Frank had written about the Palio in his novel, and it held a special place in his imagination. It was an old festival with colorful parades. On the last day there was a horse race: jockeys riding bareback in a wild scamper through the center of the old city. There was a frenzy of wagering and drinking. The streets filled with wood smoke, the smell of spiced meat soaked in oil, wine spilled on old stones. Those things attracted him just as they had attracted the hero of his novel: a young man, in the flush of his early success, who’d visited the city with his wife and daughter. That young man had gambled it all away. It wasn’t the lost money that haunted him but rather the memory of those horses, thundering down—and then the feeling of emptiness the next morning, something unfulfilled, the desire to go riding out into the warm countryside, in all those golden hills.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you . . .”

I had an idea of what he was going to say. Or I thought I did. Just yesterday the landlady had been by.

“Do you remember Jim Swinson?”

“No,” I said.

I hadn’t expected this. Then the memory came: a wiry man Frank had gone hunting with a few times in the quail country of south Texas. They were buddies from a long time back, a million years ago. The man had recently taken a job as dean of a college in Little Rock.

“I’ve had a couple of conversations with him these last weeks . . . There’s a position . . .”

I sat with my legs crossed, sweating.

“Arkansas?”

“We’ll need to be there by the end of August . . . So we have a little time . . . after Siena we could go to Lake Como . . . Or maybe the beach, in Cadaqués . . .”

He went on. The money from his uncle wasn’t enough to live on, but if he had a salary we could travel over the summer. And there was a repertory program at the college . . . with a bit of a reputation . . . Doris Day had gone there . . . or maybe Lana Turner . . . Sally Field . . . One of those, all of them, maybe none . . . I wasn’t paying strict attention but imagining the place Frank would rent for us . . . coeds and faculty dinners . . . the Piggly Wiggly out on the strip . . .

“My brother—”

“He has his own life here,” Frank said. “But you . . . As far as that business in Dallas . . . no one’s thinking about that anymore. There never were any charges.”

“Why do you bring that up?”

“I don’t want you to worry, that’s all.”

He knows, I thought. He knows about Orsini and me. He might not admit his suspicions, even to himself, but he knows.