Students from other schools jeered Hoxha Polytechnic's soccer and basketball teams because the academy bore a foreigner's name. "Odd jobs!" they shouted. "Odd jobs!" Despite a century and a half of Socialism, Albania remained the poorest country in Europe. Young Albanians sometimes crossed the Adriatic in small boats. Working as farm laborers or handymen-or thieves-in Italy seemed better to them than going hungry back home.

A big black-and-white photo of Hoxha stared down at An-narita and Gianfranco from over the entrance. He didn't look as if he approved of them. He didn't look as if he approved of anybody. Considering what he'd had to do to drive the Fascists out of Albania during the Second World War and then rule the country for so long afterwards, he probably didn't.

"See you," Gianfranco said, and hurried off to his first class.

"Ciao," Annarita called after him. She didn't want to go to Russian. It drove her crazy. Everybody who wanted to be anybody had to learn it. It was the most important language in the world, after all. When the Soviet Union sneezed, the rest of the world started sniffling. But still…

Annarita had had a couple of years of Latin. She understood the idea of cases, of using endings instead of prepositions to show how words worked in a sentence. Homo was a man as the subject of a sentence. If a man thanked you, he was homo. But if you thanked him, if he was the object, he was hominem. In the possessive, he was hominis. A man's dog was canus hominis- or hominis canus. Word order mattered much less in Latin than in Italian. The same was true in Russian, only more so.

But if Latin's grammar was weird, an awful lot of the vocabulary looked familiar. Man in Italian was uomo, while dog was cane. You didn't need to know any history to see that Latin and Italian were related.

Russian's vocabulary, though, seemed even weirder to Annarita than its grammar did.