I found my brother standing at my desk in the alcove at the end of the hall. My valise lay on the desk: the zippered bag where I kept the money I’d taken from the bank. Zanche’s purse was there, too. Johnny had taken her revolver out of its little holster and was examining it. He knew something about guns, having grown up in Texas. So did I. It was a snub nose, with a five barrel chamber, and a light action trigger.

“What are you doing?”

“I found this in Zanche’s purse.”

“For protection,” I said.

I didn’t mention my own pistola some half-dozen steps away, stashed behind the exotic wax plant with the red flowers.

“You went through my closet, too,” I said. “My valise . . .”

“She has her bag packed—ready to go.”

This didn’t surprise me. She was a meticulous person and had kept a bag containing her most vital possessions at the ready ever since Salò.

“Lodovico is out there. With two others.”

“I’ve seen.”

“There’s a back way.”

“I know. I’ve seen your little friend come and go. Your Dazio. We can’t take him with us. None of them.”

Zanche was up now, down the hall. I heard her footsteps approaching on the wooden floor.

“You went through my things,” she said. “You were in my room.”

“Just to open the shutters,” my brother said. “To get some cross breeze. You’d think, having lived in Rome, you’d know something about managing the heat.”

His explanation was nonsense. He had her purse on the desk, her gun in his hand.

She gave me a beseeching glance.

“You trust this woman too much,” my brother said to me. “For all you know, she has been in touch with the murderers outside.”

“You’re the one who led them here,” said Zanche.

“They were lying in wait. I suspected as much. But I came anyway, to help my sister.”

Her eyes slanted from one of us to the other. At the picture we made. Myself in this thin skirt, with a damp film all over me, my hair mussed. My brother covered in the same must, his shirt out, his belt hanging loose. I guessed what she was thinking. I thought she might spit out the accusation, or part of it, anyway: Murderers, the pair of you. Her lip trembled and there were tears in her eyes, but this welling of emotion wasn’t on behalf of Isabella, or Frank, or even Paolo Orsini. It was because she was afraid. For herself, and her lost Gasparo.

“Aw,” mocked my brother. “Such crocodile tears.”

“Leave her be,” I said. “She suffers.”

“That’s because her man, her lover, has sold her down the river.”

“No,” she said.

“He was reporting to the head deputy all along, to intelligence ministry. Our every move. Isn’t that right?”

Zanche said nothing.

“It’s on account of the estate, dear sister. Because on your death, as it now sits, with the papers unexecuted, the money will fall to Dazio’s mother. And the stepfather takes control. Meanwhile Isabella’s heirs . . . ”