The bottle-green Range Rover came back into the courtyard at Zocco di Erbusco on the twenty-first of August at ten past seven in the evening, on a tow truck from Palazzolo that had driven the whole length of the Sebina with its hazard lights on, and Gianmario Bertoli, forty-seven, a worker at the Capriolo foundry since two thousand and one, watched it come down off the bed nose first and thought it was smaller than he remembered it; and the curious thing is that it was exactly the same one, licence plate included, because the Italian plate had stayed in a folder at the prosecutor's office in Fiume while the car went about with a Croatian plate registered to a car rental company in Rijeka which, according to the traffic police report, never owned any offices at all, only a post office box on via Zagrebačka, a box that is still listed as active and still rented, though under another name.

Gianmario had sold the car in two thousand and twenty-one to a man who turned up with a cashier's cheque for twenty-five thousand five hundred euros, a cheque printed well, with the right watermark and the right serial number, and forged; and the forgery was established the following Tuesday, when the car had already passed Trieste.

That is where the paperwork begins.

The papers are kept in a light blue three-flap folder that Gianmario keeps on top of the refrigerator, and they are, in order: the report to the carabinieri at Palazzolo, the criminal complaint, the public prosecutor's file, three reminders, the request for letters rogatory, the sworn translation of the request for letters rogatory made by a translator in Trieste who charges forty-two euros a page and who took eleven pages, the Croatian reply, the second request because the first had gone to the wrong office, and finally the record of restitution, which is the only sheet with a photograph on it. In the photograph you can see the bonnet and, reflected in the bonnet, the hand of whoever is taking the picture.

The bank transfers, on the other hand, are not in the folder, because they are not his.

They are Ivan's, the older brother, who lays tiles and who in two thousand and twenty-two put in one thousand two hundred euros, in twenty-three another eight hundred, in twenty-four one thousand four hundred for the letters rogatory and the translator, and then other, smaller sums that Gianmario has never added up but that over five years come to more than the car can be worth now, with one hundred and ninety thousand kilometres on it and four years standing in a customs yard where impounded cars sit out in the open under the bora.

On the twenty-second of August, the next morning, there were six or seven people in the courtyard.

There were the two neighbours from upstairs, the wife, the elder son with his girlfriend, a cousin, and Ivan, the last to arrive, in his van. They all walked around the car the way people walk around an open coffin, and they said the things that get said: that you can tell it has been standing, that the seats are good, that the paint on the roof is gone.

Ivan went round it twice, slowly. Then he stopped on the driver's side and said, in his everyday voice, will you let me take it for a run.

He did not ask off to one side. He asked there, in front of the cousin and the neighbours from upstairs, and this is the point Gianmario carried around with him all week, because in five years his brother had never asked him for anything, and the first time he asked for something he asked in a normal voice in front of six people, which is the way of asking of someone who has a right to it and does not want to make it weigh.

Gianmario said that first he had to put it right.

He said it exactly like that, first I have to put it right, and he explained that there was the battery to do, the service, the tyres that all four needed changing because a tyre standing four years goes square, and that afterwards, once it was sorted, he would let him drive it as much as he liked.

Ivan said all right and left before the others.

The key hangs now on a nail inside the storeroom, along with the cellar keys and the one for the bicycle padlock, and the remote does not respond any more because the battery went flat during the years of the impoundment; to open it you have to put the key into the door lock, which is a thing that cars nowadays no longer let you do.

Gianmario goes through the courtyard every day.

When somebody comes by, and the cousin comes by, the neighbours from upstairs come by, the postman comes by and is glad to stop, he says the same sentence: first I have to put it right. He says it to those who ask him about the car and he says it to those who do not ask him, he says it on Wednesday to the postman and on Saturday to the cousin, and he says it always the same, without changing a word, the way things are said that have been decided once and for all.

On the first of September, which was a Tuesday, the courtyard at eight in the evening was empty.

He went down all the same with the rag, took the dust off the bonnet on the side where the sun beats, straightened up and said out loud, to the empty courtyard, that first he had to put it right.