I return to my desk—to the words on this screen, the glittering type—though I stop now and again to pour myself some wine and peer through the slatted blinds toward the Avenida. I check the Internet for rumors of myself. It is a nervous habit, but it gives me some comfort, all those pictures, the speculation, my infinite selves out there in the dark.

The stories multiply.

I have rejoined the nunnery. I am murdered. I have ascended into heaven on a miraculous cloud.

People see whatever they want. So do I.

The night is filled with noise.

The sound of a shadow. The scrape of a ladder. A rattling gate. All three men converge at once. The neighbors sleep, the police, too. On the other side of the world, the head deputy awakens. The pope blows his nose. A key turns in the lock below. Passed along by the German landlord, maybe, gotten by intimidation or money. Or given to them, as my brother suggested, by Zanche herself.

I hear a rush of footsteps.

They are in the house by whatever means, and I see myself as if from above—rising to my feet, headed toward the nearer balcony, where I might make my way over the wall and drop into the street.

Then they are upon me. I’m grabbed from behind, roughly treated, hurled to the tile floor. They hold me, a man on either side, while Lodovico watches. The metal glints in his hand. I try to squirm away, biting and scratching, but the burly one ends this with a fist into my stomach. Then I’m on the bed, the gangly one clamping me on one side, the brutish one on the other, heavy and corporeal, his cheek bristling against my neck. Lodovico looms over me. He holds the tip of the blade beneath my breast. It’s a longish blade, flat and thin, with an intricate handle. “Stop wiggling,” he says. He pauses. The gray brute makes the sign of the cross. They are superstitious, these assassins, giving me my moment with the divine. I know what comes next, steeling myself. But I don’t close my eyes. My lips tremble, searching for something noble, something defiant—at least to spit in Lodovico’s face—when all of a sudden he pushes the rapier between my ribs.

Confess.

He turns his hand, twisting the blade in my heart, like a man skilled in such maneuvers. The others hold me tight, but I don’t see them anymore. It is just me and Lodovico and the blade in my chest. I look into his eyes. They are infinite and black. I feel a great wooziness, a great silence—and in that silence a presence, an emptiness waiting, now, in the moment of death, for me to fall at last upon my knees, to succumb.

But no . . .