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asked me to come and see him. Save Venice had just restored the Fenice’s curtain, and now he wanted me, as a member of the Save Venice board, to ask Save Venice to restore the frescoes of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the bar. The superintendent invited me to come and look at the frescoes, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The place was madness. Everywhere you looked, there were flammable materials. I don’t know how many cans of varnish, turpentine, and solvents there were—open, closed, spilled on the floor—lengths of wooden parquet in stacks, rolls of plastic carpeting piled high, heaps of rubbish everywhere. In the midst of all this, men were working with blowtorches! Can you imagine! Soldering irons! And surveillance? Zero, as usual. Responsibility? Zero. I thought, ‘They’re mad!’ So if the Mafia wanted the Fenice to burn, all they had to do was wait.”
     
     
    By 2:00 A.M., even though the fire was still officially out of control, Archimede Seguso could see that an equilibrium had been reached between the flames and the firemen. He appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, the first time he had come away from the window in four hours.
     
     
    “We’re out of danger now,” he said. He kissed his wife. “I told you not to worry, Nandina.” Then he embraced his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandson. With that, and without saying another word, he went to bed.
     
     
     
 
AS SIGNOR SEGUSO FELL A SLEEP, a parade of Prussian generals, court jesters, and fairy princesses began stepping out of elevators into the candlelit Rainbow Room in New York. A bishop in full regalia handed a drink to a belly dancer. A hooded executioner chatted with Marie Antoinette. A cluster of people had gathered around the painter Ludovico De Luigi, who had sketched the outlines of the Miracoli Church and was beginning to apply colors to its inlaid-marble façade. The hired entertainers—stilt-walking jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, and mimes in commedia dell’arte costumes—strolled among the guests, most of whom had no idea the Fenice was on fire. The only coverage of it on American television so far had been an eleven-second mention, without pictures, on the CBS Evening News.
     
     
    Peter Duchin sat at the piano, perched like an exotic bird with black-and-white feathers rising from the brow of his black mask. When he saw Bob Guthrie come to the microphone, he cut off the music with a wave of his hand.
     
     
    Guthrie, his large frame wrapped in a red-and-white caftan, welcomed the guests and then told them he hated to be the bearer of bad news. “The Fenice is burning,” he said. “It cannot be saved.” A collective gasp and cries of “No!” resounded throughout the ballroom. Then the room fell silent. Guthrie introduced the guest of honor, Signora Dini, who stepped up to the microphone with tears rolling down her cheeks. In a tremulous voice, she thanked the board of Save Venice, which, she said, had voted late that afternoon to dedicate the evening to raising money to rebuild the Fenice. The silence was broken by scattered applause; the applause swelled to an ovation, and the ovation crested on a burst of cheers and whistles.
     
     
    Ludovico De Luigi, his face ashen, took the Miracoli painting off the easel and put a blank canvas in its place. In pencil he quickly sketched the Fenice. He put it in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon, for ironic effect, and engulfed it in flames.
     
     
    Several people headed for the elevators to go home and change into traditional evening clothes, saying they were no longer in the mood to be in costume. Signora Dini turned away from the microphone and daubed her eyes with a handkerchief. Bob Guthrie stood nearby, speaking to a cluster of people a few feet from the still-open microphone, which picked up part of his conversation. “We’ll probably raise close to a million dollars for the Fenice tonight,” he said, citing the thousand-dollar price of admission, the auction of