‘I don’t know how you do it, Zen, I really don’t. You take a simple courtesy call, a bit of window-dressing, and manage to turn it into a diplomatic incident.’
‘But I…’
‘The apostolic nuncio has intervened in the very strongest terms, demanding an explanation, and to make matters worse half the blue bloods at the Farnesina were fucking related to Ruspanti. Result, the Minister finds himself in the hot seat just as the entire government is about to go into the blender and he had his eye on some nice fat portfolio like Finance.’
‘But I…’
‘The media are screaming for you to be put on parade, which is all we need. We’re saying you’re in bed, not with la Biacis but a fever, something nasty and infectious. We’ve sent Marcelli along to handle the press conference. All you need to do is fiddle a doctor’s certificate and then keep out of sight for a day or two. But first get along to Via dell’Annunciata in Trastevere, number 14, and make your peace with the priests. You’d better turn on the charm, Zen — or Bianchi, as they want you to call yourself. Remember how the Inquisition worked? The Church graciously pardoned the erring sinners, and then turned them over to the secular authorities to be burnt alive. And that’s what’s going to happen to you, Zen, unless you can talk your way out of this one.’
The implications of this threat could hardly have been more serious. If the Vatican lodged a formal complaint, the Ministry would have no option but to institute a full internal inquiry. The verdict was almost irrelevant, since the severity of the eventual disciplinary proceedings was as nothing compared to the long, slow torment of the inquiry itself, dragging on for month after month, while the subject was ostracized by colleagues wary of being contaminated by contact with a potential pariah.
So gloomy were these speculations that even the arrival of Monsignor Lamboglia was a distinct relief. The cleric was wearing a plain dark overcoat, grey scarf and homburg hat and carrying a black leather briefcase, and his sharp-featured face looked even grimmer than usual.
‘Will that be all?’ murmured the elderly nun from the doorway.
Lamboglia scanned the room slowly through his steel-rimmed glasses. He might have been alone for all the sign he gave of having noted Zen’s existence. Without turning round, he nodded once. The nun backed out, closing the door behind her.
The cleric took off his overcoat, folded it carefully and laid it beside his hat and briefcase on the table. He opened his briefcase and removed a portable tape-recorder, then looked at Zen for the first time since entering the room.
‘You may smoke.’
Zen twirled the unlit cigarette between his lips.
‘Do I get a blindfold as well?’
Lamboglia regarded him like an entomologist confronted by an unfamiliar insect whose characteristics had nothing much to recommend them from a personal point of view, but which would have to be catalogued just the same. He sat down opposite Zen, set the tape-recorder on the table mid-way between them and pressed the red RECORD button.
‘Did you send that letter to the papers?’ he asked.
Zen gazed at him in shock, then growing anger. He nodded.
‘There hasn’t been enough aggravation in my life recently. I’d been wondering what to do about it.’
It was Lamboglia’s turn to get angry.
‘So you find this funny, do you?’
‘Not at all. I find it stupid.’
He fixed Lamboglia with a steady glare.
‘Look, if I were crazy enough to risk my career by pointing out irregularities in the conduct of an investigation for which I was responsible, I’d at least have done it properly!’
He tapped the pile of newspapers lying at his elbow.
‘This letter is all bluff, a farrago of vague, unsubstantiated generalities. Now I don’t know anything about this secret society which Ruspanti was apparently involved with, but as far as the manner of his death is concerned there is absolutely no doubt in my mind. I know what happened, and when, and how.’
Impressed despite himself by Zen’s confident, decisive manner, Lamboglia nodded.
‘So there’s no truth in these allegations?’
‘What allegations?’
Lamboglia tapped the table impatiently.
‘That Ruspanti was murdered!’
Zen frowned.
‘But of course he was murdered!’
The two men gazed at each other in silence for some time.
‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Zen asked incredulously.
Behind the twin discs of glass, Lamboglia’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
‘What made you think we did?’
‘Well, according to the letter, Ruspanti was living in the Vatican and you were keeping him under surveillance.’
‘But you didn’t know that on Friday!’
‘It’s true, then?’ Zen asked quickly.
Lamboglia turned off the tape-recorder, rewound the cassette briefly, and pressed PLAY.
‘… keeping him under surveillance.’
The cleric looked at Zen.
‘You were quite right, dottore — your career is at risk. Don’t try and catch me out again. Just answer my questions.’
He pressed the RECORD button.
‘It is your professional conduct on Friday which is the subject of this inquiry, dottore. At that time, you had no reason to assume — rightly or wrongly — that we had any idea that Ruspanti might have been murdered. The word was never even mentioned in the course of your interview with Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes.’
At last, Zen lit his cigarette, then looked round in vain for an ashtray. Irritated by this delay, Lamboglia waved dismissively.
‘Use the floor. The nuns will clean it up. That’s what nuns are for.’
Zen released a breath of fragrant smoke.
‘It was precisely the fact that no one mentioned the possibility of murder which I found so significant,’ he said.
Lamboglia gave a sneering laugh.
‘That’s absurd.’
‘On the contrary. I wasn’t asked to investigate Ruspanti’s death but to confirm that he had committed suicide. When I offered to do so without more ado, as a good Catholic, the archbishop made it quite clear that he wanted more than that. ‘Do whatever you need to do,’ he told me, ‘whatever must be done to achieve the desired result.’
‘Exactly!’ cried Lamboglia. ‘To determine the truth!’
Zen shrugged.
‘No one mentioned that word either.’
‘Because it was taken for granted!’
Zen tapped his cigarette, dislodging a packet of ash which tumbled through the air to disintegrate on the smooth flagstones.
‘Then the members of the Curia are a great deal less subtle than they have been given credit for,’ he replied.
Lamboglia rapped the table authoritatively.
‘Don’t be impertinent! You had no right to conceal anything from us.’
‘Excuse me, monsignore, but Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes explicitly instructed me to take whatever action I considered necessary without consulting him or his colleagues.’
‘Yes, but only to avoid compromising your status as an independent observer. No one asked you to cover up a murder!’
Zen tossed the butt of his cigarette under the table and crushed it out.
‘Of course not. It would have been impossible for me to do so if I’d been asked openly. That’s why murder was never once mentioned, despite the fact that there was no sense in calling me in unless there was a real possibility that Ruspanti had been murdered. By the same token, I couldn’t reveal the evidence I subsequently discovered without making it impossible for you to sustain the suicide verdict.’
And for me to get home to Tania, he thought, for the decisive factor that evening had been his eagerness to return as soon as possible to the bed from which he’d been ejected by the electronic pager. Any hint of what he had discovered would have put paid to that for good.
‘Let’s be honest, monsi
gnore,’ he told Lamboglia. ‘You didn’t want me coming to you and saying, “Actually Ruspanti didn’t fall from the gallery he had the key to but the one sixty feet above it.” You didn’t want to know about it, did you? You just wanted the matter taken care of, neatly and discreetly. That’s what I did, and if someone hadn’t decided to give the game away, no one would be any the wiser.’
Lamboglia stared at him across the table in silence. Several times he seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.
‘That’s impossible,’ he said at last. ‘The dome was closed when Ruspanti fell. The killer would have been trapped inside.’
‘The killers — there must have been at least two — left fifteen or twenty minutes earlier.’
Lamboglia laughed again, a harsh, brittle sound.
‘And what did Ruspanti do during that time, may I ask? Hover there in mid-air like an angel?’
‘More or less.’
‘You forget that we have extensive professional experience of false miracles.’
‘This wasn’t a miracle. They trussed the poor bastard up with a length of nylon fishing line and left him dangling over the edge of the gallery.’
‘ Fishing line?’
Zen nodded.
‘Thin, transparent, virtually invisible, but with a breaking strain of over a hundred kilos. I found several metres of the stuff tied to one of the railing supports on the upper gallery. I removed it, of course.’
Lamboglia suddenly held out a hand for silence. He got up and walked quickly to the door, which he flung open dramatically. The elderly nun almost fell into the room, clutching a mop.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Forgive me, monsignore, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just scrubbing the floor…’
‘Cleanliness is indeed a great virtue,’ Lamboglia replied in a tone of icy irony, ‘and the fact that you have seen fit to undertake this menial labour yourself, rather than delegate it to one of your younger colleagues, indicates a commendable humility. If your discretion matches your other qualities — as is fervently to be hoped — then your eventual beatification can be only a question of time.’
He glowered at the nun, who gazed back at her tormentor with an expression which to Zen’s eyes at least appeared frankly erotic.
‘Such a degree of sanctity no doubt makes any contact with the secular world both painful and problematic,’ Lamboglia continued remorselessly. ‘Nevertheless, I’m sure that someone as resourceful as yourself will find a way to procure us two coffees, easy on the milk but heavy on the foam, and a couple of pastries from a good bakery, none of that mass-produced rubbish.’
Abandoning her mop, the nun scampered off. Lamboglia slammed the door shut and returned to the table. He rewound the tape to the beginning of the interruption and replaced the recorder in front of Zen.
‘You say you found this twine attached to the upper gallery. But what made you look there in the first place?’
‘I examined the lower gallery, the part that is closed to the public, overlooking the spot where Ruspanti fell. It was at once obvious that no one had thrown himself from there. There was an undisturbed layer of dust all along the top of the guardrail, and even on the floor. Besides, there was no sign of the missing shoe there. The upper gallery was the only other possibility.’
Lamboglia frowned with the effort of keeping up with all this new information.
‘But we found the shoe in the basilica, under one of the benches. You said it had fallen there separately from the body.’
Zen nodded.
‘Separately in space and time. Several hours later, in fact, while I was searching the gallery.’
There was a timid knock at the door and the elderly nun appeared, carrying a tray covered with a spotless white cloth. She set it down on the table and removed the cloth like a conjuror to reveal two steaming bowls of coffee, an appetizing assortment of pastries and a glass ashtray. The cleric gave a curt nod and the nun slunk out.
‘So none of this can now be proved?’ Lamboglia asked.
Zen selected a pastry.
‘Well, there were some marks on Ruspanti’s wrists. I thought at first that they were preliminary cuts showing where he’d tried to slash his wrists, but in fact they must have been weals made by the pressure of the twine. A post-mortem might reveal traces of the chloroform or whatever they used to keep him unconscious, but I don’t suppose there’s the faintest possibility of the family agreeing to allow one.’
‘But if the killers left before Ruspanti fell, how did they release the bonds that were holding him to the gallery?’
Zen washed down the pastry with a long gulp of the creamy coffee and got out his cigarettes.
‘They didn’t. He did.’
Lamboglia merely stared.
‘This is just a guess,’ Zen admitted as he lit up, ‘but they probably tied him up with a slippery hitch and looped the free end around his wrists. The family said that Ruspanti suffered from vertigo, so when he came round from the chloroform to find himself suspended two hundred feet above a sheer drop to the floor of the basilica he would have panicked totally. The witnesses all talked about the terrible screams which seemed to start several seconds before the body appeared. During those seconds Ruspanti would have been desperately struggling to free his hands so that he could reach the railings and pull himself to safety. What he didn’t realize was that by doing so, he was clearing the hitch securing him to the gallery.’
Lamboglia stuck one finger between his teeth for a single moment which revealed him to be a reformed nail-biter.
‘You should have informed us.’
Zen shrugged.
‘The way I read it, you either knew or you didn’t want to. Either way, it was none of my business to tell you.’
Lamboglia stood up. He switched off the tape-recorder and replaced it in his briefcase.
‘Look, there’s no problem,’ Zen told him, getting up too. ‘Just deny everything. I’ll back you up. Without hard evidence, the media will soon drop the case.’
Lamboglia buttoned up his coat and took his hat.
‘There is also the question of the mole.’
‘You want me to tackle that?’ offered Zen, eager to show willing. ‘Someone must have supplied Ruspanti’s killers with keys to the galleries. I could make a start there.’
Lamboglia stared at the wall as though it were an autocue from which he was reading a prepared text.
‘The matter of the keys can be left to our own personnel. As far as the mole is concerned, we already have a suspect. The anonymous letter was faxed to the newspapers from a machine in the offices of Vatican Radio. At ten in the evening, there is only a skeleton staff on duty, and it was a fairly simple matter to eliminate them from suspicion. The only other person who had access to the building that evening was the duty security officer, Giovanni Grimaldi.’
Zen let his cigarette fall to the floor and stepped on it carefully.
‘The man who showed me round on Friday?’
Lamboglia inclined his head.
‘He was at the scene when Ruspanti fell, wasn’t he?’ Zen demanded. ‘Was he already involved in the case in some way?’
The cleric looked at him blankly.
‘That is neither here nor there. We are concerned to determine whether or not he sent that letter to the press, and if so to prevent it happening again. The problem is that Grimaldi is himself a member of the force which normally undertakes operations of this kind.’
‘ Quia custodet ipsis custodies,’ murmured Zen.
‘ Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, actually. But you’ve got the right idea. Who is to investigate the investigators? We normally have every confidence in our staff, but in this case it is simply too much of a risk to expect Grimaldi’s colleagues to act against him. It is essential that the mole shouldn’t be tipped off before we can act.’
He looked at Zen.
‘Which is where you come in.’
Zen returned his stare.
‘You want me to�
�� “act”?’
Lamboglia placed his hands on the table, fingers splayed as though on the keyboard of an organ.
‘A positive and decisive intervention on your part would contribute greatly towards bringing this unfortunate episode to a mutually satisfactory conclusion,’ he said.
Zen nodded.
‘But this time, perhaps you’d better tell me exactly what you want done,’ he said. ‘Just to avoid the possibility of any further confusion.’
‘The first thing is to search Grimaldi’s room. With any luck, you might find some incriminating material which we can use. He’s on duty this afternoon, so you won’t be disturbed.’
He handed Zen a brown envelope.
‘This contains his address and a telephone number on which you can call us this evening to relay your findings. Any further instructions will be conveyed to you at that stage.’
He turned to go.
‘Oh, there’s just one more thing,’ Zen said.
The cleric turned, his glasses gleaming with reflected light like the enlarged pupils of a nocturnal predator.
‘Yes?’
‘Can you recommend a good doctor?’
He closed the door with great care, lifting it slightly on its hinges to prevent the tell-tale squeak, and stood listening. The sounds he could hear would have meant little to anyone else, but to Zen they provided an invaluable guide to the hazards he was going to have to negotiate.
At the end of the hallway, beyond the glass-panelled door to the living room, his mother was talking loudly in short bursts separated by long intervals of silence. Zen couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the singsong intonations and the buzzing of the Venetian ‘x’ revealed that she was speaking in dialect rather than Italian. So unless she was talking to herself — always a distinct possibility — then she must be on the phone, almost certainly to Rosalba Morosini, their former neighbour in Venice, whom she called regularly to keep in touch with the news and gossip in the only city that would ever be quite real for her.
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