"Oh, but the sentiment," said Teenie. "I just love a sentimental song. Here's a bhong I fixed for you. Have a puff."

I took one puff.

Suddenly the whole room went up in a spiral of bright pink. As I tingled from head to toe, I still retained wit to ask, "What was in that pipe?"

"Hash oil," said Teenie. "The absolute jet plane of Mary Jane. It's the very best in Rome. Fifty (bleeping) bucks a gram! And I got a whole bottle of it!"

The sea-green negligee slid to the floor. I had enough wit to know what would happen now. But all I could do was giggle.

And horror of horrors, the music did sound wonderful, even the shouted, "WATCH OUT!"

Oh, Gods, if I only had!

In Naples, another teeming forest of cargo booms with tugs and trains running about under them like wild animals, we found no trace of Spartacus. But Teenie got on the trail there of somebody called Garibaldi who had helped wrest a lot of Italy from the age-long domination of Austria and gotten shot for his pains. And this took us to a place where he had once landed-Palermo, Sicily.

Of course, in Palermo, one had access to a whole island full of bandits and outlaws that not even the Italian government could cope with. This was the ancestral home of the Mafia. In a hired car, Madison, Teenie and myself drove all over that very extensive island. And one could imagine, from that rugged and sometimes barren terrain, how it could breed so many hit men. It was no surprise to be told that it had been largely settled by pirates.

We even took an excursion to the eastern end of the island where Mount Etna smokes into the sky. The name itself means "I burn" and judging by the number of eruptions and lives taken by it, it is well named.

The thought of driving the last twenty-one miles above the town of Catania just to get to the top made me quite dizzy and it took quite a few "grouches" and "spoilsports" from Teenie to get me up there.

At the top she was very intent. It was a brilliantly clear day and she stood with the high velocity, smoke-tinged wind whipping at her ponytail and, with Madison's help and a map, spotted the Italian mainland to the northeast, spotted Malta to the south and then a dim haze which might have been Tunisia to the southwest. She tried in vain to see Corsica. She stared to the east and squinted her eyes hard trying to see Greece. And then cupped them, squinting, trying to see Turkey. But, of course, even from ten thousand feet, they were under the horizon, Greece being over three hundred and Turkey over six hundred miles away.

"Well, I'll be a son of a (bleepch)," she said. "Old Bittie wasn't lying. The world is round after all!"

All the way down through the lava flows, down through the beech forests, down across the vineyards and back to Catania, she kept marvelling about it. "Why don't we fall off?" she said. "What if we skidded or something? How come the water doesn't run out of the ocean?"

Madison tried to explain gravity to her by holding up a couple of oranges as we bounced along. She held the oranges. She even made the driver stop the car. But she couldn't get the oranges to snap together the way Madi­son had said. She thought he was lying.

We made the ninety miles back to Palermo in time for a late dinner aboard and you would have thought it would have left its mark on her. It didn't. She explained to me that hash oil cured anything and that is the last I remembered.

The next morning at breakfast she unfortunately found the town, Corleone, just south of us. "Hey," she said, "isn't there a Corleone mob?"

I flinched visibly.

Madison assured her that there was indeed a Corleone mob. They controlled the unions and shipping lines and every U. S. port, gambling and prostitution, and if it wasn't for them, Faustino "The Noose" Narcotici, capo di tutti capi, would be a happy man indeed. The Corleones were death on drugs.

"Prostitution?" said Teenie. "I didn't know there was a whore's union. Hey, Inky, how does this fit in with your white slavery racket? Do you have a closed shop or don't you?"

"The Corleones," I said stiffly, "are people you leave very much alone."

"Hey," she said, "that sounds dangerous. Maybe we better get the hell out of here while we still have our scalps. Where is your list, Maddie? We better get them screws churning."

She got the list and promptly marched off to the ship library. The sports director wouldn't take my word for it that I hadn't had any pot last night and he worked me until my muscles screamed.

Despite all the warnings and urgency at breakfast, when I left the gym and came to lunch, we were still in Palermo and there was no sign of Teenie at the table.

"She went ashore about nine," the Chief Steward said. "She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them and said she was going to the University of Palermo. Her fiance went with her."

I dawdled through the afternoon. We still lay in port. I didn't want to go ashore: this talk about Corleones had made me a bit nervous.

I looked at the viewers. Heller was busy taking examinations at Empire University. Maliciously, I thought that if Teenie was so suddenly interested in universities, maybe she should be sicked on to him. Longingly I fingered the two-way-response radio. I just couldn't figure out how to get Teenie back to New York without my being later hit for rape of a minor.

The Countess Krak had both Balmor and Bang-Bang in tow, still looking for a graduation present. She went into a store and, for a bit, my attention lagged. Then suddenly I found myself staring at a handful of rifle shells!

"Yes, ma'am," came a clerk's voice. "Those are Holland and Holland.375 Magnum cartridges."

"They knock an elephant flat," said Bang-Bang. "One boom, one dead elephant."

"I was thinking of other game," said the Countess Krak.

Any lethargy I felt up to that instant congealed into panic.

Those huge, gleaming brass cases with their lethal slugs had only one message for me.

POW! POW!

I almost shrieked. Then I realized that it was a knock on the door. Sanity returned.

I was only too glad to shut down the volume and throw a hasty blanket over the viewers.

"Miss Teenie is back," came the Chief Steward's voice. "And I think she needs your help."

I hastily left. Anything to get away from those deadly viewers.

She and Madison were in the library. Her unlensed glasses askew, Teenie pointed at a tower of books Madi­son had worn himself out carrying.

"Those (bleeped) professors," Teenie said, "are supposed to be so educated and half of them don't even speak English. We had to buy those at a bookstore. They got plenty of pictures but I didn't notice until we were halfway back to the ship that they're all in Italian! So it's up to you, Inky. You're the only one that can sling the spaghetti around. Start translating." She sank into a chair and began to inhale the cream soda that a steward brought, reducing the bottle tide at an alarming rate. "Whew!" she said. "It's good to wash the catacombs out of my throat."

"We stopped by the catacombs on the way to the university," Madison said. "They have the corpse of an American consul there who knew Garibaldi."

"Corpses, corpses, corpses," said Teenie. "Jesus, they even got them hanging from pegs on the wall! Cold and rattly. Corpses all around staring at you with sightless eyes."

I chilled.

"But get on with the translation, research staff," said Teenie. "Start winding that spaghetti around so it spells Brooklyn."

The top one was a volume of the history of the Corleone family! Timidly, I opened it and found myself star­ing at a photograph of "Holy Joe." Shades of Silva! Yes, there was the date of his assassination! Yikes! There was a photo of Silva!