Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Do you really make them all yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course! I used to have little dolls, but that was too fiddly, so Raimondo got me these.’

  She pointed to a male figure on Zen’s right.

  ‘I made that outfit last year. It’s based on something I saw in a men’s fashion magazine Raimondo left lying around, a leather blouson and jeans. I thought that was a bit boring, so I let those panels into the suede to reveal a false lining made of blue shot silk, which looks like bleached denim. The slacks are in brushed silk, mimicking the suede.’

  Zen looked at it admiringly.

  ‘It’s wonderful.’

  Her pixie face collapsed into a scowl.

  ‘ He doesn’t think so.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m surprised he agreed to let you come, actually. I think he’s a bit ashamed of my dolls. When I told him what Ludo had said about the magazine when he phoned last week, Raimondo got terribly angry.’

  Zen gazed at the stretch panne-velvet cardigan, his mind racing. Was it possible?

  ‘And where is he now?’ he asked.

  ‘Raimondo? Oh, he’s away in Africa, hunting lions.’

  Zen nodded sagely.

  ‘That must be dangerous.’

  ‘That’s just what I said when he told me. And do you know what he replied? “Only for the lion!”’

  He looked at her, and then at the mannequins. The contrast between their astonishing garments and the woman’s shapeless black apparel, imbued with the heady reek of the living body within, could not have been more marked.

  ‘Do you ever wear any of the clothes yourself?’ Zen asked.

  She frowned, as though he’d said something that made no sense.

  ‘They’re dolls ’ clothes!’

  ‘They look quite real to me.’

  She shrugged jerkily.

  ‘It’s just something to keep me amused while I’m ill. When I get better again, and Mummy and Daddy come back, we’ll put them all away.’

  He gestured around the room.

  ‘What a huge house!’

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘Is it?’

  He was about to say something else when she went on, ‘Daddy used to say it was like a doll’s-house, with the windows and doors painted on the front.’

  ‘Why is it like that?’

  She made an effort to remember.

  ‘It happened in the war,’ she said at last. ‘A bomb.’

  ‘Ah. And do you and Raimondo live here all alone?’

  ‘No, he’s got a place of his own somewhere. He doesn’t want to catch my illness, you see.’

  Zen nodded as though this made perfect sense.

  ‘Is it infectious, then?’

  ‘So he says. He told me that if he stayed here any longer he’d end up as crazy as I am. That’s why Mummy and Daddy left, too. I drive people away. I can’t help it. It’s my illness…’

  Her voice trailed away.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Zen.

  She stood listening, her head tilted to one side. He peered at her.

  ‘Is something…?’

  ‘Ssshhh!’

  She started trembling all over.

  ‘Someone’s coming!’

  Zen strained his ears, but couldn’t detect the slightest sound.

  ‘It must be Carmela! I don’t know what’s happened! The opera can’t be over yet.’

  She clapped her hands together in sheer panic.

  ‘Oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?’

  Zen stood looking round uncertainly. Suddenly Ariana looked at him intently, sizing him up.

  ‘Take off your coat and jacket!’ she hissed.

  She darted to the mannequin near by, removed the blouson he was wearing and tossed it to Zen. Then she bundled up his overcoat and jacket and stuffed them hurriedly under a chair. Feeling absolutely ridiculous. Zen struggled into the blouson. Ariana snatched a sort of fisherman’s cap off another dummy and put it on him.

  ‘Now stand there and don’t move!’

  There was a sound of footsteps.

  ‘Ariana? Ah, there you are!’

  Zen recognized the voice at once. Indeed, it seemed as if he’d been hearing nothing else for the past week. The speaker was out of sight from the position in which Zen was frozen, but he could clearly hear the tremor in Ariana’s voice.

  ‘Raimondo!’

  ‘Who were you expecting?’

  ‘Expecting? No one! No one ever comes here.’

  You’re overdoing it, thought Zen. But the man’s brusque tone revealed no trace of suspicion.

  ‘Can you blame them?’

  The woman moved away from Zen.

  ‘I thought you were in Africa,’ she said. ‘Hunting lions.’

  He laughed shortly.

  ‘I killed them all.’

  Zen’s posture already felt painfully cramped and rigid. To distract himself, he stared at the costume of the mannequin opposite him, an extraordinary collage of fur, leather, velvet and silk apparently torn into ribbons and then reassembled in layers to form a waterfall of jagged, clashing fabrics.

  ‘Did you see Ludo?’ the woman demanded suddenly.

  The eagerness in her voice was unmistakable.

  ‘Cousin Ludovico?’ the man drawled negligently. ‘Yes, I saw him.’

  ‘When? Where? How is he? When is he coming back?’

  ‘Oh, not for some time, I’m afraid. Not for a long, long time.’

  His voice was deliberately hard and hurtful.

  ‘Did a lion hurt him?’

  She sounded utterly desolate. The man laughed.

  ‘What nonsense you talk! It wasn’t a lion, it was you. He can’t stand being around you, Ariana. It’s your own fault! You drive everyone away with your mad babbling. Everyone except your dolls. They’re the only ones who can put up with you any longer.’

  There was a sound of crying.

  ‘I hope you’ve kept yourself busy while I’ve been away,’ the man continued.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then stop blubbering and show me. Where are they? Upstairs in the workroom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come on then.’

  Suddenly the man was there, close enough for Zen to touch. The woman followed, her head lowered, sobbing. She gave no sign of being aware of Zen’s presence.

  ‘I’ll have to keep an eye on you, Ariana,’ the man remarked coldly. ‘It looks to me as if you might be going to have one of your bad patches again.’

  ‘That’s not true! I’ve felt ever so well for ages now.’

  ‘Rubbish! You have no idea whether you’re well or not, Ariana. You never did and you never will.’

  They went out of a door at the far side of the room, closing it behind them. Zen hastily removed the blouson and cap, retrieved his coat and jacket and put them on again. The gallery was as cold and silent as a crypt. Zen tiptoed across it and pattered downstairs to the hallway, where he opened the wooden door set in the painted gate and let himself out. The fog was thicker and denser by now, an intangible barrier which emerged vampire-like every night, draining substance and solidity from the surroundings to feed its own illusory reality. Zen vanished into it like a figment of the city’s imagination.

  7

  Zen’s hotel was next to the station, a thirty-storey tower topped with an impressive array of aerials and satellite dishes. The next morning, shaved and showered, his body pleasantly massaged by the whirlpool bath, clad in a gown of heavy white towelling with the name of the hotel picked out in red, he sat looking out of the window at the streets far below, where the Milanese were industriously going about their business beneath a sky of flawless grey.

  Opposite Zen’s window, a gang of workers were welding and bolting steel beams into place to form the framework of what, according to the sign on the hoarding around the site, was to be another hotel. Judging by the violence of their gestures, there must hav
e been a good deal of noise involved, but within the double layer of toughened glass the only sounds were the hiss of the air conditioning, the murmur of a newscaster on the American cable network to which the television was tuned, and a ringing tone in the receiver of the telephone which Zen was holding to his ear.

  ‘Peace be with you, signora,’ he said solemnly, as the phone was answered with an incomprehensible yelp.

  ‘And with you.’

  ‘This is the friend of Signor Nieddo. I would fain speak with Mago.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  The receiver was banged hollowly against something. Zen turned to the television. He picked up the remote control and shuffled randomly through a variety of game shows, old films, panel discussions, direct selling pitches and all-day sportscasts. Spotting a familiar face in the welter of images, he vectored up the sound.

  ‘… whatsoever. Would you agree with that?’

  ‘I agree with no one but myself.’

  ‘What’s your position on the hemline debate?’

  ‘It’s an irrelevance. My clothes are based on the simple complexities at the heart of all natural processes. Nature doesn’t ask whether hemlines are long or short this season. I seek to echo in fabric the regular irregularity of windblown sand, the orderly chaos of breaking waves…’

  Zen pressed the MUTE button as the receiver was picked up again.

  ‘Mago is graciously pleased to grant your request. Lo, hearken unto the words of Mago.’

  There was a click as the extension was picked up.

  ‘Hello?’ said the boyish voice.

  ‘Nicolo, this is Aurelio, the friend of Gilberto. Have you had any luck with the little puzzle I set you?’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  Zen closed his eyes and saw again the casbah-like shack amid the sprawling suburbs of Rome’s Third World archipelago and the fetid stall at its heart, dark but for the glowing VDU screen from which the bedridden boy with the etiolated grace of an angel played fast and loose with the secrets of the material world.

  ‘It’s dated Wednesday, the day before you came to see me,’ said Nicolo, picking up the receiver again. ‘The text reads as follows. “Anonymous sources in the Vatican allegedly assert that there is a secret group within the Order of Malta, called the Cabal. The existence of this group was allegedly revealed to the Curia by Ludovico Ruspanti in exchange for asylum in the weeks preceding his death. Reported verbally to RL by Zen, Aurelio.”’

  There was a long silence. Then Zen began to laugh, slowly and quietly, a series of rhythmic whoops which might almost have been sobbing. So this was the information which he had supposed so sensitive that Carlo Romizi had been killed to preserve its confidentiality! The Ministry had no ‘parallel’ file on the Cabal. All they knew about it was what they had been told by Zen, who knew only what he had been told by the Vatican, who knew only what they had been told by Ludovico Ruspanti, who had made it up.

  ‘I did a series of searches for the classified file on this Aurelio Zen,’ Nicolo continued, ‘but I didn’t come up with anything.’

  ‘You mean it’s inaccessible?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t exist. There’s an open file, in the main body of the database. I made a copy of that which I can let you have if you’re interested, although frankly it sounds like he’s had a pretty boring life…’

  Zen spluttered into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Nicolo.’

  ‘It’s all been a bit of a waste of time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not at all. On the contrary. Everything’s clear now.’

  He put the phone down with an obscure sense of depression. Everything was clear, and hateful. Perhaps that was why everything normally remained obscure, because people secretly preferred it that way. It was certainly a very mixed pleasure to discover that he was considered so unimportant that the powers that be hadn’t even bothered to keep tabs on him. Any relief he felt was overwhelmed by shame, anger and hurt. Was he worth no more than that? Evidently not. Well, it served him right for wanting to read his own obituary. He had just done so: a pretty boring life.

  On the table lay a message which had been brought up with his breakfast, telling him that Antonia Simonelli expected to see him in her office at eleven o’clock that morning. Zen looked at it, and then at the television, where ‘the philosopher in the wardrobe’ was still holding forth. He identified the name of the station — a private channel, based in the city — and got the number from directory inquiries. It was answered by a young woman who sounded quite overwhelmed by the excitement of working in television.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘This talk show you’ve got on now, is it going out live?’

  ‘Live! Live!’

  ‘I need to speak to your guest.’

  ‘Our guest!’

  ‘Get him to leave a number where I can contact him later this morning.’

  ‘Later! Later!’

  ‘Tell him it’s urgent. A matter of life and death.’

  ‘Life! Death!’

  ‘Yes. The name is Marco Zeppegno.’

  Before getting dressed, Zen made one more call, this time to Rome. Gilberto Nieddu was initially extremely unenthusiastic about doing what Zen wanted, particularly on a Saturday, but Zen said he’d pay for everything, even a courier to the airport.

  After leaving the hotel, Zen strolled down the broad boulevard leading from the fantastic mausoleum of the Central Station to the traffic-ridden expanses of Piazza della Repubblica. This was in fact one of the least propitious parts of the city for a pleasant walk. Because of the proximity of the railway yards, Allied bombers had given it their full attention during the closing stages of the war, and the subsequent reconstruction had taken place at a time when Italian architecture was still heavily influenced by the brutal triumphalism of the Fascist era. Zen wasn’t concerned about his surroundings, however. He just needed to kill a little time.

  He idled along, staring in the shop windows, studying the passers-by, lingering in front of an establishment which sold or hired Carnival costumes. Eventually he reached Piazza della Repubblica, whose oval and rectangular panels of greenery still showed signs of the damage they had incurred during the building of the new Metropolitana C line. At a discreet distance from the piazza, beyond a buffer zone of meticulously trimmed and tended lawns, stood one of the city’s oldest and most luxurious hotels. As Zen turned back, his attention was attracted by a young couple walking down the strip of carpet beneath the long green awning towards the waiting line of taxis. The woman looked radiant in a cream two-piece suit which effortlessly combined eroticism and efficiency, while the man, his cherubic face set off by a mass of curls, was a lively and attentive escort. Zen stopped, quite shamelessly gawking. The woman looked mysteriously familiar, like a half-forgotten memory. So bewitching was the vision that it was only at the very last moment, as the taxi swept past, bearing the woman and her young admirer from the scene of past pleasures to that of future delights, that Zen recognized her as Tania Biacis.

  He promptly sprinted up the drive towards the next taxi in line, which was coming alongside the awning to pick up a pair of Japanese men who had just emerged from the hotel. Ignoring the shouts of the doorman, an imposing figure clad in something resembling the dress uniform of a Latin American general, Zen opened the passenger door and got in.

  ‘Follow that taxi!’ he cried.

  The driver turned to him with a weary expression.

  ‘You’ve been watching too many movies, dotto.’

  ‘This rank is for the use of our guests only!’ thundered the doorman, opening the door again.

  The two Japanese looked on with an air of polite bewilderment. It was too late now anyway. The other vehicle was already lost to view amid the yellow cabs swarming in every direction across the piazza. Zen got out of the taxi and walked slowly back down the drive, shaking his head. At the corner of the block opposite, beneath the high portico, a red neon sign advertised the Bar Capri. Whether intentionally or
not, the interior, a bare concrete shell, vividly evoked the horrors of the speculative building which has all but crushed the magic of that fabled isle. Zen went to the pay-phone and dialled the number which had been left for him at the television studio. There was no ringing tone, but almost at once the acoustic background changed to a loud hum and a familiar voice barked, ‘Yes?’

  Until that moment, Zen had had no clear idea of what he was going to say, but the encounter outside the hotel seemed to have made up his mind for him. The sight of Tania and her young admirer had inspired him with a fierce determination to win her back at any cost. And cost — money — was the key. If Primo could afford to take her to a hotel like that, he must be loaded! He had probably paid for her flight, too. Of course, Primo had personal attractions as well, but then so had Zen. What he didn’t have was cash, and that was going to change. He had been a sucker for long enough, beavering away at a meaningless job without either thanks or reward. It was success people respected, not diligence or rectitude. Gilberto patronized him, his colleagues patronized him, and now it turned out that Tania was having a fling with some married man with enough money to offer her a good time. And quite right too, he thought. He didn’t blame her. What was the point in playing safe when you could end up like Carlo Romizi at any moment? Would it be any consolation, in that final instant of consciousness, to reflect on how correctly one had behaved?

  ‘Good morning, dottore,’ he said, putting on the sing-song accent of an Istrian schoolmaster whom he and his schoolfriends had once used to delight in imitating. ‘I saw you on television this morning. A very fine performance, if I may say so.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The name I gave earlier was Marco Zeppegno, but as you know, dottore, Marco’s phone has been disconnected.’

  In the background there was the constant hum of what sounded like a car’s engine.

  ‘I wonder why,’ Zen continued. ‘Didn’t he pay his bills? Or had he started to make nuisance calls, like Ludovico Ruspanti?’

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’