Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  Simonelli looked annoyed at this reference to something he had made clear was a side-issue.

  ‘I really don’t remember.’

  ‘The anonymous letter to the papers spoke of a group calling itself the Cabal,’ said Zen.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. The Cabal. Why? Do you know any more about it?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘To be honest, I assumed it referred to this group of businessmen you’ve been investigating.’

  To his surprise, Simonelli reacted with a look of total panic. Then it was gone, and he laughed.

  ‘Really?’

  Zen said nothing. Simonelli broke a baton of ash off his cigar into the glass ashtray on the table.

  ‘According to Grimaldi’s reports, I’d rather gathered that it had some connection with the Knights of Malta,’ he said.

  Zen raised his eyebrows.

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ Simonelli gasped two deep breaths.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve rather got away from my original question, which was whether you think that Grimaldi’s death could have been connected in any way to Ruspanti’s.’

  Zen frowned like a dim schoolboy confronted by a concept too difficult for him to grasp.

  ‘But Ruspanti committed suicide by jumping off the gallery in St Peter’s and Grimaldi was electrocuted in his shower by a faulty water heater. What connection could there be?’

  ‘The two deaths occurring so close together was just a coincidence, then?’

  ‘I can’t see what else it could be.’

  In his heart he apologized to Ruspanti and Grimaldi for adding such insults to the fatal injuries they had sustained. But it was all very well for the dead, he thought to himself. They were well out of it.

  ‘That anonymous letter to the press certainly was neither an accident nor a coincidence,’ Simonelli remarked with some asperity. ‘Someone wrote it, and for a reason. Do you have any ideas about that?’

  Zen looked shiftily around the lobby, as though checking whether they could be overheard.

  ‘One thing I did find out is that certain people in the Vatican are not satisfied with the official line on Ruspanti’s death,’ he confided in an undertone. ‘The Vatican isn’t a monolith, any more than the Communist Party – or whatever it’s calling itself these days. There are different currents, varying tendencies, opposed pressure groups. One of them might well have wished to try and throw doubt on the suicide verdict.’

  Simonelli plunged his cigar into the dregs of his coffee, where it expired with a hiss.

  ‘An official leak, then.’

  Zen tipped his hand back and forth.

  ‘Semi-official disinformation.’

  ‘It must have been embarrassing for you,’ Simonelli suggested, ‘to have your professional integrity publicly attacked like that.’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘One has to live with these things.’

  Simonelli hitched up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a chunky gold watch.

  ‘Well, thank you for taking the trouble to come and satisfy my interest in this business,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all. If that’s all, I’d better be getting back to the Ministry.’

  Simonelli raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Working?’ he demanded coarsely. ‘At this time?’

  The magistrate’s manner was so familiar that Zen almost winked at him.

  ‘Thanks to this Vatican business, I’ve got a backlog of other work to catch up on,’ he confided. ‘I thought I might as well get paid overtime for doing it.’

  Simonelli laughed.

  ‘Quite right, quite right!’

  Just inside the hotel’s revolving door, they shook hands again.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again some time,’ Zen found himself saying.

  Simonelli’s eyes were enlivened by some expression which he couldn’t read at all.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised, dottore. I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

  AUTHORIZATION?

  Zen gazed at the band of green script which stared back at him, as unwavering as a reptile’s eye. Something had gone wrong, but he had no idea what. True, he was no longer as utterly innocent of computers as he had once been. He had no map to the computer’s alien landscape, and wouldn’t have been able to read it if he had, but he had laboriously learned to follow a number of paths which led to the places he wanted or needed to reach. As long as he stayed on them, he could usually reach his goal, given time. But if by accident he pushed the wrong key, producing some unforeseen effect, there was nothing for it but to return to the beginning.

  That was what must have happened now, it seemed. He had intended to open a file in which to enter the outline details of the Ruspanti case which he had passed on orally to the Minister earlier in the day. He wanted to do this now, while they were still fresh in his mind. Then, later in the week, he would call up the file and rewrite it as a proper report, which he would then save to the database as a ‘Read Only’ item, imperishably enshrined in electronic form for any interested party to consult. Something had gone wrong, however. When he tried to open a file to jot down his notes, the computer had responded as though he had asked to read an already-existing file, and demanded an authorization reference. With a sigh, Zen pressed the red ‘Break’ button and began all over again.

  The window beside the desk where the terminal was installed was steadily turning opaque as the winter dusk gathered outside. Down below in Piazza del Viminale the evening rush hour was at its height, the gridlocked vehicles bellowing like cattle in rut, but no sound penetrated the Ministry’s heavy-duty reflective triple glazing, proof against everything from bullets to electronic surveillance. Zen gazed at that darkened expanse of glass where he had once caught sight of Tania, seemingly floating towards him in mid-air across the piazza outside. Searching his own personal database, he identified a day shortly before he went to Sardinia for the Burolo case, the day when Tania had come to lunch at his apartment. Although little more than a year earlier, that period already seemed to him like a state of prelapsarian innocence. What was Tania doing now, he wondered, and with whom? Concentrating his mind with an effort, he once again ran through the procedure for opening a file and pressed ‘Enter’. As before, the screen responded with a demand for his security clearance. Infuriated, Zen typed ‘Go stuff your sister.’ AUTHORIZATION INVALID the computer returned priggishly.

  It was not until the third time that he finally caught on. He had been scrupulously careful on this occasion, moving the cursor through the menus line by line and double-checking every option before selecting it. When SUBJECT? appeared, he carefully typed ‘Cabal’, the working title he was using for his notes. He was certain that he had observed all the correct procedures, yet when he pressed the ‘Enter’ key, the computer once again flashed its demand for authorization like some obsessive psychotic with a one-track mind. To dispel the urge to stick his fist through the screen, he swivelled round in his chair and stood up – and suddenly the solution came to him, huge and blindingly obvious. The computer was not stupid or malicious, just infinitely literal-minded. If it was treating his attempt to open a file named ‘Cabal’ as a ‘read’ option, it could only be because such a file already existed.

  He turned away from the screen as though it were a window from which he was being watched. His skin was prickling, his scalp taut. Grabbing the keyboard, he called up the directory. No such file was listed. That meant it must be stored in the ‘closed’ section of the database, whose contents were not displayed in the directory.

  Somewhere in the office behind him a phone was ringing. He reached out blindly, picked up the extension by the computer terminal and switched the call through.

  ‘Criminalpol, Zen speaking.’

  He was sure it must be Tania. No one else would ring him at work at that time. But to his disappointment, the voice was male.

  ‘Good evening, dottore. I’m calling from the Vatican.’

  Zen knew he had heard the voice a
lready that day, although it didn’t sound like either Sánchez-Valdés or Lamboglia.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ he asked inconsequentially.

  ‘We tried your home number first and they said you were at work. Listen, we need to see you this evening. It’s a matter of great urgency.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My identity is not important.’

  Zen reduced his voice to a charged whisper.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not good enough. I have been assured on the highest authority that my involvement with the Ruspanti affair is over. I’m currently preparing a report on the incident for my superiors. I can’t just drop everything and come running on the strength of an anonymous phone call.’

  There was a momentary silence.

  ‘This report you’re writing,’ said the voice, ‘is it going to mention the Cabal?’

  Zen raised his eyes to the glowing screen.

  ‘What do you know about the Cabal?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Zen was silent.

  ‘Come to St Peter’s at seven o’clock exactly,’ the voice told him. ‘In the north transept, where the light shows.’

  The phone went dead. Zen blindly replaced the receiver, still staring at the word AUTHORIZATION? and the box where the name of the official seeking access to the file would appear. As though of their own volition, his fingers tapped six times on the keyboard, and the box filled with the name ROMIZI. This was a perfectly harmless deception. If anybody bothered to check who had tried to read the closed file on the Cabal, it would at once be obvious that a false name had been used. Poor Carlo Romizi, helplessly comatose in the Ospedale di San Giovanni, clearly couldn’t be responsible.

  As he expected, though, the only response was AUTHORIZATION INVALID. Zen sat gazing at the screen until the words blurred into mere squiggles of light, but the message itself was so firmly imprinted on his eyeballs that it appeared on walls, floors, windows and doors long after he had turned off the computer and left the building, imbuing every surrounding surface with a portentous, threatening shimmer.

  When he got home, a familiar voice was holding forth in his living room about the philosophy of fashion. Glancing at the television, Zen recognized the young man he had last seen delivering an impromptu press conference in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. He was now perched on a leather and chrome stool, being interviewed by Raffaella Carrá about his book You Are What You Wear.

  ‘… not a question of dressing up, like draping clothes over a dummy, but of recreating yourself. When you put on a Falco creation, you are reborn! The old self dies and a new one takes its place, instantly, in the twinkling of an eye …’

  Zen crossed to the inner hallway.

  ‘Hello? Anyone there?’

  ‘… if you’re so insecure you need a label to hide behind, then by all means buy something by Giorgio or Gianni. I’ve got nothing against their stuff. It’s very pretty. But I’m not interested in merely embellishing a preconceived entity but effecting a radical transformation of …’

  He looked into the kitchen, the dining room, the bathroom and his mother’s bedroom. The flat was empty.

  ‘… clothes for people who don’t want to look like someone else but to make themselves apparent, to create themselves freely and from zero, every instant of every day. People like me, who have nothing to hide, who are neither more nor less than what they seem to be …’

  ‘And who are you?’ Raffaella Carrá demanded. ‘Who is Falco?’

  ‘What can I say? There’s no mystery about me! What you see is what you get. I am nothing but this perpetual potential to become what I am, this constant celebration of our freedom to exorcize the demons of time and place, or who and what, where and why, and escape towards a goal which is defined by our approach to it …’

  As he reached to switch off the television, Zen saw the note in his mother’s spidery handwriting on top of the set.

  Welcome back Aurelio – Lucrezia from downstairs asked if I could keep an eye on her two boys while she collects her brother and his wife from Belgium – they were supposed to arrive yesterday evening but the plane was delayed – I’ll be back in time for dinner – don’t turn TV off as I am recording the last episode of Twin Peaks – Rosella and I have a bet on who did it but I think she has been told by Gilberto’s brother in America where it was on last year Your loving mother

  Zen put the note down with a sigh. They had had a video recorder for two years now, but his mother still refused to believe that it was possible to tape a television programme successfully without the set being switched on and the volume turned up.

  ‘… refuse to recognize deterministic limitations on my freedom to be whoever I choose. No one has the right to tell me who I am, to chain me to the Procrustean bed of so-called “objective reality”. All that counts is my fantasy, my genius, my flair, eternally fashioning and refashioning myself and the world around me …’

  The voice vanished abruptly as Zen twisted the volume control. He took out his pen and scrawled a message at the bottom of his mother’s note to the effect that he had got back safely from Florence and would see her for dinner. For some reason he found his mother’s absence disturbing. It was good that she was out and about, of course, keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, there was something about the whole arrangement which jarred. He set the note down on top of the television, walked back down the hallway and opened the last door on the right.

  The pent-up odours of the past broke over him like a wave: camphor and mildew, patent medicines and obsolete toiletries, stiffened leather, smoky fur, ghostly perfumes, the whiff of sea fog. He pushed his way through the piles of overflowing trunks, chests and boxes. Spiders and woodlice froze, then broke ranks and scattered in panic as the colossus approached. There it was, in the far corner, perched on a plinth of large cardboard boxes containing back-numbers of Famiglia Cristiana from the early fifties. The gaily painted wooden box had originally been stamped with the insignia of the State Railways and a warning about the detonators it had contained. Zen still lucidly recalled his wonder at the transformation wrought by his father’s paint-brush, which had magically turned this discarded relic into a toy box for little Aurelio.

  Reaching over so far his stomach muscles protested, he pulled the box down and removed the lid. Then he sifted through the contents – clockwork train set, tin drum, lead soldiers and battleships – until he found the revolver which had been made specially for him by a machinist in the locomotive works at Mestre. The man had been an ardent Blackshirt, and although unfireable, the gun was an accurate replica of the 9mm Beretta he carried when he went out to raise hell with his fellow squadristi. Zen weighed it in his hand, tracing the words MUSSOLINI DUX incised in the solid barrel, remembering epic battles and cowboy show-downs in the back alleys of the Cannaregio. The pistol had been the envy of all his friends, but its connections with the leader whose adventurism had caused his father’s death perhaps explained Zen’s lifelong reluctance to carry a firearm, or even learn to use one.

  He squeezed his way back out of the storeroom with a sigh of relief, as though emerging from a prison cell. The past was always present in the Zen family. Nothing was ever thrown away, and even the dead remained unburied. That man Falco talked a load of pretentious rubbish, of course, but it was easy to see the attractions of his shallow, consumerist credo. Fascism had perhaps offered similar raptures and consolations to the people of his father’s generation.

  It was ten to seven when he left the house, the replica pistol concealed in his overcoat pocket. The streets were crowded with shoppers and people going home from work or out on the town, and when he emerged into the vacant expanses of St Peter’s Square it was like stepping into another city. The throng of pilgrims and their coaches had long since departed, and the only people to be seen were two Carabinieri on patrol. Zen climbed the shallow steps leading up to the façade of St Peter’s and passed in under the portico.

  Apart from a party of to
urists who were just leaving, the basilica seemed as deserted as the piazza outside. Zen walked down the nave to the baldacchino, then turned right into the north transept. Between each of the three chapels stood a curvaceous confessional of dully gleaming mahogany which reminded Zen of his mother’s wardrobe. There were six in all, but only one showed a light indicating the presence of a confessor. The gold inscription above the entrance read EX ORDINE FRATRVM MINORVM. For a moment Zen hesitated, feeling both ridiculous and slightly irreverent. Then, with a shrug, he approached the recess and knelt down.

  It was at least three decades since he had been to confession, but as he felt the wooden step beneath his knees and looked at the grilled opening before his face, the years slipped away and he once again felt that anxious sense of generalized guilt, assuaged by the confidence of possessing a system for dealing with it. So strong were these sensations that he was on the point of intoning ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’ when a voice from the other side of the grille recalled him to the realities of his present situation.

  ‘Can you hear me, dottore?’

  Zen cleared his throat.

  ‘Only just.’

  ‘I prefer not to speak too loudly. Our enemies are everywhere.’

  It was the man who had phoned him earlier at the Ministry.

  ‘You are probably wondering why you have been summoned at such short notice, and in this unusual fashion. I shall be frank. Many people think of the Curia as a monolith expressing a single, unified point of view. This is not surprising, since we spend a considerable amount of time and trouble cultivating just such an impression. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy. To take the present instance, considerable differences exist over the handling of the Ruspanti affair. There have been some heated exchanges. I represent a group who believe that the issues at stake here are too serious to be swept under the carpet. If our arguments had been rejected by the Holy Father, we should of course have submitted. We have in fact repeatedly urged that the matter be placed before him, but on each occasion we have been overruled. The decision to cover up the truth about the Ruspanti case has been taken by a small number of senior officials acting on their own initiative.’