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THE BUILDING was from the late 1950s and stood in the San Paolo area. Its balconies were cluttered with clotheshorses, plastic deck chairs, small tables, tricycles, geraniums, stacked plant pots, rugs, and blankets left out to air, all partially hidden by striped awnings that had faded in the sunlight.

Luisa and Giulia spotted the entryphone panel. Names, handwritten, had been added in at different points and taped over more than once.

“There it is: Belletti.”

A tabby cat came to rub against Giulia’s socks but her mother pulled her along. “Come on. We mustn’t make them wait for us.”

The walls of the apartment were papered in bottle-green, hazelnut, and mustard-yellow. Belletti’s wife had already put the coffee on and she brought it straight through into the dining room, a smallish space with nothing in it apart from the round table in the middle. She opened up a games table with a green cloth surface and set the plastic tray on it with cups and a glass of lukewarm orange squash. Giulia had a tummy ache and tried not to look at Signor Belletti, who was making small talk with her mother and explaining that he preferred to be called a clairvoyant. The man was balding, with a chest that had expanded over the years, an enormous head, and eyes that were magnified by glasses. His smooth, fleshy cheeks and bulging forehead made him seem like an elderly infant, as if his hair had not yet grown in and his head and body had never been in proportion.

It was her friends from the factory who’d advised Luisa to see the clairvoyant. Two of them had visited him personally and could vouch for his being a very serious and humble person, a council employee who in his spare time exercised his gift in the service of others.

“Trying doesn’t cost anything,” they’d said, “or, well—the price is reasonable.”

Luisa’s faith was accommodating. She believed in what were called presences, in guardian angels, dreams that foretold the future. Actually, she did feel the conflict between Catholic teaching and her attempt to contact the other world after she’d forked out the money, but in her view the Church didn’t manage to encompass all the relationships between the human and the divine, though it definitely covered the majority. In situations of extreme anxiety, trying everything was forgivable. She drank her coffee, staving off impatience. Giulia looked over at her nose and thought: Why didn’t I get my mother’s nose? So straight. I don’t look at all like her. She’d insisted on being taken there and was sure that Luisa wouldn’t have given in if she hadn’t been strung out with insomnia and false hope.

There had been other sightings after Santhià. Anselmo had taken a leave of absence from work so he would be ready to run anywhere along with the fire department or friends already retired. Gemma and Luisa cooked at home while they waited, telling themselves it was better to remain pessimistic. Meanwhile they cleaned floors on their hands and knees, attacked tile joints with a brush, or applied themselves to the blinds and rugs to dispel some of their anxiety. Whenever they heard the key turn in the lock, they held back from running down the hallway. Anselmo would come in by himself, tired and enraged, drink a glass of water and baking soda in the kitchen. He found the blinds half washed and arabesqued with trickles of black water, rugs rolled up, the furnishings in disarray, and he whined. They let him do it, knowing that it was his way of pouring out his desperation, the way they did by scrubbing and polishing. To each his own.

Signor Belletti sat down and his wife left the room, closing the door. A crucifix hung on the wall behind him, above it an olive branch with dusty leaves. Luisa held out a photo of Silvia, which he turned upside down on the table before closing his eyes to concentrate.

Giulia struggled to believe it would all be useful. She’d heard that clairvoyance, like prayer, works only if you truly expect it to, and she didn’t want to sabotage Signor Belletti’s abilities with her doubts. She closed her eyes, too, and when she opened them again Luisa was moving the tray to a chair and the man was spreading a large map of the area on the table. He took a pendulum from a drawer, a brass cone hanging from a thin chain, and let it fall perpendicular to the map.

The chain quivered. Belletti slowly moved it from side to side, over the city, hills, and the surrounding mountains, valleys, woods, and villages. Luisa seemed troubled and Giulia realized that she feared the total absence of a sign, which would mean that Silvia had gone a long way away or, worse, that she was dead. She gripped the hem of her skirt in her fists. Imperturbable, Belletti moved his arm. He was passing over the city again when the cone began to rotate. His hand looked motionless and relaxed while the pendulum turned and turned.

“Clockwise,” he commented. When he moved the chain to another area, the twisting slowed until it stopped, and when he went back over the city it regained momentum.

Belletti put the pendulum down and turned the photo of Silvia over. Giulia had goose bumps and the hair on her arms was standing straight up.

“According to what I’m seeing, your relative is alive somewhere in the city. I can’t be certain, but I believe she’s hiding in a church.”

“A church?”

“Behind the organ, maybe, or in one of the back rooms.”

Luisa was worried. “She won’t have been able to drink if she’s been indoors.”

“Maybe she’s drunk the holy water, Mamma!” Giulia suggested earnestly.

Belletti nodded in approval with his massive head. “You can continue to hope. And as for holy water, I stock up every year with water from Lourdes. Let’s close with a nice blessing, okay?”

From a drawer he took a small perfume bottle bearing a sticker with LOURDES on it in capitals. He sprayed the map, the pendulum, and, quickly, his two guests.