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but the others were gentleman. This is a jumped up little gigolo out for all he can get. He obviously thinks everyone’s as bad as him. Well, all I can say is, if he thinks he can push me about, he can think again.”
    ***
    Dragonetti was smoking out of the window and staring gloomily at the monotonous blue sky. It was hot and humid and he was bored. His recent transfer to Lucca meant that he had to get up earlier because now he had a good hour’s drive twice a day. What’smore, he was stuck in this provincial town which was heaving with tourists and petty thieves and illegal immigrants. He’d hardly seen his two daughters this summer. His ex-wife, Diana, and her new husband had taken them away on holiday to the Dolomites. He would take them on holiday later, to the sea, in August, the last two weeks. Tonight, he would go back to an empty house again. He thought about the kitten. There was something plucky about the little guy that appealed to him. He made a mental note to pop out and get some cat food just in case.
    He felt as though he was the only one stuck here with nothing very interesting to do except sign papers and look efficient, not that anyone would notice if he wasn’t, because the whole place seemed to be shutting down. Everyone who could, had gone on holiday, but he was going to have to wait, probably because he had got up someone’s nose again. He had a very unhappy knack of saying what he thought and on more than one occasion had really put his foot in it. It was impossible for him to do the kow-towing that so many of his colleagues performed with such ease. He knew that in this he took after his father.
    Always present in his mind was the memory of his father’s death. His father, a judge, had become a household name when his car had been blown up by a car bomb, shortly after finding a Mafia Boss guilty of instigation to murder. It had happened a life-time ago, when Jacopo was a boy of fourteen. The perpetrators had never been found and probably never would be now, unless some ‘ pentito ’ turned up and decided to sing. Every so often someone would defy the Mafia and the omertà code of absolute secrecy and silence that all members were subjected to if they wanted to live, and then, suddenly, under police protection, spout out a load of information that sometimes helped solve old crimes or more often muddied the waters even further. Some of the information was blatantly untrue and given out for complex motives. Anyone out of favour might find a pentito , a repentant, suddenly remembering his presence in the house of an already compromised Don at an inopportune moment. Consorting with known Mafia memberswas a crime. It didn’t pay to move against the Mafia then, or now. With a recent head of the government accused of knowingly employing a Mafia member in his household, with another party member calling a Mafioso who had died in jail and kept his mouth firmly shut, a hero for doing so, one had to tread carefully. Furthermore, his own left-wing views were well-known and in the current political climate, hardly likely to further his career.
    He threw his half smoked cigarette down to the courtyard and slammed the window shut on the heat. The air-conditioning was working only too well and his office felt like a cold storage room. He often had to put a jacket on to bear it. He sighed again and fiddled with his pen. He hated inactivity. He paced up and down the room. What he would really like was an interesting murder inquiry, not a run of the mill knifing of Romanians or Moroccans by their fellow countrymen. The poor squabbled and fought over their miserable belongings, their women and their illegal ill-paid jobs, and in this heat tempers seemed to rise fast with lethal results. There had been two knifings in the last month, but there was no real investigating involved. He wanted something that would tax his brain, take him out of himself and make him forget the heat. He shivered, well, maybe not the