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seats, and he did not say please. Giuseppe’s brother was a taxi driver and had complained about German tourists often enough—they were supposedly the only ones ruder than Americans. Accurate or not, that was the stereotype, and it fit Giuseppe’s need to come across as a
type
, not an individual. Just another tourist. Forgettable.
    But it’s harder to be forgettable when you’re missing an arm, so Giuseppe was wearing his special windbreaker. The left sleeve below the elbow was filled with foam rubber and a tennis ball was glued inside the elastic cuff and pinned inside the left pocket. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but if you stayed in motion, moving through people’s field of view, you didn’t jump out as an amputee. Otherwise he was dressed as any other casual tourist, with nice blue jeans and a lime-green polo shirt under the windbreaker. Nothing to identify him as a priest.
    Sticking with bad Italian and still holding the map out, he added, “I know where it is, so do not get the idea to take me for a long ride.”
    The driver sneered and turned to face the road. “
Si,
mein Führer
,” he said as he threw the Fiat into gear.
    At the west end of the piazza, Giuseppe told the driver to stop, paid the fare, and got out beside the fountain of Neptune and his two pet dolphins. He walked—not too quickly—toward the center of the vast oval, which had served in centuries past as a favorite location for public executions. Reaching the center, he put on his sunglasses and stopped at the Egyptian obelisk of Ramesses II.
    The obelisk had been brought to Rome by Augustus in 10 BC and later moved to this spot in 1589, and every Roman knew its history. Giuseppe had seen it thousands of times, but he stopped and pretended to be a German seeing it for the first time. He walked slowly around it while scanning the tourists milling about the piazza to be sure he wasn’t followed. Then he shoved the map in his windbreaker and pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the back pocket of his jeans. He strode to the east side of the piazza, where he lit a cigarette and puffed away, not enjoying it. He normally smoked Marlboro Lights, but for the next taxi driver he would be French, and so these were Gitanes Brunes, which carried a distinctive odor that would linger in his hair.
    This time he spoke French, with a perfect Parisian accent.
“Je vais a la Trinità dei Monti, s’il vous plaît.”
He checked over his shoulder as the taxi pulled into traffic. No one was following. He breathed slow and deep to calm his nerves, again fighting the urge to touch the stump end of his left arm.
    It happened whenever he was particularly tired or stressed, this feeling of the phantom limb. Years ago it had been painful,like paper cuts on his fingertips, bee stings on his forearm. The pain had faded over time, but what lingered was the aggravating feeling that he
had
fingers, a hand, a forearm, where there were none. The doctors had told him to apply sensory stimulation to the skin covering the stump whenever the phantom limb reappeared. They said this would train his brain to stop imagining the missing appendage. And it worked, temporarily, but the damn thing always came back. After five years, Giuseppe had just about given up hope that it would ever go away completely.
    The driver stopped in front of the French church. Giuseppe waited until the taxi was out of sight before crossing the street and descending the Spanish Steps, navigating around tourists and college kids, all the way down to the Piazza di Spagna and past the Fontana della Barcaccia, which to Giuseppe’s eye was the least interesting fountain in Rome. He crossed the square and rounded the corner to a small newsagent and tobacco shop—the sign above the door read
Edicola Moderna
.
    Giuseppe entered and browsed magazines while the old man behind the counter announced he was closing for lunch. Once the shop was empty of customers, the old man looked at him and