SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2 P.M.

STAY THE RE,” WAS all the man with no ears said. Then he called downstairs. “Will someone come up here and take a look?”

“Coming.” A woman’s voice.

Pernazzo considered hurling himself at the man in the doorway, but he felt rooted to the spot. The man with no ears and bored eyes looked impregnable. Then he stepped aside and Pernazzo saw a raw-faced woman with peroxide hair who chewed gum as she studied his face. He had seen her somewhere before.

“Are you Pernazzo?”

“No.”

On Di Tivoli’s documentary show. That’s where he had seen her.

Manuela Innocenzi.

“Yes, you are,” she said, then turned around and walked out.

Pernazzo made a half movement after her, but the man with no ears stepped to close off the door. There was at least one other person in the corridor.

“Hey. Wait a minute,” said Pernazzo. “Maybe there’s been a mistake. Who do you think I am?”

No reply.

Surreptitiously, he felt around the washstand for the scissors, but then remembered they were in the bedroom, and they belonged to a child and were small and blunt.

He heard the sound of someone shuffling slowly across the landing and into his bedroom. Again, Pernazzo considered rushing the man with no ears, but found his feet would not respond.

“Come here,” ordered the man in the doorway. “Come on,” he added in an exasperated and half-cajoling voice when Pernazzo did not move. “I don’t want to have to drag you out by the ears. In there,” said his captor. He gave him a gentle push into the bedroom and stood by the door. Sitting on the bed, leafing idly through the passports, was the woman again. Pernazzo felt his sweat soak through the entire back of his shirt. He had to try to gain a negotiating position. He nodded at the passports, and tried to fix a knowing smile on his face, but she did not glance up.

“Pretty good, aren’t they?”

She threw a glance in his direction, as if checking to see where the unexpected noise had come from, then put down the passports and pulled out some Transcend memory sticks from the bag.

“Ah, now those. Those are special,” he tried, but she had already lost interest, and was now peering with one eye at a circular metal die contained in a transparent plastic disc. Pernazzo recognized it as the one with the British crown and lion.

“That’s the relief die for the British passport. The recessed die is in another case,” he offered.

Manuela Innocenzi put the metal circle down on the bed, and picked up one of the five sheets of numbers.

“That’s just backup. In case something goes wrong with the memory sticks, which could never happen. With these numbers I can reconstruct bank account numbers and telephone contacts.”

She took out the Ka-Bar Tanto, and examined its hilt. She took it out of its sheath, and turned it back and forth as if looking for blemishes on the blade. He realized he should never have kept that knife, no matter how important it was to him.

Pernazzo stared at a Star Wars bedside mat on the floor beside the bed. C3P0 had his hand raised in greeting.

“How did you find me?” All at once, this was all he wanted to know.

She ignored the question, but spoke at last. “You had no reason to do all these things. You had a choice. I was born into it, and I tried to move above, without hurting my father’s feelings. Arturo was my last chance to change. I would have made it, too. I’d have got away. Escaped into goodness.”

Pernazzo had no idea what the ugly woman was talking about, but he was in no doubt of her power.

She said, “You killed Arturo with this,” and gently waved her hand to forestall any protests. “And you kept it because you are proud of what you did. Arturo and I had a deep sense of justice. Know that? It’s what we had in common.”

Pernazzo felt a shadow move down his head and body as hope drained away.

“This is yours, too?” Her voice sounded tender. Pernazzo looked down and saw she had placed Alleva’s undersized pistol on the child’s bed. “Not this backpack, though. This was his. I remember he used it to bring a packed lunch. He was always walking or cycling, always had this bag. He kept a book for identifying flowers in it. Not just flowers. He was enthusiastic even about weeds, grass.”

Pernazzo looked at a world map on the bedroom wall. It curled at the edges. The Soviet Union still existed. Argentina was green, Brazil orange, Chile pink. His feet were cold.

“How did you find me?”

“We all get found out in the end.”

Pernazzo found himself in the corridor, the earless old man behind him. He moved down the staircase as if it were an escalator. At the bottom of the steps stood a youth in a white tracksuit, who looked hardly older than a child. He had a bum-fluff moustache, a hairless chest, and doe-like eyes. He was also holding a pistol and pointing it casually at Pernazzo’s heart. It was an elegant model, like Massoni’s.

The kid seemed nice enough. Pernazzo looked slowly to his right. The raw-faced woman had sat down, her big feet pointed in his direction. She was twisting something in her hands and staring at him with her small blue eyes, never taking them off him, all the time working the gum in her jaw. The old man’s phone rang, he pressed it to his mutilated ear, murmured something about five minutes, put it away.

“Move,” commanded the boy. They left by the front door, and the boy suddenly gave him a hard shove, as if the house had kept him polite and he was only now coming into his element. Pernazzo slipped on the grass, went sprawling forward, and considered breaking into a sprint, but the boy was just behind him with his long-barreled pistol. Pernazzo saw two four-by-four vehicles parked in front of the gate. How had he not heard? They circled the house, and he was in the back garden again. There was the broken window, the shining glass shards.

As they approached the thicket at the end of the garden, he tensed, ready to make a break for it, but though the top of his body felt light and ready to burst into flight, the lower part seemed to be wading through water. The youth whispered “Stop,” and his voice was so close that Pernazzo felt the hairs in his ears tingle.

Pernazzo walked on a few paces, wondering whether his mother could see him now.

“I said ‘stop.’ ” There was no annoyance in the soft voice.

Using the energy surging through the upper part of his body, Pernazzo bent down and grabbed a broken elm branch, but it was as light as cork. He spun around, stick in hand, but the kid was five paces behind and out of reach. He didn’t even seem to have noticed Pernazzo’s weapon.

“Wait a minute!” said Pernazzo. He raised the rotten stick above his head. “This is too light. I need . . .”

“What?”

But Pernazzo could not think of anything to say.

The kid shot him through the right elbow. When he heard the crack, Pernazzo thought the wood had exploded over his head. And, then, suddenly, the pain was so bad he wanted to tear off his right arm with his left.

The next bullet buried itself in his kneecap and did not come out. As he went down, he felt vomit rise from his throat, and when he hit the ground he sucked it all back in again and couldn’t breathe. He wriggled over onto his side and dislodged enough to be able to gasp for air. Something infinitely strong and merciless grabbed his shattered arm and pulled, causing the agony to move from his elbow to his entire body. Far above him stood the darkened face of the young man and above him a blue sky with clouds like faint chalk marks.

Pernazzo had not planned for the pain. It left him no chance of clarity. Most of all, it was not fair. He had no chance, lying there. A distant idea was beginning to form in his mind, somewhere behind the pain. He would need some time to work it through. Time to recover. It had something to do with change. He was sure it was going to be a beautiful idea.

“Wait,” said Pernazzo, “I think I may . . .”

The young man in the white tracksuit shot Pernazzo twice in the forehead, putting an immediate end to the thrashing movements. He used his foot to push the scrawny corpse over and, never one to take a gamble, delivered two more shots to the back of the head.