The next morning I went to court to attend a couple of hearings, but found it hard to concentrate on legal matters and court procedure. All I could think about was how to meet her again without having to pathetically stake out the area around the Casa delle Rose in Via Eritrea, waiting for her to come out or go back in.

The one brilliant solution I managed to come up with was to go to her building and ring her bell. I did that early in the afternoon. When I got there, I realized I didn’t know her surname. So I rang every bell in the building and asked if Lorenza was there. Those who answered – mostly old people, their heavily accented voices filled with hostility – told me there was no Lorenza there and that they didn’t even know who she was. There remained two apartments from which I didn’t receive an answer: Delle Foglie and Pontrelli. So now I had reduced her likely surname down to two, and the next time I would at least know which bells not to ring.

In the weeks that followed I would try again several times, always without success. She was never at home, or maybe didn’t answer her bell. One piece, among many, in that mosaic of elusiveness I would never be able to put together.

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14

Nothing memorable happened during those weeks. Or if it did, I didn’t notice. The days passed, almost all the same, slow and fast at the same time – and a little scary for that very reason, if you stopped to think about it.

I went twice to the prison to talk to Iacopo. He was starting to trust me and, quite unexpectedly, I was getting to like him.

In the second of our interviews an interesting element emerged.

The previous time I’d asked him to think over the afternoon of the murder, to see if he recalled any useful details. And he had done just that.

“I thought about it, and one thing did come into my mind.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t know if it’s important.”

“Anything might be important, as I told you.”

“When they came to get me, outside the bar, I knew one of the cops. After they searched me and found the pills on me, they put me in the car and he sat in the back with me.”

“Go on.”

“On the ride to Headquarters we talked. He asked me if I’d seen my friend Cosimo that afternoon.”

“And what did you say?”

“I asked him if he meant Gaglione – I told him I’d never called him Cosimo, always Mino. Then I said I’d been to his 149apartment for a coffee, though of course without telling him he’d given me the pills.”

“Did this police officer inform you that Gaglione was dead?”

“No. I only found that out when we got to Headquarters.”