Maya pressed the black button for the doorbell, but no one answered. When she tried again, a man’s voice came from the speaker in the wall. “Buon giorno.”

“Good afternoon. I’m looking for Mr. Lumbroso.”

“And for what reason?” The voice-once warm and friendly-had a sharp, critical tone.

“I’m thinking about buying a certain object and I want to know how old it is.”

“I’m looking at you on my video screen and I don’t see any statues or paintings.”

“It’s jewelry. A gold brooch.”

“Of course. Beautiful jewelry for una donna bella.”

The lock buzzed open and Maya entered the building. The ground floor consisted of two connecting rooms that led to an enclosed courtyard. The apartment looked as if the contents of a scientific laboratory and an art gallery had been loaded into a truck and then dumped into the same space. In the front room, Maya saw a spectroscope, a centrifuge, and a microscope on various tables along with bronze statues and old paintings.

She stepped around some antique furniture and entered the back room, where a bearded man in his seventies sat at a workbench examining a piece of parchment with illuminated letters. The man wore black pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a black skullcap. Like many Orthodox Jews, he showed the white fringe from his tallit katan: a linen garment similar to a poncho worn beneath his shirt.

The man gestured to the page on his workbench. “The parchment is old, probably cut from a Bible, but the inscription is modern. For ink, the medieval monks used soot, crushed seashells-even their own blood. They couldn’t drive over to the store and buy products from the petrochemical industry.”

“You’re Simon Lumbroso?”

“You sound skeptical. I do have business cards, but I keep losing them.” Lumbroso slipped on a pair of eyeglasses with thick lenses that magnified his dark brown eyes. “Names are fragile these days. Some people change names like pairs of shoes. And what’s your name, signorina?”

“I’m Rebecca Green, from London. I left the brooch back at my hotel, but perhaps I could draw you a sketch that shows you what it looks like.”

Lumbroso smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll need the actual item. If there’s a stone, I can remove it and look for a patina in the setting.”

“Loan me some paper. Maybe you’ll recognize the design.”

Looking skeptical, Lumbroso handed her a pad of paper and a felt-tipped pen. “As you wish, signorina.”

Quickly, Maya drew the Harlequin lute. She tore off the page and placed it on the workbench. Simon Lumbroso glanced at the oval with the three lines, then turned slightly and studied her face. Maya felt as if she were an art object that had been brought to his house for evaluation. “Yes, of course. I recognize the design. If you allow me, perhaps I could give some more information.”

He walked over to large safe set against the wall and began to turn the dial. “You said that you were from London. Were your parents born in Great Britain?”

“My mother came from a Sikh family living in Manchester.”

“And your father?”

“He was German.”

Lumbroso opened the safe and took out a cardboard shoe box filled with over one hundred letters, arranged by date. He placed the box on the workbench and thumbed through its contents. “I can’t tell you about the brooch. In fact, I don’t think it really exists. But I do know something about your place of origin.”

He opened an envelope, took out a black-and-white photograph, and placed it on the bench. “I think you’re the daughter of Dietrich Schöller. At least, that was his name before he became a Harlequin named Thorn.”

Maya examined the photograph and was surprised to see herself, at the age of nine, sitting next to her father on a bench in St. James’s Park. Someone, perhaps her mother, had taken the shot.

“Where did you get this?”

“Your father has sent letters to me for almost forty years. I have one of your baby pictures if you’d like to see it.”

“Harlequins never take photographs unless it’s for a fake passport or some kind of identification card. I always stayed home when they took pictures at school.”

“Well, your father took some pictures, and then he stored them with me. So where is he, Maya? I was sending letters to a postbox in Prague, but they’ve all been returned.”

“He’s dead. Murdered by the Tabula.”

Tears for Maya’s father-her violent, arrogant father-filled Lumbroso’s eyes. He sniffed loudly, found some tissues on the workbench, and blew his nose. “I’m not surprised by this news. Dietrich lived a very dangerous life. But still, his death saddens me greatly. He was my closest friend.”

“I don’t think you knew my father at all. He never had a friend in his life. He never loved anyone, including my mother.”

Lumbroso looked astonished and then sad. He shook his head slowly. “How can you say that? Your father had a great deal of respect for your mother. When she died, he was depressed for a very long time.”

“I don’t know anything about that, but I do know what happened when I was a little girl. My father trained me to kill people.”

“Yes, he turned you into a Harlequin. I’m not going to defend his decision.” Lumbroso stood up, went over to a wooden hat stand, and retrieved a black suit coat. “Come with me, Maya. Let’s get something to eat. As we Romans would say, ‘No story on an empty stomach.’”

Wearing the suit coat and a black fedora, Simon Lumbroso escorted her through the ghetto. The sun had disappeared behind the red tile roofs, but quite a few people were sitting on kitchen chairs out in the street and gossiping while children kicked at a ball. Everyone appeared to know Lumbroso, who greeted his neighbors by touching two fingers to the wide brim of his hat.

“Forty years ago I used to offer tours of this area to foreigners. That was how I met your father. One afternoon, he was the only person who showed up outside the synagogue. Your father was a gentile, of course, but he knew a great deal about Jewish history. He asked intelligent questions, and we had a pleasant time debating various theories. I told him that I had enjoyed practicing my German and that he didn’t need to pay me anything.”

“That meant my father had an obligation.”

Lumbroso smiled. “Yes, that’s how a Harlequin would see it. But I didn’t realize any of that. At the time, a group of wealthy young men here in Rome had formed a fascist group, and they would come down to the ghetto late at night to beat up Jews. They caught me down by the Tiber-just a few hundred yards from here. It was five against one. And then, suddenly, your father appeared.”

“He destroyed them…”

“Yes. But it was the way he did it that startled me. He showed no anger while fighting-just this cold, focused aggression and a complete lack of fear. He beat all five men unconscious and would have tossed them into the river to drown if I hadn’t pulled him away.”

“Now that sounds like my father.”

“From then on, we began to see each other to explore the city and eat dinner together. Gradually, Dietrich told me about his life. Although your father came from a Harlequin family, he never saw that as his destiny. As I recall, he studied history at the Free University of Berlin; then he decided to become a painter and moved to Rome. Some young men experiment with drugs or sexuality. For your father, having a friend was just as forbidden. He never had a friend-even when he was a teenager at the Oberschule.”

They circled the synagogue on Lungotevere and took the Ponte Fabricio footbridge to the small island in the middle of the Tiber. Lumbroso paused in the middle of the bridge, and Maya gazed down at the muddy green water that flowed through Rome.

“When I was growing up, my father told me that friends made you weak.”