Zen signalled the waiter. Obsession was an occupational hazard in Calabria, but obsessing about tomatoes was absurd. He paid over the agreed fee and responded with a brief nod to the waiter’s thanks, nicely pitched as always in the grey area between grudging respect and overt truculence. The moment he emerged from the air-conditioned dining room into the sullen, stacked heat of the street, he felt his pores gaping open like the mouth of the goldfish he had kept as a child. He lit a cigarette and surveyed the visible slice of sky, an incandescent azure enlivened by puffy, faintly bruised clouds trailing translucent spumes of virga. The door behind him opened and Nicodemo, the owner of the restaurant, appeared and also lit up.

‘You didn’t like your meal?’ he asked with a solicitous expression.

Zen chose his words carefully.

‘It was very authentic.’

Nicodemo beamed. He had already told Zen, at some length, that he was un immigrante. Having spent almost thirty years as a construction worker in a Canadian city called Tronno, he had now retired to his native Calabria and opened a restaurant dedicated to preserving and reviving the genuine cuisine of his youth.

‘My mother used to make that dish on very special occasions, starting at dawn,’ he confided to Zen in reverential tones. ‘The sauce takes hours to prepare, but the flavour of sheep from the bone and the fat is incomparable.’

‘There is certainly very little to which it can be compared. I just don’t have much appetite today.’