“He’s gone.”

“What did he want?”

“To know if there was another entrance around back, so he could address the problem without bothering us.”

“What did you tell him?”

She glanced at the gun.

“I told him no.”

“Good.”

“Do you think I’m so foolish, to let in a stranger?”

“There’s been another man lately lingering out in the park.”

“I know,” she said.

She started up the steps, haughty as ever but with no fewer suspicions about Johnny than I had, wondering too if the appearance of these new men had something to do with my brother. Johnny had just woken. He sat at the table, crumbling bread into soft-boiled eggs and drinking black coffee. He was in a jovial mood, whistling the refrain from a song called “El Perro Negro.” I peered through the balcony slats into the street. The two men loitered by the terrace, the gangly one and the workman in the gray clothes. They engaged in a brief conversation. Then the burly one went on his way, pressing his nose against this gate and that, testing the handles, poking around for a passage through.

––––––––

There was a back way out, not easily discerned from the street. Dazio’s window overlooked a storage shed. A ladder leaned against the shed, heading downward to an enclosed courtyard shared by the buildings on all sides. This courtyard offered entry into an adjoining building through a laundry room, which in turn entered onto the alley whose entrance was blocked by the cyclone gate. If you left that way, you would be within sight of the gate, though only for a moment, because the alley twisted and led by roundabout means onto The Avenue of the Sacred Queen. I hadn’t discovered this by myself—it was the path by which Dazio came and went with his young waif from the clubs.

The pair lay in Dazio’s room even now, curled up against each other, dead to the world. She was as beautiful as he and just as naive, with her oversize eyes and her big, pouting lips.

I was envious of them both.

––––––––

That afternoon we slept. It was the local custom, because of the heat. After the morning business, the shop doors shuttered. In this respect the city resembled Europe before the days of the new currency, back when the great dictators and the Church were still in charge. We had fallen into the local habit and lay down to rest, despite the men lurking outside. Zanche’s room got the brunt of the sun, so she lay on the daybed in the front room, under the ceiling fan. Dazio was at the back of the house with his little princess. My brother loitered on the bed beside me. We had done the same as children often enough—and occasionally as adults, when circumstances conspired—and I lay there now, looking at him, at his open lips and the lock of hair that fell over his forehead. I probably shouldn’t have told him where we were. But he was my brother, and when I looked at him, I had a hard time looking away.