“A boy about seventeen or eighteen, black hair, Arab eyes, bronze skin, a smile difficult to refuse, and a figure almost as perfect as a Nubian’s, but rather squarer about the shoulders?”
“You have seen him, then?”
“Smoking ten of my special Khali Targa cigarettes, with his bare toes cocked up, and one hand drooping into the Saint’s Pool.”
Hermione smiled.
“My cigarettes! They’re common property here,” she said.
“That boy can’t be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks the language. There’s no mistaking the blow he gives to the last syllable of a sentence.”
“He’s a Sicilian, Vere says.”
“Pure bred?”
“I don’t know.”
“I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It is he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this morning.”