Who can I trust? he’d been wondering obsessively for hours now. He needed to talk to someone, spit out the thing that had been killing him minute after minute. Because Sergio Mozzicarelli had seen.

He’d seen it all.

STRETCHED OUT ON THE EXTREMELY HARD MATTRESS OF HIS residential hotel, Rocco was staring, eyes wide-open, at the ceiling, illuminated by the neon light of a sign outside a pub down in the street below. It blinked at regular intervals, like a metronome, changing color as it blinked. Light pink, dark pink, purple. One two three, one two three. A waltz. Still midnight. How could it be? How could the nights in that residential hotel be so everlasting? One two three. One two three! He got up from the bed. Lupa looked at him, baffled. “I’m going out, Lupa. What about you, want to come?”

He put on his trousers. The dog was already standing next to the door.

It was a May evening, the stars were bright in the sky, and only the occasional straggler was still out wandering the streets of the city. He walked down Rue Piave, where he had lived for nine months. He looked up at the building. He looked at the downspout that the nameless murderer had used just a few days earlier to scale the wall and enter his apartment. There it was. Shutters fastened tight. Eyes closed. Dead and blind. Like Adele. Who was now sleeping forever in the cemetery of Montecompatri, near Rome.

“What’s the name of the street where the police chief found me an apartment?” he asked Lupa, who was sniffing at a manhole cover. “Via Laurent Cerise . . .”

Lupa trotted along next to him. “Let’s go over to Ettore’s bar right now and ask him where it is . . .” And he headed off toward Piazza Chanoux.