Cosi Fan Tutti - 5 by Michael Dibdin Page A

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’.
     
     
    Un uom nascosto
     
     
    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