Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  Aware of the weakness of his position, Zen backed down.

  ‘Of course. Go where you like. It looks like I might have to work, anyway.’

  The fishing boats which had landed their catches early that morning were now tied up two abreast on either side of the channel, stem to stern. Two crewmen were mending nets spread out over the quay, and Tania and Zen chose to go opposite ways around them. As they joined up again, she said, ‘What is this work you’re doing, anyway?’

  Partly out of fatigue with the truth, partly to get his own back for her own evasions, Zen decided to lie.

  ‘The Vatican have got a problem with documents disappearing from the Secret Archives,’ he said, recalling the case which Grimaldi had been working on at the time of his death. ‘They can’t use their own security people because they think some of them may be involved.’

  ‘And you hang around like a store detective waiting for someone to lift a pair of tights?’

  ‘More or less. It’s a hell of a way to make a living, but if I crack the case I get a full plenary indulgence.’

  Tania laughed.

  ‘Not that I really need one,’ he went on, eager to please. ‘I’m already owed over a hundred thousand years’ remission from purgatory. In fact I’m a bit worried that I might soon reach the stage where my spiritual credit exceeds any practical possibilities I have of sinning. Just think what a ruinous effect that would have on my moral fibre.’

  ‘How did you get to be so holy?’

  ‘Oh, I used to be quite devout in my way. I loved the idea of collecting indulgences, like saving up coupons for a free gift. If I said three Pater nosters after confession, I got three hundred years’ remission from purgatory. That seemed an incredible bargain! I couldn’t believe my luck. It takes maybe a minute or so, if you gabble, and for that you got off three hundred years of unspeakable torture! I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t taking advantage. I and Tommaso, my best friend, used to vie with each other. I had well over a hundred thousand years’ worth stored up before I finally fell in love with Tommaso’s sister. After that, the next world no longer seemed quite so important.’

  His words were drowned by the roar of a plane taking off from the international airport just a few kilometres to the north.

  ‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘having attended Mass on the first Friday of each month for the nine months after my First Communion, I’m assured of dying in a state of grace whatever happens.’

  To his surprise, Tania immediately reached out and touched the nearest metal – a mooring bollard – for good luck.

  ‘Don’t mention such things, Aurelio.’

  He took her in his arms, and she kissed him in that way she had, making him wish they were in bed.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she said.

  He laughed, moved despite himself, despite his knowledge that she was cheating him.

  ‘I didn’t know you were superstitious,’ he said as they walked on. ‘You’ve spent too long living with southerners.’

  ‘Now, now! Don’t start coming on like some region-alist red-neck who thinks that the Third World starts at the Apennines.’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t! It starts at Mestre.’

  ‘Mauro may have been a creep, but …’

  ‘May? Tania, you once described Mauro Bevilacqua as someone for whom strangling at birth would have been too good.’

  Perhaps that was who she was seeing on the side, he thought. Perhaps Mauro would have the last laugh after all, and Zen suffer the ignominy of being cuckolded by his lover’s husband.

  ‘… but not all southerners are like that,’ Tania continued. ‘Mauro’s elder brother, for example, is a charming man, scholarly and cultured, with a nice dry wit.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ demanded Zen, his jealousy immediately locking on to this new target.

  ‘In fact you might see him while you’re snooping around the Vatican Archives. He works for the region’s cultural affairs department, and he spends a lot of time there researching material for exhibitions and so on.’

  ‘Maybe he’s the one who’s been stealing the stuff,’ Zen muttered moodily.

  ‘From what Tullio says, I’m surprised the thefts were ever noticed. According to him the Vatican collections are so vast and so badly organized that you can spend days tracking down a single item. It’s more like a place for hiding documents than for finding them, he says.’

  She broke off, frightened by the intensity with which he was staring at her.

  ‘What’s the matter, Aurelio? Did I say something wrong? You seem so strange today, so moody and unpredictable. Is there something you haven’t told me?’

  There was a deafening siren blast as a large orange ocean-going tug slipped her moorings on the other side of the river. Zen transferred his obsessively fixated gaze to the vessel as it proceeded slowly downstream towards the open sea.

  ‘Do you ever see this … what’s his name?’

  Now it was Tania’s turn to stare.

  ‘Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?’

  He looked at her and shrugged, ignoring her indignant tone.

  ‘What it says.’

  They faced each other like enemies.

  ‘Do I ever see Tullio Bevilacqua?’ Tania recited with sarcastic emphasis. ‘No, I haven’t seen him since Mauro and I broke up. Does that satisfy you?’

  ‘But are you on good terms? Would he do you a favour?’

  ‘What sort of favour?’ Tania shouted, scaring away the seagulls. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Aurelio?’

  So he told her.

  They returned by train. Tania got off at Trastevere and got a bus back to her flat, while Zen continued to the suburban Tiburtina station. The determined effort they both made to part on good terms was itself the clearest indication yet of the growing crisis in their relationship, and of their mutual sense that things were no longer quite what they seemed.

  From the station, Zen caught a taxi to the Hotel Torlonia Palace. On the way he looked through the Ministry’s file on the Knights of Malta. As he had expected, the document was entirely non-controversial, amounting to little more than an outline of the organization’s history, structure and overt aims. Founded in 1070, the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta was the third oldest religious Order after the Benedictines and Augustans, and the first to consist entirely of laymen. The Order was originally formed to staff and run infirmaries during the Crusades, but soon took on a military role as well. At the end of the twelfth century the Knights retreated to Rhodes, from where they conducted covert operations all over the Middle East until their expulsion by the Turks in 1522. Thereafter they led a token existence in Malta until Napoleon’s conquest of the island once again forced them into exile, this time in Rome.

  The Knights had thus lost their original religious and political relevance by 1522, and the last fragment of their territorial power three centuries after that. Nevertheless, like an archaic law which has never been repealed, the Order still enjoyed the status and privileges of an independent nation state, with the power to mint coins, print stamps, license cars, operate a merchant fleet and issue passports to its diplomats and other favoured individuals. ‘Like Opus Dei [q.v.],’ Zen read, ‘the Order is exempt from the jurisdiction of local bishops, being under the direct authority of the pope, exercised through the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes. The contradiction between the obedience required by this relationship and the independence inherent in the Order’s sovereign temporal status has on occasion led to acrimonious conflicts.’

  Zen scanned the rest of the report, which sketched the structure of this very exclusive organization. At least sixteen quarterings of noble blood were required for membership, except in a special category – Knights of Magisterial Grace – created to accommodate prominent but plebian Catholics. At the core of the Order were the thirty ‘professed’ knights, or Knights of Justice, who had taken a triple vow of poverty, chas
tity and obedience. ‘Governed by the His Most Eminent Highness the Prince and Grand Master with the help of a “general chapter” which convenes regularly, the Order donates medicine and medical equipment to needy countries and performs humanitarian work throughout the Third World …’

  The text began to blur in front of Zen’s eyes. It was clear what was involved: a snobbish club designed to give the impoverished remnants of the Catholic aristocracy access to serious money, while bestowing a flattering glow of religious and historical legitimacy over the ruthlessly acquired wealth of the nouveaux riches. Under cover of the Order’s meritorious charitable work, its members could dress up in fancy red tunics, flowing capes and plumed hats and indulge themselves to their heart’s content in the spurious rituals and meaningless honours of a Ruritanian mini-state. All very silly, no doubt, but no more so than most pastimes of the very rich. What was really silly was the idea that such an organization might be capable of plotting – never mind executing – the cold-blooded murders of Ludovico Ruspanti and Giovanni Grimaldi.

  The taxi drew up in the courtyard of an umbertino monstrosity on a quiet street overlooking the gardens of the Villa Borghese. The uniformed doorman surveyed Zen without notable enthusiasm, but eventually let him pass. Zen identified himself at Reception, walked across the spacious lobby and flopped down in a large armchair, wondering what he was going to say. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Antonio Simonelli had a vested interest in establishing that Ruspanti’s death was connected with the currency fraud which he had been investigating. If it wasn’t, then his entire dossier on the affair, painstakingly compiled over many months of arduous work, would become so much wastepaper. Since Ruspanti had died in St Peter’s, which was technically foreign soil, Simonelli could not pursue his suspicions officially without the cooperation of the Vatican, which was not forthcoming. Zen was therefore the magistrate’s only hope.

  What Simonelli wanted from him was some inside information, some awkward fact or compromising discrepancy, which he could use to bring pressure to bear on the Vatican authorities to permit a full official investigation of Ruspanti’s death to be carried out by him in collaboration with one of the Vatican’s own magistrates. The affair would then drag on inconclusively for years, until it petered out, smothered beneath the sheer volume of contradictory and confusing evidence. That would be of no concern to Simonelli, who would meanwhile have established himself as one of the rising stars of the judiciary, a man to watch. As for Zen, he would be used and abused without respite by all sides in the affair, and would be lucky to keep his job. Unless he scotched this thing now, he would never hear the end of it.

  There was a buzz of voices behind him.

  ‘I have nothing further to say!’

  ‘According to Giorgio Bocca, your philosophy encapsulates the shallow, a-historical consumerism of the nineties. Do you accept that?’

  Zen turned to find a strikingly attractive man in his mid-twenties standing at bay before a pack of reporters brandishing notebooks and microphones. His sleek, feral look jibed intriguingly with his boyish fair hair and the candour of his pale blue eyes. His movements were almost feminine in their suppleness, yet the look of breathtaking insolence with which he confronted the journalists could hardly have been more macho.

  ‘Bocca can say what he likes. No one’s listening anyway. As for me, my clothes speak for me!’

  They certainly did, a layered montage of overlapping textures and colours so cunningly contrived that one hardly noticed where one garment ended and another began. Especially in motion, the resulting flurry of activity was so distracting that you hardly noticed the man himself.

  Another reporter waved a microphone in the man’s face.

  ‘Camilla Cederna has said, “The one thing that is clear from this book is that it was composed by a ghost-writer. Since the invented personality the author describes is equally substanceless, the whole exercise amounts to one ghost writing about another.” Any comment?’

  ‘If la Cederna is so out of touch with the rhythms of contemporary reality, perhaps she should restrict herself to a topic more suited to her talents, for example needlework.’

  This caused some laughter.

  ‘Fortunately the thousands of people who read my book and wear my clothes have no such difficulties,’ the man continued. ‘They understand that what I am is what I have made myself, using nothing but my own genius. I owe nothing to anyone or to anything! I am entirely my own creation! I am Falco!’

  ‘Dottor Zen?’

  A corpulent man had approached the chair where Zen was sitting and stood looking down at him with a complacent expression.

  ‘I am Antonio Simonelli.’

  They’re letting all sorts in these days, thought Zen as they shook hands. With his crumpled blue suit and hearty manner, Simonelli seemed more like a provincial tradesman than a magistrate. But this might well be a deliberate ploy designed to lull Zen into a false sense of security. And indeed Simonelli at once struck a confidential note.

  ‘You know who that was, of course?’

  The media star had swept out by now, surrounded by his entourage, and the lobby was quiet again.

  ‘Some designer, isn’t he? I don’t really keep up with such things.’

  Simonelli subsided into a leather chair opposite, which resembled an overdone soufflé.

  ‘Falco, he calls himself,’ Simonelli explained in his Bergamo whine, like an ill-tuned oboe d’amore. ‘He’s based in Milan, but he’s down here promoting some book he’s published, explaining his “design philosophy” if you please. Of course he would have to choose the very hotel where I always stay. It’s terrible. You can’t move for reporters.’

  He signalled a waiter. Zen ordered an espresso, Simonelli a caffè Hag.

  ‘It’s my heart,’ he explained, unwrapping a panatella cigar with his big, blunt fingers. ‘One of my colleagues dropped dead just last month. He was fifteen years younger than me. Gave me a bit of a jolt, so I had a check-up, and it turns out I’m at risk myself.’

  Zen smiled politely.

  ‘Anyway, I mustn’t bore you with my problems,’ the magistrate went on. ‘Except for the Ruspanti case, that is. I don’t know how much you know about the investigation I have been involved in …’

  ‘Only what I’ve read in the newspapers.’

  ‘It’s all water under the bridge now, of course,’ Simonelli sighed mournfully. ‘With my key witness dead, there’s no case to be made. This is really only a private chat, just to satisfy my curiosity. Naturally whatever is said between us two will remain strictly off the record.’

  He broke off as the waiter brought their coffees. Simonelli emptied two sachets of sugar into his cup and looked across the table at Zen as he stirred.

  ‘So tell me, what really happened? Did he fall, or was he pushed?’

  It had been perfectly done, thought Zen. The illusion of a personal rapport, the implied assumption that they were associates and equals, the casual request for information ‘just to satisfy my curiosity’, the assurance that Zen could speak freely in the knowledge that what was said would go no further, even the facetious touch of the final question. If Zen hadn’t been expecting something of the kind, he might well have fallen for it hook, line and sinker – and then spent the next few years wriggling and thrashing as Simonelli reeled him in. As it was, the magistrate’s adroitness merely reinforced Zen’s determination to give nothing away. Reticence would be a mistaken tactic, however, merely confirming that there were significant secrets to be learned. The true art of concealment, Zen knew, lay not in silence but garrulity, in rumour and innuendo. Best of all was to let the victim spin the web of deceit himself. That way, it was bound to conform perfectly to his fears and prejudices, forming a snug, cosy trap from which he had no desire to escape.

  ‘I found no evidence to suggest that Ruspanti’s death was anything other than it appeared to be,’ he declared firmly.

  Simonelli gazed at him levelly.

  ‘So yo
u accept that he committed suicide.’

  ‘I see no reason not to.’

  The magistrate lit his cigar carefully, rotating the end above the flame of his lighter.

  ‘Even in the light of this second fatality?’

  Zen looked blank.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Vatican security man, Giovanni Grimaldi. You don’t think his death was connected in any way to Ruspanti’s?’

  Zen downed his coffee in three swift gulps.

  ‘How do you know about that?’ he asked casually.

  Simonelli sipped his coffee and puffed at his cigar, making Zen wait.

  ‘Grimaldi was what the espionage profession calls a double agent,’ he explained at last. ‘In addition to his duties for the Vigilanza, he was also working for me as a paid informant.’

  Zen knew that this revelation was intended to encourage him to make one in return, but he was too intrigued not to follow it up.

  ‘So you knew that Ruspanti had taken refuge in the Vatican?’

  Simonelli nodded.

  ‘After the Maltese kicked him out. Yes, I knew. But I couldn’t prove it, and if I’d spoken out they’d have spirited him away before anyone could do anything. So I bided my time and used Grimaldi to keep track of what was happening. Until last week, he was providing me with regular, detailed reports of Ruspanti’s movements, the people he met, the calls he made, and so on. Most of it was irrelevant, all about some organization which Ruspanti was threatening to expose if they didn’t help him. But the first thing I did when I heard of Ruspanti’s death was to try and contact Grimaldi. He didn’t return my calls, so I flew down here to look him up, only to find that he was dead.’

  Zen sat perfectly still, eyeing Simonelli. His racing pulse might have been due to the coffee he had just drunk.

  ‘What was the name of this organization Ruspanti was threatening?’ he asked.