Back at the hotel he had found June vomiting onto the floor between the twin beds, which they’d pushed apart as far as the room allowed, barely a foot. It was just watery mucus and he cleaned it up. When he wiped her mouth with a hand towel she batted at him from her medicated half-sleep and Hector had to calm her, though simply folding her arms seemed to cause her pain. Her feet were terribly swollen, distended into hideous, red-purplish bags. The flight had finally caught up with her. Yet despite her condition he kept seeing her differently, as the lean, angular child he once knew, the unflaggingly angry, aggressive, icily silent girl who wouldn’t let anyone touch her or get too close. Everybody at the orphanage was wary of her and kept their distance, even the toughest boys, not wanting to risk a hard shove or even a kick in the groin. One day she’d taken on two of the bigger boys at once, breaking the middle finger of one and nearly scratching out the eyes of the other; the memory of it was clear enough that Hector unconsciously reclined gingerly on his bed, so as not to make the springs creak and disturb her. And though he could have easily taken all her identifying papers and the large sum of money she’d given him and let her die there anonymously and be done with it he was amazed by her ceaseless, spearing will to persist, a life force that her physical distress was somehow sharpening rather than blunting. He was awed by the way she could push herself, ignore her obvious wretchedness, and apply herself like a tool.

The next morning she was miraculously improved, her cheeks no longer the light slate color, her movements as she quickly repacked her bag steady and efficient, like any woman leaving on a business trip. They had a breakfast of tea and stale rolls (June took only the tea) and flagged a taxi to the rental-car office and soon enough they were on the road, headed north, June reading the map for them. Hector was driving and they made it to Livorno by noon, but it proved to be a worthless trip. Directing them was a dossier of documents from Clines’s contact in Rome, but they were following a trail that seemed to Hector a pathetic, frayed yarn.

It turned out they’d gone to Livorno because someone with a name similar to one of Nicholas’s aliases had been was arraigned there recently on check-kiting charges, but when they got there nobody at the courthouse knew anything or could even find a file on the man. The court officer who was contracted to deal with them was on vacation. June put it down to the confusion of the aliases and the language difficulty, but Hector was not convinced; Clines’s contact in Rome, a talkative fish-mouthed fellow with an Australian accent to his English, struck him instantly as a crook and a liar, the sort who maybe specialized in swindling old people and women, and after June paid what he said he’d been promised, he offered up the name of a court officer in Livorno, assuring that a sizable bribe to him would erase the indictment.

There was little point in going back to Rome, for the contact there was probably gone, too. After staying a night in Livorno they went to the medieval town of Massa Marittima, a place where her son had briefly worked in a fancy antiques shop after leaving London. They found the shop, but it was no longer an antiques store; it had changed hands recently and was in the midst of being renovated as a tourist shop, and the Czech construction workers could tell her nothing. But they got lucky: it was only because June had suddenly craved something sweet, a gelato-the one thing she felt like eating anymore-that they stopped at the stand on the other side of the tiny cobbled street and struck up a conversation with the English-speaking counter girl. June asked if a young man had worked there and the girl said that an Asian-British man named Nicky Crump had indeed worked in the shop.

June gasped that this was sure proof; Crump Antiques had been the name of her shop early on, after the original owner, before she changed it to just Fine Antiques, Nicholas himself scraping off the old name and painting the new one on the glass panel of the door in matte gold and black lettering. When June showed her the old school picture the girl had at first hesitated, scrunching her nose, but when June pressed her she agreed that it was he. Apparently Nicky Crump had told her when he learned the shop was closed that he was heading to Siena, as there were a good number of antiques shops there. The girl was gentle and bookish and not unattractive and seemed to want to say something else, maybe that she had liked him, but before she could June had whisked them away, saying they should move on, move on.

Now, heading to Siena, they seemed to be lost again, stuck on a rutted two-lane road outside yet another unsigned town. The autostrada had been full of tourist traffic and delivery trucks and marred by construction sites and after inching along for several half-hour stretches June decided they ought to take the smaller roads that ran alongside the main highway. But then there were countless unmapped roundabouts and side-jogs and because it was hazy they couldn’t read the sun for direction. They’d doubled back several times already, even ending up twice at the same roundabout, as they were now, and June suddenly cried, “This can’t be where we are!” ripping the page from the map book and crumpling it with rage.

Hector kept quiet, but while he drove them he began to wonder about the reality of this all, how Clines’s contact had been able to get any of this information. He thought maybe Clines had been playing her, or been duped himself. Or perhaps he had been simply pulled along, just as Hector was being drawn along now, pulled forth in the wake of June’s intensity, her inhuman stamina. And yet the questions about her son kept accruing, if more to him than to her. She seemed to ignore the fact, documented in Clines’s folder, that the name of the person she’d wired money to in the last weeks-a Paul Ferro-was very different from the names Nicholas had used in the past, or that the sums requested had dramatically increased. She was simply aiming herself toward him as he kept moving and it didn’t matter that hers was a likely folly of a journey and destined to end in nothing at all.

But soon they found the right road, and she retrieved the balled-up paper from the car floor, wincing as she reached for it, and then opened the map book and carefully smoothed the page out to go back in its spot. Her mood would swing erratically like this, depending on the changing matrix of the pain, the drugs in her system, or the periodic attacks of vertigo that seemed to be gaining in strength and frequency, and with it would ebb her energy and ability to reason. In the space of thirty minutes she might change their routing, or break down, or even lash out at him for driving too slowly. Every so often June tapped him to pull over at the next shoulder so she could shut her eyes for a minute and regain her equilibrium, or else so she could retch, yet time after time she’d emerge from the restroom and don her sunglasses and walk quickly back to the car like she was ready for another hundred kilometers and open the spiral map book to the connecting page.

They had traveled up well past the foothills now and the road narrowed and began to curl severely about the hillsides. The roadway lacked guardrails and the exposed slopes fell away so steeply that June was shutting her eyes as Hector marked the hairpin loops. A local bus had closed in behind them and was riding their bumper; he was driving with her in mind and didn’t speed up, but soon enough June signaled him to stop. The road was too curvy and it was only after a few more switchbacks that he could turn off onto a gravel drive, pulling in a bit too fast. The driveway was even steeper than the road and the car bottomed out on the spine of the rutted path and he had to gun the throttle to get it moving. They slid perilously for a few feet, the front wheel stopping on the edge of the knee-deep rainwater ditch that was cut alongside. June promptly opened the door and leaned over and gagged, dry-heaving; the color in her face was wrong, perfectly metallic and dulled, and he simultaneously noticed through the trees the faded terra-cotta tiles of a roof and followed the road downward.