What idiots we are, they’ll be saying, we should have checked his jacket. So they’ll be coming to the conclusion (but only now) that I keep it in my pocket. Last night, of course, they’d also have been to the office and found no diskette of mine. Now they’ll have worked out the truth, that I keep everything on a diskette. They’re not stupid, they’d have assumed I must have made notes about all the work we are doing in the newsroom-and therefore that, if I knew anything about the Braggadocio business, I’d have written it down somewhere. What were they hoping to find? It’s obvious-I mean, I can’t see any other explanation-they were looking for something to do with the newspaper. And, very craftily, they did what my neighbor would have done: they turned off the water. Someone was in my house, and he, they, were afraid I might have been disturbed, not by the noise they were making (they were silent as the grave) but by the drip, which might have irritated even them, and perhaps they wondered why I didn’t stir. So, my dear Watson, the valve had been closed during the night-and not by you. Obviously the water was still running then. Last night before going to bed, I took a sleeping pill with a glass of water. We can rule out a miracle-I can’t see why God would worry about my shower, it’s hardly the Red Sea. Every effect has its cause, or so they say. And I don’t have a chimney down which the Ourang-Outang of Rue Morgue could have climbed. It’s an old-fashioned tap (everything in this apartment dates back at least fifty years) and rusty besides. It’s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, murder-and clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II, from Mussolini to Berlusconi, that will keep readers turning the pages as the novel’s thrilling plot unfolds.It couldn’t have been an electrical contact (it’s a hand valve, it can only be worked by hand), or a mouse, which, even if there was a mouse, would hardly have had the strength to move such a contraption. It’s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor’s paranoid theory that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t resist to ghostwrite a book. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain controversial.
Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The worldwide bestselling novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder from the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery ¶ #1 bestseller in Italy ¶ 1945, Lake Como.
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