His tone was menacing, and the other man shifted in his chair, the metal legs grinding against the stone. A door lay open behind them, a dim light tumbling out. I had thought it might be a café, but I saw from the clutter it was one of those ground-floor apartments in which building managers sometimes live, together with the furnace and the brooms.

“Do you have a rendezvous?”

I didn’t answer. Stumbling on him like this made me uncomfortable, and I wondered about the circumstances. Maybe he lived here, in this quarter. Or he had come here to drink with his friend, to have a bite to eat. There could be no explanation other than happenstance, but that didn’t reassure me. The other man, his companion—the lanky one, the marionette, with his shirt buttoned to the collar—had seemed at first the less threatening of the two. But the way he looked at me now, up and down, in the lascivious way of Italian men, didn’t give me a lot of comfort.  They spoke in a southern dialect I couldn’t follow entirely, though I gathered they talked about me: I was all but certain I heard my name, spoken in the language of the gutter, my name and Paolo Orsini’s, uttered in a drunken chuckle; and the name of my brother, who was being called a faggot and a pimp.

“I understand everything you say,” I said. The men fell silent. I was lying, but they didn’t know that. “And I know who you are.”

I heard the Corso in the distance. The dogs, closer by, snuffled against the church wall.

“Come here,” the guard said.

“You are Lodovico.”

He called me a name, in Italian first. Then English.

“You are a cunt,” he said. “You and your brother, you are both cunts.”

I responded in English with a common vulgarity.

Lodovico started to his feet, and I slipped on my heels. It could be that my clumsiness saved me. The dogs began barking and the men stopped in their tracks. They laughed. I scampered to my feet and they laughed even more, calling to me obscenely, and the dogs laughed in their own way—yowling and nipping, snapping at my heels—until a man bellowed from an upstairs window. Like that, the noise let off.

I hurried up the alley. I paused to listen for footsteps, but I heard only my heart in my chest. I had no idea where I was. I recognized nothing. Then I came on a street name, carved in brick, on a corner illuminated by a small lamp:

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Vicolo del Gallo