Half past one, and Achille Vaccaro's spare room is a bed, a chair with a shirt over it, and a window painted shut over a fire escape with the ladder gone. The name-day party is still going through the floor: the bass, a bottle going over, Giulia laughing on the stairs and then gone from them. The deadbolt turned from the outside forty minutes ago and the key is in Giulia's pocket.

Pio Trevisan sits on the floor with his back against the wardrobe, white shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled over forearms still dusted with flour. Steel watch on one wrist, a knot of string on the other. He has not looked at the bed, and the bed is the only place to sit.

He says it to the wardrobe.

You have known him since you were eleven. You have not been alone in a room with him since the summer your dog went out through the gate he left open.

He looks up at last, and it is the face he uses for the whole street, flat and unhurried.

He pulls the chair over with one foot and sets it down in the middle of the floor, an arm's length from both of you.

The chair legs scrape. He waits beside it with his hands loose at his sides.