Gasparo leaned on the horn and gunned the engine. The crowd surged away, but the mass behind pushed back. They thumped their fists on the trunk and kicked at the sides, and a young man threw himself over the hood, rolling and laughing, and Gasparo gunned it again. The car rolled over something. There was another thump, a cry, and the people fell away. Dazio turned to look back but I took him by the hand. We reached the A1 headed north. We drove through the sprawling Roman suburbs up into the middle of the country, toward Tuscany and Bologna and the mountains beyond. The traffic on the Autostrade was thinner than usual, maybe because by this time the Italians had gathered around their televisions to see the new pope when he appeared on the balcony.

“Mussolini,” said Zanche. “He had a place in Salò.”

I knew what Zanche was talking about. Everyone knew. When Mussolini fled Rome, he had lived up by Lake Garda in the northern part of the country.

The Republic of Salò, it was called.

Eventually, fleeing the oncoming Americans, he’d been caught by the partisans and executed.

Italians loved to retell the story.

Of the partisans who’d captured him, and how they’d pumped the bald dictator and his mistress full of bullets.

I didn’t want to hear about Mussolini and his dead mistress.

“I need to stretch out.”

“Should I ride in the front?”

We pulled over then so Zanche could ride with Gasparo in the front, and it was just me and Dazio on facing seats in the back. The glass divider was drawn to give everyone their privacy, and I unbuckled my seat belt, slid off my heels, and stretched my feet.

Dazio laid his head in my lap.

He was a young boy, barely seventeen. He was somewhat naive for his age and thought of me as a sister. I comforted him for a moment, brushing my fingertips along the hair on his brow. Then I sent him back to the other side, where he put his head against the window and slumped into sleep.

PART FOUR

23.

We didn’t stay long in Salò. Three days after our arrival, a tourist snapped a photo of Dazio and me at a restaurant down by the water. In the photo I was wearing a scarf and sunglasses, and you could see Dazio’s good looks. I’d applied gloss to my lips, and Dazio was leaning toward me. It was, I suppose, possible to mistake the nature of the moment—to infer an intimacy where none existed. But I was just his aunt. He was just a child in my keeping.

The tourist sold the photo.

It was bad timing, given the sudden realignment of political allegiances taken place in the Senate, under religious guise. Paulo’s enemies saw opportunity. Worse, the photo attracted the press to Salò.