Cabal

4

They strolled along the quay, hand in hand, fingers entwined. It had rained while they were in the restaurant, briefly but hard. Now the sky had cleared again, every surface glistened, and the air was flooded with elusive, evocative scents.

The little town of Fiumicino, at the mouth of the narrower of the two channels into which the Tiber divided just before it met the sea, was somewhere Zen always returned to with pleasure. The scale of the place, the narrow waterway and the low buildings flanking it, the sea tang, the bustle of a working port, all combined to remind him of the fishing villages of the Venetian lagoon. In addition, Fiumicino contained several restaurants capable of doing justice to the quality and freshness of the catches which its boats brought in.

Replete with crema di riso gratinato ai frutti di mare and grilled sea bass with artichokes, he and Tania wandered along the stone quays like a pair of young lovers without a care in the world.

‘… the best artichokes in the world,’ she was saying. ‘My aunt prepares the hearts, then they bottle them in oil, ten kilos at a time.’

‘You’re making me hungry again.’

‘You must try them, Aurelio! I’ll get Aldo to send an extra jar with the next batch of samples…’

She broke off.

‘Batch of what?’ Zen asked mechanically, so as not to reveal that he hadn’t been listening, absorbed in the spectacle of a skinny cat stalking a butterfly across a pile of empty fish crates.

‘The next time one of the family comes to Rome, I mean,’ said Tania.

‘Look!’

Balanced on its hind legs like a performing monkey, the cat was frantically pawing at the air, trying in vain to seize the elusive, substanceless quiver of colour.

‘You’ll never catch it, silly!’ laughed Tania in a slightly tipsy voice. ‘And even if you do, there’s nothing there to eat!’

Still intent on its prey, the cat stepped off the edge of the boxes. It twisted round in mid-air and landed on its feet, shooting a hostile glance at the couple who had witnessed its humiliation.

‘Actually I may go myself, this weekend,’ Tania announced as they continued on their way.

‘Go? Where?’

‘Home to Udine, to see my cousins.’

Zen freed his hand.

‘Suppose I came too?’

Tania shot him a panicky glance.

‘You? Well…’

She gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘You see, Bettina and Aldo don’t actually know about you.’

A few minutes earlier, as they walked together along the quay, Zen had found himself thinking, ‘This, or something very like it, is happiness.’ That exaltation now looked like nothing more special than a side effect of the verdicchio they had drunk at lunch. Now the hangover had arrived.

‘So who do they know about?’ he demanded truculently.

Tania looked at him, a new hardness in his eyes.

‘They know I’m no longer with Mauro, if that’s what you mean.’

He didn’t say whether it was or not.

‘So they think you’re living alone.’

‘Well, aren’t I?’

They faced each other for a moment over that. Then Tania broke into a smile and took his arm.

‘Look, Bettina’s my cousin, the second daughter of my father’s younger brother. It’s not an intimate relationship, but since my parents died and Nino emigrated to Australia it’s the best I’ve got. Bettina doesn’t burden me with her problems and I don’t burden her with mine.’

‘I didn’t realize I was a problem,’ he replied, snapping up the cheap shot on offer.

‘I didn’t mean that, Aurelio. I mean that we don’t share our innermost preoccupations, good or bad. We keep our distance. That’s the best way sometimes, particularly with relatives. Otherwise the whole thing can get out of control.’

‘And control is important to you, is it?’

He hated the snide way he said it. So did Tania, it soon became clear.

‘And why not?’ she snapped. ‘Damn it, I spent the first thirty years of my life asleep at the wheel. You saw the result. Now I’ve decided to try taking charge for a while and see how that goes. I mean is that all right?’

Aware of the weakness of his position, Zen backed down.

‘Of course. Go where you like. It looks like I might have to work, anyway.’

The fishing boats which had landed their catches early that morning were now tied up two abreast on either side of the channel, stem to stern. Two crewmen were mending nets spread out over the quay, and Tania and Zen chose to go opposite ways around them. As they joined up again, she said, ‘What is this work you’re doing, anyway?’

Partly out of fatigue with the truth, partly to get his own back for her own evasions, Zen decided to lie.

‘The Vatican have got a problem with documents disappearing from the Secret Archives,’ he said, recalling the case which Grimaldi had been working on at the time of his death. ‘They can’t use their own security people because they think some of them may be involved.’

‘And you hang around like a store detective waiting for someone to lift a pair of tights?’

‘More or less. It’s a hell of a way to make a living, but if I crack the case I get a full plenary indulgence.’

Tania laughed.

‘Not that I really need one,’ he went on, eager to please. ‘I’m already owed over a hundred thousand years’ remission from purgatory. In fact I’m a bit worried that I might soon reach the stage where my spiritual credit exceeds any practical possibilities I have of sinning. Just think what a ruinous effect that would have on my moral fibre.’

‘How did you get to be so holy?’

‘Oh, I used to be quite devout in my way. I loved the idea of collecting indulgences, like saving up coupons for a free gift. If I said three Pater noster s after confession, I got three hundred years’ remission from purgatory. That seemed an incredible bargain! I couldn’t believe my luck. It takes maybe a minute or so, if you gabble, and for that you got off three hundred years of unspeakable torture! I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t taking advantage. I and Tommaso, my best friend, used to vie with each other. I had well over a hundred thousand years’ worth stored up before I finally fell in love with Tommaso’s sister. After that, the next world no longer seemed quite so important.’

His words were drowned by the roar of a plane taking off from the international airport just a few kilometres to the north.

‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘having attended Mass on the first Friday of each month for the nine months after my First Communion, I’m assured of dying in a state of grace whatever happens.’

To his surprise, Tania immediately reached out and touched the nearest metal — a mooring bollard — for good luck.

‘Don’t mention such things, Aurelio.’

He took her in his arms, and she kissed him in that way she had, making him wish they were in bed.

‘Sweetheart,’ she said.

He laughed, moved despite himself, despite his knowledge that she was cheating him.

‘I didn’t know you were superstitious,’ he said as they walked on. ‘You’ve spent too long living with southerners.’

‘Now, now! Don’t start coming on like some region-alist red-neck who thinks that the Third World starts at the Apennines.’

‘Of course it doesn’t! It starts at Mestre.’

‘Mauro may have been a creep, but…’

‘ May? Tania, you once described Mauro Bevilacqua as someone for whom strangling at birth would have been too good.’

Perhaps that was who she was seeing on the side, he thought. Perhaps Mauro would have the last laugh after all, and Zen suffer the ignominy of being cuckolded by his lover’s husband.

‘… but not all southerners are like that,’ Tania continued. ‘Mauro’s elder brother, for example, is a charming man, scholarly and cultured, with a nice dry wit.’

‘Oh yes?’ demanded Zen, his jealousy immediately locking on to this new target.

‘In fact you might see him while you’re snooping around the Vatican Archives. He works for the region’s cultural affairs department, and he spends a lot of time there researching material for exhibitions and so on.’

‘Maybe he’s the one who’s been stealing the stuff,’ Zen muttered moodily.

‘From what Tullio says, I’m surprised the thefts were ever noticed. According to him the Vatican collections are so vast and so badly organized that you can spend days tracking down a single item. It’s more like a place for hiding documents than for finding them, he says.’

She broke off, frightened by the intensity with which he was staring at her.

‘What’s the matter, Aurelio? Did I say something wrong? You seem so strange today, so moody and unpredictable. Is there something you haven’t told me?’

There was a deafening siren blast as a large orange ocean-going tug slipped her moorings on the other side of the river. Zen transferred his obsessively fixated gaze to the vessel as it proceeded slowly downstream towards the open sea.

‘Do you ever see this… what’s his name?’

Now it was Tania’s turn to stare.

‘Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?’

He looked at her and shrugged, ignoring her indignant tone.

‘What it says.’

They faced each other like enemies.

‘Do I ever see Tullio Bevilacqua?’ Tania recited with sarcastic emphasis. ‘No, I haven’t seen him since Mauro and I broke up. Does that satisfy you?’

‘But are you on good terms? Would he do you a favour?’

‘What sort of favour?’ Tania shouted, scaring away the seagulls. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Aurelio?’

So he told her.

They returned by train. Tania got off at Trastevere and got a bus back to her flat, while Zen continued to the suburban Tiburtina station. The determined effort they both made to part on good terms was itself the clearest indication yet of the growing crisis in their relationship, and of their mutual sense that things were no longer quite what they seemed.

From the station, Zen caught a taxi to the Hotel Torlonia Palace. On the way he looked through the Ministry’s file on the Knights of Malta. As he had expected, the document was entirely non-controversial, amounting to little more than an outline of the organization’s history, structure and overt aims. Founded in 1070, the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta was the third oldest religious Order after the Benedictines and Augustans, and the first to consist entirely of laymen. The Order was originally formed to staff and run infirmaries during the Crusades, but soon took on a military role as well. At the end of the twelfth century the Knights retreated to Rhodes, from where they conducted covert operations all over the Middle East until their expulsion by the Turks in 1522. Thereafter they led a token existence in Malta until Napoleon’s conquest of the island once again forced them into exile, this time in Rome.

The Knights had thus lost their original religious and political relevance by 1522, and the last fragment of their territorial power three centuries after that. Nevertheless, like an archaic law which has never been repealed, the Order still enjoyed the status and privileges of an independent nation state, with the power to mint coins, print stamps, license cars, operate a merchant fleet and issue passports to its diplomats and other favoured individuals. ‘Like Opus Dei [q.v.],’ Zen read, ‘the Order is exempt from the jurisdiction of local bishops, being under the direct authority of the pope, exercised through the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes. The contradiction between the obedience required by this relationship and the independence inherent in the Order’s sovereign temporal status has on occasion led to acrimonious conflicts.’

Zen scanned the rest of the report, which sketched the structure of this very exclusive organization. At least sixteen quarterings of noble blood were required for membership, except in a special category — Knights of Magisterial Grace — created to accommodate prominent but plebian Catholics. At the core of the Order were the thirty ‘professed’ knights, or Knights of Justice, who had taken a triple vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. ‘Governed by the His Most Eminent Highness the Prince and Grand Master with the help of a “general chapter” which convenes regularly, the Order donates medicine and medical equipment to needy countries and performs humanitarian work throughout the Third World…’

The text began to blur in front of Zen’s eyes. It was clear what was involved: a snobbish club designed to give the impoverished remnants of the Catholic aristocracy access to serious money, while bestowing a flattering glow of religious and historical legitimacy over the ruthlessly acquired wealth of the nouveaux riches. Under cover of the Order’s meritorious charitable work, its members could dress up in fancy red tunics, flowing capes and plumed hats and indulge themselves to their heart’s content in the spurious rituals and meaningless honours of a Ruritanian mini-state. All very silly, no doubt, but no more so than most pastimes of the very rich. What was really silly was the idea that such an organization might be capable of plotting — never mind executing — the cold-blooded murders of Ludovico Ruspanti and Giovanni Grimaldi.

The taxi drew up in the courtyard of an umbertino monstrosity on a quiet street overlooking the gardens of the Villa Borghese. The uniformed doorman surveyed Zen without notable enthusiasm, but eventually let him pass. Zen identified himself at Reception, walked across the spacious lobby and flopped down in a large armchair, wondering what he was going to say. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Antonio Simonelli had a vested interest in establishing that Ruspanti’s death was connected with the currency fraud which he had been investigating. If it wasn’t, then his entire dossier on the affair, painstakingly compiled over many months of arduous work, would become so much wastepaper. Since Ruspanti had died in St Peter’s, which was technically foreign soil, Simonelli could not pursue his suspicions officially without the cooperation of the Vatican, which was not forthcoming. Zen was therefore the magistrate’s only hope.

What Simonelli wanted from him was some inside information, some awkward fact or compromising discrepancy, which he could use to bring pressure to bear on the Vatican authorities to permit a full official investigation of Ruspanti’s death to be carried out by him in collaboration with one of the Vatican’s own magistrates. The affair would then drag on inconclusively for years, until it petered out, smothered beneath the sheer volume of contradictory and confusing evidence. That would be of no concern to Simonelli, who would meanwhile have established himself as one of the rising stars of the judiciary, a man to watch. As for Zen, he would be used and abused without respite by all sides in the affair, and would be lucky to keep his job. Unless he scotched this thing now, he would never hear the end of it.

There was a buzz of voices behind him.

‘I have nothing further to say!’

‘According to Giorgio Bocca, your philosophy encapsulates the shallow, a-historical consumerism of the nineties. Do you accept that?’

Zen turned to find a strikingly attractive man in his mid-twenties standing at bay before a pack of reporters brandishing notebooks and microphones. His sleek, feral look jibed intriguingly with his boyish fair hair and the candour of his pale blue eyes. His movements were almost feminine in their suppleness, yet the look of breathtaking insolence with which he confronted the journalists could hardly have been more macho.

‘Bocca can say what he likes. No one’s listening anyway. As for me, my clothes speak for me!’

They certainly did, a layered montage of overlapping textures and colours so cunningly contrived that one hardly noticed where one garment ended and another began. Especially in motion, the resulting flurry of activity was so distracting that you hardly noticed the man himself.

Another reporter waved a microphone in the man’s face.

‘Camilla Cederna has said, “The one thing that is clear from this book is that it was composed by a ghost-writer. Since the invented personality the author describes is equally substanceless, the whole exercise amounts to one ghost writing about another.” Any comment?’

‘If la Cederna is so out of touch with the rhythms of contemporary reality, perhaps she should restrict herself to a topic more suited to her talents, for example needlework.’

This caused some laughter.

‘Fortunately the thousands of people who read my book and wear my clothes have no such difficulties,’ the man continued. ‘They understand that what I am is what I have made myself, using nothing but my own genius. I owe nothing to anyone or to anything! I am entirely my own creation! I am Falco!’

‘Dottor Zen?’

A corpulent man had approached the chair where Zen was sitting and stood looking down at him with a complacent expression.

‘I am Antonio Simonelli.’

They’re letting all sorts in these days, thought Zen as they shook hands. With his crumpled blue suit and hearty manner, Simonelli seemed more like a provincial tradesman than a magistrate. But this might well be a deliberate ploy designed to lull Zen into a false sense of security. And indeed Simonelli at once struck a confidential note.

‘You know who that was, of course?’

The media star had swept out by now, surrounded by his entourage, and the lobby was quiet again.

‘Some designer, isn’t he? I don’t really keep up with such things.’

Simonelli subsided into a leather chair opposite, which resembled an overdone souffle.

‘Falco, he calls himself,’ Simonelli explained in his Bergamo whine, like an ill-tuned oboe d’amore. ‘He’s based in Milan, but he’s down here promoting some book he’s published, explaining his “design philosophy” if you please. Of course he would have to choose the very hotel where I always stay. It’s terrible. You can’t move for reporters.’

He signalled a waiter. Zen ordered an espresso, Simonelli a caffe Hag.

‘It’s my heart,’ he explained, unwrapping a panatella cigar with his big, blunt fingers. ‘One of my colleagues dropped dead just last month. He was fifteen years younger than me. Gave me a bit of a jolt, so I had a check-up, and it turns out I’m at risk myself.’

Zen smiled politely.

‘Anyway, I mustn’t bore you with my problems,’ the magistrate went on. ‘Except for the Ruspanti case, that is. I don’t know how much you know about the investigation I have been involved in…’

‘Only what I’ve read in the newspapers.’

‘It’s all water under the bridge now, of course,’ Simonelli sighed mournfully. ‘With my key witness dead, there’s no case to be made. This is really only a private chat, just to satisfy my curiosity. Naturally whatever is said between us two will remain strictly off the record.’

He broke off as the waiter brought their coffees. Simonelli emptied two sachets of sugar into his cup and looked across the table at Zen as he stirred.

‘So tell me, what really happened? Did he fall, or was he pushed?’

It had been perfectly done, thought Zen. The illusion of a personal rapport, the implied assumption that they were associates and equals, the casual request for information ‘just to satisfy my curiosity’, the assurance that Zen could speak freely in the knowledge that what was said would go no further, even the facetious touch of the final question. If Zen hadn’t been expecting something of the kind, he might well have fallen for it hook, line and sinker — and then spent the next few years wriggling and thrashing as Simonelli reeled him in. As it was, the magistrate’s adroitness merely reinforced Zen’s determination to give nothing away. Reticence would be a mistaken tactic, however, merely confirming that there were significant secrets to be learned. The true art of concealment, Zen knew, lay not in silence but garrulity, in rumour and innuendo. Best of all was to let the victim spin the web of deceit himself. That way, it was bound to conform perfectly to his fears and prejudices, forming a snug, cosy trap from which he had no desire to escape.

‘I found no evidence to suggest that Ruspanti’s death was anything other than it appeared to be,’ he declared firmly.

Simonelli gazed at him levelly.

‘So you accept that he committed suicide.’

‘I see no reason not to.’

The magistrate lit his cigar carefully, rotating the end above the flame of his lighter.

‘Even in the light of this second fatality?’

Zen looked blank.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Vatican security man, Giovanni Grimaldi. You don’t think his death was connected in any way to Ruspanti’s?’

Zen downed his coffee in three swift gulps.

‘How do you know about that?’ he asked casually.

Simonelli sipped his coffee and puffed at his cigar, making Zen wait.

‘Grimaldi was what the espionage profession calls a double agent,’ he explained at last. ‘In addition to his duties for the Vigilanza, he was also working for me as a paid informant.’

Zen knew that this revelation was intended to encourage him to make one in return, but he was too intrigued not to follow it up.

‘So you knew that Ruspanti had taken refuge in the Vatican?’

Simonelli nodded.

‘After the Maltese kicked him out. Yes, I knew. But I couldn’t prove it, and if I’d spoken out they’d have spirited him away before anyone could do anything. So I bided my time and used Grimaldi to keep track of what was happening. Until last week, he was providing me with regular, detailed reports of Ruspanti’s movements, the people he met, the calls he made, and so on. Most of it was irrelevant, all about some organization which Ruspanti was threatening to expose if they didn’t help him. But the first thing I did when I heard of Ruspanti’s death was to try and contact Grimaldi. He didn’t return my calls, so I flew down here to look him up, only to find that he was dead.’

Zen sat perfectly still, eyeing Simonelli. His racing pulse might have been due to the coffee he had just drunk.

‘What was the name of this organization Ruspanti was threatening?’ he asked.

Simonelli looked annoyed at this reference to something he had made clear was a side-issue.

‘I really don’t remember.’

‘The anonymous letter to the papers spoke of a group calling itself the Cabal,’ said Zen.

‘Yes, that’s right. The Cabal. Why? Do you know any more about it?’

Zen shrugged.

‘To be honest, I assumed it referred to this group of businessmen you’ve been investigating.’

To his surprise, Simonelli reacted with a look of total panic. Then it was gone, and he laughed.

‘Really?’

Zen said nothing. Simonelli broke a baton of ash off his cigar into the glass ashtray on the table.

‘According to Grimaldi’s reports, I’d rather gathered that it had some connection with the Knights of Malta,’ he said.

Zen raised his eyebrows.

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ Simonelli gasped two deep breaths.

‘Anyway, we’ve rather got away from my original question, which was whether you think that Grimaldi’s death could have been connected in any way to Ruspanti’s.’

Zen frowned like a dim schoolboy confronted by a concept too difficult for him to grasp.

‘But Ruspanti committed suicide by jumping off the gallery in St Peter’s and Grimaldi was electrocuted in his shower by a faulty water heater. What connection could there be?’

‘The two deaths occurring so close together was just a coincidence, then?’

‘I can’t see what else it could be.’

In his heart he apologized to Ruspanti and Grimaldi for adding such insults to the fatal injuries they had sustained. But it was all very well for the dead, he thought to himself. They were well out of it.

‘That anonymous letter to the press certainly was neither an accident nor a coincidence,’ Simonelli remarked with some asperity. ‘Someone wrote it, and for a reason. Do you have any ideas about that?’

Zen looked shiftily around the lobby, as though checking whether they could be overheard.

‘One thing I did find out is that certain people in the Vatican are not satisfied with the official line on Ruspanti’s death,’ he confided in an undertone. ‘The Vatican isn’t a monolith, any more than the Communist Party — or whatever it’s calling itself these days. There are different currents, varying tendencies, opposed pressure groups. One of them might well have wished to try and throw doubt on the suicide verdict.’

Simonelli plunged his cigar into the dregs of his coffee, where it expired with a hiss.

‘An official leak, then.’

Zen tipped his hand back and forth.

‘Semi-official disinformation.’

‘It must have been embarrassing for you,’ Simonelli suggested, ‘to have your professional integrity publicly attacked like that.’

Zen shrugged.

‘One has to live with these things.’

Simonelli hitched up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a chunky gold watch.

‘Well, thank you for taking the trouble to come and satisfy my interest in this business,’ he said.

‘Not at all. If that’s all, I’d better be getting back to the Ministry.’

Simonelli raised his eyebrows.

‘Working?’ he demanded coarsely. ‘At this time?’

The magistrate’s manner was so familiar that Zen almost winked at him.

‘Thanks to this Vatican business, I’ve got a backlog of other work to catch up on,’ he confided. ‘I thought I might as well get paid overtime for doing it.’

Simonelli laughed.

‘Quite right, quite right!’

Just inside the hotel’s revolving door, they shook hands again.

‘Perhaps we’ll meet again some time,’ Zen found himself saying.

Simonelli’s eyes were enlivened by some expression which he couldn’t read at all.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised, dottore. I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

AUTHORIZATION?

Zen gazed at the band of green script which stared back at him, as unwavering as a reptile’s eye. Something had gone wrong, but he had no idea what. True, he was no longer as utterly innocent of computers as he had once been. He had no map to the computer’s alien landscape, and wouldn’t have been able to read it if he had, but he had laboriously learned to follow a number of paths which led to the places he wanted or needed to reach. As long as he stayed on them, he could usually reach his goal, given time. But if by accident he pushed the wrong key, producing some unforeseen effect, there was nothing for it but to return to the beginning.

That was what must have happened now, it seemed. He had intended to open a file in which to enter the outline details of the Ruspanti case which he had passed on orally to the Minister earlier in the day. He wanted to do this now, while they were still fresh in his mind. Then, later in the week, he would call up the file and rewrite it as a proper report, which he would then save to the database as a ‘Read Only’ item, imperishably enshrined in electronic form for any interested party to consult. Something had gone wrong, however. When he tried to open a file to jot down his notes, the computer had responded as though he had asked to read an already-existing file, and demanded an authorization reference. With a sigh, Zen pressed the red ‘Break’ button and began all over again.

The window beside the desk where the terminal was installed was steadily turning opaque as the winter dusk gathered outside. Down below in Piazza del Viminale the evening rush hour was at its height, the gridlocked vehicles bellowing like cattle in rut, but no sound penetrated the Ministry’s heavy-duty reflective triple glazing, proof against everything from bullets to electronic surveillance. Zen gazed at that darkened expanse of glass where he had once caught sight of Tania, seemingly floating towards him in mid-air across the piazza outside. Searching his own personal database, he identified a day shortly before he went to Sardinia for the Burolo case, the day when Tania had come to lunch at his apartment. Although little more than a year earlier, that period already seemed to him like a state of prelapsarian innocence. What was Tania doing now, he wondered, and with whom? Concentrating his mind with an effort, he once again ran through the procedure for opening a file and pressed ‘Enter’. As before, the screen responded with a demand for his security clearance. Infuriated, Zen typed ‘Go stuff your sister.’ AUTHORIZATION INVALID the computer returned priggishly.

It was not until the third time that he finally caught on. He had been scrupulously careful on this occasion, moving the cursor through the menus line by line and double-checking every option before selecting it. When SUBJECT? appeared, he carefully typed ‘Cabal’, the working title he was using for his notes. He was certain that he had observed all the correct procedures, yet when he pressed the ‘Enter’ key, the computer once again flashed its demand for authorization like some obsessive psychotic with a one-track mind. To dispel the urge to stick his fist through the screen, he swivelled round in his chair and stood up — and suddenly the solution came to him, huge and blindingly obvious. The computer was not stupid or malicious, just infinitely literal-minded. If it was treating his attempt to open a file named ‘Cabal’ as a ‘read’ option, it could only be because such a file already existed.

He turned away from the screen as though it were a window from which he was being watched. His skin was prickling, his scalp taut. Grabbing the keyboard, he called up the directory. No such file was listed. That meant it must be stored in the ‘closed’ section of the database, whose contents were not displayed in the directory.

Somewhere in the office behind him a phone was ringing. He reached out blindly, picked up the extension by the computer terminal and switched the call through.

‘Criminalpol, Zen speaking.’

He was sure it must be Tania. No one else would ring him at work at that time. But to his disappointment, the voice was male.

‘Good evening, dottore. I’m calling from the Vatican.’

Zen knew he had heard the voice already that day, although it didn’t sound like either Sanchez-Valdes or Lamboglia.

‘How did you know I was here?’ he asked inconsequentially.

‘We tried your home number first and they said you were at work. Listen, we need to see you this evening. It’s a matter of great urgency.’

‘Who is this?’

‘My identity is not important.’

Zen reduced his voice to a charged whisper.

‘I’m afraid that’s not good enough. I have been assured on the highest authority that my involvement with the Ruspanti affair is over. I’m currently preparing a report on the incident for my superiors. I can’t just drop everything and come running on the strength of an anonymous phone call.’

There was a momentary silence.

‘This report you’re writing,’ said the voice, ‘is it going to mention the Cabal?’

Zen raised his eyes to the glowing screen.

‘What do you know about the Cabal?’

‘Everything.’

Zen was silent.

‘Come to St Peter’s at seven o’clock exactly,’ the voice told him. ‘In the north transept, where the light shows.’

The phone went dead. Zen blindly replaced the receiver, still staring at the word AUTHORIZATION? and the box where the name of the official seeking access to the file would appear. As though of their own volition, his fingers tapped six times on the keyboard, and the box filled with the name ROMIZI. This was a perfectly harmless deception. If anybody bothered to check who had tried to read the closed file on the Cabal, it would at once be obvious that a false name had been used. Poor Carlo Romizi, helplessly comatose in the Ospedale di San Giovanni, clearly couldn’t be responsible.

As he expected, though, the only response was AUTHORIZATION INVALID. Zen sat gazing at the screen until the words blurred into mere squiggles of light, but the message itself was so firmly imprinted on his eyeballs that it appeared on walls, floors, windows and doors long after he had turned off the computer and left the building, imbuing every surrounding surface with a portentous, threatening shimmer.

When he got home, a familiar voice was holding forth in his living room about the philosophy of fashion. Glancing at the television, Zen recognized the young man he had last seen delivering an impromptu press conference in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. He was now perched on a leather and chrome stool, being interviewed by Raffaella Carra about his book You Are What You Wear.

‘… not a question of dressing up, like draping clothes over a dummy, but of recreating yourself. When you put on a Falco creation, you are reborn! The old self dies and a new one takes its place, instantly, in the twinkling of an eye…’

Zen crossed to the inner hallway.

‘Hello? Anyone there?’

‘… if you’re so insecure you need a label to hide behind, then by all means buy something by Giorgio or Gianni. I’ve got nothing against their stuff. It’s very pretty. But I’m not interested in merely embellishing a preconceived entity but effecting a radical transformation of…’

He looked into the kitchen, the dining room, the bathroom and his mother’s bedroom. The flat was empty.

‘… clothes for people who don’t want to look like someone else but to make themselves apparent, to create themselves freely and from zero, every instant of every day. People like me, who have nothing to hide, who are neither more nor less than what they seem to be…’

‘And who are you?’ Raffaella Carra demanded. ‘Who is Falco?’

‘What can I say? There’s no mystery about me! What you see is what you get. I am nothing but this perpetual potential to become what I am, this constant celebration of our freedom to exorcize the demons of time and place, or who and what, where and why, and escape towards a goal which is defined by our approach to it…’

As he reached to switch off the television, Zen saw the note in his mother’s spidery handwriting on top of the set.

Welcome back Aurelio — Lucrezia from downstairs asked if I could keep an eye on her two boys while she collects her brother and his wife from Belgium — they were supposed to arrive yesterday evening but the plane was delayed — I’ll be back in time for dinner — don’t turn TV off as I am recording the last episode of Twin Peaks — Rosella and I have a bet on who did it but I think she has been told by Gilberto’s brother in America where it was on last year Your loving mother

Zen put the note down with a sigh. They had had a video recorder for two years now, but his mother still refused to believe that it was possible to tape a television programme successfully without the set being switched on and the volume turned up.

‘… refuse to recognize deterministic limitations on my freedom to be whoever I choose. No one has the right to tell me who I am, to chain me to the Procrustean bed of so-called “objective reality”. All that counts is my fantasy, my genius, my flair, eternally fashioning and refashioning myself and the world around me…’

The voice vanished abruptly as Zen twisted the volume control. He took out his pen and scrawled a message at the bottom of his mother’s note to the effect that he had got back safely from Florence and would see her for dinner. For some reason he found his mother’s absence disturbing. It was good that she was out and about, of course, keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, there was something about the whole arrangement which jarred. He set the note down on top of the television, walked back down the hallway and opened the last door on the right.

The pent-up odours of the past broke over him like a wave: camphor and mildew, patent medicines and obsolete toiletries, stiffened leather, smoky fur, ghostly perfumes, the whiff of sea fog. He pushed his way through the piles of overflowing trunks, chests and boxes. Spiders and woodlice froze, then broke ranks and scattered in panic as the colossus approached. There it was, in the far corner, perched on a plinth of large cardboard boxes containing back-numbers of Famiglia Cristiana from the early fifties. The gaily painted wooden box had originally been stamped with the insignia of the State Railways and a warning about the detonators it had contained. Zen still lucidly recalled his wonder at the transformation wrought by his father’s paint-brush, which had magically turned this discarded relic into a toy box for little Aurelio.

Reaching over so far his stomach muscles protested, he pulled the box down and removed the lid. Then he sifted through the contents — clockwork train set, tin drum, lead soldiers and battleships — until he found the revolver which had been made specially for him by a machinist in the locomotive works at Mestre. The man had been an ardent Blackshirt, and although unfireable, the gun was an accurate replica of the 9mm Beretta he carried when he went out to raise hell with his fellow squadristi. Zen weighed it in his hand, tracing the words MUSSOLINI DUX incised in the solid barrel, remembering epic battles and cowboy show-downs in the back alleys of the Cannaregio. The pistol had been the envy of all his friends, but its connections with the leader whose adventurism had caused his father’s death perhaps explained Zen’s lifelong reluctance to carry a firearm, or even learn to use one.

He squeezed his way back out of the storeroom with a sigh of relief, as though emerging from a prison cell. The past was always present in the Zen family. Nothing was ever thrown away, and even the dead remained unburied. That man Falco talked a load of pretentious rubbish, of course, but it was easy to see the attractions of his shallow, consumerist credo. Fascism had perhaps offered similar raptures and consolations to the people of his father’s generation.

It was ten to seven when he left the house, the replica pistol concealed in his overcoat pocket. The streets were crowded with shoppers and people going home from work or out on the town, and when he emerged into the vacant expanses of St Peter’s Square it was like stepping into another city. The throng of pilgrims and their coaches had long since departed, and the only people to be seen were two Carabinieri on patrol. Zen climbed the shallow steps leading up to the facade of St Peter’s and passed in under the portico.

Apart from a party of tourists who were just leaving, the basilica seemed as deserted as the piazza outside. Zen walked down the nave to the baldacchino, then turned right into the north transept. Between each of the three chapels stood a curvaceous confessional of dully gleaming mahogany which reminded Zen of his mother’s wardrobe. There were six in all, but only one showed a light indicating the presence of a confessor. The gold inscription above the entrance read EX ORDINE FRATRVM MINORVM. For a moment Zen hesitated, feeling both ridiculous and slightly irreverent. Then, with a shrug, he approached the recess and knelt down.

It was at least three decades since he had been to confession, but as he felt the wooden step beneath his knees and looked at the grilled opening before his face, the years slipped away and he once again felt that anxious sense of generalized guilt, assuaged by the confidence of possessing a system for dealing with it. So strong were these sensations that he was on the point of intoning ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’ when a voice from the other side of the grille recalled him to the realities of his present situation.

‘Can you hear me, dottore?’

Zen cleared his throat.

‘Only just.’

‘I prefer not to speak too loudly. Our enemies are everywhere.’

It was the man who had phoned him earlier at the Ministry.

‘You are probably wondering why you have been summoned at such short notice, and in this unusual fashion. I shall be frank. Many people think of the Curia as a monolith expressing a single, unified point of view. This is not surprising, since we spend a considerable amount of time and trouble cultivating just such an impression. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy. To take the present instance, considerable differences exist over the handling of the Ruspanti affair. There have been some heated exchanges. I represent a group who believe that the issues at stake here are too serious to be swept under the carpet. If our arguments had been rejected by the Holy Father, we should of course have submitted. We have in fact repeatedly urged that the matter be placed before him, but on each occasion we have been overruled. The decision to cover up the truth about the Ruspanti case has been taken by a small number of senior officials acting on their own initiative.’

Zen glanced at the grille, but the interior of the confessional was so dark that he could not make out anything of the speaker.

‘What have you been told about the Cabal?’ the man asked abruptly.

Zen cleared his throat.

‘That according to Ruspanti there was an inner group within the Order…’

‘Speak up, please! I’m rather hard of hearing.’

Zen raised his mouth to the grille.

‘I was told that Ruspanti claimed that there was an inner group within the Order of Malta known as the Cabal. These claims were investigated and found to be false.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘ Is there more?’

The response was a low chuckle which sent a shiver up Zen’s spine.

‘Both more and less. Some of what you’ve been told is true, but the manner of its telling has been deliberately designed to mislead you into discounting it and concentrating your efforts elsewhere. Certainly Ludovico Ruspanti approached us with allegations about a secret society within the Order of Malta, of whom he was himself of course a distinguished member, and with whom he had taken refuge before we gave him sanctuary. We had received similar information before, but this was the first emanating from an authoritative source and which offered the possibility of verification. Ruspanti claimed to be able to provide names, dates and full documentation. Relations between the Holy See and the Order of Malta have been strained for some time…’

The man’s voice faded under a ululating howl which seemed to come from inside the confessional. It grew quickly louder until it was deafening, then gradually faded to nothing.

‘What was that?’ asked Zen.

‘What?’

‘That noise.’

‘I heard nothing. As I was saying, relations between the Holy See and the Order of Malta have been strained for some time, but our first reaction was indeed one of suspicion. To our dismay, however, our preliminary investigations substantiated every single claim which Ruspanti had made. Far from finding his allegations baseless or false, we uncovered evidence of the most alarming kind. I hasten to add that these findings did not in any way implicate the Order of Malta as a whole, which is and has always been an admirable body, tireless in its charitable exertions and unwavering in its loyalty to the papacy. The Cabal is something quite different, a parasitic clique, a sinister inner coterie hidden within the ranks of a respectable organization, like Gelli’s P 2 within the Masonic Order.’

The voice fell silent. For a moment, Zen thought he heard the rustling of paper.

‘You may remember the Oliver North scandal in the United States,’ the man continued. ‘A small group of influential people in the Reagan administration decided that there were actions which needed to be taken, actions which the President would certainly approve, inasmuch as they were logical developments of his avowed policies, but whose existence and implementation he could not afford to know about. These men therefore decided to take matters into their own hands, since Reagan’s were tied by his constitutional and legal obligations.’

Hearing footsteps behind him, Zen looked round. One of the blue-jacketed attendants wearing the red leather badge of the basilica staff was passing on his rounds. He glanced briefly at the kneeling penitent, but with no more than the usual impersonal curiosity which anyone might feel, wondering what secrets were being divulged in muttered undertones. Zen shifted his position slightly. His knees were beginning to ache.

‘The idea behind the Cabal is very similar,’ the man went on. ‘In short, they believe they know what the Holy Father wants better than he does himself — or at any rate, better than he can afford to express openly. Like many of us, they are disturbed by the decline in church attendance and in the numbers presenting themselves for the priesthood, and by the rampant hedonism and materialism of society today. Wojtyla’s early life was dominated by the struggle against a godless ideology, but he has come to feel that we now face an even more implacable foe than Communism. The sufferings of the Church in Poland and elsewhere ultimately served to strengthen the faith of believers. But what the Communists failed to destroy with force and terror is now in danger of decaying through sheer apathy and neglect.’

Zen emitted a grunt, of pain rather than agreement. Had some malicious cleric selected this rendezvous as a way of making him appreciate his place in the Vatican’s scheme of things?

‘In this situation, it is inevitable that some people should cast envious glances at the very different situation in the Muslim world. While our young people seem to think of nothing but the instant gratifications of a materialist society, theirs are gripped with a religious fervour of undeniable intensity, for which they are prepared both to die and to kill. While our cities are flooded with drugs and pornography, theirs are rigorously patrolled by religious police with summary powers of arrest and punishment. And while the authority of our leaders, including the Holy Father himself, is challenged on all sides, a single pronouncement by one of theirs is sufficient to force a celebrated writer to go to ground like a Mafia supergrass. Can you doubt that there are those of us who are nostalgic for the days when our Church was also capable of compelling respect, by force if necessary? Of course there are!’

Once again the brief pause, the slight rustle of paper. Was the man reading a prepared text?

‘But while some may idly regret an era which has passed for ever, others are scheming to bring it back. These people have noted Wojtyla’s effect on the cheering crowds who come to greet him in their hundreds of thousands during his tours of Africa and Latin America. Here is a man who has both the potential and the will to bring about a radical desecularization of society. Naturally the Holy Father cannot be seen to harbour any such ambitions, still less endorse the tactics of destabilization necessary to bring them to fruition. But by his sponsorship of such organizations as Opus Dei and Comunione e Liberazione, Wojtyla has made it quite clear in which direction he wishes the Church to move.’

Zen tapped impatiently on the wall of the confessional. It resounded hollowly, like a stage property.

‘This is all very interesting,’ he remarked in a tone which suggested just the opposite, ‘but I’m not a theologian.’

‘Neither are the members of the Cabal! Like the original Knights of Malta, from whom they draw their inspiration, they are men of action, men of violence, organized, capable and ruthless. What happened to Ruspanti is proof of that.’

‘And what did happen?’

‘Ruspanti made the mistake of trying to play a double game. On the one hand he was trading information for protection here in the Vatican, doling it out scrap by scrap, feeding us just enough to whet our appetite for what was still to come. He described the structure and aims of the Cabal in general terms, named a few of the minor players and hinted that under the right circumstances he would be prepared to identify the leaders, including well-known figures in the political, industrial, financial and military worlds. At the same time, he was also trying to put pressure on the Cabal itself, threatening to expose them if they didn’t meet his terms. That was a mistake which proved to be fatal. Last Friday he was summoned to a meeting with two senior representatives of the Cabal, here in St Peter’s, and…’

Zen wasn’t listening. He had just realized why his mother’s absence from home had seemed so oddly disturbing. When this man had phoned him at the Ministry, he claimed to have tried Zen’s home number and been told he was at work. That was a lie. There had been no one at home to answer the phone. The deception was trivial, but it altered Zen’s whole attitude towards this faceless informant. No longer did he feel constrained or deferential. He felt rude and sassy. His knees were killing him, and he was going to get even.

‘… that the Cabal is everywhere, even within the Curia,’ the man was saying. ‘Any opposition to their aims, any threat to their secrecy, is punished by instant death.’

‘If they’re so clever, why haven’t they found the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls?’ demanded Zen.

There was silence in the confessional.

‘Grimaldi had it, so they killed him,’ Zen went on. ‘But they didn’t find it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I did.’

It was a shot in the dark, but he had nothing to lose. The urgent tremor in the speaker’s voice revealed that it had gone home.

‘You have the transcript?’

There was a sudden eruption of sound, as though a bomb had gone off.

‘Hello?’ cried the voice. ‘Are you still there?’

Now the source of the noise was visible: a rack of spotlamps being lowered from their position high above the south transept.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ said Zen.

Why couldn’t the man see him?

‘Where is the transcript?’

‘Where Grimaldi hid it. It was I who discovered his body, and I had time to search his room before the Carabinieri got there. Someone else had been there too, but they didn’t know what to look for.’

Beyond the grille, the confessional was as silent as the grave.

‘Among Grimaldi’s belongings was a red plastic diary,’ Zen continued. ‘It was for the new year, so it was mostly empty, but he had noted down a series of letters and numbers that leads straight to the transcript, assuming you know where to look.’

‘And where’s that?’

Zen laughed teasingly.

‘Have you told anyone else where it is?’ the man demanded.

‘Not yet. It’s hard to know who to tell, with so many conflicting interests involved.’

There was a considerable silence.

‘Naturally you want to do the right thing,’ the voice suggested more calmly.

‘Naturally.’

Again the man fell silent.

‘This revelation changes everything,’ he said at last. ‘This is not the time or place to discuss it further, but I do urge you most strongly to take no further action of any kind until we contact you again.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Zen replied. ‘I don’t even know who you are. Suppose you step out of there and let me see your face.’

The sinister chuckle sounded again.

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, dottore.’

Zen took the fake pistol from his pocket. He had been right to bring it after all.

‘You’re taking a big chance,’ he warned the man. ‘Supposing I decide to let someone else have the transcript instead?’

‘But how would you know it was someone else? You know nothing about us.’

One hand gripping the wooden railing, Zen raised himself painfully to a crouching position. Then he straightened up, gritting his teeth against the fierce aching of his knees. The revolver in one hand, he swept aside the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the confessional.

‘I do now!’ he cried.

He gazed wildly around. There was no one there. Then he heard the low chuckling once again. It was coming from a small two-way radio suspended from a nail which had been driven into the wall of the confessional, just below the grille.

‘You know nothing about us,’ the voice repeated. ‘Nothing at all.’