Cabal - 3 (29 page)

‘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,
dottó
.’

‘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?’

Zen chuckled.

‘Bearing recent experiences in mind, I’m sure you’ll understand if I decline to answer just now. Tapping a phone in the Vatican is a matter for professionals like Grimaldi, but any radio ham can listen in to a mobile phone.’

The connection went dead. For a moment Zen thought that the man had hung up, but he came back at once, calling ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘It was only interference,’ Zen assured him. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily!’

‘What is it you want?’

‘I’ll tell you when we meet this afternoon.’

‘Impossible! I have a …’

Once again the connection was broken for several moments.

‘… until six thirty or seven. I could see you then.’

‘Very well.’

‘Come to my office,’ the man said after a long pause. ‘It’s just off Piazza del Duomo. The main entrance is closed at that time, but you can come in the emergency exit at the back. The place was burgled last week and the lock hasn’t been repaired yet. It’s in Via Foscolo, next to the chemist’s, the green door without a number. My offices are on the top floor.’

In Piazza della Repubblica, Zen boarded a two-coach orange tram marked ‘Porta Vittoria’. A notice above the large wooden-framed windows set out in considerable detail the conditions governing the transport of live fish and fowl. Goldfish and chicks, Zen learned, would be conveyed (up to a maximum of two per passenger) providing that the containers, which might under no circumstances be larger than a ‘normal parcel or shoe box’, were neither rough nor splintery, dirty nor foul-smelling, nor yet of such a form as to cause injury to other passengers. The remainder of the text, which laid down the penalties for flaunting these regulations, was too small to read with the naked eye, but the implication was that any anarchistic hotheads who took it upon themselves to carry goldfish or chicks on trams without due regard for the provisions heretofore mentioned would be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law.

Zen recalled the bewilderment of the Japanese businessmen as he barged in like a truculent drunk and attempted to commandeer their taxi. ‘Is it always like this?’ they were clearly asking themselves. ‘Is this the rule, or just an exception?’ If they really wanted to understand Italy, they could do worse than give up taxis, take to public transport and ponder the mysteries of a system which legislated for circumstances verging on the surreal yet was unable to ensure that the majority of its users even bought a ticket.

He got off at the stop opposite the Palazzo di Giustizia and ran the gauntlet of the traffic speeding across the herringbone pattern of smooth stone slabs. As he reached the safety of the kerb, a taxi drew up and Antonia Simonelli got out. She looked severe and tense.

‘It was Zeppegno all right,’ she nodded. ‘There doesn’t seem any question that it was suicide.’

There was a squeal of tyres at the kerb and someone called his name. Turning round, he found himself face to face with Tania Biacis. Another taxi had pulled up behind the first. The young man who had left the hotel with Tania sat watching from the rear seat of the taxi with an expression of alarm.

‘Okay, Aurelio,’ shouted Tania, thrusting a finger aggressively towards Antonia Simonelli. ‘I’ve asked you before and I ask you again. Who is she?’

Arm in arm, visibly reconciled, Tania and Zen walked across the pedestrianized expanses of Piazza del Duomo. At the far end, the upper storeys of several buildings were completely hidden behind a huge hoarding displaying three faces represented on the gargantuan scale which Zen associated with the images of Marx, Lenin and Stalin that had once looked down on May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square. But like Catholicism, its old rival, Communism was no longer a serious contender in the ideological battle for hearts and minds. The icon which dominated Milan’s Cathedral Square was that of the United Colors of Benetton: the vast, unsmiling features of a Nordic woman, a Black woman and an Asian baby. These avatars of the new order, representatives of a world united by the ascendant creed of consumerism, gazed down on the masses whose aspirations they embodied with a look that was at once intense and vapid.

‘They’re suing the hospital,’ said Tania.

‘Good for them.’

‘This is all between us, but apparently Romizi’s wife was having an affair with Bernardo Travaglini.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Once she’d got over the shock of Carlo’s death, she got in touch with Bernardo and told him her suspicions about what happened. He and De Angelis went round to the hospital with a couple of uniformed men in a squad car and put the fear of God into the director.’

Zen could easily picture the scene, the two plainclothes officials wandering menacingly about the director’s office, their words a mixture of bureaucratic minutiae and paranoia-inducing innuendo, while their uniformed cohorts guarded the door. Yes, Giorgio and Bernardo would have had the director eating out of their hands in no time at all. The irony was that Zen might have done something of the sort himself if he hadn’t been so convinced that Carlo had been the victim of the Cabal. But it now appeared that Romizi’s death had been caused by a different sort of plot.

‘Under pressure from Travaglini and De Angelis, the director came up with the name of the intern who visited Romizi that night,’ Tania continued. ‘When they called on him, the intern claimed that he had been acting on orders. He’d never been trained to use life-support equipment, and had no idea what the effect would be. He was told to reset such-and-such a knob to such-and-such a setting, and that’s what he did.’

‘They needed the bed?’

Tania shrugged.

‘That’s what it looks like. The hospital is denying the whole thing, of course. Signora Romizi’s suing the hospital, the intern and the doctor in charge have been suspended, and the Procura has opened a file on the affair.’

They crossed the square and entered the glazed main aisle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The elegant mall was almost empty, the offices on the upper floors and the exclusive shops at ground level both shut. Tania lingered for some time in front of a window displaying the latest creations from the teeming imagination of the legendary Falco. With a shove half-playful, half-serious, Zen propelled her towards the one establishment still open for business, the Café Biffi. They sat outside, under the awnings whose function here was purely decorative, in an area cordoned off from the aisle by a row of potted plants on stands. Tania opted for a breaded veal cutlet and salad. Zen said he’d have the same.

‘But if you specialize in products from the Friuli,’ Zen asked, picking up a conversation they had had earlier, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘We want to diversify, keeping the original concept of traditionally-made items from small producers whom a big exporter company won’t handle because they can’t deliver in quantity. Primo is based here in Milan, so …’

‘Don’t tell me he’s a farmer!’

‘God, you don’t let up, do you?’

Her look wavered on the edge of the brink of a real challenge. Don’t push me too hard, it said. Zen grinned in a way he knew she found irresistible.

‘You know what the police are like.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They’re bastards.’

Their food arrived, and for a while everything else was forgotten. It was almost two o’clock by now, and they were starving. Once the embarrassment and confusion of the initial confrontation in front of the lawcourts had been cleared up, there had been no time to do anything but arrange to meet later. Then Zen had accompanied Antonia Simonelli to her office, where he provided her with a detailed and largely accurate account of the circumstances in which Ludovico Ruspanti had died, while Tania had gone off to ‘talk business’ with Primo.

Now they were together again, other commitments suspended for an hour. But although both seemed eager to dispel the suspicions which had arisen as a result of past evasions, the explanations and revelations came unevenly, in fits and starts, a narrative line deflected by questions and digressions, forging ahead towards the truth but leaving pockets of ambiguity and equivocation to be mopped up afterwards. Amongst these was the one Zen had just tackled, and to which he returned once they had satisfied their immediate hunger.

‘So, about Primo …’

Tania wiped her lips with a napkin which looked as though it had been carved from marble.

‘Primo is a middleman representing a network of small producers stretching from Naples to Catanzaro.’

Zen nodded slowly.

‘Oh, you mean he works for the mob! No wonder he can afford to stay at that fancy hotel. They probably own it.’

Tania twitched the hem of her cream skirt.

‘Aurelio, I’m going to get really angry in a moment. Quite apart from anything else, it so happens that
I’m
the one who’s staying there.’