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saw that both the owner and the few customers were third-world immigrants. Reassured, he walked into the store with a confident step, smiled genially, and began to pull canned goods and other items from the shelves. When his shopping basket was full, he walked over to the cash register.
    “Two bottles of red wine,” he asked.
    “No wine. No alcohol,” the proprietor replied in foreign-accented Italian.
    He slid the two plastic bags filled with groceries onto the handlebars, and pedaled back out into the countryside. The fog almost made him miss the dirt road he was looking for. He was obliged to make a wide circle back before he could turn into the lane. As he rode along between skeletal grape vines, the fog grew even denser. The rough surface of the road made the bicycle rattle and jolt; it wasn’t easy to keep his balance. He was beginning to feel tired; he needed to rest and think about everything that had happened since his arrival the day before.
    He rode practically blind for a couple of miles, until he could finally make out the silhouette of a house through the fog. He dismounted and wheeled the bicycle, careful to make no noise over the last fifty yards.
    The house was shrouded in silence. He circled cautiously around it until he realized that the building was completely abandoned. Reassured, he peered in through one of the windows, whose shutters dangled slightly askew, each from a single surviving hinge. He shattered the window glass with an elbow to get inside. When he set foot on the floor, he felt fragments of glass crunch and snap beneath the soles of his hiking boots. He ran his fingers along the wall until he felt a light switch. He flipped it on: there was no power. Making his way by the flame of a lighter, he managed to find the kitchen. It was empty, except for a table with a broken marble top. He rummaged through the drawers and, amidst the clutter of mismatched cutlery, wine corks, multicolored rubber bands, and rusted corkscrews, he found several candle ends.
    By the light of the candle flames, he saw that he had stumbled into an eighteenth-century mansion, abandoned for years, probably because of some never-resolved dispute over an estate. Aside from a few skittering mice and a dropped ceiling of spiderwebs, there were no signs of life. The furniture had all been taken away, except for a pile of chairs in the dining room and a swaybacked sofa. The chairs were decorated with finely crafted intarsia work, but they were badly worm-eaten. In the middle of the back wall stood an enormous and empty fireplace. It was brutally cold. He managed to kick a couple of chairs to pieces, and he piled up the shattered wood in the fireplace. It was almost dark by now; no one would notice the smoke. He had a nice fire going before long. Later, he would retrieve the duffel bag containing his possessions. The man pulled the sofa closer to the flames and sat huddled, still wrapped in his heavy jacket. He made himself a sandwich with a can of tunafish, and opened a can of Mecca Cola. He pulled a transistor radio out of his jacket pocket and switched it on. He tuned the radio to a local station that broadcast only Italian music requested by listeners; the callers all spoke dialect, as did the announcer. After an old hit by the pop singer Drupi dedicated to a certain Rosi, the DJ, Franchino, took a call from an elderly female caller.
    “Ciao, Franchino, it’s me, Maria,” she introduced herself.
    “
Carissima
, it’s been a while since we’ve heard your voice.”
    “Eh, I’m so busy with my grandchildren. There’s four of them now, and you know, at my age . . .”
    “Oh, come on, you’re practically a teenager. So, Maria, what song would you like to request?”
    “‘Tears in the Wind’
by Adamo. And I want to dedicate it to that girl that died the other night, Giovanna Barovier. Poor girl, to think that she was getting married next week. It makes me think about my poor sister . . .”
    “Yes, we mentioned