Evenings at the Lighthouse

The archive in Genoa kept its nineteenth-century drawings in a basement that had once been a wine cellar, and the archivist, a man called Pagliari, hated the telephone and loved Giulia because she had known his late wife in the restoration course at the Politecnico in 2011. When she called on the Thursday morning, from the café in the village, he asked after her mother and then asked what she wanted. "The 1998 restoration file for Faro di Monteriggi," she said. "And whatever you have from before that. I want the original nineteenth-century drawings if they exist. And any ministry correspondence." "For the whole file I need a requisition." "I'll send the requisition. But I need the numbers today, on the phone. Look at the 1998 file. There's a ministry invoice, probably twenty-third or twenty-fourth page, for the render work. I need the figure and I need the contractor." "Giulia." "Please." He rang back in forty minutes. The figure was one hundred and ninety-two million lire, in the currency of the time — about ninety-nine thousand euros in today's money. The contractor was a firm called *Colombo & Ricci Restauri*, with an address in Rapallo that no longer existed. The invoice had been signed off by the ministerial inspector on the basis of a report that described the exterior render as "original fabric, consolidated in full" and the base-course stonework as "intact,