Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  The man’s voice faded under a ululating howl which seemed to come from inside the confessional. It grew quickly louder until it was deafening, then gradually faded to nothing.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Zen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That noise.’

  ‘I heard nothing. As I was saying, relations between the Holy See and the Order of Malta have been strained for some time, but our first reaction was indeed one of suspicion. To our dismay, however, our preliminary investigations substantiated every single claim which Ruspanti had made. Far from finding his allegations baseless or false, we uncovered evidence of the most alarming kind. I hasten to add that these findings did not in any way implicate the Order of Malta as a whole, which is and has always been an admirable body, tireless in its charitable exertions and unwavering in its loyalty to the papacy. The Cabal is something quite different, a parasitic clique, a sinister inner coterie hidden within the ranks of a respectable organization, like Gelli’s P 2 within the Masonic Order.’

  The voice fell silent. For a moment, Zen thought he heard the rustling of paper.

  ‘You may remember the Oliver North scandal in the United States,’ the man continued. ‘A small group of influential people in the Reagan administration decided that there were actions which needed to be taken, actions which the President would certainly approve, inasmuch as they were logical developments of his avowed policies, but whose existence and implementation he could not afford to know about. These men therefore decided to take matters into their own hands, since Reagan’s were tied by his constitutional and legal obligations.’

  Hearing footsteps behind him, Zen looked round. One of the blue-jacketed attendants wearing the red leather badge of the basilica staff was passing on his rounds. He glanced briefly at the kneeling penitent, but with no more than the usual impersonal curiosity which anyone might feel, wondering what secrets were being divulged in muttered undertones. Zen shifted his position slightly. His knees were beginning to ache.

  ‘The idea behind the Cabal is very similar,’ the man went on. ‘In short, they believe they know what the Holy Father wants better than he does himself — or at any rate, better than he can afford to express openly. Like many of us, they are disturbed by the decline in church attendance and in the numbers presenting themselves for the priesthood, and by the rampant hedonism and materialism of society today. Wojtyla’s early life was dominated by the struggle against a godless ideology, but he has come to feel that we now face an even more implacable foe than Communism. The sufferings of the Church in Poland and elsewhere ultimately served to strengthen the faith of believers. But what the Communists failed to destroy with force and terror is now in danger of decaying through sheer apathy and neglect.’

  Zen emitted a grunt, of pain rather than agreement. Had some malicious cleric selected this rendezvous as a way of making him appreciate his place in the Vatican’s scheme of things?

  ‘In this situation, it is inevitable that some people should cast envious glances at the very different situation in the Muslim world. While our young people seem to think of nothing but the instant gratifications of a materialist society, theirs are gripped with a religious fervour of undeniable intensity, for which they are prepared both to die and to kill. While our cities are flooded with drugs and pornography, theirs are rigorously patrolled by religious police with summary powers of arrest and punishment. And while the authority of our leaders, including the Holy Father himself, is challenged on all sides, a single pronouncement by one of theirs is sufficient to force a celebrated writer to go to ground like a Mafia supergrass. Can you doubt that there are those of us who are nostalgic for the days when our Church was also capable of compelling respect, by force if necessary? Of course there are!’

  Once again the brief pause, the slight rustle of paper. Was the man reading a prepared text?

  ‘But while some may idly regret an era which has passed for ever, others are scheming to bring it back. These people have noted Wojtyla’s effect on the cheering crowds who come to greet him in their hundreds of thousands during his tours of Africa and Latin America. Here is a man who has both the potential and the will to bring about a radical desecularization of society. Naturally the Holy Father cannot be seen to harbour any such ambitions, still less endorse the tactics of destabilization necessary to bring them to fruition. But by his sponsorship of such organizations as Opus Dei and Comunione e Liberazione, Wojtyla has made it quite clear in which direction he wishes the Church to move.’

  Zen tapped impatiently on the wall of the confessional. It resounded hollowly, like a stage property.

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ he remarked in a tone which suggested just the opposite, ‘but I’m not a theologian.’

  ‘Neither are the members of the Cabal! Like the original Knights of Malta, from whom they draw their inspiration, they are men of action, men of violence, organized, capable and ruthless. What happened to Ruspanti is proof of that.’

  ‘And what did happen?’

  ‘Ruspanti made the mistake of trying to play a double game. On the one hand he was trading information for protection here in the Vatican, doling it out scrap by scrap, feeding us just enough to whet our appetite for what was still to come. He described the structure and aims of the Cabal in general terms, named a few of the minor players and hinted that under the right circumstances he would be prepared to identify the leaders, including well-known figures in the political, industrial, financial and military worlds. At the same time, he was also trying to put pressure on the Cabal itself, threatening to expose them if they didn’t meet his terms. That was a mistake which proved to be fatal. Last Friday he was summoned to a meeting with two senior representatives of the Cabal, here in St Peter’s, and…’

  Zen wasn’t listening. He had just realized why his mother’s absence from home had seemed so oddly disturbing. When this man had phoned him at the Ministry, he claimed to have tried Zen’s home number and been told he was at work. That was a lie. There had been no one at home to answer the phone. The deception was trivial, but it altered Zen’s whole attitude towards this faceless informant. No longer did he feel constrained or deferential. He felt rude and sassy. His knees were killing him, and he was going to get even.

  ‘… that the Cabal is everywhere, even within the Curia,’ the man was saying. ‘Any opposition to their aims, any threat to their secrecy, is punished by instant death.’

  ‘If they’re so clever, why haven’t they found the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls?’ demanded Zen.

  There was silence in the confessional.

  ‘Grimaldi had it, so they killed him,’ Zen went on. ‘But they didn’t find it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I did.’

  It was a shot in the dark, but he had nothing to lose. The urgent tremor in the speaker’s voice revealed that it had gone home.

  ‘You have the transcript?’

  There was a sudden eruption of sound, as though a bomb had gone off.

  ‘Hello?’ cried the voice. ‘Are you still there?’

  Now the source of the noise was visible: a rack of spotlamps being lowered from their position high above the south transept.

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ said Zen.

  Why couldn’t the man see him?

  ‘Where is the transcript?’

  ‘Where Grimaldi hid it. It was I who discovered his body, and I had time to search his room before the Carabinieri got there. Someone else had been there too, but they didn’t know what to look for.’

  Beyond the grille, the confessional was as silent as the grave.

  ‘Among Grimaldi’s belongings was a red plastic diary,’ Zen continued. ‘It was for the new year, so it was mostly empty, but he had noted down a series of letters and numbers that leads straight to the transcript, assuming you know where to look.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  Zen laughed teasingly.

  ‘Have you told anyone else where it
is?’ the man demanded.

  ‘Not yet. It’s hard to know who to tell, with so many conflicting interests involved.’

  There was a considerable silence.

  ‘Naturally you want to do the right thing,’ the voice suggested more calmly.

  ‘Naturally.’

  Again the man fell silent.

  ‘This revelation changes everything,’ he said at last. ‘This is not the time or place to discuss it further, but I do urge you most strongly to take no further action of any kind until we contact you again.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Zen replied. ‘I don’t even know who you are. Suppose you step out of there and let me see your face.’

  The sinister chuckle sounded again.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, dottore.’

  Zen took the fake pistol from his pocket. He had been right to bring it after all.

  ‘You’re taking a big chance,’ he warned the man. ‘Supposing I decide to let someone else have the transcript instead?’

  ‘But how would you know it was someone else? You know nothing about us.’

  One hand gripping the wooden railing, Zen raised himself painfully to a crouching position. Then he straightened up, gritting his teeth against the fierce aching of his knees. The revolver in one hand, he swept aside the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the confessional.

  ‘I do now!’ he cried.

  He gazed wildly around. There was no one there. Then he heard the low chuckling once again. It was coming from a small two-way radio suspended from a nail which had been driven into the wall of the confessional, just below the grille.

  ‘You know nothing about us,’ the voice repeated. ‘Nothing at all.’

  5

  Ever since his transfer to the capital from Naples, Aurelio Zen had travelled to and from work by bus. His removal from active duty at the Questura at the time of the Aldo Moro kidnapping had had no effect on this, since the Ministry of the Interior — where he had been allocated a menial desk job — was only a few blocks from police headquarters. Even the opening of the new underground railway line had not induced him to change his habits, despite the fact that the terminus at Ottaviano was only a few blocks from his house, and the Termini stop a short walk from the Ministry. But experience showed that twenty minutes in the tunnels of the Metropolitana A left Zen’s day spavined before it had even begun. The bus journey was by no means an unrelieved joy, but at least it took place in a real city rather than that phantasmagoric subterranean realm of dismal leaky caverns which might equally well be in London, or New York — or indeed the next century.

  Tania Biacis had changed Zen’s habits in this respect, as in so many others. They spent about three nights a week together, absences which Zen explained to his mother in terms of overtime or trips away from Rome. But whether Zen had slept at the flat or not, he and Tania travelled to work together by taxi every morning. It was yet another aspect of the new arrangement which was costing a small fortune, but it seemed worth it just to have that precious interval of time with Tania before they separated to go about their different jobs at the Ministry. He was perfectly willing to pay, Zen reflected as his taxi crossed Ponte Cavour on the way to Tania’s that Thursday morning. The problem was his ability.

  The simple fact that was he could no longer go on supporting two households in this kind of style, and what was the point in doing it if not in style? Mistresses were not something you could get on the cheap, any more than champagne or caviar. They were a luxury, a self-indulgence for the rich. If you couldn’t afford them, you had to do without. Zen couldn’t do without Tania, but it was becoming clear that he couldn’t really afford her either — unless he found some way of making a large sum of money overnight. As the taxi turned right along the embankment of the Tiber, he found himself wondering idly how much the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls would fetch, assuming that his intuition about the hiding-place proved correct.

  The idea was absurd, of course! He couldn’t contemplate making a personal profit from a piece of evidence which would presumably make it possible to bring the murderers of Ludovico Ruspanti and Grimaldi to justice. Of course, a cynic might argue that there was no chance of the murderers being brought to justice anyway, if the issues involved in the case were anywhere near as extensive as they appeared to be. Such a cynic — or a realist, as he would no doubt prefer to be called — might claim that in this particular case, as in so many others, justice was simply not an option, and to pretend otherwise was mere wishful thinking masquerading as idealism. In reality, there were only two possible outcomes. Zen could sell the transcript, thereby solving all his problems, or he could create a host of new problems for himself by setting in motion a major scandal with repercussions at every level of society. A rational man, the realist might well conclude, should be in no doubt which course to choose.

  The taxi drew up in the narrow street, scarcely wider than an alley, where Tania lived. Almost at once the door opened and she appeared. It was a measure of what was happening to them that while Zen would once have been glad of a promptitude which allowed them a few extra minutes together, he now wondered whether she was anxious to prevent him seeing who was in the flat.

  ‘I phoned Tullio,’ she said, slipping in beside him with a seemingly guileless kiss. ‘He sounded very keen. He’ll see you this morning at his office in EUR.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘About ten, he said.’

  ‘Did you tell him who I was?’

  ‘Of course not! As far as he knows, you’re just a high-ranking colleague of mine at the Ministry who needs a favour done. Not that Tullio would care. He’s made a pass or two at me himself, if it comes to that.’

  Zen inspected her.

  ‘And did it?’

  She sighed.

  ‘Give me a break, Aurelio!’

  It was a windless grey morning, humid and close. The taxi was now wedged into the flank of the phalanx of traffic on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Zen patted her knee.

  ‘Sorry.’

  She flashed him a smile.

  ‘Shall we eat out tonight?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll be out till about eight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could try that Chinese place behind Piazza Navona.’

  Zen grunted unenthusiastically. Oriental cuisine, the latest Roman craze, left him cold. The food was excellent, but it seemed to him an exoticism as irrelevant to his life as Buddhism. The way he looked at it, you were either a Catholic or an atheist. There was no point in shopping around for odd doctrines, however original, nor eating odd food, however delicious.

  The taxi dropped Tania first, at the corner of Via Venezia and Via Palermo, then drove round to the other side of the Ministry, where Zen paid it off. Lorenzo Moscati’s jibes had made it clear that their efforts to keep the affair secret had been a failure, but there was still a difference between accepting that people knew what was going on and flaunting it in their faces. The porter ticked Zen’s name off in the ON TIME column of his massive ledger.

  ‘Oh, dottore! They want to see you up in Personnel.’

  Zen rode the lift up to the office on the fourth floor where Franco Ciliani, a tiny balding tyrant given to Etna-like eruptions of temper, presided over the thankless task of trying to complete the jigsaw of staff allocation when over half the pieces were missing at any one time.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as Zen appeared.

  ‘Ciccillo said you wanted to see me.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean! As far as I’m concerned, you’re in Milan.’

  Zen gestured a comically excessive apology.

  ‘Sorry, but I’m not, as you see.’

  Ciliani gave a brutal shrug.

  ‘I don’t give a damn where you are in reality. That’s entirely your affair. I’m talking about what’s down on the roster, and that tells me you’re in Milan. So when I get a call yesterday asking why you haven’t turned up, I naturally wonder what the hell.’

  �
��Who did you speak to?’

  Ciliani made a half-hearted attempt to locate something in the chaos of papers on his desk.

  ‘Shit. Sermonelli? Something like that.’

  ‘Simonelli?’

  ‘That’s it. Antonia Simonelli.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ queried Zen, ignoring the little matter of Simonelli’s gender.

  ‘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.