The silence in the Giulietta became a physical entity, a third passenger occupying the space between them, saturated with the smell of warm plastic and unspoken fear. Martinez stared at the road, her fingers drumming a nervous rhythm on her thigh.
"Where do we look for him?" she asked, without turning. "A Milanese architect missing in a city of a million people, all potential witnesses or potential accomplices. And we have less than a day."
Valesi started the engine. The familiar rumble of the four-cylinder felt like a note of absurd normality. "We're not looking for him. We're looking for his work. That little model wasn't a message for us. It was a signature. A signature left there by whoever made him disappear, or by himself, before leaving. A clue that only someone who knew his work would have understood."So?"So we go where his work lives. His studio."
Arturo Silvestri's studio occupied the top floor of a small Art Nouveau building on Via Margutta, a street normally teeming with tourists and gallery owners, but which now seemed touched by a shiver. The shop windows were lit, but few people stopped to look. The few passersby were Romans, and they walked with their heads down, avoiding the gaze of others.
The studio entrance was made of frosted glass, with a brass nameplate still shiny: *Silvestri & Associates – Design*. Valesi tried the handle. Locked.
"We can't wait for a warrant," murmured Martinez, looking around. The street was deserted in that stretch.
"We don't need to." Valesi bent down, examined the lock. It was an old model, elegant but not sophisticated. He was already reaching into his pocket for the pocket pick he always carried, a memento from his early years on the force, when he found himself more often having to pick locks than fill out forms, when an upstairs neighbor would call because the old man in 3B wasn't answering and there was a smell of gas, and you had to get in, and often what you found wasn't gas, but silence, a different kind of silence, definitive. This silence, now, was everywhere.
Before he could insert the pick, a voice stopped them, coming from the shadow of the doorway next door.
"Are you looking for Doctor Silvestri?"
They turned. A woman was leaning against the doorjamb, an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She observed them with a look that mixed wariness and a strange resignation.
"We're with the police," said Valesi, showing his badge. "And you are?"Beatrice Conti. But everyone calls me Bibi. I was his assistant for five years." She took a step forward, the afternoon light illuminating her tired face. "He's disappeared too, hasn't he? Like the others."
It wasn't a question. Martinez nodded. "Yes. Last night. We knew his work. We were hoping here, in his studio, we might find something to help us understand."
Bibi snorted, a bitter sound. "Understand. Nice word." Nevertheless, she rummaged in a leather purse and pulled out a set of keys. "Come in. At this point… at this point, what?" She inserted the key into the lock and swung the entrance open with a decisive gesture.
The studio was a large, bright space, with big windows overlooking the rooftops of Roma. Drawing tables were aligned like stretchers in a hospital, covered with transparencies, sketches, blueprints. Models similar to the one found in the apartment – but evidently real projects, of skyscrapers, museums, residential complexes – occupied shelves along the walls. The air smelled of balsa wood, glue, and a faint hint of rancid coffee.
"Was he working on anything particular, lately?" asked Valesi, as his eyes scanned the shelves, looking for a match, a dissonance. "Something… different from the usual? A personal project, maybe not commissioned."
Bibi approached the main table, touching the edge of a transparency with a finger. "Arturo was an idealist. A romantic, even if he hid behind numbers and estimates. In the last few months… he had changed. Distracted. Sometimes I'd find him here at night, working on his own things. He told me he was 'redesigning memory'." She shrugged. "I thought it was a midlife crisis. Him, a transplanted Milanese, trying to put down roots here by digging into the past."Which past?" Martinez was drawn to a series of photographs pinned to a corkboard. They weren't images of modern architecture, but old prints, faded black and white photos. Walls, arches, foundations of ancient buildings.
"Underground Roma," said Bibi, coming closer. "He was obsessed with it. He said the real city wasn't the one on the surface, but the one underneath, layered, forgotten. He spent days in archives, talking with archaeologists and crazy historians."Names," pressed Valesi. "Someone he spoke with often."
Bibi hesitated, then went to a small desk, opened a worn leather pocket diary. "There was one, especially. A professor. Lorenzo Fiore. An art historian, specialized in… well, in strange things. Symbolism, sacred geometry, that kind of stuff. Arturo met him often. He said Fiore 'provided the grammar' for his new project."
Martinez caught Valesi's eye. *The grammar*. Like the little model, a message in a language to be deciphered.
"Where do we find Fiore?"At the University, usually. La Sapienza. But…" Bibi looked out the window, at the city spread out below them, golden and deceptive. "With what's happening… who knows if he's still there. Who knows if he's still… anywhere."
Valesi took the address Bibi scribbled for him on a post-it. As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on a corner of the table, partially covered by a roll of graph paper. He moved the roll with a knuckle.
Underneath, there was a sheet of sketching paper. There were no designs, but a diagram. A series of concentric circles, like a target, superimposed on a schematic map of Roma. At the center of the target, a point was circled in red ink. It wasn't the Colosseum, nor the Vatican. It was an apparently anonymous area, between the Quirinale and Via Nazionale. Next to it, in Silvestri's precise, angular handwriting, a single word: *Custode*.
"Bibi," called Valesi, without taking his eyes off the diagram. "This. Have you ever seen it? *Custode*."
The woman approached, scrutinized the sheet. She shook her head, perplexed. "No. Never. But… the circles. He talked about them, sometimes. He said Roma hadn't grown by chance. That it was an organism, with a heart and energetic boundaries. Headache-inducing stuff. I made him coffee and nodded."
*Energetic boundaries*. The rule of "born in Roma" took on a new, sinister shape in Valesi's mind. Not an administrative law, but something older, more deeply rooted. An enclosure. A protection. Or a prison.
"Let's take this," he said to Martinez, carefully folding the paper and slipping it into his jacket's inner pocket. "Let's go see the professor."
They left, leaving Bibi alone in the silent studio, among the models of a world that might never be built. Outside, the air had grown cooler. The sun had begun its descent towards the Gianicolo, staining the walls a threatening orange.
The car seemed to start with a sigh of reluctance. As Valesi merged into the traffic on Via del Tritone, as mad and chaotic as ever despite the ongoing Apocalypse, Martinez studied the paper.
"A target. And at the center, the 'Custodian'. Who, or what, is being guarded?"It could be guarding the mechanism," hypothesized Valesi, swerving to avoid a scooter cutting him off. "The cause of all this. Or it could be its victim. Or its guardian." An even more disturbing thought crossed his mind. "Or it represents the switch itself. And Silvestri was trying to find it."
La Sapienza University, with its majestic Minerva courtyard and severe facades, seemed an island of normal frenzy. Students milled between lecture halls, chatting, laughing. Life, the normal, banal, wonderful life of those born in the right place. Valesi felt a sudden surge of anger. These people laughed, argued, fell in love, unaware that their very existence had become a weapon, a monstrous privilege.
Finding the Art History department was easy. Finding Professor Lorenzo Fiore, less so. The department secretary, a woman in her fifties wearing a wool cardigan despite the heat, looked at them over her reading glasses.
"Fiore? The professor has no lectures today. And truthfully... he hasn't been seen since yesterday morning. He's not answering his home phone." Her voice lowered, conspiratorial. "With all that's going around, you know... people disappear. Let's hope nothing has happened to him too. He was so kind."
*Kind*. A useless adjective, thought Valesi, in a world where kindness didn't save you from being erased if your birth certificate had the wrong stamp.
"Do you have an address? A place he might be? Maybe he's doing research," insisted Martinez, showing her FBI badge. The secretary blinked, more impressed by the American accent than the badge.
"Well... sometimes he went to the State Archive, in Piazza dell'Orologio. Or to the Angelica Library. He said you could still breathe the 'true history' there, not the one from textbooks." She gave them both addresses, writing them in neat handwriting on a sheet of graph paper.
They were back in the car, time slipping like sand through their fingers. Martinez checked her watch every five minutes.
"The State Archive," proposed Valesi. "It's closer. And if he was looking for 'the true history', that's where you find it. Good and bad."
Piazza dell'Orologio, on the Campidoglio, was bathed in the long shadows of Renaissance palaces. The State Archive, with its imposing facade, seemed asleep. They passed through the main gate and the modern world vanished, replaced by a dusty silence, smelling of ancient paper, treated wood, and a distant cellar dampness.
An elderly clerk, with the pallid complexion of someone who lives under neon lights, rose from a desk behind a walnut counter.
"May I help you?" The voice was a polite whisper, suited to the place.
"We're looking for Professor Lorenzo Fiore. The art historian. Has he been here today? Or yesterday?"
The clerk, whose name tag read "Dr. A. Moretti", slowly shook his head. "Professor Fiore hasn't been here for a few days. He was a frequent visitor, especially to the map room and the collections on medieval Roma. But lately... no."
A bitter disappointment rose in Valesi's stomach. Another dead end. He was about to thank him and turn away when Martinez placed a hand on the counter.
"Medieval Roma. Was Fiore consulting something specific? Maps, as you said? Could they be maps showing ancient boundaries? City boundaries?"
Dr. Moretti stared at her, then shifted his gaze to Valesi, as if seeking confirmation of the question's legitimacy. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Yes. In fact, lately he was very interested in one thing in particular. Not a map, but a document. A 10th-century *breviarium*. A sort of inventory of the properties and boundaries of a powerful family of the time, the *Crescenzi*."
The name meant nothing to Valesi, but he felt a tingling at the nape of his neck.
"And in this document," continued Martinez, her voice taut as a violin string, "was there something special?"
Moretti cleared his throat, lowered his tone even further, almost as if he feared the surrounding parchments might eavesdrop. "Professor Fiore was convinced it described not just land boundaries, but... how to put it... boundaries of a different *jurisdiction*. Obscure words, references to 'limina' and 'custodiae'. To a 'Pact'. He said it was the key to understanding certain... topographical anomalies of the city." The clerk shrugged, embarrassed by his own erudition. "I told him they were fantasies. History is made of papers and stones, not superstitions."
*Custodiae*. Custodian. The term used by Silvestri.
"Can we see this document?" asked Valesi.
Moretti shook his head firmly. "Absolutely not. It's an extremely fragile original. And anyway... it's not here."Where is it?"Professor Fiore had it transferred, with special authorization from the Superintendent, for further study. He took it three days ago." The clerk made a dramatic pause. "It was due back yesterday."
The silence that followed was broken only by the distant hum of a dehumidifier. Fiore had the document. Fiore had disappeared. The document with him.
"And he left no notes, no copy of his research?" insisted Martinez, desperation beginning to seep into her controlled tone.
Moretti hesitated. Then, as if deciding to betray a small secret, he nodded his head toward a table at the back of the hall, near a tall Gothic window. "That's his assigned desk. We haven't emptied the drawers yet. Out of respect, you know. If you want to take a look... but please, be gentle."
They approached the table. It was a simple wooden surface, with a desk lamp and three drawers. The first contained pencils, erasers, a penknife. The second, empty notepads. The third, the bottom one, was slightly harder to open, as if something inside was obstructing it.
Valesi pulled it forcefully. With a jerk, the drawer gave way.
Inside, there were no notes. There was an object.
It was a rough, terracotta reproduction, the size of a fist. It depicted a bearded head, with a stern expression, wearing something that could be a helmet or a crown of leaves. It was not a work of art. It was crude, almost primitive. And beneath it, a small piece of paper folded in four.
Martinez took it, opened it.
On the paper, in the same cultured and precise handwriting they imagined belonged to Fiore, was written:
*"The Custodian is not a place. It is a man. The Pact is renewed with the blood of those who do not belong. They have found it. They are looking for me. If you are reading this, it is too late for me. Look for 'The Threshold' in the innermost circle. Where the Custodian watches over the broken Pact."*
On the back of the note, a quick, hurried schematic map. Not Silvestri's concentric circles, but a broken line, a path that started from a point near Piazza Venezia and delved into a tangle of alleys, ending in a small empty space, marked with a cross. Next to it, two words: *Arco degli Acetari*.
Valesi looked up and met Martinez's gaze. In the dusty air of the archive, heavy with the weight of centuries, the stakes had suddenly changed.
They were no longer just looking for a missing architect or a professor.
They were looking for a passage.
And someone – the Custodian himself or another figure in the shadows – was looking for them. Sarah Martinez's time was running out, and now they knew they were not just racing against a mystery, but against someone who was protecting that mystery. And who was willing to make disappear anyone, born in Roma or not, who got too close to the truth.