For half a day, on the train to Rome, walking down the corridors of the nursing home, I’d felt something akin to rage. I’d carried it for a handful of hours, righteously, on my mother’s behalf. Now the unfolding events came at me through the scrim of other people’s emotions and decisions, blunting the anger to a weary kind of exasperation. Silvio Ruffo’s pocketknife was still in my pocket. Every morning I placed it there along with some loose change that I always carried and never spent.
