I had come full circle. Here was the palazzo, there the narrow alley, and in this direction the foot passage that led around to the gate. I found it unlocked, just as my brother had promised. Johnny waited on a garden bench not far from where I’d stood earlier with Isabella. Up above, the men were playing cards, and their voices echoed down. I hadn’t been gone as long as I’d thought.

“Dogs,” I spat.

“The men upstairs?”

“Them, too. But that’s not what I meant.”

I told him about my encounter with Lodovico. My brother tried to reassure me. The man lived nearby with his cronies, but he wouldn’t be around much longer. There would be charges against him soon, on an old matter recently come to light. “He’ll deny involvement  . . . he’ll cast blame elsewhere,” Johnny said, “but it doesn’t matter . . . Italy is so corrupt . . . the people who hired him . . . My guess, with their assistance, he’ll escape the country rather than face charges”

“What did he do?”

“He murdered his former employer,” Johnny said, “a powerful man, in his bedroom in Palermo . . . he was paid by the man’s enemies . . . to infiltrate security . . .”

“Orsini knew about this?”

“Not at first.”

“And Isabella  . . . ?”

“Don’t worry about her. She takes care of herself,” Johnny said. He hesitated. “Would you like to see her where she sleeps?”

I didn’t understand. Upstairs there was the sound of laughter, the men at their game. My husband’s laugh was louder than the others. It wasn’t a happy laugh.

“He must be losing,” I said.

“You are shivering.”

“The street . . . those men . . .”

Johnny put his arm around my shoulders, comforting me, full of sympathy, taking me under the arbor to a stone building on the other side of the garden.

9.

Years before, the cottage had been the palazzo’s kitchen. There’d been fewer buildings inside the walls then, and the pigs and chickens had wandered where the flower garden was now and been slaughtered on stone slabs inside. Some time after that, the slaughter kitchen had been remade into a servants’ house, and later remade again, into quarters for an illegitimate daughter of one of the Renaissance popes. Despite its history, the interior was nice enough, a bedroom with slatted shades and windows opening onto the garden. We could still hear the men at cards, though more faintly. My brother lowered the shades.

He had a bottle of champagne. And some cocaine as well.

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

It was a joke, one my brother understood. He put his head on my shoulder. We’d grown up in close quarters as children, often sleeping in the same room. With my mother gone so much—forever with a different man—we’d learned to take comfort in each other’s presence.

“This is Isabella’s room?”

“When she’s in Rome. Sometimes.”

“They don’t sleep together?”