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Dead . . . Middleton felt a fierce urge to call Leonora and tell her.

“When I learned of your connection with the piano tuner and the death on the same day of the war criminal you’d had arrested, I had sent to me a prison security camera picture of the probable murderer. I showed the picture to a witness we located who saw the likely suspect leaving the Old Market Square recital hall last night.”

“It’s the same man?”

“She said with certainty that it was.” Padlo indulged again and lit a Sobieski. “You seem to be the hub of this strange wheel, Mr. Middleton. A man kills Rugova and his wife and then tortures and kills a man you’ve just met with. So, now, you and I are entwined in this matter.”

It was then that a young uniformed officer arrived carrying an envelope. He placed it on the inspector’s desk.

“Dzenkuje,” Padlo said.

The aide nodded and, after glancing at the American, vanished.

The inspector handed the photos to Middleton, who looked down at them. “Oh, my God.” He sucked cigarette-smoke-tainted air deep into his lungs.

“What?” Padlo asked, seeing his reaction. “Was he someone you know from your investigation of Rugova?”

The American looked up. “This man . . . He was sitting next to me at Krakow airport. He was taking my flight to Paris.” The man in the ugly checked jacket.

“No! Are you certain?”

“Yes. He must’ve killed Henryk to find out where I was going.”

And in a shocking instant it was clear. Someone—this man or Faust, or perhaps he was Faust—was after Middleton and the other Volunteers.

Why? For revenge? Did he fear something? Was there some other reason? And why would he kill Rugova?

The American jabbed his finger at the phone. “Did he get on the flight to Paris? Has it landed? Find out now.”

Padlo’s tongue touched the corner of his mouth. He lifted the receiver and spoke in such rapid Polish that Middleton couldn’t follow the conversation.

Finally the inspector hung up. “Yes, it’s landed and everyone has disembarked. Other than you, everyone with a boarding pass was on the flight. But after that? They don’t know. They’ll check the flight manifest against passport control at De Gaulle—if he left the airport. And outgoing flight manifests in case he continued in transit.”

Middleton shook his head. “He’s changed identity by now. He saw me detained and he’s using a new passport.”

The inspector said, “He could be on his way to anywhere in the world.”

But he wasn’t, Middleton knew. The only question was this: Was he en route to Africa to find Tesla at her relief agency? Or to the States, where Lespasse ran a very successful computer company and Brocco edited the Human Rights Observer newsletter?

Or was he on a different flight headed to D.C., where Middleton himself lived?

Then his legs went weak.

As he recalled that, showing off proud pictures, he’d told the piano tuner that his daughter lived in the D.C. area.

What a lovely young woman, and her husband, so handsome. . . . They seem so happy.

Middleton leapt to his feet. “I have to get home. And if you try to stop me, I’ll call the embassy.” He strode toward the door.

“Wait,” Padlo said sharply.

Middleton spun around. “I’m warning you. Do not try to stop me. If you do—”

“No, no, I only mean. . . . Here.” He stepped forward and handed the American his passport. Then he touched Middleton’s arm. “Please. I want this man too. He killed three of my citizens. I want him badly. Remember that.”

He believed the inspector said something else but by then Middleton was jogging hard down the endless hall, as gray as the offices, as gray as the sky, digging into his pocket for his cell phone.

2

DAVID HEWSON

F
elicia Kaminski first noticed the tramp outside the Pantheon when she was playing gypsy folk tunes, old Roman favorites, anything that could put a few coins in the battered gray violin case she had inherited from her mother, along with the century-old, sweet-toned Italian instrument that lived inside. The man listened for more than 10 minutes, watching her all the time. Then he walked up close, so close she could smell the cloud of sweat and humanity that hung around people of the street, not that they ever seemed to notice.

“I wanna hear ‘Volarè,’” he grumbled in English, his voice rough and carrying an accent she couldn’t quite place. He held a crumpled and dirt-stained 10-euro note. He was perhaps 35, though it was difficult to be precise. He stood at least six feet tall, muscular, almost athletic, though the thought seemed ridiculous.

“‘Volarè’ is a song, sir, not a piece of violin music,” she responded, with more teenage ungraciousness than was, perhaps, wise.

His face, as much as she could see behind the black unkempt beard, seemed sharp and observant. More so, it occurred to her, than most street people who were either elderly Italians thrown out of their homes by harsh times, or foreign clandestini, Iraqis, Africans and all manner of nationalities from the Balkans, each keeping their own counsel, each trying to pursue their own particular course through the dark, half-secret hidden economy for those trying to survive without papers.

There were other more pressing reasons that made hers a bold and unwise response. The money her uncle had given her had not been much to begin with, though more generous than his meager living as a Warsaw piano tuner ought to have allowed. Two months before, on the day she turned 19, he had abruptly announced that his role as her guardian was finished, and that it was time to seek a new life in the west. She chose Italy because she wanted warm weather and beauty, and refused to follow the stream of Poles migrating to England. The grubby, slow bus to Rome had cost 50 euros, and the room in a squalid student house in San Giovanni swallowed up a further 200 each week, as did the language-school lessons in Italian. Her adequate English meant she could get some bar work but only in tourist dives at what the owners called “the Polish rate”—four euros an hour, less than the legal minimum wage. She ate like a sparrow, pizza rustica, precooked, often disgusting, but less than two euros a slice. She never went out and had yet to make a friend. Still each week the money from Uncle Henryk went down a little further. She could not, in all conscience, call and ask for more.

“I know it’s a song,” the tramp replied with an unpleasant sneer on his half-hidden face. Then he crooned a line of it, in the voice of a long-dead American singer she’d heard when her mother and father played music on their cheap hi-fi to remind themselves of their days in the States, before they returned to a new, free Poland in search of different lives. The name of the singer came back to her: Dean Martin. And the tune too, so she played it, pitch perfect, from memory, improvising a little after the fashion of Stéphane Grappelli, putting a leisurely jazz swing on each inflected run of notes until the original was only just recognizable.

She was good at the fiddle. Sometimes, if she was bored or there seemed to be someone musical in her audience, she would pull out some sheet music stuffed into the case, ask a spectator to hold it, then play Wieniawski’s Obertass mazurka, with its leaping fireworks of double stopping, harmonics and left-hand pizzicato. Both of her parents were musical, her mother a violinist, her father an accomplished pianist. Together they had provided her with a musical education from before she could remember, in a household where music was as natural and easy as laughter, right up until the black day they disappeared and she found herself under the wing of Uncle Henryk.

The tramp stared at her as if she’d committed a sin.

“You screwed with it,” he spat. “Bad girl. You ought to know your place.” He stared at his own clothes: a grimy overcoat that stank of sweat and urine, with a belt made, perhaps a little theatrically, out of rope. “One little step up from me. Nothing more.”

Then he threw a single euro in her violin case and stomped off toward Largo Argentina, the open space where she used to catch the bus back home, fascinated always by the wrecked collection of ancient temples there—a ragged, shapeless gathering of columns and stones populated by a yowling community of feral cats, a piece of history only she and the passing tourists seemed to notice any more. She didn’t like cats. They were bold, aggressive, insistent, climbing into her fiddle case when it was open to collect money. So she kept a small water pistol, modeled on something military, alongside her music and rosin, and used it to shoo them away when the creatures became too persistent.

The bum caught up with her four times after that. Twice at the Trevi Fountain. Once in the Campo dei Fiori. Once outside the new museum for the Ara Pacis, the peace monument erected by Augustus that now lived in a modern, cubist home by the hectic road running alongside the Tiber. She was surprised to see him there. It didn’t seem the usual kind of place for street people, and she caught him staring through the windows, engrossed in the beautifully carved monument inside she had only glimpsed from the street too, since paying the entrance fee was beyond her. Homeless men rarely looked at Imperial Roman statuary, she thought. Most of them never looked much at anything at all.

And now he was back near her again—on this hot, sunny summer morning in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure at the weekly market her uncle had told her about. It took place at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi—the street of Poles—and made her homesick every time she went. This was where the poor, migrant Polish community gathered in an impromptu bazaar that was part economic necessity, part reaffirmation of their distant roots. There were cars and vans, all rusty, all belching diesel as they arrived bearing plates from Warsaw and Gdansk. Quickly, not wishing to draw the attention of the police, they threw open their doors and trunks and began selling all the goods that Polish immigrants could not find or, more likely, afford in their new home: spirits and sausage, ham and pastries; some clearly homemade, a few possibly illegal.

Felicia knew none of these people. But sometimes the poor were the most generous, particularly when they knew she was Polish too, alone in the city, still a little lost. The Berlin Wall had tumbled to the ground when she was 12 months old, an infant in some small apartment in a suburb of Chicago. She knew this because her parents had told her so often of the joy that followed. Of their own expectant return to the country they had fled in order to throw off the shackles of Communism.

There had always been a shadow in their eyes when they spoke of that decision. As she grew older she knew why. When they left Poland it was a world of black and white, and they returned to one that was a shifting shade of gray. The bad days before she was born was a time of secret police and cruel, arbitrary punishment of dissent, but no one had to travel thousands of miles to a distant country to earn a living. They said something good had been lost alongside the visible, more easily acknowledged bad. Talking to the old men and women who gathered at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi she had come to realize there was a gulf between them and her that could never be bridged, a strange sense of guilty loss she could never share. Yet there was a bond too. She was Polish, she was poor. When she played the right notes—a mazurka, a polonaise—there were misty eyes all around and a constant shower of small coins into the fiddle case.

And on this day there was the tramp too, with a hateful look in his eyes, one that said, she believed . . . shame on you, shame on you.

As she bowed a slow country dance she told herself that, if he continued with these attentions, she would upbraid him, loudly, in public, with no fear. Who was a tramp to talk to anyone of shame? What gave him the right? . . .

Then, feeling a hand on her shoulder, she ceased playing and turned to find herself staring into the amiable, bright blue eyes of a middle-aged man in a gray suit. He had a pale, fleshy face with stubbly red cheeks, receding fair hair and the easy, confident demeanor of someone official, like a civil servant or a school headmaster.

“You play beautifully, Felicia,” he said in Polish.

“Do I know you?”

He took out an ID card from his jacket and flashed it in front of her face, too quickly for her to make much sense of the words there.

“No. I am a Polish police officer on attachment here in Rome. There is no need for you to know me.”

She must have looked startled. He placed a hand on her arm and said, in a voice full of reassurance, “Do not be alarmed. There is nothing for you to worry about.” His genial face fell. “I am simply performing an unhappy task which falls to this profession from time to time. Come, I will buy coffee. There is a small place around the corner.”

The man had such a pleasant air of authority that she followed him automatically into the Via dei Polacchi, even though she couldn’t remember any cafe in this direction.

They were halfway along when he stopped her in the shadow of an overhanging building. There was such sadness in his eyes, a sense of regret too.

“I am sorry,” he said in his low, calm voice. “There is no easy way to say this. Your uncle Henryk has been killed.”

Her stomach clenched. Her eyes began to sting. “Killed?”

“Murdered, as he worked. With two other people too. Such a world we live in.”

“In Warsaw?”

He shrugged. “This would never have happened before. Not in the old days. People then had too much respect. Too much fear.”

There were so many questions, and none of them would form themselves into a sensible sentence in Felicia’s mind. “I must go home,” she said finally.

The man was silent for a moment, thinking, a different expression in his eyes, one she couldn’t work out.

“You can’t afford to go home,” he observed, frowning. “What’s there for you anyway? It was never your country. Not really.”

The narrow street was empty. A cloud had skittered across the bright summer sun casting the entire area into sudden gloom.

“I can afford a bus ride,” she answered, suddenly cross.

“No you can’t,” he replied, and took her by both arms. He was strong. His blue eyes now burned, insistent, demanding. “What did your uncle give you? To come here?”

She tried to shake herself free. It was impossible. His grip was too firm.

“Some money . . . Two thousand euros. It was all he had.”

“Not money,” the man barked at her, his voice rising in volume. “I’m not talking money.”

He turned his elbow so that his forearm fell beneath her throat and pinned her against the wall as he snatched her fiddle case with his free hand. Then he quickly bent down, flipped up the single latch with his teeth and scrabbled open the lid.

“This is a pauper’s instrument,” he grumbled, and flinging the fiddle to the ground. Crumpled sheets of music followed, fluttering to the cobblestones like leaves in autumn. “What did he give you?”

“Nothing. Nothing . . . ”

She stopped. He had discarded the bow and her last piece of rosin, and now had her one remaining spare string, a Thomastik-Infeld Dominant A, in his fingers. He took away his elbow. Before she could run off, he jerked her back and punched her hard in the stomach. The breath disappeared from her lungs. Tears of pain and rage and fear rose in her eyes.

As she began to recover, she saw he had turned the fiddle string into a noose and felt it slip over her head, pushing it down until it rested on her neck. He pulled it, not so tight, only so much that she could feel the familiar wound metal become a cold ligature around her throat.

“Poor little lost girl,” he whispered, his breath rank and hot in her ear. “No home. No friends. No future. One last time . . . What did he give you?”

“Nothing . . . Nothing . . . ”

The Thomastik-Infeld Dominant A started to tighten. She was aware of her own breathing, the short, repetitive muscular motion one always took for granted. His face grew huge in her vision. He was smiling. This was, she now realized, the result he wished all along.

Then the smile faded. A low, animal grunt issued from his mouth. His body fell forward, crushing hers against the wall, and a crimson spurt of blood began to gush from between his clenched teeth. She turned her head to avoid the red stream now flowing down his chin, and clawed at the noose on her throat, loosening it, forcing the deadly loop over her hair until it was free and she could manage to drag it over her head.

Something thrust the gray-suited man aside. The tramp was there. A long stiletto knife sat in his right fist, its entire length red with gore.

He dropped the weapon and held out his hand.

“Come with me now,” he said. “There are three of them in a car round the corner. They won’t wait long.”

“Who are you?” she mumbled, her head reeling, breath still short.

A car was starting to turn into the narrow street, finding it too difficult to make the corner in one go. The cloud worked free of the sun. Bright, blinding light filled the area around them, enough to make their presence known. She heard Polish voices and other accents, ones she didn’t recognize. They sounded angry.

“If you stay here you will die,” the tramp insisted. “Like your uncle. Like your mother and your father. Come with me . . . ”

She bent down and picked up her fiddle and bow, roughly pushing them into the case, along with the scrappy sheets of music.

And then they ran.

He had a scooter round the corner. A brand new purple Vespa with a rental sticker on the rear mudguard. She climbed on the back automatically, hanging tight, the fiddle case still in her grip, as he roared through the narrow lanes trying to lose the vehicle behind.

It wasn’t easy. She turned her head and saw the car bouncing off the ancient stone walls of the quarter, following them down narrow alleys the wrong way. She knew this area. It was one of her favorites for its unexpected sights and the way the buildings ranged across the centuries, sometimes as far back as the age of Caesar.