It was Lamboglia’s turn to get angry.
‘So you find this funny, do you?’
‘Not at all. I find it stupid.’
He fixed Lamboglia with a steady glare.
‘Look, if I were crazy enough to risk my career by pointing out irregularities in the conduct of an investigation for which I was responsible, I’d at least have done it properly!’
He tapped the pile of newspapers lying at his elbow.
‘This letter is all bluff, a farrago of vague, unsubstantiated generalities. Now I don’t know anything about this secret society which Ruspanti was apparently involved with, but as far as the manner of his death is concerned there is absolutely no doubt in my mind. I know what happened, and when, and how.’
Impressed despite himself by Zen’s confident, decisive manner, Lamboglia nodded.
‘So there’s no truth in these allegations?’
‘What allegations?’
Lamboglia tapped the table impatiently.
‘That Ruspanti was murdered!’
Zen frowned.
‘But of course he was murdered!’
The two men gazed at each other in silence for some time.
‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Zen asked incredulously.
Behind the twin discs of glass, Lamboglia’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
‘What made you think we did?’
‘Well, according to the letter, Ruspanti was living in the Vatican and you were keeping him under surveillance.’
‘But you didn’t know that on Friday!’
‘It’s true, then?’ Zen asked quickly.
Lamboglia turned off the tape-recorder, rewound the cassette briefly, and pressed PLAY.
‘… keeping him under surveillance.’
The cleric looked at Zen.
‘You were quite right, dottore — your career is at risk. Don’t try and catch me out again. Just answer my questions.’
He pressed the RECORD button.
‘It is your professional conduct on Friday which is the subject of this inquiry, dottore. At that time, you had no reason to assume — rightly or wrongly — that we had any idea that Ruspanti might have been murdered. The word was never even mentioned in the course of your interview with Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes.’
At last, Zen lit his cigarette, then looked round in vain for an ashtray. Irritated by this delay, Lamboglia waved dismissively.
‘Use the floor. The nuns will clean it up. That’s what nuns are for.’
Zen released a breath of fragrant smoke.
‘It was precisely the fact that no one mentioned the possibility of murder which I found so significant,’ he said.
Lamboglia gave a sneering laugh.
‘That’s absurd.’
‘On the contrary. I wasn’t asked to investigate Ruspanti’s death but to confirm that he had committed suicide. When I offered to do so without more ado, as a good Catholic, the archbishop made it quite clear that he wanted more than that. ‘Do whatever you need to do,’ he told me, ‘whatever must be done to achieve the desired result.’
‘Exactly!’ cried Lamboglia. ‘To determine the truth!’
Zen shrugged.
‘No one mentioned that word either.’
‘Because it was taken for granted!’
Zen tapped his cigarette, dislodging a packet of ash which tumbled through the air to disintegrate on the smooth flagstones.
‘Then the members of the Curia are a great deal less subtle than they have been given credit for,’ he replied.
Lamboglia rapped the table authoritatively.
‘Don’t be impertinent! You had no right to conceal anything from us.’
‘Excuse me, monsignore, but Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes explicitly instructed me to take whatever action I considered necessary without consulting him or his colleagues.’
‘Yes, but only to avoid compromising your status as an independent observer. No one asked you to cover up a murder!’
Zen tossed the butt of his cigarette under the table and crushed it out.
‘Of course not. It would have been impossible for me to do so if I’d been asked openly. That’s why murder was never once mentioned, despite the fact that there was no sense in calling me in unless there was a real possibility that Ruspanti had been murdered. By the same token, I couldn’t reveal the evidence I subsequently discovered without making it impossible for you to sustain the suicide verdict.’
And for me to get home to Tania, he thought, for the decisive factor that evening had been his eagerness to return as soon as possible to the bed from which he’d been ejected by the electronic pager. Any hint of what he had discovered would have put paid to that for good.
‘Let’s be honest, monsignore,’ he told Lamboglia. ‘You didn’t want me coming to you and saying, “Actually Ruspanti didn’t fall from the gallery he had the key to but the one sixty feet above it.” You didn’t want to know about it, did you? You just wanted the matter taken care of, neatly and discreetly. That’s what I did, and if someone hadn’t decided to give the game away, no one would be any the wiser.’
Lamboglia stared at him across the table in silence. Several times he seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.
‘That’s impossible,’ he said at last. ‘The dome was closed when Ruspanti fell. The killer would have been trapped inside.’
‘The killers — there must have been at least two — left fifteen or twenty minutes earlier.’
Lamboglia laughed again, a harsh, brittle sound.
‘And what did Ruspanti do during that time, may I ask? Hover there in mid-air like an angel?’
‘More or less.’
‘You forget that we have extensive professional experience of false miracles.’
‘This wasn’t a miracle. They trussed the poor bastard up with a length of nylon fishing line and left him dangling over the edge of the gallery.’
‘ Fishing line?’
Zen nodded.
‘Thin, transparent, virtually invisible, but with a breaking strain of over a hundred kilos. I found several metres of the stuff tied to one of the railing supports on the upper gallery. I removed it, of course.’
Lamboglia suddenly held out a hand for silence. He got up and walked quickly to the door, which he flung open dramatically. The elderly nun almost fell into the room, clutching a mop.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Forgive me, monsignore, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just scrubbing the floor…’
‘Cleanliness is indeed a great virtue,’ Lamboglia replied in a tone of icy irony, ‘and the fact that you have seen fit to undertake this menial labour yourself, rather than delegate it to one of your younger colleagues, indicates a commendable humility. If your discretion matches your other qualities — as is fervently to be hoped — then your eventual beatification can be only a question of time.’
He glowered at the nun, who gazed back at her tormentor with an expression which to Zen’s eyes at least appeared frankly erotic.
‘Such a degree of sanctity no doubt makes any contact with the secular world both painful and problematic,’ Lamboglia continued remorselessly. ‘Nevertheless, I’m sure that someone as resourceful as yourself will find a way to procure us two coffees, easy on the milk but heavy on the foam, and a couple of pastries from a good bakery, none of that mass-produced rubbish.’
Abandoning her mop, the nun scampered off. Lamboglia slammed the door shut and returned to the table. He rewound the tape to the beginning of the interruption and replaced the recorder in front of Zen.
‘You say you found this twine attached to the upper gallery. But what made you look there in the first place?’
‘I examined the lower gallery, the part that is closed to the public, overlooking the spot where Ruspanti fell. It was at once obvious that no one had thrown himself from there. There was an undisturbed layer of dust all along the top of the guardrail, and even on the floor. Besides, there was no sign of the missing shoe there. The upper gallery was the only other possibility.’
Lamboglia frowned with the effort of keeping up with all this new information.
‘But we found the shoe in the basilica, under one of the benches. You said it had fallen there separately from the body.’