ATD 243-272

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Page 244

ragazza
Italian 'girl'.

Picardy thirds
Cf p50.

Page 245

twentyfold
5 chums times 4 suspects each.

San Polo
Wikipedia

Page 246

"with all the spaghetti-joints in this town to choose from, are you saying those dadblame Russians have come in here?"
reminiscent of a similar line from the film Casablanca, spoken by Humphrey Bogart: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Page 247

Dum vivimus, bibamus
While we live, we drink. Corruption of "Dum vivimus, vivamus".

Page 252

Mattoidi
Borderland cases between sanity and insanity.

Page 254

"Chums of Chance were expected to die on the job. Or else live forever, there being two schools of thought, actually." Possibly a reference to the fact that the Chums seem to live simultaneously in the "real" world of the novel and also in fictional stories within the novel.

Page 255

Bastille Day
The Campanile di San Marco collapsed 14 July 1902. cite and pic

Page 256

Padzhitnoff sees the Campanile come apart as a game of Tetris! The "four-brick groupings [...] begind their gentle, undeadly descent, rotating and translating in all available modes". (See page 123 for more on Tetris.)

Page 269

the dirt, the blood-red dirt

This line recalls Homer's "wine-dark sea" first found in The Iliad (Bk VII) in a scene in which Achilles grieves for the death of Patroclus. Given the context here, it might be thought of as "mock-heroic."