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He’s putting in a development there? Another development?”
    She laughed. “Well, I don’t know what it was before, but it’s not a pasture anymore.”
    Caravale’s heart was perhaps just a little less softened as he returned to his car.

THREE
    The site was just where he’d feared it would be, on what had once been a wide ribbon of undulating meadow dotted with old flowering plum trees, which curved around the mountain’s flank. When he’d been a boy, it had been his playground. He and his friends had played soccer here and badgered the resident goats, pretending to be matadors-but now backhoes and bulldozers were shoving piles of rock and naked earth from one place to another. Already it was hard to remember the meadow as it had been.
    GOLF AND COUNTRY CLUB LAKE MAGGIORE, the big, laser-embossed sign said in almost-English (which presumably gave it the trendy American tone that would attract rich Swiss and Milanese buyers), and underneath it a smaller, tacked-on placard for the benefit of the locals: Circolo Golf del Lago Maggiore. Una Realizzazione di Aurora Costruzioni.
    Vincenzo de Grazia stood in consultation with another man, both wearing hard hats, work clothes, and work boots, and leaning over a blueprint spread out on the hood of a mud-caked cement truck. Truck, men, and everything else in sight were covered with dust. That was one thing you had to say about de Grazia: He didn’t run from getting dirt under his fingernails.
    Caravale approached and waited for them to look up, but they remained immersed. “Signor de Grazia?” he said after a minute.
    De Grazia glanced up, calculatedly leaving his forefinger resting on the diagram. “Yes, Colonel, can I do something for you?”
    Caravale was impressed. It was natural enough that he himself should recognize de Grazia. He had seen him about often enough, and his picture was frequently in the newspaper; once there had even been a two-page spread on him in Oggi (“The Aristocrat of Waste-Water Treatment Plants”). Besides, de Grazia was quite striking-looking: a tight-knit, distinctively hawkfaced man with thick, stiff, ropy gray hair brushed straight back from the hairline, and a nose that cleaved the air like the prow of a ship. Add to that an air of bottled-up, restless energy and a rarely disguised impatience to get on with things, to move along, and he was not someone who would be easy to forget. Beyond that, once you watched him for a while, you couldn’t help but be aware of an ingrained sense of natural authority and entitlement that was hard to ignore, although it also tended to grate on the nerves. On Caravale’s nerves, anyway.
    Colonel Caravale’s picture was occasionally in the papers or on local TV as well, but it was always in connection with some ceremonial affair or other, for which he’d be one of a crowd, and in dress uniform, complete with lavish gold braid and cocked hat with feather. Today he was wearing his workaday uniform, a simple, businesslike black with a white shirt and dark tie. And no one, to his knowledge, had ever called him “striking.” He was swarthy, short, fifteen pounds overweight, and heavy-featured, with beefy jowls that rode over his collars. Adolescent acne had left his cheeks deeply pitted. His thinning hair and receding hairline were more than made up for by the thick eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead and even dipped a little, so that he had to shave the top of his nose every Sunday.
    Once, dressing before a civic affair, stripped down to undershirt and shorts, he had taken a long look at his slope-shouldered, barrel-chested, short-legged figure in the mirror and shaken his head.
    His wife, who had been unwrapping tissue paper from the ridiculous hat, had looked at him. “What’s the matter?”
    “Ah, it’s hopeless,” he had said. “Look at me. Without my uniform, I look as if I should be slicing salami at the corner trattoria.”
    She had shrugged and gone back to unpacking the hat.