Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘… so important to make a good impression if you want to get ahead, I always say. People judge you by your clothes, Aurelio, and if you’re inappropriately dressed it doesn’t matter what you do…’

  ‘Mamma!!!’

  ‘… watching on television while I was at Lucrezia’s yesterday, ever so nice, and talented too! He’s written this book called You Are What You Wear, which is precisely what I’ve been trying to say all along, not that anyone ever has me on TV or even listens to me for that…’

  Zen depressed the rest of the telephone, cutting the connection. He counted slowly to ten, then dialled again.

  ‘Sorry, mamma, we must have got cut off somehow. Listen, apart from the blue suit, is my case packed?’

  ‘All except your suit, yes. We looked everywhere, Maria Grazia and I, but we just couldn’t find it. Perhaps it’s at the cleaners, I said, but she…’

  ‘I’ve got to go now, mamma. I’ll be back late. Don’t wait up for me.’

  ‘Oh listen, Aurelio, I almost forgot, someone phoned for you. They were going to ring again tomorrow but I told them you were going to Milan on the early train and they said they needed to speak to you urgently and so they gave me a number you’re to ring at seven thirty tonight.’

  ‘Who was it, mamma?’

  ‘I don’t remember if he gave a name, but he said it was about something you had for sale. It’s not any of the family belongings, I hope?’

  Zen felt his heart beating quickly.

  ‘No, no. No, it’s just something to do with work. Give me the number.’

  He noted down the seven digits and stared at them for some time before setting to work. Like a burglar, he made his way steadily through the flat, turning out drawers and searching cupboards, wardrobes and shelves. He became much better acquainted with Tania’s taste in clothes and jewellery, including a number of unfamiliar items bearing designer labels which even Zen had heard of. He had been allowed to see the Falco sweater, but the others had been concealed from him. None, he reckoned, could have cost much less than half a million lire.

  As he passed by the extension phone in the hallway, he had an idea. He dialled the Ministry, quoted the Rome number which his mother had passed on, and asked them to find out the subscriber’s name and address. Then he went into the kitchen. Spreading an old newspaper over the floor, he lifted the plastic rubbish sack out of its bin and emptied out the contents. When the phone rang, he was on his hands and knees, separating long white worms of cold spaghetti from the whiffy mess in which they were breeding, poring over fish bones, separating scraps of orange peel from the gutted hulks of burst tomatoes. Wiping his hands quickly on a towel, he took the call in the hallway. It was the Ministry with the information he had requested.

  ‘The number is a public call-box, dottore, in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. The address is…’

  ‘It’s all right, I know the address.’

  ‘Very good, dottore. Will that be all?’

  Zen closed his eyes.

  ‘No. Contact the Questura and have a man sent round there to watch the phone. He’s to take a full description of anyone using it around seven thirty. If the person is a guest, he’s to identify him. If not, follow him.’

  Back in the kitchen, he resumed his analysis of the mess on the floor. Deep in the ripest puree of all, which had been fermenting for days at the bottom of the sack, he found the first scrap of paper. Gradually he recovered the others, one by one, from a glutinous paste of coffee grounds moistened with the snot of bad egg white. In the end he traced all but two of the sixteen irregular patches into which the sheet had been torn, and carefully pieced it together again on the kitchen counter.

  Dear Tania, It’s great news that you can make it on the 27th. Let me know which flight you’ll be on and I’ll meet you. I have to take my wife to the opera that evening, but we can have lunch and then spend the afternoon together. I’m really looking forward to it. All the best, Primo

  Zen crunched the fragments into a clammy wodge which he tossed back on to the pile of smelly rubbish. Then he rolled up the sheets of newspaper and stuffed the bundles back into the plastic sack. The 27th was the following Saturday, when Tania claimed she was going back to Udine to spend the weekend with her cousin. When the rubbish was bagged, he opened the window to air out the kitchen. It was just after a quarter past seven, time to find out if his hunch about Giovanni Grimaldi’s hiding place for the transcript had been correct. Going back to the living room, he phoned the number Tullio had given him. A girlish voice answered before being silenced by a rather older boy. A brief struggle for the phone ended with a slap and crying.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked the victor.

  ‘Luigi Borsellino,’ said Zen. ‘Let me speak to your dad.’

  Cutlery and crockery pinged and jangled distantly above the chatter of a family mealtime, and then a gleeful voice in Zen’s ear exclaimed ‘I’ve got it!’

  ‘It was there?’

  ‘Exactly where you said, interleaved between the pages of a fourteenth-century treatise on some obscure Syrian heresy.’

  ‘And you brought it out with you?’

  ‘No problem. The security at that place is a joke. Anyway, if they’d tried to stop me I’d have pointed out that fourteenth-century Syrians didn’t use typewriters.’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘There’s about twenty pages. It starts with a list of what looks like telephone numbers.’

  ‘No, those will be the numbers of the bank accounts the gang uses to launder the money from the drug sales,’ Zen replied glibly. ‘Just read them out to me, will you? I’ll pick up the document itself later on this evening, but we need to take action to freeze those accounts as soon as possible.’

  There were about twenty numbers altogether. Zen wrote them down in his notebook on the same page as the number his mother had passed on. To his surprise, one of the numbers Bevilacqua read out was the same, the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. But the Torlonia Palace was of course one of the leading luxury hotels in Rome. It was perfectly natural that the intimates and associates of Prince Ruspanti should choose to stay there, just like other eminent visitors to the city such as Antonio Simonelli.

  ‘… before nine o’clock all right?’ Tullio Bevilacqua was saying.

  Zen glanced at his watch. Christ! Seven thirty-one!

  ‘Yes, yes! I’ll see you then! Bye!’

  ‘But I haven’t given you the address!’ squawked Bevilacqua.

  ‘I’ll get it from…’

  Zen broke off in confusion. ‘From Tania’, he had been going to say.

  ‘… from the Ministry computer.’

  Bevilacqua gasped.

  ‘You mean… you’ve got a file on me?’

  ‘We’ve got a file on everyone.’

  He hit the receiver rest repeatedly until he got a dialling tone, then punched the number which now figured twice on the notebook page open on his knee. It was answered immediately.

  ‘You’re late.’

  It was the voice which had spoken to Zen the night before from the confessional in St Peter’s. The man’s arrogant tone triggered an instinctive response for which Zen was quite unprepared.

  ‘I’ve cornered the market in the commodity you’re interested in. I’ll be as late as I fucking well choose.’

  ‘Can you prove you have possession?’

  The voice was the same as the night before, but the background was now thoroughly worldly: a babble of voices competing for attention against the synthetic battery of a pop band.

  ‘Well, I could read you a list of phone numbers, but that would be giving away information which I could sell elsewhere. Just as a taster, though, one of the numbers which Ruspanti phoned just before he died is the same as the one on which you are now speaking. But I expect you already knew that.’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘But now we know that you know. That makes all the difference.’

  Zen said no
thing.

  ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ the man queried peevishly.

  ‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you to say something worth listening to. I got an earful of your waffle last night.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  This was the crunch. If Zen had been bluffing, his bluff had been called. And what else could he have been doing? The idea of selling evidence to the highest bidder, never more than an idle speculation in the first place, was out of the question after what had happened to Carlo Romizi. It was unthinkable to imagine disposing of the transcript for his personal advantage, merely to restore his flagging finances and win back Tania from the rich young shit beside whom he looked drably impoverished, timidly conventional.

  ‘How much?’ prompted the voice impatiently.

  ‘Rather more than Grimaldi asked, and rather less than he got.’

  The man laughed. He could relax, the deal was in the bag. Money would never be a problem for these people.

  ‘We offered Grimaldi thirty million, but he tried to hold out for more. I think we would be prepared to improve the price this time, to let us say fifty. But I would very strongly urge you to accept.’

  Zen kept silent. What was the man talking about? The transcript wasn’t for sale, not at any price. It was sacred, stained with the innocent blood of his colleague, Carlo Romizi.

  ‘That figure of course applies only to the original,’ the voice stressed. ‘As you rightly surmised, the contents are already known to us.’

  ‘Grimaldi showed you a photocopy, I suppose, to whet your appetite for the real thing?’

  ‘We’ll contact you in the next day or two, dottore. I understand you’re going to Milan tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘We shall know how to contact you. Buon viaggio.’

  Zen replaced the phone slowly. Then he shrugged, as though shaking off a bad dream. Nothing would come of it. Tomorrow he would take the transcript to Milan and hand it over to Antonio Simonelli or his secretary. Then it would be out of his hands, and just as well too. He didn’t trust himself to do the right thing any longer.

  The thought of Milan made him get out his notebook and look again at the list of phone numbers which Ruspanti had called from his hideaway in the Vatican. As he thought, in addition to those in Rome, there had been several calls prefixed 02, the code for Milan. Zen picked up the phone and dialled one of them, just out of curiosity. There was no answer. He tried another and got an answering machine.

  ‘This is 879 4632. There is no one able to answer the phone at present. If you wish to leave a message…’

  The voice sounded rather like the man he had just been speaking to a moment ago in the Hotel Torlonia Palace. Which all went to show that one person can sound much like another, particularly on the telephone. There was one other Milan number on the list, and Zen was just about to dial it when the phone suddenly started to ring.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is the Questore, dottore. The Ministry asked us to contact you about the phone you wanted watched. I’m afraid the situation was a bit confusing. Apparently there was some sort of publicity event being held at the hotel, a launch party for some book, so the place was thick with media people and the phones were in use all the time.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  He had expected something of the kind. The men he was dealing with were too clever to allow themselves to be trapped in that way. Zen picked up the phone again and dialled the last of the Milan numbers which Ludovico Ruspanti had called in the final week of his life.

  ‘Yes?’

  The voice was that of a young woman. She spoke hesitantly, as though expecting a reprimand. Zen realized that he had no idea what to say.

  ‘It’s me,’ he murmured finally.

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘Ludo?’

  The woman sounded tentative, incredulous. Not half as incredulous as Zen, though.

  ‘Who else?’

  There was a stifled gasp.

  ‘But they told me you’d had to go away. They told me I’d never see you again…’

  Her voice trailed away. Perhaps she too had become aware of the altered acoustic on the line. Someone, somewhere, was listening in.

  ‘Listen, can I see you tomorrow?’ Zen went on quickly.

  ‘You’re coming here? To see me?’

  ‘Yes! I’ll ring when I arrive.’

  ‘But remember to let it ring and then call back, so that I have time to get rid of Carmela. You forgot this time, silly! Luckily her sister is visiting this week and they’re out every evening. Well, she couldn’t very well bring her here, could she?’

  Zen caught sight of the clock on the sideboard opposite. It showed five to eight, long past time for him to be gone.

  ‘Till tomorrow, then!’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!’ the woman cried girlishly. ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

  A superstitious revulsion rose like nausea in Zen’s throat.

  ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ he said, and hung up.

  He couldn’t believe what had just happened. Seemingly the number in Milan belonged to one of ‘Ludo’ Ruspanti’s mistresses, and — incredible as this seemed — she was apparently unaware that her lover was dead. His elation was briefly dimmed by the knowledge that someone had been eavesdropping on their conversation. Nevertheless, here was a golden opportunity which, if he could only find the right way to handle it, might lead him to the heart of the…

  ‘All right, Aurelio, who is she?’

  Zen looked up to find Tania Biacis glowering at him from the doorway.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouted, advancing into the room. ‘Don’t try palming me off with clever lies. I’ve seen you taking in too many other people to fall for it myself. Just tell me the truth, then get to hell out of here!’

  He had never seen her like this, furious, overbearing, utterly sure of herself. He got up, gesturing weakly.

  ‘You don’t think…’

  ‘I don’t think anything!’ she broke in brutally. ‘I just heard you speaking to her on the phone, fixing a rendezvous for tomorrow. “Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!” Sounds like hot stuff, this lady of yours!’

  ‘So it was you listening in, on the extension in the hallway!’

  ‘I wasn’t listening in. I was trying to use my phone. I had no idea you were here. How the hell did you get in, anyway? You’ve had a key all along, I suppose. I might have known!’

  ‘The American gave me a spare key. I thought I’d hang on to it, just in case…’

  ‘So I get home and pick up the phone, only to hear this woman practically sticking her tongue into your ear. So you’re going away tomorrow, right? A sudden urgent mission of the highest importance to — where did you say she lives?’

  ‘And what about you, my dear?’ Zen retorted. ‘Who were you trying to phone so urgently the moment you got in? Was it that man who answered the phone when I called here on Tuesday?’

  Tania held up her hands.

  ‘All right, I admit it. It wasn’t a wrong number. It was Aldo, my cousin Bettina’s husband. He was here on business.’

  ‘Business? You told me he worked for the post office.’

  She flapped her hands in evident confusion.

  ‘Well, there was some… conference or something.’

  The evident lie stung him to push things to the limit.

  ‘All right, then, let’s forget Aldo. But you still haven’t told me who you were trying to phone. Was it Primo, by any chance?’

  The pink flush around her high cheek bones revealed that the name had had its effect.

  ‘It’s too bad he’s got to take his wife to the opera in the evening, isn’t it?’ Zen carried on. ‘Still, he’s going to pick you up from the airport and take you out to lunch, and after that, who knows?’

  ‘Is that why you broke in here? So that you could snoop around reading
my mail? You… you… you cop!’

  ‘I can think of an even more insulting epithet to apply to you, if I chose to use it!’

  ‘Fuck off! Just fuck off out of my house!’

  Zen measured her with a look.

  ‘What do you mean, your house?’

  Tania tossed her head contemptuously.

  ‘Oh, you mean because you’ve been secretly paying someone to rent this place to me? Well I’d guessed that, as it happens. I’m not stupid. The only reason I hadn’t told you I knew was that I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Oh, it’s so fucking pathetic, the whole thing…’

  To Zen’s utter consternation, she turned away and burst into tears. Not as a ploy; that he could have withstood. But she had moved beyond him, into uncharted areas of real grief. Yet how could it be real when she was false, and believed him to be? It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. So he fled, leaving her to her intolerable mysteries. The real world awaited him: his distraction, his toy.

  6

  The piazza in front of Rome’s Stazione Termini, normally thronged with buses, cars, traders’ vans and lorries, with crowds of commuters, tourists, beggars, transients and the forlorn Senegalese and Filipino immigrants who used the place as an informal clubhouse, information centre and canteen, was now a bleak, empty, rainswept wasteland. As Zen stared out of the window of the taxi at the porticoed arcade to one side and the blank wall closing off the vista, he slipped back into the dream from which the alarm clock had saved him less than half an hour earlier.

  He’d been walking across just such a piazza, but in broad daylight, beneath a brutal summer sun. The light flattened the ground at his feet, reducing it to a featureless expanse bordered by a row of broken columns, the last of which cast a perfect shadow of itself on the hot paving, like the hands of a clock showing one minute to twelve. That was indeed the time, and he would never manage to catch the train, which left on the hour from the station whose enormous facade sealed off the perspective. Already he could see the plume of smoke as the locomotive pulled away from the invisible platform, inaccessible behind a high wall…

  The taxi hit one of the kerbs delineating the bus lanes, jolting him awake again. The dream was still horribly vivid, though: the stillness, the stifling heat, the paralysis of his limbs, the sickening perspectives of the piazza, at once vertiginous and claustrophobic. He sat up straight, willing himself back to the here and now. It was only a dream, after all.