“I thought you were Montenegrin. What were you doing in Italy?”
“In those days I was mobile. I have submitted to your ultimatum, as you framed it, but I’m not going to give you an account of my youthful gestes — certainly not here and now.”
“What’s the program for Bari?”
“I don’t know. There was no airport then, and I don’t know where it is. We’ll see.” He turned away to look through the window. In a moment he turned back. “I think we’re over Benevento. Ask the pilot.”
“I can’t, damn it! I can’t ask anybody anything. You ask him.”
He ignored the suggestion. “It must be Benevento. Glance at it. The Romans finished the Samnites there in three hundred and twelve B.C.”
He was showing off, and I approved. Only two days earlier I would have given ten to one that up in an airplane he wouldn’t have been able to remember the date of anything whatever, and here he was rattling off one twenty-two centuries back. I went back to my window for a look down at Benevento. Before long I saw water ahead and to the left, my introduction to the Adriatic, and watched it spread and glisten in the sun as we sailed toward it; and then there was Bari floating toward us. Part of it was a jumble on a neck stretched into the sea, apparently with no streets, and the other part, south of the neck along the shore, had streets as straight and regular as midtown Manhattan, with no Broadway slicing through.
The plane nosed down.
V
From here on, please have in mind the warning I put at the front of this. As I said, I have had to do some filling in, but everything important is reported as Wolfe gave it to me.