'Actually, I'd like a cappuccino scuro. Not too hot, lots of foam, no chocolate.'

He lay back, glancing at the clock on the wall. Less than five minutes later there was a knock at the door and a uniformed patrolman entered bearing a tray laden with a glass of mineral water, a selection of freshly baked pastries and the cappuccino.

Every morning after that, an identical tray appeared a few minutes after Zen's arrival at the office. For a while, that was all. Then, about three weeks after his conversation with Caputo, he came in one day to find a large cardboard box in the corner of the room. It proved to contain fifty cartons of Nazionali, 10,000 cigarettes in all. Zen removed three cartons and took them home, and stacked the rest in the empty drawers of his filing cabinet.

After that, things improved by leaps and bounds. He was greeted in respectful yet friendly fashion by every one he met, and his orders and requests were obeyed with alacrity, sometimes before he even realized that he had made them. He normally showed up at work each morning about eleven, unless he had something better to do, leaving again shortly before lunch. Today he was entertaining Valeria at home, so he planned to make no more than a token appearance before stopping by the market to shop for whatever took his fancy.

Cars and vans and lorries surged sluggishly along the partitioned channel supposedly reserved for the trams, but in practice used by all and sundry as a relief route from the traffic-clogged Via Cristoforo Colombo. Once in a while, the city's vigili would swoop down and start handing out fines, but such actions were sporadic and tokenistic, repressive blitzes by a colonial power which knew that the struggle against the local population was unwinnable but could not afford to concede this openly.

In the dock area behind Zen, the white Tirrenia line steamer which had arrived from Sardinia that morning was tied up on one side of the passenger terminal. On the other lay a sleek grey warship flying a flag he found familiar but which he couldn't identify. Farther back, in one of the outer docks, a huge aircraft carrier displayed the unmistakable emblem of the Stars and Stripes.