Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘That’s right. Real ball-breaker. You know what the Milanese are like.’

  ‘There must be some mistake. Simonelli’s here in Rome. We met yesterday.’

  ‘I said you’d be there by tomorrow at the latest.’

  ‘But I just told you …’

  ‘Told me?’ demanded Ciliani. ‘You told me nothing. We aren’t even having this conversation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ciliani sighed deeply.

  ‘Look, you’re in Milan, right? I’m in Rome. So how can I be talking to you? It must be a hallucination. Probably the after-effects of that fever you had.’

  Zen stared up at the fault-line of a huge crack running from one end of the ceiling to the other.

  ‘When did the original notification come through?’

  Ciliani consulted his schedule.

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘I was off sick on Monday.’

  He suddenly saw what must have happened. Simonelli had summoned Zen to Milan on Monday, then decided to come to Rome himself to investigate Grimaldi’s continuing silence. He had then got in touch with Zen direct, but presumably his secretary in Milan – the officious woman Ciliani had spoken to – had not been informed of this, and was still trying to complete the earlier arrangement.

  ‘Fine!’ said Ciliani. ‘I’ll give Milan a call and explain that your departure was unavoidably delayed due to medical complications, but you have since made a swift and complete recovery and will be with them tomorrow. Speaking of which, it’s tough about Carlo, eh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Romizi, Carlo Romizi.’

  ‘Oh, you mean his stroke? Yes, it’s …’

  ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

  ‘What news?’

  Ciliani stuck his finger in his ear and extracted a gob of wax which he scrutinized as though deciding whether to eat it.

  ‘He went last night.’

  ‘Went? Went where?’

  Ciliani looked at him queerly.

  ‘Died.’

  ‘No!’

  Such was the emotion in Zen’s voice that Ciliani lowered his voice and said apologetically, ‘Excuse me, dottore, I didn’t know you were close.’

  We are now, thought Zen. Trembling with shock, he left Ciliani and joined the human tide which was beginning to flow in the opposite direction, as those dedicated members of staff who had reported for duty on time rewarded their efficiency by popping out for a coffee and a bite to eat at one of the numerous bars which spring up in the vicinity of any government building like brothels near a port. Zen scandalized the barman by ordering a caffè corretto, espresso laced with grappa, a perfectly acceptable early-morning drink in the Veneto but unheard of in Rome.

  He stood sipping the heady mixture and gazing sightlessly at the season’s fixture list for the Lazio football club. From time to time he took a stealthy peek at the idea which had leapt like a ghoul from the grave when Ciliani gave him the news of Carlo Romizi’s death. It didn’t go away. On the contrary, every time he glanced at it – surreptitiously, like a child in bed at the menacing shadows on the ceiling – it looked more substantial, more certain.

  The pay-phone in the bar was one of the old models that only accepted tokens. Zen bought two thousand lire’s worth from the cashier and ensconced himself in the narrow passage between the toilet and a broken ice-cream freezer. A selection of coverless, broken-spined telephone directories sprawled on top of the freezer. Zen looked up the number of the San Giovanni hospital. The first four times he dialled, it was engaged, and when he finally did get through the number rang for almost five minutes and was then answered by a receptionist who had taken charm lessons from a pit bull terrier. But she was no match for a man with twenty-five years’ experience as a professional bully, and Zen was speedily put through to the doctor he had spoken to the week before.

  All went well until Zen mentioned Romizi’s name, when the doctor suddenly lost his tone of polite detachment.

  ‘Listen, I’ve had enough of this! Understand? Enough!’

  ‘But I …’

  ‘She’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?’

  ‘I’m simply …’

  ‘I refuse to be harried and persecuted in this fashion! If it continues, I shall take legal advice. The woman is mad!’

  ‘Please understand that …’

  ‘In a case of this kind prognosis is always speculative, for the very good reason that a complete analysis is only possible post-mortem. I naturally sympathize with the widow’s grief, but to imply that the negligence of I or my staff in any way contributed to her husband’s death is slanderous nonsense. There were no unusual developments in the case, the outcome was perfectly consistent with the previous case-history. If Signora Romizi proceeds with this campaign of harassment, she will find herself facing charges of criminal libel. Good day!’

  There were two columns of Romizis in the phone book, so Zen got the number from the Ministry switchboard. Carlo’s sister Francesca answered. Having conveyed his condolences, Zen asked if it would be possible to speak to Signora Romizi.

  ‘Anna’s just gone to sleep.’

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock for her.’

  ‘We’ve both found it very hard. They’d warned us that Carlo might not recover, but you never really think it will happen. He had seemed better in the last few …’

  Her voice broke.

  ‘I’m sorry to distress you further,’ Zen said. ‘It’s just that I heard from someone at work that Signora Romizi felt that the hospital hadn’t done everything they might to save Carlo.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘I was wondering if I could do anything to help.’

  ‘It’s kind of you.’ Francesca’s voice was bleak. ‘The problem is that Anna is finding it hard to accept what has happened, so she’s taking it out on the people there. And of course there’s plenty to complain about. Carlo had a bed in a corridor, along with about thirty other patients, some of them gravely ill. There are vermin, cockroaches and ants everywhere. The kitchen staff walked out last week after some junkie’s relatives held them up at gun point, and the patients might have starved if the relatives hadn’t got together and provided sandwiches and rolls. That’s on top of taking all the sheets home to wash, of course. Meanwhile when the politicians get ill, they go to the Villa Stuart clinic and get looked after by German nuns!’

  ‘If it’s not too painful, could you tell me what actually happened?’

  Francesca sighed.

  ‘We had been taking it in turns to sit up with Carlo round the clock, so that there would always be a familiar face there at his bedside if he regained consciousness. Last night it was Anna’s turn to stay up. She says she dozed off in her chair and some time in the middle of the night a noise woke her. She sat up to find a doctor standing by the bed, someone she had never seen before. He seemed to be adjusting the controls of the life-support apparatus. When Anna asked him what he was doing, he left without …’

  Francesca Romizi’s quiet voice vanished as though the barman pointing his remote control unit at Zen had changed the channel of his life. From the huge television set mounted on a shelf at the entrance to the passage, the commentary and crowd noises of a football match which had taken place in Milan the previous evening boomed out to engulf the bar.

  ‘Can you speak up?’ Zen urged the receiver.

  ‘… grew light … cold and pale … nurse was … told her …’

  High on the wall above the telephone was a black fuse-box. Standing on tiptoe, Zen reached for the mains cut-out. As abruptly as it had started, the clamour of the television ceased again, to be replaced by the groans of the staff and clientele.

  ‘Not again!’

  ‘This is the tenth time this month!’

  ‘I’m not paying my electricity bill! They can do what they like, send me to prison, anything! I’m not paying!’

  ‘The government should step in!’

  ‘Rubbish! The abuse of p
olitical patronage is the reason we don’t have a viable infrastructure in the first place.’

  Zen covered one ear with his hand and pressed the other to the receiver.

  ‘I’m sorry, I missed that.’

  ‘I said, Anna thinks that the doctor who tampered with the electronic equipment was some intern, not properly trained. She’s threatening to sue the hospital for negligence.’

  Zen struggled to keep his voice steady.

  ‘Have you any evidence?’

  ‘Well, they haven’t been able to identify the doctor concerned so far. But Anna could have dreamed the whole thing, or even invented it to relieve her guilt at the fact that she had been sleeping while Carlo died. Such strong emotions are unleashed at these moments that really anything is possible.’

  Zen asked Francesca to convey his profoundest sympathy to Signora Romizi and offered to help in any way he could. As he replaced the receiver with one hand, he reached for the mains switch with the other, and the bar sprang to rowdy life again.

  Back at the counter, Zen consumed a second coffee, this time without additives. Like Francesca Romizi, but for very different reasons, he was sceptical about the idea of negligence on the part of the hospital staff. Carlo’s death had no more been an accident than Giovanni Grimaldi’s. From the moment Zen used his name in an unsuccessful attempt to access the Ministry’s ‘closed’ file on the Cabal, Carlo Romizi had been doomed. No wonder the hospital had been unable to trace the mysterious doctor who had visited his bedside in the small hours of the night. There was no doctor, only a killer in a white coat.

  The demonstrable absurdity of this response merely guaranteed its authenticity. The comatose Romizi, utterly dependent on a life-support system, could not conceivably have been responsible for the electronic prying carried out in his name at the Ministry the night before. His death had been intended to serve as a message to Aurelio Zen. The Cabal had of course seen through Zen’s feeble attempt at disguise, but they had gone ahead and killed Romizi anyway, knowing that he had nothing whatever to do with it. It was a masterstroke of cynical cruelty, calculated not only to strike terror into Zen’s heart but also to cripple him with remorse. For it was he who had condemned Carlo Romizi to death. If Zen had chosen another name, or used his own, the Umbrian would still be alive.

  These reflections were much in Zen’s mind as he arrived at the ponderous block in Piazza dell’Indipendenza which housed the consulate of a minor South American republic, three pensioni patronized largely by American backpackers, a cut-price dental surgery, a beauty salon, and the headquarters of Paragon Security Consultants. Zen was still too shocked by the reality of what had happened to work out the long-term implications, but of one thing he was absolutely determined. The file which had cost Carlo Romizi his life was going to give up its secrets. If that part of the database was ‘closed’, then he would break in. Zen had no idea how to do this, but he felt sure that Gilberto Nieddu would know someone who did.

  Gilberto at first seemed something less than enchanted to see his friend.

  ‘No!’ he cried as Zen walked in. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’

  ‘I haven’t said anything yet.’

  ‘I don’t care! Jesus, last time I agree to look at a faulty water heater for you, and what happens? Not only do I end up having to tear-gas the Carabinieri and then risk my neck escaping across the rooftops, but when I get home my wife assaults me with the pasta rolling-pin, accusing me of having another woman on the side! Well that was the last time, Aurelio, the very last! From now on …’

  Zen got out his cigarettes and offered them to Nieddu, who ignored the gesture.

  ‘I’m really sorry about that, Gilberto. You see, I’d told my mother I was in Florence so that I could spend a few nights with a friend. We should all get together some time. You’d like her. She’s called Tania and …’

  ‘Oh I see! You sin and I pay the price.’

  ‘I’ll explain to Rosella …’

  ‘If she thinks that I’ve buddy-buddied you into covering up for me, she’ll kill us both.’

  ‘All right then, I’ll get Tania to call her.’

  ‘She’d assume that she was my mistress, pretending to be yours. Can you imagine what Rosella would do if she thought I’d tried to con her like that? Sardinian girls learn how to castrate pigs when they’re five years old. And they don’t forget.’

  Zen blew a cloud of smoke at the rows of box-files and tape containers stacked on the shelves.

  ‘She’ll get over it, Gilberto. It might even be a good thing in the end. There’s nothing like jealousy to liven up a marriage.’

  ‘Spare me the pearls of wisdom, Aurelio. I’m up to my eyes in work.’

  He bent ostentatiously over a blueprint of an office building which was spread out across his desk.

  ‘I need to see some classified information held in a computer database,’ said Zen.

  Nieddu unstoppered an orange highlight pen and marked a feature on the plan.

  ‘I was wondering how you’d go about that,’ Zen went on.

  ‘Who runs the computer?’ asked Nieddu without looking up.

  ‘The Ministry.’

  The Sardinian shot him a quick glance.

  ‘But you have clearance to that.’

  ‘Not this part.’

  Nieddu shook his head and pored over the blueprint again.

  ‘I know someone who can do it. It’ll cost you, though.’

  ‘That’s no problem. But it’s urgent. I have to go up to Milan on the early train tomorrow, and I need to set it up before leaving. What’s the address?’

  ‘I’ll run you out there before lunch.’

  ‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble, Gilberto.’

  Nieddu gave him a peculiar smile.

  ‘You’d never find the place,’ he said. ‘And anyway, you don’t just turn up. You have to be presented.’

  The new metro was going to be wonderful when it was finished, but then Romans had been saying that about one grandiose and disruptive construction project or another ever since Nero set about rebuilding the city after the disastrous fire of July 64. The national pastime of dietrologia, ‘the facts behind the facts’, was also well established by that time, and many people held that the blaze had been started deliberately so as to facilitate the Emperor’s redevelopment scheme. Nero’s response to these scurrilous rumours of state terrorism had an equally familiar ring. The whole affair was blamed on an obscure and unpopular sect of religious fanatics influenced by foreign ideologies such as monotheism and millennialism. One of the victims of the resulting campaign of persecution was a Jewish fisherman named Simon Peter, who was crucified in the Imperial Circus and buried near by, in a tomb hollowed out of the flank of the Vatican hill.

  This stirring historical perspective, far from inspiring Aurelio Zen to a sense of wonder and pride, merely intensified his oppressive conviction that nothing ever changed. Being stuck for twenty minutes at Garbatella station because of a signalling fault hadn’t exactly helped his mood. The work in progress to integrate the grubby old Ostia railway into the revamped Metropolitana B line to EUR had resulted in the partial paralysis of services on both. Nevertheless, it would be wonderful when it was finished – until it started to fall apart like the A line, which been open for less than a decade and already looked and smelt like a blocked sewer.

  The short walk to the office where Tullio Bevilacqua worked helped restore Zen’s spirits, although he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting this to anyone. For both political and aesthetic reasons, it was wholly unacceptable to admire the monumental EUR complex, conceived in the late thirties for a world fair designed to show off the achievements of Fascist Italy. The war put an end to the project for an Esposizione Universale di Roma, but the architectural investment survived and, as usual in Rome, was recycled for purposes quite different from that intended by its creator.

  The resulting complex – the only example of twentieth-century urban planning attempted in
the capital since the First World War – had a freakish, hallucinogenic appearance at once monumental and two-dimensional, like a film set designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a production by Dino de Laurentiis. The vast rectangular blocks of white masonry evenly distributed along either side of the broad straight thoroughfares locked together at right angles created a succession of perspectives which seemed designed to demonstrate and also subvert the laws of perspective. Despite the crushing scale and geometric regularity, the effect was curiously insubstantial, abstract and ethereal, diametrically opposed both to the poky confines of the old city centre and to the sprawling jumble of the unplanned borgate on the outskirts.

  Tullio Bevilacqua looked like a caricature of his brother, the same features exaggerated into an extravagance larger than life. Tullio was not just overweight but grossly fat. His balding scalp was beaded with sweat, his nose glistened with grease, his moustache bristled and curled in anarchic abandon. Seeing him, Zen felt his first twinge of sympathy for fastidious, pedantic Mauro.

  Zen introduced himself as Luigi Borsellino and outlined the cover story which he had prepared.

  ‘The case is still sub judice, but without going into details I can tell you that it concerns a drug-smuggling ring which has been bringing in heroin in consignments of tinned tuna from Thailand destined for the Vatican supermarket. Such goods are exempt from inspection by our customs officials, of course. The box containing the hot tuna is then moved across the unguarded frontier into Italy for distribution.’

  Bevilacqua raised his eyebrows and whistled. Zen nodded.

  ‘The problem is that the resulting scandal would be so damaging for the Vatican that unless we go to them with a watertight case they might try and hush it up. What we’re doing at the moment is assembling a jigsaw of apparently unrelated pieces, one of which consists of some papers which we believe may be concealed in the Archives. But since we’re not liaising officially with the Vatican, we have no way of getting at them. That’s why your assistance would be invaluable – if you would be prepared to collaborate.’