Cabal - 3 (3 page)

Things notoriously turned out differently from what one had expected, of course, but Zen was so used to them turning out worse, or at any rate
less
, that he found himself continually disconcerted by what had actually happened. Tania loved him, for a start. That was something he had certainly never expected. He had grown accustomed to thinking of himself as essentially unlovable, and he was finding it difficult – almost painful – to abandon the idea. He was comfortable with it, as with a well-worn pair of shoes. It would no longer do, though. Tania loved him, and that was all there was to it.

She loved him, but she didn’t want to live with him. This fact was equally as real as the first, yet to Zen they were incompatible. How could you love someone with that passionate intensity, yet still insist on keeping your distance? It didn’t make any sense, particularly for a woman. But there it was. He had invited Tania to move in with him and she had refused. ‘I’ve spent the last eight years of my life living with a man, Aurelio. I married young. I’ve never known anything else. Now I’m finally free, I don’t just want to lock myself up again, even with you.’ And that was that, a fact as unexpected and irreducible as her love, handed him to take or leave.

He’d taken it, of course. More than that, he’d schemed and grafted to grant her the independence she wanted, and then conceal from her that it was all a sham, subsidized by him. If Italian divorce rates were still relatively low, this was due less to the waning influence of the Church than to the harsh facts of the property market. Accommodation was just too expensive for most single people to afford. When Zen and his wife had broken up, they had been forced to go on living together for almost a year until one of Luisella’s cousins found room to take her in. Tania’s clerical job at the Ministry of the Interior had been a nice little perk for the Bevilacqua household, but it was quite inadequate to support Tania in the independent single state to which she aspired.

So Zen had stepped into the breach. The first place he’d come up with had been a room in a hotel near the station which had been retained by the police for use in a drug surveillance operation. In fact the subject of the investigation had been killed in a shoot-out with a rival gang several months earlier, but the officer in charge had neglected to report this and had been subletting the room to Brazilian transvestite prostitutes. As illegal immigrants, the
viados
were in no position to complain. Neither was Zen’s informant, a former colleague from the Questura, since the officer in question was one of his superiors, but Zen was under no such constraints. He sought the man out, and by a mixture of veiled threats and an appeal to masculine complicity had got him to agree to let Zen’s ‘friend’ have the use of the room for a few months.

It was only when they met at the hotel to exchange keys that Zen quite realized what he’d got himself into. Quite apart from the transvestites and the pushers, the room was filthy, noisy, and stank. It was unthinkable that he could ever suggest that Tania move in there, still less visit her, surrounded by the sounds and smells of commercial sex. Unfortunately they had already celebrated the good news, so he had had to find an alternative, and quickly.

The solution came through an expatriate acquaintance of Ellen, Zen’s former lover, who had been renting a flat right in the old centre of the city. The property had been let as an office, to get around the
equa canone
fair rent laws, and the landlord took advantage of this to impose a twenty per cent increase after the first year. The American quickly found an apartment he liked even better, but in order to cause his ex-landlord as much grief as possible, he suggested that Tania come and live in the original flat as his ‘guest’, thus forcing the owner to go through a lengthy and costly procedure to obtain a court order for his eviction. The rent still had to be paid, however, and since Zen had boasted of his cleverness in getting Tania a place for nothing – he told her that the American was away for some months and wanted someone to keep an eye on the flat – he had to foot the bill.

In the bedroom, Tania removed her clothes with an unselfconscious ease which always astonished Zen. Most women he’d known preferred to undress in private, or in the intimacy of an embrace. But Tania pulled off her jeans, tights and panties like a child going swimming, revealing her long leggy beauty, and then pulled back the covers of the bed and lay down half-covered while Zen was still taking off his jacket. Her straightforwardness made it easy for him, too. His doubts and anxieties dropped away with his clothes. As he slipped between the cool sheets and grasped Tania’s warm, silky-smooth flesh, he reflected that there was a lot to be said for the human body, despite everything.

‘What’s that?’ Tania asked some time later, raising her head above the covers.

Zen raised his head and listened. The silent dimness of the bedroom had been infiltrated by an electronic tone, muffled but just audible, coming in regular, incessant bursts.

‘Sounds like an alarm.’

Tania raised herself up on one elbow.

‘Mine’s one of the old ones, with a bell.’

They lay side by side, the hairs on their forearms just touching. The noise continued relentlessly. Eventually Tania sat up like a cat, flexing her back, and crawled to the end of the bed.

‘It seems to be coming from your jacket, Aurelio.’

Zen pulled the covers over his head and gave vent to a loud series of blasphemies in Venetian dialect.

‘Your position here is essentially – indeed, necessarily – anomalous. You are required to serve two masters, an undertaking not only fraught with perils and contradictions of all kinds but one which, as you may perhaps recall, is explicitly condemned by the Scriptures.’

Juan Ramón Sánchez-Valdés, archbishop
in partibus infidelium
and deputy to the Cardinal Secretary of State, favoured Aurelio Zen with an arch smile.

‘One might equally well argue, however,’ he continued, ‘that the case is exactly the opposite, and that so far from serving two masters, you are in fact serving neither .As a functionary of the Italian Republic, you have no
locus standi
beyond the frontiers of that state. Neither, clearly, are you formally empowered to act as an agent of either the Vatican City State or the Holy See.’

Zen raised his hand to his mouth, resting his chin on the curved thumb. He sniffed his fingers, still redolent of Tania’s vagina.

‘Yet here I am.’

‘Here you are,’ the archbishop agreed. ‘Despite all indications to the contrary.’

And just my luck too, thought Zen sourly. Like every other Criminalpol official, he had to take his turn on the night duty roster, on call if the need should arise. In Zen’s case it never had, which is why he hadn’t at first recognized the electronic pager which had sounded while he and Tania were in bed. He shifted in his elegant but uncomfortable seat. Unachieved coition made his testicles ache, a common enough sensation in his adolescence but latterly only a memory. Tania had said she’d wait up for him, but it remained to be seen when – or even whether – he would be able to return to the flat.

On phoning in, he’d been told to report to the Polizia dello Stato command post in St Peter’s Square. The telephonist he spoke to was reading a dictated message and could not elaborate. The taxi had dropped him at the edge of the square, and he walked round the curve of Bernini’s great colonnade. As part of the Vatican City State, St Peter’s Square is theoretically off-bounds to the Italian police, but in practice their help in patrolling it is appreciated by the overstretched Vigilanza. But this is strictly the small change of police work, concerned above all with the pickpockets and the ‘scourers’, men who infiltrate themselves into the crowds attending papal appearances with the aim of touching up as many distracted females as possible. The high-level contacts between the Vatican security force and the police’s anti-terrorist DIGOS squad, set up in the wake of the shooting of Pope John Paul II, were conducted at a quite different level.

The patrolman on duty called a number in the Vatican and announced Zen’s arrival. He then waited a few minutes for a return call, before escorting Zen to an enormous pair of bronze doors near by, where two Swiss Guards in ceremonial uniforms stood clutching halberds. Between them stood a thin man with a face like a hatchet, wearing a black cassock and steel-rimmed glasses, who introduced himself as Monsignor Enrico Lamboglia. He inspected Zen’s identification, dismissed the patrolman, and led his visitor along a seemingly interminable corridor, up a set of stairs leading off to the right, and through a sequence of galleried corridors to a conference room on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, where he was ushered into the presence of Archbishop Juan Ramón Sánchez-Valdés.

The Deputy Cardinal Secretary of State was short and stout, with a face which seemed too large to fit his skull, and had thus spilled over at the edges in an abundance of domed forehead, drooping jowls and double chins. His dull green eyes, exposed by the flight of flesh towards the periphery of the face, were large and prominent, giving him an air of slightly scandalized astonishment. He was wearing cheap grey slacks, a dark-green pullover with leather patches on the elbows, and an open-necked shirt. This casual dress, however, did not detract from the formidable air of authority and competence he radiated as he reclined in a red velvet armchair, his right arm resting on an antique table whose highly polished surface was bare except for a white telephone. The hatchet-faced cleric who had escorted Zen stood slightly behind and to one side of the archbishop’s chair, his head lowered and his hands interlocked on his chest as though in prayer. On the other side of the oriental rug which covered the centre of the lustrous marble floor, Zen sat on a long sofa flanking one wall. Three dark canvases depicting miracles and martyrdoms hung opposite. At the end of the room was a floor-length window, covered by lace curtaining and framed by heavy red velvet drapes.

‘However, let us leave the vexed issue of your precise status, and move on to the matter in hand.’

Several decades in the Curia had erased almost all traces of Sánchez-Valdés’s Latin-American Spanish. He fixed Zen with his glaucous, hypnotic gaze.

‘As you may have gathered, there was a suicide in St Peter’s this afternoon. Someone threw himself off the gallery inside the dome. Such incidents are quite common, and do not normally require the attention of this department. In the present instance, however, the victim was not some jilted maidservant or ruined shopkeeper, but Prince Ludovico Ruspanti.’

The archbishop looked significantly at Zen, who raised one eyebrow.

‘Of course, the Ruspantis are no longer the power they were a few hundred years ago,’ Sánchez-Valdés continued, ‘or for that matter when the old Prince, Filippo, was alive. Nevertheless, the name still counts for something, and no family, much less an eminent one, likes having a
felo de se
among its number. The remaining members of the clan can therefore be expected to throw their not-inconsiderable weight into a concerted effort to discredit the suicide verdict. They have already issued a statement claiming that Ruspanti suffered from vertigo, and that even if he had decided to end his life, it is therefore inconceivable that he should have chosen to do so in such a way.’

The middle finger of Sánchez-Valdés’s right hand, adorned by a heavy silver ring, tapped the tabletop emphatically.

‘To make matters worse, Ruspanti’s name has of course been in the news recently as a result of these allegations of currency fraud. To be perfectly honest, I never really managed to master the ins and outs of the affair, but I know enough about the way the press operates to anticipate the kind of malicious allegations which this is certain to give rise to. We may confidently expect suggestions, more or less explicit, to the effect that from the point of view of certain people, who must of course remain nameless, Ruspanti’s death could hardly have been more convenient or better-timed, etcetera, etcetera. Do you see?’

Zen nodded. Sánchez-Valdés shook his head and sighed.

‘The fact is, dottore, that for a variety of reasons which we have no time to analyse now, this little city state, whose sole object is to facilitate the spiritual work of the Holy Father, is the object of an inordinate degree of morbid fascination on the part of the general public. People seem to believe that we are a mediaeval relic which has survived intact into the twentieth century, rife with secrecy, skulduggery and intrigue, at once sinister and colourful. Since such a Vatican doesn’t in fact exist, they invent it. You saw the results when poor Luciani died after only thirty days as pope. Admittedly, the announcement was badly handled. Everyone was shocked by what had happened, and there were inevitably delays and conflicting stories. As a result, we are still plagued by the most appalling and offensive rumours, to the effect that John Paul I was poisoned or suffocated by members of his household, and the crime covered up.

‘Now a prince is not a pope, and Ludovico Ruspanti no Albino Luciani. Nevertheless, we have learned our lesson the hard way. This time we’re determined to leave nothing to chance. That is why you’ve been invited to give us the benefit of your expert opinion, dottore. Since Ruspanti died on Vatican soil, we are under no
legal
obligation to consult anyone whatsoever. In the circumstances, however, and so as to leave no room for doubt in anyone’s mind, we have voluntarily decided to ask an independent investigator to review the facts and confirm that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding this tragic event.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘There’s no need for that, Your Excellency.’

Sánchez-Valdés frowned.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Zen leaned forward confidentially.

‘I’m from Venice, just like Papa Luciani. If the Church says that this man committed suicide, that’s good enough for me.’

The archbishop glanced up at Monsignor Lamboglia. He laughed uneasily.