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however, capitulated. For an instant he stared hard at me, then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I allowed myself to get carried away. Let’s go back to Nechayev.’
    ‘Is the memoir his?’
    ‘I’m coming to that. You won’t be surprised to hear that, where women were concerned, he was poison. One affair he had has become notorious. You may know about it. No? Well, Alexander Herzen the doyen of the exiled Russian intelligentsia had a daughter. After his death in Paris she returned to Geneva to live on the small fortune she had inherited. Nechayev, who was always broke, tried to get his hands on the money by seducing her. He failed, but it was such an ugly story that it has been well remembered. What has
not
been remembered, mainly because there was a family cover-up, is that he had another affair around the same time. It was with the daughter of an Italian doctor named Luccio.Dr Luccio was a member of Garibaldi’s corps of volunteers. He had fought beside the Liberator in Italy and attended him between campaigns. When Garibaldi made his new home on the island of Caprera, the Luccios set up house there too. Now misfortune strikes. In eighteen-seventy Garibaldi goes to Switzerland to attend the Congress of Peace and Freedom in Berne. Dr Luccio takes his family along. Enter Nechayev. He is attending the Congress and that’s where he meets and woos the doctor’s daughter. When Garibaldi suddenly takes off again with his volunteers to fight the French, the doctor naturally tags along. The wife and daughter linger, unwisely maybe, in Berne before returning to their home on Caprera. That’s off the north coast of Sardinia, you know, small and isolated. Anyway, it is there, in eighteen-seventy-one, that Nechayev’s illegitimate son is born.’ He raised his bushy eyebrows at me. ‘Where was Nechayev? We can’t be certain. There were undoubtedly letters exchanged, but they have been lost. All we do know for certain is that during the following year, ’seventy-two, the Swiss extradited Nechayev to Russia. The charges were technically criminal, not political. He was wanted in Russia for the murder of a student. Tried for and convicted of the murder, he later died in a dungeon of the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. He left behind him as his legacy to the world the doctrines of modern terrorism, an illegitimate son and a memoir of his life and thoughts – written in Geneva apparently – which he had handed or sent to the girl for safekeeping. It has survived and is in the hands of his great-grandson. A copy of it is now with Pacioli.’
    ‘What language is it written in? Russian?’
    ‘A mixture of Russian and French mostly. That would be the way most of that circle wrote. Some of the French is in a nineteenth-century shorthand. There is a little Italian too. The memoir ends with a dedication to the girl in expectation of a marriage in Caprera which could never have taken place.’
    ‘The great-grandson owns it?’
    ‘Yes, he inherited it. In fact, until it came into his handsnobody quite knew what it was because nobody could read it properly. It survived, I guess, as one of those family heirlooms with no intrinsic value that gets passed on as a sort of keepsake with romantic associations. This one was valued, perhaps, because it had belonged to the foreigner who, supposedly, had married great-grandmother in Switzerland and then been spirited away to Russia by the Czar’s wicked secret police.’
    ‘Does the great-grandson read Russian?’
    ‘Enough, I gather, to figure out the Russian passages in the memoir and grasp the importance of it. His name, too, is Luccio and he is the person who has suggested the form the book should take. I’ll come to his actual contribution in a moment. The Nechayev memoir is short, less than thirty thousand words, but it is of obvious importance as an historical document. Incidentally, the phrase “children of the twilight” about which you have reservations, Mr Halliday,