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it.
    She was about to get to her feet and continue looking around the palazzo when something occurred to her. She opened her MySpace page again, looked at her profile, and found the sentence, “Would like to be as self-confident as my sister.” It felt like she’d written that a hundred years ago, and she thought of deleting it with all the rest of the nonsense that no longer had anything to do with her. But that felt like killing off a whole person, her old self, the Rosa of a year ago.
    It was silly and childish, but she couldn’t bring herself simply to delete her profile. It would be like sweeping out a room that no one had entered for too long. She would never open the door to it again, but at the same time something about it fascinated her. The old Rosa would still be alive on the internet, as if the world hadn’t stopped for a moment and then started turning in an entirely different direction.
    While Scott Walker sang about death, she stared at the profile of a stranger, and at a photo in which she’d taken a lot of trouble to look melancholy and profound. Shaking her head, she left it as it was, closed the browser again, and felt like she’d just buried herself deep in the internet under a granite slab without any date of death on it.
    Outside, gravel crunched under tires as a car drove into the inner courtyard. Maybe it was Florinda coming home from somewhere. Rosa hadn’t seen her in the palazzo that morning.
    She typed the dead baron’s name into the search window. Massimo Carnevare. To make sure, she added the name of the place she’d read in Alessandro’s passport: Genuardo.
    A car door slammed. She heard hasty footsteps.
    The screen offered countless sites, mainly connected with the names of all kinds of companies. Most of them sounded straightforward and boring: construction firms, agricultural machinery importers, even a foundation supporting disadvantaged kids in the slums of Palermo and Catania. But there were also press reports of court proceedings, of financial scandals over the construction of government buildings, alleged contacts with North African drug barons. She’d expected all that. She was sure that if she’d entered Florinda’s name, similar sites would have come up. Including wind turbines that never went around.
    She deleted the name Massimo and replaced it with Alessandro.
    She glanced briefly at the archway, which gave her a view through several other rooms to the far side of the wing. No one in sight.
    Enter.
    A year ago Alessandro had been on a sports team at an American private school in the Hudson Valley. Then he took a course for law students who were going to work in economics. In her mind’s eye she saw him in a gray suit standing at a speaker’s podium with a laptop, explaining the fascinating attraction of forged balance sheets to other seventeen-year-olds.
    She was just losing interest when, ten or eleven links down, she came upon a story about a charity gala in Milan. The article was excruciatingly slow coming up; broadband speeds in the Sicilian backwoods obviously left a lot to be desired. The text appeared first, then, gradually, the pictures.
    Alessandro smiled out of the screen at her, hair as unruly as on the plane. He looked unexpectedly elegant in a dark suit. Not even the flash photography could affect him much. He had a small scab on his chin, probably from shaving. Thank heaven there were no photos of Rosa’s shins on the internet.
    A man of about fifty was standing beside him, with black hair and a high forehead, dark brows, and a politician’s frozen grin.
    Baron Massimo Carnevare , said the caption, with his son, Alessandro.
    She didn’t meet a soul as she left the palazzo, then walked through the shadowy circle of chestnut trees to the outskirts of the olive groves. She was wearing a short black skirt, a black T-shirt with the words THERE ARE ALWAYS BETTER LIARS on it, and her metal-studded boots. She’d removed the rest of the polish from her nails