Cabal - 3 (6 page)

Tania had told Aurelio nothing of all this. Her nominal reason for reticence was that he was a senior Ministry official, and although everyone knew perfectly well what went on in the way of moonlighting, scams and general private enterprise, she didn’t want to compromise her lover by making him a party to activities which were theoretically punishable by instant dismissal, loss of pension rights and even a prison sentence. Tania was pretty sure that no one would throw the book at
her
. The rules were never enforced on principle, only as a result of someone’s personal schemes for advancement or revenge, and she simply wasn’t important enough to attract that kind of negative compliment. Moreover, as a result of her six years’ service in the Administration section she was now privy to most of her colleagues’ dirty little secrets, which in itself would make any potential whistle-blower think twice.

Aurelio’s situation was quite different. By nature a loner, his reputation damaged by a mistaken fit of zealousness at the time of the Moro affair, he was promoted to the Ministry’s élite Criminalpol squad as a result of an unsavoury deal during his comeback case in Perugia, and had subsequently been connected with a heavily compromised political party at the time of the Burolo affair. As a result, Zen was surrounded by enemies who would like nothing better than to implicate him in a case involving misuse of bureaucratic resources and conspiracy to defraud the state, not to mention a little matter of undeclared taxes amounting to several million lire.

The fact that they were lovers would just make the whole scandal even more juicy, but it also explained Tania’s unadmitted reason for not telling Aurelio about the success of Agrofrul. She was well aware that the story he had told her about the flat was not true. It supposedly belonged to an American who was out of the country on business for a few months and was happy to have someone looking after the place, but this was clearly nonsense. Where were this American’s belongings? Why did he never get any post? Above all, why had he handed it over free of charge to the friend of a friend, a person he’d never even met, when he could have sub-let it for a small fortune? Flats as gorgeous as that, in such a sought-after district, didn’t just fall into your lap free of charge. Someone was paying for it, and in the present case that someone could only be Aurelio Zen.

This put Tania in an awkward position. Eight years of marriage to Mauro Bevilacqua had left her with no illusions about the fragility of the male ego, or the destructive passions that can be unleashed without the slightest warning when it feels slighted. She knew that Zen had already been hurt by her refusal to move in with him, and she guessed that his belief that he was supporting her financially might well be the necessary salve for this wound. He could accept Tania’s independence as long as he was secretly subsidizing it, as long as he believed that she was only
playing
at being free. But how would he react if he learned that his mistress was in fact the senior partner in a business with a turnover which already exceeded his salary by a considerable amount? She had no wish to lose him, this strange, moody individual who could be so passionately there one moment, so transparently distant the next, who seemed to float through life as though he had nothing to hope or fear from it. She wanted to know him, if anyone could, and to be known in return. But not possessed. No one would ever own her again, on that she was quite adamant.

She pulled the phone over, got an outside line and then dialled a restaurant in Stockholm’s business district where a brambly
refosco
made by a relative of Aldo’s sister had become a cult wine. The distributor who had been importing Agrofrul’s produce had recently gone bankrupt and the restaurant now wanted to know if they could obtain supplies direct. Using her limited but serviceable English, Tania ascertained that the proprietor had not yet arrived but would call back. She lit a cigarette and turned her attention to the newspaper open on the desk in front of her, which was making great play with allegations of a cover-up in the death of a Roman nobleman in the Vatican.

Tania turned the page impatiently. She had no appetite for such things any more, the grand scandals which ran and ran for years, as though manipulated by a master storyteller who was always ready with some fresh ‘revelation’ whenever the public interest started to wane. The one thing you could be sure of, the only absolute certainty on offer, was that you would never, ever, know the truth. Whatever you did know was therefore by definition not the truth. Like children playing ‘pass the parcel’, the commentators and analysts tried to guess the nature of the mystery by examining the size, shape and weight of the package in which it had been concealed. But the adult game was even more futile, for once the wrappings had all been removed the parcel always proved to be empty.

The shrilling of the phone interrupted her thoughts. Pulling over the rough jotting of proposals she had prepared for the Swedish restaurateur, Tania lifted the receiver.

‘Good morning,’
she said in English.

‘Who the hell is this?’

The speaker was male, Italian, and very angry. Tania immediately depressed the rest with her finger, breaking the connection. A moment later the phone rang again. She let it go on for some time before lifting her finger and snarling ‘Yes?’ in her best bureaucratic manner, bored and truculent.

‘Is that Biacis?’ demanded the same male voice.

‘Who do you think, the Virgin Mary?’

There was a furious spluttering.

‘Don’t you dare talk like that to me!’

‘And how am I supposed to know how I should talk when you haven’t told me who you are?’ Tania snapped back.

In fact she knew perfectly well who it was, even before the caller angrily identified himself as Lorenzo Moscati, head of the Criminalpol division. Within the caste system of the Ministry, Moscati was a person of considerable stature, whose relation to a mere Grade II administrative assistant such as Tania was roughly that of one of the figures in the higher reaches of a baroque ceiling-piece, almost invisible in the refulgence of his glory, to one of the extras supporting clouds or propping up sunbeams in the bottom left-hand corner. But Tania didn’t give a damn. As a successful independent businesswoman, she had no reason to be impressed by some shit-for-brains with the right party card and an influential clique behind him. Even the Russians were finally having second thoughts about the virtues of such a system. Only the Italian state apparatus remained utterly immune to the effects of
glasnost
.

‘Zen, Aurelio!’ Moscati shouted.

‘What about him?’

‘Where is he?’

‘How should I know? This isn’t Personnel.’

Moscati’s voice modulated to a tone of unctuous viciousness.

‘I am aware of that, my dear, but all Ciliani can tell me is that he’s off sick. So I called his home number and asked if I could speak to the invalid, only to find that his mother hasn’t seen him since yesterday and seems to think he’s gone to Florence for work.’

‘So? What have I to do with it?’

Moscati gave a nasty chuckle.

‘To be perfectly honest, I thought he might be holed up at your little love-nest.’

Tania gasped involuntarily. Moscati chuckled again, more confidently now.

‘No wonder he needs a day off to recover, poor fellow,’ he continued in the tone of silken brutality he used with female underlings. ‘All that night service, and at his age, too. Anyway, that’s another matter. The fact is that our Aurelio is deep in the shit, wherever he may be. Have you seen the papers? These allegations are extremely serious, even alarming, but as his colleague I naturally feel a certain solidarity. That’s why I’m giving him one last chance to put things right. Have him call me, now.’

He hung up. Tania stubbed out her cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, and dialled a Rome number. It rang for some time before a sleepy voice answered.

‘Yes?’

‘Did I wake you, sweetheart?’ she asked gently.

A pleased grunt.

‘Not exactly. I’ve been lying here beside you. The pillow is still shaped by your head, and the sheets smell of you. There’s really quite a lot of you still here.’

‘More than there is here, believe me. Look, I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but Moscati has been on to me. He’s after your blood for some reason.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Why did he call you?’ Zen asked.

He sounded wide awake now.

‘He knows, Aurelio.’

‘He can’t!’

The exclamation was as involuntary as a cry of pain.

‘I’m afraid he does,’ said Tania. ‘And about the flat, too.’

A silence. Zen sighed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered almost inaudibly.

‘It doesn’t make any difference. Not to me, at any rate.

You’d better phone him, Aurelio. It sounded urgent.’

Another sigh.

‘Any other messages?’

Tania leafed through the mail for the Criminalpol department, which she planned to deliver when the pressures of business permitted.

‘Just a telegram.’

‘Let’s have it.’

Tania tore open the envelope and read the brief typed message.

‘It sounds like some loony,’ she told him.

‘What does it say?’

‘“If you wish to get these deaths in the proper perspective, apply at the green gates in the piazza at the end of Via Santa Sabina.”’

He grunted.

‘No name?’

‘Nothing. Don’t go, Aurelio. It could be a nutter.’

She sounded nervous, memories of Vasco Spadola’s deadly vendetta still fresh in her mind.

‘When was it sent?’

‘Just after five yesterday afternoon, from Piazza San Silvestro.’

He yawned.

‘All right. I’d better ring Moscati now.’

‘What’s it all about, Aurelio? He said it was in the papers.’

‘Well, well. Fame at last.’

Tania said nothing.

‘I’ll ring you later about tonight,’ he told her. ‘And don’t worry. It’s just work, not life and death.’

The letters had been faxed from the Vatican City State to the Rome offices of five national newspapers about ten o’clock on Monday evening. The time had been well chosen. The following day’s editions were about to go to bed, while most people in the Vatican had already done so. There was thus no time to follow up the startling allegations which the letter contained, still less to get an official reaction from the Vatican Press Office, notoriously reticent and dilatory at the best of times.

The anonymous writer had thoughtfully included a list of the publications to whom he had sent copies of the document. The editors phoned each other. Yes, they’d seen the thing. Well, they were undecided, really. They weren’t in the habit of printing unsubstantiated accusations, although these did seem to have a certain ring of authenticity, and if by chance they were true then of course … Nevertheless, in the end all five agreed that it would be wiser to hold back until the whole thing could be properly investigated. Chuckling with glee at their craftiness in securing this exclusive scoop, each then phoned the newsroom to hold the front page. Here was a story which had everything: a colourful and notorious central character, a background rife with financial and political skulduggery, and – best of all – the Vatican connection.

Aurelio Zen read the reports as his taxi crawled through the dense traffic, making so little progress that at times he had the impression that they were being carried backwards, like a boat with the tide against it. He had bought
La Stampa
, his usual paper, as well as
La
Repubblica, II Corriere della Sera
, and, for a no-holds-barred view, the radical
II Manifesto
. Each served up the rich and spicy raw materials with varying degrees of emphasis and presentation, but all began with a résumé of the affair so far which inevitably centred on the enigmatic figure of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti, an inveterate gambler and playboy but also a pillar of the establishment and a prominent member of the Knights of Malta. Unlike the vast majority of the Italian aristocracy – most notoriously the so-called ‘Counts of Ciampino’ created by Vittorio Emanuele III before his departure into exile from that airport in 1944 – the Ruspantis were no parvenus. The family dated back to the fifteenth century, and had at one time or another counted among its members a score of cardinals, a long succession of Papal Knights, a siege hero flayed alive by the Turks, the victim of a street affray with the Orsini clan and a particularly gory uxoricide.

After unification and the collapse of the Papal States, one junior member of the Ruspantis had sensed which way the wind was blowing, moved to the newly emergent power centre in Milan and married into the Falcone family of textile magnates. The others remained in Rome, slowly stagnating. Ludovico’s father, Filippo, had succumbed to the febrile intoxications of Fascism, which had seemed for a time to restore some of the energy and purpose which had been drained from their lives. But this drunken spree was the Ruspantis’ final fling. Filippo survived the war and its immediate aftermath, despite his alleged participation in war crimes during the Ethiopian campaign, but the peace slowly destroyed him. The abolition of papal pomp and ritual in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was the last straw. Prince Filippo took to his bed in the family palazzo on Lungotevere opposite the Villa Farnesina, where he died anathemizing the ‘antipope’ John XXIII who had delivered the Church into the hands of the socialists and freemasons. Lorenzo, the elder of Filippo’s two sons, had been groomed since birth for the day when he would become Prince, but in the event he survived his father by less than a year before his Alfa Romeo was crushed between an overtaking truck and the wall of a motorway tunnel. And thus it was that Ludovico, to whose education and character no one had given a second thought, found himself head of the family at the age of twenty-three.

The young Prince appeared at first a reassuring clone of his late brother, doing and saying all the right things. As well as joining such exclusive secular associations as the Chess Club and the Hunting Club, he also put himself forward for admission to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, like every senior Ruspanti for the previous four hundred years. He hunted hard, gambled often, and busied himself with running the family’s agricultural
tenuta
near Palestrina. His political and social opinions were reassuringly predictable, and he expressed no views on the controversial reforms instituted by John XXIII, or indeed on anything else apart from hunting, gambling and running the aforementioned country estate. The only thing which caused a raised eyebrow among certain ultras was the reconciliation with the family’s mercantile relatives in Milan. This event, which most people considered long overdue, unfortunately came too late for the Falcone parents, who had paid the price of their high industrial and financial profile by falling victim to the Red Brigades, but Ludovico went out of his way to cultivate his cousins Raimondo and Ariana – to such an extent, indeed, that malicious tongues accused him of having conceived an unhealthy passion for the latter, a striking girl who had never fully recovered from her parents’ death. Such improprieties, however, even if such they were, occurred a world away, in the desolate, misty plains of Lombardy. Where it mattered, in the salons of aristocratic Rome, Ludovico’s behaviour seemed absolutely unexceptionable.