Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  The speaker was male, Italian, and very angry. Tania immediately depressed the rest with her finger, breaking the connection. A moment later the phone rang again. She let it go on for some time before lifting her finger and snarling ‘Yes?’ in her best bureaucratic manner, bored and truculent.

  ‘Is that Biacis?’ demanded the same male voice.

  ‘Who do you think, the Virgin Mary?’

  There was a furious spluttering.

  ‘Don’t you dare talk like that to me!’

  ‘And how am I supposed to know how I should talk when you haven’t told me who you are?’ Tania snapped back.

  In fact she knew perfectly well who it was, even before the caller angrily identified himself as Lorenzo Moscati, head of the Criminalpol division. Within the caste system of the Ministry, Moscati was a person of considerable stature, whose relation to a mere Grade II administrative assistant such as Tania was roughly that of one of the figures in the higher reaches of a baroque ceiling-piece, almost invisible in the refulgence of his glory, to one of the extras supporting clouds or propping up sunbeams in the bottom left-hand corner. But Tania didn’t give a damn. As a successful independent businesswoman, she had no reason to be impressed by some shit-for-brains with the right party card and an influential clique behind him. Even the Russians were finally having second thoughts about the virtues of such a system. Only the Italian state apparatus remained utterly immune to the effects of glasnost.

  ‘Zen, Aurelio!’ Moscati shouted.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘How should I know? This isn’t Personnel.’

  Moscati’s voice modulated to a tone of unctuous viciousness.

  ‘I am aware of that, my dear, but all Ciliani can tell me is that he’s off sick. So I called his home number and asked if I could speak to the invalid, only to find that his mother hasn’t seen him since yesterday and seems to think he’s gone to Florence for work.’

  ‘So? What have I to do with it?’

  Moscati gave a nasty chuckle.

  ‘To be perfectly honest, I thought he might be holed up at your little love-nest.’

  Tania gasped involuntarily. Moscati chuckled again, more confidently now.

  ‘No wonder he needs a day off to recover, poor fellow,’ he continued in the tone of silken brutality he used with female underlings. ‘All that night service, and at his age, too. Anyway, that’s another matter. The fact is that our Aurelio is deep in the shit, wherever he may be. Have you seen the papers? These allegations are extremely serious, even alarming, but as his colleague I naturally feel a certain solidarity. That’s why I’m giving him one last chance to put things right. Have him call me, now.’

  He hung up. Tania stubbed out her cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, and dialled a Rome number. It rang for some time before a sleepy voice answered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did I wake you, sweetheart?’ she asked gently.

  A pleased grunt.

  ‘Not exactly. I’ve been lying here beside you. The pillow is still shaped by your head, and the sheets smell of you. There’s really quite a lot of you still here.’

  ‘More than there is here, believe me. Look, I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but Moscati has been on to me. He’s after your blood for some reason.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Why did he call you?’ Zen asked.

  He sounded wide awake now.

  ‘He knows, Aurelio.’

  ‘He can’t!’

  The exclamation was as involuntary as a cry of pain.

  ‘I’m afraid he does,’ said Tania. ‘And about the flat, too.’

  A silence. Zen sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered almost inaudibly.

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference. Not to me, at any rate.

  You’d better phone him, Aurelio. It sounded urgent.’

  Another sigh.

  ‘Any other messages?’

  Tania leafed through the mail for the Criminalpol department, which she planned to deliver when the pressures of business permitted.

  ‘Just a telegram.’

  ‘Let’s have it.’

  Tania tore open the envelope and read the brief typed message.

  ‘It sounds like some loony,’ she told him.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘“If you wish to get these deaths in the proper perspective, apply at the green gates in the piazza at the end of Via Santa Sabina.”’

  He grunted.

  ‘No name?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t go, Aurelio. It could be a nutter.’

  She sounded nervous, memories of Vasco Spadola’s deadly vendetta still fresh in her mind.

  ‘When was it sent?’

  ‘Just after five yesterday afternoon, from Piazza San Silvestro.’

  He yawned.

  ‘All right. I’d better ring Moscati now.’

  ‘What’s it all about, Aurelio? He said it was in the papers.’

  ‘Well, well. Fame at last.’

  Tania said nothing.

  ‘I’ll ring you later about tonight,’ he told her. ‘And don’t worry. It’s just work, not life and death.’

  The letters had been faxed from the Vatican City State to the Rome offices of five national newspapers about ten o’clock on Monday evening. The time had been well chosen. The following day’s editions were about to go to bed, while most people in the Vatican had already done so. There was thus no time to follow up the startling allegations which the letter contained, still less to get an official reaction from the Vatican Press Office, notoriously reticent and dilatory at the best of times.

  The anonymous writer had thoughtfully included a list of the publications to whom he had sent copies of the document. The editors phoned each other. Yes, they’d seen the thing. Well, they were undecided, really. They weren’t in the habit of printing unsubstantiated accusations, although these did seem to have a certain ring of authenticity, and if by chance they were true then of course … Nevertheless, in the end all five agreed that it would be wiser to hold back until the whole thing could be properly investigated. Chuckling with glee at their craftiness in securing this exclusive scoop, each then phoned the newsroom to hold the front page. Here was a story which had everything: a colourful and notorious central character, a background rife with financial and political skulduggery, and – best of all – the Vatican connection.

  Aurelio Zen read the reports as his taxi crawled through the dense traffic, making so little progress that at times he had the impression that they were being carried backwards, like a boat with the tide against it. He had bought La Stampa, his usual paper, as well as La Repubblica, II Corriere della Sera, and, for a no-holds-barred view, the radical II Manifesto. Each served up the rich and spicy raw materials with varying degrees of emphasis and presentation, but all began with a résumé of the affair so far which inevitably centred on the enigmatic figure of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti, an inveterate gambler and playboy but also a pillar of the establishment and a prominent member of the Knights of Malta. Unlike the vast majority of the Italian aristocracy – most notoriously the so-called ‘Counts of Ciampino’ created by Vittorio Emanuele III before his departure into exile from that airport in 1944 – the Ruspantis were no parvenus. The family dated back to the fifteenth century, and had at one time or another counted among its members a score of cardinals, a long succession of Papal Knights, a siege hero flayed alive by the Turks, the victim of a street affray with the Orsini clan and a particularly gory uxoricide.

  After unification and the collapse of the Papal States, one junior member of the Ruspantis had sensed which way the wind was blowing, moved to the newly emergent power centre in Milan and married into the Falcone family of textile magnates. The others remained in Rome, slowly stagnating. Ludovico’s father, Filippo, had succumbed to the febrile intoxications of Fascism, which had seemed for a time to restore some of the energy and purpose which
had been drained from their lives. But this drunken spree was the Ruspantis’ final fling. Filippo survived the war and its immediate aftermath, despite his alleged participation in war crimes during the Ethiopian campaign, but the peace slowly destroyed him. The abolition of papal pomp and ritual in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was the last straw. Prince Filippo took to his bed in the family palazzo on Lungotevere opposite the Villa Farnesina, where he died anathemizing the ‘antipope’ John XXIII who had delivered the Church into the hands of the socialists and freemasons. Lorenzo, the elder of Filippo’s two sons, had been groomed since birth for the day when he would become Prince, but in the event he survived his father by less than a year before his Alfa Romeo was crushed between an overtaking truck and the wall of a motorway tunnel. And thus it was that Ludovico, to whose education and character no one had given a second thought, found himself head of the family at the age of twenty-three.

  The young Prince appeared at first a reassuring clone of his late brother, doing and saying all the right things. As well as joining such exclusive secular associations as the Chess Club and the Hunting Club, he also put himself forward for admission to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, like every senior Ruspanti for the previous four hundred years. He hunted hard, gambled often, and busied himself with running the family’s agricultural tenuta near Palestrina. His political and social opinions were reassuringly predictable, and he expressed no views on the controversial reforms instituted by John XXIII, or indeed on anything else apart from hunting, gambling and running the aforementioned country estate. The only thing which caused a raised eyebrow among certain ultras was the reconciliation with the family’s mercantile relatives in Milan. This event, which most people considered long overdue, unfortunately came too late for the Falcone parents, who had paid the price of their high industrial and financial profile by falling victim to the Red Brigades, but Ludovico went out of his way to cultivate his cousins Raimondo and Ariana – to such an extent, indeed, that malicious tongues accused him of having conceived an unhealthy passion for the latter, a striking girl who had never fully recovered from her parents’ death. Such improprieties, however, even if such they were, occurred a world away, in the desolate, misty plains of Lombardy. Where it mattered, in the salons of aristocratic Rome, Ludovico’s behaviour seemed absolutely unexceptionable.

  Nevertheless, as the years went by the family’s financial situation gradually began to slide out of control. First sections of the country estate were sold off, then the whole thing. Palazzo Ruspanti was next to go, although Ludovico managed to retain the piano nobile for the use of himself and his mother until she died, when he sold up and moved to rented rooms in the unfashionable Prenestino district. Friends and relations were heard to suggest that marriage to some suitably endowed young lady might prove the answer to these problems. Such things were a good deal rarer than they had been a hundred years earlier, when a noble title counted for more and people were less bashful about buying into one, but they were by no means unheard of.

  Ludovico, though, showed no interest in any of the potential partners who were more or less overtly paraded before him. This indifference naturally added fuel to the rumours concerning his love for Ariana Falcone, whose brother Raimondo had recently and quite unexpectedly achieved fame as a fashion designer. Other versions had it that Ruspanti was gay, or impotent, or had joined that inner circle of the Order of Malta, the thirty ‘professed’ Knights who are sworn to chastity, obedience and poverty – cynics joked that Ludovico would have no difficulty with the final item, at any rate. Then there was the question of where all the money had gone. Some people said it had been swallowed by the Prince’s cocaine habit, some that he had paid kidnappers a huge ransom for the return of his and Ariana’s love-child, while others held that the family fortune had gone to finance an abortive monarchist coup d’état. Even those who repeated the most likely story – that Ludovico’s inveterate love of gambling had extended itself to share dealing, and that his portfolio had been wiped out when the Wall Street market collapsed on ‘Black Monday’ – were careful to avoid the charge of credulous banality by suggesting that this was merely a cover for the real drama, which involved a doomsday scenario of global dimensions, involving the CIA, Opus Dei and Gelli’s P2, and using the Knights of Malta as a cover.

  Thus when word spread that Ruspanti had taken refuge with the latter organization following his disappearance from circulation about a month earlier, the story was widely credited. The official line was that Ruspanti was wanted for questioning by a magistrate investigating a currency fraud involving businessmen in Milan, but few people were prepared to believe that. Far larger issues were clearly at stake, involving the future of prominent members of the government. This explained why the Prince had chosen a hiding place which was beyond the jurisdiction of the Italian authorities. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta has long lost the extensive territories which once made it, together with the Knights Templar, the richest and most powerful mediaeval order of chivalry, but it is still recognized as an independent state by over forty nations, including Italy. Thus Palazzo Malta, opposite Gucci’s in elegant Via Condotti, and the Palace of Rhodes on the Aventine hill, headquarters of the local Grand Priory and chancery of the Order’s diplomatic mission to the Holy See, enjoy exactly the same extraterritorial status as any foreign embassy. If the fugitive had taken refuge within the walls of either property, he was as safe from the power of the Italian state as he would have been in Switzerland or Paraguay. Whatever the truth about this, Ruspanti had not been seen again until his dramatic reappearance the previous Friday in the basilica of St Peter’s.

  This event initially appeared to render the question of the Prince’s whereabouts in the interim somewhat academic, but the letter to the newspapers changed all that with its dramatic suggestion that his death might not be quite what it seemed – or rather, what the Vatican authorities had allegedly been at considerable pains to make it seem. According to the anonymous correspondent, in short, Ludovico Ruspanti – like Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona and so many other illustrious corpses – had been the subject of ‘an assisted suicide’.

  The letter made three principal charges. The first confirmed the rumours about Ruspanti having been harboured by the Order of Malta, but added that following his expulsion, which took place after a personal intervention by the Grand Master, the Prince had been leading a clandestine existence in the Vatican City State with the full connivance of the Holy See. Moreover, the writer claimed, Ruspanti’s movements and contacts during this period had been the subject of a surveillance operation, and the Vatican authorities were thus aware that on the afternoon of his death the Prince had met the representatives of an organization referred to as ‘the Cabal’. But the item of most interest to Zen was the last, which stated categorically that the senior Italian police official called in by the Holy See, a certain ‘Dottor Aurelio Zeno’, had deliberately falsified the results of his investigation in line with the preconceived verdict of suicide.

  Almost the most significant feature of the letter was that no more was said. The implication was that it was addressed not to the general public but to those in the know, the select few who were aware of the existence and nature of ‘the Cabal’. They would grasp not only how and why Ruspanti had met his death, but also the reasons why this information was now being leaked to the press. ‘In short,’ II Manifesto concluded, ‘we once again find ourselves enveloped by sinister and suggestive mysteries, face to face with one of those convenient deaths signed by a designer whose name remains unknown but whose craftsmanship everyone recognizes as bearing the label “Made in Italy”.’

  ‘This one?’

  The taxi had drawn up opposite an unpainted wooden door set in an otherwise blank wall. There was no number, and for a moment Zen hesitated. Then he saw the black Fiat saloon with SCV number plates parked on the other side of the street, right under a sign reading PARKING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. It could sit there for the rest of the year w
ithout getting a ticket, Zen reflected as he paid off the taxi. Any vehicle bearing Sacra Città del Vaticano plates was invisible to the traffic cops.

  A metal handle dangled from a chain in a small niche beside the door. Zen gave it a yank. A dull bell clattered briefly, somewhere remote. Nothing happened. He pulled the chain again, then got out a cigarette and put it in his mouth without lighting it. A small metal grille set in the door slid back.

  ‘Yes?’ demanded a female voice.

  ‘Signor Bianchi.’

  Keys jingled, locks turned, bolts were drawn, and the door opened a crack.

  ‘Come in!’

  Zen stepped into the soft, musty dimness inside. He just had time to glimpse the speaker, a dumpy nun ‘of canonical age’, to use the Church’s euphemism, before the door was slammed shut and locked behind him.

  ‘Follow me.’

  The nun waddled off along a bare tiled corridor which unexpectedly emerged in a well-tended garden surrounded on three sides by a cloister whose tiled, sloping roof was supported by an arcade of beautifully proportioned arches. Zen’s guide opened one of the doors facing the garden.

  ‘Please wait here.’

  She scuttled off. Zen stepped over the well-scrubbed threshold. The room was long and narrow, with a freakishly high ceiling and a floor of smooth scrubbed stone slabs. It smelt like a disused larder. The one window, small and barred, set in the upper expanses of a bare whitewashed wall, emphasized the sense of enclosure. The furnishings consisted of a trestle table flanked by wooden benches, and an acrylic painting showing a young woman reclining in a supine posture while a bleeding heart hovered in the air above her, emitting rays of light which pierced her outstretched palms.

  Zen sat heavily on one of the benches. The tabletop was a thick oak board burnished to a sullen gleam. He took the cigarette from his lips and twiddled it between two fingers. It seemed inconceivable that only half an hour earlier he had been lying in a position not dissimilar from that of the female stigmatic in the painting, wondering if it was worth bothering to get out of bed at all given that Tania would be back shortly after two. For no particular reasons, he had decided to treat himself to a couple of days sick-leave. Like all state employees, Zen regularly availed himself of this perk. A doctor’s certificate was only required for more than three days’ absence, and as long as you didn’t abuse the system too exaggeratedly, everyone turned a blind eye. That was how Zen had known that something was seriously wrong when Tania told him about Moscati checking up on him. When he phoned in, Lorenzo Moscati had left him in no doubt whatever that the shit had hit the fan.