In the elevator Tina could feel Marco looking at her. He was a youngish man, certainly younger than Angela, and Tina wondered who he was. He didn’t seem intelligent enough to be a colleague of Angela’s, and the cursory way he was introduced meant that Angela herself didn’t consider him important enough to give any more information about. Just someone to sleep with.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Tina, attempting to be friendly but increasing her distaste for him and for his open shirt-front with all his chains and gold horns dangling in the thatch of hairy chest. “It’s very simple . . . and done very quickly. Nothing at all.”

She glanced quickly at him, then away. She didn’t answer.

A gleaming oviform brass plate at the door read “Prof. Brenta,” and the professore himself answered the door and showed Tina into a large study. There he changed from his suit jacket into a white one while he motioned her to sit down. Then he sat facing her from behind a desk ornate with leather and silver frames.

“Have you brought the sum, signorina?”

She handed him the envelope with the 2 50,000 lire in it. He took the pack of bills, and as he counted them, held each of the ten-thousand-lire notes up to the light to see if it was good.

“Benissimo,” he said cordially as if congratulating her on some accomplishment. He slipped the envelope into a drawer, which he then locked, and nodded at her brightly. He looked like any one of her father’s friends. He could be her father.

“Very well,” he continued, “now we proceed. Go into the bathroom across the hall, empty your bladder, and leave off your panties. Then go into the adjacent room.”

Tina did as she was told, also running water into the bidet and using her handkerchief to wash herself. Like brushing one’s teeth before going to the dentist, she thought, so as not to be offensive. Wondering what to do with them, she left her pink silk panties in the bathroom. Why had she worn them? Did she think she was meeting a lover? She had bought them in Florence the semester she was there—her first luxury. She had spent book money on a pair of panties and a matching slip handworked with appliqué embroidery. And she had never worn her silk things until this evening. They had been left in Rome in a drawer in her room because she was afraid they’d be stolen at college.

Tina went to the room where the doctor was waiting. He motioned her to get up onto the examining table. She slipped off her sandals, got onto the table, and following his directions, put her feet into the steel stirrups, uselessly trying to keep her knees together.