If I’d visited Cardinal Whiting after Frank’s death . . . if I’d spent time in widows’ clothing . . . if I’d posted, as was the local custom, notices of his death in the cafés he used to frequent . . . But I didn’t do any of that. I kept to myself, and in my solitude I grew reckless. I slept during the day and danced at night at the clubs in the Testaccio. I went alone. Something shifted inside me—about to reveal itself—but I pushed it away and went out again, to a crowded room where I could throw my arms in the air and feel my body pulse. The men crowded close in the blue light. When the clubs closed, I walked alone in the morning heat, in the early dawn when there was no one else out but the drunks and the nuns. I walked all the way to Roma Termini. I studied the train schedules—to Paris, Prague, anywhere—but I never got on. Back at the apartment, Frank’s boxes lay in crooked stacks and the landlady awaited her rent.

“What’s the matter?” my brother asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Let me hold you.”

I could have left Rome then, but I didn’t. Johnny was my brother. I have certain loyalties. “This will pass,” he said, “things will settle.” Maybe they would have, if not for the photograph that appeared in Il Foglio. The picture showed Paolo and me emerging from Emilio’s, a five-star restaurant in the Testaccio. It wasn’t a new picture but had been taken several weeks back, not long after Frank and Isabella died, in one of our careless moments.

GRIEVING SPOUSES: Spotted together at Emilio’s: Paolo Orsini, husband of Isabella, and Vittoria Paris, wife of slain novelist Frank Paris.

That was all there was to it, just the caption and picture. But one thing triggered another. The tabloids competed in such matters, but the biggest purveyors were the readers themselves. They posted photos that then found their way everywhere, and the news blogs began to take an unexpected interest in the details of Frank’s passing. All this might have passed, too, if Cardinal Whiting hadn’t taken up the drum in his column for Avvenire, the Catholic daily.

He complained of the cursory investigation into his nephew’s death. Of witnesses who had disappeared and evidence suppressed. He found his way onto television.

“Who lay behind the suppression?” he demanded. “Who’s pulling the strings?”

He didn’t answer these questions himself, but everyone could see where he was leading. They could see where his finger pointed. At Paolo Orsini, the senator from Lazio. Whose own wife had died not long before, under suspicious circumstances. And who had been flaunting himself with Frank Paris’s widow through the streets of Rome.

PART THREE

17.