They weren’t in any hurry, and by the time my new client arrived – at least a quarter of an hour later-I was thinking of setting fire to the table or a couple of chairs, to warm myself up and draw attention to myself.

I recognized him as soon as he came in, even though I hadn’t seen him for more than twenty-five years.

Fabio Paolicelli, known as Fabio Rayban. We called him that because he always wore sunglasses, even at night. That was why I hadn’t immediately recognized the name. For me, for everyone, he had always been Fabio Rayban.

It was the Seventies, which I remember as one long black-and-white TV news broadcast. The first images I have of that time are of the Piazza Fontana just after the bomb. I was seven years old, but I remember it all very well: the photos in the newspapers, the filmed reports on television, the conversations at home between my parents and friends who came to see them.

One afternoon – it may have been the day after the attack – I asked my grandpa Guido why they’d planted that bomb, if we were at war, and with what country. He looked at me and said nothing. It was the only time he couldn’t answer one of my questions.

I remember almost all the important events of those years. I remember the faces of young men, the same age as us, gradually starting to appear on TV news broadcasts.

In those days I associated sporadically, without a great deal of conviction, with a number of far-left groups.

Fabio Rayban, on the other hand, was a Fascist thug.

Maybe more than just a thug. A lot of stories circulated about him, and others like him. Stories about armed robberies done for the sake of a daring gesture. About military camps in the remotest areas of the Murgia, attended by dubious characters from the armed forces and the secret services. About so-called Aryan celebrations in luxurious villas on the outskirts of town. But the thing you heard most often about Rayban was that he had been part of the paramilitary squad that had stabbed to death an eighteen-year-old Communist who suffered from polio.