The fire soon took hold. The younger Jew might well have already been dead, as he lay still in the flames that consumed him. However, ben Solomon screamed out and managed to rise to his feet. His clothes were aflame as he staggered out of the blaze, only to be set upon by the leader, who bashed him over and over with his club.

After ben Solomon collapsed back to the ground, the leader turned to the other Jews and shook his fist again. Let this be your warning! he cried. You heretics, you murderers of our Savior! You have brought this cursed plague upon us believers. You will all be punished for it yet!

Chapter

Forty-Six

Byron and Alana spend much of the afternoon with Dr. Pietro Polese, Naples’s chief public health officer, a heavyset man with a quick laugh and a good command of English. Polese drives them out to the Scampìa suburb where Lalia Renzi fell ill. As they walk, Alana hugs the bag holding her passport and wallet a little tighter to her chest. Even in broad daylight, the neighborhood feels less safe than some of the worst inner cities she has seen after dark.

“Scampìa was built in the sixties and seventies to house Napoli’s rapidly growing workforce,” Polese says sadly. “High-rises everywhere. Then the economy—especially in manufacturing—slowed. Many of the working people left. In the last twenty years, Scampìa has been overrun by unemployment, addiction, and crime, especially the gangs. It’s so very sad. A black eye for all Neapolitans.”

As if to prove the point, they have to slow to step over the legs of an addict who is sprawled across the sidewalk. His beard is crusted with food, or possibly dried saliva, and the stink of his body odor follows them for several feet. Half a block farther, a man with wild spiky hair stops digging through a dumpster to look up at them and scream obscenities. Metal fences and padlocked gates line the building fronts, and Alana notices surveillance cameras mounted at regular intervals high up on the walls. Graffiti and litter are everywhere. The faint stench of garbage wafts through the air. The neighborhood strikes Alana as a dream ecosystem for rats. She realizes that trapping any infected animals among the undoubtedly huge endemic rodent population could prove to be a challenge of needle-in-a-haystack proportions.

As they get back into his car, Polese receives a phone call and speaks urgently for a few minutes. After he hangs up, his tone is grim. “They have found a second victim.”

“Where?” Byron asks.

“Here in Scampìa,” Polese says. “In an alley. A few blocks from where we were just walking.”

“Let’s go talk to him,” Byron says.

“It won’t be much of an interview, I am afraid,” Polese says. “He is dead.”

“How do they know it was the plague?” Alana asks.

“The police found his body about two hours ago. It was assumed he died of a heroin or fentanyl overdose. So many of them do. However, once he arrived at the morgue, the pathologist found buboes in his groin. He took a biopsy. It is Yersinia. No question.”