The paramedics covered Paolo and strapped him to a gurney. Then they wheeled him out to the front of the house—to the ambulance that waited in front of the long line of garages that clung to the sand along the edges of the Pacific Coast Highway.

––––––––

As a matter of routine, the coroner performed an autopsy at the hospital, slitting open the chest to get a look. That glance confirmed that the heart muscle had seized up: death by cardiac infarction. The examiner took some fluids for chemical analysis, also a matter of routine. The results weren’t back yet, but in the meantime the hospital released the body to the Malibu Funeral Home.

––––––––

“You can’t blame yourself for this,” Johnny said. He put his arm around me, and the funeral director rose discreetly to her feet. “It isn’t your fault,” he whispered, “no, no,” and he continued murmuring to me in this tender, gentle way even after she was gone. We’d been talking about burial options, and at the mention of cremation I’d broken down. “We tried to talk to him,” Johnny said. “We both did. Those concoctions from China, those dosages—there’s no quality control. I understand how you feel. But he was devoted to this particular agenda. Quite stubborn.”

I dabbed my eyes.

“He was insistent,” I agreed.

“Maybe the ingredients were impure. Or mislabeled. I blame myself, too. Though how were we to know?”

I’d heard my brother talking about this to the police, telling them we had no idea where Paolo had bought his medication. He’d simply gone out on his own one morning. Then three days later, he was dead.

It wasn’t exactly true, of course.

“You can’t blame yourself for this,” he repeated. “There’s no way you could have known.”

I pulled myself together.

“What about the chemical analysis?” I asked.

My voice was different.

“What about it?”

“At the morgue?  What will it show?”

The mask dropped.

We looked at each other.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “He poisoned himself, unintentionally or otherwise. No one can prove differently.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I sobbed.

“Poor sister,” he said. “You have such bad luck with men.”

29.

The next day I spoke with my husband’s estate lawyer, Romeo Ferragamo, whom I’d first met not too long after I married Paolo, when my name replaced Isabella’s on documents related to the estate. Ferragamo was a dry little man, very thin, who wore a black suit tailored too short at the extremities. He spoke to me now by phone from his office along the Via di Ripetta. He was fluent in both English and Italian, but in either language his voice was very droll and overly precise, like the small print in a very long contract.

The news wasn’t good.

On account of the government’s pending action, Orsini’s financial matters were in disarray.