'What's a trentuno?' Cossa asked.

'He will come back here with thirty men from the Vatican and they'll rape me one after the other.' 'Impossible!' Cossa said.

'You have destroyed his honour and he brought his own witness to see it,' Bernaba keened. ''Listen he is the most rabid kind of Sicilian. It could even be a trentuno reale, a continuous rape by seventy-nine men. I won't be able to work for two weeks! Then he will burn the house down. Oh, shit, those poor people downstairs.'

'Get dressed,' Cossa said. 'You'll come with us,'

'Where?'

'Bologna.'

'Over the mountains? Where it snows?'

'If you want a trentuno reale, then stay here.'

`Ah, shit.’

Cossa scrambled into his clothes: I kicked both, men in the head to make sure they stayed unconscious. Cossa wrote a note.

`Get me a pin,' he said.

`What are you writing?'

He took the pin from her and knelt beside Spina's broken face. He pinned the note to Spina's chest. 'It's in the best Latin,' he said, grinning, and he had such a smile, as I said, that the girl, despite all the trouble she thought she was in had to, smile as if somebody had handed her a gold florin. `Listen to this,' Cossa said. 'The entire male family of Bernaba Minerbetti have just performed a trentuno upon every orifice of your body. You have lost your honour. We are revenged."

`You knew my name!' the girl said with. immense pleasure. `But that really does it. Spina will spend the rest of his life trying to avenge this.'

`Let's get out of here,' I: said.

We left Rome with the escort one hour before dawn. We reached Bologna four days later without incident.

4

As we were riding north, 1 said to him, 'Your father wouldn't like it if he knew that, on, our second night in Rome, you made an enemy of someone in the Vatican.'