“I think I laid my hand over his and patted him to console him because he sounded so sad.

“All the while the water of the bath was warm and moving, and then he told me in my ear that he was taking me to a place where I would wake from the drugs I’d been given, but I mustn’t make noise.

“I slept.

“When I woke, I knew that I was alone. I could hear the silence and stillness around me, and I found myself on a couch and surrounded by golden bars.

“ ‘How my friend loves gold,’ I whispered, ‘but then I have always loved it myself.’

“Within seconds I realized I was in a glorified round cage. The door was securely locked, and I wore no boot or even a sandal with which to kick at it, and my fist did little good.

“As for my clothes, I’d been dressed in a pair of black pants. No shirt.

“Now, outside of this cage there was a great marble room, precisely what one would expect in a hillside palazzo, and it had its large square floor-length windows open to a long terrace, as one might also expect, and there was the sunset streaking the sky with red, and the violet light simmering as the sun sank into the sea.

“Italy, so glorious, on the flank of the great mountain, and not very far no doubt from the ruins of tragic cities it had destroyed.

“I sat back on the couch, watching the windows fill up with early stars and the room darken before me, which only proved to put it in a gentler light.

“There was something so very decadent and perverse about the cage in which I was imprisoned that I loathed it intensely, yet it had an odd calming effect on me because I knew that in a monstrous game with Petronia I might have some chance. That had been the implication of the boy who had bathed me. At least that had been the inference which I drew. Nevertheless, I was revolted by everything around me. This was a completely new emotion for me.

“The lights came up slowly, revealing scattered lamps along the inner walls of the room and murals which somewhat mimicked those of Pompeii—that is, rectangular paintings framing in Roman red various goddesses who danced with their backs turned to the room.

“And as these lights filled the space with a golden illumination there entered not the proud arrogant Petronia whom I expected but two other creatures equally strange.

“One was a black man, so black indeed that he looked like polished onyx, and though he was at the very far end of the marble room, away from me, I could see the gold earrings in his ears.

“He had very delicate features and he had yellow eyes. His hair was very curly and short-cropped and not totally unlike my own.