"Yes."
"What do you want for your option?"
"A thousand pounds sterling."
"When do you want to know by?"
"Now, at once. Otherwise I start at three o'clock for London by aeroplane."
Pastafina plucked out his words one by one as though they were the strings of a guitar.
Lewis took his fountain pen from his pocket and, still walking along, signed a cheque on his silk hat.
"And now," he said, "let's break the ranks as one used to at school, and go and have a vermouth without anyone seeing us."
[III]
"IT's scarcely credible," said Lewis to himself, as though the words he had uttered a few hours earlier behind the hearse were still ringing in his ears. Neither reflection nor folly had anything to do with his determination. It was just that he had been struck whilst Pastafina was speaking, by the wholly southern character of the approach to La Roquette. Pretty work girls wearing pearls, suits for hire, turtle-doves, songs going up in spirals, corsets. When the road narrowed into a sort of corridor the hearse traced its way with difficulty through a Neapolitan riot of food and life which seemed to overflow on to the passing dead: the dinner dishes, sweet wines, snails, choice tripe. He learnt later that in the adjacent passages lived Bergamask table-leg turners and the Parmesan chauffeurs of the Say refineries, who help to give this quarter its Italian air.