Michael Dibdin - Cabal

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

‘Time to go?’ asked Nieddu calmly.

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

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

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

‘Fuck!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve snagged my jacket on a nail.’

‘Christ, is that all?’

‘ All? It’s brand-new, from Ferre.’

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

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

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

‘Give me your hands.’

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

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

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

If Zen had spent the night at home instead of at Tania’s, he could have walked to his first appointment next morning. As it was he ended up on foot anyway, the taxi he summoned having ground to a halt outside the Liceo Terenzio Mamiani, just round the corner from Zen’s apartment. Wednesday mornings were always bad, as the usual rush-hour jam was supplemented by the influx of pilgrims heading for the weekly papal audience. Zen paid the driver and strode off past lines of honking, bleating vehicles, including coaches whose utilitarian styling and robust construction exuded a graceless charm which awakened nostalgic memories of the far-off, innocent 1950s. From portholes wiped in their misted-up windows, the Polish pope’s compatriots peered out at the Eternal City, perhaps wondering if the last kilometre of their pilgrimage was going to take as long as the previous two thousand.

Zen crossed Piazza del Risorgimento and followed the towering ramparts of the Vatican City State up the hill, passing women carrying wicker baskets and plastic bags of fruit and vegetables home from the Trionfale market. The bells of the local churches were in some disagreement about the exact moment when nine o’clock arrived, but the Vatican itself opened its doors dead on time, as though to emphasize that although in Rome, it was by no means of Rome. The handful of tourists waiting for the museums to open began to file inside. Zen followed them up the curving ramp to the cash desk, where he plonked down his ten-thousand-lire note with the rest. Then, like someone doing Rome in two days, he hurried through the collections of classical antiquities, following the arrows marked ‘Raphael Stanze and Sistine Chapel Only’.

A marble staircase brought him to a gallery receding as far as the eye could see. The walls were hung with tapestries and painted maps alternating with windows overlooking a large courtyard. Dust swarmed like a school of fish in the sunlight streaming in through the windows. Zen had already left the other early visitors far behind, and this part of the museums was deserted. At the end of the gallery, he turned left into a chamber hung with enormous battle scenes, then down a staircase to a suite of rooms on the lower floor overlooking a courtyard patrolled by a Swiss Guard. Zen smiled wryly, thinking of the night before. Following their hasty exit from the house where Giovanni Grimaldi had been murdered, he and Gilberto Nieddu had climbed down a fire escape into the internal courtyard of a building in the next street and then sneaked past the lodge where the portiere was watching television.

‘Never again, Aurelio!’ Gilberto told him as they parted in the street. ‘Don’t even bother phoning.’

Back at Tania’s, Zen had called his mother to tell her that his duties in Florence unfortunately required him to stay another night but he would be back for sure the following day.

‘That’s all right,’ his mother replied. ‘At least you ring up and let me know what’s happening, not like some.’

‘What do you mean, mamma?’

‘Oh, that Gilberto! It makes me furious, it really does! Rosella phoned here only half an hour ago, to ask if I knew where you were. Apparently Gilberto called her this afternoon and said he might be a bit late home this evening because he was meeting you, if you please! Can you believe the cheek of it? Poor Rosella! Come nine o’clock there’s no sign of him and the dinner’s ruined, so she phones me to try and find out what’s going on. Of course I didn’t know any of this at first, so I just told her the truth, that you were in Florence. It’s the old story. I told her. Just look the other way. There’s no point in making a fuss. You’re not the first and you won’t be the…’

‘Listen, mamma, I’m running out of tokens. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Wait, Aurelio! There’s a message for you. This gentleman called, he wouldn’t leave his name, but he said it was about a Signor Giallo. He asked you to phone him immediately.’

Zen dialled the number he had been given by Lamboglia. It was answered by a different voice, this time with a foreign intonation. But why not? The Vatican was the headquarters of an international organization.

‘Your presence is required tomorrow morning,’ the man told him. ‘Come to the main entrance to the Vatican Museums, pay in the normal way, then follow these directions.’

Zen noted them down.

‘Now there’s something I want you to do,’ he told the anonymous voice. ‘Contact whoever is responsible for the maintenance of the building where Signor Giallo lived and find out whether a workman was sent there yesterday to investigate the sewers.’

He had hung up just as Tania walked in naked from the shower, looking rather like the gracefully etiolated females in the frescos which covered the chamber where he now found himself. The subjects were nominally biblical, but the action had been transferred from the harsh realities of historical Palestine to a lush Italian landscape peopled by figures of an ideal renaissance beauty. On one wall, ships navigated under full sail and armies manoeuvred for battle. Another showed a large chamber where men were disputing and orators pronouncing. The painted room was about the same size and shape as the one on whose wall it was depicted, and the artist had cleverly included a painted door at floor level, creating the illusion that one could simply turn the handle and step into that alternative reality. Zen was just admiring this amusing detail when the handle in fact turned and the door opened to reveal the stooping figure of Monsignor Lamboglia.