FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 12:30 P.M.

HAVING REMAINED DETACHED and efficient while killing Clemente, and having successfully battled down an onrush of nausea at the scene, Angelo Pernazzo was disappointed that he threw up as soon as he arrived home. It was the tension, especially on the drive back, he decided. He wiped the toilet rim with some tissue, filled the bath with tepid water and lay in it for an hour until the water was cold and gray. Then he put all his clothes in the washing machine, poured in bleach and washing powder, and set it at the highest temperature. Whatever did not survive, he would throw out. He put on a pair of elasticized gray tracksuit bottoms, a pair of cotton espadrilles, and a red V-neck Roma football shirt. He ate some Ringo chocolate cream cookies, drank a Diet Coke and felt better.

He wiped down the knife with a rag soaked in pink denatured alcohol, enjoying the smell and the glint. Then he put it on his desk next to his computer. That is where he had always kept it since he bought it at a martial arts shop outside the train station in Ostia, nine months ago. He had impressed them, walking in out of the rain, ignoring all the shit on display, asking for a Ka-Bar Tanto that he knew they would have to order from Japan.

Exactly on time, he took his scheduled twenty-minute sleep. When he awoke, he climbed off the sofa with the same sort of feeling he used to get on his birthday morning, when he knew his mother would be waiting in the kitchen with precisely whatever gift he had asked for. The last gift she had given him was a silver bracelet with his name inscribed on it. This was his first birthday without her, but if Massoni came through on his promise, today Pernazzo would finally get himself a pistol.

He had asked for a Colt Python, but Massoni had laughed at him.

Eventually Massoni agreed to get him a Glock, in exchange for which he wanted Pernazzo to do him a little favor, which was to go to Clemente, tell him to back off, stop disrupting the shows.

“You want me to take him a message from Alleva?” Pernazzo had asked.

“No. Just tell him to back off. Don’t say who the message is from.”

“I could say it was from myself.”

“And how would that work, Angelo? Are you going to threaten the man? Just deliver the message. No source, just a warning. Think you can do that?”

Once Pernazzo had done this favor, Massoni promised, he would get his gun. For fifteen hundred euros. Angelo knew it was five times as much as it was worth, and Massoni knew he knew.

Pernazzo’s first real contact with Massoni had been a fist in the stomach. That was eighteen months ago.

His mother was still dying in her bedroom, and the doorbell had rung. He answered to a massive man with a blue tattoo on his neck. Massoni asked Pernazzo to identify himself and, when Pernazzo did, punched him directly in the solar plexus.

Pernazzo had never received a punch like that. As he lay on the floor, all he could think of was that he needed to breathe in, but couldn’t. The blow had scrambled his thoughts, which re-formed into a single imperative: breathe. His brain started screaming the command, his limbs began to thrash as he tried to obey. Perhaps the worst of it was that he could not make a sound. He lay there jerking, mouth open like a fish, agonizing in total silence. No one had hurt him physically before. Then, finally, the air came whooshing in, making him hoot, gasp, and hoot again. By the time he had finished hooting, he could hear his mother’s anxious voice from the bedroom asking if that was him.

Massoni had taken apart the living room, the bedroom, kitchen. He had done it professionally and quietly. Pernazzo saw he had looked in several places where he had hidden money in the past.

“Where is it?” Massoni had asked without even turning round, as Pernazzo staggered in behind him.

“I haven’t got it. You said to have it for this afternoon. It’s still morning.”

“If you don’t have it now, you won’t have it in the afternoon.”

“Yes, I will. I was paid for a Web site. Bank transfer the other day. The money’s in the bank.”

Massoni went over to the door leading into Pernazzo’s mother’s bedroom. As he reached it, he paused and turned around to look at Pernazzo.

“What’s in there?”

“My mother.”

“And maybe the five thousand you owe Alleva? Five thousand eight as it now is.”

“No, it’s not in there. She’s very old. She’s dying.”

Massoni stepped back a little from the door.

“She could have heard that,” he said.

“She’s too doped to know, too much in pain to care.”

Massoni leaned over and practically plucked Pernazzo from the ground. “We’re going to the bank together. I hope for your sake you were telling the truth.”

Pernazzo had been telling the truth. He had been paid five thousand for a Web design, five thousand more for some JavaScript that wasn’t even very good, and a few hundred from another client for some style sheet templates.

His bank balance was eleven thousand euros, of which he owed twenty-two hundred in VAT immediately, and around four thousand more in taxes, payable in a few months. After paying off his fifty-eight-hundred-euro gambling debt to Alleva, he would be unable to cover his tax bill. Unless his mother died first.

Pernazzo came out of the bank that day with sixty-three hundred-euro notes. Massoni was waiting for him. He handed him fifty- eight notes. Massoni counted them three times. Pernazzo allowed him to walk away a bit, then called out. Massoni stopped, walked back over, fists clenched. As he reached him, Pernazzo deftly inserted five one-hundred bills into Massoni’s hand.

“That’s for not going into my mother’s bedroom. I appreciate it.”

Massoni looked at him, closed his fist around the money. He smiled contemptuously at Pernazzo.

Pernazzo smiled back. Massoni could be bought. It took longer than he expected, and he had to pay Massoni off a few times, but eventually, Massoni told him the underdog trick, and together they laid out a plan for placing a large bet against Alleva. Massoni said he would get some other friends involved.

After his bath, he sat by the phone and waited. After an hour and ten minutes, it rang.

“Did you take the message?” said Massoni not wasting time with preliminaries.

“I did,” said Pernazzo. He felt a catch in his throat, and wondered whether he was going to vomit again. But then he realized it was joy rising from his chest. He did not want to vomit: he wanted to sing, roar, laugh. Pernazzo hugged himself in glee.

“Did he say anything?”

Pernazzo thought back. Had Clemente said anything? He could only remember grunts and gasps and those wet sounds at the end.

“No.”

“Shit. If he brings journalists again we’ll have to cancel for months.”

“I don’t think he’ll bring any journalists to the dog fight tomorrow,” said Pernazzo.

“Did he say that?”

“Not exactly. This is shit you can’t explain on the phone.”

He left the phrase hanging there, but Massoni ignored it. “You got the money?”

“Yes.”

“OK. I’ll be around in an hour.”

Pernazzo sat waiting. Listening to the radio. There was no news of Clemente’s murder. He was scared of what Massoni might do if he found out, but he was dying to tell him, too.