afternoon I walked along the Adige, beneath the trees of the riverside promenade, to the Castelvecchio. A sandy-coloured dog with a black mark like a patch over its left eye, that appeared like all stray dogs to run at an angle to the direction it was moving in, had attached itself to me outside the duomo, and now kept a steady distance ahead of me. If I paused to gaze down at the river, it paused as well and looked pensively at the flowing water. If I continued on my way, it too went on. But when I crossed the Corso Cavour by the Castelvecchio, it remained on the curb, and when I turned in the middle of the Corso to see where it was I narrowly escaped being run over. Once I was on the other side I wondered whether I should carry straight on through the Via Roma to the Piazza Bra, where I was meeting Salvatore Altamura, or should instead make the short detour through the Via San Silvestro and the Via dei Mutilati. All at once the dog, which had kept its eyes on me from the other side of the Corso, was gone, and so I turned down the Via Roma. I took my time, drifting along with the tide of people in the street, going into this shop and that and at length found myself opposite the Pizzeria Verona, from which I had fled headlong that November evening seven years before. The lettering over Carlo Cadavero's restaurant was still the same, but the entrance was boarded up, and the blinds on the upper floors were drawn, much as I had expected, as I realised in that instant. The image that had lodged in my mind when I fled Verona, and which had recurred time after time, with extreme clarity, before I was at last able to forget it, now presented itself to me again, strangely distorted — two men in black silver-buttoned tunics, who were carrying out from a rear courtyard a bier on which lay, under a floral-patterned drape, what was plainly the body of a human being. Whether this dark apparition was superimposed on reality for a mere moment or for much longer, I could not have said when my senses returned to the daylight and the people, quite unconcerned, passing the pizzeria, which had evidently been shut for some time. When I asked the photographer in the shop next door why the business had closed down, he was unwilling to say anything, nor could I persuade him to photograph the front of the building for me. To my questions and requests he merely responded by shaking his head, as if he did not understand me or was unable to speak. As I was turning to leave, imagining this deaf mute photographer at work in his dark room, I heard him utter a screed of savage curses behind my back, curses which seemed directed less at myself than at some incident which had happened in the restaurant next door. Out on the pavement I wandered irresolutely to and fro before at length I approached a passer-by who seemed suitable for my purpose, a young tourist who came from the Erlangen area, and asked him to take a photograph of the pizzeria for me, which he did, after some hesitation and after I had given him a ten mark note to cover the cost of sending the picture to England in due course. When,
however, I added an urgent request to photograph the flock of pigeons that had just flown from the piazza into the Via Roma, and had settled on the balcony rail and the roof of the building, the young Erlanger, who, as I now thought, might have been on honeymoon, was not prepared to oblige me a second time, probably, I suspected, because his newly-wed bride, who had been eyeing me the whole time with a distrusting and even hostile air and had not budged from his side even when he was taking the picture, was plucking impatiently at his sleeve.
When I arrived at the piazza, Salvatore was already sitting reading outside the bar with the green awning, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead and holding the book so close to his face that it was quite impossible to believe he could decipher anything at all. Taking care not to disturb him, I sat down. The book he was reading had a pink dust jacket bearing the portrait of a woman, in dark colours. Below the portrait, in lieu of a title, were the numbers ipi2+i. A waiter came to the table. He was wearing a long green apron. I ordered a double Fernet on the rocks. Salvatore had meanwhile laid his book aside and restored his glasses to their proper place. He explained apologetically that in the early evening when he had at last escaped the pressures of the daily round he would always turn to a book, even if he had left his reading glasses in the office, as he had today. Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane. He was sorry he had not noticed me right away, he said, but being short-sighted and also absorbed in Sciascias story had cut him off almost completely from what was going on around him. The story Sciascia was telling, he continued, as it were returning to the real world, was a fascinating synopsis of the years immediately before the First World War. At the centre of the narrative, which was more like an essay in form, was one Maria Oggioni nata Tiepolo, wife of a Capitano Ferrucio Oggioni, who on the 8th of November, 1912, shot her husband's batman, a bersagliere by the name of Quintilio Polimanti, in self-defence according to her own statement. At the time the newspapers naturally made a meal of the story, and the trial, which gripped the nation's imagination for weeks — since after all the accused was of the famous Venetian painter's family, as the press tirelessly repeated — this trial, which kept the entire nation on the edge of its seat, finally revealed no more than a truth familiar to everyone: that the law is not equal for all, and justice not just. Since Polimanti was no longer able to speak for himself, Signora Oggioni, whom everyone was soon calling Contessa Tiepolo, found it easy to win over the judges with that enigmatic smile of hers, a smile that promptly reminded journalists of the Mona Lisa's, as one can imagine, the more so since in 1913 La Gioconda was also in the headlines, having been discovered under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated her from her exile in the Louvre two years before and returned her to her native country. It is curious to observe, added Salvatore, how in that year everything was moving towards a single point, at which something would have to happen, whatever the cost. But you, he went on, were interested in a quite different story. And that story, to tell you the end of it first, has now almost reached its conclusion. The trial has been held. The verdict was thirty years. The appeal is due to be heard in Venice in the autumn. I do not think we can expect any new developments. Recently on the phone you said that you were more or less familiar with the story up to the autumn of 1980. The series of ghastly crimes continued after that time. That same autumn in Vicenza, a prostitute by the name of Maria Alice Beretta was killed with a hammer and an axe. Six months later, Luca Martinotti, a grammar school pupil from Verona, succumbed to injuries sustained when an Austrian casemate on the banks of the Etsch, used as a shelter by drug addicts, was torched. In July 1982, two monks, Mario Lovato and Giovanni Pigato, both of advanced years, on their customary walk of an evening round the quiet streets near their monastery, had their skulls smashed in with a heavy-duty hammer. After that killing, a Milan news agency received a letter from the Organizzazione Ludwig, which had already claimed responsibility for the crimes in the autumn of 1980, as you know. If I remember correctly, in the second letter the group claimed that their purpose in life was to destroy those who had betrayed God. In February, the body of a priest, Armando Bison, was found in the Trentino. He lay bludgeoned in his own blood, and a crucifix had been driven into the back of his neck. A further letter proclaimed that the power of Ludwig knew no bounds. In mid-May of the same year, a cinema in Milan, which showed pornographic films, went up in flames. Six men died. Their last picture show bore the title Lyla, profumo di femmina. The group claimed responsibility for what they described as a blazing pyre of pricks. In early 1984, on the day after Epiphany, a further arson attack, which also remained unsolved, was made on a discotheque near Munich's main station. It was not until two weeks later that Furlan and