Trotti sat in the back of the taxi. He was tired, he felt dirty and wanted to get out of his sticky clothes. Water in the lungs. He closed his eyes. (In 1978 he had been to the school. It was in the Scuola Elementare Gerolamo Cardano that he had first met Rosanna Belloni. Trotti remembered wondering how old she was; in her mid-forties, he had decided. The grey hair made her appear older, but she still had the living softness that disappears as a woman goes through the change. A few years older, perhaps, than Agnese. He had asked her about the disappearance of Anna Ermagni. “You don’t think it’s a maniac who’s taken Anna, Signora Direttrice?” “I don’t understand.” “A maniac, a child molester. You don’t think that Anna Ermagni has been kidnapped by a sex maniac?” “I know of only one case of child rape,”
