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The square smells of petrol and spring and the human smell of a crowd that has been standing in the heat for a long time, pressed together, running on something that is not quite joy and not quite grief and is not, whatever the newspapers will call it tomorrow, simple.
He stands at the edge of it and looks at what is hanging from the girder of the Esso station and feels nothing he expected to feel.
He expected... He doesn't know exactly what he expected. He has been waiting for this, or something like this, for years.
The thing has come.
And Romano stands in the April light and looks at the body hanging upside down from the girder - the body and beside it Clara Petacci, the woman who loved him enough or was stupid enough to die beside him - and feels.
The crowd around him is doing what crowds do. It's nothing unusual, he has seen it before, one of the advantages and disadvantages of being what he is - the pattern recognition that comes from having watched human beings long enough to know that they behave, in aggregate, with a consistency that individual people rarely achieve.
The crowd is loud and it is pressing forward; from the outside it looks like joy and relief, from the inside it the release of pressure that has been building for so long that the release itself has become indistinguishable from the pressure. Romano understands this. He is made of these people, is them, and he understands the release because he has felt the pressure himself, has felt it for twenty years.
Il Duce, they called him. Il Duce who gave him the Roman salute though nonno didn't use it like that, and the Roman eagle which was nonno's symbol, and the dream of a Rome that would be Rome again like when Romano was something else, something that didn't have the shape he has now. And he had watched, with the feeling of a person watching someone use a family heirloom as a weapon, the dream be made into a machine, the machine be made into a war, the war be made into catastrophe.
He doesn't think about the man. He will not think about the man. The man does not get his interiority.
He thinks about Giacomo instead.
Giacomo, who stood up in the Chamber of Deputies on the thirtieth of May, 1924, eleven days after the election, and without metaphors - because the situation couldn't allow metaphors anymore - that the election had been a fraud, that the violence was real, that the results could not stand, that what was happening was wrong and that he intended to say so out loud in the only room in the country where it still carried any formal weight.
Romano had been in Rome that day. He had heard about the speech and had known. He had felt the city's register change, the atmosphere settle. He had known it and he had not known what to do with the knowing - such is the fate of being a nation in a moment when history has made its decision and is simply waiting for the rest to catch up.
Eleven days later Giacomo left his home on the Lungotevere and did not arrive where he was going. He was thirty-nine years old. He had a wife and three children and a clarity of moral purpose that Romano had watched with partial awe, partial grief, and partial the guilt of the witness that remains just that.
They found the body two months later in a field outside Rome. Something cracked inside him.
Giacomo was not the first one, nor the last. The OVRA's files are very thorough in their bureaucracy of repression and in administer silence through violence. Not all people have been important enough to generate paperwork though.
Then there are the ones who died in Africa in a war that was a massacre that required the bureaucratic cover of being called a war; the ones who died in Greece, in the Albanian mountains, in the Russian winter. There are the ones who came home from those places and were not the same shape as the ones who left - a category of loss that doesn't get counted in the final numbers because the people are still alive and alive is supposed to be enough.
Then there are the Jews and-
And there is a stone in his hand. He doesn't remember picking it up.
The stone is the right weight, it will travel cleanly and arrive at the thing it is thrown at with the full intention of the throw.
He looks at the bodies on the girder.
He does not think about the man.
He thinks about Giacomo again, walking along the Lungotevere on the tenth of June, 1924, about the crack in his own chest that opened on the day they found the body in the field, the crack that has been there for years, that his thumb has found every day since, pressing at it, unable to leave it alone, the evidence of a structural failure. He thinks about his brother, his foolish brother with hopes and dreams and good intentions that lay on the path to hell.
He throws the stone.
The throw is clean.
It travels the way he knew it would travel.
It arrives with a sickening, satisfying sound.
The crowd around him surges and shouts and the surging and shouting wash over him and through him and he stands in the middle of it and he feels...
He feels and the crowd shouts and the bodies hang from the girder and the stone is gone from his hand but the crack is still there and who knows when it will go away.