'You may depend on it, sir.'

He hung up and turned to Giovan Battista Caputo.

'That's all right, then/ he remarked, stretching luxuriously.

'You've got till tomorrow to stitch something together.'

Caputo's face fell.

'What about you, chief? Don't you even want to interview the suspect?'

'Impossible, I'm afraid/ Zen replied, reaching for his coat. 'I have a prior engagement which I just can't get out of. Which reminds me, do you have any contacts at the opera? A friend of mine mentioned that she'd like to go, and I said I'd take her. Then I phone the box office and they tell me the whole run's been sold out for a month.'

Caputo grunted sympathetically.

I'll see what I can do.'

Amico Don Alfonso 'But are you sure it'll work?'

'When it comes to love, no one can be sure of anything.'

A short silence.

'Two weeks isn't much time.'

'The shorter, the better. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If they were gone for a month, the lads might start to grow sentimental.'

A longer silence. It wasn't really silence, of course, not even this far up the Vomero, on one of the steep, stepped alleys inaccessible to the most daring or desperate of Neapolitan drivers. From the streets below, on the foothills sloping down to the bay, rose a muffled cacophony of car horns, all at slightly different pitches, a rhythmic urban symphony in some indecipherable time signature. Punctuating this medley, nearer at hand, came the gruff staccato barking of the shaggy, semi-feral dog kept chained up on the flat roof surrounding the cupola of Santa Maria del Petraio, presumably to ward off burglars.