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Your wife is a nice, pretty lady. We will not harm a hair of her head. We’ll set her free when you turn yourself in.” So far, according to the latest reports, he had not turned himself in.
    But Forli was Mussolini’s hometown. Partisans there, I’d reasoned, had it harder.
    We’re going to find him. She had said that. It wasn’t even her country. What was she doing here anyway?
    We’re going to find him, you know. A golfer, an American lady golfer. Maybe she thought of Beppi as one of her little white balls, obscured in a bush somewhere. Weren’t golfers always hitting balls into bushes?
    â€œI don’t know much about golf,” I said.
    â€œAlmost no one in Italy does. That’s all right. I don’t know much about…” Her voice faltered, stopped. Maybe she’d been about to say, “singing.”
    â€œBeing anyone’s mother,” she said. “This would be a good time for you to close your eyes and get some rest.”
    â€œDo you honestly think I can
rest
?”
    â€œNo, but you should close your eyes. Now that we’re moving faster, I’m going to open the window and get rid of all this flour. We can’t have it weighing us down, and I believe it’s not something you’ll want to watch. Don’t worry, I won’t throw out the guns.”
    â€œI won’t look.”
    â€œThey told me that you’re a woman of astonishing strength. I can see they understated it.”
    I made an attempt at a smile. “No one my son associates with would say a thing like astonishing strength, not even our priest, as eloquent as he is.”
    â€œI admit, it was put to me more colloquially.”
    But I didn’t feel strong. I didn’t feel I could even pretend it.
    Sometimes when I was about to enter the spotlight at Aldo’s with an especially vicious fright, I’d pick up some object from a table, as if seizing a prop, whether or not it suited the song I was finding it impossible to sing. A spoon, a napkin, a salt cellar. Nothing easily breakable. It didn’t matter what it was. I’d grip it intensely: a good-luck charm. I’d think of my voice as something to speak to. Maybe it was a little like praying. “Please, don’t let this be the day you leave me.” At the end of the evening, I presented the object to a patron at the table I’d taken it from: a little ceremony. A souvenir. A waiter rushed over to put it in a white paper bag, embossed with a silver A, which Aldo’s had crates of, for favors at wedding banquets and free sweets to children who behaved through an entire meal. “Good children get candy. Bad children drool while watching them eat it,” was Nizarro’s rule of what to say, discreetly, while seating them.
    Something to hold.
    I remembered the Italian pistols. I put my hands in my pockets. I wasn’t so numb that I couldn’t feel how good it was to touch them, even though they weren’t loaded, yet.
    â€œBeppino,” I said to myself, as if my son were with me and I’d reached for him, patting him lightly. “What kind of a partisan are you, blowing something up without telling your mother? You’d better not be hurt in any way. You’re a good boy, although I’m sick of all these surprises.”

T HE VILLAGE OF S AN G UARINO had been built in the early nineteen hundreds because of a furniture factory. It consisted of a long, broad avenue lined on both sides with trees, front yards, and boxy, tidy brick houses. There was no town square, no
trattoria,
no church, no school, no café. It looked as if someone had taken it from Ravenna or Bologna—a whole residential block—and plunked it at the edge of a marsh, far enough from the sea to be uninteresting to tourists, but close enough to call itself coastal.
    In spite of its well-kept appearance, it looked like a misfit in that countryside. The one avenue began at the train