Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘And there’s no doubt that it was suicide?’

  Zen looked away. This was the question he had been asking himself ever since the torch beams picked out the corpse sprawled by the trackside. The circumstances had conspired to prevent anything but the most cursory investigation at the scene. Short of closing the Apennine tunnel, and thus paralysing rail travel throughout Italy, the corpse could not be left in situ while the Carabinieri in Bologna dispatched their scene-of-crime experts. Fortunately there happened to be a doctor travelling on the train who was able to pronounce the victim dead. Zen then carried out a nominal inspection before authorizing the removal of the body. By the time the train reached Bologna, no one had the slightest interest in questioning that they were dealing with a case of suicide. The only remaining mystery was the victim’s identity, since there were no papers or documents on the body.

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘The only person who was anywhere near him when he fell from the train was a woman who had gone to the toilet, and she wouldn’t have had the strength. Anyway, she was a German tourist with no connection with the dead man. No, he must have done it himself. There’s simply no other possibility.’

  Antonia Simonelli got up from her desk.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, dottore,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’d come to know Zeppegno quite well, and if you’d asked me, I’d have said that he just wasn’t someone who would ever commit suicide. He thought too highly of himself for that.’

  She waved at the file, the photographs, the computer.

  ‘For the past five years I have been painstakingly assembling a case against a cartel of Milanese businessmen. Zeppegno was typical. His family were provincial bourgeois with aspirations. His father ran an electrical business in a town near Bergamo. By a combination of graft and hard work, Marco gradually built up a chain of household appliance suppliers in small towns across Lombardy. As an individual unit, each of his outlets was modest enough, but taken together they represented a profitable slice of the market.

  ‘Like other entrepreneurs, Zeppegno hated paying taxes and wanted to be able to invest his money freely. The answer was to cream off a percentage of his pre-tax profits and invest them abroad. The problem was how to do it. Big businesses have their own ways around the currency control laws, of course. You order a consignment of raw material from a foreign supplier who is prepared to play along. This is duly invoiced and paid for, but the goods in question are never shipped, and the money ends up in the off-shore bank account of your choice. There’s an element of risk involved, but in a big outfit with a complex structure and a high volume of foreign trade the danger is minimal. The bogus orders can be hidden amongst a mass of legitimate transactions, and if all else fails i finanzieri have on occasion been known to look the other way.’

  Zen acknowledged the gibe with a blink. The venality of the Finance Ministry’s enforcement officials was legendary.

  ‘The turnover of a company like Zeppegno’s was far too small to conceal that sort of scam successfully. Which is where the late Ludovico Ruspanti came in. It didn’t hurt that he was an aristocrat, of course. Self-made provincials like Zeppegno tend to retain the prejudices of their class. A title like “Prince” not only helped convince them that their money was safe in Ruspanti’s hands, but reassured them that what they were doing was nothing much to be ashamed of, since a man like him was involved. The procedure itself couldn’t have been simpler or more convenient. You simply wrote Ruspanti a cheque for whatever amount you wished to dispose of. If you preferred, of course, you could hand it over in cash. He deposited the money in his account at the Vatican bank, and it was then transferred — less his fee — to your foreign bank account.

  ‘The fascinating thing about this arrangement is that while the ensemble constitutes a flagrant breach of the law, each of the individual operations is in itself perfectly legal. There is no law against one Italian citizen donating a large sum of money to another. If the recipient happens to be one of the privileged few who enjoy the right to an account at the Institute for the Works of Religion, it is perfectly in order for him to deposit the money there. And since that institution is extraterritorial, what subsequently happens to the money is of no concern to the Italian authorities.’

  She gave a bitter laugh.

  ‘They talk about the rival claims of London and Frankfurt as the future financial capitals of Europe, but what about Rome? What other capital city can boast the convenience of an off-shore bank, completely unaccountable to the elected government, subject to no verifiable constraints or controls whatsoever and located just a brief taxi-ride from the centre, with no customs controls or security checks to pass through? Ludovico Ruspanti could walk in there with a billion lire, and when he came out again that billion had effectively vanished! Poof!

  ‘The only weak point in all this was Ruspanti himself. The cut he took counted as unearned income, and of course he couldn’t declare it — even supposing he wanted to — without giving the game away. That was the lever I planned to use to squeeze Ruspanti for information on the whole operation, and I must say I was very hopeful of success. But without him, there is literally no case. I naturally couldn’t help wondering whether this might not have occurred to some of the other interested parties. That’s what I really want to know, dottore. Forget Zeppegno for a moment. You investigated Ruspanti’s death. Tell me, did he fall or was he pushed?’

  Zen smiled.

  ‘Funnily enough, those were exactly the words that Simonelli used when I spoke to him in Rome.’

  The magistrate stared at him coldly.

  ‘ I am Simonelli.’

  ‘Of course! Please excuse me. I meant Zeppegno, of course.’

  He tried to think clearly, but his experiences on the train and in the tunnel seemed to have left him incapable of much more than reacting to immediate events. The only thing he was sure of was the single thread, flimsy but as yet unbroken, which he still held in his hand. It might yet lead him to the heart of this affair, but it would not bear the weight of a judicial process. So although he found himself warming to Antonia Simonelli, he was going to have to stall her for the moment.

  ‘Ruspanti was murdered,’ he replied. ‘So was the minder the Vatican had assigned to him.’

  The magistrate stared at him fixedly.

  ‘But you were quoted in the papers the other day as saying that the allegations that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Ruspanti’s death were mischievous and ill-informed.’

  ‘I wasn’t consulted about the wording of that statement.’

  He had Simonelli hanging on his every word. The dirtier and more devious it got, the better she liked it. The case she thought was dead had miraculously sprung to life before her eyes!

  ‘The familiar tale,’ she said, nodding grimly.

  Zen stood up and leaned across the desk towards her.

  ‘Familiar, yes, but in this case also long and complex. You will naturally want to get in touch with the authorities in Bologna, and possibly even go there in person. I therefore suggest that we postpone further discussion on the matter until then.’

  She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But please don’t imagine that this is any more than a postponement, dottore. I am determined to get to the bottom of this business, whatever the vested interests involved. I hope I shall have your entire cooperation, but if I have any reason to suspect that it is not forthcoming, I shall have no hesitation in using my powers to compel you to testify.’

  Zen held up his hands in a protestation of innocence.

  ‘There’ll be no need for that. I’ve been put in an impossible position in this case, but basically I’m on the side of the angels.’

  Antonia Simonelli looked at him with a finely judged mixture of wariness and confidence.

  ‘I’m not concerned with angels, dottore. What I need is someone who’s on the side of the law.’

  The house was not immediately recognizable as
such. The address, in a back street just north of the Teatro alla Scala and west of the fashion alleys of Via Monte Napoleone and Via della Spiga, appeared at first to be nothing more than a slab of blind walling, slightly less high than the modern apartment buildings on either side. It was only as his taxi pulled away that Zen noticed the doors, windows and balconies painted on the plaster, complete with painted shadows to give an illusion of depth. The facade of a severe late-eighteenth-century Austro-French palazzo had been recreated in considerable detail, and the fact that the third dimension was missing would doubtless have been less apparent by daylight than it was under the intense glare of the streetlamps, diffused by the pall of fog which had descended on the city with the coming of dusk.

  It took Zen some time to locate the real entrance, a plain wooden door inset in the huge trompe I’oeil gate framed by pillars at the centre of the frontage. There was no name-plate, and the grille of the entry-phone was disguised in the plumage of the hawk which rose in fake bas-relief above an illusory niche where the actual button figured as the nippled peak of a massive painted metal bell-pull. Zen had barely touched the button when, without a challenge or a query, the door release buzzed to admit him. Only after he stepped inside did he realize, from the shock he felt, what it was he had been expecting: some aggressively contemporary space defined by the complex interaction of concrete, steel and glass. The punch-line of the joke facade, he had tacitly assumed, must lie in the contrast with something as different as possible from historical gentility.

  It was the smell which initially alerted him to his error. The musty odours which assailed him the moment he stepped over the threshold were quite incompatible with the processes of late-twentieth-century life. Nor could they be reproduced or mocked up. Dense and mysterious, with overlapping strata of rot and mould and fume and smoke, they spoke of years of habitation, generations of neglect. He looked around the cavernous hallway, a huge vaulted space feebly lit by a lamp dangling from a chain so thickly encased in dust and spider-webs that it seemed to be this rather than the rusted metal which was supporting the yellowing bulb. He had a sudden urge to laugh. This was a much better joke than the predictable contrast he had imagined. It was a brilliant coup to have the fake and the reality correspond. Evidently the house really was what it had been made to resemble, an aristocratic residence dating from the period when Milan was a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  At one end of the hallway, an imposing stone staircase led upwards into regions of murky obscurity. There was no sound, no one in sight. ‘You remember how to get here?’ the voice on the phone had asked when he rang that afternoon from his hotel. The same girlish tones as before. For her part, though, she had remarked this time that he ‘sounded different, somehow’. He had got the address from SIP, the telephone company, via the Ministry in Rome. They had also supplied the names of the other two subscribers whom Ruspanti had called in Milan. One, predictably enough, was his cousin, Raimondo Falcone. The other was Marco Zeppegno. The woman had told him to arrive at eight o’clock. Apparently Carmela was taking her sister to the opera that night, and would have left by then.

  The stairs led to a gallery running the length of the building on the first floor, which was conceived on a scale such as Zen had seen only in museums and government offices. Stripped of the trappings and booty which it had been designed to show off, the gallery looked as pointless and slightly macabre as a drained swimming pool. Such furnishings as there were related neither to use nor comfort. There were no chairs, but a wealth of wooden chests. A fireplace the size of a normal room took up much of one wall, but there was no heating. Acres of bare plaster were relieved only by a series of portraits of men with almost identical beards, whiskers, cravats and expressions of earnest insolence.

  ‘You’re not Ludo!’

  He whirled round. The voice had come from the other side of the gallery, but there seemed to be no one there. Then he noticed what looked at first like a full-length oil portrait of the woman he had seen on the train, her light blue eyes turned towards him, her head surrounded by a nimbus of fine flaxen hair. He squinted at her. The air seemed thick and syrupy, as though the fog outside were seeping into the house, distorting distances and blurring detail.

  ‘He couldn’t come,’ Zen ventured.

  ‘But he promised!’

  He saw now that the supposed canvas was in fact a lighted doorway from which the woman was observing his advance, without any alarm but with an expression of intense disappointment which she made no effort to disguise.

  ‘I spoke to him just this afternoon, and he promised he would come!’

  She was wearing a shapeless dress of heavy black material which accentuated the pallor of her skin. Her manner was unnervingly direct, and she held Zen’s gaze without any apparent embarrassment.

  ‘He promised!’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s quite right. But he’s not feeling very well.’

  ‘Is it his tummy?’ the woman asked serenely.

  Zen blinked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, his tummy, yes. So he asked me to come instead.’

  She moved towards him, her candid blue gaze locked to his face.

  ‘It was you,’ she said.

  Had she recognized him from the train?

  ‘Me?’ he replied vaguely.

  She nodded, certain now.

  ‘It wasn’t Ludo who rang. It was you.’

  He smiled sheepishly.

  ‘Ludo couldn’t come himself, so he sent me.’

  ‘And who are you?’ she asked, like a princess in a fairy story addressing the odd little man who has materialized in her bedchamber.

  Zen could smell her now. The odour was almost overpowering, a heady blend of bodily secretions that was far from unpleasant. Combined with the woman’s full figure and air of childish candour, it produced an overall effect which was extremely erotic. Zen began to understand the Prince’s attraction to his cousin in Milan.

  ‘Do you remember Ludo mentioning that he’d spoken to someone who worked for a magazine?’ he said.

  The woman’s face creased into a scowl, as if recalling the events of the previous week was a mental feat equivalent to playing chess without a board. Then her frowns suddenly cleared and she beamed a smile of pure joy.

  ‘About my dolls!’

  Zen smiled and nodded.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It was you? You want to write about them?’

  She bit her lower lip and wrung her thin hands in agitation.

  ‘Will there be photographs? I’ll need time to get them all looking their best. To tell you the truth, I thought Ludo was only joking.’

  She smiled a little wistfully.

  ‘He has such a queer sense of humour sometimes.’

  Zen explained that although they would of course want to take photographs at some later stage, this was just an introductory visit to get acquainted. But Ariana Falcone didn’t seem to be listening. She turned and led the way through the doorway as though lost in the intensity of her excitement.

  ‘Just think! In the magazines!’

  By contrast with the cold, formal, antiquated expanses of the gallery, the room beyond — although about the size of a football pitch — was reassuringly normal in appearance. The architectural imperatives of the great house had been attenuated by the skilful use of paint and light, and the furnishings were comfortable, bright and contemporary. But to Zen’s dismay, the place was filled with a crowd numbering perhaps fifty or sixty people, standing and sitting in complete silence, singly or in groups.

  Their presence struck Zen with panic. Ariana might have accepted his story at face value, but it was unlikely to bear scrutiny by this sophisticated host. Zen had never been so conscious of himself as the dowdy government functionary, encased in his anonymous suit, as when he ran the gauntlet of that fashionable throng, each flaunting an outfit so stylish and exotic that you hardly noticed the person wearing it. And in fact it was not until Ariana swung round with a grand gesture and announ
ced, ‘Well, here they are!’, that Zen realized they were all mannequins.

  ‘Some of them are upstairs, being fitted,’ she went on. ‘Raimondo gave me a copy of Woman’s Wear Daily recently. I got lots of ideas from that. Which magazine do you work for, by the way?’

  ‘Er… Gente.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  You must be the only person in Italy who hasn’t, thought Zen. She didn’t know what had happened to Ludovico Ruspanti, either. Was there a connection?

  ‘It’s about famous people,’ he explained. ‘Stars.’

  ‘All Raimondo brings me are fashion magazines. And I can’t go out, of course, because of my illness. Anyway, what do you think?’

  She pointed around the room, watching anxiously for Zen’s reaction.

  ‘It’s magnificent,’ he replied simply.

  He meant it! Whatever the implications of this peculiar ensemble, the scale of the conception and the quality of the execution were quite astonishing. Each of the ‘dolls’ — a full-size figure of articulated wood — was fitted out with a costume like nothing Zen had ever seen. Sometimes the fabrics and colours were boldly contrasted, sometimes artfully complementary. The construction often involved a witty miracle in which heavy velvets apparently descended from gossamer-fine voile, or tweed braces supported a skirt which might have been made of beaten egg whites. Even to someone as deeply ignorant of fashion as Zen was, it was clear that these garments were very special indeed.

  ‘Raimondo is your brother?’ he asked.

  Ariana’s face, which had been beaming with pleasure at his compliment, crumpled up. She nodded mutely.

  ‘And what does he do?’ Zen inquired.

  ‘Do? He doesn’t do anything. Neither of us do anything.’

  Zen laughed lightly and pointed to the dolls.

  ‘What about all this?’

  She made a moue.

  ‘Oh, that’s play, not work.’

  He walked about through the throng of figures inclined in a variety of life-like poses. One costume in particular caught his eyes, a clinging cardigan of stretch panne velvet textured to resemble suede and dyed in clashing patches of brilliant primary colours. He had seen it before, and not on a mannequin.