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clandestine OVRA station in the Tenth Arrondissement:
     
    The Liberazione group met on the morning of 4 December at the Café Europa, the same subjects attending as in previous reports, with the engineer AMATO and the journalist WEISZ absent. It was decided to publish a “political obituary” of the lawyer BOTTINI, and to state that his death was not a suicide. It was further decided that the journalist WEISZ will now assume the editorship of the Liberazione newspaper.
     
    28 December. With prosperity, or at least its distant cousin, Weisz had found himself a new place to live, the Hotel Dauphine, on the rue Dauphine in the Sixth Arrondissement. The proprietor, Madame Rigaud, was a widow of the 1914 war and, like women to be seen everywhere in France, still, after twenty years, wore the black of mourning. She liked Weisz, and did not much overcharge him for his two rooms, linked by a door, up four endless flights of stairs, on the top floor. From time to time she fed him, poor boy, in the hotel kitchen, a pleasant break from his little haunts, Mère this and Chez that, sprinkled through the narrow streets of the Sixth.
    Worn out, he slept late on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and when the sun slanted through the slats on the closed shutters, forced himself awake, to find, on getting to his feet, that pretty much everything hurt. Even a visit to a war, for a few weeks, took its toll. So he would eat the three-course lunch, stop briefly at the office, see if any of the regulars at his café were around, and maybe call Véronique, once she got home from the gallery. A pleasant day, at least in the anticipation of it. But the dusty sun shafts revealed a slip of paper, slid under his door at some point while he was away. A message, brought up by the clerk at the hotel desk. Now what could that be? Véronique? My darling, you must come and see me, how I yearn for you! Pure fantasy, and he knew it. Véronique would never even consider doing such a thing, theirs was a very pallid love affair, off and on, now and then. Still, one never knew, anything was possible. On the slim chance, he read the note. “Please telephone as soon as you return. Arturo.”
      
    He met Salamone in a deserted bar near the insurance company. They sat in back and ordered coffee. “And how does it go in Spain?” Salamone said.
    “Badly. It’s almost finished. What remains is the nobility of a lost cause, but that’s thin stuff in a war. We’re beaten, Arturo, for which we can thank the French and the British and the nonintervention pact. Outgunned, not outfought, end of story. So now it’s up to Hitler, what happens next.”
    “Well, my news is no better. I must tell you that Enrico Bottini is dead.”
    Weisz looked up sharply, and Salamone handed him a page cut from a newspaper. Weisz flinched when he saw the photograph, read quickly through the tabloid prose, then shook his head and gave it back. “Something happened, poor Bottini, but not this.”
    “No, we believe this was done by the OVRA. Staged to look like a murder/suicide.”
    Weisz felt it, the sharp little bite that sickened the heart; it wasn’t like being shot at, it was like seeing a snake. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    Weisz took a deep breath, and let it out. “Let them burn in hell for doing this,” he said. Only anger cured the fear that had reached him.
    Salamone nodded. “In time, they will.” He paused, then said, “But for today, Carlo, the committee wants you to replace him.”
    From Weisz, a nod of casual assent, as though he’d been asked the time. “Mmm,” he said. Of course they do.
    Salamone laughed, a bass rumble inside a bear. “We knew you’d be eager to do it.”
    “Oh yes, eager barely says it. And I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend.”
    Salamone almost believed him. “Ahh, I don’t think…”
    “And the next time we go to bed, I must remember to shave. For the photograph.”
    Salamone nodded, closed his eyes. Yes, I know, forgive