“Are you taking a trip?” Alana asks.

“Yes, thank God.” Claudio grins. “I have been ‘sprung.’ Is that the right term?”

“If you happen to be a character in a fifties gangster film.”

“I’d rather be trapped in one of those than stay in this room for another minute.” He laughs. “My quarantine period is over as of this evening.”

“And you’re fully recovered?”

“Like a new man.” He flashes a thumbs-up sign. “Like someone who has been given a second chance . . . to ruin his life all over again. What do you think?” He winks. “Want to get married?”

Alana laughs, her mood improved by his presence. “So what’s so urgent about the diary?”

“It’s incredible. Truly incredible.” Claudio pulls his tablet computer out of the bag and motions to the bed. “Come. Sit with me.”

They sit side by side as Claudio scrolls down a screen filled with bullet points. “I have read it twice,” he says. “I didn’t have time to type out a proper translation, but I have made notes. Will they suffice for now?”

“Of course.”

“This doctor, Rafael Pasqua, he was such a wise and thoughtful man.” Claudio sounds reverential. “And brave! You have no idea the hell he went through.”

“Tell me.”

He consults his notes. “Pasqua was a local barber-surgeon. He was thirty-six years old when the plague struck Genoa in the winter of 1348. He started his diary on the very day he buried his wife. He never expected to survive the plague. Pasqua recorded his observations only for the sake of science and history.”

“That is some dedication.”

“You have no idea, truly,” Claudio says. “It’s bad enough for us now, but we can’t imagine what it would have been like in Pasqua’s time. So much superstition and ignorance! They didn’t have a clue what caused the plague. Some blamed astrology, others the apocalypse. Even Pasqua—who was very enlightened for his day—thought it came from some kind of miasma or evil vapors.” Claudio pauses to check his notes again. “Every day, Pasqua would see one victim after another in his surgery. He lanced buboes, treated wounds, and did what little he could for the other symptoms. And the scale of this epidemic! Pasqua writes that on one day alone, more than six hundred people died in Genoa. I looked it up. The population of the whole city was little more than a hundred thousand at the time. They ran out of places to bury the dead. And gravediggers to do the work. Eventually they simply dumped the bodies in the harbor.”

“This is fascinating, Claudio, truly,” Alana says, beginning to overheat under her hood. “But how does any of it apply to our situation?”

“Indulge me,” he says with a mischievous grin. “I’ve been alone in here with my thoughts for too long.”

She nods. “Go on.”

“People weren’t the only victims of this epidemic. Soon the whole social order began to decay. Without laborers and farmers, the economy fell apart. Crime became rampant. Relatives abandoned loved ones. Eventually people turned on each other, looking for scapegoats.”