He walked over to the window and opened the shutters.

The wooden jalousies beyond the glass were closed, but segments of the scene outside were visible by looking down through the angled slats. Both sides of the street were packed with cars, parked on the road, on either side of the trees lining it and all over the pavement. Some distance from the house a red saloon was parked beyond all these, all by itself, facing towards the house. It appeared to be empty.

The scene was abruptly plunged into darkness as the street-lamp attached to the wall just below went out.

Something had gone wrong with its automatic switch, so that the lamp was continually fooled into thinking that its own light was that of the dawn and therefore turned itself off. Then, after some time, it would start to glow faintly again, gradually growing brighter and brighter until the whole cycle repeated itself.

Zen closed the shutters and walked back to the sofa.

Catching sight of his reflection in the large mirror above the fireplace, he paused, as though the person he saw there might hold the key to what was puzzling him. The prominent bones and slight tautness of the skin especially around the eyes, gave his face a slightly exotic air, probably due to Slav or even Semitic blood somewhere in the family's Venetian past. It was a face that gave nothing away, yet seemed always to tremble on the brink of some expression that never quite appeared. His face had made Zen's reputation as an interrogator, for it was a perfect screen on to which others could project their own suspicions, fears and apprehensions. Where other policemen confronted criminals, using the carrot or the stick, according to the situation, Zen's subjects found themselves shut up with a man who barely seemed to exist, yet who mirrored back to them the innermost secrets of their hearts. They read their every fleeting emotion accurately imaged on those scrupulously blank features, and knew that they were lost.