Mr. Contreras surged into the hall when he heard me open the stairwell door. “Oh, there you are, doll. I found your cousin hanging around the entrance waiting for you, least, I didn’t know he was your cousin, but he explained it all, and I thought you wouldn’t want him standing out there, not knowing how long it was gonna be before you came home.”

“Ah, cara cugina!” Vico appeared behind my neighbor, but before he could launch into his recitative the chorus of dogs drowned him, barking and squeaking as they barreled past him to greet me.

I stared at him, speechless.

“How are you? Your working it was good?”

“My working was difficult. I’m tired.”

“So, maybe I take you to dinner, to the dancing, you are lively.” He was speaking English in deference to Mr. Contreras, whose only word of Italian is “grappa.”

“Dinner and dancing and I’ll feel like a corpse. Why don’t you go back to your hotel and let me get some sleep.”

“Naturally, naturally. You are working hard all the day and I am playing. I have your-your partitura-”

“Score.”

“Buono. Score. I have her. I will take her upstairs and put her away very neat for you and leave you to your resting.”

“I’ll take it with me.” I held out my hand.

“No, no. We are leaving one big mess last night, I know that, and I am greedy last night, making you stay up when today you work. So I come with you, clean-il disordine-disorderliness?, then you rest without worry. You smell flowers while I work.”

Before I could protest further he ducked back into Mr. Contreras’s living room and popped out with a large portmanteau. With a flourish he extracted a bouquet of spring flowers, and the score, wrapped this time in a cream envelope, and put his arm around me to shepherd me up the stairs. The dogs and the old man followed him, all four making so much racket that the medical resident who’d moved in across the hall from Mr. Contreras came out.

“Please! I just got off a thirty-six-hour shift and I’m trying to sleep. If you can’t control those damned dogs I’m going to issue a complaint to the city.”

Vico butted in just as Mr. Contreras, drawing a deep breath, prepared to unleash a major aria in defense of his beloved animals. “Mi scusa, Signora, mi scusa. It is all my doing. I am here from Italy to meet my cousin for the first time. I am so excited I am not thinking, I am making noise, I am disturbing the rest your beautiful eyes require…”

I stomped up the stairs without waiting for the rest of the flow. Vico caught up with me as I was closing the door. “This building attracts hardworking ladies who need to sleep. Your poor neighbor. She is at a hospital where they work her night and day. What is it about America, that ladies must work so hard? I gave her some of your flowers; I knew you wouldn’t mind, and they made her so happy, she will give you no more complaints about the ferocious beasts.”

He had switched to Italian, much easier to understand on his lips than English. Flinging himself on the couch he launched happily into a discussion of his day with the “partitura.” He had found, through our mutual acquaintance Mr. Ranier, someone who could interpret the music for him. I was right: it was from the Baroque, and not only that, most likely by Pergolesi.

“So not at all possibly by our great-grandmother. Why would your mother have a handwritten score by a composer she could find in any music store?”

I was too tired for finesse. “Vico, where were you at five this afternoon?”

He flung up his hands. “Why are you like a policeman all of a sudden, eh, cugina?”

“It’s a question the police may ask you. I’d like to know, myself.”

A wary look came into his eyes-not anger, which would have been natural, or even bewilderment-although he used the language of a puzzled man: I couldn’t be jealous of him, although it was a compliment when we had only just met, so what on earth was I talking about? And why the police? But if I really wanted to know, he was downstairs, with my neighbor.

“And for that matter, Vic, where were you at five o’clock?”

“On the Kennedy Expressway. Heading toward north Harlem Avenue.”

He paused a second too long before opening his hands wide again. “I don’t know your city, cousin, so that tells me nothing.”

“Bene. Thank you for going to so much trouble over the score. Now you must let me rest.”

I put a hand out for it, but he ignored me and rushed over to the mound of papers we’d left in the hall last night with a cry that I was to rest, he was to work now.

He took the Pergolesi from its envelope. “The music is signed at the end, with the initials ‘CF.’ Who would that be?”

“Probably whoever copied it for her. I don’t know.”

He laid it on the bottom of the trunk and placed a stack of operas on top of it. My lips tight with anger I lifted the libretti out in order to get at the Pergolesi. Vico rushed to assist me but only succeeded in dropping everything, so that music and old papers both fluttered to the floor. I was too tired to feel anything except a tightening of the screws in my forehead. Without speaking I took the score from him and retreated to the couch.

Was this the same concerto Vico had taken with him the night before? I’d been naive to let him walk off with a document without some kind of proper safeguard. I held it up to the light, but saw nothing remarkable in the six pages, no signs that a secret code had been erased, or brought to light, nothing beyond a few carefully corrected notes in measure 168. I turned to the end where the initials “CF” were written in the same careful black ink as the notes.

Vico must have found Fortieri’s letter to my mother stuffed inside Don Giovanni and tracked him down. No, he’d been here at five. So the lawyer, Ranier, was involved. Vico had spent the day with him: together they’d traced Mr. Fortieri. Vico came here for an alibi while the lawyer searched the shop. I remembered Ranier’s eyes, granite chips in his soft face. He could stab an old man without a second’s compunction.

Vico, a satisfied smile on his face, came to the couch for Gabriella’s evening gown. “This goes on top, right, this beautiful concert dress. And now, cugina, all is tidy. I will leave you to your dreams. May they be happy ones.”

He scooped up his portmanteau and danced into the night, blowing me a kiss as he went.

I fell heavily into sleep, and then into dreams about my mother. At first I was watching her with Mr. Fortieri as they laughed over their coffee in the little room behind the shop where McGonnigal and I had spoken. Impatient with my mother for her absorption in someone else’s company I started smearing strawberry gelato over the oboe Mr. Fortieri was repairing. Bobby Mallory and John McGonnigal appeared, wearing their uniforms, and carried me away. I was screaming with rage or fear as Bobby told me my naughtiness was killing my mother.

And then suddenly I was with her in the hospital as she was dying, her dark eyes huge behind a network of tubes and bottles. She was whispering my name through her parched lips, mine and Francesca Salvini’s. “Maestra Salvini… nella cassa… Vittora, mia carissima, dale…” she croaked. My father, holding her hands, demanded of me what she was saying.

I woke as I always did at this point in the dream, my hair matted with sweat. “Maestra Salvini is in the box,” I had told Tony helplessly at the time. “She wants me to give her something.”

I always thought my mother was struggling with the idea that her voice teacher might be dead, that that was why her letters were returned unopened. Francesca Salvini on the Voice had filled my ears from my earliest childhood. As Gabriella staged her aborted comeback, she longed to hear some affirmation from her teacher. She wrote her at her old address in Pitigliano, and in care of the Siena Opera, as well as through her cousin Frederica-not knowing that Frederica herself had died two years earlier.