The Company had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that none of the neighbouring buildings would ever rise higher than its own. To the east of the headquarters lay a park where, with the Company’s encouragement and financial support, a playground and a sports field had been established.

Now Tony Tolomei noticed a red-and-white circus tent standing on the playing field.

He had been to the circus once.

It had simply been a very long time ago.

He tried to remember when.

His brother had been with him that day, and his brother had been dead for forty-seven years. That meant he had last been to the circus fifty-four years earlier.

His mother had laughed until tears ran down her face.

Had she ever laughed like that at any other time?

Tony Tolomei entered the Company building, crossed the marble lobby, and greeted the doormen by name. They smiled at him warmly, as they had every morning for decades.

He was always the first of the executives to arrive, taking the lift alone to the executive floor.

Alma, who oversaw the running of the floor, and Maria, who had been his secretary, were already at work.

He paused to think.

Maria had arrived the year after the new headquarters had been completed.

Eighteen years ago.

Tony Tolomei stepped into his office.

His eyes rested on the great reddish desk.

Whenever he looked at it, he remembered his mother telling him how she had shared a bed with her four sisters until she was twelve years old, when the eldest finally married and moved away.

His desk occupied two square metres more than his mother’s childhood bed.

Upon it stood a computer that he hardly ever used, a leather writing pad, and a French pen stand nearly a century old.

There were photographs as well.

His father.

He looked as though he were about to cough up one of those pellets owls disgorge.

The photograph had been taken only a few months before he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

His mother.

Large-eyed, solemn, exactly as she had always been.

Pearls around her neck.

Her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the camera, as it so often had been.

And his brother.

His brother had been a handsome man. He had inherited their mother’s beautifully shaped face, their father’s broad mouth, and from some unknown ancestor an irresistibly infectious laugh.

The photograph had been taken a few years before he flew his aircraft into a forest somewhere utterly insignificant, beyond some anonymous little airfield.

Tony Tolomei looked at the photographs.

Then he placed them carefully into his briefcase.

He walked to the western corner of the office.

From there, by turning only his head, he could look towards the west.

He could not quite see his own home, but he could see the northern end of the building.

He had lived there ever since the merger.

First with his father, his mother, his brother, and Margaret, the housekeeper.

Then with his father, his mother, and Margaret.

Then with his father, Joanne, the new housekeeper, and no one else.

Now only Joanne remained with him.

Then Tony Tolomei turned east.

He could just make out—or perhaps merely imagined he could—the green tiled roof, about three finger-widths to the right of the yellow tower that stood where the family company had once been.

He had spent the first years of his life beneath that green roof.

The four-storey building had been home to Grandmother Giulia, Uncle Franco and his family.

Handsome Franco—Francobello, as everyone called him—had eventually returned to their grandfather’s hometown and sold his share of the business to Tony’s father.

The memory always made his father laugh.

“Handsome Franco… the bloody fool. He sold me half the company for the price of a vineyard—and less than it would cost to buy a single floor in this building today.”

Tony Tolomei turned north.

Beyond the river, just past the power station chimney—about a thumb’s width to the east, though hidden from direct view—lay the cemetery.

There, inside a little white marble house, rested the bones of his parents.

Tony Tolomei could never understand the point of it.

But it had been his father’s wish.

A little white house, carved from stone brought from the old country.

Larger than the home in which his mother had grown up.

Built for two dead people.

Not the slightest trace of reason in it.