Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  Further away, a mere background drone, came the sound of a vacuum cleaner, indicating that Maria Grazia, the housekeeper, was at work in one of the bedrooms at the far end of the apartment. Zen moved cautiously forward along the darkened hallway. The room to his left, overlooking the gloomy internal courtyard, was crammed with boxes of papers and photographs, trunks full of his father’s clothes and miscellaneous furniture which had been transferred wholesale to Rome when his mother had finally been persuaded to abandon the family home just off the Cannaregio canal. The thought of that emptied space pervaded by the limpid, shifting Venetian light made Zen feel as weightlessly replete as a child for a moment.

  With extreme caution, he opened the door opposite. The elaborate plaster moulding, picture rail and ceiling rose revealed that this had been intended to serve as the dining room, but following his mother’s arrival Zen had commandeered it as his bedroom. As far as he was concerned, whatever it lacked in charm and intimacy was more than compensated for by its proximity to the front door. High on the list of problems caused by his mother’s presence in the house was the fact that every time she saw him putting on his coat Signora Zen wanted to know where he was going and when he’d be back, while on his return she expected a detailed account of where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Exactly as though he were still ten years old, in short. It was, Zen had concluded, the only way in which mothers could relate to their sons, and therefore not something for which they were to be blamed, still less which there was any point in trying to change. Nevertheless, it got on his nerves, particularly since his relationship with Tania Biacis had begun to make ever greater demands on his time.

  Zen had been separated from his wife Luisella for ever a decade, but in the eyes of the Church and Zen’s mother they were still married. In his previous affair, with an American expatriate, Zen had used this as a way of maintaining his distance. Ellen had ultimately returned to New York, disappointed by Zen’s unwillingness to commit himself to her more fully. Now the tables had been turned with a vengeance. Zen would have been more than happy to present Tania to his mother as his fidanzata, that usefully vague category somewhere between steady girlfriend and future wife. It was she who had refused, with a light laugh which, had he been less in love, might have seemed almost insulting.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aurelio, but after eight years of Signora Bevilacqua I can’t face having to deal with another mamma just yet.’

  So it was back to the lies and deceptions which had characterized his affair with Ellen. If he felt less guilty about them, it was not only because his feelings for Tania had a self-justifying intensity, but because his mother was no longer the pathetic figure she had been at that time. The change dated from the previous year, when the Zens’ apartment had been broken into by Vasco Spadola, an ex-mobster bent on revenge. Signora Zen had been forced to go and stay with Gilberto and Rosella Nieddu, where she had proved to be such a hit with the Nieddu children that she now spent two afternoons a week looking after them.

  The effect of this surrogate auntyhood – greatly appreciated by the Nieddus, whose relatives were all in their native Sardinia – had been to transform Signora Zen from a semi-comatose recluse, parasitic on the imported soap operas doled out by Channel 5, into a sprightly, inquisitive old person with opinions and interests, still sharply critical of the city in which she lived like a foreigner, but also aware of its attractions and possibilities. Zen had had mixed feelings about this at first, since it meant revising a number of his own attitudes and habits, but he soon came to appreciate the fact that Signora Zen was out of the house more. It was easier in every sense to sneak off and spend time with Tania when he knew that his mother was happily occupied elsewhere.

  He still needed to keep his stories straight, though, and in the present case that meant not being seen at home. He had been away from both home and work for the past two days, but as far as his mother was concerned his absence was not caused by illness but by an urgent mission to Florence. Alarmed by the effects of Moscati’s call to the house, Zen had phoned her that morning from Tania’s bed and repeated the story, so it would be difficult for him to explain his abrupt return just a few hours later. Hence the extreme caution with which he closed himself into his bedroom and walked across to the chest of drawers, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboard near the foot of the bed.

  He eased the middle drawer open as gingerly as though it were filled with unstable high explosive, although at first sight it seemed to contain nothing but socks and underwear. Zen moved a pile of vests at the back of the drawer and pulled out a small scarlet plastic bag marked Profumeria Nardi. He opened the mouth of the bag and peered at the tangled plastic twine inside, the end melted to a blob by the flame of his lighter. The remaining portion would still be there, tied to the foot of the railing on the upper gallery of the dome of St Peter’s. It too would have a terminal blob of transparent plastic, slightly darkened by the flame.

  He stuffed the bag into his coat pocket and went over to the wardrobe in the corner. Pulling up a rickety wooden chair which stood near the wash-basin in the corner, Zen lifted down the small leather suitcase on top of the wardrobe. He snapped the catches quietly and opened the lid. The suitcase was almost full with packets, boxes and papers. Zen removed a small flat wooden box, which must have been upside down, for the hinged lid opened and the contents clattered all over the floor.

  His mother either didn’t hear the noise or must have assumed that it came from outside, for she didn’t stop talking. Zen knelt down and collected the tools and instruments. One had rolled right under the bed, and when Zen crawled in there to retrieve it he caught sight of some writing on the wooden bedstead. With an effort, he could just make out the irregular lettering: Zen, Anzolo Zuane, 28 March 1947. The inscription blurred and he felt a terrible panic grip him. Seizing the metal instrument he had come in search of, he thrust himself out from under the dream-soaked structure of the bed, back into the light and the air of the room. The name written on the bedstead was his father’s – Angelo Giovanni in Italian – but the writing was his own, and by 1947 the man named must have been long dead in some frozen swamp or Soviet prison camp. Only his son had continued to insist, secretly, magically, on his father’s continuing presence in the house.

  He stood up and dusted himself down, then tiptoed over to the door leading to the hallway. Pressing against the door to prevent the catch snapping against the edge of the mortise, he gripped the handle and turned. He put his ear to the crack and listened. To his dismay, the aural radar on which he depended had gone dead. The only sound was the continual murmur of traffic in the street outside. With a glance at his watch, he opened the door quickly. The hinges shrieked.

  ‘Is that you?’ called his mother.

  ‘Eh?’ shouted Maria Grazia from the bedroom.

  ‘Was that you?’

  There was a pause as the housekeeper interrupted her work and appeared in the doorway of the living room.

  ‘What, signora?’

  ‘Was that you?’

  ‘Was what me?’

  ‘That noise.’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘It sounded like … like the front door opening.’

  His mother sounded anxious. Homes never feel the same after they’ve been violated by a break-in. Maria Grazia’s bulky form suddenly appeared in outline on the glass-panelled door to the living room. Zen stepped back hastily.

  ‘It’s shut,’ the housekeeper reported, having presumably taken a look down the hall.

  ‘Go and check!’ Zen’s mother insisted.

  Zen tried to close the door, but it was too late.

  ‘Mother of God!’ cried Maria Grazia as she caught sight of him.

  ‘What is it?’ Signora Zen called from the living room. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m not here!’ Zen whispered urgently to the housekeeper.

  Maria Grazia put her hand on her abundant bosom and mimed relief.

  ‘It’s all right, signora,’ sh
e yelled. ‘I just banged my elbow.’

  She opened the front door and made energetic shooing gestures to Zen, who left his hiding place and slipped out on to the landing and down the stairs to freedom with a smile of gratitude.

  His local café had seen much less of him now that he regularly slept at Tania’s, and when he asked the cashier for gettoni he received a qualified welcome hinting at both the promise of rehabilitation if he ceased to patronize rival establishments and the threat of being reduced to the status of a casual customer if he didn’t. Zen went to the pay-phone and called the doctor whose name he had extracted from Lamboglia. At a pinch he could probably have got a certificate from his own doctor, but the last thing he wanted was to drag someone he knew and respected into this murky affair. If the press got suspicious about his ‘illness’, let them hound someone else.

  The Vatican contact, a Doctor Carmagnola, said that he had heard from Monsignor Lamboglia, and would influenza or infectious gastro-enteritis do or did he want to be quarantined? Zen said that there was no need to exaggerate, and Carmagnola told him he could collect the certificate from the reception of the Ospedale del Bambino Gesù. Zen picked up a taxi in Piazza Cavour and went first to the hospital on the Gianicolo, and then on to one of the more illustrious of Rome’s hills. They drove along the Tiber as far as the Palatino bridge, then across the river and up a narrow, curving lane. Following Zen’s directions, the driver turned right and continued along a wealthy residential street past a public garden planted with orange trees. They passed two churches on the right, then a consulate on the left. A police jeep was parked opposite, and the two bored patrolmen watched the taxi drive past and park in the small pizza enclosed by a high wall.

  A stiff breeze hissed in the trees all round, and from a nursery school near by came the sound of children at play. There was no other sound. Zen walked over to the pair of large green gates set in the wall at one side of the piazza. The letters SMOM were etched on a small brass plate above the bell. Zen pressed the button.

  ‘Yes?’ replied a crackly voice from the entry-phone.

  ‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen. I understand there is a message for me.’

  ‘One moment.’

  There was a brief pause before the voice resumed.

  ‘I regret that we have no knowledge of any such message.’

  Zen wasn’t surprised. In his bones he’d known all along that the errand was a hoax set up by some prankster who had read his name in the newspaper reports of Ruspanti’s death. He might even be here, watching the success of his stratagem. Zen glanced around, but there was no one to be seen except an elderly couple sitting on a bench at the other side of the piazza. He made one more attempt.

  ‘Listen, I’m a police official! I received a message telling me to come to this address.’

  ‘We have no knowledge of this matter,’ the voice insisted with finality.

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ snapped Zen, but the entry-phone had clicked off. He stood staring up at the tall green gates. The stone lintel above them was decorated with a cross whose arms grew broader towards their forked tips. A Maltese cross, thought Zen. SMOM: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. These were the gates of the Palace of Rhodes, the Order’s extraterritorial property where, according to rumour, Ludovico Ruspanti had taken refuge from the rigours of Italian justice.

  Perhaps the message hadn’t been a hoax, after all. But in that case what did it mean? ‘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.’ Zen focused his eyes with an effort. The gates were high and tightly closed. The only opening of any kind was an ornamental metal plate set close to the edge of the left-hand gate. The plate was of bronze, worked by hand in a complex elliptic pattern, with a plain circular keyhole in the centre. Zen bent down and squinted through the keyhole.

  He expected the hole to be covered at the other end, so it was a shock to find, on the contrary, a view arranged specifically to be seen from that point. It was still more of a shock to realize that what he was looking at – framed by an alley of tall evergreen shrubs and centred in the keyhole like the target in a gun-sight – was the dome of St Peter’s. Despite the distance, he could count each of the ribs protruding through the leading of the roof, and the tiny windows lighting the internal gallery from which Prince Ludovico Ruspanti had plunged to his death.

  An hour later Zen was in a take-out pizzeria just outside the walls of the Vatican City. The other side of the street was lined with the boutiques which had recently sprung up in this area, once notorious as a haunt of thieves and prostitutes. One window was bisected by a huge poster reading FALCO, which Zen remembered as the name of the ‘hot young designer’ whose creation Tania had been wearing the previous Friday. This must have been a mistake, however, for the window was that of a bookshop. Next door stood a doorway giving access to the residential floors where Giovanni Grimaldi lived.

  Zen finished his square slab of sausage-meat and mushroom boscaiolo pizza and wiped his hands on the paper napkin in which it had been wrapped. Time to go. He had not actually seen Grimaldi leave the building, but he must be at work by now. The only person who had gone either in or out, in fact, had been a young woman in a long tweed coat with a white scarf over her head who had appeared about ten minutes earlier. As for Grimaldi, he had probably opted for a lunch in the heavily subsidized Vatican canteen. Zen tossed the soiled napkin into a rubbish bin and walked out into the hazy sunshine.

  Like a quarter of all the real estate in Rome, including the house in which Zen himself lived, the building opposite was owned by the Church, in this case an order of Carmelite nuns. This was not an investment property, however, but one of those set aside to provide cheap accommodation as part of the package which the Vatican offered in an effort to attract and retain its low-paid employees, the other principal incentives being access to duty-free goods and exemption from Italian income tax. From Zen’s point of view there were both pros and cons to the building’s low-rent status. On the plus side, there was no caretaker to worry about. The problem was that there was no lift either, and Grimaldi lived on the top floor.

  The stairwell was dark, and the timer controlling the lights had been adjusted for the agility of a buck chamois in rut rather than a middle-aged policeman going about his dubious business. Lamboglia had told Zen that ‘with any luck’ he might ‘find some incriminating material which we can use’. There were various ways you could read that, quite apart from the literal meaning, which was in fact the only one Zen was prepared to discount entirely. The question was not whether Lamboglia had expected him to plant evidence in Grimaldi’s room – that was taken for granted – but what that evidence was to prove. After due consideration Zen had decided to go for broke and frame Grimaldi for the murder. The way things were looking, the Vatican was going to need a scapegoat. Grimaldi would do nicely, particularly if, as Zen suspected, he had been part of the team carrying out surveillance on Ruspanti.

  The top floor of the building differed from the others only in that the rectangular circuit of bleak barracks-like corridors was lit by a succession of grimy skylights. The stench of carbolic cleanser was fighting a losing battle against a guerilla force of odours associated with stale food, dirty clothes, clogged drains and night sweats. The only sounds were the murmur of a distant radio and a steady hushing as of rain. Zen made his way along the corridor to a brown-painted door marked 4W, a loosened screw having allowed the 3 to flop over on its face.

  There was no sound inside, but as a precaution Zen knocked gently before getting out the wooden box he had removed from the suitcase in his bedroom at home. The door was fitted with a Yale-type lock above the handle and a deadlock with a keyhole below. Zen bent down and squinted into the opening of the lower lock but the key was in position. He frowned briefly, then shrugged. Presumably Grimaldi only used the Yale lock when he went out.

  He opened the tool kit and selected a device like a pair of callipers, which he in
serted into the upper lock. Zen had acquired the tools during the years he had spent in Naples. He had been directing a plan to bug the beachside villa of a prominent camorra boss when a burglar had broken into the property. He couldn’t arrest the intruder without compromising the original operation, but the burglar didn’t know that, and was delighted when Zen offered to drop all charges in return for the tool kit and a series of masterclasses in its use. It was some time since he had needed to put these skills to the test, but he was nevertheless surprised to find that the lock totally resisted all his efforts.

  The lack of play in the lock was so marked that if the lower lock hadn’t had the key in it, he might have thought that the catch was snibbed back. But it had, and an unoccupied room couldn’t very well be locked from the inside. He stood listening to the hushing of the rain and staring at the stubborn door. Wrapping a handkerchief around the door handle, he shoved his shoulder hard against the edge, to see which lock gave. The next thing he knew, the door had swung effortlessly open, depositing him on his knees in the middle of the floor.

  A dull prickle of apprehension ran over his scalp as he got up again. Surely Giovanni Grimaldi’s work could not have left him with such a rosy view of human nature that he went off to work leaving his belongings in an unlocked room in an unguarded building? The only possible answer seemed to be that he didn’t have any belongings, or at least none worth stealing. Apart from a few magazines, a small radio, a cheap alarm clock, some empty soft-drink bottles and the clothes hanging in the closet and laid out on the bed, the place looked as impersonal as a hotel room. The furniture must have been an eyesore even when new, which it hadn’t been for a very long time.