Chapter IX
This is how the client had contacted me: The year before, a few days after Christmas, a young man had come to the door at dinner time. After putting on the chain, I had suspiciously opened the door a little, despite the fact that he was elegantly dressed and spoke with propriety. He had introduced himself as one of the secretaries of the financier Angelo Tartaglia Fioretti, for whose newspaper I was still writing, and with no preambles and as if it were his credentials, he had immediately pulled out a wad of 10,000 lire banknotes 6: "This is a down payment for you if you agree to write about twenty poems and sell them to my boss. They must all be about love in praise of a certain Tatiana, whose name must appear at least five times. Mind you, after payment is made you will never
