Cabal - 3 (21 page)

These reflections were much in Zen’s mind as he arrived at the ponderous block in Piazza dell’Indipendenza which housed the consulate of a minor South American republic, three
pensioni
patronized largely by American backpackers, a cut-price dental surgery, a beauty salon, and the headquarters of Paragon Security Consultants. Zen was still too shocked by the reality of what had happened to work out the long-term implications, but of one thing he was absolutely determined. The file which had cost Carlo Romizi his life was going to give up its secrets. If that part of the database was ‘closed’, then he would break in. Zen had no idea how to do this, but he felt sure that Gilberto Nieddu would know someone who did.

Gilberto at first seemed something less than enchanted to see his friend.

‘No!’ he cried as Zen walked in. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’

‘I haven’t said anything yet.’

‘I don’t care! Jesus, last time I agree to look at a faulty water heater for you, and what happens? Not only do I end up having to tear-gas the Carabinieri and then risk my neck escaping across the rooftops, but when I get home my wife assaults me with the pasta rolling-pin, accusing me of having another woman on the side! Well that
was
the last time, Aurelio, the very last! From now on …’

Zen got out his cigarettes and offered them to Nieddu, who ignored the gesture.

‘I’m really sorry about that, Gilberto. You see, I’d told my mother I was in Florence so that I could spend a few nights with a friend. We should all get together some time. You’d like her. She’s called Tania and …’

‘Oh I see! You sin and I pay the price.’

‘I’ll explain to Rosella …’

‘If she thinks that I’ve buddy-buddied you into covering up for me, she’ll kill us both.’

‘All right then, I’ll get
Tania
to call her.’

‘She’d assume that she was my mistress, pretending to be yours. Can you imagine what Rosella would do if she thought I’d tried to con her like that? Sardinian girls learn how to castrate pigs when they’re five years old. And they don’t forget.’

Zen blew a cloud of smoke at the rows of box-files and tape containers stacked on the shelves.

‘She’ll get over it, Gilberto. It might even be a good thing in the end. There’s nothing like jealousy to liven up a marriage.’

‘Spare me the pearls of wisdom, Aurelio. I’m up to my eyes in work.’

He bent ostentatiously over a blueprint of an office building which was spread out across his desk.

‘I need to see some classified information held in a computer database,’ said Zen.

Nieddu unstoppered an orange highlight pen and marked a feature on the plan.

‘I was wondering how you’d go about that,’ Zen went on.

‘Who runs the computer?’ asked Nieddu without looking up.

‘The Ministry.’

The Sardinian shot him a quick glance.

‘But you have clearance to that.’

‘Not this part.’

Nieddu shook his head and pored over the blueprint again.

‘I know someone who can do it. It’ll cost you, though.’

‘That’s no problem. But it’s urgent. I have to go up to Milan on the early train tomorrow, and I need to set it up before leaving. What’s the address?’

‘I’ll run you out there before lunch.’

‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble, Gilberto.’

Nieddu gave him a peculiar smile.

‘You’d never find the place,’ he said. ‘And anyway, you don’t just turn up. You have to be
presented
.’

The new metro was going to be wonderful when it was finished, but then Romans had been saying that about one grandiose and disruptive construction project or another ever since Nero set about rebuilding the city after the disastrous fire of July 64. The national pastime of
dietrologia
, ‘the facts behind the facts’, was also well established by that time, and many people held that the blaze had been started deliberately so as to facilitate the Emperor’s redevelopment scheme. Nero’s response to these scurrilous rumours of state terrorism had an equally familiar ring. The whole affair was blamed on an obscure and unpopular sect of religious fanatics influenced by foreign ideologies such as monotheism and millennialism. One of the victims of the resulting campaign of persecution was a Jewish fisherman named Simon Peter, who was crucified in the Imperial Circus and buried near by, in a tomb hollowed out of the flank of the Vatican hill.

This stirring historical perspective, far from inspiring Aurelio Zen to a sense of wonder and pride, merely intensified his oppressive conviction that nothing ever changed. Being stuck for twenty minutes at Garbatella station because of a signalling fault hadn’t exactly helped his mood. The work in progress to integrate the grubby old Ostia railway into the revamped Metropolitana B line to EUR had resulted in the partial paralysis of services on both. Nevertheless, it would be wonderful when it was finished – until it started to fall apart like the A line, which been open for less than a decade and already looked and smelt like a blocked sewer.

The short walk to the office where Tullio Bevilacqua worked helped restore Zen’s spirits, although he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting this to anyone. For both political and aesthetic reasons, it was wholly unacceptable to admire the monumental EUR complex, conceived in the late thirties for a world fair designed to show off the achievements of Fascist Italy. The war put an end to the project for an
Esposizione
Universale di Roma
, but the architectural investment survived and, as usual in Rome, was recycled for purposes quite different from that intended by its creator.

The resulting complex – the only example of twentieth-century urban planning attempted in the capital since the First World War – had a freakish, hallucinogenic appearance at once monumental and two-dimensional, like a film set designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a production by Dino de Laurentiis. The vast rectangular blocks of white masonry evenly distributed along either side of the broad straight thoroughfares locked together at right angles created a succession of perspectives which seemed designed to demonstrate and also subvert the laws of perspective. Despite the crushing scale and geometric regularity, the effect was curiously insubstantial, abstract and ethereal, diametrically opposed both to the poky confines of the old city centre and to the sprawling jumble of the unplanned
borgate
on the outskirts.

Tullio Bevilacqua looked like a caricature of his brother, the same features exaggerated into an extravagance larger than life. Tullio was not just overweight but grossly fat. His balding scalp was beaded with sweat, his nose glistened with grease, his moustache bristled and curled in anarchic abandon. Seeing him, Zen felt his first twinge of sympathy for fastidious, pedantic Mauro.

Zen introduced himself as Luigi Borsellino and outlined the cover story which he had prepared.

‘The case is still
sub judice
, but without going into details I can tell you that it concerns a drug-smuggling ring which has been bringing in heroin in consignments of tinned tuna from Thailand destined for the Vatican supermarket. Such goods are exempt from inspection by our customs officials, of course. The box containing the hot tuna is then moved across the unguarded frontier into Italy for distribution.’

Bevilacqua raised his eyebrows and whistled. Zen nodded.

‘The problem is that the resulting scandal would be so damaging for the Vatican that unless we go to them with a watertight case they might try and hush it up. What we’re doing at the moment is assembling a jigsaw of apparently unrelated pieces, one of which consists of some papers which we believe may be concealed in the Archives. But since we’re not liaising officially with the Vatican, we have no way of getting at them. That’s why your assistance would be invaluable – if you would be prepared to collaborate.’

He needn’t have worried. Tullio Bevilacqua was one of those men who are fascinated by police work. He clearly felt thrilled and privileged at the idea of becoming a part of this investigation, even on the basis of such a flimsy briefing. Zen had been prepared for awkward questions and hard bargaining, but Tullio had no more intention of quibbling about the details than a small boy who has been invited on to the footplate by the engine driver will stop to ask where the train is going.

‘We believe that the papers have been concealed in or near the document filed under this reference,’ Zen explained.

He passed Bevilacqua a card on which he had written the sequence of numbers and letters which Giovanni Grimaldi had noted in his diary.

‘Do we know what it looks like?’ asked the new recruit.

What a thrill that ‘we’ gave him!

‘It’s probably a number of typed pages, possibly with a printed heading of some sort to make it look official. In any case, it should stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of all those mediaeval manuscripts. Don’t worry about the contents. The information we need will be coded. Just get us the document and we’ll take care of the rest.’

Zen hoped that Grimaldi would have had the sense to remove any reference to Ruspanti on the cover of the transcript, and that the document itself would conform to the standard practice, identifying the telephone numbers involved rather than the speakers’ names. At any rate, Tullio Bevilacqua gave every impression of having been convinced by the story Zen had told him, and promised to do what he could to help. He gave Zen his home phone number and told him to ring between seven and eight that evening.

At the intersection just beyond offices of the
assessorato
alla cultura
, four sets of converging façades combined to produce a perspective of vertiginous symmetry. Zen stood motionless at the kerb, gazing at the seemingly endless vistas on every side. In the even pearly light, the outlines of the buildings appeared to blur and merge into the expanse of the sky. It was impossible to say how much time passed before the metallic grey Lancia Thema screeched to a halt beside him.

‘Hop in,’ said Gilberto Nieddu.

The Sardinian had changed out of the jeans and poloneck he had been wearing earlier that morning into a sleek suit with matching tie and display handkerchief.

‘You look like a pimp at a wedding,’ Zen told him sourly as they swept off along the broad central boulevard running the length of EUR.

‘I’ve got an important lunch coming up,’ explained Nieddu. ‘It’s all very well for you, Aurelio. You can wear any old tat. In business, if you want to be rich and successful you have to look like you already are.’

Zen flushed indignantly. His suits came from an elderly tailor in Venice who had once supplied his father. They might not be in the latest style, but they were sober, durable, well-cut and of excellent cloth. To hear them denigrated was like hearing someone speak ill of a friend.

‘You sound like that jerk I saw on television yesterday,’ he retorted. ‘He claims that you are what you wear.’

‘Falco?’ exclaimed Nieddu. ‘He’s a genius.’

‘What!’

‘Well he’s done all right for himself, hasn’t he? Which reminds me, have you got the cash?’

‘Of course I’ve got it.’

The envelope containing the five fifty-thousand-lire notes was safely lodged in his jacket pocket. At this rate he was going to be broke by the New Year. They left the confines of EUR and drove along a road whose original vocation as a winding country lane was still perceptible despite the encroaching sprawl of concrete towers and jerry-built shacks which continually spilt across it. Nieddu punched the buttons of the radio without finding anything which satisfied him.

‘Want to hear a joke?’ he said. ‘This priest is playing bowls with the village drunk. Every time the drunk misses his shot, he yells, “Jesus wept!” “Don’t take Our Lord’s name in vain,” the priest tells him. Next shot, the drunk is wide again. “Jesus wept!” “If you blaspheme like that, God will strike you dead,” warns the priest. They play again, again the drunk misses. “Jesus wept!” Sure enough, a black thundercloud covers the sky, a bolt of lightning sizzles down and strikes dead … the priest. And from the heavens comes a tremendous cry, “
Jesus wept!
”’

Nieddu turned off on to a dirt track running through an enclave of shacks and shanties to the right of the tarred road. The Lancia bumped over dried mud ruts and a collapsed culvert. Three toddlers standing on a rusty pick-up perched on concrete blocks watched solemnly as they passed by. Just before the track turned left to rejoin the road, Nieddu stopped the car.

Like its neighbours, the house at the corner had apparently been cobbled together out of materials scavenged from other jobs. The walls were formed from breezeblocks, roof tiles, bricks of varying shape and shade, and sections of concrete and tile piping, all stuck together with plenty of rough thick cement. The property seemed to have grown organically, like a souk, further sections being added as and when required. Some of these were roofed with tiles, others with corrugated iron or asbestos sheeting, one with a sagging tarpaulin. There were few windows, and one of these, its wooden frame painted a lurid shade of puce, was nailed to the outside of the wall, presumably for decorative effect. The house was surrounded by a large expanse of bare earth, every growing thing having been consumed by the pigs and goats which roamed the property freely except for a small fenced-off area of kitchen garden. The entire lot was surrounded by a mesh fence against which two savage-looking mongrels were hurling themselves, their fangs bared at the intruders.

Nieddu locked the car, having first set and tested an alarm which briefly silenced the dogs. As he and Zen walked up to the gate they renewed their aggressive clamour, only to be stilled again, this time by a voice from inside the house. The front door opened and a shapeless, ageless creature appeared on the step. It was wearing a long robe of bright yellow silk, a crimson sash and a tiara set with green, blue and red stones.

Gilberto Nieddu raised his right hand in a gesture of salutation.