Michael Dibdin - Cabal

Zen tossed the disposable plastic cup into the rubbish bag provided and turned to survey his fellow passengers. They looked bizarrely out of place, an elegant, wealthy throng clustered around the mini-bar like factory workers on the early shift. Power dressing was the order of the day, both men and the few women present discreetly flaunting an understated sartorial muscle based on cut, finish and quality fabrics. The only exception was a tense-looking man wearing the undress uniform of the Church the world over, a plain clerical suit and white collar clutching a locked attache case under his arm. Zen instinctively glanced at his own battered leather briefcase, leaning against the overnight bag at his feet.

After storming out of Tania’s apartment the night before, he had gone to the bar round the corner and shared some of his problems, suitably depersonalized, with the Neapolitans over a hot chocolate. Since he couldn’t very well ask Tania for her brother-in-law’s address, Zen looked it up in the phone book and then took a cab round there to pick up the transcript. Unfortunately, Tullio Bevilacqua was so proud of the part he had played in the relentless struggle against organized crime that he had invited his brother to witness this historic event.

The last time Zen had seen Tania’s husband, Mauro Bevilacqua was waving a gun in his face and threatening to exact revenge for the insult done to his family honour, so his unexpected appearance at this juncture seemed likely to result in all manner of problems, both professional and personal. In the event, the encounter was less fraught than it might have been. After a brief but violent internal tussle, Mauro opted for a pose of contemptuous indifference, as though to emphasize that the doings of his estranged wife were of no concern to him. Only at the end, when Zen was about to leave, did his mask slip for a moment.

‘We mustn’t detain our guest any longer, brother. He has important work to do keeping prostitution off the streets.’

Tullio frowned.

‘Dottor Borsellino isn’t in the Vice Squad.’

Mauro gave a smile of exquisite irony.

‘Borsellino?’ he enquired archly. ‘Ah, excuse me! I was confusing him with an official who used to work with all the sluts of the city. A slimy, venal little faccia di culo by the name of Aurelio Zen.’

He turned to face Zen.

‘Do you know him by any chance, dottore?’

Zen nodded.

‘I’ll tell him what you said.’

‘Yes, do that. Not that I’ve got anything personal against him, you understand. In fact he did me a favour once. Took this whore off my hands.’

Mauro Bevilacqua smiled reminiscently.

‘I wonder who’s she with now!’

Since Zen was wondering almost exactly the same thing, he was unable to come up with a suitably crushing reply. Back home, his mother had kept him up late with a long and involved story about some childhood friend of hers who had moved to Milan with her husband and been killed during the war when an Allied bomb struck the laundry where she worked. By the time he extricated himself, Zen had felt too tired to do more than go straight to bed and hope that he would feel better in the morning.

He walked over to the news-stall, which had just opened, and looked through the serried ranks of magazines. The cover of the new issue of Moda showed an extraordinary peacock of a man, a shimmering apparition in heavy grey and gold silks, his guileless blue eyes turned levelly towards the camera. The caption read ‘Falco: A Philosopher in the Wardrobe’. Just then a subliminal frisson spread through the group of men standing at the news-stall, leaping from one to another like an electric charge. Zen turned his head along with all the others, but it was too late. The woman who had generated all this excitement had already passed by, and all he could see of her was her shoulder-length blonde hair and the back of her darkcream trenchcoat, the hem oscillating back and forth above her suede bootees. With a sigh he picked up his luggage and followed her and the other passengers towards the platform where il pendolino, as the pride of the Ferrovie dello Stato was popularly known, was now boarding.

The eight carriages which made up the ETR 450 high-speed unit, with a bullet-shaped cab at each end, were mounted high above the bogies on which they tilted to maintain stability at speeds of up to 150 mph — hence its nickname, ‘the pendulum’. All seats were reserved and first class only. Zen’s carriage was towards the middle of the train. In the vestibule, a uniformed attendant checked his ticket and directed him to his place. Two rows of reclining seats ran the length of the coach, just as in an airplane. Indeed, the pendolino was the next best thing to a plane, covering the four hundred miles between Rome and Milan in under four hours.

Having stowed the suitcase in the luggage rack, Zen lowered the table attached to the back of the chair in front, opened his briefcase and extracted the sheaf of papers which it contained. Apart from the initial reference list of phone numbers, the transcript consisted of twenty-two pages headed UFFICIO CENTRALE DI VIGILANZA and covered in single-spaced typing, divided into blocks headed with a date, time and telephone number. Each represented one phone call which Ruspanti had made. Incoming calls did not figure. Ruspanti presumably hadn’t given his phone number to anyone, either because the 698 prefix would have revealed his presence in the Vatican City State, or because he knew or suspected that the line was being tapped.

There was a whistle blast from the platform outside, a whine as the automatic doors closed, then a slight jolt of movement. Zen glanced at his watch. Seven o’clock on the dot. A moment later the window was covered in a speckle of rain as the train emerged into the grey dawn. Inside, the broad strip of fluorescent panelling on the ceiling of the coach bathed everything in a coolly efficient radiance. Zen lowered his head over the papers again and started to read.

Some time later he sensed someone standing behind him, craning over him. He hastily covered the type-written page, but it was only one of the stewards, offering him an airplane-style breakfast tray, an assortment of sad pastries and unloved rolls in plastic shrouds. Zen waved it away, then reclaimed the cup and asked for coffee. Beyond the window, the flat expanses of the Tiber flood-plain slipped past like a video being fast-forwarded. They were on the new direttissima line by now, the train humming purposefully along at its top speed on the custom-built high-speed track.

Zen read quickly through the rest of the transcript, then laid it on the table, face down, and sighed. Giovanni Grimaldi had been felled in his shower like a beast at the abattoir because he had threatened to reveal the contents of this document, yet Zen had just read it from cover to cover and it meant almost nothing to him.

He turned back to the beginning and read it through once more. Whether Ruspanti had been aware of the tap on his own line, or was concerned about possible eavesdroppers the other end, he had gone to great pains to say nothing of any consequence. About half the calls amounted to little more than requests to be contacted ‘at the usual number’ or ‘in the normal way’. In others, Ruspanti referred to ‘the sum agreed’ or ‘under discussion’, or urged that ‘the measures previously outlined be put into immediate effect’. Only twice did he mention anything more specific. The first instance occurred in the course of the call to the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace the previous Thursday. His patience had finally run out, Ruspanti said. If ‘Zeppegno’ couldn’t be persuaded to ‘do the decent thing’ by the weekend at the latest, then he would ‘have no alternative but to make public the matter which you know about’.