June had planned to accompany them after a quick bath. But when she was done she called weakly for him and he had to help her once again from the tub, this time blotting her wet skin and hair with the towel. She wavered there before him like a terribly sick child, barely able to stand upright. She was partly revived by the warm water but perhaps altered, too, and she spoke with a breathy delirium about how deeply grateful she was to him, saying again that her lawyer would ensure he was well compensated. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into him in her full nakedness and murmured that he could do whatever he wished to her, kissing his ear, his neck. He could feel the cling of her damp legs about his thigh and although he could not in a lifetime accede to so wrong an invitation, the barest instinctual shiver crept up from his groin to his chest, momentarily rousing him before a flood of shame clogged his throat. She collapsed into him and he wrapped her in a robe and helped her to the bed. She said she would just rest for a moment, but after lying down she asked him for a shot of morphine. He opened her kit and prepared the shot, unable to quell the thought of doing the same for Sylvie Tanner, to numb and pleasure, too.

“Where are we, now?”

“In Siena.”

“Oh yes, yes. Will you go find Nicholas?”

“I’ll try.”

“Bring him back here soon,” she said, a waxy veneer dulling her eyes. “Very soon.”

He rolled her onto her side and injected her in her rump and she drifted off to sleep. It was easier for him to do it for her, of course, rather than watch her struggle with the vial and syringe, to twist and try to find a good spot. When he did it her breathing would quicken and she might even reach out and hold tightly to his shirt and then softly exhale with a certain ripe agony when he finally injected her. In her overly grateful euphoria she once said she loved him. He didn’t know how to answer.

Sometimes he may have jabbed harder than necessary, or in a spot that wasn’t fleshy enough, and she’d cry out sharply, gritting her teeth. He did so because a part of him was afraid of her, because he wanted to get away from her but couldn’t force himself to do so. But in guilty compensation he now gave her more of the drug, drawing down a few more lines on the syringe. She was no longer insisting she needed to keep her mind clear. What was left of her body was in charge of her and as such she somehow seemed a bit stronger, fuller, her cheeks not so drawn and wan; she was suddenly eating more, having a butter cookie along with the gelato she had him buy her every other hour or so, which was the only regular thing she consumed, save water; maybe it was all the sugar that was plumping her up, propping her. Earlier they had stopped at the big highway cafeteria and she’d had an anise cookie and lemonade, and she surprised him by rising from her chair like any healthy, sprightly woman and walking out to the car for the Italian phrasebook in order to ask the girl at the register what the best route would be to Lombardy, after leaving Siena. But her exertions had now left her like this, and when it was clear she would sleep for a while he drew closed the heavy draperies, the place as shrouded and hushed as a mausoleum.

He bathed and shaved and put on the last of the shirts she’d bought him, which was still in its clear plastic package. Everything else of his stunk. They had been traveling without a thought of doing wash and so he gathered their dirty clothes up into a canvas drawstring sack he found in the closet, rooting through her luggage and pulling out what was unfolded or dirty. Her things smelled only marginally better than his, the odor more of dampness and spoilage than body smells. Someone could easily argue that all of him had spoiled, even as his physique remained remarkably sound, that a special scan of his abstract being would show an unsettling result, revealing a soul neither bountiful nor spare but used up, right down to nothing. Of course Dora would not have said so about him, but he couldn’t help wondering during the long, silent hours in the car whether he had been fooling her and himself, whether she would have eventually seen him for what he was, agreed with June that he was a man who wanted to hide himself away forever. He wasn’t useless (as a gravedigger, a janitor, a driver, a nurse, now a laundry maid), but by any weighing of the present evidence-what one might have banked via family or friendship or love or self-purpose, not even counting the mistakes or transgressions or outright crimes-he was not a worthy man. It was as plain as his thirst. His heart felt smashed every time he pictured Dora, but if he was honest it soon revived with what he had to believe was a rush of liberty, if liberty degraded, this feeling that he was released once again from the onus of having to hope or dream.

And yet here he was, dressing for an errand that he could hardly pretend had not partly become his own. He was increasingly curious about Nicholas, too, wondering about the bloodlines that he and June had given him; about its expression in his physical appearance, and then in his undeniably slippery character; what his voice sounded like; and then simply wanting to lay eyes on the young man, take in the shape of him astride the world. He wished he could bump into him and know him and trail him unannounced, peer at him as he sat at a café or on a bus. Maybe this was what comprised fatherhood, at least for somebody like him: a sorry kind of surveillance. He knew he was a thousand light-years from being a respectable adult, his only contact that was even remotely paternal being his sometime counsel at Smitty’s of the slumming suburban kids, muttering they ought to switch to beer before they drove back home on the Palisades Parkway. He certainly couldn’t bear any connection now, any relationship, the prospect of learning too much about Nicholas only trumped by the frightening idea that he’d have to explain himself, too, go over his background and his history and his bond to June, which would, if Nicholas pushed it, open up every other damn thing. But as he shuffled quietly across the expansive space of the suite to leave, he stopped by the bedroom and the sight of her stilled body, looking desiccated and abandoned in the gauzy raft of the canopied bed, made him think he couldn’t deny her this one last thing, however it might disturb him.

At the residenza office on the ground floor he held up the bag of their dirty clothes and tried to communicate to the woman at the desk that he wanted to wash them someplace. She kept talking and motioning and then began pulling the bag away from him and it was only when Bruno appeared that it was sorted out; it had been so long since Hector had stayed in anything but a fleabag hotel that he’d forgotten that such a thing as laundry service was possible. He gave over the bag and had Bruno make sure she knew to leave it outside their door, as the signora was sleeping. Outside they made their plan. Hector had briefly mentioned to Bruno earlier that they were looking for someone and now he showed him the old school photograph and said he was likely working in an antiques shop.

“There are many numerous establishments of antiquities here in Siena, signore,” he replied. “But I have cognizance of the very best ones, and we shall be advised to start at these.”

He explained that it would be better to go by foot today. They were heading to Il Campo, the large main square, where the most prominent shops were, several of them in the piazza itself and on the street immediately ringing it. This was where they would run the horse race tomorrow.

“Excuse me if this is offensive to you, but may I inquire who is this fellow you are looking for?”

“He’s her son.”

“I see,” he said, openly searching Hector’s face. “This is dolorous. Is the situation due to an estrangement?”