I waited for the next question—and at the same time wondered how I should answer, not knowing whether some servant had witnessed Orsini enter the cottage. Or if Isabella, before she died, had told someone how she’d caught Paolo and me together.

Secca did not ask the question.

I realized the committee had nothing. If they’d had evidence regarding the deaths of Isabella and Frank Paris, it would have emerged long before. So they focused on innuendo instead.

“Your husband went out the next day?”

“He did.”

“Did you receive any visitors while he was out?”

My landlady wouldn’t meet my eyes. I understood now why she was here and where this was going. I understood the arrangement the party had made. I was to give up my dignity and play the trollop. In exchange, the committee would abandon their inquest into Paolo Orsini.

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“I think you do,” said Senator Secca.

He turned his sights on my landlady, the poor woman in the blue gauze with the big white polka dots. Such a small woman, aging, with such thin shoulders. Those shoulders twitched now and again, as if she possessed a nervous condition.

Secca asked her for a description of the visitor.

“I was a flight below,” she replied. “From my angle, I couldn’t see very well.”

“What could you see?”

She nodded her chin in my direction. “Her,” she said.

“You mean Mrs. Paris?”

“Yes.”

The woman’s discomfort was plain.

“Could you describe what you saw?”

“I saw Vittoria Paris standing in front of her apartment door.”

“Is that all?”

“No.”

“What else?”

“There was a man on his knees in front of her. With his head in her skirt.”

She delivered this line with some pleasure, and a touch of disgust. She seemed glad to spit it out. The chamber came alive, rattling with noise.

“Could you make out the identity of the man?”

“I didn’t try. It wasn’t my business. But later I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. My husband heard them, too.”

“You got a look at the man then, as he came down the stairs?”

The woman looked frail and lonely and afraid. She didn’t glance my way, but it wasn’t me she was afraid of, I knew—because it was one thing to impugn my character, but another to mention the name of Paolo Orsini, a powerful man, after all.

“I didn’t see anyone,” she said. “I didn’t look.”

I thought Secca might pursue her, but he grew sly. He let the moment linger. He let the chamber see the fear on the woman’s face, up on the big monitor. He turned to me.

“This fellow on his knees,” he asked, “who was this person?”