“Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero, and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms — dense and thick and buttery, though God knows where she got the butter from …” He closed his eyes. “I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn’t bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

“They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing … I couldn’t tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn’t.”

“And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?”

“It was all I could think of.”

By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking for him. In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

“Maria was really your cousin?”

“No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents — your, uh, great- great — grandparents, I guess — who left Rome for the States in the first place. Hell, I don’t know what you’d call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know — you have them,” he said, looking at me. “But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an ass — well, I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was sexy like you wouldn’t believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn’t keep his hands off her.”

“Mussolini?”

“She was never a fascist — that’s what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four — but I believed her. It turns out she’d known the Duce since the thirties. She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it.”

“And she became — what, his mistress?”

“You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in ‘thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism.”

I did the math quickly. “Thirteen each?”

He grinned. “They were heroes. But we’ve always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too.” That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. “The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where Maria kissed a glass case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief — the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an assassination attempt.” He winked at me. “But that wasn’t all she kissed.”

I spluttered.

“Come on, kid. I think we need a walk.”

And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.

Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a classic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than

four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue, four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro’s, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world’s largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

Lou said, “So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?”

“Too bloody expensive.”

“Yeah, but if you were rich enough your head would work differently. You don’t spend to get stuff. You spend as a statement. But it hasn’t always been this way. I started to come here in the early sixties. We had a beach house, farther up the coast.”

“We?”

“Lisa, my wife. Two boys. Already growing up, even then.” He didn’t mention the wife and kids again; I inferred the usual story, the wife had died, the kids rarely visited. “It was a good place for the summer. But back then it was kind of different.” The town had been founded in the nineteenth century as a winter playground for the well heeled. In the twenties had come further development. “It was a winter town. In the summer they used to dismantle the traffic lights! Now, though, it stays open all year. Some say it’s the richest town in the Union.”

“So you’ve done well to end up here,” I said.

“ End up. You’re not around old people much, are you?”

“Shit. I—”

“Ah, forget it. Yes, I did okay. Stock options—” His talk drifted back to the Second World War. He had been a draftee. “I was lucky. Spared the fighting. I already had some business experience, helping my father run his machine shop as a kid. So I got staff positions. Logistics. Requisitions. The work was endless.

“The invasion of Italy was the biggest bureaucratic exercise in history. We were heroes of paperwork.” I grinned dutifully. “But it was good experience. I learned a hell of a lot, about people, business, systems. Stuff you learn in the army you can apply anywhere.

“I went back home after the war, but my father’s business felt too small, with all respect to the old man.” Having grown up in New York — he was old enough to remember the Wall Street crash — Lou took some positions in the financial industry. “But I got impatient with being so far from the action. After Italy,

moving funds around, buying and selling stocks, watching numbers on a ticker tape — it was all too remote. I’m not a miner or an engineer. But I wanted to work somewhere I could see things being built.”

So, after taking some kind of business degree, he had moved to California to work for none other than North American Aviation in Downey, California.

“It was North American built Apollo. You know, the moon ship?” I nodded. Evidently he was used to younger people never having heard of the program. “Not all of it,” he said. “Just the CSM — the command and service modules, the part that came back to Earth. I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part — but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon.”

He was a solid character, intense, engaged, vividly real. In his anecdotes I glimpsed a postwar America growing fast, confident and rich, a time of technological growth and economic expansion — and I liked the idea that a relative of mine had been there at the fall of Rome, and had worked on Apollo. But I wasn’t enjoying the encounter. Beside him I felt pale, diminished, uncertain, maybe a bit intimidated. And young.