interested him most was the eyes. Totally dystonic with respect to the mouths. The wider open the mouths, the deader the eyes. He watched, cataloguing the fish in that aquarium: The woman with her legs crossed and her face ravaged by the efforts of some plastic surgeon was a moray eel. The little fat man with a triple chin and thinning hair was a puffer fish. The bespectacled member of parliament was a clown fish. Then a sudden rustling noise interrupted his string of fantasies. Someone was slipping a piece of paper underneath his door. Rocco got up from the bed, bent down, and picked it up. The doorman of the residential hotel was informing him that Anna had tried to get in touch with him six separate times, and asking him please to call her back.

Calling Anna back was out of the question. He didn’t have the energy to spend an evening with her, eating culinary concoctions and spouting bullshit. He didn’t even feel any yearning for her lips, no urge to sleep with her. He’d never been able to fall asleep with his arms around any woman but Marina. With her, he could easily spend the whole night tangled up with her limbs, never once shifting position, moving arms or legs, lulled by her respiration into a sleep where he would chase after her in his dreams.

His phone rang.

“What the fuck!” He picked up the receiver without thinking. “Schiavone here . . .”

“A call for you from Rome,” said the chilly voice of the receptionist downstairs. “By the way, I didn’t want to bother you, but I did slide a message under the door.”

“Yes, I saw that, thanks. Please go ahead and put the call through . . .” A few moments later, the voice of his old friend Officer Alfredo De Silvestri rang out from the phone.

“Dottore, it’s De Silvestri.”

“Do you already have something for me?”

“Yes . . .”