‘To ensure quality service and for your protection, this conversation is being recorded. If Avvocato Amadori considers your attitude inappropriate, he reserves the right to take the necessary steps.’

‘Oh yeah? What does he do when he gets mad, run up the bell tower of San Petronio and make like Quasimodo?’

‘Thank you. Avvocato Amadori will be informed of your response in due course.’

‘Listen, I’m on the job, okay? But discretion is of the essence and so far a suitable opportunity has not presented itself.’

But he was talking to a dead line.

He put the phone down and poured himself another bourbon. I knew the Amadori case would be trouble from the beginning, he fantasised. Of all the PI offices in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. In point of hard fact, it was a routine surveillance operation for a fortyish yuppy whose kid had left home and was refusing to communicate with him. Giulio Amadori’s main worry seemed to be that Vincenzo would end up in trouble with the cops and that this would reflect badly on his own law practice, although he had made a cursory gesture towards fashionable sentimentality by foregrounding the family reputation and his wife’s feelings. He was prepared to pay five hundred up front for details of his son’s whereabouts, habits and associates, with the possibility of more to come for follow-up investigations or interventions based on the primary information.

Tony Speranza would much rather have been hired to look into a seemingly casual disappearance that led him to a sexy but dangerous babe with plenty to hide both physically and criminally, but in his experience that sort of thing rarely happened in Bologna. All he had to go on was a snapshot of the young man and the information that he affected to be a diehard supporter of the Bologna football club.