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"Moving around how?" He moved around in the two best senses of the word: often changing his room or rather lair or cot: and strolling idly about Rome from morning to evening: looking for you never know what. The last time, she had run into him at the Tunnel of Via Nazionale. He lived here for a while, then there. But he wouldn't tell her where he was staying. On a couch at some relative's: in a room rented from a seamstress. In the empty bed of an uncle who had died, a couple of weeks ago . . . that is, the uncle of a friend of his, who had lost his uncle. And when he couldn't manage any more, couldn't pay up, then he had to get a change of air, you see?

"Obviously," Doctor Fumi concurred in a low voice. And he wandered around the city with no particular place to go, or else with slow and perhaps meditated itineraries: he shifted softly from one neighborhood to another: Monti at ten, Trastevere at four, at Piazza Colonna or Piazza Esedra with the lights and the red-green reclame of the evening, the night. The residential districts? Yes.

"He also used to work Via Veneto, Via Ludovisi every now and then, where it's a little darker, because of the women."

The girl blushed, raised her head, and her voice became spiteful, irked. "He went out walking, walking: he had to have his shoes resoled every month: he walked, and disappeared, and you never knew where he had gone."

Either to cultivate his beauties, or to escape his beauties: certain beauties, at least so it seemed to Ingravallo, looking for him, eager to find him, to catch him, with long, examining looks beyond the flow of the cars, from one sidewalk to the other, or along the sidewalk crowded with tables and chairs, with ladies and gentlemen drinking or in the process of sucking, in cautious, disinterested sips, the pallid fistulas.

"They'd go to the end of the earth to hunt for him," she stated: her eyes steady, calm.

"He too! He, too!" Ingravallo's feelings ached. "In the roster of the fortunate and the happy, even he!" His face became grim. "He, too, persecuted by women!"

"So he kind of wanders around, you know what I mean . . ." and, after some hesitation and with a certain amount of emotion in her tone: "so all those women looking for him won't find him at home, so he doesn't have to trip over some girl every step he takes."

With one hand she threw back the evil mop: she was silent.

"I understand," Doctor Fumi resumed. "Now, tell me: what's he like, what kind of a face does he have, this Diomede? By the way, is Diomede his first name or his last name?"

"His last name?" Ines lowered her eyes: she blushed, to gain time, to fabricate her seventy-third lie.

"His last name," Ingravallo followed up. "Yes, we may need him."

"To learn a few things from him, too," Doctor Fumi added.

"Well, he didn't want to tell me his last name."

"But he finally did tell you, though," Ingravallo insisted. "Out with his last name."

"Listen to me, girlie. The bunch of us, here . . . it's best for you ... we need his help."

"But officer, sir, how can you need a boy like him? He's never done any harm to anybody."

"He has to you! . . . Seeing as how the vice squad has run you in."

"Well, I mean, that's between me and him: the police haven't got anything to do with that: it's our business."

"Aha, so the police have nothing to do with it, eh? Honey, you're not talking sense. We're the ones who know what the police have to do or not."

"He hasn't done anything."

"Well, then tell us his name."

"And I don't feel like I've done anything wrong, either": her eyes became damp: "Let me go, too."

"Diomede, eh . . ." and Doctor Fumi's gaze had the unswerving quality of a request to see identification papers, urgently.

"Well, they told me his name was Diomede .. . Lanciani, Diomede." And she burst into a sort of stifled, soft weeping.

"Don't you worry your head. We want to get hold of him because he has to tell us . . . something: something interesting. That's why we have to find him."

"Hurry up now. What sort of a mug does this