Cabal - 3 (11 page)

He slammed the phone down. When he turned, the barman and all five customers were staring at him. He was about to say something when he saw Marco Duranti emerge from the Carabinieri station and set off along the street at a surprisingly brisk trot. Zen tossed a five-thousand-lire note in the general direction of the barman and ran after him.

‘Excuse me!’

Duranti swung round with a wary, hostile expression. When he saw Zen he relaxed, but only slightly.

‘It’s about this maintenance man you saw in the building yesterday,’ Zen told him.

‘Yes?’

Zen pointed across the street.

‘Are you going home? We could walk together.’

Duranti shrugged gracelessly.

‘I was wondering if there might be a connection with this case I’m working on, you see,’ Zen told him as they set off together. ‘They could be using the sewers as a place to hide their drug cache. Where was he actually working?’

‘I didn’t look. All I know is he had the electric drill going for about half an hour just when I’m trying to have my siesta. Of course they
would
have to pick the week I’m on night shift.’

They were just passing the Porta Sant’ Anna, the tradesman’s entrance of the Vatican City State. A Swiss Guard in the working uniform of blue tunic, sleeveless cloak and beret set at a jaunty angle was gesturing with white-gloved hands to a driver who had just approached the security barrier. Meanwhile his colleague chatted to a girl on the pavement. A little further up the street was a second checkpoint, manned by the Vigilanza. Their uniform, dark blue with red piping, badly cut and with too much gold braid, made a sad contrast with the efficient elegance of the Swiss. Revolver on his hip, radio on his shoulder, the Guard held up his hand to stop the car, which had now been permitted through the first barrier, and swaggered over to give the driver a hard time.

‘What did this man look like?’ Zen asked.

Duranti shrugged.

‘Stocky, muscular, average height, with a big round face. He wasn’t Roman, I’ll tell you that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The accent! All up here in the nose, like a real northerner.’

Zen nodded as though this confirmed his suspicions.

‘That’s very helpful. You make an excellent witness, signore. If only everyone was as observant.’

They had reached the corner of the street where Duranti lived. Zen thanked him and then waited until he had disappeared before following him down the street to the pizzeria where he had had lunch.

Normality had already returned to the neighbourhood. In an area where safety standards were rarely or never observed, domestic accidents were even more frequent than suicide attempts in St Peter’s. In the pizzeria, the owner and three cronies were discussing the recent and spectacular explosion of a butane gas cylinder which had blown a five-year-old girl clean through the window of the family’s third-floor apartment. The child landed on the roof of a car below, unhurt but orphaned, her father having been disembowelled by a jagged chunk of the cylinder while the mother succumbed to brain injury after part of the wall collapsed on her.

Zen elbowed his way through to the counter and ordered another slab of pizza to keep him going until, God willing, he finally got to eat a proper meal. The baker had just pushed a large baking tray filled with bubbling pizza through the serving hatch from the kitchen next door, and the
pizzaiolo
hacked out a large slice which he folded in two and presented to Zen with a paper wrapper. He moved to the back of the shop and leant against a stack of plastic crates filled with soft-drink bottles, munching the piping-hot pizza and awaiting the arrival of Paragon Security’s electrician.

A blowsy near-blonde of rather more than a certain age walked in and greeted the four men with the familiar manner of one who has seen the best and worst they could do and not been at all impressed. She ordered one of the ham and mozzarella pasties called
calzoni
, ‘trousers’. The men guffawed, and one remarked that that was all Bettina ever thought about. She replied that on the contrary,
calzoni
these days were usually a disappointment, ‘delicious looking from the outside, but with no filling worth a damn’. The owner of the pizzeria protested that his ‘trousers’, on the other hand, were crammed with all the good things God sends. Bettina remained unimpressed, claiming that while his father had known a thing or two about stuffing, the best the present proprietor could manage was a pathetic scrap of meat and a dribble of cheese.

Zen’s left elbow turned to a burning knob of pain.

‘Hi there.’

The pain vanished as suddenly as it had begun. Zen looked round to find Gilberto Nieddu grinning puckishly at him.

‘I didn’t expect you to come personally,’ said Zen.

He still found it odd to see Nieddu’s rotund, compact body dressed in a smart suit and tie. Gilberto had been running an independent security firm for years now, and very successfully too, but Zen still thought of him as the colleague he had once been, and was always vaguely taken aback to see him disguised as a businessman. Nieddu set down the small metal case he was carrying.

‘You don’t think I’d risk one of my lads getting involved with your crazy schemes?’

Zen waved at the counter.

‘Want something?’

Nieddu shook his head.

‘I’ve got a meal waiting for me at home, Aurelio. If I ever
get
home.’

Zen finished his pizza and lit a Nazionale.

‘Okay, this is the situation. Like I said on the phone, someone was killed in an accident this afternoon, only I don’t think it was an accident. The victim lived in a rundown tenement where the wiring was installed around the time Caesar got mugged in the Forum. The water heater in particular is very dodgy, and tenants have been warned to switch it off before using the shower. It seems to me that all someone needed to do was fix the heater so that it became seriously dangerous, and then wait for the victim to trot along and electrocute himself. In short, the perfect murder.’

‘Give me a smoke, polenta-head,’ said Nieddu.

‘I thought you’d given up.’

‘I’ve given up
buying
them. Don’t laugh. My doctor says it’s a first step.’

He lit up and exhaled mightily, then shook his head.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ he said. ‘They’d need to get out the element, for a start. That’s a major job even with a new heater. If this one’s as old as you say, the nuts will have rusted up. Anyway, the thing’s bound to be checked, and it’ll be clear that it’s been tampered with. There’s no chance of it being mistaken for an accident.’

‘So it can’t be done?’

‘Of course it can be done, but not like that. What you want to do is by-pass the heater altogether. Where exactly is this run-down tenement?’

‘Right across the road.’

Gilberto glanced at his watch.

‘Let’s have a quick look. Then I really must go, or Rosella will think I’m having an affair.’

The hallway was dark and dank, the only sound the brushing of Zen’s sleeve on the plaster as he groped for the switch.

‘No!’ whispered Nieddu.

He opened the metal case and removed a small torch. A beam of light split the darkness, precise as a pointing finger, indicating walls and ceiling, doorways, steps, painting brief slashes and squiggles in the stairwell as they walked upstairs. On each floor they could hear the murmur of radios and televisions, but they saw no one. When they reached the top, Zen led the way along the corridor. Light showed under the door of Marco Duranti’s room, but there was no sound inside. Zen tried the door to Giovanni Grimaldi’s room, but it was now locked. The shower sported a brand-new hasp and a large padlock, as well as a sign reading ‘OUT OF ORDER’.

Zen opened his burglary kit and got to work on the padlock. Despite its impressive appearance, it was a cheapie. He had barely started work before it snapped open. Nieddu gave a low whistle.

‘When you finally get the boot, Aurelio, you give me a call. We can always use people with skills like yours.’

He pushed the door open. The broken hinges protested loudly and the base scraped across the tiles like fingernails down a blackboard. Zen shoved him inside quickly and pushed the door closed as someone came out of a room further along the corridor. Nieddu doused the torch and he and Zen stood side by side in the darkness. Footsteps approached, then retreated again. A door closed and feet receded down the stairs.

Nieddu switched on the torch. The beam bounced and skittered around the glazed white tiles, picking out the water heater resting on its wooden trestle near an oblong window high up in the whitewashed wall.

‘Give me a leg up.’

Zen locked his hands together to make a step. With the adroitness of an acrobat, the Sardinian hoisted himself up, gripping the trestle with one hand and resting his foot on the wall screening off the shower cubicle.

‘Just as I thought,’ he said, his voice reverberating off the bare walls. ‘The threads are all corroded to hell. No one’s touched this for years.’

He dropped back to the floor and padded around the bathroom, shining the torch over the glossy tiles and matt-white plaster. When he reached the partition wall beside the door, he grunted significantly.

‘Ah.’

‘Found something?’ queried Zen.

Nieddu eased the door open and stepped outside. He shone the torch into the angle of the wall. Inside, a thin pencil of light appeared in the darkness. Zen bent down and inspected the wall. A small hole had been drilled right through it. He went out to join Nieddu in the corridor. The torch beam was now pointing along the wall at an electric junction box a few yards away.

Outside in the street, a police car approached at high speed, siren howling. The walls and ceiling of the corridor pulsed with a revolving blue light. Down below, in the entrance hall of the building, an excitable voice which Zen recognized as that of Marco Duranti yelled ‘This way!’ The stairwell resounded to the sound of voices and clattering boots.

‘Time to go?’ asked Nieddu calmly.

Zen nodded. The Sardinian opened the metal case and removed something which looked like a large firework. He ran along the corridor to the head of the stairs, tossed it down and came running back.

‘Smoke bomb,’ he explained. ‘Should hold them for a while.’

There was an acrid smell in the air, and the sounds below turned to coughing and spluttering. They ran back to the bathroom, where Nieddu held his hands cupped while Zen hoisted himself clumsily up to the wooden trestle. Nieddu then passed up his dispatch case. Going into the shower, he gripped the metal piping and pulled himself up on the wall around the cubicle. From there he leapt across to join Zen on the trestle, which creaked ominously under their combined weight. Nieddu clambered on top of the water heater.

‘Fuck!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve snagged my jacket on a nail.’

‘Christ, is that all?’

‘
All?
It’s brand-new, from Ferre.’

He leant across to the window and pulled it open. Taking the metal case from Zen, he pushed it through the opening, then sprang after it and held his hands out to Zen, who had clambered up on top of the tank. He tried not to look down. The trestle was still groaning and the window looked a long way away.

‘It’s no good,’ he said suddenly. ‘I can’t do it.’

The Sardinian sat down facing the window, his feet braced on either side.

‘Give me your hands.’

Zen leaned forward across the gap and Nieddu gripped his wrists. In the corridor outside he could hear a stampede of approaching boots. He kicked off from the heater, scraping his shoes desperately on the wall, and somehow Nieddu dragged him through the opening and out on to the sloping tiled roof.

‘Come on!’ the Sardinian said urgently. ‘I’ve got some stun grenades, but you wouldn’t want me to have to use those. They cost a fortune, and you already owe me for the suit.’

They ran off together across the roofs towards the lights of the next street.

3

If Zen had spent the night at home instead of at Tania’s, he could have walked to his first appointment next morning. As it was he ended up on foot anyway, the taxi he summoned having ground to a halt outside the Liceo Terenzio Mamiani, just round the corner from Zen’s apartment. Wednesday mornings were always bad, as the usual rush-hour jam was supplemented by the influx of pilgrims heading for the weekly papal audience. Zen paid the driver and strode off past lines of honking, bleating vehicles, including coaches whose utilitarian styling and robust construction exuded a graceless charm which awakened nostalgic memories of the far-off, innocent 1950s. From portholes wiped in their misted-up windows, the Polish pope’s compatriots peered out at the Eternal City, perhaps wondering if the last kilometre of their pilgrimage was going to take as long as the previous two thousand.

Zen crossed Piazza del Risorgimento and followed the towering ramparts of the Vatican City State up the hill, passing women carrying wicker baskets and plastic bags of fruit and vegetables home from the Trionfale market. The bells of the local churches were in some disagreement about the exact moment when nine o’clock arrived, but the Vatican itself opened its doors dead on time, as though to emphasize that although
in
Rome, it was by no means
of
Rome. The handful of tourists waiting for the museums to open began to file inside. Zen followed them up the curving ramp to the cash desk, where he plonked down his ten-thousand-lire note with the rest. Then, like someone doing Rome in two days, he hurried through the collections of classical antiquities, following the arrows marked ‘Raphael Stanze and Sistine Chapel Only’.

A marble staircase brought him to a gallery receding as far as the eye could see. The walls were hung with tapestries and painted maps alternating with windows overlooking a large courtyard. Dust swarmed like a school of fish in the sunlight streaming in through the windows. Zen had already left the other early visitors far behind, and this part of the museums was deserted. At the end of the gallery, he turned left into a chamber hung with enormous battle scenes, then down a staircase to a suite of rooms on the lower floor overlooking a courtyard patrolled by a Swiss Guard. Zen smiled wryly, thinking of the night before. Following their hasty exit from the house where Giovanni Grimaldi had been murdered, he and Gilberto Nieddu had climbed down a fire escape into the internal courtyard of a building in the next street and then sneaked past the lodge where the
portiere
was watching television.