Cabal

1

‘… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’

Amplified both by the loudspeaker system and the sonorous acoustics of the great basilica, the celebrant’s voice reverberated with suprahuman authority, seemingly unrelated to the diminutive figure beating his breast like a hammy tenor in some provincial opera house. The fifty or so worshippers who had turned out on this bleak late-November evening were all elderly, and predominantly female. The apse and the chapel of the cattedra, itself a space larger than many churches, had been cordoned off for the service by uniformed attendants, but in other regions of St Peter’s basilica tourists and pilgrims continued to promenade, singly or in groups, dazed by the sheer scale of the sacred and secular claims being made on every side, numbly savouring the bitter taste of their individual insignificance.

For some, the tinkling of the bell, the strains of the organ and the procession of red-clad priest and ministers had come as a welcome relief from these oppressive grandeurs, rather as though afternoon Mass were a dramatic spectacle laid on by the authorities in an attempt to bring this chilly monstrosity to life, a son et lumiere event evoking the religious function it had originally had. Curious as children, they crowded behind the ropes dividing off the apse, gawking at Bernini’s shamelessly showy sunburst and the great papal tombs to either side. For a time the rhythmic cadences of the Latin liturgy held their attention, but during the reading from the Apocalypse of St John many drifted away. Those who remained were fidgety and restless, whispering to each other or rustling through their guide-books.

One man, standing slightly apart on one side of the crowd, was ostentatiously paying no attention at all to the service. He was wearing a suede jacket and a flowery print shirt opened at the neck to display the thick gold chain which nestled in the lush hairs on his chest. His big arms were crossed, the sleeve of the jacket riding up to reveal the gold Rolex Oyster watch on his left wrist, and his large, round, slightly concave face was tilted upwards like a satellite dish tracking some celestial object invisible to the naked eye, high above, in the vast dark recess of the unlighted cupola. Not far away, at the base of one of the massive whorled columns supporting the fantastic canopy of the bronze baldacchino over the papal altar, a woman was also absorbed by the spectacle above. With her grey tweed coat, black tailored wool jacket, calf-length velvet skirt and the white silk scarf over her head, she looked like a designer version of the aged crones who constituted the majority of the congregation. But her lipstick, a blare of brilliant red only partially qualified by her cold blue eyes, sent a very different message.

The homily which followed the reading sounded less like a learned discourse than a spontaneous outburst of sour grapes on the part of the priest, nettled by the poor turn-out. Once upon a time, he complained, the church had been the centre of the community, a privileged place where the people gathered to experience the presence of God. Now what did we see? The shops, discotheques, night clubs, beer bars and fast food outlets were all turning people away, while the churches had never been so empty. The touristic passing trade had by this time largely dispersed, but this line of argument appeared to risk alienating even the core of the congregation, reminding them painfully of their status as a marginalized and anachronistic minority, representatives of an outmoded way of thinking. Coughing, shuffling and inattention became endemic.

A brief diversion was provided by the arrival of a buck-toothed, bespectacled nun, breathless and flurried, clutching a large bouquet of flowers. She apologized to the attendants, who shrugged and waved her through the ropes. Depositing the bouquet on the balustrade surrounding the colossal statue of St Veronica, the nun took her place on a bench near the back of the congregation as the priest began reciting the Credo. A plainclothes security man who had been looking on from the fringes of the crowd walked over, picked up the flowers and inspected them suspiciously, as though they might explode.

‘ Et iterum venturus est cum gloria, judicare vivos et mortuos…’

At first the noise sounded like electronic feedback transmitted via the loudspeakers, then the screech of a low-flying aircraft. One or two departing tourists glanced up towards the looming obscurity of the dome, as the man with the suede jacket and gold chain and the woman in the tweed coat and white scarf had been doing all along. That certainly seemed to be the source of the eerie sound, somewhere between a whine and a growl, which billowed down to fill the basilica like coloured dye in a tank of water. Then someone caught sight of the apparition high above, and screamed. The priest faltered, and even the congregation twisted round to see what was happening. In utter silence all watched the black shape tumbling through the dim expanses towards them.

The sight was an ink-blot test for everyone’s secret fears and fantasies. An arthritic seamstress who lived above an automobile body shop in the Borgo Pio saw the long-desired angel swooping down to release her from the torments of the flesh. A retired chemist from Potenza, on the other hand, visiting the capital for only the second time in his life, recalled the earthquake which had recently devastated his own city and saw a chunk of the dome plummeting down, first token of a general collapse. Others thought confusedly of spiders or bats, super-hero stunts or circus turns. Only one observer knew precisely what was happening, having seen it all before. Giovanni Grimaldi let go of the nun’s bouquet of flowers, which scattered on the marble floor, and reached for his two-way radio.

Subsequent calculations demonstrated that the period of time elapsing between the initial sighting and terminal impact cannot have exceeded four seconds, but to those watching in disbelief and growing horror it was a period without duration, time-free. The figure might have been falling through a medium infinitely more viscous than air, so slowly did it appear to descend, revolving languidly about its own axis, the long sustained keening wrapped around it like winding robes, the limbs and trunk executing a leisurely sarabande that ended as the body smashed head first into the marble paving at something approaching seventy miles per hour.

No one moved. The glistening heap of blood and tissue subsided gently into itself with a soft farting sound. Priest and congregation, tourists and attendants, stood as silent and still as figures in a plaster Nativity. In distant nooks and crannies of the vast enclosure, the final echoes of that long scream died away. Then, as strident as trumpets, first one, them many voices took up the strain, shrieking hysterically, howling, sobbing and gasping.

Giovanni Grimaldi started towards the body. It seemed to take for ever, as in a bad dream, the crowd perpetually closing up right in front of him, denying him passage. Then he was through the inner circle, beyond which no one was prepared to go, and promptly slipped and fell, his radio dropping with a loud clatter. Instinctively the crowd drew back, terrified by this renewed proof of the malignant power possessed by this killing floor. The screaming redoubled in volume as those at the back were toppled and trodden underfoot. As the attendants ran to try and contain the crowd, Grimaldi stood up, his blue suit stained with the blood on which he had slipped. It was almost invisible on the marble slabs, a light spattering that blended perfectly with the scarlet veins beneath the highly polished surface of the stone.

He retrieved his radio and pressed the call-up button. While Control took their sweet time about answering, as usual, Grimaldi looked round to try and find the man in the suede jacket and the woman in the tweed coat, but they were no longer there.

‘Well?’ a crackly voice demanded crossly in his ear.

‘This is Grimaldi. We have a jumper in the basilica.’

‘In progress or complete?’

‘Complete.’

He switched off the radio. There was no need to say more. Suicides were a regular occurrence in St Peter’s, partly due to the vertiginous attraction of high places in general, but still more to a popular belief that those who died on the Apostle’s tomb went straight to heaven, by-passing the normal red tape and entry quotas. The Church had preached repeatedly and at length against this primitive superstition, but in vain. The part of the inner gallery beneath the dome that was open to the public had been fitted with a two-metre-high wire-mesh security fence, but if folk want to kill themselves badly enough it’s impossible to prevent them doing so.

Nevertheless, this particular jump was unique, at least in Grimaldi’s experience. As far as he knew, no one had ever managed to commit suicide while Mass was being said, for at such times there was no access to the dome.

Grimaldi’s message set in motion a well-established routine. The first step was to clear the basilica. Those witnesses suffering from shock were led across the piazza to the Vatican’s first-aid post, pausing briefly to allow the passage of an ambulance from the nearby Santo Spirito hospital. When there was life to be saved, as when Papa Wojtyla had been shot, the Church preferred the high standards of its own Policlinico Gemelli, but when it came to carting away corpses the institutions of the Italian state were good enough.

The ambulance slowed at the gate beneath the Arch of the Bells where the Swiss Guards, who had been advised of the situation, waved it through into the succession of small, dark courtyards flanking the east side of St Peter’s. Just beyond the enormous bulge of the transept a uniformed member of the Vigilanza, the Vatican Security Force, waved the vehicle to a halt. The ambulance men got out, opened the rear doors and lifted out a stretcher. Then they followed the security guard through a door into a bare sloping passage tunnelled into the massive lower walls of the basilica. They passed through two small antechambers, then through a doorway concealed beneath the beckoning skeletons of Bernini’s funeral monument to Alexander VII, and thence into the basilica itself.

In the open space between the apse and the papal altar, a team of cleaners in blue overalls waited with their mops and buckets, ready to expunge every physical trace of the outrage once the body had been removed. A bishop would then be summoned to perform the spiritual equivalent, a rite of reconsecration. The ambulance men put down their stretcher and set about unwrapping the green plastic sheeting used to wrap the remains. At this point Giovanni Grimaldi turned aside, his stomach thrashing like live fish in a net. It was precisely to avoid having to witness things like this that he had come to work for the Vatican in the first place.

The son of a fisherman from Otranto, Grimaldi had started his career in the Carabinieri, and as a brighter-than-average recruit was rapidly promoted to investigative work. He had stuck it for four years, struggling heroically with a squeamishness which he knew would master him in the end. Every time he had to go to the scene of a violent crime his guts tightened up, his breath choked like an asthmatic’s, his skin became filmy with perspiration and his heart went wild. For days afterwards he couldn’t sleep properly, and when he did, the dreams were so horrible that he wished he hadn’t.

His colleagues seemed to think nothing of spending the morning poking around a burnt-out car containing the remains of four local mobsters and then tucking into a nice charred roast at lunch, but Grimaldi lacked this ability to detach his professional and private lives. The experience had marked him even physically. His body was hunched, his head lowered, face averted, and his eyes peered up with the guarded, wary look of abused children. His hair had started falling out at an alarming rate, while deep wrinkles corrugated his face until by now he looked older than his own father — who still put to sea each night with his crew of illegal Algerian immigrants, and didn’t give a fuck about anything.

The usual fate of ex-Carabinieri is to join one of the many armies of private bank guards, but thanks to a local politician who had a word with a bishop who mentioned the matter to a monsignore in the Curia who had the ear of a certain archbishop in the Palazzo del Governatorato, Giovanni Grimaldi moved to Rome and became a member of the Vigilanza. Because of his experience and abilities, he was soon transferred to a select detective unit responsible directly to the Cardinal Secretary of State. In addition to investigating such minor crime as occurred within the Vatican — mostly petty theft — this group allegedly carried out a variety of covert operations which were the subject of considerable gossip among employees of the Curia. His children only visited him in the holidays now, and his wife in his dreams, for she had contracted cancer the year after he settled in the capital. The children now lived in Bari with Grimaldi’s sister, while he himself eked out a solitary life in a church property near the Vatican, trying to make ends meet for his absentee family, and to put a little aside for the future.

Despite himself, Grimaldi glanced over as the ambulance men transferred the corpse to the plastic sheeting. He noted with impersonal curiosity, as though watching a film, that the blue lounge suit in which the shattered body was clad was of the highest quality, and that one of the black brogues was missing. He looked again at the material of the suit. It looked oddly familiar. His breath started to come in heaves and gasps. No, he thought, not that. Please not that.

The ambulance men had already started to parcel up the body.

‘Just a minute,’ Grimaldi told them. ‘We need to know who he was.’

‘That’s all done at the hospital,’ one of the men replied dismissively, not even looking up.

‘The victim must be identified before the body is released to the representatives of the Italian authorities,’ Grimaldi recited pedantically.

The ambulance man looked up wearily, as though dealing with a halfwit.

‘All the paperwork’s done back at the morgue. We’ve got a strict turn-around time.’

Grimaldi planted his foot on the plastic sheeting just inches from the man’s hand.

‘Listen, this may be just another bit of Trastevere to you, but when you drove through the archway out there, past our Swiss friends in their fancy dress, you left Italy and went abroad. Just like any other foreign country, this one has its own rules and regulations, and in the present case they stipulate that before this cadaver can be released to the representatives of the Italian state — that’s you — it must be identified to the satisfaction of an official of the Vatican City State — which in this case means me. So let’s get busy. Pass me the contents of his pockets.’

The ambulance man heaved a profound sigh, indicating helpless acquiescence in the face of might rather than right, and started to go through the dead man’s clothing. The trouser pockets and the outer ones of the jacket were empty, but a zipped pocket inside the left breast of the jacket yielded a large metal key, seemingly new, and a worn leather wallet containing an identity card and driving licence. The security man scanned these documents, then brusquely turned his back on everyone and switched on his radio again.

‘This is Grimaldi,’ he said, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘Tell the chief to get over here immediately! And you’d better notify His Excellency.’

Aurelio Zen, on the other hand, was to remember that particular Friday as the night the lights went out.

His first thought was that it was a personal darkness, like the one which had descended without warning a few months earlier on poor Romizi. ‘Come on, Carlo, at least try and look like you’re working!’ one of the other officials had jeered at the sight of the Umbrian frozen at his desk, a grey, sweating statue of flesh. Romizi had always been a laughing-stock in the Criminalpol squad. Only that very morning Giorgio De Angelis had retailed yet another apocryphal story about their hapless colleague. ‘Romizi is detailed off to attend a conference in Paris. He rings the travel agent. “Excuse me, could you tell me how long it takes to get to Paris?” “Just one moment,” says the travel agent, reaching for his time-table. “Thanks very much,” says Carlo, and hangs up.’

But Romizi’s fate hadn’t been funny at all. ‘A clot on the brain,’ the doctor had explained when Zen looked in at the San Giovanni hospital. When asked what the prognosis was, he simply shook his head and sighed. Anna, Romizi’s wife, and his sister Francesca were looking after him. Zen recognized Anna Romizi from the photograph of her as a young mother which Carlo had kept on his desk, their twin baby boys on her lap. Now those fresh, plumpish features had been rendered down to reveal the bedrock Mediterranean female beneath, grim, dauntless, enduring. Zen said his piece and left as soon as he could, fearful and depressed at this reminder of the primitive, messy plumbing on which all their lives ultimately depended. It didn’t seem remotely surprising that it should break down without warning. On the contrary, the miracle was that it ever functioned in the first place. In growing panic he listened to the thudding of his heart, felt the blood coursing about the system, imagined the organs going about their mysterious, secretive business. It was like being trapped aboard an airplane piloted by an onboard computer. All you could do was sit there until the fuel ran out, or one of the incomprehensibly complex and delicate systems on which your life depended suddenly failed.

Which is what he thought had happened when the darkness abruptly enveloped him. He was on foot at the time, heading for an address in the heart of the old city. The same raw November evening which had culled the congregation in St Peter’s kept people indoors. The streets were lined with small Fiats parked nose to tail like giant cockroaches, but there was no one about except a few youths on scooters. Zen made his way through the maze of the historic centre by following a succession of personalized landmarks, a painted window here, a patch of damaged plasterwork there, that rusty iron rib to stop men peeing in the corner. He had just caught sight of the great bulk of the Chiesa Nuova when it, and everything else, abruptly disappeared.

In different circumstances the wails, groans and curses that erupted from the darkness on every side might have been distinctly unnerving, but in the present case they were a welcome token that whatever had happened, Zen was not the only one affected. It was not a stroke, then, but a more general power failure, the umpteenth to strike the city this year. And the voices he could hear were not those of the restless dead, seeping like moisture out of the ancient structures all around to claim the stricken Zen as their own, but simply the indignant residents of the neighbourhood who had been cooking or watching television or reading when the lights went out.

By the time he realized this, the darkness was already punctuated by glints and glimmers. In a basement workshop, a furniture restorer appeared, crouched over the candle he had just lit, one hand cupped around the infant flame. The vaulted portico of a renaissance palace was illumined by a bow-legged figure clutching an oil-lamp which cast grotesque shadow images across the white-washed walls and ceiling. From a window above Zen’s head a torch beam shone down, slicing through the darkness like a blade.

‘Mario?’ queried a woman’s voice.

‘I’m not Mario,’ Zen called back.

‘So much the better for you!’

Like a vessel navigating an unfamiliar coast by night, Zen made his way from one light to another, trying to reconstruct his mental chart of the district. Reaching the corner, he got out his cigarette lighter. Its feeble flame revealed the presence of a stone tablet mounted on the wall high above, but not the name of the street incised in it. Zen made his way along the houses, pausing every so often to hold his lighter up to the numbers. The flame eventually wilted, its fuel used up, but by its dying flickers he read a name off the list printed next to the button of an entry-phone. He pushed one of the buttons, but there was no response, the power being dead. The next moment his lighter went out, and his attempts to relight it produced only a display of sparks.

He got out his key-holder and felt the differing shapes and position of the keys. When he had identified the one he was looking for, he reached out both hands and palpated the surface of the door like a blind man until he discovered the keyhole. He fitted the key into it and turned, opening the invisible door into a new kind of darkness, still and dense with a dank, mildewy odour. He started groping his way up the stairs, hanging on to the handrail and feeling with his foot for each step. In the darkness the house seemed larger than he remembered, like the family home in Venice in his childhood memories. As he made his way up the steep flight of steps to the top floor, he heard a male voice droning on, just below the threshold of comprehension. Zen cautiously traversed the open spaces of the landing, located the door by touch, knocked. The voice inside did not falter. He knocked again, more loudly.

‘Yes?’ a woman called.

‘It’s me.’

After a moment, the door opened to reveal a tall slim figure silhouetted against a panel of candle-gleam.

‘Hello, sweetheart!’

They fell into each other’s arms.

‘How did you get in? I didn’t hear the buzzer.’

‘It’s not working. But luckily someone had left the door open.’

He didn’t want her to know that he had keys to the house and the flat.

‘… from the gallery inside the dome. According to the Vatican Press Office, the tragedy occurred shortly after 5.15 this evening, while Holy Mass was being celebrated in the…’

Tania covered Zen’s face with light, rapid, bird-like kisses, then drew him inside. The living room looked and smelt like a chapel. Fat marbly candles flooded the lower regions of the room with their unctuous luminosity and churchy aroma while the pent-roof ceiling retreated into a virtual obscurity loftier than its real height.

‘… where he had been a virtual prisoner since a magistrate in Milan issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with…’

Tania broke free of his embrace long enough to switch off her small battery-operated radio. Zen sniffed deeply.

‘Beeswax.’

‘There’s an ecclesiastical wholesaler in the next street.’

She slipped her hands inside his overcoat and hugged him. Her kisses were firmer now, and moister. He broke away to stroke her temples and cheeks, gently follow the delicate moulding of her ear and gaze into the depths of her warm brown eyes. Disengaging himself slightly, he ran his fingers over the extraordinary garment she was wearing, a tightly clinging sheath of what felt like velvet or suede and looked like an explosion in a paint factory.

‘I haven’t seen this before.’

‘It’s new,’ she said lightly. ‘A Falco.’

‘A what?’

‘Falco, the hot young designer. Haven’t you heard of him?’

Zen shrugged.

‘What I know about fashion you could fit on a postcard.’

‘And still have room for “Wish you were here” and the address,’ laughed Tania.

Zen joined in her laughter. Nevertheless, there’s one thing I do know, he thought — any jacket sporting the label of a ‘hot young designer’ is going to cost. Where did she get the money for such things? Or was it her money? Perhaps the garment was a present. Pushing aside the implications of this thought, he produced a small plastic bag from his pocket, removed the neatly wrapped package inside and handed it to her.

‘Oh, Aurelio!’

‘It’s only perfume.’

While she unwrapped the little flask, he added with a trace of maliciousness, ‘ I wouldn’t dare buy you clothes.’

She did not react.

‘I’d better not wear it tonight,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘It’ll come off on your clothes and she ’ll know you’ve been unfaithful.’

They smiled at each other. ‘She’ was Zen’s mother.

‘I could always take them off,’ he said.

‘Mmm, that’s an idea.’

They had been together for almost a year now, and Zen still hadn’t quite taken the measure of the situation. Certainly it was something very different from what he had imagined, back in his early days at the Ministry of the Interior, when Tania Biacis had been the safely inaccessible object of his fantasies, reminding him of the great Madonna in the apse of the cathedral on the island of Torcello, but transformed from a figure of sorrow to one of gleeful rebellion, a nun on the run.

His fancy had been more accurate than he could have known, for the breakup of her marriage to Mauro Bevilacqua, a moody bank clerk from the deep south, had transformed Tania Biacis into someone quite different from the chatty, conventional, rather superficial woman with whom Zen, very much against his better judgement, had fallen in love. Having married in haste and repented at leisure, Tania was now, at thirty-something, having the youthful fling she had missed the first time around. She had taken to smoking and even drinking, habits which Zen deplored in women. She never cooked him a meal, still less sewed on a button or ironed a shirt, as though consciously rejecting the ploys by which protomammas lure their prey. They went out to restaurants and bars, took in films and concerts, walked the streets and piazzas at all hours, and then went home to bed.

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 Ramon Sanchez-Valdes, 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 Ramon Sanchez-Valdes.

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 Sanchez-Valdes’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,’ Sanchez-Valdes 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 Sanchez-Valdes’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. Sanchez-Valdes 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.’

Sanchez-Valdes 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.

‘Well!’

Zen beamed a reassuring smile.

‘Tell the press anything you like. I’ll back you up.’

The archbishop laughed again.

‘This is good to hear, my son. Very good indeed. If only there were more like you! But these days, alas, the Church is surrounded by enemies. We cannot be too careful. So although I applaud your attitude of unquestioning obedience, I fear that we need more than just a rubber-stamped nihil obstat.’

Sanchez-Valdes rose to his feet and walked over to stand in front of Zen.

‘I shall introduce you to one of our security officers,’ he continued quietly. ‘He was at the scene and will be able to tell you anything you wish to know. After that you are on your own. Inspect, investigate, interrogate, take whatever action you may consider necessary. There is no need for you to consult me or my colleagues.’

He stared intently at Zen.

‘In fact it is imperative that you do not do so.’

Zen looked him in the eye.

‘So as to preserve my independent status, you mean?’

The archbishop smiled and nodded.

‘Precisely. Any suspicion of collusion between us would vitiate the very effect we are trying to produce. Do whatever you need to do, whatever must be done to achieve the desired result. I have been assured by your superiors that you are an extremely capable and experienced operative.’

He turned to Monsignor Lamboglia.

‘Fetch Grimaldi in.’

On the wall of the antechamber in which Giovanni Grimaldi had been kept waiting for the best part of two hours hung a large, murky canvas. It depicted a number of armed figures doing something extremely unpleasant to a nude male in the foreground, while a group of senior citizens with haloes looked on with expressions of complacent detachment from the safety of a passing cloud. Closer inspection revealed that the prospective martyr was being torn apart by teams of yoked buffaloes. Grimaldi winced sympathetically. He knew exactly how the poor bastard felt.

His initial reaction to what had happened was one of straightforward panic. He had been entrusted with a job whose delicacy and importance had been repeatedly stressed. It was a chance to prove himself once and for all, to make his mark as a responsible and trustworthy employee. And he had blown it. If only he hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted by that man with the gold chain, the flashy watch and the nasal accent who had apparently become detached from the Comunione e Liberazione sightseeing group which had passed through a few minutes earlier. The man had approached Grimaldi as he stood at the rail of the external balcony at the very top of St Peter’s, apparently absorbed in the stupendous view, and fired off an endless series of questions about where the Spanish Steps were and which hill was the Aventine and whether you could see the Coliseum from there. Grimaldi had known he had better things to do than play the tourist guide, but his pride in knowing Rome so well, being able to identify each of its significant monuments, had been too great. It was such a thrill to point out the principal attractions of the Eternal City with languid, confident gestures, as though he were the hereditary landlord.

Besides, his quarry was in plain view, standing by the railing a little further round the balcony, chatting up that classy number with the white silk headscarf who had been all alone on the balcony when they arrived. Grimaldi didn’t blame him! He might have had a go himself if he hadn’t been on duty. Not that he’d have stood a chance. It looked like she might well go for the Prince, though. They were standing very close together, and their conversation looked unusually animated for two people who had only just met. Meanwhile he was stuck with this northerner and his dumb questions. ‘And is that the Quirinale Palace?’ he whined, pointing out the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

The next time Grimaldi had looked across to the other side of the balcony, the Prince and his pick-up had disappeared. Abandoning the inquisitive tourist in mid-sentence, he clattered down the steel ladder leading to the precipitous stairway, crazily slanted and curved like a passage in a nightmare, which led down to the roof of the basilica. The cupola was riddled with such corridors and stairs, but most had been sealed off, and those open to the public were clearly signposted so as to send visitors on their way with the minimum of delay or confusion. There was nowhere to get lost, nowhere to hide. Minutes after leaving the lantern, Grimaldi was down in the nave of St Peter’s, and knew that he had lost the man he had been given strict orders to keep in view at all costs.

It was clear what had happened. The whole thing had been carefully set up. While the Vigilanza man’s attention was distracted by the supposed Comunione e Liberazione truant, Ruspanti had been whisked away by his female companion. They could be anywhere by now. Grimaldi wandered disconsolately around the basilica, where preparations for the evening Mass were in progress. He was merely postponing the moment when he would have to report back to headquarters and reveal his failure. Then he caught sight of the woman in the grey tweed coat and white silk headscarf, and began to feel that everything might turn out all right after all. When the man in the suede jacket turned up a few minutes later, he felt sure of it. The two did not look at each other, but they were aware of each other’s presence. They were a unit, a team. Only Ruspanti was still missing, but Grimaldi now had no doubt that the Prince would also reappear in due course.

And indeed he had, although not in quite the manner the Vigilanza man had imagined. It certainly wasn’t the perfect outcome, from his point of view, but on the other hand it could have been worse. Rather than going on bended knees to Luigi Scarpione, his boss, and admitting that he had fallen for a trick which shouldn’t have fooled an untrained rookie, he had found himself summoned to the Secretariat of State, no less, in the Apostolic Palace itself, next door to the pope’s private quarters, a sanctum sanctorum guarded by a hand-picked elite of the Swiss Guards, where the riff-raff of the Vigilanza were not normally permitted to set foot. Not only had he set foot there, he’d actually met the legendary Sanchez-Valdes face to face.

Normally, the special security unit to which Grimaldi belonged liaised with the Curia through the archbishop’s secretary, Lamboglia, a cold and charmless man who received minions in his anonymous office in an obscure building off Via del Belvedere, in the Sant’ Anna district. The clergy might need the likes of Grimaldi to do their dirty business, but that didn’t give him entry to a society which had almost as little time for laymen as for women. However, the implications of Ruspanti’s death were so dramatic that this caste system had been temporarily suspended, and on this occasion Grimaldi was received not just by Lamboglia but by Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valdes himself. By all accounts, it was this Latin American who more or less ran the domestic side of the Holy See’s affairs, leaving His Eminence the Cardinal Secretary of State at liberty to devote himself to the complexities of foreign policy.

Unfortunately Grimaldi was unable to savour this exceptional honour as fully as it deserved, since he was preoccupied with the delicate question of deciding exactly how much of the truth to reveal. The aim was no longer simply to disguise his own incompetence. There was more at stake than that. Once the initial shock of the horror he had witnessed had worn off, Grimaldi had dimly begun to perceive possibilities of personal advantage which took precedence even over his innate desire to impress his superiors. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was going to exploit them, never mind how, but in the meantime he wanted to keep all his options open, and that meant not giving too much away.

In the event, his performance seemed to have gone down quite well. Sanchez-Valdes had accepted that Grimaldi’s inability to keep track of Ruspanti’s movements had been due to circumstances beyond his control, namely the press of tourists in the dome of St Peter’s that day. No attempt had been made to reprimand or punish him. Grimaldi was just congratulating himself on his success, when he was called back from the antechamber where he had been sent to kick his heels and introduced to a newcomer, a man he had never seen before. Slightly taller even than Lamboglia, he had fine, slightly wavy hair and a face stretched as tautly over its bones as a drum. His angular nose and square, protuberant chin might have looked strong, but the mouth was weak and indecisive, as were the opaque grey eyes. Or so Grimaldi thought, until they turned towards him. It only lasted a moment, but he felt as though he had never been looked at before.

‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen, a specialist investigator dispatched by the Italian authorities in response to an urgent request conveyed by the apostolic nuncio,’ Sanchez-Valdes announced. ‘He is lending us the benefit of his experience and expertise to ensure that no possible doubt remains concerning this tragic event. You are to accompany him wherever he wishes to go and to see that he is accorded total cooperation in carrying out his duties.’

Zen shook hands with Sanchez-Valdes, and was accompanied to the door by Monsignor Lamboglia. Grimaldi was about to follow when the archbishop called him back.

‘You need say nothing about the other business,’ he murmured sotto voce.

‘The surveillance?’

Sanchez-Valdes nodded.

‘Or the whereabouts of the deceased prior to today’s events. As far as our guest is concerned, Ruspanti appeared from nowhere to obliterate himself on the floor of St Peter’s. Descendit de caelis, as you might say.’

Grimaldi blushed, shocked by the levity of the reference. The archbishop flapped his right hand rapidly, urging him to join the others.

Lamboglia led Zen and Grimaldi out of the Apostolic Palace by a circuitous route which brought them out directly in St Peter’s. In the nave, workmen were shifting benches into position in readiness for Saturday’s papal Mass, but the area beyond the crossing was still sealed off by plastic tape and patrolled by two uniformed Vigilanza officials.

‘I look forward to hearing from you,’ Lamboglia told Zen, and strode off. After a brief word with the uniformed guards, Grimaldi led Zen over the tape and round the baldacchino. The body had been covered in a tarpaulin borrowed from the sampietrini, the workers responsible for maintaining the fabric of St Peter’s. Once the identity of the illustrious corpse had been established, the ambulance men from Santo Spirito hospital and the cleaning crew had been hurriedly dismissed until further notice. No one was to approach the body and nothing was to be removed or otherwise disturbed without an explicit order to that effect from the office of the Cardinal Secretary of State.

Grimaldi looked away as Zen lifted the tarpaulin to view the tangle of broken bone, unsupported flesh and extruded innards that constituted the remains of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti. He certainly didn’t appear bothered by such things, Grimaldi noted, risking a quick glimpse. Indeed, he seemed almost indecently unimpressed, this hot-shot from the Interior Ministry, squatting over the corpse like a child over a box of hand-me-down toys, lifting the odd item which looked as though it might be of interest, bending down to sniff the blood-drenched clothing and inspect the victim’s shoes.

‘Looks like he thought about slashing his wrists first,’ Zen murmured, indicating the thin red weals on the victim’s wrists. Deliberately unfocusing his eyes, Grimaldi turned his head towards the horror.

‘Preliminary cuts,’ Zen explained. ‘But he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it, so he decided to jump instead.’

Grimaldi nodded, though he could see nothing but a merciful blur.

‘We’re going to have do something about these shoes,’ added Zen.

The offending items, cheap brown suede slip-ons with an elastic vent, stood side by side on the marble flooring. Both were spotlessly clean, as was the stocking covering the victim’s left foot. The other sock was covered in rust-red bloodstains.

Grimaldi was on the point of saying something, but then he remembered that the shoes had been Scarpione’s idea. The Vigilanza boss had appeared at the scene before any of the clerics could get there. ‘Save trouble all round,’ he’d said, giving the necessary orders. Apparently he’d been wrong, but Grimaldi knew better than to get involved.

‘What about them?’ he asked.

Zen looked at him sharply, then shrugged.

‘Very well, I’ll raise it with Monsignor Lamboglia.’

The lift had been shut down for the night, so they had to walk all the way up to the roof of the basilica. They climbed the shallow steps of the spiral staircase in silence. Zen had no small-talk, and Grimaldi had decided to volunteer no information. This official from the Interior Ministry, despite his lethargic manner, might not be as easy to fool as Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes.

They found Antonio Cecchi, chief of the sampietrini maintenance men, in one of a cluster of sheds and workshops perched on the undulating roof of the basilica like a lost corner of old Rome. Cecchi was a compact, muscular man of about fifty with the face of a gargoyle: thin, splayed ears protruding prominently from a bulbous skull topped by a shock of short wavy hair like white flames. Grimaldi explained the situation. With a sigh, Cecchi picked up a torch and led them up a short flight of steps on the outside of the dome. As they waited for Cecchi to find the right key on the huge bunch he produced from the pouch of his blue overalls, Zen studied a large crack in the wall. A number of marble strips had been bridged across it to keep track of its progress, the earliest being dated August 1835. He was not reassured to note that all the tell-tales were broken.

Inside the door, a ramp led up to a door opening on to the internal gallery at the base of the drum. The roof outside gave such a strong illusion of being at ground level, with its alleys and piazzas, its washing lines and open casements, that it was a shock to realize just how high they were. Zen peered through the safety fence at the patterned marble floor over a hundred and fifty feet below. The fence ran inside the original railings, all the way from the floor to a point higher than Zen’s head, closing off the half of the gallery which was open to the public.

‘This is supposed to stop jumpers,’ Cecchi explained, shaking the mesh with his powerful fingers.

‘This one went off the other side,’ put in Grimaldi.

He pointed across the circular abyss to a door set in the wall of the drum opposite, giving on to a section of the gallery that was not open to the public, and hence was protected only by the original railings.

‘The stairs leading down from the top of the dome pass by that door,’ Grimaldi explained. ‘The door’s kept locked, but he somehow got hold of a key.’

Zen frowned.

‘But he would have been seen by anyone standing over here.’

‘The dome was closed by then. This part of the gallery would have been shut and locked. Only the exit was still open.’

Zen nodded.

‘Sounds all right. Let’s have a look round the other side.’

Cecchi led the way along a corridor which ran around the circumference of the dome in a series of curved ramps. When they reached the doorway corresponding to the one by which they had left the gallery on the other side, the building superintendent produced his keys again and unlocked the door. Zen pushed past him and stepped out on to the open section of the gallery. The finger he wiped along the top of the railing came away covered in dust.

‘They don’t bother cleaning here,’ Cecchi remarked. ‘No call for it.’

Halfway between the gallery and the floor, the roof of the baldacchino rose up towards them, surmounted by a massive gold cross. Bernini had not envisaged his showpiece being seen from this angle, and it had an awkward, clumsy look, like an actress glimpsed backstage without her costume or make-up. Immediately underneath the gallery ran a wide strip of gold, like an enormous hatband, with a Latin inscription in blue capitals: TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM EDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. The air was filled with a sonorous squealing as the staff, far below in the body of the nave, manoeuvred the heavy wooden benches into place for the papal Mass. It reminded Zen of the sirens of fog-bound shipping in the Venetian lagoons.

Telling Cecchi and Grimaldi to wait there, he walked round this semi-circular section of the gallery, inspecting the railing and floor carefully. He sighed heavily and consulted his watch. Then he leant over the railing, looking up at the sixteen frescoed segments into which the interior of the dome was divided. Beneath each segment was a huge rectangular window consisting of thirty enormous panes, like a monstrous enlargement of an ordinary casement. The glass was dark and glossy, reflecting back the glare of the floodlights which Cecchi had turned on as they entered the dome. Each pair of windows was separated by a double pilaster whose cornices supported a ledge topped with what looked like railings.

Zen walked back to the waiting Vatican employees.

‘Is there another gallery up there?’ he asked.

Cecchi nodded.

‘It’s locked, though.’

‘So was this one.’

‘He had a key to this one,’ said Grimaldi, as though explaining the obvious to a child.

Zen nodded.

‘I’d like to have a look at the upper gallery, if that’s possible.’

Cecchi sighed heavily.

‘It’s possible, but what’s the point? There’s nothing to see.’

‘That’s what I want to make sure of,’ Zen replied.

On the landing outside, two doorways faced one another. The one on the right was the lighted public way leading down from the lantern. Cecchi turned to the other, a locked wooden door. After searching through his keys for some time, he opened it, revealing yet another ramp curving upwards into darkness. The ramp ended at a narrow spiral staircase bored through the stonework between the gargantuan windows. At the top, another door gave access to a second gallery in the floodlit interior of the dome, sixty feet above the lower one.

Zen looked over the railing at the vertiginous prospect below. From here, the tarpaulin was a mere scrap of blue. Again he told Grimaldi and Cecchi to wait while he walked slowly round the ledge, running his finger along the top of the railing and examining the floor. He had gone about a quarter of the way round when he stopped abruptly and glanced back at the other two men. They were standing near the door, chatting quietly together. Zen bent down beside the object which had caught his attention. It was a black brogue shoe, resting on its side between two of the metal stanchions supporting the railing. The toe, its polish badly scuffed, protruded several inches over the void.

A moment later he noticed the twine. Thin, colourless, almost invisible, it was tied to one of the stanchions against which the shoe rested. The other end dangled over the edge of the gallery. Zen pulled it in. There were several yards of it. He got out his lighter and burned through the twine near the knot securing it to the metal post. Straightening up again, he stuffed the twine into his pocket with the plastic bag in which the perfume had been wrapped.

Looking over the railing, he studied the scene below. The workmen were still shifting benches further down the nave, but the area below was deserted. With a gentle kick, Zen eased the black shoe off the edge of the gallery and watched it tumble end over end until he could make it out no longer. Whatever sound it made as it hit the floor of the basilica was lost in the squealing and honking of the benches. Rubbing his hands briskly together, Zen completed his circuit of the gallery, returning to the spot by the door where Grimaldi and Cecchi were in conversation.

‘Quite right,’ he told the building superintendent. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

Cecchi sniffed a told-you-so. Zen tapped Grimaldi’s two-way radio.

‘Does this thing work up here?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then get hold of Lamboglia and tell him to meet me by the body in ten minutes.’

He glanced at his watch again.

‘And then call a taxi to the Porta Sant’ Anna,’ he added.

When Zen and Grimaldi emerged into the amplitude of the basilica, like woodlice creeping out of the skirting of a ballroom, Monsignor Lamboglia was waiting for them. Zen regretted not having paid much attention to Sanchez-Valdes’s secretary earlier, since it meant dealing with an unknown quantity at this crucial juncture. If he played it smart, he could be back in bed with Tania in half an hour. He therefore studied the cleric as he approached, trying to gather clues as to how best to handle him. Lamboglia’s gaunt, craggy face, a mask of gloomy disapproval which looked as though it had been rough-hewn from granite, gave nothing away. But the rapid tapping of his fingers and the darting, censorious eyes betrayed the testy perfectionist who loved catching inferiors out and taxing them with inconsequential faults. It was this that gave Zen his opening.

‘Well?’ demanded Lamboglia brusquely, having dismissed Grimaldi with a curt wave of the hand.

Zen shrugged.

‘More or less, yes. Apart from the business of the shoes, of course.’

Lamboglia’s lips twisted in disapproval and his eyes narrowed.

‘Shoes? What do you mean?’

Zen pulled the edge of the tarpaulin back, exposing the victim’s feet and the brown suede slip-ons.

‘The archbishop said you people had learned a thing or two from the way Papa Luciani’s death was handled,’ he remarked contemptuously. ‘You wouldn’t know, judging by this sort of thing.’

By now Lamboglia looked apoplectic. For an instant, Zen caught a glimpse of the little boy, desperate to please, yet finding himself unjustly accused, fighting to restrain the tears, the panicky sense that the universe made no sense. The boy was long gone, but the strategies he had worked out in his misery still determined the behaviour of the man.

‘If you have noticed anything amiss,’ the cleric snapped, ‘then kindly inform me what it is without further prevarication.’

Zen handed him one of the shoes.

‘For a start, these shoes have only ever been worn by a corpse. Moreover they are mass-produced items totally out of keeping with the quality of the victim’s other garments. On top of that, they’re brown. A man like this wouldn’t be seen dead — to coin a phrase — wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. And finally, the stocking on the right foot is stained with blood all the way down to the toe, and must therefore have been uncovered when the body struck the ground.’

After inspecting the shoe carefully, Monsignor Lamboglia nodded. His panic was subsiding, converting itself into a cold anger which would eventually be discharged on the appropriate target.

‘And what conclusion do you draw from these observations?’ he demanded challengingly.

Zen shrugged.

‘You’d need to interrogate your staff to find out exactly what happened. My guess is that when the body was discovered, one of the shoes was missing. Some bright spark realized that this might look suspicious, and since they couldn’t find the missing shoe, a different pair was substituted. But people are superstitious about letting their shoes be worn by a dead man, so they used a new pair. Result, an amateurish botch-job calculated to arouse exactly the sort of suspicions it was meant to allay.’

Lamboglia measured Zen with a cold glare. It was one thing for him to criticize his underlings — and whoever was responsible for this was going to wish he had never been conceived — but that did not mean he was prepared to condone gratuitous insults from outsiders.

‘Nevertheless,’ he pointed out, ‘the problem remains. No one’s going to be prepared to believe that Ruspanti walked up to the dome with one shoe off and one shoe on.’

Zen nodded slowly, as if recalling something.

‘Ah yes, the shoe.’

Strolling over to the benches of pews lined up in the north transept, he walked along them until he saw the missing black brogue. He picked it up and walked back to Lamboglia.

‘Here you are.’

Lamboglia turned the shoe over as though it were a property in a magic trick.

‘What was it doing there?’ he demanded.

‘It must have got pulled off as Ruspanti clambered over the railings. Perhaps he changed his mind at the last minute and tried to climb back.’

Lamboglia thought about this for a moment.

‘I suppose so,’ he said.

‘There are no further problems as far as I can see,’ Zen told him briskly. ‘But you can of course contact me through the Ministry, should the need arise.’

Lamboglia glared at him. Although the man’s behaviour couldn’t be faulted professionally, his breezy, off-hand manner left a lot to be desired. Lamboglia would dearly have loved to take him down a peg or two, to make him sweat. But as things stood there was nothing he could do except give him the sour look which his subordinates so dreaded.

‘Are you in a hurry, dottore?’ he snapped.

‘I have a taxi waiting.’

Lamboglia’s glare intensified.

‘Another appointment? You’re a busy man.’

Zen looked at the cleric, and smiled.

‘No, I just want to get to bed.’