The middle finger of Sánchez-Valdés’s right hand, adorned by a heavy silver ring, tapped the tabletop emphatically.
‘To make matters worse, Ruspanti’s name has of course been in the news recently as a result of these allegations of currency fraud. To be perfectly honest, I never really managed to master the ins and outs of the affair, but I know enough about the way the press operates to anticipate the kind of malicious allegations which this is certain to give rise to. We may confidently expect suggestions, more or less explicit, to the effect that from the point of view of certain people, who must of course remain nameless, Ruspanti’s death could hardly have been more convenient or better-timed, etcetera, etcetera. Do you see?’
Zen nodded. Sánchez-Valdés shook his head and sighed.
‘The fact is, dottore, that for a variety of reasons which we have no time to analyse now, this little city state, whose sole object is to facilitate the spiritual work of the Holy Father, is the object of an inordinate degree of morbid fascination on the part of the general public. People seem to believe that we are a mediaeval relic which has survived intact into the twentieth century, rife with secrecy, skulduggery and intrigue, at once sinister and colourful. Since such a Vatican doesn’t in fact exist, they invent it. You saw the results when poor Luciani died after only thirty days as pope. Admittedly, the announcement was badly handled. Everyone was shocked by what had happened, and there were inevitably delays and conflicting stories. As a result, we are still plagued by the most appalling and offensive rumours, to the effect that John Paul I was poisoned or suffocated by members of his household, and the crime covered up.
‘Now a prince is not a pope, and Ludovico Ruspanti no Albino Luciani. Nevertheless, we have learned our lesson the hard way. This time we’re determined to leave nothing to chance. That is why you’ve been invited to give us the benefit of your expert opinion, dottore. Since Ruspanti died on Vatican soil, we are under no legal obligation to consult anyone whatsoever. In the circumstances, however, and so as to leave no room for doubt in anyone’s mind, we have voluntarily decided to ask an independent investigator to review the facts and confirm that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding this tragic event.’
Zen glanced at his watch.
‘There’s no need for that, Your Excellency.’
Sánchez-Valdés frowned.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Zen leaned forward confidentially.
‘I’m from Venice, just like Papa Luciani. If the Church says that this man committed suicide, that’s good enough for me.’
The archbishop glanced up at Monsignor Lamboglia. He laughed uneasily.
‘Well!’
Zen beamed a reassuring smile.
‘Tell the press anything you like. I’ll back you up.’
The archbishop laughed again.
‘This is good to hear, my son. Very good indeed. If only there were more like you! But these days, alas, the Church is surrounded by enemies. We cannot be too careful. So although I applaud your attitude of unquestioning obedience, I fear that we need more than just a rubber-stamped nihil obstat.’
Sánchez-Valdés rose to his feet and walked over to stand in front of Zen.
‘I shall introduce you to one of our security officers,’ he continued quietly. ‘He was at the scene and will be able to tell you anything you wish to know. After that you are on your own. Inspect, investigate, interrogate, take whatever action you may consider necessary. There is no need for you to consult me or my colleagues.’
He stared intently at Zen.
‘In fact it is imperative that you do not do so.’
Zen looked him in the eye.
‘So as to preserve my independent status, you mean?’
The archbishop smiled and nodded.
‘Precisely. Any suspicion of collusion between us would vitiate the very effect we are trying to produce. Do whatever you need to do, whatever must be done to achieve the desired result. I have been assured by your superiors that you are an extremely capable and experienced operative.’
He turned to Monsignor Lamboglia.
‘Fetch Grimaldi in.’
On the wall of the antechamber in which Giovanni Grimaldi had been kept waiting for the best part of two hours hung a large, murky canvas. It depicted a number of armed figures doing something extremely unpleasant to a nude male in the foreground, while a group of senior citizens with haloes looked on with expressions of complacent detachment from the safety of a passing cloud. Closer inspection revealed that the prospective martyr was being torn apart by teams of yoked buffaloes. Grimaldi winced sympathetically. He knew exactly how the poor bastard felt.
His initial reaction to what had happened was one of straightforward panic. He had been entrusted with a job whose delicacy and importance had been repeatedly stressed. It was a chance to prove himself once and for all, to make his mark as a responsible and trustworthy employee. And he had blown it. If only he hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted by that man with the gold chain, the flashy watch and the nasal accent who had apparently become detached from the Comunione e Liberazione sightseeing group which had passed through a few minutes earlier. The man had approached Grimaldi as he stood at the rail of the external balcony at the very top of St Peter’s, apparently absorbed in the stupendous view, and fired off an endless series of questions about where the Spanish Steps were and which hill was the Aventine and whether you could see the Coliseum from there. Grimaldi had known he had better things to do than play the tourist guide, but his pride in knowing Rome so well, being able to identify each of its significant monuments, had been too great. It was such a thrill to point out the principal attractions of the Eternal City with languid, confident gestures, as though he were the hereditary landlord.
Besides, his quarry was in plain view, standing by the railing a little further round the balcony, chatting up that classy number with the white silk headscarf who had been all alone on the balcony when they arrived. Grimaldi didn’t blame him! He might have had a go himself if he hadn’t been on duty. Not that he’d have stood a chance. It looked like she might well go for the Prince, though. They were standing very close together, and their conversation looked unusually animated for two people who had only just met. Meanwhile he was stuck with this northerner and his dumb questions. ‘And is that the Quirinale Palace?’ he whined, pointing out the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
The next time Grimaldi had looked across to the other side of the balcony, the Prince and his pick-up had disappeared. Abandoning the inquisitive tourist in mid-sentence, he clattered down the steel ladder leading to the precipitous stairway, crazily slanted and curved like a passage in a nightmare, which led down to the roof of the basilica. The cupola was riddled with such corridors and stairs, but most had been sealed off, and those open to the public were clearly signposted so as to send visitors on their way with the minimum of delay or confusion. There was nowhere to get lost, nowhere to hide. Minutes after leaving the lantern, Grimaldi was down in the nave of St Peter’s, and knew that he had lost the man he had been given strict orders to keep in view at all costs.
It was clear what had happened. The whole thing had been carefully set up. While the Vigilanza man’s attention was distracted by the supposed Comunione e Liberazione truant, Ruspanti had been whisked away by his female companion. They could be anywhere by now. Grimaldi wandered disconsolately around the basilica, where preparations for the evening Mass were in progress. He was merely postponing the moment when he would have to report back to headquarters and reveal his failure. Then he caught sight of the woman in the grey tweed coat and white silk headscarf, and began to feel that everything might turn out all right after all. When the man in the suede jacket turned up a few minutes later, he felt sure of it. The two did not look at each other, but they were aware of each other’s presence. They were a unit, a team. Only Ruspanti was still missing, but Grimaldi now had no doubt that the Prince would also reappear in due course.
And indeed
he had, although not in quite the manner the Vigilanza man had imagined. It certainly wasn’t the perfect outcome, from his point of view, but on the other hand it could have been worse. Rather than going on bended knees to Luigi Scarpione, his boss, and admitting that he had fallen for a trick which shouldn’t have fooled an untrained rookie, he had found himself summoned to the Secretariat of State, no less, in the Apostolic Palace itself, next door to the pope’s private quarters, a sanctum sanctorum guarded by a hand-picked élite of the Swiss Guards, where the riff-raff of the Vigilanza were not normally permitted to set foot. Not only had he set foot there, he’d actually met the legendary Sánchez-Valdés face to face.
Normally, the special security unit to which Grimaldi belonged liaised with the Curia through the archbishop’s secretary, Lamboglia, a cold and charmless man who received minions in his anonymous office in an obscure building off Via del Belvedere, in the Sant’ Anna district. The clergy might need the likes of Grimaldi to do their dirty business, but that didn’t give him entry to a society which had almost as little time for laymen as for women. However, the implications of Ruspanti’s death were so dramatic that this caste system had been temporarily suspended, and on this occasion Grimaldi was received not just by Lamboglia but by Juan Ramón Sánchez-Valdés himself. By all accounts, it was this Latin American who more or less ran the domestic side of the Holy See’s affairs, leaving His Eminence the Cardinal Secretary of State at liberty to devote himself to the complexities of foreign policy.
Unfortunately Grimaldi was unable to savour this exceptional honour as fully as it deserved, since he was preoccupied with the delicate question of deciding exactly how much of the truth to reveal. The aim was no longer simply to disguise his own incompetence. There was more at stake than that. Once the initial shock of the horror he had witnessed had worn off, Grimaldi had dimly begun to perceive possibilities of personal advantage which took precedence even over his innate desire to impress his superiors. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was going to exploit them, never mind how, but in the meantime he wanted to keep all his options open, and that meant not giving too much away.
In the event, his performance seemed to have gone down quite well. Sánchez-Valdés had accepted that Grimaldi’s inability to keep track of Ruspanti’s movements had been due to circumstances beyond his control, namely the press of tourists in the dome of St Peter’s that day. No attempt had been made to reprimand or punish him. Grimaldi was just congratulating himself on his success, when he was called back from the antechamber where he had been sent to kick his heels and introduced to a newcomer, a man he had never seen before. Slightly taller even than Lamboglia, he had fine, slightly wavy hair and a face stretched as tautly over its bones as a drum. His angular nose and square, protuberant chin might have looked strong, but the mouth was weak and indecisive, as were the opaque grey eyes. Or so Grimaldi thought, until they turned towards him. It only lasted a moment, but he felt as though he had never been looked at before.
‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen, a specialist investigator dispatched by the Italian authorities in response to an urgent request conveyed by the apostolic nuncio,’ Sánchez-Valdés announced. ‘He is lending us the benefit of his experience and expertise to ensure that no possible doubt remains concerning this tragic event. You are to accompany him wherever he wishes to go and to see that he is accorded total cooperation in carrying out his duties.’
Zen shook hands with Sánchez-Valdés, and was accompanied to the door by Monsignor Lamboglia. Grimaldi was about to follow when the archbishop called him back.
‘You need say nothing about the other business,’ he murmured sotto voce.
‘The surveillance?’
Sánchez-Valdés nodded.
‘Or the whereabouts of the deceased prior to today’s events. As far as our guest is concerned, Ruspanti appeared from nowhere to obliterate himself on the floor of St Peter’s. Descendit de caelis, as you might say.’
Grimaldi blushed, shocked by the levity of the reference. The archbishop flapped his right hand rapidly, urging him to join the others.
Lamboglia led Zen and Grimaldi out of the Apostolic Palace by a circuitous route which brought them out directly in St Peter’s. In the nave, workmen were shifting benches into position in readiness for Saturday’s papal Mass, but the area beyond the crossing was still sealed off by plastic tape and patrolled by two uniformed Vigilanza officials.
‘I look forward to hearing from you,’ Lamboglia told Zen, and strode off. After a brief word with the uniformed guards, Grimaldi led Zen over the tape and round the baldacchino. The body had been covered in a tarpaulin borrowed from the sampietrini, the workers responsible for maintaining the fabric of St Peter’s. Once the identity of the illustrious corpse had been established, the ambulance men from Santo Spirito hospital and the cleaning crew had been hurriedly dismissed until further notice. No one was to approach the body and nothing was to be removed or otherwise disturbed without an explicit order to that effect from the office of the Cardinal Secretary of State.
Grimaldi looked away as Zen lifted the tarpaulin to view the tangle of broken bone, unsupported flesh and extruded innards that constituted the remains of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti. He certainly didn’t appear bothered by such things, Grimaldi noted, risking a quick glimpse. Indeed, he seemed almost indecently unimpressed, this hot-shot from the Interior Ministry, squatting over the corpse like a child over a box of hand-me-down toys, lifting the odd item which looked as though it might be of interest, bending down to sniff the blood-drenched clothing and inspect the victim’s shoes.
‘Looks like he thought about slashing his wrists first,’ Zen murmured, indicating the thin red weals on the victim’s wrists. Deliberately unfocusing his eyes, Grimaldi turned his head towards the horror.
‘Preliminary cuts,’ Zen explained. ‘But he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it, so he decided to jump instead.’
Grimaldi nodded, though he could see nothing but a merciful blur.
‘We’re going to have do something about these shoes,’ added Zen.
The offending items, cheap brown suede slip-ons with an elastic vent, stood side by side on the marble flooring. Both were spotlessly clean, as was the stocking covering the victim’s left foot. The other sock was covered in rust-red bloodstains.
Grimaldi was on the point of saying something, but then he remembered that the shoes had been Scarpione’s idea. The Vigilanza boss had appeared at the scene before any of the clerics could get there. ‘Save trouble all round,’ he’d said, giving the necessary orders. Apparently he’d been wrong, but Grimaldi knew better than to get involved.
‘What about them?’ he asked.
Zen looked at him sharply, then shrugged.
‘Very well, I’ll raise it with Monsignor Lamboglia.’
The lift had been shut down for the night, so they had to walk all the way up to the roof of the basilica. They climbed the shallow steps of the spiral staircase in silence. Zen had no small-talk, and Grimaldi had decided to volunteer no information. This official from the Interior Ministry, despite his lethargic manner, might not be as easy to fool as Archbishop Sánchez-Valdés.
They found Antonio Cecchi, chief of the sampietrini maintenance men, in one of a cluster of sheds and workshops perched on the undulating roof of the basilica like a lost corner of old Rome. Cecchi was a compact, muscular man of about fifty with the face of a gargoyle: thin, splayed ears protruding prominently from a bulbous skull topped by a shock of short wavy hair like white flames. Grimaldi explained the situation. With a sigh, Cecchi picked up a torch and led them up a short flight of steps on the outside of the dome. As they waited for Cecchi to find the right key on the huge bunch he produced from the pouch of his blue overalls, Zen studied a large crack in the wall. A number of marble strips had been bridged across it to keep track of its progress, the earliest being dated August 1835. He was not reassured to note that all the tell-tales were broken.
Inside the door, a ramp led up t
o a door opening on to the internal gallery at the base of the drum. The roof outside gave such a strong illusion of being at ground level, with its alleys and piazzas, its washing lines and open casements, that it was a shock to realize just how high they were. Zen peered through the safety fence at the patterned marble floor over a hundred and fifty feet below. The fence ran inside the original railings, all the way from the floor to a point higher than Zen’s head, closing off the half of the gallery which was open to the public.
‘This is supposed to stop jumpers,’ Cecchi explained, shaking the mesh with his powerful fingers.
‘This one went off the other side,’ put in Grimaldi.
He pointed across the circular abyss to a door set in the wall of the drum opposite, giving on to a section of the gallery that was not open to the public, and hence was protected only by the original railings.
‘The stairs leading down from the top of the dome pass by that door,’ Grimaldi explained. ‘The door’s kept locked, but he somehow got hold of a key.’
Zen frowned.
‘But he would have been seen by anyone standing over here.’
‘The dome was closed by then. This part of the gallery would have been shut and locked. Only the exit was still open.’
Zen nodded.
‘Sounds all right. Let’s have a look round the other side.’
Cecchi led the way along a corridor which ran around the circumference of the dome in a series of curved ramps. When they reached the doorway corresponding to the one by which they had left the gallery on the other side, the building superintendent produced his keys again and unlocked the door. Zen pushed past him and stepped out on to the open section of the gallery. The finger he wiped along the top of the railing came away covered in dust.
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