Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  In different circumstances the wails, groans and curses that erupted from the darkness on every side might have been distinctly unnerving, but in the present case they were a welcome token that whatever had happened, Zen was not the only one affected. It was not a stroke, then, but a more general power failure, the umpteenth to strike the city this year. And the voices he could hear were not those of the restless dead, seeping like moisture out of the ancient structures all around to claim the stricken Zen as their own, but simply the indignant residents of the neighbourhood who had been cooking or watching television or reading when the lights went out.

  By the time he realized this, the darkness was already punctuated by glints and glimmers. In a basement workshop, a furniture restorer appeared, crouched over the candle he had just lit, one hand cupped around the infant flame. The vaulted portico of a renaissance palace was illumined by a bow-legged figure clutching an oil-lamp which cast grotesque shadow images across the white-washed walls and ceiling. From a window above Zen’s head a torch beam shone down, slicing through the darkness like a blade.

  ‘Mario?’ queried a woman’s voice.

  ‘I’m not Mario,’ Zen called back.

  ‘So much the better for you!’

  Like a vessel navigating an unfamiliar coast by night, Zen made his way from one light to another, trying to reconstruct his mental chart of the district. Reaching the corner, he got out his cigarette lighter. Its feeble flame revealed the presence of a stone tablet mounted on the wall high above, but not the name of the street incised in it. Zen made his way along the houses, pausing every so often to hold his lighter up to the numbers. The flame eventually wilted, its fuel used up, but by its dying flickers he read a name off the list printed next to the button of an entry-phone. He pushed one of the buttons, but there was no response, the power being dead. The next moment his lighter went out, and his attempts to relight it produced only a display of sparks.

  He got out his key-holder and felt the differing shapes and position of the keys. When he had identified the one he was looking for, he reached out both hands and palpated the surface of the door like a blind man until he discovered the keyhole. He fitted the key into it and turned, opening the invisible door into a new kind of darkness, still and dense with a dank, mildewy odour. He started groping his way up the stairs, hanging on to the handrail and feeling with his foot for each step. In the darkness the house seemed larger than he remembered, like the family home in Venice in his childhood memories. As he made his way up the steep flight of steps to the top floor, he heard a male voice droning on, just below the threshold of comprehension. Zen cautiously traversed the open spaces of the landing, located the door by touch, knocked. The voice inside did not falter. He knocked again, more loudly.

  ‘Yes?’ a woman called.

  ‘It’s me.’

  After a moment, the door opened to reveal a tall slim figure silhouetted against a panel of candle-gleam.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart!’

  They fell into each other’s arms.

  ‘How did you get in? I didn’t hear the buzzer.’

  ‘It’s not working. But luckily someone had left the door open.’

  He didn’t want her to know that he had keys to the house and the flat.

  ‘… from the gallery inside the dome. According to the Vatican Press Office, the tragedy occurred shortly after 5.15 this evening, while Holy Mass was being celebrated in the…’

  Tania covered Zen’s face with light, rapid, bird-like kisses, then drew him inside. The living room looked and smelt like a chapel. Fat marbly candles flooded the lower regions of the room with their unctuous luminosity and churchy aroma while the pent-roof ceiling retreated into a virtual obscurity loftier than its real height.

  ‘… where he had been a virtual prisoner since a magistrate in Milan issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with…’

  Tania broke free of his embrace long enough to switch off her small battery-operated radio. Zen sniffed deeply.

  ‘Beeswax.’

  ‘There’s an ecclesiastical wholesaler in the next street.’

  She slipped her hands inside his overcoat and hugged him. Her kisses were firmer now, and moister. He broke away to stroke her temples and cheeks, gently follow the delicate moulding of her ear and gaze into the depths of her warm brown eyes. Disengaging himself slightly, he ran his fingers over the extraordinary garment she was wearing, a tightly clinging sheath of what felt like velvet or suede and looked like an explosion in a paint factory.

  ‘I haven’t seen this before.’

  ‘It’s new,’ she said lightly. ‘A Falco.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Falco, the hot young designer. Haven’t you heard of him?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘What I know about fashion you could fit on a postcard.’

  ‘And still have room for “Wish you were here” and the address,’ laughed Tania.

  Zen joined in her laughter. Nevertheless, there’s one thing I do know, he thought — any jacket sporting the label of a ‘hot young designer’ is going to cost. Where did she get the money for such things? Or was it her money? Perhaps the garment was a present. Pushing aside the implications of this thought, he produced a small plastic bag from his pocket, removed the neatly wrapped package inside and handed it to her.

  ‘Oh, Aurelio!’

  ‘It’s only perfume.’

  While she unwrapped the little flask, he added with a trace of maliciousness, ‘ I wouldn’t dare buy you clothes.’

  She did not react.

  ‘I’d better not wear it tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’ll come off on your clothes and she ’ll know you’ve been unfaithful.’

  They smiled at each other. ‘She’ was Zen’s mother.

  ‘I could always take them off,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm, that’s an idea.’

  They had been together for almost a year now, and Zen still hadn’t quite taken the measure of the situation. Certainly it was something very different from what he had imagined, back in his early days at the Ministry of the Interior, when Tania Biacis had been the safely inaccessible object of his fantasies, reminding him of the great Madonna in the apse of the cathedral on the island of Torcello, but transformed from a figure of sorrow to one of gleeful rebellion, a nun on the run.

  His fancy had been more accurate than he could have known, for the breakup of her marriage to Mauro Bevilacqua, a moody bank clerk from the deep south, had transformed Tania Biacis into someone quite different from the chatty, conventional, rather superficial woman with whom Zen, very much against his better judgement, had fallen in love. Having married in haste and repented at leisure, Tania was now, at thirty-something, having the youthful fling she had missed the first time around. She had taken to smoking and even drinking, habits which Zen deplored in women. She never cooked him a meal, still less sewed on a button or ironed a shirt, as though consciously rejecting the ploys by which protomammas lure their prey. They went out to restaurants and bars, took in films and concerts, walked the streets and piazzas at all hours, and then went home to bed.

  Things notoriously turned out differently from what one had expected, of course, but Zen was so used to them turning out worse, or at any rate less, that he found himself continually disconcerted by what had actually happened. Tania loved him, for a start. That was something he had certainly never expected. He had grown accustomed to thinking of himself as essentially unlovable, and he was finding it difficult — almost painful — to abandon the idea. He was comfortable with it, as with a well-worn pair of shoes. It would no longer do, though. Tania loved him, and that was all there was to it.

  She loved him, but she didn’t want to live with him. This fact was equally as real as the first, yet to Zen they were incompatible. How could you love someone with that passionate intensity, yet still insist on keeping your distance? It didn’t make any sense, particularly for a woman. But there it was. He had in
vited Tania to move in with him and she had refused. ‘I’ve spent the last eight years of my life living with a man, Aurelio. I married young. I’ve never known anything else. Now I’m finally free, I don’t just want to lock myself up again, even with you.’ And that was that, a fact as unexpected and irreducible as her love, handed him to take or leave.

  He’d taken it, of course. More than that, he’d schemed and grafted to grant her the independence she wanted, and then conceal from her that it was all a sham, subsidized by him. If Italian divorce rates were still relatively low, this was due less to the waning influence of the Church than to the harsh facts of the property market. Accommodation was just too expensive for most single people to afford. When Zen and his wife had broken up, they had been forced to go on living together for almost a year until one of Luisella’s cousins found room to take her in. Tania’s clerical job at the Ministry of the Interior had been a nice little perk for the Bevilacqua household, but it was quite inadequate to support Tania in the independent single state to which she aspired.

  So Zen had stepped into the breach. The first place he’d come up with had been a room in a hotel near the station which had been retained by the police for use in a drug surveillance operation. In fact the subject of the investigation had been killed in a shoot-out with a rival gang several months earlier, but the officer in charge had neglected to report this and had been subletting the room to Brazilian transvestite prostitutes. As illegal immigrants, the viados were in no position to complain. Neither was Zen’s informant, a former colleague from the Questura, since the officer in question was one of his superiors, but Zen was under no such constraints. He sought the man out, and by a mixture of veiled threats and an appeal to masculine complicity had got him to agree to let Zen’s ‘friend’ have the use of the room for a few months.

  It was only when they met at the hotel to exchange keys that Zen quite realized what he’d got himself into. Quite apart from the transvestites and the pushers, the room was filthy, noisy, and stank. It was unthinkable that he could ever suggest that Tania move in there, still less visit her, surrounded by the sounds and smells of commercial sex. Unfortunately they had already celebrated the good news, so he had had to find an alternative, and quickly.

  The solution came through an expatriate acquaintance of Ellen, Zen’s former lover, who had been renting a flat right in the old centre of the city. The property had been let as an office, to get around the equa canone fair rent laws, and the landlord took advantage of this to impose a twenty per cent increase after the first year. The American quickly found an apartment he liked even better, but in order to cause his ex-landlord as much grief as possible, he suggested that Tania come and live in the original flat as his ‘guest’, thus forcing the owner to go through a lengthy and costly procedure to obtain a court order for his eviction. The rent still had to be paid, however, and since Zen had boasted of his cleverness in getting Tania a place for nothing — he told her that the American was away for some months and wanted someone to keep an eye on the flat — he had to foot the bill.

  In the bedroom, Tania removed her clothes with an unselfconscious ease which always astonished Zen. Most women he’d known preferred to undress in private, or in the intimacy of an embrace. But Tania pulled off her jeans, tights and panties like a child going swimming, revealing her long leggy beauty, and then pulled back the covers of the bed and lay down half-covered while Zen was still taking off his jacket. Her straightforwardness made it easy for him, too. His doubts and anxieties dropped away with his clothes. As he slipped between the cool sheets and grasped Tania’s warm, silky-smooth flesh, he reflected that there was a lot to be said for the human body, despite everything.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tania asked some time later, raising her head above the covers.

  Zen raised his head and listened. The silent dimness of the bedroom had been infiltrated by an electronic tone, muffled but just audible, coming in regular, incessant bursts.

  ‘Sounds like an alarm.’

  Tania raised herself up on one elbow.

  ‘Mine’s one of the old ones, with a bell.’

  They lay side by side, the hairs on their forearms just touching. The noise continued relentlessly. Eventually Tania sat up like a cat, flexing her back, and crawled to the end of the bed.

  ‘It seems to be coming from your jacket, Aurelio.’

  Zen pulled the covers over his head and gave vent to a loud series of blasphemies in Venetian dialect.

  ‘Your position here is essentially — indeed, necessarily — anomalous. You are required to serve two masters, an undertaking not only fraught with perils and contradictions of all kinds but one which, as you may perhaps recall, is explicitly condemned by the Scriptures.’

  Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valdes, archbishop in partibus infidelium and deputy to the Cardinal Secretary of State, favoured Aurelio Zen with an arch smile.

  ‘One might equally well argue, however,’ he continued, ‘that the case is exactly the opposite, and that so far from serving two masters, you are in fact serving neither. As a functionary of the Italian Republic, you have no locus standi beyond the frontiers of that state. Neither, clearly, are you formally empowered to act as an agent of either the Vatican City State or the Holy See.’

  Zen raised his hand to his mouth, resting his chin on the curved thumb. He sniffed his fingers, still redolent of Tania’s vagina.

  ‘Yet here I am.’

  ‘Here you are,’ the archbishop agreed. ‘Despite all indications to the contrary.’

  And just my luck too, thought Zen sourly. Like every other Criminalpol official, he had to take his turn on the night duty roster, on call if the need should arise. In Zen’s case it never had, which is why he hadn’t at first recognized the electronic pager which had sounded while he and Tania were in bed. He shifted in his elegant but uncomfortable seat. Unachieved coition made his testicles ache, a common enough sensation in his adolescence but latterly only a memory. Tania had said she’d wait up for him, but it remained to be seen when — or even whether — he would be able to return to the flat.

  On phoning in, he’d been told to report to the Polizia dello Stato command post in St Peter’s Square. The telephonist he spoke to was reading a dictated message and could not elaborate. The taxi had dropped him at the edge of the square, and he walked round the curve of Bernini’s great colonnade. As part of the Vatican City State, St Peter’s Square is theoretically off-bounds to the Italian police, but in practice their help in patrolling it is appreciated by the overstretched Vigilanza. But this is strictly the small change of police work, concerned above all with the pickpockets and the ‘scourers’, men who infiltrate themselves into the crowds attending papal appearances with the aim of touching up as many distracted females as possible. The high-level contacts between the Vatican security force and the police’s anti-terrorist DIGOS squad, set up in the wake of the shooting of Pope John Paul II, were conducted at a quite different level.

  The patrolman on duty called a number in the Vatican and announced Zen’s arrival. He then waited a few minutes for a return call, before escorting Zen to an enormous pair of bronze doors near by, where two Swiss Guards in ceremonial uniforms stood clutching halberds. Between them stood a thin man with a face like a hatchet, wearing a black cassock and steel-rimmed glasses, who introduced himself as Monsignor Enrico Lamboglia. He inspected Zen’s identification, dismissed the patrolman, and led his visitor along a seemingly interminable corridor, up a set of stairs leading off to the right, and through a sequence of galleried corridors to a conference room on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, where he was ushered into the presence of Archbishop Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valdes.

  The Deputy Cardinal Secretary of State was short and stout, with a face which seemed too large to fit his skull, and had thus spilled over at the edges in an abundance of domed forehead, drooping jowls and double chins. His dull green eyes, exposed by the flight of flesh towards the periphery of the face, were large and prominent, giving
him an air of slightly scandalized astonishment. He was wearing cheap grey slacks, a dark-green pullover with leather patches on the elbows, and an open-necked shirt. This casual dress, however, did not detract from the formidable air of authority and competence he radiated as he reclined in a red velvet armchair, his right arm resting on an antique table whose highly polished surface was bare except for a white telephone. The hatchet-faced cleric who had escorted Zen stood slightly behind and to one side of the archbishop’s chair, his head lowered and his hands interlocked on his chest as though in prayer. On the other side of the oriental rug which covered the centre of the lustrous marble floor, Zen sat on a long sofa flanking one wall. Three dark canvases depicting miracles and martyrdoms hung opposite. At the end of the room was a floor-length window, covered by lace curtaining and framed by heavy red velvet drapes.

  ‘However, let us leave the vexed issue of your precise status, and move on to the matter in hand.’

  Several decades in the Curia had erased almost all traces of Sanchez-Valdes’s Latin-American Spanish. He fixed Zen with his glaucous, hypnotic gaze.

  ‘As you may have gathered, there was a suicide in St Peter’s this afternoon. Someone threw himself off the gallery inside the dome. Such incidents are quite common, and do not normally require the attention of this department. In the present instance, however, the victim was not some jilted maidservant or ruined shopkeeper, but Prince Ludovico Ruspanti.’

  The archbishop looked significantly at Zen, who raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Of course, the Ruspantis are no longer the power they were a few hundred years ago,’ Sanchez-Valdes continued, ‘or for that matter when the old Prince, Filippo, was alive. Nevertheless, the name still counts for something, and no family, much less an eminent one, likes having a felo de se among its number. The remaining members of the clan can therefore be expected to throw their not-inconsiderable weight into a concerted effort to discredit the suicide verdict. They have already issued a statement claiming that Ruspanti suffered from vertigo, and that even if he had decided to end his life, it is therefore inconceivable that he should have chosen to do so in such a way.’