“No matter—the investigation is over,” he said. “And the police cases, those are even further behind us.”

“Are you sure?”

“There’s no reason to think about it anymore.”

I felt her presence everywhere. I felt it when I looked out at the sea. In the breeze. In the sweater I had wrapped around my shoulders and the scarf about my throat. I felt it when he touched me.

“No,” I whispered. “Please.”

Then he kissed me.

And his hands strayed underneath my skirt.

And he pushed me back in the sand, in a little culvert between the stones.

“I’d never hurt you.”

“No?”

“Never.”

“You’ll protect me?.”

“Of course.”

My breathing became wilder, and in that instant, pulling him close to me, I realized I didn’t believe him, no, not for an instant. I smelled Isabella, her perfume, her hair, and Frank Paris, too, poor Frank, stupid Frank—the smell of him rose high in my nostrils.

I cried out, my legs in the air, and pulled him closer.

I shuddered.

In the morning it was as if they had never existed, the pair of them.

I made Paolo breakfast in the scorched white light. We were a simple couple, on the edge of the earth. We lived three weeks like that, and then we went back to Rome. Things settled down. We went to the opera. People came to dinner. I had a small role in that American television series set here in Rome, and my picture appeared in the celebrity magazines and on the cover of Vogue Italia. My brother and I were featured on a layout inside.

Then one day, the dark smoke came rising from the Vatican.

The pope was dead.

And Lodovico, by some sleight of hand, had been given leave to reenter the country.

22.

We lost a number of staff members in the days following the pope’s death. The laundress abandoned us midshift, leaving delicates to fester in the basement sink. A cook disappeared. There were defections among security and administrative staff. The reasons weren’t clear. There had been some ugliness in the press lately, old rumors circling back, and new ones, too.

Outside, the black smoke continued to leak heavenward from the chimney of the Vatican.

The tradition went back.

The smoke burned black upon the death of the pontiff and kept burning, streaking the sky, while inside, the College of Cardinals convened to decide who would be the next pope. When the decision was made, the smoke would turn white. It would billow forth in its whiteness to fill the Roman sky. This would be the sign that the new pope would appear soon on the balcony at Saint Peter’s. The crowds were already gathering in anticipation, much as they had in the old days, coming down through the Porto Populo amassing along the Tiber and in the square in front of the Basilica.