I buttoned my shirt, got my jacket, thought I should probably buy a sweater, maybe at that trendy store off San Lorenzo square, the place I’d passed with Alexandra. That was all I needed to start thinking about her again, not that I’d stopped replaying the kiss and the electric touch of her hand. I hoped she’d be at the library, in the way I’d hoped to see my junior-high-school crush, but it was a lot more than that: she’d gotten under my skin.

I stopped at the hotel front desk, asked if the maid had been in my room.

The same guy was there as always, puffing on a cigarette, the air around him a toxic nicotine cloud. He managed to tear himself from an Italian tabloid and raised his head in slow motion. “The maid?”

“La domestica,” I said.

“Perche? A problem?”

I told him no, I was just curious. He sighed as if the conversation were exhausting, then said the maid was ill and had not been in at all.

What about you? I thought, but the idea of him attempting to clean a room was ridiculous.

Still early, I forced myself to walk slowly from Piazza di Madonna along the side of San Lorenzo, stopped at the coffee bar I had been to the other day, and was greeted like an old friend. I sipped espresso, chatting with the barman about the weather, colder than usual, politics, never a good idea, then Italian soccer, about which I knew nothing.

The combination of caffeine and conversation made me feel better, but as I reached the square, I sensed it again, that feeling of being followed. I looked over my shoulder: some obvious tourists, Italians with briefcases heading to work, no one on my tail that I could see, though I couldn’t shake the feeling, my antenna well honed, something that had come in handy in my Bayonne days. I looked around again but didn’t stop, anxious to get back to the journal as I cut into the dark alley that led into the cloister. Just beside me, a couple of monks, hoods pulled up against the cold, looked more ominous than righteous. We nodded hello, then they headed into the garden as I headed up the stairs to the library, the whole time feeling as if I were not alone.

24

He stares at his cell phone. The red dot that represents the American’s movement from hotel to espresso bar has stopped, the red dot idling.

It had not been difficult to install the camera and sensor, only an eighth of an inch square, in a corner of the hotel room to gather information from the American’s laptop and phone, good for a distance of up to three hundred feet, thanks to recent products from FFI Software Solutions, a spyware firm he has used before in his work, both activated from his cell phone. The American will have no idea that every one of his emails and texts are being read, his calls listened to, GPS following his every move.