`You've mounted women?' he asked me with astonishment. `Well, after all, I am twenty-two years old,' I told my thirteen year-old master.

`Who."

A couple of your cousins.'

We clattered through the night streets past the closely packed houses of the burgo, with their gables and sloping roofs facing the streets, most of them made from pilfered Roman ruins. Tomas stopped us in front of a two-storey house which had an outside marble staircase to the upper floor, in the street of the Blessed Santa Denisetta di Grellou. It had a small garden in front of the house with one olive tree, one fig tree and one apple tree. Tomas led Cossa up the outside stairway. Halfway up, Cossa stopped him. 'What's her name?' he asked.

`What do you care?'

'I have to know the name.'

`Bernaba.'

'Bernaba what?'

`Are you going to marry her or just wrestle with her: Her name is Bernaba Minerbetti. She comes from Bari, the pope's home town. She's so new to Rome that hardly anybody knows she's in business. You are lucky – she is a beautiful little piece with a lot of life in her. The reason you are going to get to have her at this time of night is because her protector – if you can imagine a fellow who thinks he has bought a whore all for himself – is a Sicilian protonotary apostolic named Piero Spina who works the night shift at the Vatican.'

`I wouldn't want her to be too much of a whore.' Cossa said.

`She'll be whatever you want her to be,' Tomas told him. `That's her business.'

Tomas knocked at the door at the top of the stairs. They waited. `Why is she taking so long?' Cossa asked.

The door opened. A tiny, dark, very pretty sixteen-year-old woman wearing a sheepskin, and holding a guttering candle opened the door. `Where you been?'she said. 'You got me all horny waiting for you.'

Tomas patted his nephew on the shoulder. `I have a virgin for you, he said to the girl.

`Ah, Uncle Tomas,' Cossa said. He didn't want to say that he had screwed many of his cousins because one of them was Tomas's daughter.