Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  Until that moment, Zen had had no clear idea of what he was going to say, but the encounter outside the hotel seemed to have made up his mind for him. The sight of Tania and her young admirer had inspired him with a fierce determination to win her back at any cost. And cost – money – was the key. If Primo could afford to take her to a hotel like that, he must be loaded ! He had probably paid for her flight, too. Of course, Primo had personal attractions as well, but then so had Zen. What he didn’t have was cash, and that was going to change. He had been a sucker for long enough, beavering away at a meaningless job without either thanks or reward. It was success people respected, not diligence or rectitude. Gilberto patronized him, his colleagues patronized him, and now it turned out that Tania was having a fling with some married man with enough money to offer her a good time. And quite right too, he thought. He didn’t blame her. What was the point in playing safe when you could end up like Carlo Romizi at any moment? Would it be any consolation, in that final instant of consciousness, to reflect on how correctly one had behaved?

  ‘Good morning, dottore,’ he said, putting on the sing-song accent of an Istrian schoolmaster whom he and his schoolfriends had once used to delight in imitating. ‘I saw you on television this morning. A very fine performance, if I may say so.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The name I gave earlier was Marco Zeppegno, but as you know, dottore, Marco’s phone has been disconnected.’

  In the background there was the constant hum of what sounded like a car’s engine.

  ‘I wonder why,’ Zen continued. ‘Didn’t he pay his bills? Or had he started to make nuisance calls, like Ludovico Ruspanti?’

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  Zen chuckled.

  ‘Bearing recent experiences in mind, I’m sure you’ll understand if I decline to answer just now. Tapping a phone in the Vatican is a matter for professionals like Grimaldi, but any radio ham can listen in to a mobile phone.’

  The connection went dead. For a moment Zen thought that the man had hung up, but he came back at once, calling ‘Hello? Hello?’

  ‘It was only interference,’ Zen assured him. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily!’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we meet this afternoon.’

  ‘Impossible! I have a …’

  Once again the connection was broken for several moments.

  ‘… until six thirty or seven. I could see you then.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Come to my office,’ the man said after a long pause. ‘It’s just off Piazza del Duomo. The main entrance is closed at that time, but you can come in the emergency exit at the back. The place was burgled last week and the lock hasn’t been repaired yet. It’s in Via Foscolo, next to the chemist’s, the green door without a number. My offices are on the top floor.’

  In Piazza della Repubblica, Zen boarded a two-coach orange tram marked ‘Porta Vittoria’. A notice above the large wooden-framed windows set out in considerable detail the conditions governing the transport of live fish and fowl. Goldfish and chicks, Zen learned, would be conveyed (up to a maximum of two per passenger) providing that the containers, which might under no circumstances be larger than a ‘normal parcel or shoe box’, were neither rough nor splintery, dirty nor foul-smelling, nor yet of such a form as to cause injury to other passengers. The remainder of the text, which laid down the penalties for flaunting these regulations, was too small to read with the naked eye, but the implication was that any anarchistic hotheads who took it upon themselves to carry goldfish or chicks on trams without due regard for the provisions heretofore mentioned would be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law.

  Zen recalled the bewilderment of the Japanese businessmen as he barged in like a truculent drunk and attempted to commandeer their taxi. ‘Is it always like this?’ they were clearly asking themselves. ‘Is this the rule, or just an exception?’ If they really wanted to understand Italy, they could do worse than give up taxis, take to public transport and ponder the mysteries of a system which legislated for circumstances verging on the surreal yet was unable to ensure that the majority of its users even bought a ticket.

  He got off at the stop opposite the Palazzo di Giustizia and ran the gauntlet of the traffic speeding across the herringbone pattern of smooth stone slabs. As he reached the safety of the kerb, a taxi drew up and Antonia Simonelli got out. She looked severe and tense.

  ‘It was Zeppegno all right,’ she nodded. ‘There doesn’t seem any question that it was suicide.’

  There was a squeal of tyres at the kerb and someone called his name. Turning round, he found himself face to face with Tania Biacis. Another taxi had pulled up behind the first. The young man who had left the hotel with Tania sat watching from the rear seat of the taxi with an expression of alarm.

  ‘Okay, Aurelio,’ shouted Tania, thrusting a finger aggressively towards Antonia Simonelli. ‘I’ve asked you before and I ask you again. Who is she?’

  Arm in arm, visibly reconciled, Tania and Zen walked across the pedestrianized expanses of Piazza del Duomo. At the far end, the upper storeys of several buildings were completely hidden behind a huge hoarding displaying three faces represented on the gargantuan scale which Zen associated with the images of Marx, Lenin and Stalin that had once looked down on May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square. But like Catholicism, its old rival, Communism was no longer a serious contender in the ideological battle for hearts and minds. The icon which dominated Milan’s Cathedral Square was that of the United Colors of Benetton: the vast, unsmiling features of a Nordic woman, a Black woman and an Asian baby. These avatars of the new order, representatives of a world united by the ascendant creed of consumerism, gazed down on the masses whose aspirations they embodied with a look that was at once intense and vapid.

  ‘They’re suing the hospital,’ said Tania.

  ‘Good for them.’

  ‘This is all between us, but apparently Romizi’s wife was having an affair with Bernardo Travaglini.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Once she’d got over the shock of Carlo’s death, she got in touch with Bernardo and told him her suspicions about what happened. He and De Angelis went round to the hospital with a couple of uniformed men in a squad car and put the fear of God into the director.’

  Zen could easily picture the scene, the two plainclothes officials wandering menacingly about the director’s office, their words a mixture of bureaucratic minutiae and paranoia-inducing innuendo, while their uniformed cohorts guarded the door. Yes, Giorgio and Bernardo would have had the director eating out of their hands in no time at all. The irony was that Zen might have done something of the sort himself if he hadn’t been so convinced that Carlo had been the victim of the Cabal. But it now appeared that Romizi’s death had been caused by a different sort of plot.

  ‘Under pressure from Travaglini and De Angelis, the director came up with the name of the intern who visited Romizi that night,’ Tania continued. ‘When they called on him, the intern claimed that he had been acting on orders. He’d never been trained to use life-support equipment, and had no idea what the effect would be. He was told to reset such-and-such a knob to such-and-such a setting, and that’s what he did.’

  ‘They needed the bed?’

  Tania shrugged.

  ‘That’s what it looks like. The hospital is denying the whole thing, of course. Signora Romizi’s suing the hospital, the intern and the doctor in charge have been suspended, and the Procura has opened a file on the affair.’

  They crossed the square and entered the glazed main aisle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The elegant mall was almost empty, the offices on the upper floors and the exclusive shops at ground level both shut. Tania lingered for some time in front of a window displaying the latest creations from the teeming imagination of the legendary Falco. With a shove half-playful, half-serious, Zen propelled her towards the one establishment still open f
or business, the Café Biffi. They sat outside, under the awnings whose function here was purely decorative, in an area cordoned off from the aisle by a row of potted plants on stands. Tania opted for a breaded veal cutlet and salad. Zen said he’d have the same.

  ‘But if you specialize in products from the Friuli,’ Zen asked, picking up a conversation they had had earlier, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘We want to diversify, keeping the original concept of traditionally-made items from small producers whom a big exporter company won’t handle because they can’t deliver in quantity. Primo is based here in Milan, so …’

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s a farmer!’

  ‘God, you don’t let up, do you?’

  Her look wavered on the edge of the brink of a real challenge. Don’t push me too hard, it said. Zen grinned in a way he knew she found irresistible.

  ‘You know what the police are like.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They’re bastards.’

  Their food arrived, and for a while everything else was forgotten. It was almost two o’clock by now, and they were starving. Once the embarrassment and confusion of the initial confrontation in front of the lawcourts had been cleared up, there had been no time to do anything but arrange to meet later. Then Zen had accompanied Antonia Simonelli to her office, where he provided her with a detailed and largely accurate account of the circumstances in which Ludovico Ruspanti had died, while Tania had gone off to ‘talk business’ with Primo.

  Now they were together again, other commitments suspended for an hour. But although both seemed eager to dispel the suspicions which had arisen as a result of past evasions, the explanations and revelations came unevenly, in fits and starts, a narrative line deflected by questions and digressions, forging ahead towards the truth but leaving pockets of ambiguity and equivocation to be mopped up afterwards. Amongst these was the one Zen had just tackled, and to which he returned once they had satisfied their immediate hunger.

  ‘So, about Primo …’

  Tania wiped her lips with a napkin which looked as though it had been carved from marble.

  ‘Primo is a middleman representing a network of small producers stretching from Naples to Catanzaro.’

  Zen nodded slowly.

  ‘Oh, you mean he works for the mob! No wonder he can afford to stay at that fancy hotel. They probably own it.’

  Tania twitched the hem of her cream skirt.

  ‘Aurelio, I’m going to get really angry in a moment. Quite apart from anything else, it so happens that I’m the one who’s staying there.’

  Zen raised his eyebrows, genuinely disconcerted.

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘It’s my little indulgence.’

  ‘Not that little. You must be doing well.’

  She nodded.

  ‘We are. Very well. But I’m increasingly realizing that the future is in the south. Up here, agriculture is getting more and more commercialized, more industrialized and centralized. You’re no longer dealing with individual producers but with large agribusinesses or cooperatives whose managers think in terms of consistency and volume. The south has been spared all that. It’s just too poor, too fragmented, too disorganized, too far from the centre of Europe. Those factors are all drawbacks for bulk produce, but once you’re talking designer food then the negatives become positives …’

  She broke off, catching sight of his abstracted look.

  ‘I’m boring you.’

  He quickly feigned vivacity.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘It’s all right, Aurelio. There’s no reason why you should be interested in the wholesale food business.’

  He pushed the last piece of veal cutlet around his plate for a moment, then laid down his knife and fork.

  ‘It’s just a shock to find that you’re so … so successful and high-powered. It makes me feel a bit dowdy by comparison.’

  If his words sounded slightly self-pitying, the look he gave her immediately afterwards was full of determination.

  ‘But that’s going to change.’

  ‘Of course. You’ll soon get used to it.’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  A pair of Carabinieri officers in full dress uniform strode by, murmuring to each other in a discreet undertone. With their tricorn hats and black capes trimmed with red piping, they might have passed for clergy promenading down the apse of this secular basilica, oriented not eastward, like the crumbling gothic pile in the square outside, but towards the north, source of industry, finance and progress.

  ‘So he works for you?’ asked Zen, lighting a cigarette.

  Tania pushed her plate aside.

  ‘Primo? No, no, we don’t pay salaries. Piece-rates and low overheads, that’s the secret of success. Look at Benetton. That’s how they started out. Run by a woman, too.’

  She took one of her own cigarettes, a low-tar mentholized brand. Zen had tried one once. It was like smoking paper tissues smeared with toothpaste.

  ‘No, Primo works for the EC,’ she said. ‘He goes round farms assessing their claims for grants. We pay him on a commission basis to put us in touch with possible suppliers.’

  He nodded vaguely. She was right, of course. He wasn’t interested in the details of the business she was running. He was interested in the results, though. Tania had rejected the idea of moving in with Zen, on the grounds that his flat was too small. But if he could bring off the little coup he had planned for that evening, he would have the cash for a down-payment on somewhere much larger, perhaps with a separate flat for his mother across the landing. And as a double-income couple, they could pay off the loan with no difficulty.

  He looked around the Galleria, smoking contentedly and running over the idea in his mind. This was a new venture for him. He had cut corners before, of course. He had bent the rules, turned a blind eye, and connived at various mild degrees of fraud and felony. But never before had he cold-bloodedly contemplated extorting a large sum of money for his personal gain. Still, better late than never. Who the hell did he think he was, anyway, Mother Theresa? Not that there was any great moral issue involved. Antonia Simonelli might succeed in embarrassing the Vatican, but she had no real chance of making a case against those responsible for killing Ludovico Ruspanti. One of them, Marco Zeppegno, was already dead, and with his death the other man had put himself beyond the reach of justice. But not beyond the reach of the Cabal, thought Zen.

  He leant back, looking up at the magnificent glass cupola, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century engineering consisting of thousands of rectangular panes supported by a framework of wrought-iron ribs soaring up a hundred and fifty feet above the junction of the two arcaded aisles. The resemblance to a church was clearly deliberate: the four aisles arranged like an apse, choir and transepts, the upper walls decorated with frescoed lunettes, the richly inlaid marble flooring, the vaulted ceilings, the central cupola. Here is our temple, said the prophets of the Risorgimento, a place of light and air, dedicated to commerce, liberty and civic pride. Compare it with the oppressive, dilapidated pile outside, reeking of ignorance and superstition, and then make your choice.

  ‘What now?’ asked Tania.

  He gave a deep frown, which cleared as he realized that she meant the question literally.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the airport.’

  ‘You’re not leaving already?’

  ‘No, no. I have to pick up something which is being air-freighted up here. Something I need for my work.’

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Just following up some ramifications of the Ruspanti affair. Nothing very interesting.’

  She signalled the waiter and asked for two coffees and the bill. Zen raised his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘I’ll put it on expenses,’ she said.

  ‘Fiddling already?’

  ‘Actually I’m saving money. If I hadn’t bumped into you,
I’d be lunching Primo instead, the full five courses somewhere they really know how to charge.’

  ‘Whereas I get a snack in a café, eh?’ he retorted in a mock-surly tone.

  Tania smiled broadly and stroked his hand.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you tonight, sweetheart.’

  His face clouded over.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I may not be free until nineish.’

  She patted his hand reassuringly.

  ‘That’s all right. I shall just have to go and buy some very expensive clothes to while away the time. There’s a wonderful new outfit by Falco I just crave. Jagged strips of suede and silk and fur arranged in layers like a pile of scraps, just odds and ends, but somehow holding together, though you can’t see how. Did you see it in that shop, towards the back?’

  He smiled mysteriously.

  ‘I’ve seen it, but not in a shop.’

  She looked at him with interest.

  ‘You’ve seen someone wearing it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Zen took advantage of the interruption to change tack slightly.

  ‘Are his clothes very expensive?’

  ‘Hideously!’ she cried. ‘But each one is an original creation. It’s an investment as well as a luxury, like buying a work of art.’

  Zen’s mysterious smile intensified.

  ‘All the same, if I were you I’d put my money into something else. I have a feeling that the market in Falco creations might be about to take a tumble.’

  Tania patted his hand indulgently.

  ‘Aurelio, you’re a dear, sweet man, but you haven’t a clue about fashion.’