Cosi Fan Tutti - 5 Read Online Free PDF

self-defence. But be that as it may, all the indications are that this was merely a banal crime of mistaken identity. I’ll have a full report on your desk within twelve hours…’
    Seeing Caputo signalling frantically, Zen broke off.
    Caputo held up the first two fingers of his left hand and whirled the right round and round.
    ‘… or twenty-four at the very most/ Zen concluded.
    “I shall pass on what you have told me to the relevant parties/ said the Questore curtly. ‘But I must remind you that if a satisfactory solution has not emerged within the period you mention, it is you and not I who will be held responsible. I am not prepared to cover for you on this case, and I regret that my department is too overstretched to permit me to dispatch one of our operatives to put your house in order for you. So I trust that you will give this matter your fullest and most urgent attention.’
    ‘You may depend on it, sir.’
    He hung up and turned to Giovan Battista Caputo.
    ‘That’s all right, then/ he remarked, stretching luxuriously.
    ‘You’ve got till tomorrow to stitch something together.’
    Caputo’s face fell.
    ‘What about you, chief? Don’t you even want to interview the suspect?’
    ‘Impossible, I’m afraid/ Zen replied, reaching for his coat. ‘I have a prior engagement which I just can’t get out of. Which reminds me, do you have any contacts at the opera? A friend of mine mentioned that she’d like to go, and I said I’d take her. Then I phone the box office and they tell me the whole run’s been sold out for a month.’
    Caputo grunted sympathetically.
    I’ll see what I can do.’
     
     
    Amico Don Alfonso
     
     
    ‘But are you sure it’ll work?’
    ‘When it comes to love, no one can be sure of anything.’
    A short silence.
    ‘Two weeks isn’t much time.’
    ‘The shorter, the better. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If they were gone for a month, the lads might start to grow sentimental.’
    A longer silence. It wasn’t really silence, of course, not even this far up the Vomero, on one of the steep, stepped alleys inaccessible to the most daring or desperate of Neapolitan drivers. From the streets below, on the foothills sloping down to the bay, rose a muffled cacophony of car horns, all at slightly different pitches, a rhythmic urban symphony in some indecipherable time signature. Punctuating this medley, nearer at hand, came the gruff staccato barking of the shaggy, semi-feral dog kept chained up on the flat roof surrounding the cupola of Santa Maria del Petraio, presumably to ward off burglars.
    And, overlaying all, the cries of a gang of boys playing football on the steps below, a fast and demanding game whose main challenge was to prevent the ball going missing in one of the inaccessible walled gardens all around, or plunging precipitously down the entire length of the salita, 287 steps to the point where it crossed the broad curve of paved street looping up the hillside.
    Most dramatic were the intermittent appearances of aircraft on their final approach to Capodichino, monstrously large, deafening and unpredictable apparitions, seemingly near enough to touch. And yet, despite everything, the terrace where they were sitting seemed an oasis of calm and stillness, a secluded refuge miraculously isolated from the stress and stridency of the city all around.
    Calling it a terrace was a bit of an exaggeration, too. In reality it was merely a section of flat tarred roof extending around two sides of a partial one-storey extension added illegally twenty years earlier to allow the original building to be converted into two apartments. The extension housed the kitchen and bathroom, while the bedroom
    and sitting room were on the floor below. There was a small eating area adjoining the kitchen, but now the summer had arrived Aurelio Zen preferred to take his meals
    outside, at an old marble-topped table in the shade of the green-and-white striped canvas awning.
    The silence which