Cabal az-3

by Michael Dibdin

  Then a miracle occurred. That, at least, is how he explained it to himself in that initial instant of wordless awe. After that it was pure sensation, pure experience. Later he realized that the whole thing could have taken no more than a few seconds, but while it lasted there was nothing else, only the noise and the light. The light was the kind you might see if they skinned your eyeballs, pickled them in acid and trained lasers on them. As for the noise…

  When he was a boy, he had once been allowed up the campanile of the family church. After endless windings, the spiral staircase broadened into a chamber where the bells hung, great lumps of dull metal, seeming no more resonant than so many rocks. Yet when the clapper struck, they could be heard over half the city. He had wondered ever after what it would have sounded like if they’d started pealing while he was standing there. Now he knew. His whole body thrilled and jangled, every cell and fibre quivering in exquisite agony as the overtones and reverberations of that blow died away. Another such would kill him, he thought as he lay in a heap on the floor, clutching his head. But there wasn’t another. This puzzled him at first. Once the clapper was set swinging with that kind of violence, it was bound to come back to strike the other side, just when you were least expecting it.

  Hands moved lightly and rapidly all over his body, like a couturier fitting a client. He opened his eyes. A tall figure wearing a black clerical suit stood looking down at him, a revolver in each hand. Above the trim white collar rose a garish latex Carnival mask representing the bluff, benign features of John Paul II.

  From the other side of the latex mask, Aurelio Zen surveyed the situation with a sense of satisfaction and relief. He had been extremely dubious about the outcome of this venture ever since picking up the package that afternoon at Linate. He had no idea what stun grenades looked like, but given what Gilberto had told him they were going to cost, he was expecting something pretty impressive. Gleaming stainless-steel canisters with spring-action triggers and time-delay settings, slightly greasy to the touch — that sort of thing. Above all, he was expecting them to weigh. ‘We are the goods,’ he expected them to tell him as he staggered away from the airline counter with a metal case marked DANGER — HIGH EXPLOSIVE.

  Instead of which the clerk had casually tossed him a padded envelope which felt almost empty. Zen left feeling like the victim of a confidence trick. Matters did not improve when he opened the envelope in the taxi on the way back to the city. Inside, he found two grey plastic tubes, each about the size of a toothpaste dispenser, lashed together by a rubber band looped over on itself. At one end, a red plastic peg with a ridged grip protruded a few centimetres from the body of the tube, the junction being sealed with a pull-tab. There was also a note in Gilberto’s jauntily precise writing.

  To avoid accidents, remove seal at last moment. After pulling out the red pin, you have 3 seconds to deliver the grenade and get out. The effects last 5 seconds or more, depending on the physical condition of the opposition, their degree of preparation and training, etc. One pack is enough for an average-sized room; larger areas may require two.

  Just like air freshener, thought Zen disgustedly. Four hundred thousand lire each, Gilberto was charging him for these! ‘And that’s cost price, Aurelio. In fact below cost, because it’s what I paid three months ago. God knows what the replacement cost will be.’ As an added irony, the source was one of Zen’s colleagues. The reason the grenades were so expensive was that very few came on to the market. Any equipment on general military or police issue could be had at massive discounts, for that was very much a buyer’s market. But stun grenades were supplied only to a few specialist units in the police and Carabinieri. Nieddu’s supplier was connected to the Interior Ministry’s DIGOS anti-terrorist squad, whose morale was at an all-time low these days — which no doubt explained why they were resorting to private enterprise, like everyone else.

  In the event, though, Zen had to admit that his doubts had been decisively confounded. The grenades might not look much, but they packed one hell of a punch. Even from the other side of the door, the effect had been that of the firework to end all fireworks. He hadn’t been sure how large the room was, but at almost half a million lire a go, Zen decided that one was going to have to be enough. Which it certainly had been. When he charged in, Falcone was lying on the floor, his hands to his head and his knees drawn up, like one of the victims over-whelmed by lava at Pompeii. Setting down his replica revolver, Zen grabbed the pistol which the man had been holding and frisked him swiftly for other weapons. Then he picked up his toy gun and stepped back.

  After a few seconds, Falcone moaned and rubbed his eyes as though stirring from sleep. He stared incredulously at Zen, who smiled in the privacy afforded by the latex mask. The fancy dress had been another aspect of the affair which he had been unsure about. Some disguise was certainly necessary. He didn’t want to give the game away too soon, not without finding out as much as he could. This was his first deliberate attempt at criminal extortion, and he didn’t want to bungle it. The single card he had to play should certainly be enough to extract a cash settlement, but if his victim could be kept in suspense about who he was and what he wanted, then other potentially profitable facts might well emerge. At the very least, the aura of psychological domination thus established would work strongly to Zen’s advantage when it came to agreeing terms.

  The moment he thought of disguises, he recalled the fancy-dress shop he had seen that morning in Via Pisani. At that time of year, they had an extensive selection available for hire, but in the end Zen had opted for a clerical outfit. The mask, a pudgy parody of Wojtyla’s Slavic features, had then been an obvious accessory. Nevertheless, it remained to be seen how it went down on the night. As it turned out, there were no worries on that score. Falcone couldn’t keep his eyes off it.

  ‘You’re a bit early for Carnival,’ he eventually remarked with a brave attempt at reasserting himself.

  ‘It’s for your protection,’ Zen replied in the singsong accent he had used on the phone.

  ‘For yours, you mean.’

  The plastic pope’s face moved from side to side in a gesture of negation that made a macabre contrast with its expression of benevolent paternalism.

  ‘If I were not masked, you might recognize me,’ Zen explained. ‘Then we would have to kill you.’

  He waited a moment for this to sink in.

  ‘We may decide to do so anyway in the end, of course. That depends on whether you are able to furnish a satisfactory explanation of your conduct with regard to the Ruspanti affair.’

  Falcone tried a laugh.

  ‘What have I to do with that? There’s absolutely no evidence linking me to the Ruspanti affair.’

  ‘Evidence is for judges. I am not a judge, I am an executioner. Sentence has already been passed. Unless you can persuade me otherwise in the next few minutes, it will be carried out.’

  In the pools of shadow on the floor, Falcone squirmed like a stranded fish.

  ‘But what have I done, for God’s sake? What have I done?’

  ‘You have taken our name in vain! You have slandered our organization and circulated lies about our aims and activities. You have stirred up a hornet’s nest of speculation and rumour that is causing us considerable embarrassment. In short, you have attempted to make use of us.’

  The black holes of the mask’s eyes bored into Falcone.

  ‘The Cabal does not allow itself to be made use of.’

  Once again Falcone tried to laugh, but it broke from him like a belch, uncontrolled and shameful.

  ‘Listen, there’s been a terrible mistake! I had no idea that any such organization as the Cabal even existed! Ruspanti told me he had dreamed it up as a way of getting the Vatican to give him refuge. He was very proud of how clever he’d been, of how the priests were swallowing it all and coming back for more. I thought that’s all it was, just something he’d made up!’

  ‘That’s not what you told the police.’

  At this, Falcone v
isibly shrank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The police official from the Ministry of the Interior who was called in by the Vatican to investigate the Ruspanti affair. You didn’t tell him that you thought the whole thing was a hoax. On the contrary, you went to great lengths to ensure that he thought that the Cabal was behind the whole affair.’

  Falcone gasped.

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘It will save a lot of time if you just assume that we know everything. Now answer my question! Why did you go to such extraordinary lengths — breaking into a confessional in St Peter’s, setting up a shortwave radio link — just so as to smear an organization whose existence you now say you didn’t believe in?’

  ‘I never intended to smear anyone…’

  ‘Well you certainly succeeded! The Ministry of the Interior even opened a file on us. Fortunately one of our men was able to have it suppressed, but the effect could have been incalculable. For the last time, why?’

  Falcone looked up at the pistol in the man’s right hand. It was now pointing directly towards him. With absolute clarity, he realized that he was going to die — and by his own gun, or rather his father’s.

  ‘It was just a bluff!’ he cried. ‘We suspected that the police knew more than they were officially admitting. The idea was to convince the officer in charge that Ruspanti’s death was not a criminal matter but a political one, and that the guilty party might include anyone and everyone from his own boss to the President of the Republic.’

  The papal mask nodded like an obscene parody of a priest hearing confession.

  ‘But who is this “we”? And why should you care what line the police were taking?’

  ‘I meant the Falcone family. Ruspanti was a distant cousin of ours, and we were worried that…’

  A harsh cackle from the lips of the plastic pope cut him off.

  ‘Oh come, now! You had rather more reason to worry about than the family connection, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Then let me fill you in. Friday last week, you and Marco Zeppegno murdered Ludovico Ruspanti by throwing him from the upper gallery in St Peter’s…’

  ‘We didn’t throw him!’

  Too late, he realized the trap he had fallen into.

  ‘Quite right,’ the intruder continued gloatingly. ‘You lashed him to the railings with a length of fishing twine fastened in such a way that once he regained consciousness, his own struggles precipitated him to his death. Four days later, you electrocuted Giovanni Grimaldi in his shower…’

  ‘I had nothing to do with that!’

  The cry was spontaneous, an affirmation of an innocence he really felt. Although it had been he who had connected the electric cable to the mains and listened to the dying man’s screams, the elimination of Grimaldi had served only Zeppegno’s interests. The photocopy of the transcript he had been shown on the Monday afternoon confirmed that there was nothing to compromise him, particularly since Grimaldi had obviously been totally taken in by his female clothing — even to the extent of doing a half-hearted number on him!

  To be honest, it might have been that which sealed the Vigilanza man’s fate. He’d been shocked to find himself the object of that kind of attention, just because he’d put on a skirt and blouse. Of course this merely confirmed what he’d claimed all along — fixed categories were an illusion, you were what you appeared to be — but it was one thing to theorize about such things, quite another to see a man eye you up and down in that smug, knowing way. There was nothing remotely sexual about his cross-dressing. It was just an extension of the possibilities open to him, that was all, a blurring of distinctions he had already proclaimed meaningless. He would even more happily have dressed as a child, if that had been possible.

  But Giovanni Grimaldi had made the mistake of making sexual advances to him, so when Marco had said they were going to have to move, he had agreed, even though he himself was not at risk. The telephone call from Ludovico to Ariana which had originally forced him to intervene was recorded in the transcript, but Ludo was still being careful at that point, and he had said nothing that would make any sense to an outsider. But by the eve of his death, Ruspanti had thrown caution to the winds, and Zeppegno’s name appeared in black and white. If the police got hold of it, they’d beat the truth out of Marco in no time at all. That was another reason why he’d decided to play along at the time, and later too, negotiating by phone from the lobby of the hotel in the middle of a party to celebrate the publication of his new book. It was only then that he realized that his own interests would be better served by killing Zeppegno himself.

  ‘I had nothing to do with that!’ he repeated.

  The intruder seemed at first to understand.

  ‘“You are what you wear.” I didn’t realize you took your own slogan so seriously! Very well then, Zeppegno’s accomplice wasn’t you but a woman of similar build and bone structure. Oddly enough, yesterday yet another young woman — clearly no relation, because she was wearing brown instead of black — pushed Marco Zeppegno out of a train in the middle of the Apennine tunnel. Quite an eventful week they’ve had, these girls, whoever they may be.’

  Raimondo Falcone had once watched a pig gutted, out at the villa where Carmela used to live. The beast was suspended by its hind trotters from a hook. The knife was plunged in below the pink puckered anus and tugged down like the tag of a zipper, opening the animal’s belly, releasing its heavy load of innards. The plastic pope’s words had a similar effect on him now. The man had not exaggerated. He did know everything.

  Well, not every thing. He knew about Ruspanti and Grimaldi. He even knew about Zeppegno. But that was only the wrapping on the real secret, the key to all the others and the reason why he had originally suggested to Zeppegno that they pool forces and pay a visit to the Prince in Rome. Ironically enough, it was Ruspanti himself who had brought Falcone and Zeppegno together in the first place, when he learned that his cousin had abandoned the derelict family mansion to mad Ariana and moved into a smart new apartment block which also happened to house one of the former clients of his currency export business. At first the Prince merely asked Falcone to pass on his demands and menaces to Marco Zeppegno, who could in turn relay them to the other men under investigation by Antonia Simonelli. When Raimondo balked, his cousin reminded him that it was in his own interests to see the affair settled quietly. A major scandal would reflect badly on everyone in the family, especially a young designer at such a delicate stage of his career, just starting to rise in the world, but still within reach of jealous rivals who would seize on any excuse to burst the bubble of his success.

  At the time Falcone had understood this as an observation, not a threat, and had agreed to act as go-between. Zeppegno, for his part, refused to be drawn on the specific commitments Ruspanti wanted, claiming that he needed more time, and that dramatic interventions by influential people were just around the corner. To Falcone he was less diplomatic, perhaps hoping that some echo of this might get back to the Prince. ‘It was a business arrangement. He did the job, we paid him well. If the bastard’s in the shit now, let him look after himself. I’ve got problems of my own without adding conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.’ Raimondo took little interest in the matter one way or the other until the day Ruspanti dropped an oblique reference to Ariana’s dolls. A few days later he mentioned the dolls again, this time referring to their ‘extraordinarily inventive’ costumes. In a panic, Falcone hung up. When the phone rang again, he did not answer it. He did not answer it for the next week, but when he dropped in to pick up a consignment of costumes from Ariana, she told him about Ludovico’s story about meeting a reporter who was interested in writing an article about her and her dolls. The implication was clear. If his demands were not met, Ruspanti would reveal to the world that Falco was a fake, a pretentious posturer who had deceived everyone by cynically exploiting the talents of the traumatized sibling he kept locked up at home.

 
It was then he decided that his cousin must die. Ruspanti had in fact seriously miscalculated. Not for a moment did Falcone think of agreeing to the Prince’s demands, which now ran to private planes to smuggle him out of the country and secret hideouts in Switzerland or Austria where he could lie low until the affair blew over. It was not just his commercial success that was at stake, but his very self! He was no longer Falcone, but Falco. If Falco were to be revealed as a void, an illusion, then what would become of him? As long as Ludovico Ruspanti remained alive, Falco’s existence had hung in the balance.

  As it did now, he thought. The intruder stood quite still, the pistols aimed at his queasily yawing head.

  ‘Until this moment, I had no idea that any such organization as the Cabal existed,’ Falcone said wearily. ‘If I have inadvertedly offended or inconvenienced you, I apologize. If there is any way in which I can make reparations, I am more than willing to do so.’

  The man in cleric costume raised his hands slowly.

  ‘No!’ shrieked Falcone in sheer terror. ‘For the love of God forgive me, I beg of you!’

  The empty eyes of the mask stared at him.

  ‘I? I have nothing to do with it.’

  Falcone grovelled on the floor, abasing himself utterly.

  ‘I meant the Cabal.’

  The intruder laughed.

  ‘The Cabal doesn’t exist.’ And he raised his mask like a visor.

  The effect was as stunning as the detonation of the grenade. Slack-jawed, pale, seemingly paralysed, Falcone just stared and stared. He, who had fooled everyone around him for so long, had now himself been made a fool of — and by a dowdy creep whose suits looked as though they were made by his mother! How was it possible? Why had it been permitted? The world had stopped making sense.