Michael Dibdin Cosi Fan Tutti
In the lead-up to Cosi Fan Tutti, needing to disappear into a relative backwater, Zen requests a transfer to the harbour police in Naples, which seems like an appropriate place for him to wait till his fortunes improve.
If that theory seems a little far-fetched, the fact that the upper floor of Zen’s new headquarters doubles as a brothel is probably enough to suggest policing the Naples waterfront is a relatively relaxed affair. In theory, all Zen has to do is keep his head down, check in at the office occasionally, and let things run along as they would have done anyway.
Unfortunately prominent citizens start disappearing from the streets of the city, a wealthy widow refuses to let her daughters marry their Mafia-connected fiancés and an American sailor goes missing after a knifing incident.
Cosi Fan Tutti, a comic opera by Mozart and Lorenzo Daponte has a similar plot line as Zen arranges for Valeria Squillace’s daughters to head off to London while he hires a pair of Albanian prostitutes to compromise their highly unsuitable suitors and as the melodramatic farce unfolds just about everybody involved turns out to be something other than what they seem.
The whole affair provides an interesting change of pace from what had gone before, and it’s got all the staged melodrama you’d associate with comic opera.