“One paolo is missing,” the man said.
Antonio looked up. Since being brought into this chamber, he had heard the clink of keys, the murmur of a prayer, and the admonitions of a jailer who feared above all an uneasy night. He had not anticipated this shopkeeper’s grievance. The man standing before him held an open linen purse in his palm. He wore a cloak whose elbow had been mended with thread that was far too pale.
“You found the rest, then?”
“Twenty-six.”
The turnkey brought his lantern closer. He had permitted this interview because the man had presented himself with the priest and had neither shouted nor uttered threats. Now, he regretted his indulgence. The prisoner was to be executed on the morrow, and here, of all things, an account was being reopened.
Antonio looked at the purse. He recognized it. He had forgotten the face of the man he had robbed, but not that fold of fabric near the drawstring, where the coins had gathered when he snatched it. The memory returned to him with an unpleasant clarity. He averted his gaze.
“I no longer have it.”
“I can see that.”
The man drew the stool forward and sat down. This liberty irked Antonio. The visitor had come to the prison as one comes to dun a debtor, resolved to take whatever time was required. Yet time, in this place, was no longer a thing one possessed at will.
“You will be able to tell people you saw me,” Antonio said. “That will still amount to something.”
“I did not come to tell tales.”
The priest remained near the door. He had overheard on the staircase what the visitor wished to ask. He was not certain this meeting would serve anyone, but he had thought that a man on the brink of death still had the right to face a question that did not come from the executioner.
“The last paolo,” the visitor resumed, “what did you do with it?”
Antonio gave a short, dry laugh. He would have preferred an insult. With an insult, he could have defended himself, shrugged his shoulders, and once again become the man who feared nothing. This precise reckoning dragged him back to a petty, ignoble act: a purse torn away, a man shoved to the ground, twenty-seven coins taken simply because they were there and because he believed himself strong enough.
“I bought food,” he replied.
The other man slowly closed the purse.
“I see.”
He added nothing. Antonio thought at first he had won the exchange. Then he saw that the visitor did not rise.
“Was that what you wished to know?”
“Yes.”
“Now you know it.”
“I know what you say.”
The jailer opened his mouth, ready to remind them that this conversation could not drag on indefinitely. The priest laid two fingers upon his sleeve. There was something in the visitor’s composure that did not resemble stubbornness. He was seeking an answer simpler than the one he had just been given, and far more difficult.
“When you took that money from me,” he said at last, “you thought I would still be able to work.”
Antonio did not answer.
“You saw me standing. You told yourself that a man left on his feet can always find another coin.”
The prisoner observed the hand that held the purse. Two fingers remained curled, stiffened, and the seam of the cloak barely shifted as the man drew his arm back against his chest. Antonio could no longer recall the struggle with precision. In his memory, it had lasted just long enough to allow his escape. The consequences had not walked away with him.
“I had not thought of your hands.”
“That is what I wished to know.”
This time, the visitor stood up. The stool scraped against the flagstones. Antonio felt an absurd rush of impatience: the man had obtained his answer and was about to leave, taking with him the lantern from the stairs, the street, the days to come. The prisoner wished to detain him, without knowing by what right.
“Wait.”
The visitor turned back.
Antonio fumbled in his jacket pocket. The turnkey took a step forward, but the prisoner drew out only a brass button. He had torn it off that afternoon because it was dangling by a thread, and had kept it for no particular reason. Now, he held it between his thumb and forefinger like a shameful coin.
“I have only this.”
“Keep it.”
“It is not for the paolo.”
“For what, then?”
He did not know. He had wished to give something so that he might no longer be merely the man who had taken. The gesture suddenly struck him as so pitiful that he closed his fist. He might have asked for forgiveness; the priest was perhaps waiting for that very word. But he feared having it granted too readily, as one hands a blanket to a man whose night will be short.
The visitor slipped his purse back beneath his cloak.
“I did not ask for your death,” he said.
Antonio lifted his head sharply.
“Yet I am to die.”
“I know.”
“And you will leave with twenty-six.”
“Yes.”
They looked at one another. The account admitted of no solution. The visitor could not restore a life he had not taken; Antonio could not undo the theft by offering the life that was being stripped from him. Between them, the missing paolo had become almost a derisory trifle, yet it prevented the matter from ever being cleanly settled.
The priest stepped aside to let the man pass. At the threshold, the visitor fumbled for a moment, trying to fasten his cloak with a single hand. Antonio saw the movement, and then the jailer’s fingers reaching out to assist him without a word. That minute kindness wounded Antonio more than the prospect of the scaffold: it exposed what he had refused to see when he struck.
The door swung shut. Antonio laid the button on the empty stool. When he had detached it, he had hoped the visitor would extend his hand. Such a gesture would have provided a convenient conclusion: the thief offering, the victim accepting, and each man permitted to play the noble part. But the visitor had left the brass behind. Antonio turned it over with the tip of his finger; on the back, a frayed remnant of thread still clung. He would no longer attempt to pass it off as restitution. When the turnkey returned for him, it would be nothing more than a button, abandoned in a cell where no one would ever wear his coat again.
“Do you wish to pray?” the priest asked.
“I should like to remember him as something other than that purse.”
The priest sat down in his turn. He offered no rote phrases to repeat. Antonio described the cloak, the two curled fingers, the pale thread at the elbow. He paused, began again, corrected a detail. For the first time since the robbery, the man he had despoiled occupied more room in his memory than the money.
On the following day, the fifth of February 1803, Antonio Lavagnini was hanged at Zagarolo; his body was subsequently quartered. The executioner’s register preserved the sum of the theft: twenty-seven paoli. Twenty-seven: that single figure filled the entire line in which a man was erased.