The little Honda was trying to do the impossible or at the very least the idiotic-to pass another car on the Corso Italia in the middle of the morning rush. True, the Corso was ample by local standards, the widest avenue in Stresa, a beautiful concourse that ran picturesquely along the lakefront, with two lanes in each direction. And as rush hours went, Stresa’s wasn’t anything to brag about, but that didn’t mean you could expect to lane-change as if you were on the motorway around Rome. And certainly not with a big semitrailer truck-a Mercedes-Benz cab hauling an empty flatbed-bearing down on you in the oncoming lane and more than filling it.

There was nothing they could do but stand there and watch it happen. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes-they could see him pulling on the wheel so hard (as if it made any difference) that he was standing up, like a wagon driver hauling back on the reins. The truck slewed to the left, veered in front of the oncoming traffic, bounced heavily up over the curb, scattering pedestrians, and went scraping and grinding across the entrance to the police parking lot until its huge left front wheel sank squarely into one of the planting beds that bordered the entrance.

The only damage to city property that they could see were a couple of bushes that had been run over, but the truck was in sorry shape. The flatbed in the rear, carried forward by its momentum, had swung around to the right, snapping or twisting something in the trailer connection, so that it ended up tilted and jackknifed, with its rear end clear on the other side of the street, almost up to the sidewalk and thoroughly eliminating any possibility of through traffic for hours to come.