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height. Nearby, a clothes-chest illuminated by a guttering candle.
    In the middle of the room stood a high-backed chair, behind a little desk. In it, a man’s body sat stiff and motionless. Dead, but not abandoned to the peace of eternal repose, or prone and crying out for vengeance, because none could have uttered that scream. The man’s head, almost severed from his torso by a savage blow, lay sideways on his shoulder.
    Dante crossed the threshold to approach the body. Copious amounts of blood had gushed from the wound, spraying the clothes and splashing a page upon which the dead man’s right hand still lay, precisely at the centre of an octagon drawn in charcoal on the parchment. The fallen head appeared to turn towards the body from which it had begun to separate. The prior had to conquer a sudden feeling of dizziness before his eyes decided which of the two parts of the body to focus upon.
    The body was dressed in fine clothes. They were ample and light, draped around the man’s nakedness as majestically as a Roman toga; his forehead was partly wrapped in a woven veil. There was something unusual about the garments’ shape, which explained the Bargello’s idea that the man was dressed in the Turkish style. In fact they were clothes more suited to travelling than to urban living. Perhaps a wealthy pilgrim, as his presence in the aristocratic area of the inn seemed to indicate. The prior delicately moved the head, brushing aside the long strips of white hair that fell on either side of the face, hiding it from view, and then lifted it towards him.
    The victim’s face was marked by an anguished grimace, the eyes wide open. And yet, the poet was sure, it was not in pain or surprise. No, that man had tried to go on seeing until the very end. To know the experience of death, or rather to try to escape it. In the black of the pupils Dante sought that shadow of the last image seen, which is said to imprint itself upon the eyes of the dying. But all that his investigations found was a dark cavity. The deep folds in the forehead and at the corners of the half-open mouth, revealing an incomplete, yellowish set of teeth, as well as the grain of the skin marked by the wear of time, indicated advanced age. He recalled the face of the oriental man on the galley, also aged.
    And yet the body of the man in front of him seemed massive and well formed. Beneath the clothes one could sense a powerful set of muscles.
    For a moment Dante suspected that he might be in the presence of the remains of two different corpses, and that the strip of flesh that still held them together was merely an artifice. He lifted the head, and rested it against the severed throat of the corpse. The lacerations matched up perfectly, and the skin connecting the two parts was intact.
    As he performed this operation, his eye concentrated on the dead man’s face. The features reminded him of something – a vague ghost of voices and faint colours had begun to stir within him. He placed the head against the shoulder once again and continued to stare at it.
    Around him, the little room seemed to have been ransacked. The clothes-chest had been opened and turned upside down, and beside it lay a leather bag with the straps cut, perhaps by the same blade that had slashed the man himself.
    Dante looked inside, but it was empty. A thin smell of wax struck his nostrils, along with the more distinct one of ink-gall. There had been papers in there, perhaps removed by the murderer. The hypothesis was reinforced by a dark stain in one corner of the bag, next to a fragment of broken pen. The chest had contained a brass ruler and a compass.
    ‘Call the innkeeper,’ he told the Bargello.
    A few moments later the other returned, along with a quivering little man, who almost slid along the wall, in an attempt to gaze upon the corpse as little as possible.
    The poet cast him an enquiring glance. ‘Are you Manetto del Molino, who keeps this inn on behalf of the