'How I long to see Naples again,' the bishop said: `But you and I by our service, Baldassare, must put that past behind us. You have been chosen by His Holiness to study at Bologna, to transform yourself into an instrument of the Church.' Tomacelli's voice rode upon exquisite Latin, although a few years later, after I had perfected my own, I didn't rate it so highly. He was striking a bargain with Cossa.

`There is no career to equal what the Church can offer a brilliant young lawyer,' Tomacelli said. `Canon law is the skeletal structure of the Church. It is the oil which, has been rubbed into her by her lawyers, keeping her agile for more than a thousand years.'

We crossed the bridge of Sant' Angelo at about one fifteen in the morning. The horses were lively in the night air. Cossa was still excited by the audience. `Did you notice his shoes?' he asked us. `At first I thought they were painted on his feet but after a while I saw that they were made of silk.'

`Shoes?' I said. `What about the furniture? How about the paintings?'

`Yes!' he said. `And I thought to myself that Margaret of Durazzo, ruler of Naples, cannot have better than that. Where are we headed, Uncle?'

`Your father told me to put you on a woman,' Tomas said. `That's where we're going.'

`A woman?'

`You'll like it, my lord,' I told him.

`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.

Tomas pushed him and the girl pulled him inside the door. It closed on my upturned face at the bottom of the stairs.

Tomas went home. I fell asleep in the garden waiting for Cossa to finish: Several hours later I was awakened by a racket above me.

Cossa told me later what had happened. He and the girl fell asleep in each other's arms after he had done four or five times what she had found out he could do quite well (and he spent the rest of his life perfecting it). They came out of sleep the same time I did, like stones from a catapult, when the door splintered open and two violent men broke into the room.

The girl sat straight up. `Spina!' she yelled. It was the protonotary apostolic who was paying the rent. Cossa told me Spina's eyes were popping out of his head at the horror of his personal disgrace. He had been conditioned to react this way: he was Sicilian.

'Sfregia!' Spina shouted.

The girl moaned like the night wind. 'Sfregia?' Cossa said blankly.

'He's going to cut up my face!' the girl shrilled, moving backwards and upwards in the bed. 'No, Spina! This is only a boy. He is from my village. He is my brother, Spina. He had no place to sleep.'

Spina took out a knife. He moved slowly around the bed towards the girl's side, motioning to his companion to move in on Cossa. The other man took out a knife and moved towards Cossa. By this time I had made it to the top of the stairs. I banged the companion over the head. He went down. Cossa,, naked, had leaped out of bed, picked up a heavy wooden chair and charged at, Spina, holding the chair before him like the horns of a fighting bull, running over the top of the bed to crash the chair into the soft front of Spina's head. and knocking him to the floor unconscious.

'Do something!' the girl yelled, as if we had just been standing around. 'He is a Sicilian! He will hold a trentuno to get his revenge! Oh, shit, and I just set up business in this town.'

'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.