From the locker room afterward she phoned Robert on her cell phone. He wasn’t home yet either.

“Want to grab a pizza?” she asked.

“I’d like to grab you, instead,” he answered. “Or maybe the pizza and then you.”

“I’ve got cold beer in the fridge,” she said. It was the first time all day Alex felt relaxed. Robert had that effect on her.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

There was a Chicago-style pizza place called Jean & Luca’s not far from Dupont Circle where he lived. He said he’d swing by there, get a thick pie, and drive it over to her place.

He did.

She had an ulterior motive this evening, however, and elaborated when they broke open the pie and the beer.

“How would you feel about running a couple of names across your files?” she asked.

“What files?”

“The Secret Service ones that will tell you where someone in the government works.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Michael Cerny, who recruited me for this Ukrainian assignment,”she said. “And this three-hundred-pound woman named Olga Liashko. I want to know if they have any CIA links.”

“Come on,” he said.

“No. Really. Something about them doesn’t smell quite right.”

He considered it.

“Michael Cerny’s been with the State Department for several years. I’ve known him for six years. I’ve never heard of any CIA affiliation.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not connected to the CIA,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. Look, there’s an awful lot of this that doesn’t make sense.”

She was angry. Indignant. She kept going. “Listen, Robert, what are they asking me to really accomplish? They’re practically asking me to share a shower and a bedroom with this repulsive East Bloc hoodlum. I don’t know what they think I can find out that all their intelligence hasn’t already given them.”

“I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I agree with you, but I don’t have any answers.”

“I don’t like Cerny and I don’t like this Ukrainian steamroller he works with,” Alex said. “So why don’t you just be the man I know and love and run a check?”

He finished one square slice of pie and started another. He nodded thoughtfully.

“I can’t do it myself,” he said. “I don’t have the authorization. But I can call in a favor. I won’t have an answer right away, but I’ll see what I can do. How’s that?”

She leaned across the table and kissed him.

“That would be perfect,” she said.

The Lt. de polizia Gian Antonio Rizzo stood with his arms folded across his chest in the small cluttered apartment on the via Donorfio. A tall lean man with dark hair and sharp features, Lt. Rizzo of the Roman city police felt a deep disgust, an outrage, that fed upon the deeply cynical outlook on life that he had developed over the decades.

Lt. Rizzo had had more than enough of the type of scene that lay before him. At age fifty-five, he was contemplating retirement toward the middle of the summer. His final day at this underpaid unappreciated job could not come soon enough. Of course, he still had an enterprise or two on the side, but who knew about that?

Downstairs at the doorway to the street, a crowd gathered. Here, upstairs, police had strung crime scene tape in the hallway. Police techies vacuumed everything for fibers. Forensic photographers took digital shots of everything while busily trampling the rest of the crime scene.

Rizzo’s brown eyes slid uneasily over the death chamber. The cara-binieri who busily assisted him, as well as his own detectives from Rome’s homicide squad, had no question about the emotions sizzling within him.

“Pervertitidi! Degenerati!” Rizzo said. “Scum! You know what makes me mad? Having to spend time investigating what these people do to each other. Maybe we should let them kill one another, hey? Then these foreign parasites-questi scrocconi stranieri-would stop coming to Roma. Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?”

In the lieutenant’s opinion, there was a struggle under way for the soul of Rome. On one side were the forces of restraint, lawfulness, etiquette, and cultural preservation. On the other, the unswerving desire to use the ancient city for permissiveness, debauchery, and the commission of international crime.

Lt. Rizzo saw it every night on off-duty strolls through the Campo dei Fiori and the Piazza Navona. Why, just two evenings earlier witnesses in overlooking apartments had reported seeing two people shot and killed around the corner from where Julius Caesar used to address the forum, their bodies whisked away afterwards.

The case had landed on his desk and it was most unwelcome.

Well, the city had changed a bit since Caesar’s day, and not necessarily for the better. So Rizzo, who felt himself a guardian of public decency, looked around this room and felt his blood pressure rising.

More murder. More crime. More drugs.

“Incredibile!” Rizzo growled as those under his command went about their business. “This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season and can’t do anything about all these foreign degenerates either!”

With retirement beckoning, Rizzo was increasingly free with his opinions. The forensic technicians busied themselves with the details of the double homicide. Why take issue? They agreed with him, anyway. Even his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, knew enough to ignore him.

The dead woman was on the floor of the living room, her arms and legs a tangle, a robe half on, half off, the upper part of it caked with blood. Her face was blue from strangulation, her eyes frozen wide in the pain of her death. Her throat looked as if it had been perforated with a butcher’s knife.

Lt. Rizzo walked to the next room. There, a man, who appeared to have been a musician, had been shot to death while sleeping. He had a couple of guitars by the bed, a collection of sheet music, and the inevitable marijuana paraphernalia, none of which was going to be much use to him now.

The first and second bullets had passed through him. The third had blown apart his skull. Nasty splatter. A crime scene pick-four: Skin, hair, tissues, bone in every direction.

It wasn’t pretty.

The pillow and the worn mattress had caught most of the blood, which was good for the cleanup squad. But his left eye was ruptured and half out of his head, which would make their task messier. And at least the remains of the bullets had already been recovered. That was another good part.

The really grisly detail, aside from the homicides themselves, had been the discovery. For a solid day, starting at two in the afternoon, the dead man’s clock radio had blasted some vile American music.

The downstairs neighbors, after a sleepless night and much pounding on the ceiling, indignantly phoned the proprietario over the excessive noise. The landlord had raised the portiera, the deaf-as-a-haddock old Signora Massiella.

Signora Massiella had used her passkey to enter the apartment. She had pushed the door open. The door had stopped against the dead woman on the floor.

Then she screamed and fled, crossing herself several times as she ran. She called the police. The carabinieri arrived and then summoned the homicide people, which included Lt. Rizzo. Rizzo brought in his attitude, of which he had plenty.

Rizzo stood at the foot of the bed, surveying the death scene and not feeling much compassion. He glanced at the disgraceful film poster above the body, one that turned immorality drug addiction into a joke.

Cheech and Chong. The Corsican Brothers. Who was kidding whom? If one of these potheads wanted to meet some real Corsican brothers, Rizzo could arrange it. And as for this dead guy being a singer-musician, well, Sinatra and Pavarotti had been singers. Gino Paoli was a singer. The current pop star Zucherro was a singer. This guy was just a dead guy.