FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 5 P.M.

MASSONI SAT DOWN on a wooden-slat chair near Pernazzo’s desk. The chair let out a sharp crack. Massoni stood up, looked at it, and sat down more slowly. The chair held its own. He put a plastic bag on the floor, and lifted out a gray Puma shoebox, about to give way at the sides.

He slid the box across the floor toward Pernazzo, who had settled on the sofa. It hit something sticky on the floor, fell over and lost its lid. Inside, partly enveloped in a lint cloth, was a colorless Glock 22 that looked like it was fashioned from prison soap. Pernazzo bent down to retrieve it.

Massoni did not move a muscle.

Basically, Pernazzo was disappointed. The weapon did not look impressive. It did not even look real. He really did not want to part with fifteen bright green hundred-euro notes for this thing.

He picked it up. It was even lighter than he had imagined. With a sudden sense of panic, he wondered if it might not be a fake, and Massoni was brimming with silent laughter right now, dying to tell his friends about selling a toy gun for one and a half grand. Casually, he checked it. It looked real enough. He had read that all you had to do with a Glock was pull the strange double trigger.

“The money’s there, on the desk,” said Pernazzo. He watched as Massoni looked over, saw the envelope, and beside the envelope the magnificent knife. Now there was a real weapon. “Be back in a moment.”

Pernazzo took his gun, went to the kitchen and examined it more carefully. It was real. He exerted tiny pressure on the safety catch and trigger mechanism, and felt it begin to travel back. That’s all it would take. Then he opened the refrigerator, came back in with two tumblers and a one-and-a-half-liter plastic bottle of Fanta, his favorite drink.

“Want some?”

“No,” said Massoni.

Pernazzo twisted open the top, enjoyed the hiss and the gassy orange whiff, then poured himself a full glass. He put the glasses on the desk. The money was gone; the knife was in a different position.

He drank down his glass, holding the Glock by his side, in a natural way. He put down his glass, picked up the plastic bottle and carried it over to the sofa, and crammed it into the corner so that half of it was protruding from below the velveteen brown cushion. He leaned over, placed the barrel of the pistol right against the plastic and, as he had read he was supposed to do, squeezed rather than pulled the trigger.

The gun went click.

“You didn’t like your Fanta?” said Massoni.

Pernazzo kept his back turned. He could feel himself beginning to shake. He tried to modulate his voice, but the words came out vibrating with emotion. “The gun you sold me doesn’t even work!”

“It’s not loaded,” said Massoni. “Look.”

Pernazzo had to turn around now. He set a look of indifference on his face as he did so, but the grin on Massoni’s face almost made him lose it.

Massoni was holding out both hands. In one was a magazine clip, in the other a red and gray box.

“Bullets,” said Massoni. “Here.” His huge hand beckoned Pernazzo to give him back the pistol. Pernazzo thought about it, then surrendered the weapon.

Massoni popped out the magazine, inserted the new one, shook the box. “These are forty-caliber cartridges.” He opened the box, plucked out snub-nosed bullets and began pressing them into the empty magazine with his fat thumb. “Like this. Easy, see?”

“Just put them on the desk.”

Massoni did as asked, and said, “You’ve got to tell me what that move with the Fanta was about.”

“Give me back my gun first.”

Massoni held out the weapon, and Pernazzo snatched it. He let it hang in the air for a few seconds, its square-shaped barrel pointing causally toward Massoni’s crotch, kneecaps.

Eventually Massoni noticed, and said, “Careful.”

Pernazzo went back to the sofa. The weapon in his hand felt better balanced.

“Why do you want to shoot the bottle?” insisted Massoni.

“I want to test it.”

Massoni scraped his neck tattoo with his forefinger.

“Test what?”

“The Glock!”

“Against the Fanta, it is going to win.”

“The bottle is a silencer. You put the barrel up against a full plastic bottle and fire, it muffles the sound.”

Massoni pulled his head back in disbelief. “Who told you that?”

“None of your business.”

“You want to shoot that bottle on the sofa?”

Pernazzo began to raise the weapon slightly so that it was aiming at Massoni’s barge-like shoe.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll cover the whole place in fizzy orange.”

“That’s obvious,” said Pernazzo.

“Yeah, but you’ll blow a hole in the sofa, too.”

“So?”

“I don’t get it. Those are forty-caliber cartridges. You’ll probably smash a hole in the wall or floor, too, and the noise would be just as loud.”

“No, it won’t. The bottle will silence it.”

“No way. Not a forty-caliber in a closed room. You ever used a pistol in an enclosed space?”

Pernazzo looked at the large shape of Massoni, colorless against the bright window. His hand ached in sympathy with his imagination, which foresaw the Glock in his hand and himself standing in front of Massoni sprawled on the floor as he retrieved the money.

Massoni shrugged, “Whatever you want to think. Tell me about Clemente. Did you tell him we were watching him, his wife, his kid?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“I don’t even believe you went to his house,” said Massoni. “He probably wasn’t even in. Or maybe you chickened out when he answered the door. It doesn’t matter. We’ll find a proper way of persuading him.”

“I killed him,” said Pernazzo. “I got in and I killed the bastard. With that knife on the table, the one you just touched.”

Massoni moved away from the window, and the sunlight struck Pernazzo between the eyes, disorienting him and giving a strobe-light effect to Massoni’s movements. One moment he was at the window, next moment he seemed to have got across the floor in a single jerking movement and was standing in front of Pernazzo. He balled Pernazzo’s shirt in his fist, drew their faces together, then relaxed and said, “No. You’re kidding. In your dreams you killed a man.”

“That’s his bag there,” said Pernazzo pointing to a gray backpack near the desk.

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing. I used it for my clothes.”

“No, you didn’t. This isn’t some fantasy game.”

“I killed him. You’ll hear. It’ll be on TV and the radio.”

“No way,” said Massoni. “I was just messing with your head sending you there. You think we need you as messenger boy?”

“You couldn’t afford to go there yourself. It was too risky, so you sent me.”

“If we wanted to harm the guy, we’d have sent a real person. Jesus, you’re serious? How did you get in?”

“The building door downstairs was open, then I just knocked on his apartment door. He opened.”

“And you—what—you burst in and stabbed him?”

“A guy was delivering groceries. He had gone upstairs, left two boxes there. When the dog lover opened, he thought I was the grocery boy. Made it easier. Except I had to wait till I was sure the real grocery boy wasn’t going to knock on the door.”

“He was on his own?”

“Yes.”

“Thank Christ for small mercies. Do you know whose daughter he’s fucking? That’s why I couldn’t do it . . . Have you any idea what you’ve just done? What was so hard about dropping a few hints, like I said? I should—I should shoot you right now.”

But Massoni made no move to extract a weapon. Maybe he was not armed. Pernazzo tightened his grip on his own.

“I need to phone Alleva,” said Massoni. “This is unbelievable.”

“So phone him. It’s about time you and he started taking me seriously.”

Massoni pulled out a small folding cell phone, and stared at it doubt-fully. Pernazzo wondered how he managed to push fewer than ten buttons at a time with his sausage fingers.

Massoni eventually made his call. “Yeah, I know, unbelievable,” Pernazzo heard him say. He used the word three times.

When he had finished, he looked at Pernazzo and shook his head slowly from side to side—a gesture of admiring disbelief, Pernazzo felt.

“Are we going to see Alleva?”

“No. First, we check that this is true. You stay here. Don’t move from this house.”

“What about our bet for tomorrow night—the underdog fight?”

Massoni ran his hand through the hedgehog hair of his head. “You expect the dog fight to go ahead? After Clemente has been killed? The whole operation will close for months now.”

“Shit, I hadn’t thought about that,” said Pernazzo.

“Alleva’s going to hold you responsible for lost income. But that’s the least of your worries now.”

“We can do the underdog bet some other time, then,” said Pernazzo.

“Sure we can, Angelo. Sooner or later you’re going to be a big winner.”

“And you. You get thirty percent.”

“How could I forget?” said Massoni. “Stay in, remember? Answer the door to visitors. It’ll be me or maybe Alleva.”

He left.

Pernazzo spent the rest of the day monitoring the news. At eight, he took a scheduled twenty-minute nap and dreamed about his mother, as he did every night since the night he had helped her to die. He dreamed about Clemente, and he dreamed about the girl with the sleek hair running barefoot. He had met her in Second Life, or when he was in primary school. He couldn’t remember.

When he woke up, his eyes would not open and his body would not move when he commanded it, not that he wanted to. He felt as if his body were made of heavy metal, and the bed was magnetic but soft. He wished he could stay immobile and relaxed like that forever.

He thought he was awake because the radio was playing, but then he noticed it was talking about Clemente and Alleva, so he figured he must still be asleep. Then it was talking about the weather and a storm front making its way down south. Pernazzo sat up and realized he was back in real life.

He left the radio on while he worked on a new style sheet for the Web site of the local government offices of Genzano. It was pathetic. He knew Perl, and could make the deadest Web site interactive in a few days, but no one cared about quality. They would pay him two hundred euros. The plaque on the door had cost him a hundred fifty. It was meant to be an in-joke for a planned real-life meeting at his place with two Blood Elves, but they never showed up. Both made pathetic excuses that night when he met them online.

The radio did not mention Clemente again, so it must have been a dream.

Friday had become Saturday, and Saturday had unfolded hour by tedious hour and done nothing to celebrate Pernazzo’s new status. Meanwhile Pernazzo’s Uberman sleep schedule was going to hell. It was the tension of waiting and hearing nothing. Finally, at five in the evening, the radio reported on the killing of Clemente, husband of a respected Green Party MP. He hadn’t known that bit about the wife and was pleased. It enhanced the prestige.

At half past seven, the intercom buzzed and he went to answer it.

“Pernazzo?” said the voice.

It wasn’t Massoni. He did not recognize the voice. “Yes?”

“Angelo Pernazzo?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

And then the voice said, “Police.”