And as if that weren’t bad enough, an oncoming French tour bus had also veered wildly to avert disaster, and had ended up directly across from the police station, drunkenly sprawled in the Piazza Matteoti, which the city hall shared with the upscale Cafe Bolongaro. Cafe tables and chairs, unused at this time of the morning (so there was one little piece of luck, at any rate), had been overturned and now littered the little square. The bus passengers sat in their seats like statues, silent and white. Below the line of stunned faces, printed in bright red letters on the side of the bus, was the tour company’s slogan: LE PLAISIR DE VOYAGER.

As for the blue Honda that had caused it all, it had managed to scoot out of the way back into its lane and was long gone.

The two constables were running toward the driver before the truck tire had finished sinking into the soft earth. “Hey there, are you all right? Are you hurt?” Officer Giuseppe di Paolo called up to him.

The poorly shaven, gray-mustached man raised his head from the steering wheel, looking shell-shocked. “All right? Yes… it wasn’t my fault… there was a car…”

“We saw, we saw,” the officer said. “Did you get the license plate?”

“No, I couldn’t… it was… no.”

At this point Officer Gualtiero Favaretto asserted his natural authority (he was senior by four months) and took charge. “You,” he commanded the driver, “sit there a minute, make sure you’re not injured. Then go inside at once and tell them what happened.” His tone grew more somber. “You’d better ask for Comandante Boldini.”

The driver nodded wanly. “Yes, sir.”

Favaretto turned to his partner. “Giuseppe, this is going to create the mother of all snarls. Nobody’s going to be able to get through town. I’ll do what I can to get started cleaning up here. You better go in and tell them we need to put somebody out on the Corso up by the Regina Palace, and somebody else down at the Villa Palavicino turnoff, to divert traffic.”