Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  The archbishop lifted the sheet of paper from the table and scanned it briefly.

  ‘Enrico!’ he called.

  Lamboglia sashayed back across the carpet to his master’s side. Sánchez-Valdés handed him the paper.

  ‘There is just one remaining formality,’ he told Zen, ‘which is for you to sign an undertaking not to disclose any of the information which you may have come by in the course of your work for us.’

  Lamboglia carried the paper over to Zen, who read through the six lines of typing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t sign this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ snapped Lamboglia, who was waiting to convey the signed document back to Sánchez-Valdés.

  ‘To do so would risk placing me in an untenable position with regard to my official duties.’

  Sánchez-Valdés hitched up the hem of his soutane to reveal a pair of magenta socks.

  ‘You didn’t display such exaggerated scruples the last time we spoke,’ he said dryly.

  ‘That was altogether different, Your Excellency. Ruspanti’s death occurred in the Vatican City State, and was therefore not subject to investigation by the Italian authorities. When I acted for you in that affair, I did so as a free agent. If Grimaldi had also died within the walls of the Vatican, I would have been happy to sign this undertaking. But he didn’t, he died in Rome. If I sign this, and Grimaldi’s death is subsequently made the subject of a judicial investigation, I would be unable to avoid perjuring myself whether I spoke or remained silent.’

  Archbishop Sánchez-Valdés laughed urbanely.

  ‘But there’s no possibility of that happening! Grimaldi’s death was an accident.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘Of course. Just like Ruspanti’s was suicide.’

  The two clerics stared at him intently. The archbishop was the first to break the silence.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Grimaldi did not die accidentally?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘That’s absurd!’ cried Lamboglia. ‘We’ve seen the Carabinieri report! There’s no question that Grimaldi was electrocuted by a faulty shower.’

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘He was electrocuted in the shower, not by the shower.’

  Sánchez-Valdés looked up at the ceiling, as though invoking divine assistance.

  ‘There’s no doubt about that?’ he murmured.

  ‘None at all.’

  The archbishop nodded.

  ‘A pity.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Zen. ‘Nevertheless, although I am unable to sign this undertaking, I can assure you that I will honour it in practice. Your secrets will go no further.’

  He smiled shyly.

  ‘As I mentioned the first time Your Excellency honoured me with an audience, whatever the Church decides is good enough for me.’

  Sánchez-Valdés looked at Zen with amusement.

  ‘You’re a great loss to the Curia, dottore,’ he remarked, shaking his head. ‘A very great loss indeed! But then of course they already accuse us of creaming off the best administrators in the country.’

  He got to his feet, sighing.

  ‘Thank you, Enrico, that will be all.’

  After a momentary hesitation, Lamboglia left sullenly. When the door had closed behind him, Sánchez-Valdés walked over to the window. He pulled aside the screen of the net curtaining, allowing a beam of raw sunlight to enter.

  ‘What a lovely morning.’

  He turned to Zen.

  ‘I think we should take a walk, dottore.’

  Zen stared at him blankly.

  ‘A walk?’

  ‘That’s right. A walk in the woods.’

  ‘Have you heard the one about the whore and the Swiss Guard?’ asked the archbishop.

  Zen, who was lighting a cigarette, promptly choked on the smoke. When the fit of coughing had subsided somewhat, he shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think I have.’

  Sánchez-Valdés’s face beamed with expectation.

  ‘This new recruit has just arrived in Rome, fresh from the mountains. On his first evening off duty he decides to explore the city a little. He wanders out through the Sant’Anna gate and down into the Borgo, where he is accosted by a lady of the night.’

  He paused to inspect a flowering shrub in the rockery they were passing.

  ‘“It’s just like my friends told me,” thinks Hans. “These Roman women can’t resist a blond hunk of manhood like me.” When they reach Asphasia’s business premises, she says, “Before we go any further, let’s settle the little matter of the fee.” The Swiss smiles complacently. “Out of the question! I wouldn’t dream of accepting money from a woman.”’

  Zen laughed politely.

  ‘I heard that one from Scarpia, the head of the Vigilanza. His real name is Scarpione, but Paul VI always called him Scarpia, like the police chief in Tosca. No one was sure whether it was a mistake or a joke, and Montini wasn’t the kind of person you could ask, but somehow the name stuck, perhaps precisely because anyone further removed from Puccini’s villain would be hard to imagine. Poor Luigi is all home and family, mild and jovial to a fault. But you’ll be able to judge for yourself.’

  They passed an elaborate fountain in the form of an artificial grotto from which a stream issued to pour over a series of miniature falls while two stone cherubs watched admiringly from the pool below. The path they were following led straight uphill through a coppice of beech trees. Except for a faint background murmur of traffic, they might have been deep in the country.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sánchez-Valdés went on, ‘that joke sums up the way the Vigilanza regard their colleagues in the Cohors Helvetica, as Nordic yokels with a superiority complex, so stupid they think they’re smart. The Swiss, for their part, look down on the security men as jumped-up traffic wardens. This conceit is perhaps understandable in a corps which not only enjoys an unbroken tradition of service stretching back almost five hundred years, but is charged with responsibility for guarding the person of the Holy Father. As for the Vigilanza, their duties are indeed fairly mundane for the most part, but there is a small élite unit within the force which undertakes more specialized and sensitive tasks. The existence of this unit is officially denied, and we never discuss its operations. If I’ve decided to make an exception in your case, it’s because you already know too much. The Ruspanti affair has got completely out of control, and we must proceed as they do with forest fires, separating off the affected area and letting the flames burn themselves out.’

  Perhaps affected by this metaphor, Zen ground his spent cigarette out with exaggerated caution, creating an unsightly smudge of soiled paper and tobacco shreds.

  ‘There’s no filter,’ he explained awkwardly. ‘It’ll wash away as soon as it rains.’

  He felt constrained to apologize by the extreme tidiness of the gardens. There was something not quite real about the Vatican, he was beginning to feel. It was like Rome devoid of Romans, peopled instead by a quiet, orderly, industrious race. There was no litter, no graffiti, no traffic. Cars were parked strictly within the painted boxes allotted for the purpose, and the few people about walked briskly along, intent on their business. The grass was not only neatly trimmed and innocent of used condoms, spent syringes and the sheets of loose newspaper used as curtains by courting couples in their cars, it was also a richer, more vibrant shade of green, as though it were part of the divine dispensation that the Holy City received more rain than the secular one without the walls. Trees and shrubs, hedges and flower-beds, all appeared vibrant and vigorous, like illustrations from a theological textbook exemplifying the argument from design. In principle, this was all extremely pleasant. In practice it gave Zen the creeps, like a replica which everyone was conspiring to pass off as the real thing.

  ‘Among the responsibilities of this special Vigilanza department,’ Sánchez-Valdés was saying, ‘is the covert surveillance of individuals living or working within the Vatican City State whose activities have for one reason or an
other attracted the attention of my department. Until last Friday, one of these was Prince Ludovico Ruspanti.’

  The archbishop broke off as they approached a team of gardeners at work resetting a rockery. He nodded at the men, who inclined their heads respectfully. Once they were out of earshot again, Sánchez-Valdés resumed.

  ‘As you are no doubt aware, Ruspanti was under investigation by the Italian judiciary for his part in the illegal export of currency. What you probably do not know, since the matter was sub judice, is that his part in this alleged fraud consisted of recycling large sums through his account at the Institute for the Works of Religion. In short, the Prince was accused of using the Vatican bank to break Italian law. After the scandals surrounding the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, we clearly could not be seen to be sheltering him from justice. But although we had our own reasons for allowing Ruspanti the temporary use of a grace-and-favour apartment while he sorted out his affairs, we weren’t naïve enough simply to leave him to his own devices.’

  Zen looked up at the crest of the hill above them, where the mighty bastion of the original fortifications was now crowned with the transmitting aerials of Vatican Radio.

  ‘In that case …’ he began, then broke off.

  Sánchez-Valdés finished it for him.

  ‘In that case, we should know who killed him, just as the anonymous letter to the papers claimed. Yes, we should. The problem is that the official assigned to Ruspanti on the day he died was …’

  ‘Giovanni Grimaldi.’

  The archbishop gestured as though to say ‘There you are!’ The alley they were following had reached a round-about from which five others led off in various directions, each with its name inscribed on a travertine slab mounted in a metal stand. Sánchez-Valdés turned left along a straight gravel path running along the foot of a section of the original Vatican walls, towering up thirty metres or more to their machicolated battlements.

  ‘Grimaldi was presumably debriefed before. I arrived that Friday,’ Zen commented.

  Sánchez-Valdés nodded.

  ‘He said he had lost Ruspanti among the throng of tourists up on the dome of St Peter’s and was trying to find him again in the basilica when the body fell. At the time there seemed no reason not to believe this. The first thing which alerted our suspicions was the disappearance of the transcript which had been made of Ruspanti’s telephone conversations. Ah, there’s Luigi!’

  A plump man with carefully permed silvery hair and a benign expression stood by a pine tree beside the path, watching them approach. Zen felt a surge of revulsion. He suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of this place where even the chief of police looked like a parody of a kindly, absent-minded village priest.

  ‘We made the inquiries you requested,’ Scarpione told Sánchez-Valdés once the introductions had been performed. ‘The supervisor responsible for the Carmelites’ holdings says that no repair work had been ordered in the house where Grimaldi lived.’

  The archbishop looked at Zen.

  ‘Well, there’s the answer to the question you put to us last night. What is its significance?’

  ‘Grimaldi’s neighbour, Marco Duranti, said that someone was working there on Monday afternoon with an electric drill, supposedly repairing the drains.’

  ‘And someone was there again last night,’ Scarpione broke in, proud of his scoop. ‘I’ve just had a call about it from the Carabinieri. They were called out by this Duranti, but unfortunately the intruders managed to escape by using some sort of smoke bomb.’

  Zen coughed loudly.

  ‘They probably came back to search Grimaldi’s room again.’

  The archbishop frowned.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘They tried once before, after they killed him.’

  Luigi Scarpione took a moment to react. Sánchez-Valdés turned to Zen, indicating the Vigilanza chief’s stunned and horrified expression as proof that the Vatican’s hands were clean of Grimaldi’s death. Zen held up his palms in token of the fact that he had never for a moment believed otherwise.

  ‘But the Carabinieri …’ Scarpione began.

  ‘The Carabinieri don’t know about Grimaldi’s involvement in the Ruspanti case,’ Zen broke in. ‘In fact they don’t even know that there is a Ruspanti case. If they did, they might have concluded that two such deaths in five days was a bit too much of a coincidence, and taken the trouble to investigate the circumstances of Grimaldi’s “accident” a little more thoroughly, as I did. In which case, they would no doubt have discovered that the workman who came to the house on Monday afternoon had drilled a hole through the wall between the bathroom and the passage outside, enabling him to connect an electric cable to the water pipes feeding the shower. A woman was round at the house on Monday morning, talking to Grimaldi, and I saw her leave on Tuesday, just after he died. She would have waited for him to go into the shower, as he did every day before starting work, and then thrown the switch. The moment Grimaldi stepped under the water he was effectively plugged into the mains. Afterwards the woman pulled the cable free and removed it, leaving an electrocuted body inside a bathroom bolted from the inside. Of course the Carabinieri thought it was an accident. What else were they supposed to think?’

  Scarpione shuddered. Sánchez-Valdés patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and led the way past the helicopter landing pad from which the pope set off to his villa and swimming pool in the Alban hills, or on one of his frequent foreign trips.

  ‘And what about you, dottore?’ he asked Zen. ‘What do you think?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘What had Grimaldi been working on this week, since Ruspanti’s death?’

  ‘A case involving the theft of documents from the Archives,’ said Scarpione. ‘Giovanni was patrolling the building, posing as a researcher.’

  ‘Not the sort of thing people would kill for?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! A minor trade in illegal antiquities, that’s all.’

  ‘In that case, my guess is that he tried to put the squeeze on the men who murdered Ruspanti. That transcript that’s gone missing probably contained some reference implicating them. Grimaldi put two and two together, stole the transcript, and offered to sell it for the right price. That would also explain why he sent the anonymous letter to the papers. He couldn’t blackmail the killers without casting enough doubt on the suicide verdict to get the case reopened.’

  The three men passed through a gap in the battlemented walls, the truncated portion covered with a rich coat of ivy, and started downhill, through the formally landscaped gardens, the dome of St Peter’s rising before them in all its splendour.

  ‘Have you located the source of the keys which Ruspanti’s killers used?’ Zen asked casually.

  Sánchez-Valdés nodded.

  ‘Yes indeed! Tell Dottor Zen about the progress we’ve been making this end, Luigi.’

  Scarpione glanced at the archbishop.

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘All, all!’

  The Vigilanza chief cleared his throat and began.

  ‘We thought at first it might be one of the sampietrini.’

  He lowered his voice discreetly.

  ‘There have been complaints on several occasions from some of the younger workers about the behaviour of Antonio Cecchi, their boss.’

  ‘A little matter of attempted buggery, to be precise,’ Sánchez-Valdés explained cheerfully.

  Scarpione coughed again.

  ‘Yes, well …’

  ‘Like many people,’ the archbishop went on, speaking to Zen, ‘Luigi makes the mistake of supposing that we priests are either ignorant of or embarrassed by the facts of life. If he had spent half as much time in a confessional as we have, he would realize that there is nothing likely to shock us very much. Carry on, Luigi!’

  ‘Well, anyway, in the end one of the uniformed custodians who patrol the dome during the hours of public access admitted that he had been responsible. He said he was approached by a man who represented himself as a
monsignore attached to the Curia. This person claimed that a party of notables from his native town were visiting the Vatican, and said he wanted to give them a private tour of the basilica. He would be so obliged if it would be possible for him to borrow the keys for an hour or two.’

  ‘All such requests are supposed to be submitted in writing,’ Sánchez-Valdés explained, ‘but no lay worker in the Vatican is going to refuse a favour to a member of the Curia.’

  Zen grunted.

  ‘Only in this case, he wasn’t.’

  ‘We have a description of the impostor,’ Scarpione assured him. ‘He was of average stature, quite young, with fair hair and fine features.’

  ‘Well, that rules out la Cicciolina.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Dottor Zen is being ironic,’ Sánchez-Valdés explained heavily. ‘His implication is that while the description you have given may effectively exclude the ex-porn queen and present Radical Party deputy from suspicion, it is imprecise enough to cover almost everyone else.’

  ‘I’m sure you did the best you could,’ Zen murmured, glancing at his watch.

  They had reached a terrace overlooking a formal garden in the French style. In a cutting below, a diesel locomotive hooted and started to reverse around a freight train on the branch line linking the Vatican to the Italian state railway system.

  ‘We mustn’t detain you any longer, dottore,’ Sánchez-Valdés told Zen. He turned to Scarpione. ‘How can we get him out of here without attracting attention, Luigi? The last thing we want is a front-page photograph of the man from the Ministry of the Interior leaving the Vatican after high-level consultations at the Secretariat of State when he’s supposedly too ill to answer questions from the press.’