“There’s a great hole in the roof, hon.”

“That’s bomb damage, I guess, hon.”

I was myself again. I slept soundly.

Next morning I was not really worried again but a bit preoccupied. After all, La Rotonda is a place like Piccadilly or Time Square where, they say, you’ll meet anybody if you wait long enough. It’s an oblique way of saying that a lot of people go there. Once Rick and Mary Lou had lost the scent—even Rick had more wit than to go to Iceland—Rome was likely. Go thou to Rome! He would do it. Had he not said Mary Lou simply had to see Rome and Dublin? A flash of the glamour made me catch my breath. There was no guarantee that she had not yet done Rome or that, having done it, she would not want to do it again. I was in Navona and sitting at another round metal table or the same metal table when my heart, as they say, turned over. No. I didn’t see Mary Lou, I saw Rick. I saw Rick in the same way I used very nearly to see Elizabeth in the old days when I still cared enough. That is to say, I did not see Rick precisely. But I came to with a jump that would have spilt the coffee if I had not just drunk it.

“Christ!”

It was entirely possible. They could have left straight after their walk, then flown direct from Zurich to Rome in the evening or overnight or that very morning. I would have been safer on my motor road. I wasn’t seeing. I was remembering with an etched precision. Only this wasn’t a memory swimming up, as it were, from the depths. It was a kind of time slip or time shift, or like the “click” with which you can substitute one slide for another, then click back to the first one. It was a moment at which I had to pause and refuse to credit Rick with more than method and determination. He was not a ghost, worse luck. He was not a saint with powers of transportation and bilocation. He had been there in the Piazza Navona! He had just inspected the fountain, probably identifying the mythologized rivers. He had been turning away, still putting his tiny camera to rights under the cuff of his sweater on the right arm. I had not seen the front of that sweater with OLE ASHCAN knitted into the chest but I had seen the very beginnings of the O. What was more, less than forty-eight hours before, my nose had been resting in the disgusting heat of the sweater at the back of his neck when he carried me down through the alp from that damned mountain path. I knew it well enough and his huge shoes and his hair, discreetly long as befits a serious academic. He had gone away, vanished down a street on the other side from the café. If I had not been in a dream at the completeness of my escape from involvement, I would have started up and run before he vanished. Or I could have tracked him to his hotel, where the golden cloud of glamour was still lying in, not being physical.