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questioned me behind closed doors. But he was an honest and conscientious person, and I felt sure that I could rely upon him.
    When I finally made it back home, I poured myself a large cognac and threw it back, without even taking off my overcoat. Then I walked from room to room, gathering up all the pictures of Giovanna, and I threw them into the trash.
    “That’s where you belong, you slut.”
    I had to wait for a sullen, unprecedented fury to wash out of my mind and body. Then I broke into sobs, pulled the photographs out of the trash can, and hugged them to my chest.
    “How could you do this to me, Giovanna? What happened to you, my love?”
     
    * * *
     
    He boarded the first morning train. He had hidden his duffel bag in a nearby field. It would only be a burden, a hindrance to him in what he had to do next. The train cars were full of dozing commuters; no one paid him the slightest attention. He stepped off the train at the first stop, a few miles away but already in a different province. He ate breakfast at the train station coffee bar. Two officers of the Polfer, or railroad police, came in and ordered yet another of the succession of espressos they’d drink that day; one of the two officers gazed at the man thoughtfully, observing him as if the face reminded him of someone. It gave the man a sharp stab of pain in his belly. It was a stab of fear. If they had asked him for ID, that would have spelled the end of his plan. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He kept a sidelong eye on the policeman in the big plate-glass mirror behind the bar. The police officer, a stout fifty-year-old with white hair tufting out from beneath his hat, had been momentarily distracted by the female barista. She wanted to know about a gang of Gypsies that had been sighted in the area over the past few days. The man heaved a sigh of relief. He turned his gaze to his own reflection in the mirror. His hair was too long, too tangled. In fact, in those parts men his age, men with jobs and families, went to the barbershop more frequently than he did. He left a couple of ten-cent coins on the counter for a tip, and left the coffee bar. He went to the public bathrooms at the far end of the train station, and used a rubber band to tie his hair back in a ponytail. Then he headed into town. He stepped into a phone booth and dialed the number again. Again, he heard the anonymous and impersonal voice of the answering machine. The man didn’t know what to make of it. Angry and disappointed, he positioned himself on a bench near the town church. He didn’t have long to wait. An old man pedaled up on a bicycle, leaned it against the wall by the church’s main portal, and went in, without locking the bike. He wouldn’t be inside for very long, just time enough for a prayer and a genuflection. But the man would already be long gone. He swung onto the bicycle seat and pedaled away quickly, thinking to himself as he rode that, around there, certain customs would never vanish. As for himself, he’d never been a regular church-goer, and lately he’d stopped going entirely. In his own life, he’d always found more spiritual comfort and understanding in the arms of a skilled whore than kneeling at a confessional.
    The dense fog was thinning, as punctual as death that time of the year. He would need to find a place to hide, and there was no time to waste. Last night he had slept in a shed on a construction site; he had almost frozen to death.
    He pedaled for ten or fifteen miles. He still remembered how to use the gears properly and, despite his age, his muscles still had their spring.
    He felt like clipping a playing card to the front fork, so that he could listen to the tack-a-tack-a-tack in the spinning spokes, a sound that seemed to belong to a lost, archaic world, confusingly enveloped in another kind of fog, the fog of memory. When he reached the outskirts of town, he stopped outside a grocery store. He peered in through the plate glass window and