Over the years of collecting information about my great-grandfather, I’d never read anything about him being among the artists of the Salon de la Nationale and wondered if something had happened to bar him from the exhibition. But then, I’d never come across a mention of him being an artist at all. It was oddly comforting and made sense in a way—neither of my parents were artistic, nor my grandparents from what I knew—that at least one of my ancestors should be an artist. I tried to imagine what sort of paintings my great-grandfather had made and hoped I would find out. I jotted a note to look into the salon exhibition, then checked my watch. I was surprised to see I’d been reading for hours and that it was nearly one. I wanted to keep going and would have, but the library was closing for lunch, and I had a date with Luigi Quattrocchi, the man whose email had brought me here.

I placed the journal back into the carton, careful to cover it with Professor Guggliermo’s folders before bringing it to the front desk. I already felt a kind of ownership—as if the journal had been waiting for me and me alone all these years.

I could have gone around my end of the table, which was shorter, but eased my way down the long end, where the blond was seated. She looked up as I passed, and we exchanged another glance. She was even prettier than I’d first thought, her face lit as if from within and with the kind of posture that suggested finishing school. Out of my league, I told myself, though it didn’t stop me from another glance, our eyes meeting again, though she looked down quickly and buried her face in a book, as if I’d caught her doing something wrong.

In the outer office, “Mussolini” took my backpack, searched through it, then handed it back along with my phone. When I asked for my candy, she plucked it out of the wire basket and held it with the tips of her fingers as if it were some kind of poison and she did not want to touch it, then directed me through the body scanner with a less-than-gentle nudge.

Outside, I took a moment to look down at the garden below, its hexagon shape clearer from above, then across to the other side of the upper cloister where I thought I saw something or someone moving, not a monk, a man in plain clothes, though I couldn’t be sure, the arcade cloaked in darkness.

8

The restaurant’s cream-colored walls were dotted with framed stills from old black-and-white Italian movies. The clientele young, students I guessed. They looked the same the world over—here a bit more stylish, the boys with scarves coiled around their necks, the girls in V-neck pullovers and skintight jeans. A heavyset man, older by thirty or forty years, waved me over. I made my way through the tightly packed tables, generic techno-pop adding an electric throb to the din, everyone talking and smoking cigarettes, my eyes already stinging.