In return for a quiet life with pastries and a cappuccino on his desk every morning, he is prepared to tolerate all manner of scams, not the least of which is a brothel on the top floor of the harbour police station of which he is nominally in command.

Explanations tying together all the subplots are made during the course of a final party, at which the romantic business is settled satisfactorily, although Zen is confronted with the reproaches of his mother, his ex-wife Luisella and his former partner Tania.

A chance remark, however, compels Signora Zen to collapse and confess to one of the party-goers disguised as a priest that in reality Aurelio was her son by a clothes manufacturer who supplied uniforms to the Blackshirts.

[4] Though the setting is Neapolitan in the case of Cosi Fan Tutti, the author's descriptions of the city's "winding streets, courtyards, piazzas, staircases and narrow archways and alleys mirror Dibdin's representation of the labyrinthine social and political world of Italy".

[5] Here, however, the plot is taken further into fantasy by making the affairs of the daughters of Zen's landlady parody the theme of Mozart's similarly named Cosi fan tutte (That's the way the world goes), which was also set in Naples.