Cabal

2

On the face of it, the scene at the Ministry of the Interior the following Tuesday morning was calculated to gladden the hearts of all those who despaired of the grotesque overmanning and underachievement of the government bureaucracy, a number roughly equal to those who had failed to secure a cushy statale post of their own. Not only were a significant minority of the staff at their desks, but the atmosphere was one of intense and animated activity. The only snag was that little or none of this activity had anything to do with the duties of the Ministry.

In the Ministerial suite on the top floor, where the present incumbent and his coterie of under-secretaries presided, the imminent collapse of the present government coalition had prompted a frantic round of consultations, negotiations, threats and promises as potential contenders jockeyed for position. On the lower floors, unruffled by this aria di crisi, it was business as usual. The range of services on offer included a fax bureau, an agency for Filippino maids, two competing protection rackets, a Kawasaki motorcycle franchise, a video rental club, a travel agent and a citywide courier service, to say nothing of Madam Beta, medium, astrologer, sorcerer, cards and palms read, the evil eye averted, talismans and amulets prepared. One of the most flourishing of these enterprises was situated in the Administration section on the ground floor, where Tania Biacis ran an agency which supplied speciality food items from her native Friuli region.

Tania had got the idea from one of her cousins, who had returned from a honeymoon trip to London with the news that Italian food was now as much in demand in the English capital as Italian fashion, ‘only nothing from our poor Friuli, as usual!’ At the time this had struck Tania as little more than the usual provincial whingeing, all too characteristic of a border region acutely aware of its distance from the twin centres of power in Rome and Milan. It had been the energies released by the breakup of her marriage which had finally driven her to do something about it. Claiming some of the leave due to her, she had travelled to London with a suitcase full of samples rounded up by Aldo, the husband of her cousin Bettina, whose job with the post office at Cividale gave him ample opportunity for getting out and about and meeting local farmers.

Posing as a representative, Tania had visited the major British wholesalers and tried to convince them of the virtues of Friuli ham, wine, honey, jam and grappa. Rather to her surprise, several had placed orders, in one case so large that Aldo had the greatest difficulty in meeting it. Since then, the business had grown by leaps and bounds. Aldo and Bettina looked after the supply side, while Tania handled the orders and paperwork, using the Ministry’s telephones and fax facilities to keep in contact with the major European cities, as well as New York and Tokyo. One of Agrofrul’s greatest successes was a range of jams originally made by Bettina’s aunt; this had now been expanded into a cottage industry involving several hundred women. Genuine Friuli grappa, made in small copper stills, had also done well, while the company’s air-cured hams were rapidly displacing their too-famous rivals from Parma as the ultimate designer charcuterie.

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 elite 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 resume 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.

Nevertheless, as the years went by the family’s financial situation gradually began to slide out of control. First sections of the country estate were sold off, then the whole thing. Palazzo Ruspanti was next to go, although Ludovico managed to retain the piano nobile for the use of himself and his mother until she died, when he sold up and moved to rented rooms in the unfashionable Prenestino district. Friends and relations were heard to suggest that marriage to some suitably endowed young lady might prove the answer to these problems. Such things were a good deal rarer than they had been a hundred years earlier, when a noble title counted for more and people were less bashful about buying into one, but they were by no means unheard of.

Ludovico, though, showed no interest in any of the potential partners who were more or less overtly paraded before him. This indifference naturally added fuel to the rumours concerning his love for Ariana Falcone, whose brother Raimondo had recently and quite unexpectedly achieved fame as a fashion designer. Other versions had it that Ruspanti was gay, or impotent, or had joined that inner circle of the Order of Malta, the thirty ‘professed’ Knights who are sworn to chastity, obedience and poverty — cynics joked that Ludovico would have no difficulty with the final item, at any rate. Then there was the question of where all the money had gone. Some people said it had been swallowed by the Prince’s cocaine habit, some that he had paid kidnappers a huge ransom for the return of his and Ariana’s love-child, while others held that the family fortune had gone to finance an abortive monarchist coup d’etat. Even those who repeated the most likely story — that Ludovico’s inveterate love of gambling had extended itself to share dealing, and that his portfolio had been wiped out when the Wall Street market collapsed on ‘Black Monday’ — were careful to avoid the charge of credulous banality by suggesting that this was merely a cover for the real drama, which involved a doomsday scenario of global dimensions, involving the CIA, Opus Dei and Gelli’s P 2, and using the Knights of Malta as a cover.

Thus when word spread that Ruspanti had taken refuge with the latter organization following his disappearance from circulation about a month earlier, the story was widely credited. The official line was that Ruspanti was wanted for questioning by a magistrate investigating a currency fraud involving businessmen in Milan, but few people were prepared to believe that. Far larger issues were clearly at stake, involving the future of prominent members of the government. This explained why the Prince had chosen a hiding place which was beyond the jurisdiction of the Italian authorities. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta has long lost the extensive territories which once made it, together with the Knights Templar, the richest and most powerful mediaeval order of chivalry, but it is still recognized as an independent state by over forty nations, including Italy. Thus Palazzo Malta, opposite Gucci’s in elegant Via Condotti, and the Palace of Rhodes on the Aventine hill, headquarters of the local Grand Priory and chancery of the Order’s diplomatic mission to the Holy See, enjoy exactly the same extraterritorial status as any foreign embassy. If the fugitive had taken refuge within the walls of either property, he was as safe from the power of the Italian state as he would have been in Switzerland or Paraguay. Whatever the truth about this, Ruspanti had not been seen again until his dramatic reappearance the previous Friday in the basilica of St Peter’s.

This event initially appeared to render the question of the Prince’s whereabouts in the interim somewhat academic, but the letter to the newspapers changed all that with its dramatic suggestion that his death might not be quite what it seemed — or rather, what the Vatican authorities had allegedly been at considerable pains to make it seem. According to the anonymous correspondent, in short, Ludovico Ruspanti — like Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona and so many other illustrious corpses — had been the subject of ‘an assisted suicide’.

The letter made three principal charges. The first confirmed the rumours about Ruspanti having been harboured by the Order of Malta, but added that following his expulsion, which took place after a personal intervention by the Grand Master, the Prince had been leading a clandestine existence in the Vatican City State with the full connivance of the Holy See. Moreover, the writer claimed, Ruspanti’s movements and contacts during this period had been the subject of a surveillance operation, and the Vatican authorities were thus aware that on the afternoon of his death the Prince had met the representatives of an organization referred to as ‘the Cabal’. But the item of most interest to Zen was the last, which stated categorically that the senior Italian police official called in by the Holy See, a certain ‘Dottor Aurelio Zeno’, had deliberately falsified the results of his investigation in line with the preconceived verdict of suicide.

Almost the most significant feature of the letter was that no more was said. The implication was that it was addressed not to the general public but to those in the know, the select few who were aware of the existence and nature of ‘the Cabal’. They would grasp not only how and why Ruspanti had met his death, but also the reasons why this information was now being leaked to the press. ‘In short,’ II Manifesto concluded, ‘we once again find ourselves enveloped by sinister and suggestive mysteries, face to face with one of those convenient deaths signed by a designer whose name remains unknown but whose craftsmanship everyone recognizes as bearing the label “Made in Italy”.’

‘This one?’

The taxi had drawn up opposite an unpainted wooden door set in an otherwise blank wall. There was no number, and for a moment Zen hesitated. Then he saw the black Fiat saloon with SCV number plates parked on the other side of the street, right under a sign reading PARKING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. It could sit there for the rest of the year without getting a ticket, Zen reflected as he paid off the taxi. Any vehicle bearing Sacra Citta del Vaticano plates was invisible to the traffic cops.

A metal handle dangled from a chain in a small niche beside the door. Zen gave it a yank. A dull bell clattered briefly, somewhere remote. Nothing happened. He pulled the chain again, then got out a cigarette and put it in his mouth without lighting it. A small metal grille set in the door slid back.

‘Yes?’ demanded a female voice.

‘Signor Bianchi.’

Keys jingled, locks turned, bolts were drawn, and the door opened a crack.

‘Come in!’

Zen stepped into the soft, musty dimness inside. He just had time to glimpse the speaker, a dumpy nun ‘of canonical age’, to use the Church’s euphemism, before the door was slammed shut and locked behind him.

‘Follow me.’

The nun waddled off along a bare tiled corridor which unexpectedly emerged in a well-tended garden surrounded on three sides by a cloister whose tiled, sloping roof was supported by an arcade of beautifully proportioned arches. Zen’s guide opened one of the doors facing the garden.

‘Please wait here.’

She scuttled off. Zen stepped over the well-scrubbed threshold. The room was long and narrow, with a freakishly high ceiling and a floor of smooth scrubbed stone slabs. It smelt like a disused larder. The one window, small and barred, set in the upper expanses of a bare whitewashed wall, emphasized the sense of enclosure. The furnishings consisted of a trestle table flanked by wooden benches, and an acrylic painting showing a young woman reclining in a supine posture while a bleeding heart hovered in the air above her, emitting rays of light which pierced her outstretched palms.

Zen sat heavily on one of the benches. The tabletop was a thick oak board burnished to a sullen gleam. He took the cigarette from his lips and twiddled it between two fingers. It seemed inconceivable that only half an hour earlier he had been lying in a position not dissimilar from that of the female stigmatic in the painting, wondering if it was worth bothering to get out of bed at all given that Tania would be back shortly after two. For no particular reasons, he had decided to treat himself to a couple of days sick-leave. Like all state employees, Zen regularly availed himself of this perk. A doctor’s certificate was only required for more than three days’ absence, and as long as you didn’t abuse the system too exaggeratedly, everyone turned a blind eye. That was how Zen had known that something was seriously wrong when Tania told him about Moscati checking up on him. When he phoned in, Lorenzo Moscati had left him in no doubt whatever that the shit had hit the fan.

‘I don’t know how you do it, Zen, I really don’t. You take a simple courtesy call, a bit of window-dressing, and manage to turn it into a diplomatic incident.’

‘But I…’

‘The apostolic nuncio has intervened in the very strongest terms, demanding an explanation, and to make matters worse half the blue bloods at the Farnesina were fucking related to Ruspanti. Result, the Minister finds himself in the hot seat just as the entire government is about to go into the blender and he had his eye on some nice fat portfolio like Finance.’

‘But I…’

‘The media are screaming for you to be put on parade, which is all we need. We’re saying you’re in bed, not with la Biacis but a fever, something nasty and infectious. We’ve sent Marcelli along to handle the press conference. All you need to do is fiddle a doctor’s certificate and then keep out of sight for a day or two. But first get along to Via dell’Annunciata in Trastevere, number 14, and make your peace with the priests. You’d better turn on the charm, Zen — or Bianchi, as they want you to call yourself. Remember how the Inquisition worked? The Church graciously pardoned the erring sinners, and then turned them over to the secular authorities to be burnt alive. And that’s what’s going to happen to you, Zen, unless you can talk your way out of this one.’

The implications of this threat could hardly have been more serious. If the Vatican lodged a formal complaint, the Ministry would have no option but to institute a full internal inquiry. The verdict was almost irrelevant, since the severity of the eventual disciplinary proceedings was as nothing compared to the long, slow torment of the inquiry itself, dragging on for month after month, while the subject was ostracized by colleagues wary of being contaminated by contact with a potential pariah.

So gloomy were these speculations that even the arrival of Monsignor Lamboglia was a distinct relief. The cleric was wearing a plain dark overcoat, grey scarf and homburg hat and carrying a black leather briefcase, and his sharp-featured face looked even grimmer than usual.

‘Will that be all?’ murmured the elderly nun from the doorway.

Lamboglia scanned the room slowly through his steel-rimmed glasses. He might have been alone for all the sign he gave of having noted Zen’s existence. Without turning round, he nodded once. The nun backed out, closing the door behind her.

The cleric took off his overcoat, folded it carefully and laid it beside his hat and briefcase on the table. He opened his briefcase and removed a portable tape-recorder, then looked at Zen for the first time since entering the room.

‘You may smoke.’

Zen twirled the unlit cigarette between his lips.

‘Do I get a blindfold as well?’

Lamboglia regarded him like an entomologist confronted by an unfamiliar insect whose characteristics had nothing much to recommend them from a personal point of view, but which would have to be catalogued just the same. He sat down opposite Zen, set the tape-recorder on the table mid-way between them and pressed the red RECORD button.

‘Did you send that letter to the papers?’ he asked.

Zen gazed at him in shock, then growing anger. He nodded.

‘There hasn’t been enough aggravation in my life recently. I’d been wondering what to do about it.’

It was Lamboglia’s turn to get angry.

‘So you find this funny, do you?’

‘Not at all. I find it stupid.’

He fixed Lamboglia with a steady glare.

‘Look, if I were crazy enough to risk my career by pointing out irregularities in the conduct of an investigation for which I was responsible, I’d at least have done it properly!’

He tapped the pile of newspapers lying at his elbow.

‘This letter is all bluff, a farrago of vague, unsubstantiated generalities. Now I don’t know anything about this secret society which Ruspanti was apparently involved with, but as far as the manner of his death is concerned there is absolutely no doubt in my mind. I know what happened, and when, and how.’

Impressed despite himself by Zen’s confident, decisive manner, Lamboglia nodded.

‘So there’s no truth in these allegations?’

‘What allegations?’

Lamboglia tapped the table impatiently.

‘That Ruspanti was murdered!’

Zen frowned.

‘But of course he was murdered!’

The two men gazed at each other in silence for some time.

‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Zen asked incredulously.

Behind the twin discs of glass, Lamboglia’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

‘What made you think we did?’

‘Well, according to the letter, Ruspanti was living in the Vatican and you were keeping him under surveillance.’

‘But you didn’t know that on Friday!’

‘It’s true, then?’ Zen asked quickly.

Lamboglia turned off the tape-recorder, rewound the cassette briefly, and pressed PLAY.

‘… keeping him under surveillance.’

The cleric looked at Zen.

‘You were quite right, dottore — your career is at risk. Don’t try and catch me out again. Just answer my questions.’

He pressed the RECORD button.

‘It is your professional conduct on Friday which is the subject of this inquiry, dottore. At that time, you had no reason to assume — rightly or wrongly — that we had any idea that Ruspanti might have been murdered. The word was never even mentioned in the course of your interview with Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes.’

At last, Zen lit his cigarette, then looked round in vain for an ashtray. Irritated by this delay, Lamboglia waved dismissively.

‘Use the floor. The nuns will clean it up. That’s what nuns are for.’

Zen released a breath of fragrant smoke.

‘It was precisely the fact that no one mentioned the possibility of murder which I found so significant,’ he said.

Lamboglia gave a sneering laugh.

‘That’s absurd.’

‘On the contrary. I wasn’t asked to investigate Ruspanti’s death but to confirm that he had committed suicide. When I offered to do so without more ado, as a good Catholic, the archbishop made it quite clear that he wanted more than that. ‘Do whatever you need to do,’ he told me, ‘whatever must be done to achieve the desired result.’

‘Exactly!’ cried Lamboglia. ‘To determine the truth!’

Zen shrugged.

‘No one mentioned that word either.’

‘Because it was taken for granted!’

Zen tapped his cigarette, dislodging a packet of ash which tumbled through the air to disintegrate on the smooth flagstones.

‘Then the members of the Curia are a great deal less subtle than they have been given credit for,’ he replied.

Lamboglia rapped the table authoritatively.

‘Don’t be impertinent! You had no right to conceal anything from us.’

‘Excuse me, monsignore, but Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes explicitly instructed me to take whatever action I considered necessary without consulting him or his colleagues.’

‘Yes, but only to avoid compromising your status as an independent observer. No one asked you to cover up a murder!’

Zen tossed the butt of his cigarette under the table and crushed it out.

‘Of course not. It would have been impossible for me to do so if I’d been asked openly. That’s why murder was never once mentioned, despite the fact that there was no sense in calling me in unless there was a real possibility that Ruspanti had been murdered. By the same token, I couldn’t reveal the evidence I subsequently discovered without making it impossible for you to sustain the suicide verdict.’

And for me to get home to Tania, he thought, for the decisive factor that evening had been his eagerness to return as soon as possible to the bed from which he’d been ejected by the electronic pager. Any hint of what he had discovered would have put paid to that for good.

‘Let’s be honest, monsignore,’ he told Lamboglia. ‘You didn’t want me coming to you and saying, “Actually Ruspanti didn’t fall from the gallery he had the key to but the one sixty feet above it.” You didn’t want to know about it, did you? You just wanted the matter taken care of, neatly and discreetly. That’s what I did, and if someone hadn’t decided to give the game away, no one would be any the wiser.’

Lamboglia stared at him across the table in silence. Several times he seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.

‘That’s impossible,’ he said at last. ‘The dome was closed when Ruspanti fell. The killer would have been trapped inside.’

‘The killers — there must have been at least two — left fifteen or twenty minutes earlier.’

Lamboglia laughed again, a harsh, brittle sound.

‘And what did Ruspanti do during that time, may I ask? Hover there in mid-air like an angel?’

‘More or less.’

‘You forget that we have extensive professional experience of false miracles.’

‘This wasn’t a miracle. They trussed the poor bastard up with a length of nylon fishing line and left him dangling over the edge of the gallery.’

‘ Fishing line?’

Zen nodded.

‘Thin, transparent, virtually invisible, but with a breaking strain of over a hundred kilos. I found several metres of the stuff tied to one of the railing supports on the upper gallery. I removed it, of course.’

Lamboglia suddenly held out a hand for silence. He got up and walked quickly to the door, which he flung open dramatically. The elderly nun almost fell into the room, clutching a mop.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Forgive me, monsignore, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just scrubbing the floor…’

‘Cleanliness is indeed a great virtue,’ Lamboglia replied in a tone of icy irony, ‘and the fact that you have seen fit to undertake this menial labour yourself, rather than delegate it to one of your younger colleagues, indicates a commendable humility. If your discretion matches your other qualities — as is fervently to be hoped — then your eventual beatification can be only a question of time.’

He glowered at the nun, who gazed back at her tormentor with an expression which to Zen’s eyes at least appeared frankly erotic.

‘Such a degree of sanctity no doubt makes any contact with the secular world both painful and problematic,’ Lamboglia continued remorselessly. ‘Nevertheless, I’m sure that someone as resourceful as yourself will find a way to procure us two coffees, easy on the milk but heavy on the foam, and a couple of pastries from a good bakery, none of that mass-produced rubbish.’

Abandoning her mop, the nun scampered off. Lamboglia slammed the door shut and returned to the table. He rewound the tape to the beginning of the interruption and replaced the recorder in front of Zen.

‘You say you found this twine attached to the upper gallery. But what made you look there in the first place?’

‘I examined the lower gallery, the part that is closed to the public, overlooking the spot where Ruspanti fell. It was at once obvious that no one had thrown himself from there. There was an undisturbed layer of dust all along the top of the guardrail, and even on the floor. Besides, there was no sign of the missing shoe there. The upper gallery was the only other possibility.’

Lamboglia frowned with the effort of keeping up with all this new information.

‘But we found the shoe in the basilica, under one of the benches. You said it had fallen there separately from the body.’

Zen nodded.

‘Separately in space and time. Several hours later, in fact, while I was searching the gallery.’

There was a timid knock at the door and the elderly nun appeared, carrying a tray covered with a spotless white cloth. She set it down on the table and removed the cloth like a conjuror to reveal two steaming bowls of coffee, an appetizing assortment of pastries and a glass ashtray. The cleric gave a curt nod and the nun slunk out.

‘So none of this can now be proved?’ Lamboglia asked.

Zen selected a pastry.

‘Well, there were some marks on Ruspanti’s wrists. I thought at first that they were preliminary cuts showing where he’d tried to slash his wrists, but in fact they must have been weals made by the pressure of the twine. A post-mortem might reveal traces of the chloroform or whatever they used to keep him unconscious, but I don’t suppose there’s the faintest possibility of the family agreeing to allow one.’

‘But if the killers left before Ruspanti fell, how did they release the bonds that were holding him to the gallery?’

Zen washed down the pastry with a long gulp of the creamy coffee and got out his cigarettes.

‘They didn’t. He did.’

Lamboglia merely stared.

‘This is just a guess,’ Zen admitted as he lit up, ‘but they probably tied him up with a slippery hitch and looped the free end around his wrists. The family said that Ruspanti suffered from vertigo, so when he came round from the chloroform to find himself suspended two hundred feet above a sheer drop to the floor of the basilica he would have panicked totally. The witnesses all talked about the terrible screams which seemed to start several seconds before the body appeared. During those seconds Ruspanti would have been desperately struggling to free his hands so that he could reach the railings and pull himself to safety. What he didn’t realize was that by doing so, he was clearing the hitch securing him to the gallery.’

Lamboglia stuck one finger between his teeth for a single moment which revealed him to be a reformed nail-biter.

‘You should have informed us.’

Zen shrugged.

‘The way I read it, you either knew or you didn’t want to. Either way, it was none of my business to tell you.’

Lamboglia stood up. He switched off the tape-recorder and replaced it in his briefcase.

‘Look, there’s no problem,’ Zen told him, getting up too. ‘Just deny everything. I’ll back you up. Without hard evidence, the media will soon drop the case.’

Lamboglia buttoned up his coat and took his hat.

‘There is also the question of the mole.’

‘You want me to tackle that?’ offered Zen, eager to show willing. ‘Someone must have supplied Ruspanti’s killers with keys to the galleries. I could make a start there.’

Lamboglia stared at the wall as though it were an autocue from which he was reading a prepared text.

‘The matter of the keys can be left to our own personnel. As far as the mole is concerned, we already have a suspect. The anonymous letter was faxed to the newspapers from a machine in the offices of Vatican Radio. At ten in the evening, there is only a skeleton staff on duty, and it was a fairly simple matter to eliminate them from suspicion. The only other person who had access to the building that evening was the duty security officer, Giovanni Grimaldi.’

Zen let his cigarette fall to the floor and stepped on it carefully.

‘The man who showed me round on Friday?’

Lamboglia inclined his head.

‘He was at the scene when Ruspanti fell, wasn’t he?’ Zen demanded. ‘Was he already involved in the case in some way?’

The cleric looked at him blankly.

‘That is neither here nor there. We are concerned to determine whether or not he sent that letter to the press, and if so to prevent it happening again. The problem is that Grimaldi is himself a member of the force which normally undertakes operations of this kind.’

‘ Quia custodet ipsis custodies,’ murmured Zen.

‘ Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, actually. But you’ve got the right idea. Who is to investigate the investigators? We normally have every confidence in our staff, but in this case it is simply too much of a risk to expect Grimaldi’s colleagues to act against him. It is essential that the mole shouldn’t be tipped off before we can act.’

He looked at Zen.

‘Which is where you come in.’

Zen returned his stare.

‘You want me to… “act”?’

Lamboglia placed his hands on the table, fingers splayed as though on the keyboard of an organ.

‘A positive and decisive intervention on your part would contribute greatly towards bringing this unfortunate episode to a mutually satisfactory conclusion,’ he said.

Zen nodded.

‘But this time, perhaps you’d better tell me exactly what you want done,’ he said. ‘Just to avoid the possibility of any further confusion.’

‘The first thing is to search Grimaldi’s room. With any luck, you might find some incriminating material which we can use. He’s on duty this afternoon, so you won’t be disturbed.’

He handed Zen a brown envelope.

‘This contains his address and a telephone number on which you can call us this evening to relay your findings. Any further instructions will be conveyed to you at that stage.’

He turned to go.

‘Oh, there’s just one more thing,’ Zen said.

The cleric turned, his glasses gleaming with reflected light like the enlarged pupils of a nocturnal predator.

‘Yes?’

‘Can you recommend a good doctor?’

He closed the door with great care, lifting it slightly on its hinges to prevent the tell-tale squeak, and stood listening. The sounds he could hear would have meant little to anyone else, but to Zen they provided an invaluable guide to the hazards he was going to have to negotiate.

At the end of the hallway, beyond the glass-panelled door to the living room, his mother was talking loudly in short bursts separated by long intervals of silence. Zen couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the singsong intonations and the buzzing of the Venetian ‘x’ revealed that she was speaking in dialect rather than Italian. So unless she was talking to herself — always a distinct possibility — then she must be on the phone, almost certainly to Rosalba Morosini, their former neighbour in Venice, whom she called regularly to keep in touch with the news and gossip in the only city that would ever be quite real for her.

Further away, a mere background drone, came the sound of a vacuum cleaner, indicating that Maria Grazia, the housekeeper, was at work in one of the bedrooms at the far end of the apartment. Zen moved cautiously forward along the darkened hallway. The room to his left, overlooking the gloomy internal courtyard, was crammed with boxes of papers and photographs, trunks full of his father’s clothes and miscellaneous furniture which had been transferred wholesale to Rome when his mother had finally been persuaded to abandon the family home just off the Cannaregio canal. The thought of that emptied space pervaded by the limpid, shifting Venetian light made Zen feel as weightlessly replete as a child for a moment.

With extreme caution, he opened the door opposite. The elaborate plaster moulding, picture rail and ceiling rose revealed that this had been intended to serve as the dining room, but following his mother’s arrival Zen had commandeered it as his bedroom. As far as he was concerned, whatever it lacked in charm and intimacy was more than compensated for by its proximity to the front door. High on the list of problems caused by his mother’s presence in the house was the fact that every time she saw him putting on his coat Signora Zen wanted to know where he was going and when he’d be back, while on his return she expected a detailed account of where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Exactly as though he were still ten years old, in short. It was, Zen had concluded, the only way in which mothers could relate to their sons, and therefore not something for which they were to be blamed, still less which there was any point in trying to change. Nevertheless, it got on his nerves, particularly since his relationship with Tania Biacis had begun to make ever greater demands on his time.

Zen had been separated from his wife Luisella for ever a decade, but in the eyes of the Church and Zen’s mother they were still married. In his previous affair, with an American expatriate, Zen had used this as a way of maintaining his distance. Ellen had ultimately returned to New York, disappointed by Zen’s unwillingness to commit himself to her more fully. Now the tables had been turned with a vengeance. Zen would have been more than happy to present Tania to his mother as his fidanzata, that usefully vague category somewhere between steady girlfriend and future wife. It was she who had refused, with a light laugh which, had he been less in love, might have seemed almost insulting.

‘I’m sorry, Aurelio, but after eight years of Signora Bevilacqua I can’t face having to deal with another mamma just yet.’

So it was back to the lies and deceptions which had characterized his affair with Ellen. If he felt less guilty about them, it was not only because his feelings for Tania had a self-justifying intensity, but because his mother was no longer the pathetic figure she had been at that time. The change dated from the previous year, when the Zens’ apartment had been broken into by Vasco Spadola, an ex-mobster bent on revenge. Signora Zen had been forced to go and stay with Gilberto and Rosella Nieddu, where she had proved to be such a hit with the Nieddu children that she now spent two afternoons a week looking after them.

The effect of this surrogate auntyhood — greatly appreciated by the Nieddus, whose relatives were all in their native Sardinia — had been to transform Signora Zen from a semi-comatose recluse, parasitic on the imported soap operas doled out by Channel 5, into a sprightly, inquisitive old person with opinions and interests, still sharply critical of the city in which she lived like a foreigner, but also aware of its attractions and possibilities. Zen had had mixed feelings about this at first, since it meant revising a number of his own attitudes and habits, but he soon came to appreciate the fact that Signora Zen was out of the house more. It was easier in every sense to sneak off and spend time with Tania when he knew that his mother was happily occupied elsewhere.

He still needed to keep his stories straight, though, and in the present case that meant not being seen at home. He had been away from both home and work for the past two days, but as far as his mother was concerned his absence was not caused by illness but by an urgent mission to Florence. Alarmed by the effects of Moscati’s call to the house, Zen had phoned her that morning from Tania’s bed and repeated the story, so it would be difficult for him to explain his abrupt return just a few hours later. Hence the extreme caution with which he closed himself into his bedroom and walked across to the chest of drawers, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboard near the foot of the bed.

He eased the middle drawer open as gingerly as though it were filled with unstable high explosive, although at first sight it seemed to contain nothing but socks and underwear. Zen moved a pile of vests at the back of the drawer and pulled out a small scarlet plastic bag marked Profumeria Nardi. He opened the mouth of the bag and peered at the tangled plastic twine inside, the end melted to a blob by the flame of his lighter. The remaining portion would still be there, tied to the foot of the railing on the upper gallery of the dome of St Peter’s. It too would have a terminal blob of transparent plastic, slightly darkened by the flame.

He stuffed the bag into his coat pocket and went over to the wardrobe in the corner. Pulling up a rickety wooden chair which stood near the wash-basin in the corner, Zen lifted down the small leather suitcase on top of the wardrobe. He snapped the catches quietly and opened the lid. The suitcase was almost full with packets, boxes and papers. Zen removed a small flat wooden box, which must have been upside down, for the hinged lid opened and the contents clattered all over the floor.

His mother either didn’t hear the noise or must have assumed that it came from outside, for she didn’t stop talking. Zen knelt down and collected the tools and instruments. One had rolled right under the bed, and when Zen crawled in there to retrieve it he caught sight of some writing on the wooden bedstead. With an effort, he could just make out the irregular lettering: Zen, Anzolo Zuane, 28 March 1947. The inscription blurred and he felt a terrible panic grip him. Seizing the metal instrument he had come in search of, he thrust himself out from under the dream-soaked structure of the bed, back into the light and the air of the room. The name written on the bedstead was his father’s — Angelo Giovanni in Italian — but the writing was his own, and by 1947 the man named must have been long dead in some frozen swamp or Soviet prison camp. Only his son had continued to insist, secretly, magically, on his father’s continuing presence in the house.

He stood up and dusted himself down, then tiptoed over to the door leading to the hallway. Pressing against the door to prevent the catch snapping against the edge of the mortise, he gripped the handle and turned. He put his ear to the crack and listened. To his dismay, the aural radar on which he depended had gone dead. The only sound was the continual murmur of traffic in the street outside. With a glance at his watch, he opened the door quickly. The hinges shrieked.

‘Is that you?’ called his mother.

‘Eh?’ shouted Maria Grazia from the bedroom.

‘Was that you?’

There was a pause as the housekeeper interrupted her work and appeared in the doorway of the living room.

‘What, signora?’

‘Was that you?’

‘Was what me?’

‘That noise.’

‘What noise?’

‘It sounded like… like the front door opening.’

His mother sounded anxious. Homes never feel the same after they’ve been violated by a break-in. Maria Grazia’s bulky form suddenly appeared in outline on the glass-panelled door to the living room. Zen stepped back hastily.

‘It’s shut,’ the housekeeper reported, having presumably taken a look down the hall.

‘Go and check!’ Zen’s mother insisted.

Zen tried to close the door, but it was too late.

‘Mother of God!’ cried Maria Grazia as she caught sight of him.

‘What is it?’ Signora Zen called from the living room. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I’m not here!’ Zen whispered urgently to the housekeeper.

Maria Grazia put her hand on her abundant bosom and mimed relief.

‘It’s all right, signora,’ she yelled. ‘I just banged my elbow.’

She opened the front door and made energetic shooing gestures to Zen, who left his hiding place and slipped out on to the landing and down the stairs to freedom with a smile of gratitude.

His local cafe had seen much less of him now that he regularly slept at Tania’s, and when he asked the cashier for gettoni he received a qualified welcome hinting at both the promise of rehabilitation if he ceased to patronize rival establishments and the threat of being reduced to the status of a casual customer if he didn’t. Zen went to the pay-phone and called the doctor whose name he had extracted from Lamboglia. At a pinch he could probably have got a certificate from his own doctor, but the last thing he wanted was to drag someone he knew and respected into this murky affair. If the press got suspicious about his ‘illness’, let them hound someone else.

The Vatican contact, a Doctor Carmagnola, said that he had heard from Monsignor Lamboglia, and would influenza or infectious gastro-enteritis do or did he want to be quarantined? Zen said that there was no need to exaggerate, and Carmagnola told him he could collect the certificate from the reception of the Ospedale del Bambino Gesu. Zen picked up a taxi in Piazza Cavour and went first to the hospital on the Gianicolo, and then on to one of the more illustrious of Rome’s hills. They drove along the Tiber as far as the Palatino bridge, then across the river and up a narrow, curving lane. Following Zen’s directions, the driver turned right and continued along a wealthy residential street past a public garden planted with orange trees. They passed two churches on the right, then a consulate on the left. A police jeep was parked opposite, and the two bored patrolmen watched the taxi drive past and park in the small pizza enclosed by a high wall.

A stiff breeze hissed in the trees all round, and from a nursery school near by came the sound of children at play. There was no other sound. Zen walked over to the pair of large green gates set in the wall at one side of the piazza. The letters SMOM were etched on a small brass plate above the bell. Zen pressed the button.

‘Yes?’ replied a crackly voice from the entry-phone.

‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen. I understand there is a message for me.’

‘One moment.’

There was a brief pause before the voice resumed.

‘I regret that we have no knowledge of any such message.’

Zen wasn’t surprised. In his bones he’d known all along that the errand was a hoax set up by some prankster who had read his name in the newspaper reports of Ruspanti’s death. He might even be here, watching the success of his stratagem. Zen glanced around, but there was no one to be seen except an elderly couple sitting on a bench at the other side of the piazza. He made one more attempt.

‘Listen, I’m a police official! I received a message telling me to come to this address.’

‘We have no knowledge of this matter,’ the voice insisted with finality.

‘Who’s “we”?’ snapped Zen, but the entry-phone had clicked off. He stood staring up at the tall green gates. The stone lintel above them was decorated with a cross whose arms grew broader towards their forked tips. A Maltese cross, thought Zen. SMOM: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. These were the gates of the Palace of Rhodes, the Order’s extraterritorial property where, according to rumour, Ludovico Ruspanti had taken refuge from the rigours of Italian justice.

Perhaps the message hadn’t been a hoax, after all. But in that case what did it mean? ‘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.’ Zen focused his eyes with an effort. The gates were high and tightly closed. The only opening of any kind was an ornamental metal plate set close to the edge of the left-hand gate. The plate was of bronze, worked by hand in a complex elliptic pattern, with a plain circular keyhole in the centre. Zen bent down and squinted through the keyhole.

He expected the hole to be covered at the other end, so it was a shock to find, on the contrary, a view arranged specifically to be seen from that point. It was still more of a shock to realize that what he was looking at — framed by an alley of tall evergreen shrubs and centred in the keyhole like the target in a gun-sight — was the dome of St Peter’s. Despite the distance, he could count each of the ribs protruding through the leading of the roof, and the tiny windows lighting the internal gallery from which Prince Ludovico Ruspanti had plunged to his death.

An hour later Zen was in a take-out pizzeria just outside the walls of the Vatican City. The other side of the street was lined with the boutiques which had recently sprung up in this area, once notorious as a haunt of thieves and prostitutes. One window was bisected by a huge poster reading FALCO, which Zen remembered as the name of the ‘hot young designer’ whose creation Tania had been wearing the previous Friday. This must have been a mistake, however, for the window was that of a bookshop. Next door stood a doorway giving access to the residential floors where Giovanni Grimaldi lived.

Zen finished his square slab of sausage-meat and mushroom boscaiolo pizza and wiped his hands on the paper napkin in which it had been wrapped. Time to go. He had not actually seen Grimaldi leave the building, but he must be at work by now. The only person who had gone either in or out, in fact, had been a young woman in a long tweed coat with a white scarf over her head who had appeared about ten minutes earlier. As for Grimaldi, he had probably opted for a lunch in the heavily subsidized Vatican canteen. Zen tossed the soiled napkin into a rubbish bin and walked out into the hazy sunshine.

Like a quarter of all the real estate in Rome, including the house in which Zen himself lived, the building opposite was owned by the Church, in this case an order of Carmelite nuns. This was not an investment property, however, but one of those set aside to provide cheap accommodation as part of the package which the Vatican offered in an effort to attract and retain its low-paid employees, the other principal incentives being access to duty-free goods and exemption from Italian income tax. From Zen’s point of view there were both pros and cons to the building’s low-rent status. On the plus side, there was no caretaker to worry about. The problem was that there was no lift either, and Grimaldi lived on the top floor.

The stairwell was dark, and the timer controlling the lights had been adjusted for the agility of a buck chamois in rut rather than a middle-aged policeman going about his dubious business. Lamboglia had told Zen that ‘with any luck’ he might ‘find some incriminating material which we can use’. There were various ways you could read that, quite apart from the literal meaning, which was in fact the only one Zen was prepared to discount entirely. The question was not whether Lamboglia had expected him to plant evidence in Grimaldi’s room — that was taken for granted — but what that evidence was to prove. After due consideration Zen had decided to go for broke and frame Grimaldi for the murder. The way things were looking, the Vatican was going to need a scapegoat. Grimaldi would do nicely, particularly if, as Zen suspected, he had been part of the team carrying out surveillance on Ruspanti.

The top floor of the building differed from the others only in that the rectangular circuit of bleak barracks-like corridors was lit by a succession of grimy skylights. The stench of carbolic cleanser was fighting a losing battle against a guerilla force of odours associated with stale food, dirty clothes, clogged drains and night sweats. The only sounds were the murmur of a distant radio and a steady hushing as of rain. Zen made his way along the corridor to a brown-painted door marked 4W, a loosened screw having allowed the 3 to flop over on its face.

There was no sound inside, but as a precaution Zen knocked gently before getting out the wooden box he had removed from the suitcase in his bedroom at home. The door was fitted with a Yale-type lock above the handle and a deadlock with a keyhole below. Zen bent down and squinted into the opening of the lower lock but the key was in position. He frowned briefly, then shrugged. Presumably Grimaldi only used the Yale lock when he went out.

He opened the tool kit and selected a device like a pair of callipers, which he inserted into the upper lock. Zen had acquired the tools during the years he had spent in Naples. He had been directing a plan to bug the beachside villa of a prominent camorra boss when a burglar had broken into the property. He couldn’t arrest the intruder without compromising the original operation, but the burglar didn’t know that, and was delighted when Zen offered to drop all charges in return for the tool kit and a series of masterclasses in its use. It was some time since he had needed to put these skills to the test, but he was nevertheless surprised to find that the lock totally resisted all his efforts.

The lack of play in the lock was so marked that if the lower lock hadn’t had the key in it, he might have thought that the catch was snibbed back. But it had, and an unoccupied room couldn’t very well be locked from the inside. He stood listening to the hushing of the rain and staring at the stubborn door. Wrapping a handkerchief around the door handle, he shoved his shoulder hard against the edge, to see which lock gave. The next thing he knew, the door had swung effortlessly open, depositing him on his knees in the middle of the floor.

A dull prickle of apprehension ran over his scalp as he got up again. Surely Giovanni Grimaldi’s work could not have left him with such a rosy view of human nature that he went off to work leaving his belongings in an unlocked room in an unguarded building? The only possible answer seemed to be that he didn’t have any belongings, or at least none worth stealing. Apart from a few magazines, a small radio, a cheap alarm clock, some empty soft-drink bottles and the clothes hanging in the closet and laid out on the bed, the place looked as impersonal as a hotel room. The furniture must have been an eyesore even when new, which it hadn’t been for a very long time.

Zen looked around for somewhere to hide the plastic twine. The obvious candidate was the chest of drawers, a hideous monstrosity with bandy metal legs and a synthetic woodgrain top. The drawers were slightly open and the contents in disarray. Of course, men who live alone tend to be either obsessionally tidy or total slobs, and it might simply be that Grimaldi was one of the latter. Nevertheless, Zen once again felt the warning prickle.

On top of the chest of drawers lay a leather wallet, a bunch of keys, a red plastic diary, some loose change, an open letter and a framed photograph of a young woman holding two small children by the hand. A faded chrysanthemum lay on its side in front of the picture. Zen picked up the letter, from some relative in Bari, and skimmed through it. It was mostly about Grimaldi’s children, who were apparently well and ‘as happy as can be expected’, although they sometimes confused their mother’s absence with their father’s, thinking that he was in heaven and she in Rome. Zen put the letter down beside the flower of death. He stepped over to the window and looked down at the street below, sighing deeply as though gasping for breath. By the entrance to the pizzeria opposite a group of men were standing in the mild sunshine, arguing good-naturedly.

Zen whirled round as though someone had touched him. There was no one there. There was no one there. The unlocked door, the clothes laid out on the bed, the wallet and money and keys all ready, the drawers in disorder, the sound of rain while the sun shone… As if sleep-walking, Zen crossed the room and opened the door. Along the floor of the corridor, a long mobile tongue of dark liquid was making its slow way, curling this way and that across the red tiles. Zen set off towards the direction from which it was coming. At the end of the corridor was a door painted glossy white, with no number and no lock, just a semi-circular metal handle. The sound of falling water grew louder as Zen splashed his way towards it. Light streamed out of the cracks around the door on three sides, water on the fourth.

He rapped loudly on the white panelling. When there was no reply, he pulled and then pushed the door handle. The door rattled, but it was bolted on the inside. Zen stepped back, measuring his distance carefully. He bent his right leg and raised his foot to about the level of the internal bolt, then kicked out hard. The door burst inwards, but held.

‘Hey!’

A man had poked his head out of a doorway further along the corridor. Zen ignored him. He brought his leg up again and smashed his foot viciously at the door. This time the bolt gave way and the door sagged in. A wave of water poured down the steps into the corridor, creating a series of miniature waterfalls.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the man demanded.

Zen didn’t even look round. He was staring at the water running down the white porcelain tiles of the floor, at the drenched dressing-gown which had for some time stemmed the flood under the door, at the eight-pointed cross roughly chalked on the wall, at the naked body slumped in the shower, blocking the drain, and at the face of Giovanni Grimaldi staring back at him, seemingly with an astonishment to match his own.

If the man had done as Zen had told him — phoned the police, and then waited outside for them to arrive — there would have been no problem. There was no phone in the building, so he had to go across the road to the pizzeria. That should have left plenty of time for Zen to subject Grimaldi’s room to a thorough search. As it was, he had barely started when he heard voices on the stairs. He hastily stuffed the red plastic diary into his pocket and regained the corridor just before the neighbour returned with a Carabinieri patrolman whose 850cc Moto-Guzzi had been parked outside the pizzeria while its driver demolished a piece of ham-and-mushroom within.

Apart from forcing him to curtail his search, this coincidence meant that Zen was cast in the role of Material Witness in the ensuing investigation, which went on for the rest of the afternoon. Faced with a couple of subordinates from his own force, he could have made a brief statement and then buggered off, but the paramilitary Carabinieri saw no reason to stretch the rules to accommodate some big shot from their despised civilian rivals. On the contrary! The inquiry into Giovanni Grimaldi’s death was handled strictly according to the letter of the law, with every t crossed, every i dotted, and every statement, submission and report written up in triplicate and then signed by the witnesses and counter-signed by the officials.

Not that there was the slightest doubt as to the cause of the tragedy. ‘I always said it was just a matter of time before something like this happened,’ the dead man’s neighbour told the patrolman as they gazed in through the open doorway of the shower. Marco Duranti was one of those florid, irascible men who have the answer to all the world’s problems. It’s all so very simple! The solution is right here, at their fingertips! Only — and this is what drives them mad — no one thinks to ask them. Not only that, but when they offer the information, as a disinterested gesture of goodwill, people take no notice! They even turn away, muttering ‘Give it a rest, Marco, for Christ’s sake!’ That’s what Grimaldi had done, the last time he’d warned him — purely out of the kindness of his own heart — about that damned shower. It was thus understandable that Duranti’s grief was tempered by a certain satisfaction that his oft-repeated warnings of disaster had been proved right.

He drew the attention of the Carabinieri patrolman to the electric water heater supplying the shower. Sellotaped to the wall near by was a piece of paper in a plastic cover punched for use in a folder. A faded message in red felt-pen indicated that the heater should always be turned off before using the shower. Now, however, the switch was clearly set to ON.

‘It should have been replaced years ago,’ Duranti went on indignantly, ‘but you can imagine the chances of that happening. The Church has always got enough money to keep Wojtyla jetting about the world, but when it comes to looking after its own properties and the poor devils who live in them — eh, eh, that’s another matter! This whole place is falling to pieces. Why there was someone in only yesterday morning poking about in the drains. The next thing we know the floor will be running with shit, never mind water!’

By this time a small group of residents, neighbours and hangers-on had gathered in the corridor. No one wanted to go into the bathroom while the water was still potentially lethal, so Duranti fetched a hook with a long handle which was used for opening the skylight windows, and after several abortive attempts the patrolman managed to flip the heater switch to the OFF position. Protected by the solid leather soles of his magnificent boots, he then ventured into the flooded cubicle and turned off the water just as the maresciallo arrived with three more patrolmen and a doctor. No one paid any attention to the design chalked on the wall, and by the time they all adjourned to the local Carabinieri station it had been rubbed by so many sleeves and shoulders that it was no longer recognizable.

For the next few hours, Zen, Duranti and a selection of the other residents were questioned severally and together. Zen told them that he had gone to the house while following up a lead in a drugs case he was engaged on, details of which he could not disclose without authorization from his superiors. The lead had in fact been false — an address on the fifth floor of a building which only had four — but when he reached the top of the stairs he had noticed the water seeping along the corridor. Having traced the source to the shower, he attempted to communicate with the occupant, and when that failed he had kicked the door down.

It was this homely gesture which had finally won the Carabinieri over. They glanced at each other, nodding sympathetically. Confronted by an obstinately locked door and a stubborn silence on the other side of it, that was what you did, wasn’t it? You kicked the fucking thing down. It might not do the door any good, but it would sure as hell make the next one think twice about messing you around. The maresciallo thanked Zen for his cooperation and told him he could go. Marco Duranti on the other hand, was detained for a further forty minutes. Zen spent the time in a cafe across the road making a number of phone calls. The first was to the contact number he had been given in the Vatican. This was engaged, so he phoned Tania.

‘Hello?’

It was a man’s voice, with a reedy timbre and clipped intonation.

‘Sorry, I must have a wrong number.’

He dialled again, but now this number was engaged as well, so he fed the two-hundred lire piece back into the slot and called Paragon Security Consultants. A secretary made him hold the line for some time before putting him through to the managing director.

‘Gilberto Nieddu.’

‘This is the Ministry of Finance, dottore. Following a raid by our officers on a leading firm of accountants, we have uncovered evidence which suggests that for the last five years your company has consistently failed to declare twenty-five per cent of its profits.’

There was silence at the other end.

‘However, we have no time to concern ourselves with such small-time offenders,’ Zen continued, ‘so we’d be prepared to overlook the matter in return for the services of a discreet, qualified electrician.’

This was greeted by a sharp intake of breath.

‘Is that you, Aurelio?’

Zen chuckled.

‘You sounded worried, Gilberto.’

‘You bastard! You really had me going there!’

‘Oh come on, Gilberto! You don’t expect me to believe that you’re fiddling a quarter of your taxes, do you?

‘Of course not, but…’

‘It must be a hell of a lot more than that.’

Nieddu made a spluttering sound.

‘Now about this electrician,’ Zen went on.

‘Look, Aurelio, it may have escaped your attention, but I’m not running a community information service. You need an electrician, look in the pagine gialle. ’

‘I’m not talking about changing a plug, Gilberto.’

‘So what are you talking about?’

Zen told him. Nieddu gave a long sigh.

‘Why do I let you drag me into these things, Aurelio? What’s it got to do with me? What’s it got to do with you, for that matter?’

He sighed again.

‘Give me the address.’

When they’d agreed a rendezvous, Zen called Tania again. The same male voice answered.

‘Who’s that?’ demanded Zen.

There was a brief interval of silence, then the receiver was replaced. Zen immediately redialled, but the phone rang and rang without any answer. He hung up, went to the bar and ordered a double espresso which he gulped down, searing his throat. He got out the red plastic-bound diary which he had removed from Giovanni Grimaldi’s room. It turned out to be dated the following year, a freebie given away with a recent issue of L’Espresso. He riffled through it, but the pages were blank except for a few numbers and letters scribbled in the Personal Data section. Replacing the diary in his pocket, Zen touched his packet of Nazionali cigarettes. He took one out and lit it, then returned to the phone. There was still no reply from Tania’s number, so he tried the Vatican again. This time the number answered almost immediately.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Signor Bianchi.’

‘Yes?’

It was a voice Zen didn’t recognize.

‘I’ve just seen Signor Giallo.’

He felt ridiculous, but Lamboglia’s instructions had been quite clear: even on this supposedly secure line, Zen was to refer to Grimaldi only by this code name.

‘He’s dead.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Is there anything else?’ asked the voice.

‘You mean any other deaths?’ Zen shouted. ‘Why, how many are you expecting?’

He slammed the phone down. When he turned, the barman and all five customers were staring at him. He was about to say something when he saw Marco Duranti emerge from the Carabinieri station and set off along the street at a surprisingly brisk trot. Zen tossed a five-thousand-lire note in the general direction of the barman and ran after him.

‘Excuse me!’

Duranti swung round with a wary, hostile expression. When he saw Zen he relaxed, but only slightly.

‘It’s about this maintenance man you saw in the building yesterday,’ Zen told him.

‘Yes?’

Zen pointed across the street.

‘Are you going home? We could walk together.’

Duranti shrugged gracelessly.

‘I was wondering if there might be a connection with this case I’m working on, you see,’ Zen told him as they set off together. ‘They could be using the sewers as a place to hide their drug cache. Where was he actually working?’

‘I didn’t look. All I know is he had the electric drill going for about half an hour just when I’m trying to have my siesta. Of course they would have to pick the week I’m on night shift.’

They were just passing the Porta Sant’ Anna, the tradesman’s entrance of the Vatican City State. A Swiss Guard in the working uniform of blue tunic, sleeveless cloak and beret set at a jaunty angle was gesturing with white-gloved hands to a driver who had just approached the security barrier. Meanwhile his colleague chatted to a girl on the pavement. A little further up the street was a second checkpoint, manned by the Vigilanza. Their uniform, dark blue with red piping, badly cut and with too much gold braid, made a sad contrast with the efficient elegance of the Swiss. Revolver on his hip, radio on his shoulder, the Guard held up his hand to stop the car, which had now been permitted through the first barrier, and swaggered over to give the driver a hard time.

‘What did this man look like?’ Zen asked.

Duranti shrugged.

‘Stocky, muscular, average height, with a big round face. He wasn’t Roman, I’ll tell you that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The accent! All up here in the nose, like a real northerner.’

Zen nodded as though this confirmed his suspicions.

‘That’s very helpful. You make an excellent witness, signore. If only everyone was as observant.’

They had reached the corner of the street where Duranti lived. Zen thanked him and then waited until he had disappeared before following him down the street to the pizzeria where he had had lunch.

Normality had already returned to the neighbourhood. In an area where safety standards were rarely or never observed, domestic accidents were even more frequent than suicide attempts in St Peter’s. In the pizzeria, the owner and three cronies were discussing the recent and spectacular explosion of a butane gas cylinder which had blown a five-year-old girl clean through the window of the family’s third-floor apartment. The child landed on the roof of a car below, unhurt but orphaned, her father having been disembowelled by a jagged chunk of the cylinder while the mother succumbed to brain injury after part of the wall collapsed on her.

Zen elbowed his way through to the counter and ordered another slab of pizza to keep him going until, God willing, he finally got to eat a proper meal. The baker had just pushed a large baking tray filled with bubbling pizza through the serving hatch from the kitchen next door, and the pizzaiolo hacked out a large slice which he folded in two and presented to Zen with a paper wrapper. He moved to the back of the shop and leant against a stack of plastic crates filled with soft-drink bottles, munching the piping-hot pizza and awaiting the arrival of Paragon Security’s electrician.

A blowsy near-blonde of rather more than a certain age walked in and greeted the four men with the familiar manner of one who has seen the best and worst they could do and not been at all impressed. She ordered one of the ham and mozzarella pasties called calzoni, ‘trousers’. The men guffawed, and one remarked that that was all Bettina ever thought about. She replied that on the contrary, calzoni these days were usually a disappointment, ‘delicious looking from the outside, but with no filling worth a damn’. The owner of the pizzeria protested that his ‘trousers’, on the other hand, were crammed with all the good things God sends. Bettina remained unimpressed, claiming that while his father had known a thing or two about stuffing, the best the present proprietor could manage was a pathetic scrap of meat and a dribble of cheese.

Zen’s left elbow turned to a burning knob of pain.

‘Hi there.’

The pain vanished as suddenly as it had begun. Zen looked round to find Gilberto Nieddu grinning puckishly at him.

‘I didn’t expect you to come personally,’ said Zen.

He still found it odd to see Nieddu’s rotund, compact body dressed in a smart suit and tie. Gilberto had been running an independent security firm for years now, and very successfully too, but Zen still thought of him as the colleague he had once been, and was always vaguely taken aback to see him disguised as a businessman. Nieddu set down the small metal case he was carrying.

‘You don’t think I’d risk one of my lads getting involved with your crazy schemes?’

Zen waved at the counter.

‘Want something?’

Nieddu shook his head.

‘I’ve got a meal waiting for me at home, Aurelio. If I ever get home.’

Zen finished his pizza and lit a Nazionale.

‘Okay, this is the situation. Like I said on the phone, someone was killed in an accident this afternoon, only I don’t think it was an accident. The victim lived in a rundown tenement where the wiring was installed around the time Caesar got mugged in the Forum. The water heater in particular is very dodgy, and tenants have been warned to switch it off before using the shower. It seems to me that all someone needed to do was fix the heater so that it became seriously dangerous, and then wait for the victim to trot along and electrocute himself. In short, the perfect murder.’

‘Give me a smoke, polenta-head,’ said Nieddu.

‘I thought you’d given up.’

‘I’ve given up buying them. Don’t laugh. My doctor says it’s a first step.’

He lit up and exhaled mightily, then shook his head.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ he said. ‘They’d need to get out the element, for a start. That’s a major job even with a new heater. If this one’s as old as you say, the nuts will have rusted up. Anyway, the thing’s bound to be checked, and it’ll be clear that it’s been tampered with. There’s no chance of it being mistaken for an accident.’

‘So it can’t be done?’

‘Of course it can be done, but not like that. What you want to do is by-pass the heater altogether. Where exactly is this run-down tenement?’

‘Right across the road.’

Gilberto glanced at his watch.

‘Let’s have a quick look. Then I really must go, or Rosella will think I’m having an affair.’

The hallway was dark and dank, the only sound the brushing of Zen’s sleeve on the plaster as he groped for the switch.

‘No!’ whispered Nieddu.

He opened the metal case and removed a small torch. A beam of light split the darkness, precise as a pointing finger, indicating walls and ceiling, doorways, steps, painting brief slashes and squiggles in the stairwell as they walked upstairs. On each floor they could hear the murmur of radios and televisions, but they saw no one. When they reached the top, Zen led the way along the corridor. Light showed under the door of Marco Duranti’s room, but there was no sound inside. Zen tried the door to Giovanni Grimaldi’s room, but it was now locked. The shower sported a brand-new hasp and a large padlock, as well as a sign reading ‘OUT OF ORDER’.

Zen opened his burglary kit and got to work on the padlock. Despite its impressive appearance, it was a cheapie. He had barely started work before it snapped open. Nieddu gave a low whistle.

‘When you finally get the boot, Aurelio, you give me a call. We can always use people with skills like yours.’

He pushed the door open. The broken hinges protested loudly and the base scraped across the tiles like fingernails down a blackboard. Zen shoved him inside quickly and pushed the door closed as someone came out of a room further along the corridor. Nieddu doused the torch and he and Zen stood side by side in the darkness. Footsteps approached, then retreated again. A door closed and feet receded down the stairs.

Nieddu switched on the torch. The beam bounced and skittered around the glazed white tiles, picking out the water heater resting on its wooden trestle near an oblong window high up in the whitewashed wall.

‘Give me a leg up.’

Zen locked his hands together to make a step. With the adroitness of an acrobat, the Sardinian hoisted himself up, gripping the trestle with one hand and resting his foot on the wall screening off the shower cubicle.

‘Just as I thought,’ he said, his voice reverberating off the bare walls. ‘The threads are all corroded to hell. No one’s touched this for years.’

He dropped back to the floor and padded around the bathroom, shining the torch over the glossy tiles and matt-white plaster. When he reached the partition wall beside the door, he grunted significantly.

‘Ah.’

‘Found something?’ queried Zen.

Nieddu eased the door open and stepped outside. He shone the torch into the angle of the wall. Inside, a thin pencil of light appeared in the darkness. Zen bent down and inspected the wall. A small hole had been drilled right through it. He went out to join Nieddu in the corridor. The torch beam was now pointing along the wall at an electric junction box a few yards away.

Outside in the street, a police car approached at high speed, siren howling. The walls and ceiling of the corridor pulsed with a revolving blue light. Down below, in the entrance hall of the building, an excitable voice which Zen recognized as that of Marco Duranti yelled ‘This way!’ The stairwell resounded to the sound of voices and clattering boots.

‘Time to go?’ asked Nieddu calmly.

Zen nodded. The Sardinian opened the metal case and removed something which looked like a large firework. He ran along the corridor to the head of the stairs, tossed it down and came running back.

‘Smoke bomb,’ he explained. ‘Should hold them for a while.’

There was an acrid smell in the air, and the sounds below turned to coughing and spluttering. They ran back to the bathroom, where Nieddu held his hands cupped while Zen hoisted himself clumsily up to the wooden trestle. Nieddu then passed up his dispatch case. Going into the shower, he gripped the metal piping and pulled himself up on the wall around the cubicle. From there he leapt across to join Zen on the trestle, which creaked ominously under their combined weight. Nieddu clambered on top of the water heater.

‘Fuck!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve snagged my jacket on a nail.’

‘Christ, is that all?’

‘ All? It’s brand-new, from Ferre.’

He leant across to the window and pulled it open. Taking the metal case from Zen, he pushed it through the opening, then sprang after it and held his hands out to Zen, who had clambered up on top of the tank. He tried not to look down. The trestle was still groaning and the window looked a long way away.

‘It’s no good,’ he said suddenly. ‘I can’t do it.’

The Sardinian sat down facing the window, his feet braced on either side.

‘Give me your hands.’

Zen leaned forward across the gap and Nieddu gripped his wrists. In the corridor outside he could hear a stampede of approaching boots. He kicked off from the heater, scraping his shoes desperately on the wall, and somehow Nieddu dragged him through the opening and out on to the sloping tiled roof.

‘Come on!’ the Sardinian said urgently. ‘I’ve got some stun grenades, but you wouldn’t want me to have to use those. They cost a fortune, and you already owe me for the suit.’

They ran off together across the roofs towards the lights of the next street.