The garbage-disposal man glanced significantly at the woman waiting in the car, then gestured towards the back of the truck.
'Let's get out of earshot, dottore/ he whispered. I've got a proposal which I think will satisfy you, but it wouldn't do for us to be overheard.'
In the back seat of the car, the prostitute sat tapping her crossed legs in a bored fashion. The things some men get off on! She thought she'd heard it all, and for that matter done most of it, but this one had ideas she'd never even imagined. Still, he was prepared to pay, and this car — she stroked the leather seats — proved that he had the necessary.
She would make more tonight than the whole rest of the week. Maybe she could even treat herself to a few days off, spend some time with the children.
She turned as the orange truck started up with a roar and drove away, disappearing round the corner. A moment later another car passed by and turned into the same street, some small domestic compact not to be mentioned in the same breath as the padded, perfumed limousine in which she sat waiting for her client to reappear, having sorted out this annoying accident, and drive them to the place he said he has nearby, with all the necessary equipment set up and ready to use.
Only he didn't reappear. And when she looked round again, the street appeared to be empty. Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car. There was no one in sight. For a moment she felt a sense of relief at the thought that she wasn't going to have to go through with it after all. Then she remembered the money, its loss all the more bitter since she had already spent it in anticipation.
But what about the car? No one, however rich, was going to go off leaving a machine like that behind, even with a badly damaged wing. Clearly her client must have gone off with the cleaning crew to phone for a tow-truck or something. Typical that he should just vanish like that without bothering to explain to her what was happening.
She was only a whore, after all.
It was only then that she noticed the set of keys dangling from the steering column. He must have been so angry and shocked by the accident that he'd forgotten about them, just taken off/leaving her alone with about sixty million lire's worth of luxury import.
She opened the door, slipped in behind the wheel and started the motor, which hummed obediently into life.
The woman sat there, thinking rapidly. The owner had almost certainly never seen her before, and if she didn't return to her pitch for a while he would never be able to trace her. As for the car, she could make that disappear equally effectively. They'd rip her off on its true value, of course, but even so she and the kids should be able to live on the proceeds for a year or so, maybe more. Fate had thrown this prize her way. She'd be an ungrateful fool not to accept it. It could only bring bad luck.
With a slight scraping sound from the rear wheels, the car moved away, its lights dwindling rapidly in the distance.
A moment later the street was completely deserted.
Indeed, the only sign that anyone had been there at all was a rectangle of orange paper lying in the gutter, as though discarded at random, strade pulite read the big black headline. Underneath there was a logo of some sort, and the bold slogan 'ANew Start for a New City'.
VII
If Aurelio Zen had reduced his working week to the minimal level necessary to sustain a professional existence, his weekends were totally sacrosanct. No more overtime for him, no more broken sleep or cancelled social arrangements.
The mistake had been going home. He had been bent and battered by previous setbacks, but his experience in Venice had broken him. To cap it all, the local politician at the centre of the case Zen had been investigating had not only got off scot-free, but shortly afterwards the regionalist party he led had been lifted from their provincial marginality to the heart of the government as part of a disparate group of untried, untested and therefore untainted personalities and movements united under the brash, breezy slogan 'Go for It, Italy!'
Nor had the one positive outcome been such as to enhance Zen's sense of professional responsibility. The American family for whom he had been moonlighting in Venice had initially baulked at paying out the reward they had promised, on the grounds that the murderers had not been brought to justice. But when Zen threatened to make public some of the information he had uncovered about their kinsman's war record, they had rapidly backed off and agreed to a kill fee amounting to a substantial proportion of the original sum.
Despite this, Zen had come to Naples in a mood of bitterness and defeat. At first he had dealt with this by pretending that he was not really there at all. He put in token appearances at the office, and spent the rest of his time in the hotel where he had made an advantageous arrangement for a single room Monday to Thursday nights inclusive.
Each Friday he caught the train back to Rome, remaining there until Monday, when he caught an early morning express back to Naples.
Not that the situation back home was exactly ideal, either. Most of his friends and acquaintances were linked with his previous job in the Criminalpol squad, and seeing them inevitably served to remind him of the effective demotion he had been forced into taking. Nor were the prospects any brighter romantically. Thanks to an opportunistic dalliance in Venice — misconceived and ill-fated, like everything else that had happened to him there — Tarda Biacis was now out of the picture, seemingly for good.
So he was largely thrown back on the company of his mother, who viewed the whole country south of Rome as a bottomless pit of vice and degradation, with Naples as one of its deepest and most vicious abysses. That her son had been transferred there was cause for endless complaint and commiseration. When he revealed that he had requested the transfer himself, she concluded that he must have taken leave of his senses (a remark he let slip about his father not being dead provided further proof of this) and started treating him with a creepily solicitous reserve.
Then, imperceptibly, things began to change. The first sign was when he started returning to Rome less often and for shorter periods. But it was Valeria Squillace's offer of the house on Salita del Petraio which tipped the balance decisively. This property was eventually intended for the use of Orestina and Filomena when they completed their education and got married to young men the family approved of. Since there was no immediate prospect of this, and perhaps as a gentle hint to her daughters, Signora Squillace had kept her word and given Zen a short-term lease on the upper apartment, renewable quarterly, at a rate considerably less than he was paying at the hotel.
Even once he had moved in, it was a while before he regarded the place as anything more than a dormitory.
But gradually that too began to change. He started rearranging the furniture to suit his needs, removed a couple of pictures that were getting on his nerves, and even smuggled a few items out of the flat in Rome to make his new home more attractive or convenient. His visits there became ever rarer and more grudging, an onerous duty which he soon came to resent having to perform every month. If it hadn't been for his mother, he eventually realized, he wouldn't have gone at all.
For, much to his amazement, he found himself liking Naples. Not as he had on his previous sojourn there, as an up-and-coming officer with every prospect of a brilliant career ahead of him, for whom Naples was one of a series of appointments to major provincial cities paving the road to Rome. Now he liked it for its own sake, not for what it could do for him but for what it was. He was enchanted by every aspect of the city which he had expected to drive him mad. He loved the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the chaos, the pushiness and resilience of the people, their innate sense of tolerance, negotiation and endurance.
Above all he prized his anonymity in the midst of a city which neither knew nor cared where he was from, what he did, or even who he was.
