‘What’s that?’ Tania asked some time later, raising her head above the covers.

Zen raised his head and listened. The silent dimness of the bedroom had been infiltrated by an electronic tone, muffled but just audible, coming in regular, incessant bursts.

‘Sounds like an alarm.’

Tania raised herself up on one elbow.

‘Mine’s one of the old ones, with a bell.’

They lay side by side, the hairs on their forearms just touching. The noise continued relentlessly. Eventually Tania sat up like a cat, flexing her back, and crawled to the end of the bed.

‘It seems to be coming from your jacket, Aurelio.’

Zen pulled the covers over his head and gave vent to a loud series of blasphemies in Venetian dialect.

‘Your position here is essentially — indeed, necessarily — anomalous. You are required to serve two masters, an undertaking not only fraught with perils and contradictions of all kinds but one which, as you may perhaps recall, is explicitly condemned by the Scriptures.’

Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valdes, archbishop in partibus infidelium and deputy to the Cardinal Secretary of State, favoured Aurelio Zen with an arch smile.

‘One might equally well argue, however,’ he continued, ‘that the case is exactly the opposite, and that so far from serving two masters, you are in fact serving neither. As a functionary of the Italian Republic, you have no locus standi beyond the frontiers of that state. Neither, clearly, are you formally empowered to act as an agent of either the Vatican City State or the Holy See.’

Zen raised his hand to his mouth, resting his chin on the curved thumb. He sniffed his fingers, still redolent of Tania’s vagina.