“But the bottom — it’s all cut up into sort of dungeons.”
“They probably were. Locker rooms for the gladiators, cells for the Christians, dens for the wild beasts. They must have been roofed over with planks which rotted away long ago, which made the floor of the arena, with a layer of sand on top for easy cleaning. I expect you could hear everything that went on — from underneath. Until your turn was called... I wonder how many people have come up blinking into this same sunlight that we’re seeing, and these stones were the last thing they ever saw?”
She shuddered.
“You make it seem much too real.”
But there were no holiday crowds filling the amphitheater then. Just a handful of wandering tourists, a few self-appointed guides loafing in hopes of a generous audience, a few peddlers with trays of mass-produced cameos. Simon Templar was hardly aware of any of them. He was wholly enjoying the company of the refreshingly lovely girl whom a buccaneer’s luck had thrown into his life.
That is why he was completely astounded to realize, in the split second of pain and coruscating lights before unconsciousness rolled over him, that someone had come up behind and hit him on the head.
2
He had to repeat the steps of realization, laboriously, as the blackness slowly dissolved again. His first impression was that he had simply passed out, and he thought hazily of sunstroke, but he couldn’t believe that a little sun could do that to him. Then, as a focal point in his skull began to assert itself with painful throbbing, that last instant of awareness came back to him in a flash. He struggled up and opened his eyes.
He was not on the ground, but on a wooden bunk that was almost as hard. There was stone around him, but not the moldering stones of the Colosseum: there were modern blocks, trimly morticed. A door made of iron bars. And the only evidence of sun was a little light that came through a barred window high above his head.
He could not recall exactly when he had last looked at his watch, but it told him that at least two hours must have passed since he was talking to a delightful young blonde whose name he had not even learned. If he needed anything more than the ache in his head to attest the efficacy of the blow he had taken, the measurement was there on the dial.