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coming back in their direction. He beckoned to the doctor, and as he waited for him to approach said loudly to Massimo and the young man, “You two, make sure you’re available, I still have to interview you officially. I’ll send for you in the afternoon.”
    Â 
    â€œSo now you have to go see Fusco and be questioned?”
    By now the bar was empty, inside and outside. The people had all gone to the sea, there wouldn’t be anybody about until six in the evening, at which time they would arrive in groups of two or three to have a flatbread and a beer on the way back from the beach. Then, from seven until such time as it pleased the Almighty, life would begin. Letting his thoughts wander, Massimo imagined the scenes he would soon be seeing, the people he would greet. Every night, there were guys with gym-trained bodies and improbably tanned girlfriends, men from Livorno wearing vests over their naked chests and big gold medallions, and women so gorgeous and smooth and trim they could only be high-class hookers, and Massimo often found himself thinking they were all different but all identical, and then, as always, was irrationally ashamed of himself for pigeonholing such an interesting group.
    Sometimes he was so curious about these people that he felt like going up to them and getting into conversation, just to see what kind of people they were. He’d actually done so sometimes, and the experience hadn’t really been worth it.
    â€œPlanet Earth calling Massimo. Come in, Massimo!”
    Massimo gave a start. Aldo had been standing there with his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. Now he put them down and nodded at Massimo.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œSo now you have to go see Fusco?”
    â€œYes, in half an hour. Why?”
    â€œShouldn’t he come here?”
    Ampelio came to his aid. “Yes, he should. You’re working. If he just wants to ask you a couple of questions he could come here without the hassle of you having to go there! Don’t you think so?”
    Massimo smiled and shook his head. “Grandpa, he has to interview me at the station so that someone can take down my statement. And if he did come here, can you imagine? In ten minutes, the whole town would know everything the inspector knows. More, in fact. And don’t give me those martyred looks!”
    â€œWell . . . ” Pilade sprawled back on his chair, in the typical attitude of someone about to reveal something. He grabbed the pack of Stop cigarettes, took one out (how can you smoke something like that? Massimo always thought) and lit it as he started speaking, so that the cigarette between his lips bobbed up and down to the rhythm of the words. “You know the neat thing about this whole business, my dear Massimo? It’s that the town already knows more than the inspector. Firstly, because Fusco is a fool”—all those present nodded in unison—“and secondly, because if something happens in this town, to someone from the town, then someone else must know something about it. Maybe someone who saw something but doesn’t know what it meant. In my opinion, Massimo, Fusco should come to the bar and talk to all the people who drop in here, then go to see all the women in their homes, then go to the market, and so on. Nobody’ll go straight to him. But, I tell you, by the time I left home at ten past two my wife had already been on the phone for an hour and twenty minutes. And when I go home again you can be sure she’ll be pounding my eardrums with the murder.”
    Massimo laughed. Pilade was right: the old women’s brainstorming sessions were so fearsome that nobody would escape the deductions of all these would-be Miss Marples shut up at home telephoning everybody they knew.
    Just as long as they don’t accuse me, he thought.

THREE
    Name?”
“Massimo Viviani.”
“Born?”
    â€œOf course, or else I wouldn’t be