It was later now. The heat hadn’t broken, and I was coated with a film of sweat. My closet had been rifled, my things disarranged, and my brother no longer lay in bed beside me. I heard rummaging down the hall, drawers opening and closing. I peered outside. Men often loitered in the plaza below the terrace wall, whistling and catcalling, more as evening drew on. Through the slats I saw the thin one, the marionette, his crooked shadow sketched like graffiti along the cobbled wall. Another man loitered farther below, sitting on a porch stoop, a sharp-looking man, smoking a cigarette, studying his shoes as he smoked. He could have been any one of the rakish men who wander the streets here. But I recognized him. The way he moved, how he flicked his ash into the street, glancing at a passing mulatto girl.

The man was Lodovico.

I went down the hall. Zanche lay as before, under the ceiling fan in the central room. Her bedroom had been disarranged. Johnny’s doing, I guessed. At her window, nearer the street, I got a closer look at Lodovico. He sat on the stoop, watching the mouth of the alley that led by twists and turns from our building to the Avenue of the Sacred Queen. But he didn’t have access. The cyclone gate was locked and strung with concertina wire.

I wondered where the third man had gone, the burly one in the gray work clothes. I wondered if he’d found the back way. Then I saw him farther down, urinating against a stucco wall.

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.”