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shapeless, with a toothless, whining smile, and a history of back stairs, childbearing, privation, widowhood, minor theft, printed in every line of her body.
    Jack ordered some ice from the waiter and gave the maid the crumpled suit to be pressed and the jacket he was wearing. “Per pulire, per favore,” he said, pleased with himself for remembering the word for cleaning.
    The maid looked down doubtfully at the jacket over her arm and touched one of the soggy brownish spots. She looked questioningly at Jack.
    “Blood,” he said. He tried to remember the word in Italian, but he couldn’t. “Blood,” he said more loudly.
    The maid smiled anxiously, wanting to please, not understanding. “Va bene,” she said.
    “Sangue,” the young waiter said from the door, his voice superior, impatient. “Sangue.”
    “Ah, si, si, sangue.” The maid nodded her frizzled, sad head, as though she should have known, all along, as though all guests in this excellent hotel always arrived in bloodstained jackets. “Subito, subito.” She trotted through the door, following the waiter.
    Jack unpacked while waiting for the waiter to come back with the ice. He hung up the other suits, hoping the creases would disappear by themselves by morning, and put the leather-framed photograph of his wife and his two children on the dresser in the bedroom. There was a little balcony outside the bedroom window and he stepped out on it, but the suite was at the rear of the hotel and all he could see were the windows of the buildings across the narrow street, rain-washed and gray against the night sky, which reflected the multicolored neon of Rome. From below came the sound of a radio playing, loudly, a brassy, insistent tune with a rock-and-roll beat. It was cold on the balcony and there was still rain in the air, and with the nondescript silhouette of the buildings across the street, and the neon and the rough, unpleasant beat of the music, it might have been almost any city on a wintry night in the American Age. There was no reminder on the hotel balcony that at one time Caesar had ruled the ground below or that Michelangelo had argued with a Pope in the city or that kings had traveled across Europe to be crowned two miles away.
    Chilled, Jack went back into the room, closing the long glass doors against the sound of the radio below. On the dresser, he saw the crumpled ten-thousand-lire note that the woman had forced on him. He smiled as he looked at it, thinking, I’ve shed blood for less. He decided to get a present for his children with it before he left Rome. He smoothed it out and folded it carefully and put it in his wallet, not in the money section, but next to his driver’s license, so he wouldn’t mix it up with his other money.
    When the waiter came in with the ice, Jack poured himself a whisky and water. He took his shoes off and sat on the edge of the bed, sipping the whisky, feeling tired from his trip and uncomfortable from his puffy nose.
    Sitting like that, his eyes half-closed, tasting blood, an image began to form hazily in his mind, the faint memory of another moment long ago when he had sat bent over like that, only it was on a wooden bench, with the flavor of blood in his throat. He closed his eyes completely, to concentrate, and it became clearer. It was on a spring afternoon and there was the smell of damp grass and he was ten years old and he was on the school baseball field and a ground ball had taken a bad hop and hit him squarely between the eyes and the bleeding hadn’t stopped for three hours, until his father had come home and held ice to the back of his neck and made him lie with his head down over the edge of the bed. “Next time,” his father had said cheerfully, while his mother hovered over him, worrying, “you won’t try to field ground balls with your nose.”
    “It took a bad hop, Pa,” Jack had said, thickly.
    “The world is full of bad hops,” his father had said, undisturbed. “It’s a law of