Bruno yawned massively.

‘So how are the kids?’ he asked, cutting the volume of the radio to a plaintive whine.

‘All doing well except Carmelo. He’s got some sort of canker on his ribs just below the wing. It must be bothering him because he keeps gnawing at it.’

‘Can’t you put some sort of bandage on it? Or just tie him up till it heals?’

They drove past a rare prominence in this two-dimensional landscape, one of the vast tumuli where the city’s garbage was interred, its burning vapours a perpetual flame of remembrance.

‘They go crazy if you try and restrain them. I’m taking him to the doctor tomorrow. He needs to get on a course of antibiotics.’

‘They say now you shouldn’t overdo that stuff. Lowers your immunity to flu or something.’

‘Birds don’t get flu.’

‘Sure they do. Remember that Chinese chicken scare?’

‘Carmelo isn’t a chicken.’

Nando was a handsome hunk from some village down in the Abruzzi that Bruno had never heard of, whose latest doomed dream was to get his hands on the ten-cylinder, 500 bhp, 300 km/h Gallardo coupe which the Lamborghini company had recently donated to the Polizia di Stato for mutual public relations purposes. Built like a wrestler, with a neat black beard and an amiable but unfocused smile, he had for some reason married himself off to a skinny, neurotic harridan from Ferrara. Presumably to compensate for the fact that their marriage was and would remain childless, the couple kept a total of eleven parrots and cockatoos in their two-bedroom apartment. The birds perched on your shoulder, nibbled your ear and shat on your jacket, and the whole place stank. Bruno had been there for dinner. Once.