THE GARDEN OF THE QUIRINALE FELT LIKE A SUN TRAP as the man in the silver armor strode down the shingle path. He was sweating profusely inside the ceremonial breastplate and woolen uniform.

Tight in his right hand he held the long, bloodied sword that had just taken the life of a man. In a few moments he would kill the president of Italy. And then? Be murdered himself. It was the fate of assassins throughout the ages, from Pausanius of Orestis, who had slaughtered Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, to Marat’s murderess, Charlotte Corday, and Kennedy’s nemesis, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The stabbing dagger, the sniper’s rifle … all these were mirrored weapons, reflecting on the man or woman who bore them, joining perpetrator and victim as twin sacrifices to destiny. It had always been this way, since men sought to rule over others, circumscribing their desires, hemming in the spans of their lives with the dull, rote strictures of convention. Petrakis had read much over the years, thinking, preparing, comparing himself to his peers. Actor John Wilkes Booth’s final performance before he put a bullet through the skull of Abraham Lincoln had been in
Julius Caesar
, although through some strange irony he had taken the part of Caesar’s friend and apologist, Mark Antony, not Brutus as history demanded.

As he approached the figure in the bower, seeing the old man’s gray,
lined form bent deep over a book, Petrakis found himself murmuring a line Booth must have uttered a century and a half before.

“‘O mighty Caesar … dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?’”

A pale, long face, with sad, tired eyes, looked up from the page. Petrakis, realizing he had spoken out loud, wondered why this death, among so many, would be the most difficult.

“I didn’t quite catch that,” Dario Sordi said in a calm, unwavering voice, his eyes, nevertheless, on the long, bloodied blade.

The uniformed officer came close, stopped, repeated the line, and held the sword over the elderly figure seated in the shadow of a statue of Hermes.

The president glanced around him and asked, “What conquests in particular, Andrea? What glories? What spoils? Temporary residence in a garden fit for a pope? I’m a pensioner in a very luxurious retirement home. Do you really not understand that?”

The weapon trembled in Petrakis’s hand. His palm felt sweaty. He couldn’t speak.

Voices rose behind him. A shout. A clamor.

There was a cigarette in Dario Sordi’s hand. It didn’t even shake.

“You should be afraid, old man.”

More dry laughter. “I’ve been hunted by Nazis.” The gray, drawn face glowered at him. Sordi drew on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Played hide-and-seek with tobacco and the grape for more than half a century. Offended people—important people—who feel I am owed a lesson. Which is probably true.” A long, pale finger jabbed the evening air. “And now you wish me to cower before someone else’s puppet? A tool?”

That, at least, made it easier.

Petrakis found his mind ranging across so many things: memories, lost decades, languid days dodging NATO patrols beneath the Afghan sun, distant half-recalled moments in the damp darkness of an Etruscan tomb, talking to his father about life and the world, and how a man had to make his own way, not let another create a future for him.

Everything came from that place in the Maremma, from the whispered discovery of a paradise of the will sacrificed to the commonplace
and mundane, the exigencies of politics. Andrea Petrakis knew this course was set for him at an early age, by birth, by his inheritance.

The memory of the tomb, with its ghostly painted figures on the wall, and the terrible, eternal specter of the Blue Demon, consuming them one by one, filled his head. This, more than anything else, he had learned over the decades: Freedom, of the kind enjoyed by the long-dead men and women still dancing beneath the gray Tarquinia earth more than two millennia on, was a mayfly, gloriously fleeting, made real only by its impermanence. Life and death were bedfellows, two sides of the same coin. To taste every breath, feel each beat of the heart, one had to know that both might be snatched away in an instant. His father had taught him that, long before the Afghans and the Arabs tried to reveal the same truth.

Andrea Petrakis remembered the lesson more keenly now, as the sand trickled through some unseen hourglass for Dario Sordi and his allotted assassin.

Out of the soft evening came a bright, sharp sound, like the ping of some taut yet invisible wire, snapping under pressure.

A piece of the statue of Hermes, its stone right foot, disintegrated in front of his eyes, shattering into pieces, as if exploding in anger.

Dario Sordi ducked back into the shadows, trying, at last, to hide.

Three days earlier …
“BEHOLD,” SAID THE MAN, IN A COLD, TIRED VOICE, THE accent from the countryside perhaps. “I will make a covenant. For it is something dreadful I will do to you.”

Strong, firm hands ripped off the hood. Giovanni Batisti saw he was tethered to a plain office chair. At the periphery of his vision, he could make out that he was in a small, simple room with bare bleached floorboards and dust ghosts on the walls left by long-removed chests of drawers or ancient filing cabinets. The place smelled musty, damp, and abandoned. He could hear the distant lowing of traffic, muffled in some curious way, but still energized by the familiar rhythm of the city. Cars and trucks, buses and people, thousands of them, some from the police and the security services no doubt, searching as best they could, oblivious to his presence. There was no human sound close by, from an adjoining room or an apartment. Not a radio or a TV set. No voice save that of his captor.

“I would like to use the bathroom, please,” Batisti said quietly, keeping his eyes fixed on the stripped, cracked timber boards at his feet. “I will do as you say. You have my word.”

The silence, hours of it, had been the worst part. He’d expected a reprimand, might even have welcomed a beating, since all these things would have acknowledged his existence. Instead … he was left in limbo, in blindness, almost as if he were dead already. Nor was there any exchange he could hear between those involved. A brief meeting to discuss
tactics. News. Perhaps a phone call in which he would be asked to confirm that he was still alive.

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