Michael Dibdin - Cabal

After inspecting the shoe carefully, Monsignor Lamboglia nodded. His panic was subsiding, converting itself into a cold anger which would eventually be discharged on the appropriate target.

‘And what conclusion do you draw from these observations?’ he demanded challengingly.

Zen shrugged.

‘You’d need to interrogate your staff to find out exactly what happened. My guess is that when the body was discovered, one of the shoes was missing. Some bright spark realized that this might look suspicious, and since they couldn’t find the missing shoe, a different pair was substituted. But people are superstitious about letting their shoes be worn by a dead man, so they used a new pair. Result, an amateurish botch-job calculated to arouse exactly the sort of suspicions it was meant to allay.’

Lamboglia measured Zen with a cold glare. It was one thing for him to criticize his underlings — and whoever was responsible for this was going to wish he had never been conceived — but that did not mean he was prepared to condone gratuitous insults from outsiders.

‘Nevertheless,’ he pointed out, ‘the problem remains. No one’s going to be prepared to believe that Ruspanti walked up to the dome with one shoe off and one shoe on.’

Zen nodded slowly, as if recalling something.

‘Ah yes, the shoe.’

Strolling over to the benches of pews lined up in the north transept, he walked along them until he saw the missing black brogue. He picked it up and walked back to Lamboglia.

‘Here you are.’

Lamboglia turned the shoe over as though it were a property in a magic trick.

‘What was it doing there?’ he demanded.

‘It must have got pulled off as Ruspanti clambered over the railings. Perhaps he changed his mind at the last minute and tried to climb back.’

Lamboglia thought about this for a moment.

‘I suppose so,’ he said.

‘There are no further problems as far as I can see,’ Zen told him briskly. ‘But you can of course contact me through the Ministry, should the need arise.’

Lamboglia glared at him. Although the man’s behaviour couldn’t be faulted professionally, his breezy, off-hand manner left a lot to be desired. Lamboglia would dearly have loved to take him down a peg or two, to make him sweat. But as things stood there was nothing he could do except give him the sour look which his subordinates so dreaded.

‘Are you in a hurry, dottore?’ he snapped.

‘I have a taxi waiting.’

Lamboglia’s glare intensified.

‘Another appointment? You’re a busy man.’

Zen looked at the cleric, and smiled.

‘No, I just want to get to bed.’

On the face of it, the scene at the Ministry of the Interior the following Tuesday morning was calculated to gladden the hearts of all those who despaired of the grotesque overmanning and underachievement of the government bureaucracy, a number roughly equal to those who had failed to secure a cushy statale post of their own. Not only were a significant minority of the staff at their desks, but the atmosphere was one of intense and animated activity. The only snag was that little or none of this activity had anything to do with the duties of the Ministry.

In the Ministerial suite on the top floor, where the present incumbent and his coterie of under-secretaries presided, the imminent collapse of the present government coalition had prompted a frantic round of consultations, negotiations, threats and promises as potential contenders jockeyed for position. On the lower floors, unruffled by this aria di crisi, it was business as usual. The range of services on offer included a fax bureau, an agency for Filippino maids, two competing protection rackets, a Kawasaki motorcycle franchise, a video rental club, a travel agent and a citywide courier service, to say nothing of Madam Beta, medium, astrologer, sorcerer, cards and palms read, the evil eye averted, talismans and amulets prepared. One of the most flourishing of these enterprises was situated in the Administration section on the ground floor, where Tania Biacis ran an agency which supplied speciality food items from her native Friuli region.

Tania had got the idea from one of her cousins, who had returned from a honeymoon trip to London with the news that Italian food was now as much in demand in the English capital as Italian fashion, ‘only nothing from our poor Friuli, as usual!’ At the time this had struck Tania as little more than the usual provincial whingeing, all too characteristic of a border region acutely aware of its distance from the twin centres of power in Rome and Milan. It had been the energies released by the breakup of her marriage which had finally driven her to do something about it. Claiming some of the leave due to her, she had travelled to London with a suitcase full of samples rounded up by Aldo, the husband of her cousin Bettina, whose job with the post office at Cividale gave him ample opportunity for getting out and about and meeting local farmers.

Posing as a representative, Tania had visited the major British wholesalers and tried to convince them of the virtues of Friuli ham, wine, honey, jam and grappa. Rather to her surprise, several had placed orders, in one case so large that Aldo had the greatest difficulty in meeting it. Since then, the business had grown by leaps and bounds. Aldo and Bettina looked after the supply side, while Tania handled the orders and paperwork, using the Ministry’s telephones and fax facilities to keep in contact with the major European cities, as well as New York and Tokyo. One of Agrofrul’s greatest successes was a range of jams originally made by Bettina’s aunt; this had now been expanded into a cottage industry involving several hundred women. Genuine Friuli grappa, made in small copper stills, had also done well, while the company’s air-cured hams were rapidly displacing their too-famous rivals from Parma as the ultimate designer charcuterie.

Tania had told Aurelio nothing of all this. Her nominal reason for reticence was that he was a senior Ministry official, and although everyone knew perfectly well what went on in the way of moonlighting, scams and general private enterprise, she didn’t want to compromise her lover by making him a party to activities which were theoretically punishable by instant dismissal, loss of pension rights and even a prison sentence. Tania was pretty sure that no one would throw the book at her. The rules were never enforced on principle, only as a result of someone’s personal schemes for advancement or revenge, and she simply wasn’t important enough to attract that kind of negative compliment. Moreover, as a result of her six years’ service in the Administration section she was now privy to most of her colleagues’ dirty little secrets, which in itself would make any potential whistle-blower think twice.

Aurelio’s situation was quite different. By nature a loner, his reputation damaged by a mistaken fit of zealousness at the time of the Moro affair, he was promoted to the Ministry’s elite Criminalpol squad as a result of an unsavoury deal during his comeback case in Perugia, and had subsequently been connected with a heavily compromised political party at the time of the Burolo affair. As a result, Zen was surrounded by enemies who would like nothing better than to implicate him in a case involving misuse of bureaucratic resources and conspiracy to defraud the state, not to mention a little matter of undeclared taxes amounting to several million lire.

The fact that they were lovers would just make the whole scandal even more juicy, but it also explained Tania’s unadmitted reason for not telling Aurelio about the success of Agrofrul. She was well aware that the story he had told her about the flat was not true. It supposedly belonged to an American who was out of the country on business for a few months and was happy to have someone looking after the place, but this was clearly nonsense. Where were this American’s belongings? Why did he never get any post? Above all, why had he handed it over free of charge to the friend of a friend, a person he’d never even met, when he could have sub-let it for a small fortune? Flats as gorgeous as that, in such a sought-after district, didn’t just fall into your lap free of charge. Someone was paying for it, and in the present case that someone could only be Aurelio Zen.