SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 8:22 A.M.

PERNAZZO WAS ON the point of turning on the engine and driving away when his target, arm in a sling, appeared in front of the apartment building. Pernazzo took Alleva’s Davis P-32 out of Clemente’s backpack and climbed out, but held back to calculate line of sight, distance, and pace. The front door of the building opened again and a woman stepped out. She fell in beside the target and linked her arm through his good arm. The woman was an unforeseen element, but as she was blocking the commissioner’s only means of defense, her presence was almost certainly an advantage.

He would simply walk up behind them and plug the two bullets into the back of his head, and plant the third one in his face if he came down backward—at the top of his spine if he went down forward. The woman would scream. Maybe two-two, one-one would be the best combination.

Clack-clack, then people would look round in mild surprise and hear a soft pop, then another. He’d see the stupid looks of puzzlement on the faces of the passersby, like when he did that idiot outside the pizzeria. There would be disapproving frowns at the two people suddenly lolling on the sidewalk, then a gradual reappraisal and alarm. Some would even smile, as if recognizing something.

Pernazzo stayed on the opposite side and allowed Blume and the woman to remain thirty paces ahead. Outside mobile telephone shops and take-out pizza outlets, entire committees of early-rising Sunday time-wasters loitered on the sidewalk.

He glanced up and down the street and made a rapid count of the people he could see. Apart from the targets, he could see a pair of girls walking toward them and him, five people standing outside or ready to enter their apartment buildings, four or maybe five people behind him.

The bright marble statues of Jesus and John the Baptist poised on the top of the facade of San Giovanni were visible at the end of the street, their arms raised as if in gentle appeal to the traffic below to shut the fuck up just for once.

Pernazzo crossed over to the same side of the street as his two targets and picked up his pace. A small knot of bus and tram drivers in blue stood on the sidewalk, for no visible purpose, and he passed them by rapidly. A fat man with a small dog stared at Pernazzo as he hurried by. Pernazzo stared at the dog, which was crapping right in the middle of the sidewalk. Four people, now five as a man with a plastic case came out of an apartment building, turned, and walked out of the scope of his vision. Twenty paces away now. Four people were between him and them.

Pernazzo skipped slightly as he increased his pace, closing the gap to ten paces, then flapped out his shirt and slipped in his hand beneath. He felt the grainy polymer grip, at body temperature. He was close enough now to hear them and noticed they were speaking English.

The commissioner with the broken arm was on the right, nearest the road. He had placed his good arm lightly against the small of the woman’s back, as if ushering her into a room.

Trying to keep the movements fluid and leisurely, he extracted his firearm, cupped the grip with his left hand, and raised his arms, his finger already tightening around the trigger. It was a headshot from three paces.

Blume would go down, the woman would half-turn around, and he would blow a hole through her temporal lobe.

The moment he felt the blow under his wrist, he knew it was the woman who had hit him. He knew it because it was the lightest of blows, no more than a tap, but she had somehow managed to push his shooting arm up. As he brought it down again, adjusting his aim to shoot her first, her arm flashed out again, and made contact, harder this time, again with his wrist. It hurt no more than the last one, but to his intense surprise and rage, he felt his fingers jerk open and release the pistol. He tried to catch it with his left hand before it hit the ground, but even as he bent down slightly, he heard the blank clink of the Parkerized metal hitting the pavement. In the split second he was standing there with his left arm dangling stupidly between his knees groping for the pistol, she hit him twice. Even now, she was not inflicting any pain. It was as if she had stroked his face with the back of her hand. Pulling himself up again to full height, he found that the lumbering cop had finally maneuvered himself around and was now staring at him, a look of amazement on his face. Then she stuck her fingers into his eyes and the commissioner’s face was replaced with triangles of blinding pain. With a roar, he flung himself at her, ready to bite if need be, but came to a total standstill when she punched him in the throat, then pushed the flat of her hand into his nose.

His pistol was lying on the ground, and she would probably get to it first. It was a lost fight. He stepped back, just in time to avoid taking the full brunt of another white elbow in the throat. Her hair collected the light as she stepped forward after him and delivered a punch to the side of his head, which he managed to parry with his left hand with the result that his hand bitch-slapped the side of his own face.

A flash of red to his left warned him of another attack, and he realized she was preparing to use her leg this time, while the cop was now coming at him straight on, struggling to get his arm out of its sling.

Pernazzo saw his chance. Dropping his right shoulder, he wheeled his left leg around and smashed it into the cop’s right ankle. The impact caused Pernazzo’s cotton espadrille to fly off. As the cop staggered to regain his balance, waving his broken arm in a narrow useless circle, Pernazzo jerked upright out of his crouch and back-smashed his elbow into the side of the cop’s face, sending him lunging sideways into the woman.

Then he ran straight off the sidewalk and diagonally across the road, losing his second espadrille. A car whipped by him at high speed, inches from his feet and stomach. A horn blast sounded in his ears, and behind the horn, he heard a shushing noise and someone’s tires failed to find purchase on the asphalt. As he reached the other side, a scooter horn squawked at him, and the driver seemed to swerve with the intention of running him down.

Kristin stayed Blume’s sideways fall to the ground, but she allowed him to hit the concrete nonetheless. She jumped over him, landed, and hunkered down without losing sight of the pistol, which lay next to a piece of pink bubblegum. She snatched the pistol off the ground, tossed it to her other hand, and drew a bead on the small white head of the assailant before it ducked into the traffic.

Blume made an exclamation and she swiveled around, fearing he might be under attack from some other quarter, but realized he was referring in some way to her handling of the weapon. She snapped her head and shoulders back again to take aim, but she had lost vital seconds. She could not fire into the traffic. She held her aim, watching as the assailant ran almost headlong into a speeding car. Had she fired, the bullet could easily have hit the vehicle. Serve the asshole right for driving like that in a built-up area.

The assailant was now on the other side of the street and running parallel to the old Roman wall. A missed shot would bury itself into ancient Roman history rather than straying into a passerby, she reflected. She moved the pistol fractionally upward. If the traffic let up, she would have a clear shot, and she would not miss. If the traffic let up. He had put thirty-five meters between them. She saw the breach in the walls to which he was headed. It was maybe seventy-five or eighty meters away and required a leading shot against a moving target. It was beyond the limit of a handgun of this type.

Even so, she realigned. As she did so, a red and gray Number 85 bus heaved into sight and stopped on the far side of the road.

“Kristin!” Blume was standing beside her now. She lowered the weapon, and turned to him. A semicircle of shocked pedestrians had come to a halt several meters away, and was bunched up in a group, afraid to go near the English-speaking couple standing in the middle of the street brandishing a weapon.

Casually, in full view of everyone, Kristin wiped the gray metal against her white blouse. It left a dark stain. She placed the weapon on the ground.

“His fingerprints,” he protested.

“We know who that was,” she replied.

Blume shouted out again, turning as he did so to trace an exclusionary arc around himself and Kristin as more people were drawn toward the commotion.

“Kristin, listen,” he said. “You may want to walk away from this. Just walk away. What ever you want. But decide now, because a patrol car is coming up behind you. Do you want to be a character in the story I am about to tell the patrolmen?”

“No. It would be easier if I wasn’t.”

“I agree. Will you meet me tonight?”

“OK.”

“It’s possible I won’t make it. Depends how this pans out. I’ll let you know. Also, can you avoid going home?”

“I need to change.”

“Pernazzo might know where you live,” said Blume.

“I don’t see why. And too bad for him if he does.”