Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘For whatever’s going to happen.’

  Simonelli eyed him steadily.

  ‘All that’s going to happen is that you give me the transcript, and I take it to an associate who is seated in the next carriage. Once he has confirmed that it is the original, I return with the money.’

  Zen stared back at the magistrate. Marco Duranti had described the supposed maintenance man who hot-wired the shower to kill Giovanni Grimaldi as stocky, muscular, of average height, with a big round face and a pronounced nasal accent, ‘a real northerner’. The description fitted Simonelli perfectly. And would not such a humble task befit ‘a simple Donat, the lowest of the low’? Despite the almost oppressive warmth of the air-conditioned carriage, Zen found himself shivering uncontrollably.

  Simonelli tugged at the briefcase again, more insistently this time. Zen held on tight.

  ‘How do I know I’ll get paid?’

  ‘Of course you’ll get paid! No one can get off the train until we reach Bologna anyway.’

  As the train glided through the station of Vernio and entered the southern end of the long tunnel under the Apennines, Zen’s attention was momentarily distracted by the woman who had caused such a stir at the terminus in Rome. She was making her way to the front of the carriage, and once again he only saw her clothes, a cowlneck ribbed sweater and tightly cut skirt. She left a subtle trail of perfume behind her, as though shaken from shoulder-length blonde hair like incense from a censer.

  ‘If the transcript is safe with you, the money is safe with me,’ Zen found himself saying above the roaring of the tunnel. ‘So give it to me now, before you take the transcript.’

  He had hoped to disconcert Simonelli with this demand, to force him to consult his associate and thus give Zen more time to consider his next move. But as usual, he was a step behind. With a brief sigh of deprecation at this regrettable lack of trust on Zen’s part, Simonelli opened his briefcase. It was full of serried bundles of ten-thousand-lire notes.

  ‘Fifty million,’ the magistrate said. ‘As we agreed.’

  He closed the lid and snapped the catches, locking the case, then stood up and laid it on his seat.

  ‘Now give me the transcript, please.’

  Zen stared up at him. Why struggle? What difference did it make? He had been going to hand the transcript over to Simonelli anyway, in Milan. This way the result was the same, except that he came out of it fifty million lire better off. Even if he wanted to resist, there was nothing he could do, no effective action he could take. The only weapon he had was the fake revolver buried inside his suitcase in the luggage rack at the end of the next carriage. But even if he had been armed to the teeth, it wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run. The Cabal would get their way in the end. They always did.

  He lifted his arm off his briefcase. Simonelli reached across, opened the briefcase and removed the transcript.

  ‘I shall be no more than five minutes,’ he said. ‘We have several men on the train. If you attempt to move from this seat during that time, I cannot be responsible for your safety.’

  He strode off along the carriage towards the vestibule where the blonde woman was now smoking a cigarette. The train seemed to be full of masochistic smokers, Zen reflected with a forlorn attempt at humour. He stared out of the window, trying to think of something other than the humiliation he had just suffered. Although he had been travelling this line for years, the ten-and-a-half-minute transit of the Apennines was still something which awed him. His father had impressed the young Aurelio with the history of the epic project which had gripped the imagination of the nation throughout the twenties. Although marginally shorter than the Simplon, the Apennine tunnel had been infinitely more difficult and costly to construct, running as it did a nightmarish schist riddled with pockets of explosive gas and unmapped underground lakes which burst forth without warning, flooding the workings for months on end. Zen was lost in these memories and speculations when, just like the previous Friday, all the lights went out.

  A moment later the secure warmth of the carriage was gutted by a roaring torrent of ice-cold air. The train shuddered violently as the brakes locked on. Cries of alarm and dismay filled the carriage, turning to screams of pain as the train jerked to a complete stop, throwing the passengers against each other and the seats in front.

  Once Zen’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he discovered that it was not quite total after all. Although the lights in this carriage had failed, those in the adjoining coaches reflected off the walls of the tunnel, creating a faint glimmer by which he could just make out the aisle, the seats and the vague blurs of the other passengers moving about. Then two figures wielding torches like swords appeared at the end of the carriage. A moment later, the fluorescent strip on the ceiling of the carriage came on again.

  It was a perfect moment for a murder, Zen reflected afterwards. The killers would be wearing sunglasses, and while everyone else was blinded by the sudden excess of light, they could carry out their assignment as though in total darkness. Fortunately, though, the men who had entered the carriage were not assassins but members of the train crew. Zen followed them to the vestibule at the front of the carriage, where he made himself known to the guard, a grey-haired man with the grooming and gravity of a senior executive.

  The gale-force wind which had stripped all the warmth out of the carriage had diminished now the train had come to a halt, but there was still a vicious draught streaming in through the opened door. Zen asked what had happened. The capotreno indicated a red lever set in a recess in the wall near by. Shouting to make himself heard over the banshee whining in the tunnel outside, he explained that the external doors on the train were opened and closed by the driver, but that this mechanism could be overridden manually to prevent people being trapped inside in the event of an emergency. The lever was normally secured in the up position with a loop of string sealed like a mediaeval parchment with a circle of lead embossed with the emblem of the State Railways. This now dangled, broken, from its support.

  ‘As soon as this lever is thrown, a warning light comes on in the driver’s cab, and he stops the train. Unfortunately some people like to kill themselves this way. I don’t know why, but we get quite a few.’

  Just like St Peter’s, thought Zen.

  ‘But why did the lights go off?’ he asked.

  The guard indicated a double row of fuses and switches on the wall opposite, protected by a plastic cover which now swung loose on its hinges.

  ‘The fuse for the main lighting circuit was missing. We’ve swapped over the one for the air-conditioning thermostat, just to get the lights back on before the passengers started to panic. He must have done it himself, so he couldn’t see what was going to happen to him.’

  The toilet door opened with a click and the blonde woman stepped out. She looked slightly flustered by so much male attention.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

  Close to, her skin showed a slight roughness that made her seem older. Her pale blue eyes looked at Zen, who sniffed. Apart from her perfume, there seemed to be another new odour present – the smell of burning.

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ he said.

  The flaxen hair trembled as she shook her head.

  ‘Just the roaring noise when the lights went out. Has someone …?’

  The capotreno dismissed the woman with a wave and told two of his assistants to keep the passengers off the vestibule.

  ‘We’d better have a look on the track,’ he said.

  The pendolino had never seemed more like an airplane to Aurelio Zen than when he stepped out of its lighted sanctuary into the howling storm outside. The Apennines form a continuous barrier running almost the entire length of the Italian peninsula, and the prevailing climatic conditions are often very different on either side. This man-made vent piercing the range thus forms a conduit for violent air currents flowing in one direction or the other as the contrasting weather systems try to find their level.


  The high pressure was in Tuscany that day, so the wind was flowing north, battering the faces of the men as they walked back along the track. While they were still alongside the train, the lights streaming from the windows high overhead, Zen found the experience just about tolerable. But when they passed the final coach and struck out into the midst of that turbulent darkness which corroded the fragile beams of their torches, wearing them away, using them up, until they could hardly see the track in front of them, he was gripped by a terror so real it made anything else appear a flimsy dream of security, a collective delusion provoked by a reality too awful to be contemplated.

  The noise was already deafening, but as they moved forward, breasting that black tide that threatened at every moment to sweep them away with it, it became clear that its source lay somewhere in front of them. The five men trudged slowly on, leaning forward as though pushing a laden sledge, their feeble torch beams scanning the ballast, sleepers and rails. The occasional patch of toilet paper, a soft-drink can or two, an ancient packet of cigarettes and a newspaper was all they found at first. Then something brighter, a fresher patch of white, showed up. One of the train crew picked it up and passed it to the capotreno, who held up his torch, scanning the line of heavy type at the top: UFFICIO CENTRALE DI VIGILANZA.

  As the clamour up ahead grew ever more distinct and concentrated, the movement of the air became stronger and more devious, no longer a single blast but a maelstrom of whirling currents and eddies fighting for supremacy. Without the slightest warning a giant beacon appeared in the darkness behind them and swept past, forging south into the gale. As the locomotive passed, the darkness was briefly swept aside like a curtain, revealing the vast extent of the cavity where they cowered, deafened by the howl of its siren. Then the darkness fell back, and all other sounds were ground out by the wheels of a seemingly endless succession of unlighted freight wagons.

  At length two red lights appeared, marking the last wagon. As it receded into the distance, the men started to move forward again and the original, primitive uproar reasserted itself, an infinitely powerful presence that was seemingly located somewhere in the heart of the solid rock above their heads. The train crew shone their torches upwards, revealing a huge circular opening in the roof of the tunnel. It was almost impossible to stand here, in the vortex of the vicious currents spiralling straight up the mountaintop thousands of feet above.

  The capotreno beckoned to Zen, who lowered his ear to the man’s mouth.

  ‘Ventilation shaft!’

  They found the body a little further on, lying beside the track like another bit of rubbish dropped from a passing train in defiance of the prohibition in several languages. One leg had been amputated at the thigh and most of the left arm and shoulder was mangled beyond recognition, but by some freak the face had survived without so much as a scratch. The Maltese cross glinted proudly in the lapel of the plain blue suit, and the fingers of the right hand were still clutching several pages of the transcript which now appeared to have claimed its second victim.

  The power and influence of Milan – Italy’s rightful capital, as it liked to call itself – had never appeared more impressive to Aurelio Zen than they did as he strode along the corridors of the Palazzo di Giustizia late that afternoon. The office to which he had been directed was in an annexe built on at the rear of the main building, and its clean lines and uncluttered spaces, and still more the purposeful air of bustle and business, was as different as possible from other sites sacred to the judiciary. If Milan was capable of influencing, even superficially, an organization in which the bacillus of the ‘Bourbonic plague’ was preserved in its purest and most virulent form, then what couldn’t it do?

  He rounded a corner to find a woman looking towards him from an open doorway. A helmet of lustreless black hair cropped at the nape framed her flat, open face, the bold cheeks and strong features blurred by menopausal turmoil like a damp-damaged fresco. She wore a slate-grey wool jacket with a matching skirt cut tight just below the knee.

  ‘Antonia Simonelli,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  He followed her into an office containing two teak desks. One, pushed into a corner, was almost invisible beneath a solid wall of stacked folders reaching up to within a metre of the ceiling. The other was completely bare except for a laptop computer. At the other side of the room, a large window afforded an excellent view of the gothic fantastications of the cathedral and the glazed roofs and dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.

  The woman sat at the bare desk and crossed her long legs. Zen took the only other seat, a hard wooden stool.

  ‘I must apologize for the spartan furnishings,’ the woman said. ‘My office is in the part of the main building which is being renovated, and meanwhile I’m sharing with a colleague whose tastes and habits are very different from mine. Gianfranco likes the blinds drawn and the lights on, even in high summer. That’s his desk. I sometimes feel I’m going to go crazy just looking at it.’

  Zen looked at the rounded peak of her knee and the tip of her grey suede court shoe, which rose above the sheeny expanse of the desktop like a tropical island in a calm sea.

  ‘He didn’t have any ID,’ he murmured.

  The woman bent forward, frowning slightly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Zen looked up at her.

  ‘The man on the train. He didn’t have any identification. But I suppose you do.’

  He produced his own pass certifying him as a functionary of the Ministry of the Interior and laid it on the desk.

  ‘Anyone could walk in here,’ he remarked earnestly. ‘We’ve never met before. How would you know it wasn’t me?’

  The woman regarded him fixedly.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked guardedly.

  Zen tapped the desk where his identification lay. The woman opened her black grained-leather bucket bag and passed over a laminated card with her photograph and an inscription to the effect that the holder was Simonelli, Antonia Natalia, investigating magistrate at the Procura of Milan. Zen nodded and handed it back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must have sounded a bit crazy.’

  The woman said nothing, but her expression did not contradict the idea.

  ‘I’ve had a slight shock,’ Zen explained. ‘On the way here a man fell from the train. I had to help retrieve the body from the tunnel.’

  ‘That can’t have been very pleasant,’ the magistrate murmured sympathetically.

  ‘I had been talking to him just a few moments earlier.’

  ‘It was someone you know, then?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I thought it was you.’

  The woman’s guarded manner intensified sharply.

  ‘If that was intended as a joke …’ she began.

  ‘I don’t think the people involved intended it as a joke.’

  She eyed him impatiently.

  ‘You’re speaking in riddles.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘Let me try and explain. On Wednesday I received a message at the Ministry asking me to call a certain Antonio Simonelli at a hotel in Rome. When I did so, he identified himself as an investigating magistrate from Milan working on a case of fraud involving Ludovico Ruspanti, and asked me to meet him to discuss the circumstances of the latter’s death.’

  The woman seemed about to say something, but after a moment she just waved her hand.

  ‘Go on.’

  Zen sat silent a moment, considering how best to do so.

  ‘At the time I thought he was trying to obtain information off the record which might help him prosecute the case against Ruspanti’s associates. That risked placing me in a rather awkward position. When the Vatican called me in, I was asked to sign an undertaking not to disclose any information which I came by as a result of my investigations. I therefore answered his questions as briefly as possible.’

  The woman opened a drawer of her desk and removed a slim file which she opened.

&n
bsp; ‘Go on,’ she repeated without looking up.

  Zen pretended to look at the view for a moment. He decided to make no mention of the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls. That was lost for ever, scattered beyond any hope of retrieval by the gale which had sucked it away and strewn it the length of the eleven-mile tunnel. The only thing to do now was to pretend that it had never existed.

  ‘On the train up here this morning,’ he continued, ‘I was approached by the same man. He asked why I was travelling to Milan. I said I had an appointment with one of his colleagues at the Procura. He must have realized then that the game was up, I suppose. He went off towards the toilets, fused the lights and threw himself out.’

  The woman looked steadily at Zen.

  ‘Describe him.’

  ‘Burly, muscular. Big moon face, slightly dished. Strong nasal accent, from the Bergamo area, I should say. Smoked panatellas.’

  Antonia Simonelli selected a photograph from the file lying open on the desk and passed it to Zen. A paper sticker at the bottom read ZEPPEGNO, MARCO. Zen suppressed a gasp of surprise. There had been so many fakes and hoaxes in the case so far – including the fifty million lire, which had turned out to consist of a thin layer of real notes covering bundles of blank paper – that he had assumed that the names which appeared in the transcript were also pseudonyms. But perhaps Ruspanti had deliberately raised the stakes by mentioning the real name of one of the men he was threatening on a phone he knew to be tapped, making it clear that he was ready to start playing dirty. That would certainly explain why the individual concerned had been desperate to suppress the transcript by any means, including the murder of Giovanni Grimaldi.

  Zen handed the photograph back.

  ‘You know about him, then?’

  Antonia Simonelli nodded.

  ‘I know all about him!’

  ‘Including whether he is – was – a member of the Order of Malta?’