FROM THAT DAY ON, Linda supported him like a third crutch. They didn’t talk about it, or make a conscious decision. It simply happened. She set him up in the guest room of her small top-floor apartment. In the morning she took her car out of the garage in her building and drove him to his physical therapy sessions, and in the afternoon, taking advantage of the Roman spring weather, she insisted on long walks through the streets of the historic center and Trastevere, even though they were crawling with young people and tourists.
When he was tired they went home and sat on her plant-filled terrace with its view of St. Peter’s dome, and there they enjoyed the dinners she made for them. They never spoke of the night Michele Balistreri almost died, nor of the crimes that had been committed. He never mentioned them, and she avoided the subject completely.
Linda met his friends and his brother’s family, and so they undertook the kind of humdrum bourgeois home life that Balistreri had always imagined he would detest. Several couples came to visit them: Alberto and his wife on Saturdays, Angelo and Margherita almost every evening. Corvu and Piccolo often came by after work. They even resumed their weekly ritual of poker, and on those evenings Linda usually went out with Margherita.
They were an ordinary couple, except for the lack of sex. At midnight they went their separate ways, each going to his or her own room to sleep.
Am I in love with her? Then why do I feel as if there’s an insurmountable barrier?
Days passed, and one evening at the end of May, they set two chairs near each other on the little terrace facing St. Peter’s.
In those ten weeks of living together, many things had become important to him. Now all he wanted was silence and Linda. He felt just as he had thirty-six years earlier on that beach on the other side of the Mediterranean.
His arm slipped around Linda’s shoulders. She turned slowly toward him, her face a few inches from his. There was no furrow in her brow; her eyes were clear and calm.
It’s your decision, Michele.
He remembered the silent pact he had made with the Invisible Man on that distant night.
The manhunt is off. But you have to stop.
He was just an old cop protecting something valuable, something that should never suffer even the slightest harm, something he had to protect from everyone, beginning with Michele Balistreri, his sins, and his remorse.
Because you can’t harm the fairies in a nursery rhyme . . .
The moment passed as the thought came to him. Linda rested her head on his shoulder and fell asleep.
The following evening they were there again, not saying a word, enjoying the warm sunset that marked the beginning of the long Roman summer. Balistreri was scheduled to return to work the next day.
“Michele, I have to ask you something personal.” Linda’s tone was odd; direct questions were not a part of their everyday life.
“That sounds ominous,” Balistreri joked.
But she was serious, clearly unhappy about asking the question. “I’d like to know whether, when you were involved in politics, you caused anyone’s death.”
Balistreri was struck by the roundabout way she phrased the question.
When you were involved in politics . . . you caused anyone’s death . . .
He was certain she knew that, up until November 1973, Michele Balistreri had been a Fascist agitator and a leader of Ordine Nuovo, which was later dissolved by government decree because it had been accused of being a new incarnation of the old Fascist party. And, being a good journalist, she must have wondered why he hadn’t been arrested and put on trial along with the movement’s other leaders.
“Would it change anything between us, Linda?”
She thought for a while. “I need to know who you are today, Michele, and in order to know that I have to know something about who you were back then.”
Balistreri didn’t ask why. He trusted her and her good intentions in asking him.
“I never killed an innocent person nor ordered any innocent people to be killed. In my group, though, there were people who thought that bullets and bombs were the only means for engaging in the fight.”
“And you?”
“After Ordine Nuovo was disbanded, I tried to make the group a political one again, but they only wanted armed struggle, and I lost.”
“Where were you from 1974 to 1978?”
Her tone was perfectly friendly.
I was still part of that group, one of its leaders. But I’d agreed to spy on them.
“I can’t tell you, Linda. It’s for your own good.”
She took one of his hands in hers. “I know you didn’t kill innocent people. But when you found yourself next to people who wanted to kill innocent people, did you let them do it? Or did you stop them?”
I betrayed my former friends because they betrayed themselves, and because they thought combat meant putting a bomb in a dumpster in a crowded place.
“I did what I could, Linda—everything I could to combat what I thought was unjust and dishonorable.”
“And you’d do the same thing again?”
Linda Nardi had a knack for asking questions that knocked him off-balance. Here was another one.
“Today I’d only kill someone if I were forced to do so. That happened five months ago up on that hill.”
She nodded, but her eyes told a different story. She separated her palms, and Balistreri’s hand was left free, light as a feather, and alone.