Do you really think it’s right that if I want to talk to you I have to get out the phone book and find the number of your residential hotel, and since it’s an old phone book, it doesn’t have the number, after which I have to go on the Internet and only after six different sites that no one’s bothered to update, I finally get to hear your jerky voice in my earpiece?”

“What time is it?” asked Rocco.

“Seven thirty in the morning, may you die of cancer!” shouted Alberto Fumagalli. “Come to the hospital. I’m here working. And I’ve just witnessed something that, believe me, not even in a film by Spielberg . . . Hurry!”

“What do films by Spielberg have to do with anything?”

“It’s straight out of a horror flick!”

“Spielberg doesn’t make horror flicks, you ignorant lunkhead.”

“Whatever, just get your ass in gear!”

“But wasn’t Pietra on the case?”

“Pietra has gone back to Turin, he has a murder in Parella. I called the police chief, I called the judge. And they made an executive decision that your fucking vacation is over. Get moving!” And with that the pathologist ended the call.

Rocco rubbed his eyes. But he had no intention of hurrying over, the way Fumagalli had suggested. If life was sucking him back into the stream, he’d made up his mind he wasn’t going down without a fight. Did they want to stick him with a royal pain in the ass of the tenth degree? Then he would go back to his longtime rhythms of existence: shower, breakfast at Ettore’s café on Piazza Chanoux, police headquarters, morning joint. After that, and only after that, a visit to the morgue.

AND SURE ENOUGH, THAT’S WHAT HE DID. GOING BACK TO the office was like finding yourself face-to-face with someone who had been insisting for years that he was your friend, but who had never been your friend in the first place. The people from the cleaning crew had avoided dusting his furniture. He shut the door, flung open the window to the sweet smells of May that were being wafted into the room by a light breeze, sat down, opened the desk drawer, and lit the first joint after four days of abstinence. He leaned out the windowsill. The cars were going by on the street below; the peaks, still covered with snow, were gleaming in the timid springtime sunlight, while the shoulders of the mountains had turned emerald green. New grass, excellent fodder for the cows.