Cabal

7

Zen’s hotel was next to the station, a thirty-storey tower topped with an impressive array of aerials and satellite dishes. The next morning, shaved and showered, his body pleasantly massaged by the whirlpool bath, clad in a gown of heavy white towelling with the name of the hotel picked out in red, he sat looking out of the window at the streets far below, where the Milanese were industriously going about their business beneath a sky of flawless grey.

Opposite Zen’s window, a gang of workers were welding and bolting steel beams into place to form the framework of what, according to the sign on the hoarding around the site, was to be another hotel. Judging by the violence of their gestures, there must have been a good deal of noise involved, but within the double layer of toughened glass the only sounds were the hiss of the air conditioning, the murmur of a newscaster on the American cable network to which the television was tuned, and a ringing tone in the receiver of the telephone which Zen was holding to his ear.

‘Peace be with you, signora,’ he said solemnly, as the phone was answered with an incomprehensible yelp.

‘And with you.’

‘This is the friend of Signor Nieddo. I would fain speak with Mago.’

‘Hold on.’

The receiver was banged hollowly against something. Zen turned to the television. He picked up the remote control and shuffled randomly through a variety of game shows, old films, panel discussions, direct selling pitches and all-day sportscasts. Spotting a familiar face in the welter of images, he vectored up the sound.

‘… whatsoever. Would you agree with that?’

‘I agree with no one but myself.’

‘What’s your position on the hemline debate?’

‘It’s an irrelevance. My clothes are based on the simple complexities at the heart of all natural processes. Nature doesn’t ask whether hemlines are long or short this season. I seek to echo in fabric the regular irregularity of windblown sand, the orderly chaos of breaking waves…’

Zen pressed the MUTE button as the receiver was picked up again.

‘Mago is graciously pleased to grant your request. Lo, hearken unto the words of Mago.’

There was a click as the extension was picked up.

‘Hello?’ said the boyish voice.

‘Nicolo, this is Aurelio, the friend of Gilberto. Have you had any luck with the little puzzle I set you?’

‘Just a moment.’

Zen closed his eyes and saw again the casbah-like shack amid the sprawling suburbs of Rome’s Third World archipelago and the fetid stall at its heart, dark but for the glowing VDU screen from which the bedridden boy with the etiolated grace of an angel played fast and loose with the secrets of the material world.

‘It’s dated Wednesday, the day before you came to see me,’ said Nicolo, picking up the receiver again. ‘The text reads as follows. “Anonymous sources in the Vatican allegedly assert that there is a secret group within the Order of Malta, called the Cabal. The existence of this group was allegedly revealed to the Curia by Ludovico Ruspanti in exchange for asylum in the weeks preceding his death. Reported verbally to RL by Zen, Aurelio.”’

There was a long silence. Then Zen began to laugh, slowly and quietly, a series of rhythmic whoops which might almost have been sobbing. So this was the information which he had supposed so sensitive that Carlo Romizi had been killed to preserve its confidentiality! The Ministry had no ‘parallel’ file on the Cabal. All they knew about it was what they had been told by Zen, who knew only what he had been told by the Vatican, who knew only what they had been told by Ludovico Ruspanti, who had made it up.

‘I did a series of searches for the classified file on this Aurelio Zen,’ Nicolo continued, ‘but I didn’t come up with anything.’

‘You mean it’s inaccessible?’

‘No, it doesn’t exist. There’s an open file, in the main body of the database. I made a copy of that which I can let you have if you’re interested, although frankly it sounds like he’s had a pretty boring life…’

Zen spluttered into the mouthpiece.

‘Thank you for your help, Nicolo.’

‘It’s all been a bit of a waste of time, I’m afraid.’

‘Not at all. On the contrary. Everything’s clear now.’

He put the phone down with an obscure sense of depression. Everything was clear, and hateful. Perhaps that was why everything normally remained obscure, because people secretly preferred it that way. It was certainly a very mixed pleasure to discover that he was considered so unimportant that the powers that be hadn’t even bothered to keep tabs on him. Any relief he felt was overwhelmed by shame, anger and hurt. Was he worth no more than that? Evidently not. Well, it served him right for wanting to read his own obituary. He had just done so: a pretty boring life.

On the table lay a message which had been brought up with his breakfast, telling him that Antonia Simonelli expected to see him in her office at eleven o’clock that morning. Zen looked at it, and then at the television, where ‘the philosopher in the wardrobe’ was still holding forth. He identified the name of the station — a private channel, based in the city — and got the number from directory inquiries. It was answered by a young woman who sounded quite overwhelmed by the excitement of working in television.

‘Yes!’

‘This talk show you’ve got on now, is it going out live?’

‘Live! Live!’

‘I need to speak to your guest.’

‘Our guest!’

‘Get him to leave a number where I can contact him later this morning.’

‘Later! Later!’

‘Tell him it’s urgent. A matter of life and death.’

‘Life! Death!’

‘Yes. The name is Marco Zeppegno.’

Before getting dressed, Zen made one more call, this time to Rome. Gilberto Nieddu was initially extremely unenthusiastic about doing what Zen wanted, particularly on a Saturday, but Zen said he’d pay for everything, even a courier to the airport.

After leaving the hotel, Zen strolled down the broad boulevard leading from the fantastic mausoleum of the Central Station to the traffic-ridden expanses of Piazza della Repubblica. This was in fact one of the least propitious parts of the city for a pleasant walk. Because of the proximity of the railway yards, Allied bombers had given it their full attention during the closing stages of the war, and the subsequent reconstruction had taken place at a time when Italian architecture was still heavily influenced by the brutal triumphalism of the Fascist era. Zen wasn’t concerned about his surroundings, however. He just needed to kill a little time.

He idled along, staring in the shop windows, studying the passers-by, lingering in front of an establishment which sold or hired Carnival costumes. Eventually he reached Piazza della Repubblica, whose oval and rectangular panels of greenery still showed signs of the damage they had incurred during the building of the new Metropolitana C line. At a discreet distance from the piazza, beyond a buffer zone of meticulously trimmed and tended lawns, stood one of the city’s oldest and most luxurious hotels. As Zen turned back, his attention was attracted by a young couple walking down the strip of carpet beneath the long green awning towards the waiting line of taxis. The woman looked radiant in a cream two-piece suit which effortlessly combined eroticism and efficiency, while the man, his cherubic face set off by a mass of curls, was a lively and attentive escort. Zen stopped, quite shamelessly gawking. The woman looked mysteriously familiar, like a half-forgotten memory. So bewitching was the vision that it was only at the very last moment, as the taxi swept past, bearing the woman and her young admirer from the scene of past pleasures to that of future delights, that Zen recognized her as Tania Biacis.

He promptly sprinted up the drive towards the next taxi in line, which was coming alongside the awning to pick up a pair of Japanese men who had just emerged from the hotel. Ignoring the shouts of the doorman, an imposing figure clad in something resembling the dress uniform of a Latin American general, Zen opened the passenger door and got in.

‘Follow that taxi!’ he cried.

The driver turned to him with a weary expression.

‘You’ve been watching too many movies, dotto.’

‘This rank is for the use of our guests only!’ thundered the doorman, opening the door again.

The two Japanese looked on with an air of polite bewilderment. It was too late now anyway. The other vehicle was already lost to view amid the yellow cabs swarming in every direction across the piazza. Zen got out of the taxi and walked slowly back down the drive, shaking his head. At the corner of the block opposite, beneath the high portico, a red neon sign advertised the Bar Capri. Whether intentionally or not, the interior, a bare concrete shell, vividly evoked the horrors of the speculative building which has all but crushed the magic of that fabled isle. Zen went to the pay-phone and dialled the number which had been left for him at the television studio. There was no ringing tone, but almost at once the acoustic background changed to a loud hum and a familiar voice barked, ‘Yes?’

Until that moment, Zen had had no clear idea of what he was going to say, but the encounter outside the hotel seemed to have made up his mind for him. The sight of Tania and her young admirer had inspired him with a fierce determination to win her back at any cost. And cost — money — was the key. If Primo could afford to take her to a hotel like that, he must be loaded! He had probably paid for her flight, too. Of course, Primo had personal attractions as well, but then so had Zen. What he didn’t have was cash, and that was going to change. He had been a sucker for long enough, beavering away at a meaningless job without either thanks or reward. It was success people respected, not diligence or rectitude. Gilberto patronized him, his colleagues patronized him, and now it turned out that Tania was having a fling with some married man with enough money to offer her a good time. And quite right too, he thought. He didn’t blame her. What was the point in playing safe when you could end up like Carlo Romizi at any moment? Would it be any consolation, in that final instant of consciousness, to reflect on how correctly one had behaved?

‘Good morning, dottore,’ he said, putting on the sing-song accent of an Istrian schoolmaster whom he and his schoolfriends had once used to delight in imitating. ‘I saw you on television this morning. A very fine performance, if I may say so.’

‘Who is this?’

‘The name I gave earlier was Marco Zeppegno, but as you know, dottore, Marco’s phone has been disconnected.’

In the background there was the constant hum of what sounded like a car’s engine.

‘I wonder why,’ Zen continued. ‘Didn’t he pay his bills? Or had he started to make nuisance calls, like Ludovico Ruspanti?’

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

Zen chuckled.

‘Bearing recent experiences in mind, I’m sure you’ll understand if I decline to answer just now. Tapping a phone in the Vatican is a matter for professionals like Grimaldi, but any radio ham can listen in to a mobile phone.’

The connection went dead. For a moment Zen thought that the man had hung up, but he came back at once, calling ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘It was only interference,’ Zen assured him. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily!’

‘What is it you want?’

‘I’ll tell you when we meet this afternoon.’

‘Impossible! I have a…’

Once again the connection was broken for several moments.

‘… until six thirty or seven. I could see you then.’

‘Very well.’

‘Come to my office,’ the man said after a long pause. ‘It’s just off Piazza del Duomo. The main entrance is closed at that time, but you can come in the emergency exit at the back. The place was burgled last week and the lock hasn’t been repaired yet. It’s in Via Foscolo, next to the chemist’s, the green door without a number. My offices are on the top floor.’

In Piazza della Repubblica, Zen boarded a two-coach orange tram marked ‘Porta Vittoria’. A notice above the large wooden-framed windows set out in considerable detail the conditions governing the transport of live fish and fowl. Goldfish and chicks, Zen learned, would be conveyed (up to a maximum of two per passenger) providing that the containers, which might under no circumstances be larger than a ‘normal parcel or shoe box’, were neither rough nor splintery, dirty nor foul-smelling, nor yet of such a form as to cause injury to other passengers. The remainder of the text, which laid down the penalties for flaunting these regulations, was too small to read with the naked eye, but the implication was that any anarchistic hotheads who took it upon themselves to carry goldfish or chicks on trams without due regard for the provisions heretofore mentioned would be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law.

Zen recalled the bewilderment of the Japanese businessmen as he barged in like a truculent drunk and attempted to commandeer their taxi. ‘Is it always like this?’ they were clearly asking themselves. ‘Is this the rule, or just an exception?’ If they really wanted to understand Italy, they could do worse than give up taxis, take to public transport and ponder the mysteries of a system which legislated for circumstances verging on the surreal yet was unable to ensure that the majority of its users even bought a ticket.

He got off at the stop opposite the Palazzo di Giustizia and ran the gauntlet of the traffic speeding across the herringbone pattern of smooth stone slabs. As he reached the safety of the kerb, a taxi drew up and Antonia Simonelli got out. She looked severe and tense.

‘It was Zeppegno all right,’ she nodded. ‘There doesn’t seem any question that it was suicide.’

There was a squeal of tyres at the kerb and someone called his name. Turning round, he found himself face to face with Tania Biacis. Another taxi had pulled up behind the first. The young man who had left the hotel with Tania sat watching from the rear seat of the taxi with an expression of alarm.

‘Okay, Aurelio,’ shouted Tania, thrusting a finger aggressively towards Antonia Simonelli. ‘I’ve asked you before and I ask you again. Who is she?’

Arm in arm, visibly reconciled, Tania and Zen walked across the pedestrianized expanses of Piazza del Duomo. At the far end, the upper storeys of several buildings were completely hidden behind a huge hoarding displaying three faces represented on the gargantuan scale which Zen associated with the images of Marx, Lenin and Stalin that had once looked down on May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square. But like Catholicism, its old rival, Communism was no longer a serious contender in the ideological battle for hearts and minds. The icon which dominated Milan’s Cathedral Square was that of the United Colors of Benetton: the vast, unsmiling features of a Nordic woman, a Black woman and an Asian baby. These avatars of the new order, representatives of a world united by the ascendant creed of consumerism, gazed down on the masses whose aspirations they embodied with a look that was at once intense and vapid.

‘They’re suing the hospital,’ said Tania.

‘Good for them.’

‘This is all between us, but apparently Romizi’s wife was having an affair with Bernardo Travaglini.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Once she’d got over the shock of Carlo’s death, she got in touch with Bernardo and told him her suspicions about what happened. He and De Angelis went round to the hospital with a couple of uniformed men in a squad car and put the fear of God into the director.’

Zen could easily picture the scene, the two plainclothes officials wandering menacingly about the director’s office, their words a mixture of bureaucratic minutiae and paranoia-inducing innuendo, while their uniformed cohorts guarded the door. Yes, Giorgio and Bernardo would have had the director eating out of their hands in no time at all. The irony was that Zen might have done something of the sort himself if he hadn’t been so convinced that Carlo had been the victim of the Cabal. But it now appeared that Romizi’s death had been caused by a different sort of plot.

‘Under pressure from Travaglini and De Angelis, the director came up with the name of the intern who visited Romizi that night,’ Tania continued. ‘When they called on him, the intern claimed that he had been acting on orders. He’d never been trained to use life-support equipment, and had no idea what the effect would be. He was told to reset such-and-such a knob to such-and-such a setting, and that’s what he did.’

‘They needed the bed?’

Tania shrugged.

‘That’s what it looks like. The hospital is denying the whole thing, of course. Signora Romizi’s suing the hospital, the intern and the doctor in charge have been suspended, and the Procura has opened a file on the affair.’

They crossed the square and entered the glazed main aisle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The elegant mall was almost empty, the offices on the upper floors and the exclusive shops at ground level both shut. Tania lingered for some time in front of a window displaying the latest creations from the teeming imagination of the legendary Falco. With a shove half-playful, half-serious, Zen propelled her towards the one establishment still open for business, the Cafe Biffi. They sat outside, under the awnings whose function here was purely decorative, in an area cordoned off from the aisle by a row of potted plants on stands. Tania opted for a breaded veal cutlet and salad. Zen said he’d have the same.

‘But if you specialize in products from the Friuli,’ Zen asked, picking up a conversation they had had earlier, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘We want to diversify, keeping the original concept of traditionally-made items from small producers whom a big exporter company won’t handle because they can’t deliver in quantity. Primo is based here in Milan, so…’

‘Don’t tell me he’s a farmer!’

‘God, you don’t let up, do you?’

Her look wavered on the edge of the brink of a real challenge. Don’t push me too hard, it said. Zen grinned in a way he knew she found irresistible.

‘You know what the police are like.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They’re bastards.’

Their food arrived, and for a while everything else was forgotten. It was almost two o’clock by now, and they were starving. Once the embarrassment and confusion of the initial confrontation in front of the lawcourts had been cleared up, there had been no time to do anything but arrange to meet later. Then Zen had accompanied Antonia Simonelli to her office, where he provided her with a detailed and largely accurate account of the circumstances in which Ludovico Ruspanti had died, while Tania had gone off to ‘talk business’ with Primo.

Now they were together again, other commitments suspended for an hour. But although both seemed eager to dispel the suspicions which had arisen as a result of past evasions, the explanations and revelations came unevenly, in fits and starts, a narrative line deflected by questions and digressions, forging ahead towards the truth but leaving pockets of ambiguity and equivocation to be mopped up afterwards. Amongst these was the one Zen had just tackled, and to which he returned once they had satisfied their immediate hunger.

‘So, about Primo…’

Tania wiped her lips with a napkin which looked as though it had been carved from marble.

‘Primo is a middleman representing a network of small producers stretching from Naples to Catanzaro.’

Zen nodded slowly.

‘Oh, you mean he works for the mob! No wonder he can afford to stay at that fancy hotel. They probably own it.’

Tania twitched the hem of her cream skirt.

‘Aurelio, I’m going to get really angry in a moment. Quite apart from anything else, it so happens that I’m the one who’s staying there.’

Zen raised his eyebrows, genuinely disconcerted.

‘Well, well.’

‘It’s my little indulgence.’

‘Not that little. You must be doing well.’

She nodded.

‘We are. Very well. But I’m increasingly realizing that the future is in the south. Up here, agriculture is getting more and more commercialized, more industrialized and centralized. You’re no longer dealing with individual producers but with large agribusinesses or cooperatives whose managers think in terms of consistency and volume. The south has been spared all that. It’s just too poor, too fragmented, too disorganized, too far from the centre of Europe. Those factors are all drawbacks for bulk produce, but once you’re talking designer food then the negatives become positives…’

She broke off, catching sight of his abstracted look.

‘I’m boring you.’

He quickly feigned vivacity.

‘No, no.’

‘It’s all right, Aurelio. There’s no reason why you should be interested in the wholesale food business.’

He pushed the last piece of veal cutlet around his plate for a moment, then laid down his knife and fork.

‘It’s just a shock to find that you’re so… so successful and high-powered. It makes me feel a bit dowdy by comparison.’

If his words sounded slightly self-pitying, the look he gave her immediately afterwards was full of determination.

‘But that’s going to change.’

‘Of course. You’ll soon get used to it.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘You’ll see.’

A pair of Carabinieri officers in full dress uniform strode by, murmuring to each other in a discreet undertone. With their tricorn hats and black capes trimmed with red piping, they might have passed for clergy promenading down the apse of this secular basilica, oriented not eastward, like the crumbling gothic pile in the square outside, but towards the north, source of industry, finance and progress.

‘So he works for you?’ asked Zen, lighting a cigarette.

Tania pushed her plate aside.

‘Primo? No, no, we don’t pay salaries. Piece-rates and low overheads, that’s the secret of success. Look at Benetton. That’s how they started out. Run by a woman, too.’

She took one of her own cigarettes, a low-tar mentholized brand. Zen had tried one once. It was like smoking paper tissues smeared with toothpaste.

‘No, Primo works for the EC,’ she said. ‘He goes round farms assessing their claims for grants. We pay him on a commission basis to put us in touch with possible suppliers.’

He nodded vaguely. She was right, of course. He wasn’t interested in the details of the business she was running. He was interested in the results, though. Tania had rejected the idea of moving in with Zen, on the grounds that his flat was too small. But if he could bring off the little coup he had planned for that evening, he would have the cash for a down-payment on somewhere much larger, perhaps with a separate flat for his mother across the landing. And as a double-income couple, they could pay off the loan with no difficulty.

He looked around the Galleria, smoking contentedly and running over the idea in his mind. This was a new venture for him. He had cut corners before, of course. He had bent the rules, turned a blind eye, and connived at various mild degrees of fraud and felony. But never before had he cold-bloodedly contemplated extorting a large sum of money for his personal gain. Still, better late than never. Who the hell did he think he was, anyway, Mother Theresa? Not that there was any great moral issue involved. Antonia Simonelli might succeed in embarrassing the Vatican, but she had no real chance of making a case against those responsible for killing Ludovico Ruspanti. One of them, Marco Zeppegno, was already dead, and with his death the other man had put himself beyond the reach of justice. But not beyond the reach of the Cabal, thought Zen.

He leant back, looking up at the magnificent glass cupola, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century engineering consisting of thousands of rectangular panes supported by a framework of wrought-iron ribs soaring up a hundred and fifty feet above the junction of the two arcaded aisles. The resemblance to a church was clearly deliberate: the four aisles arranged like an apse, choir and transepts, the upper walls decorated with frescoed lunettes, the richly inlaid marble flooring, the vaulted ceilings, the central cupola. Here is our temple, said the prophets of the Risorgimento, a place of light and air, dedicated to commerce, liberty and civic pride. Compare it with the oppressive, dilapidated pile outside, reeking of ignorance and superstition, and then make your choice.

‘What now?’ asked Tania.

He gave a deep frown, which cleared as he realized that she meant the question literally.

‘I’ve got to go to the airport.’

‘You’re not leaving already?’

‘No, no. I have to pick up something which is being air-freighted up here. Something I need for my work.’

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

He shrugged.

‘Just following up some ramifications of the Ruspanti affair. Nothing very interesting.’

She signalled the waiter and asked for two coffees and the bill. Zen raised his eyebrows slightly.

‘I’ll put it on expenses,’ she said.

‘Fiddling already?’

‘Actually I’m saving money. If I hadn’t bumped into you, I’d be lunching Primo instead, the full five courses somewhere they really know how to charge.’

‘Whereas I get a snack in a cafe, eh?’ he retorted in a mock-surly tone.

Tania smiled broadly and stroked his hand.

‘I’ll make it up to you tonight, sweetheart.’

His face clouded over.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

‘Well, I may not be free until nineish.’

She patted his hand reassuringly.

‘That’s all right. I shall just have to go and buy some very expensive clothes to while away the time. There’s a wonderful new outfit by Falco I just crave. Jagged strips of suede and silk and fur arranged in layers like a pile of scraps, just odds and ends, but somehow holding together, though you can’t see how. Did you see it in that shop, towards the back?’

He smiled mysteriously.

‘I’ve seen it, but not in a shop.’

She looked at him with interest.

‘You’ve seen someone wearing it?’

‘Not exactly.’

The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Zen took advantage of the interruption to change tack slightly.

‘Are his clothes very expensive?’

‘Hideously!’ she cried. ‘But each one is an original creation. It’s an investment as well as a luxury, like buying a work of art.’

Zen’s mysterious smile intensified.

‘All the same, if I were you I’d put my money into something else. I have a feeling that the market in Falco creations might be about to take a tumble.’

Tania patted his hand indulgently.

‘Aurelio, you’re a dear, sweet man, but you haven’t a clue about fashion.’

The man stepped off the exercise bicycle and surveyed himself in the mirror. His lithe, slender body was covered with a pleasing sheen of sweat, creating highlights and chiaroscuro and emphasizing the contours of the evenly tanned flesh, hardened and sculpted by workouts such as the one he had just completed. So satisfied was he by what the mirror showed him that he lingered there a moment longer under the spell of that unattainable object of desire.

‘Without my clothes, I feel naked,’ he had once remarked to an interviewer, who had laughed uproariously at this witticism. It was in fact the literal truth. Even his own nudity was only tolerable when reflected back to him from the mirror. The idea of other people’s was quite repugnant to him. His secret fantasy was to become that glistening image, to break through the glass and merge with that substanceless child of light, for whom being and seeming were one and the same. As for the others, as imperfect as himself, and a good deal less fastidious in most cases, he did not particularly care to share a room with most of them, never mind anything more intimate. With a final, flirtatious glance at the mirror, he turned away and flounced off to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, he walked through to the adjoining pair of offices. The clock on the wall showed twenty to seven. The suite was located on the top floor of a block backing on to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and commanded a striking view of the great glazed cupola, swelling up into the night sky like a luminous balloon. He had switched off all the lights, and this background glimmer, softened by the thickening fog, was the only source of illumination. Feeling a prickle of sweat break out on his stomach and back, he opened the window slightly. Coolness was the key to everything. The secret of his success lay in the ability to remain perfectly calm whatever happened, to manipulate events and perceptions so that people saw only what he wished them to see.

He picked up a canvas bag lying on the desk and went into the workroom next door. The walls were covered with sketches and photographs, the floor littered with irregular off-cuts of the fine paper used for sizing garments. Only a tiny fraction of the light from the Galleria penetrated to this internal room, but he moved through it with total confidence, skirting the pin-studded mannequins and sidestepping the benches draped with silk and velvet, cashmere and wool, leather and tweed. As he passed each one, he let his fingers run over the material, and shivered sensuously.

The one way in which he revealed himself to be his father’s son was his passion for materials: their look, their feel, their smell. Umberto used to bring samples home from the mills at Como and stroke the boy’s infant cheeks with them. The idea was to train Raimondo from the earliest possible age for his future role as heir to the family textile business. But the child had misunderstood, as children are prone to do. He thought his father was caressing him, expressing a love that so rarely manifested itself on other occasions.

At the door leading to the hallway, he paused briefly and listened. All was quiet. He unlocked the door, went out and closed it behind him, pulling until the lock engaged with a precise click. He removed a pair of disposable rubber gloves from the bag and put them on, then took out the cold chisel and hammer. Working the chisel into the crack between the lock and the jamb, he struck it repeatedly until the lock shattered. Then he replaced the chisel and hammer in the bag, peeled off the rubber gloves with a shudder of disgust — they reminded him of condoms — and went back inside, leaving the door slightly ajar.

As he passed one of the worktables, his fingers touched a garment which he could not for a moment identify. He paused to stroke it delicately, grazing the surface of the fabric like a lover exploring the contours of his partner’s body. A languid smile of recognition softened the normally rigid contours of his lips. Of course! It was the model for the new line of jeans which he was going to unleash on the world next year, a move calculated to reaffirm the atelier’s revolutionary reputation. Not that demand for the existing lines had in any way slackened. On the contrary, business was booming. But he knew that the time to abandon a successful formula was before it began to pall. That way, you retained the initiative. You weren’t running for cover, you were ‘making a statement’.

In the present instance, this meant abandoning the complex, multi-layered pyrotechnics for which he’d become famous in favour of something plain and popular, something strong and simple, something ecological. Jeans were all these things, of course, but their appeal was fatally diminished by the fact that they were also durable, and cheap. The response of the leading designers had been to price them up, to sell the price rather than the garment.

Such a solution was worthy of the shallow, conventional minds who ran the major fashion houses. Anyone could license a line of designer denims and sell them at a five hundred per cent mark-up — at least, anyone with a name like Armani or Valentino could. It had been left to him, the newcomer, to achieve a truly creative breakthrough. His fingertips caressed the soft brushed silk which he’d had tinted to resemble worn and faded denim. Naturally no one in their right minds would be prepared to pay Falco prices for real denim, which would last for years. These, on the other hand, although virtually indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye, would tolerate only the most limited wear before falling apart. People were going to kill for them.

Back in his private sanctum, he sat down at his desk and held his watch up to the glimmer from the window. Five to seven. He opened the middle drawer of the desk and took out the pistol he had brought from home. The gun had belonged to his father, a service-issue revolver which he had retained illegally at the end of the war as a souvenir. As far as he knew, Umberto had never used the weapon in anger, not that it would have done him much good against the Red Brigades’ Kalashnikovs. But that would just make the authorities more sympathetic when his son acted a trifle hastily in a similar situation. Not that anyone was likely to think twice about the matter anyway. Break-ins and muggings were everyday events in the junkie-ridden centre of Milan. What was more natural than that he should keep his father’s old service pistol at the office where he often worked late and alone? Or indeed that he should use it when the need arose?

‘I was walking towards my desk, officer, when I heard a sound in the outer office. I’d just had a shower. I suppose that’s why I hadn’t heard the noise of the door being forced. I ran to the desk and got out the pistol I’ve kept there since the building was broken into last week…’ After that, it would depend on whether his visitor proved to have been armed, something which he could easily verify after shooting him dead. If he wasn’t, then it might be marginally more difficult, although accidents did notoriously happen in these circumstances. But this was unlikely. The overwhelming probability was that the intruder would have a gun too. He sounded like Zeppegno, a wannabee thug full of tough talk and cheap threats. To scum like that, a gun was like an American Express card. It said something about you. People treated you with respect and said, ‘That’ll do nicely, sir.’ You didn’t leave home without it. All he needed to do was put on the rubber gloves and fire a few rounds from the victim’s gun into the walls and furniture, then transfer the sheaths to the dead man’s hands, thus explaining the lack of fingerprints, and call the police. If he got anything more than a fine for possessing an unregistered firearm, there would be a universal outcry among the good burghers of Milan. What, an eminent designer could be threatened by some doped-up hoodlum in his own office without even being permitted to defend himself? What was the world coming to?

He placed the gun on the desk within easy reach and lay back in his swivel chair, thinking about his father. His parents were not often in his thoughts. Indeed, people had called him cold and unnatural at the time of the tragedy, but it would be truer to say that he felt little or nothing, and refused — this was the scandal, of course — to pretend that he did. He had never tried to get anyone else to understand his views on the subject, which all came down to the fact that he did not consider Umberto and Chiara to be his parents at all, except in the most reductive genetic sense. Their children were Raimondo and his sister Ariana. He, Falco, owed them nothing.

His cousin Ludovico Ruspanti had been an early inspiration. He had made everyone else in Raimondo’s circle seem wan and insipid. When Umberto and Chiara became martyrs of the class struggle, his father dying in a hail of machine-gun fire sprayed through the windscreen of their Mercedes, his mother succumbing to her injuries a few days later, he had remembered Ludovico’s deportment on the occasion of his own bereavements. He must have handled it badly, though. No one had criticized Ludovico’s play-acting, even though he had turned to wink broadly at his cousin after making some fulsome comments about his late brother, as though to say ‘We know better, don’t we?’ Raimondo, on the other hand, had made the mistake of being frank about his feelings, or lack of them, and for this he had never been forgiven.

What no one could ever deny was that he had coped extremely well with orphanhood, while Ariana had been broken. She had worshipped her parents, particularly her mother, to whom she had always been close. Raimondo had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of her child-like dependency, of that physical intimacy prolonged well into adolescence. He found it cloying and excessive, and he had been proved right. When the walls of her emotional hothouse were so brutally shattered by the terrorists’ bullets, Ariana had collapsed into something very close to madness.

This fact had been hushed up by the services of exclusive and discreet private ‘nursing homes’ which existed for just this very purpose, and by the use of such euphemisms as ‘prostrated by grief’ and ‘emotionally overwrought’. The plain truth was that Ariana Falcone had gone crazy, as her brother had not scrupled to tell her to her face shortly after the funeral. Enough was enough! He had always resented the exaggerated fuss which had been made of Ariana, the way her every wish and whim was pandered to. This excessive display of temperament was just another blatant example of attention-seeking, and in extremely poor taste too, trading on their parents’ violent deaths for her own selfish ends, and trying — with a certain amount of success, moreover — to make him look cold and heartless by comparison. The sooner she faced up to the realities of the new situation the better. Their parents were dead and he was in charge. What Ariana needed was a series of short, sharp shocks to bring this home to her, and it was this which he had set out to provide.

Although he had applied his treatment rigorously, Ariana stubbornly refused to respond. On the first anniversary of the killings, he had given her one last chance, ordering her to appear at a memorial service which was being held at their local church. Not only had she refused, but the only reason she deigned to give was that she wanted to play with her collection of dolls which were kept in the beautiful wooden toyhouse which her parents had given her for her eighth birthday. Her brother’s response had been swift and decisive. Tying her to a chair, he had doused the doll’s-house in paraffin and set fire to it before her eyes, with the dolls inside.

But Ariana’s petulance seemingly knew no bounds. Far from accepting that it was time to stop these embarrassing and self-indulgent games, she had sunk into a condition verging on catatonia. Eventually Raimondo found a doctor who was prepared to prescribe an indefinite course of tranquillizers which kept Ariana more or less amenable, and their Aunt Carmela was brought in to act as minder. Raimondo moved out to a small modern flat near the university, where he had been re-enrolling for years without ever taking his exams. The huge palazzo which Umberto’s father had bought in the twenties was turned over to Carmela and Ariana. A new playhouse was obtained and stocked with dolls. It was not quite the same, but Ariana showed no sign of noticing the difference, or of remembering what had happened to the original. She spent her days happily sewing clothes for her dolls based on ideas culled from Carmela’s discarded magazines.

What happened next was completely unpredictable. Appropriately enough, the whole thing had been intended as a joke. Paolo, one of Raimondo’s student acquaintances, had always dreamt of becoming a fashion designer, much against his parents’ wishes. It was he who told Raimondo about the competition being run by a leading fashion magazine to find the ‘designers of tomorrow’. He was submitting a portfolio of drawings and sketches, which he described to his friends at every opportunity. If he won, he explained, then his parents would be obliged to let him follow his genius instead of taking a job in a bank. Paolo went on at such length about it that Raimondo finally decided to play a trick on him. One evening when Ariana had gone to bed, he borrowed a dozen of her dolls, complete with the miniature costumes she had made for them, removed the heads to make them resemble dressmaker’s mannequins, and then photographed them carefully with a close-up lens. Next he took the prints to a commercial art studio and had them reproduced as fashion sketches, which he triumphantly showed to Paolo as his entry.

If Paolo had taken the thing in the spirit in which it had been intended, Raimondo would have admitted the truth, had a good laugh, and that would have been that. To his amazement, however, Paolo reacted with a torrent of vituperative abuse. Raimondo’s designs were impractical nonsense, he claimed. No one could ever make such things, let alone wear them. In short, it would be an insult to submit them for the competition. Until that moment, Raimondo had not had the slightest intention of doing so, but Paolo had been so unpleasant that he sent the drawings in to spite him. When the results were announced three months later, he was awarded the first prize.

His first reaction was one of incredulity. The joke had gone far enough — much too far, in fact. He must put a stop to it at once. But that wasn’t so easy, not with all Milan beating a path to the door. Paolo couldn’t have been more wrong, it seemed. The designs Raimondo had submitted were judged to be daring but accessible, refreshingly different, striking just the right balance between novelty and practicality. He was offered contracts, more or less on his own terms, with several of the city’s top fashion houses.

If Ariana had been in her right mind, he would have let her take the prize and the fame and fortune that went with it. As it was, this was out of the question. His sister was quite incapable of sustaining the ordeal of public exposure. Apart from Aunt Carmela and Raimondo himself, the only person she ever saw was her cousin Ludovico, on whom she seemed to have developed a schoolgirlish crush. She always brightened up before, during and after his visits, which had grown quite frequent. Apparently Ludo had some business interests in Milan, although it was never very clear what they were. When he was around, Ariana could almost pass for normal, but this was an illusion. Ariana lived in a self-contained world, talking to no one but her dolls. She had never watched television or read the papers since the day a report about some terrorist atrocity had caused a lengthy relapse. Her world had a lot to recommend it, from her point of view. It was warm, stable and quiet. There were no nasty surprises. Love might safely be invested, secure in the knowledge that no harm could befall.

For Raimondo to admit the truth would only have served to kill a goose whose eggs, it seemed, were of solid gold. But it wasn’t really a question of money. The Falcone family fortunes, although no longer quite what they had been when Umberto was running the business, were still in an altogether different league from those of their Roman cousins. No, it was the original element — that of the practical joke, the elaborate prank — which swayed him in the end. If fooling Paolo had seemed a worthwhile thing to do, the idea of fooling everybody was completely irresistible.

It took him a while to find his feet. The freelance contract didn’t work out in the end. When the house involved requested small changes in various details, he’d had to refuse, for the simple reason that he was unable to draw. His arrogance and intransigence attracted criticism at the time, but in the long run the episode merely strengthened his hand, increasing his reputation as a wayward, uncompromising genius who worked alone by night and then appeared with a sheaf of sketches and said, ‘Take it or leave it!’

When he launched his own ready-to-wear line the following March, it was only a modest success. The fashion world in Italy is dominated by a handful of big names whose control is exercised through exclusive contracts with textile producers, insider deals in which the fashion press allocate editorial space in direct proportion to the amount of advertising bought, and licensing arrangements for perfumes, watches, lighters, glasses, scarves and luggage which make such ‘conces-sion tycoons’ multi-millionaires without their having to lift a finger. What was being sold was an image created by the designers’ haute couture range, shown three times a year in Rome and abroad. Such garments, selling for tens of billions of lire, were out of reach to anyone but the super-rich, most of them in America and the Gulf oil states, but the image of luxury and exclusivity were available to anyone prepared to pay a modest sum for a ‘designer-labelled’ product which might in fact have been produced in a Korean sweat shop. The sweat didn’t stick, the chic did. That was the trick of it.

As sole owner of a large textile mill, Raimondo Falcone was in a unique position to break the cartel on raw materials. The problem lay in generating the desirable image. He clearly couldn’t go into couture. As the word implies, this means being able to cut, to go into a fitting room with the client, pick up a length of cloth and a pair of scissors and produce something which looks like it has grown there. This was clearly not a possibility for Raimondo, who couldn’t cut a slice of panettone without wrecking the entire cake. Then he had his inspiration, one day when he was being interviewed on television. His sudden emergence on to the fashion scene, as though from nowhere, was already the stuff of legend. People were naturally curious about him, his background, his working methods, his philosophy. While he was telling the interviewer a pack of lies — ‘I always thought of it as a hobby really, I used to scribble ideas on the back of an envelope and then lose it somewhere…’ — it occurred to him that what people really wanted from their clothes was the kind of miraculous transformation like the one which so fascinated them about him. They wanted to be able to put on a new personality like putting on a shirt. Fashion wasn’t just about attracting sexual partners or showing off your wealth. It was a search for metamorphosis, for transcendence. And who better to offer it than a man who appeared unfettered by the constraints within which ordinary mortals were forced to operate?

From that moment, he had never looked back. It took no more than an occasional grudging, condescending word of praise from him to keep Ariana busy. Censored extracts from fashion magazines, from which all reference to Falco designs had of course been removed, kept her fantasy world in touch with the colours, lines and fabrics which were currently in vogue. Once he had succeeded in convincing her that she needed big dolls to play with now, being a big girl herself, the trick-photography and out-of-house sketches could be dispensed with. From time to time he removed a selection of the garments she made and handed them over to his subordinates, a tight, highly-paid and very loyal team who relieved the maestro of the tiresome day-to-day business of putting his creations into production from the original models. All he had to do was tour the country, appearing at shops and on television, telling people that they were what they wore, and that in the late twentieth century it was ideologically gauche to suggest otherwise.

He sat upright suddenly, listening intently. Then he heard it again, a distant metallic sound somewhere far below. Once again, a smile bent his lips. He knew what it was: the discarded filing-cabinet shell which had been sitting on the landing of the first floor for as long as anyone could remember. When he arrived, having smashed off the padlock used to secure the emergency exit since the break-in, he had pulled the metal cabinet out from the wall so that it all but blocked the way upstairs. Its faint tintinnabulation was as good as a burglar alarm to him.

He picked up the pistol and walked with rapid, light steps into the workroom, where he knelt down behind one of the tables with a clear view of the door. The moment it opened, the intruder would be framed in a rectangle of light, peering into a dark, unfamiliar territory where the only recognizable targets were the mannequins. But he would be ready, his eyes perfectly adjusted to the fog-muted glimmer from the Galleria outside, the pistol steadied against the edge of the table and trained on its target. It would be like shooting rabbits leaving the burrow.

Then a miracle occurred. That, at least, is how he explained it to himself in that initial instant of wordless awe. After that it was pure sensation, pure experience. Later he realized that the whole thing could have taken no more than a few seconds, but while it lasted there was nothing else, only the noise and the light. The light was the kind you might see if they skinned your eyeballs, pickled them in acid and trained lasers on them. As for the noise…

When he was a boy, he had once been allowed up the campanile of the family church. After endless windings, the spiral staircase broadened into a chamber where the bells hung, great lumps of dull metal, seeming no more resonant than so many rocks. Yet when the clapper struck, they could be heard over half the city. He had wondered ever after what it would have sounded like if they’d started pealing while he was standing there. Now he knew. His whole body thrilled and jangled, every cell and fibre quivering in exquisite agony as the overtones and reverberations of that blow died away. Another such would kill him, he thought as he lay in a heap on the floor, clutching his head. But there wasn’t another. This puzzled him at first. Once the clapper was set swinging with that kind of violence, it was bound to come back to strike the other side, just when you were least expecting it.

Hands moved lightly and rapidly all over his body, like a couturier fitting a client. He opened his eyes. A tall figure wearing a black clerical suit stood looking down at him, a revolver in each hand. Above the trim white collar rose a garish latex Carnival mask representing the bluff, benign features of John Paul II.

From the other side of the latex mask, Aurelio Zen surveyed the situation with a sense of satisfaction and relief. He had been extremely dubious about the outcome of this venture ever since picking up the package that afternoon at Linate. He had no idea what stun grenades looked like, but given what Gilberto had told him they were going to cost, he was expecting something pretty impressive. Gleaming stainless-steel canisters with spring-action triggers and time-delay settings, slightly greasy to the touch — that sort of thing. Above all, he was expecting them to weigh. ‘We are the goods,’ he expected them to tell him as he staggered away from the airline counter with a metal case marked DANGER — HIGH EXPLOSIVE.

Instead of which the clerk had casually tossed him a padded envelope which felt almost empty. Zen left feeling like the victim of a confidence trick. Matters did not improve when he opened the envelope in the taxi on the way back to the city. Inside, he found two grey plastic tubes, each about the size of a toothpaste dispenser, lashed together by a rubber band looped over on itself. At one end, a red plastic peg with a ridged grip protruded a few centimetres from the body of the tube, the junction being sealed with a pull-tab. There was also a note in Gilberto’s jauntily precise writing.

To avoid accidents, remove seal at last moment. After pulling out the red pin, you have 3 seconds to deliver the grenade and get out. The effects last 5 seconds or more, depending on the physical condition of the opposition, their degree of preparation and training, etc. One pack is enough for an average-sized room; larger areas may require two.

Just like air freshener, thought Zen disgustedly. Four hundred thousand lire each, Gilberto was charging him for these! ‘And that’s cost price, Aurelio. In fact below cost, because it’s what I paid three months ago. God knows what the replacement cost will be.’ As an added irony, the source was one of Zen’s colleagues. The reason the grenades were so expensive was that very few came on to the market. Any equipment on general military or police issue could be had at massive discounts, for that was very much a buyer’s market. But stun grenades were supplied only to a few specialist units in the police and Carabinieri. Nieddu’s supplier was connected to the Interior Ministry’s DIGOS anti-terrorist squad, whose morale was at an all-time low these days — which no doubt explained why they were resorting to private enterprise, like everyone else.

In the event, though, Zen had to admit that his doubts had been decisively confounded. The grenades might not look much, but they packed one hell of a punch. Even from the other side of the door, the effect had been that of the firework to end all fireworks. He hadn’t been sure how large the room was, but at almost half a million lire a go, Zen decided that one was going to have to be enough. Which it certainly had been. When he charged in, Falcone was lying on the floor, his hands to his head and his knees drawn up, like one of the victims over-whelmed by lava at Pompeii. Setting down his replica revolver, Zen grabbed the pistol which the man had been holding and frisked him swiftly for other weapons. Then he picked up his toy gun and stepped back.

After a few seconds, Falcone moaned and rubbed his eyes as though stirring from sleep. He stared incredulously at Zen, who smiled in the privacy afforded by the latex mask. The fancy dress had been another aspect of the affair which he had been unsure about. Some disguise was certainly necessary. He didn’t want to give the game away too soon, not without finding out as much as he could. This was his first deliberate attempt at criminal extortion, and he didn’t want to bungle it. The single card he had to play should certainly be enough to extract a cash settlement, but if his victim could be kept in suspense about who he was and what he wanted, then other potentially profitable facts might well emerge. At the very least, the aura of psychological domination thus established would work strongly to Zen’s advantage when it came to agreeing terms.

The moment he thought of disguises, he recalled the fancy-dress shop he had seen that morning in Via Pisani. At that time of year, they had an extensive selection available for hire, but in the end Zen had opted for a clerical outfit. The mask, a pudgy parody of Wojtyla’s Slavic features, had then been an obvious accessory. Nevertheless, it remained to be seen how it went down on the night. As it turned out, there were no worries on that score. Falcone couldn’t keep his eyes off it.

‘You’re a bit early for Carnival,’ he eventually remarked with a brave attempt at reasserting himself.

‘It’s for your protection,’ Zen replied in the singsong accent he had used on the phone.

‘For yours, you mean.’

The plastic pope’s face moved from side to side in a gesture of negation that made a macabre contrast with its expression of benevolent paternalism.

‘If I were not masked, you might recognize me,’ Zen explained. ‘Then we would have to kill you.’

He waited a moment for this to sink in.

‘We may decide to do so anyway in the end, of course. That depends on whether you are able to furnish a satisfactory explanation of your conduct with regard to the Ruspanti affair.’

Falcone tried a laugh.

‘What have I to do with that? There’s absolutely no evidence linking me to the Ruspanti affair.’

‘Evidence is for judges. I am not a judge, I am an executioner. Sentence has already been passed. Unless you can persuade me otherwise in the next few minutes, it will be carried out.’

In the pools of shadow on the floor, Falcone squirmed like a stranded fish.

‘But what have I done, for God’s sake? What have I done?’

‘You have taken our name in vain! You have slandered our organization and circulated lies about our aims and activities. You have stirred up a hornet’s nest of speculation and rumour that is causing us considerable embarrassment. In short, you have attempted to make use of us.’

The black holes of the mask’s eyes bored into Falcone.

‘The Cabal does not allow itself to be made use of.’

Once again Falcone tried to laugh, but it broke from him like a belch, uncontrolled and shameful.

‘Listen, there’s been a terrible mistake! I had no idea that any such organization as the Cabal even existed! Ruspanti told me he had dreamed it up as a way of getting the Vatican to give him refuge. He was very proud of how clever he’d been, of how the priests were swallowing it all and coming back for more. I thought that’s all it was, just something he’d made up!’

‘That’s not what you told the police.’

At this, Falcone visibly shrank.

‘What?’

‘The police official from the Ministry of the Interior who was called in by the Vatican to investigate the Ruspanti affair. You didn’t tell him that you thought the whole thing was a hoax. On the contrary, you went to great lengths to ensure that he thought that the Cabal was behind the whole affair.’

Falcone gasped.

‘You know about that?’

‘It will save a lot of time if you just assume that we know everything. Now answer my question! Why did you go to such extraordinary lengths — breaking into a confessional in St Peter’s, setting up a shortwave radio link — just so as to smear an organization whose existence you now say you didn’t believe in?’

‘I never intended to smear anyone…’

‘Well you certainly succeeded! The Ministry of the Interior even opened a file on us. Fortunately one of our men was able to have it suppressed, but the effect could have been incalculable. For the last time, why?’

Falcone looked up at the pistol in the man’s right hand. It was now pointing directly towards him. With absolute clarity, he realized that he was going to die — and by his own gun, or rather his father’s.

‘It was just a bluff!’ he cried. ‘We suspected that the police knew more than they were officially admitting. The idea was to convince the officer in charge that Ruspanti’s death was not a criminal matter but a political one, and that the guilty party might include anyone and everyone from his own boss to the President of the Republic.’

The papal mask nodded like an obscene parody of a priest hearing confession.

‘But who is this “we”? And why should you care what line the police were taking?’

‘I meant the Falcone family. Ruspanti was a distant cousin of ours, and we were worried that…’

A harsh cackle from the lips of the plastic pope cut him off.

‘Oh come, now! You had rather more reason to worry about than the family connection, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Then let me fill you in. Friday last week, you and Marco Zeppegno murdered Ludovico Ruspanti by throwing him from the upper gallery in St Peter’s…’

‘We didn’t throw him!’

Too late, he realized the trap he had fallen into.

‘Quite right,’ the intruder continued gloatingly. ‘You lashed him to the railings with a length of fishing twine fastened in such a way that once he regained consciousness, his own struggles precipitated him to his death. Four days later, you electrocuted Giovanni Grimaldi in his shower…’

‘I had nothing to do with that!’

The cry was spontaneous, an affirmation of an innocence he really felt. Although it had been he who had connected the electric cable to the mains and listened to the dying man’s screams, the elimination of Grimaldi had served only Zeppegno’s interests. The photocopy of the transcript he had been shown on the Monday afternoon confirmed that there was nothing to compromise him, particularly since Grimaldi had obviously been totally taken in by his female clothing — even to the extent of doing a half-hearted number on him!

To be honest, it might have been that which sealed the Vigilanza man’s fate. He’d been shocked to find himself the object of that kind of attention, just because he’d put on a skirt and blouse. Of course this merely confirmed what he’d claimed all along — fixed categories were an illusion, you were what you appeared to be — but it was one thing to theorize about such things, quite another to see a man eye you up and down in that smug, knowing way. There was nothing remotely sexual about his cross-dressing. It was just an extension of the possibilities open to him, that was all, a blurring of distinctions he had already proclaimed meaningless. He would even more happily have dressed as a child, if that had been possible.

But Giovanni Grimaldi had made the mistake of making sexual advances to him, so when Marco had said they were going to have to move, he had agreed, even though he himself was not at risk. The telephone call from Ludovico to Ariana which had originally forced him to intervene was recorded in the transcript, but Ludo was still being careful at that point, and he had said nothing that would make any sense to an outsider. But by the eve of his death, Ruspanti had thrown caution to the winds, and Zeppegno’s name appeared in black and white. If the police got hold of it, they’d beat the truth out of Marco in no time at all. That was another reason why he’d decided to play along at the time, and later too, negotiating by phone from the lobby of the hotel in the middle of a party to celebrate the publication of his new book. It was only then that he realized that his own interests would be better served by killing Zeppegno himself.

‘I had nothing to do with that!’ he repeated.

The intruder seemed at first to understand.

‘“You are what you wear.” I didn’t realize you took your own slogan so seriously! Very well then, Zeppegno’s accomplice wasn’t you but a woman of similar build and bone structure. Oddly enough, yesterday yet another young woman — clearly no relation, because she was wearing brown instead of black — pushed Marco Zeppegno out of a train in the middle of the Apennine tunnel. Quite an eventful week they’ve had, these girls, whoever they may be.’

Raimondo Falcone had once watched a pig gutted, out at the villa where Carmela used to live. The beast was suspended by its hind trotters from a hook. The knife was plunged in below the pink puckered anus and tugged down like the tag of a zipper, opening the animal’s belly, releasing its heavy load of innards. The plastic pope’s words had a similar effect on him now. The man had not exaggerated. He did know everything.

Well, not every thing. He knew about Ruspanti and Grimaldi. He even knew about Zeppegno. But that was only the wrapping on the real secret, the key to all the others and the reason why he had originally suggested to Zeppegno that they pool forces and pay a visit to the Prince in Rome. Ironically enough, it was Ruspanti himself who had brought Falcone and Zeppegno together in the first place, when he learned that his cousin had abandoned the derelict family mansion to mad Ariana and moved into a smart new apartment block which also happened to house one of the former clients of his currency export business. At first the Prince merely asked Falcone to pass on his demands and menaces to Marco Zeppegno, who could in turn relay them to the other men under investigation by Antonia Simonelli. When Raimondo balked, his cousin reminded him that it was in his own interests to see the affair settled quietly. A major scandal would reflect badly on everyone in the family, especially a young designer at such a delicate stage of his career, just starting to rise in the world, but still within reach of jealous rivals who would seize on any excuse to burst the bubble of his success.

At the time Falcone had understood this as an observation, not a threat, and had agreed to act as go-between. Zeppegno, for his part, refused to be drawn on the specific commitments Ruspanti wanted, claiming that he needed more time, and that dramatic interventions by influential people were just around the corner. To Falcone he was less diplomatic, perhaps hoping that some echo of this might get back to the Prince. ‘It was a business arrangement. He did the job, we paid him well. If the bastard’s in the shit now, let him look after himself. I’ve got problems of my own without adding conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.’ Raimondo took little interest in the matter one way or the other until the day Ruspanti dropped an oblique reference to Ariana’s dolls. A few days later he mentioned the dolls again, this time referring to their ‘extraordinarily inventive’ costumes. In a panic, Falcone hung up. When the phone rang again, he did not answer it. He did not answer it for the next week, but when he dropped in to pick up a consignment of costumes from Ariana, she told him about Ludovico’s story about meeting a reporter who was interested in writing an article about her and her dolls. The implication was clear. If his demands were not met, Ruspanti would reveal to the world that Falco was a fake, a pretentious posturer who had deceived everyone by cynically exploiting the talents of the traumatized sibling he kept locked up at home.

It was then he decided that his cousin must die. Ruspanti had in fact seriously miscalculated. Not for a moment did Falcone think of agreeing to the Prince’s demands, which now ran to private planes to smuggle him out of the country and secret hideouts in Switzerland or Austria where he could lie low until the affair blew over. It was not just his commercial success that was at stake, but his very self! He was no longer Falcone, but Falco. If Falco were to be revealed as a void, an illusion, then what would become of him? As long as Ludovico Ruspanti remained alive, Falco’s existence had hung in the balance.

As it did now, he thought. The intruder stood quite still, the pistols aimed at his queasily yawing head.

‘Until this moment, I had no idea that any such organization as the Cabal existed,’ Falcone said wearily. ‘If I have inadvertedly offended or inconvenienced you, I apologize. If there is any way in which I can make reparations, I am more than willing to do so.’

The man in cleric costume raised his hands slowly.

‘No!’ shrieked Falcone in sheer terror. ‘For the love of God forgive me, I beg of you!’

The empty eyes of the mask stared at him.

‘I? I have nothing to do with it.’

Falcone grovelled on the floor, abasing himself utterly.

‘I meant the Cabal.’

The intruder laughed.

‘The Cabal doesn’t exist.’ And he raised his mask like a visor.

The effect was as stunning as the detonation of the grenade. Slack-jawed, pale, seemingly paralysed, Falcone just stared and stared. He, who had fooled everyone around him for so long, had now himself been made a fool of — and by a dowdy creep whose suits looked as though they were made by his mother! How was it possible? Why had it been permitted? The world had stopped making sense.

‘Don’t worry, dottore, you’re in good company,’ said Zen, tossing the latex mask aside. ‘The best minds in the Vatican fell for it when Ruspanti spun them the tale. The press and the public fell for it when Grimaldi wrote his anonymous letter. I fell for it myself when the Vatican seemed to be covering the matter up, and the top man at the Ministry did when I passed the story on.’

Falcone studied him watchfully from the floor.

‘The shock’s wearing off now, isn’t it?’ Zen continued. ‘You’re starting to ask yourself why I bothered going to all this trouble. After all, everyone else has had a reason. Ruspanti used the Cabal to get into the Vatican. Grimaldi used it to stir up speculation about Ruspanti’s death, so that he could put the squeeze on you and Zeppegno. You two used it to try and lead me up a blind alley. But what’s in it for me? That’s what you’re asking yourself, isn’t it dottore?’

He took out his packet of Nazionali and lit up.

‘Of course, I could say that I’m just getting even for that session in the confessional. My knees just about seized up solid! Where were you, anyway?’

Falcone gave a pallid grin. He didn’t know what this man wanted, but he sensed that his life was no longer in danger.

‘In a car on the Gianicolo hill. It was Marco’s idea. He provided the gadgetry and set it all up. Mind you, we had a few tricky moments, like when that police car passed by with its siren going.’

‘What you told me about the Vatican — the schisms and feuds, all the various groups jockeying for position — sounded very authentic.’

‘I got all that from Ludovico. He knew all the right-wing weirdos and religious eccentrics in Rome, of course. These people are actually quite harmless, like the ones who want to restore the monarchy. All I did was make them sound a significant threat.’

Zen nodded.

‘It sounds like you were on quite good terms with your cousin. And Ariana is still in love with him, isn’t she?’

A chill ripple passed over Falcone’s skin.

‘What?’ he croaked.

Zen waved a pistol casually.

‘Look, let’s get one thing clear. I’m not here in my professional capacity.’

Falcone stared at him.

‘You mean…’

‘I mean I’m on the make,’ Zen replied. ‘I’m a corrupt cop. You’ve read about them in the papers, you’ve seen them on television. Now, for a limited period only, you can have one in your own home or office.’

Raimondo Falcone stood up, facing Zen.

‘How much?’

Zen let his cigarette fall to the floor and stubbed it out with the toe of his right shoe. Falcone watched anxiously to make sure it was properly extinguished. Fire in the atelier was the great terror of every designer.

‘How much do you think it’s worth?’

Falcone’s eyes narrowed.

‘How much what ’s worth?’

Zen looked past him at the window of the inner office, where the lighted dome of the Galleria rose into the gathering fog.

‘You killed your cousin to keep it secret,’ he said as though to himself. ‘That would seem to make it quite valuable.’

Again the chill spread over Falcone, eating into his complacency like acid. With an effort, he pulled himself together. There was no need to panic. He was in no danger. All this crooked, taunting bastard wanted was money. Give it to him, promise him whatever he wanted, and get him the hell out of here.

‘We agreed fifty million for the transcript,’ he said decisively, the businessman in him taking charge.

‘I no longer have the transcript.’

Falcone couldn’t help smiling. He knew that, having wrested most of it from Zeppegno before pushing him out of the train. Instead of hanging on to the door, poor obtuse Zeppegno had clutched the transcript, still believing that it was the real object of the exercise. The idea had been that Zeppegno would join the pendolino at Florence, engage Zen in conversation and get hold of the document. Falcone, in drag again, would go to the vestibule as they approached the Apennine tunnel and turn off the lights. While Zeppegno walked through to the next carriage, Falcone was to go back to the seat where Zen was sitting and shoot him dead.

At least, that’s what Zeppegno thought was going to happen. Falcone had quite different ideas, and in the event they prevailed. Once he’d opened the door and pushed his startled accomplice out, he’d taken the part of the transcript he’d managed to seize back to the lavatory. Luckily it included the page where Ruspanti phoned Ariana. He’d burnt that and flushed the ashes down the toilet. This was no doubt an unnecessary precaution, but he preferred to err on the safe side. Then he’d pushed the other pages out of the window, checked his appearance in the mirror and gone out to face Zen and the train crew. As he’d expected, all they’d looked at was his bum.

‘I’m not interested in the transcript,’ he said.

‘There’s no reason why you should be,’ agreed Zen. ‘You weren’t even mentioned.’

‘I was simply using that figure as a benchmark.’

‘Your sister was, though.’

For a moment Falcone hoped he’d misheard, even though he knew perfectly well he hadn’t.

‘And her dolls,’ added Zen. ‘And the journalist who supposedly wanted to write about them. That’s who she thought I was when I went there yesterday. What really shook me was that she seems to think that Ruspanti is still alive.’

Falcone stood perfectly still, his hands clasped and his eyes raised to the ceiling, like a plaster statue of one of the lesser saints.

‘Of course, given the isolation in which she lives, there’s no reason why she should ever find out. Unless someone told her.’

There was no reaction apart from a fractional heightening of Falcone’s expression of transcendental sublimity.

‘I’m no psychologist,’ Zen admitted, ‘but I’d be prepared to bet that if Ariana was told that her beloved cousin Ludo was dead, and exactly how he died, then the consequences would be extremely grave.’

He waved casually around the workshop.

‘At the very least, the supply of new Falco designs would be likely to dry up for some considerable…’

Then the other man was on him, grabbing the pistol in his right hand. Zen tried to shake him off, but Falcone hung on like a terrier. In the end he had to crack him across the head with the other pistol before he would let go.

‘There’s no need for this,’ Zen told him. ‘All I want is a reasonable settlement. We can come to terms. I’m not greedy.’

But Falcone was beyond reach. Shaking his woozy head like a boxer, he came forward again. Zen cocked the replica revolver and pointed it at him.

‘Keep your distance!’

There was a deafening bang. This time both men looked stunned, but Zen recovered first. He wasn’t still groggy from the first time, for one thing. But the main point was that he had felt the revolver rear up in his hand, and realized what had happened. Falcone didn’t seem to have been hit, thank God, but his face was that of a man in hell.

‘It was a mistake!’ Zen assured him. ‘I got the pistols mixed up. I fired yours by mistake. Mine’s just a replica.’

But Falcone was gone, turning on his heel and sprinting through to the next room.

‘Come back!’ yelled Zen, chasing him. ‘You’re in no danger! All I want is money!’

When he reached the door of the office, it was empty. He searched the gymnasium and bathroom beyond, but there was no sign of Falcone. Only then did he notice the open window. The offices formed part of the south end of the Galleria’s main aisle, the lower floors having windows which opened directly on to it, beneath the glazed-barrel vault roof. This floor was at roof level, and it was only a short drop from the window to one of the iron girders which supported the large panes of glass. Catwalks ran the length of the main supporting struts, giving access to the roof for cleaning and maintenance. Along one of these, Raimondo Falcone was now running for his life.

‘ Merda!’ shouted Zen.

He was disgusted with his clumsiness, his unbelievable gaucheness, his limitless ineptitude. Couldn’t he do any thing right? What would Tania think of him, after all his proud boasts about things changing? Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. In sheer frustration he fired the pistol again and again, blasting away as though to punch new stars in the night sky.

The renewed firing made Falcone run even faster. He had reached the cupola now, and started to climb the metal ladder which led from the catwalk up the curving glass slope of the dome to the ventilation lantern at the top. Through the shifting panels of fog, Zen could just see Falcone moving rapidly across the panes of lighted glass like a nimble skater on a luminous mountain of ice. It thus seemed no great surprise when, in total silence and with no fuss whatsoever, he abruptly disappeared from view.

Down in the Galleria itself, Christmas was in the air. The shops, cafes and travel agencies were all doing a thriving business. Giving and receiving, eating and drinking, skiing and sunning and all the other rituals and observances of the festive season ensured that money was changing hands in a manner calculated to gladden the hearts of the traders. Any modern Christ who had attempted to intervene would himself have been expelled in short order by the security guards employed to keep this temple of commerce free of beggars, junkies, buskers, religious fanatics and other riff-raff.

Nevertheless, it was some such gesture of protest that sprang to most people’s minds when they heard the sound of breaking glass. The shop windows were a powerful symbol of the socio-economic barriers against which the poor were constantly being brought up short. They could gawk at the goodies as much as they liked, but they couldn’t get at them. Sometimes, especially around Christmas, the disparity between the way of life on display and the one they actually lived became too much to bear, and some crazed soul would pick up a hammer and have a go.

Even the screaming seemed at first to fit this scenario, until some people, more acute of hearing, realized that it was not coming from on-lookers in the immediate vicinity of the presumed outrage, but from somewhere else altogether — in fact from above. When they raised their eyes to the roof to see what it could be, the expression of amazement on their faces made their neighbours do the same, until in no time at all everyone in the Galleria was gazing upwards. It must have looked extraordinary, seen from above, this crowd of faces all tilted up like a crop of sunflowers.

Until then, the distribution of people in the aisles of the Galleria had been fairly even, but they now began to scatter and press back, forming clusters near the walls and rapidly evacuating the space at the centre of the building, where the arms of the House of Savoy were displayed in inlaid marble. The clearing thus formed might have been destined for an impromptu performance of some kind, a display of acrobatics or some similar feat of skill or daring. But the crowd’s attention was high above, where the vast, dark opacity of the cupola weighed down on the lighted space below. Now the shock was over, they were reassured to realize that the body plummeting to earth amid a debris of broken glass must be a spectacle of some kind got up to divert the shoppers, an optical illusion, a fake. Clearly no one could have fallen through the enclosure overhead, as solid and heavy as vaulted masonry. It was all a trick. A moment before impact the plunging body would pull up short, restrained by hidden wires, while the accompanying shoal of jagged icicles tinkled prettily to pieces on the marble floor before melting harmlessly away.

In the event, though, it turned out to be real.