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murmured.
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘Any of them. The last one.’
    ‘Codreanu? King Carol had him killed in 1938. Two years later Antonescu overthrew the monarchy and turned the state into a dictatorship run by the Legion of the Archangel Michael, otherwise known as the Iron Guard.’
    Rodolfo yawned again and embraced her.
    ‘You’re Scheherazade, spinning me crazy stories to keep me awake all night. You and your Ruritania! I don’t believe the place even exists.’
    Flavia nodded.
    ‘It’s never been very real, particularly if you happened to be a “stateless alien” of Hungarian or Jewish origin. But it does exist. And some of the things that happened there definitely weren’t imaginary.’
    ‘Like what?’
    It was Flavia’s turn to rise, though with evident reluctance, to the perceived challenge.
    ‘Like the sealed rooms. They couldn’t afford gas chambers, so they just locked them up and left them to suffocate.’
    Rodolfo leaned over her and took a cigarette.
    ‘What’s all this got to do with Vincenzo, precisely?’ he enquired in the pedantic tone, unwittingly borrowed from Professor Ugo himself, that he employed in the latter’s classes.
    Flavia took a long time to answer, as though her reply had to travel all the way back from the planet she had been observing earlier, situated at a distance that made even light lame.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she said at last. ‘I know only that he is very strong. So am I, but I may not be here to take care of you. And you are not strong,
caro mio
. You’re very sweet and intelligent, but you’re weak. The man you are living with is none of those things. So be careful.’

4
    Gemma Santini stood in her nightdress, dispassionately surveying the ravages of time in the mirror above the dressing table. Not too bad, all things considered, was her conclusion. Some decorative details might have succumbed to wear and tear, and the odd patch of pediment gone missing, but the Goths and Vandals had yet to lay waste to everything in sight. In short, she still felt reasonably confident that she could get a date, if it should come to that.
    Which it very well might, she reflected. This was an uncomfortable thought, but Gemma had never felt at ease with anything but the truth, however inconvenient it might be. Facts had to be faced, whether they were the facts about her own face, as reflected in the bedroom mirror, or about the man in her life, as reflected in the kaleidoscopic sequence of grotesque and disturbing patterns into which their life together had recently disintegrated. Gemma took a modest pride in being a truth-teller who did not spare herself or others; a realist who, whatever mistakes she might make, could recognise them as such and learn to stop making them. And she was beginning to consider her relationship with Aurelio Zen as just such a mistake.
    Another characteristic of hers was that having come to this decision–or at least contemplated the possibility of doing so–she had not the slightest interest, unlike her partner, in endlessly analysing the hows, whats, whens and whys of the situation. At the same time she took a certain satisfaction from knowing that if she had chosen to play this game, she could have beaten Zen hollow. There were, for instance, two crucial factors involved of which he remained totally unaware. One he might be forgiven for, since it was a family matter which Gemma had kept from him. He had only himself to blame for his ignorance, however. If you make it abundantly clear that certain concerns of other people are of not the slightest interest to you, it is only to be expected that they will spare you any details of subsequent developments.
    The other factor was Zen’s hypochondria, in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing not only a morbid anxiety about his health but also chronic depression. Of this, Gemma had originally been as unaware as Zen still was that she herself might be going to become a grandmother. Looking back, she had