A stiff breeze hissed in the trees all round, and from a nursery school near by came the sound of children at play. There was no other sound. Zen walked over to the pair of large green gates set in the wall at one side of the piazza. The letters SMOM were etched on a small brass plate above the bell. Zen pressed the button.
‘Yes?’ replied a crackly voice from the entry-phone.
‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen. I understand there is a message for me.’
‘One moment.’
There was a brief pause before the voice resumed.
‘I regret that we have no knowledge of any such message.’
Zen wasn’t surprised. In his bones he’d known all along that the errand was a hoax set up by some prankster who had read his name in the newspaper reports of Ruspanti’s death. He might even be here, watching the success of his stratagem. Zen glanced around, but there was no one to be seen except an elderly couple sitting on a bench at the other side of the piazza. He made one more attempt.
‘Listen, I’m a police official! I received a message telling me to come to this address.’
‘We have no knowledge of this matter,’ the voice insisted with finality.
‘Who’s “we”?’ snapped Zen, but the entry-phone had clicked off. He stood staring up at the tall green gates. The stone lintel above them was decorated with a cross whose arms grew broader towards their forked tips. A Maltese cross, thought Zen. SMOM: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. These were the gates of the Palace of Rhodes, the Order’s extraterritorial property where, according to rumour, Ludovico Ruspanti had taken refuge from the rigours of Italian justice.
Perhaps the message hadn’t been a hoax, after all. But in that case what did it mean? ‘If you wish to get these deaths in the proper perspective, apply at the green gates in the piazza at the end of Via Santa Sabina.’ Zen focused his eyes with an effort. The gates were high and tightly closed. The only opening of any kind was an ornamental metal plate set close to the edge of the left-hand gate. The plate was of bronze, worked by hand in a complex elliptic pattern, with a plain circular keyhole in the centre. Zen bent down and squinted through the keyhole.
He expected the hole to be covered at the other end, so it was a shock to find, on the contrary, a view arranged specifically to be seen from that point. It was still more of a shock to realize that what he was looking at — framed by an alley of tall evergreen shrubs and centred in the keyhole like the target in a gun-sight — was the dome of St Peter’s. Despite the distance, he could count each of the ribs protruding through the leading of the roof, and the tiny windows lighting the internal gallery from which Prince Ludovico Ruspanti had plunged to his death.
An hour later Zen was in a take-out pizzeria just outside the walls of the Vatican City. The other side of the street was lined with the boutiques which had recently sprung up in this area, once notorious as a haunt of thieves and prostitutes. One window was bisected by a huge poster reading FALCO, which Zen remembered as the name of the ‘hot young designer’ whose creation Tania had been wearing the previous Friday. This must have been a mistake, however, for the window was that of a bookshop. Next door stood a doorway giving access to the residential floors where Giovanni Grimaldi lived.
Zen finished his square slab of sausage-meat and mushroom boscaiolo pizza and wiped his hands on the paper napkin in which it had been wrapped. Time to go. He had not actually seen Grimaldi leave the building, but he must be at work by now. The only person who had gone either in or out, in fact, had been a young woman in a long tweed coat with a white scarf over her head who had appeared about ten minutes earlier. As for Grimaldi, he had probably opted for a lunch in the heavily subsidized Vatican canteen. Zen tossed the soiled napkin into a rubbish bin and walked out into the hazy sunshine.
Like a quarter of all the real estate in Rome, including the house in which Zen himself lived, the building opposite was owned by the Church, in this case an order of Carmelite nuns. This was not an investment property, however, but one of those set aside to provide cheap accommodation as part of the package which the Vatican offered in an effort to attract and retain its low-paid employees, the other principal incentives being access to duty-free goods and exemption from Italian income tax. From Zen’s point of view there were both pros and cons to the building’s low-rent status. On the plus side, there was no caretaker to worry about. The problem was that there was no lift either, and Grimaldi lived on the top floor.
The stairwell was dark, and the timer controlling the lights had been adjusted for the agility of a buck chamois in rut rather than a middle-aged policeman going about his dubious business. Lamboglia had told Zen that ‘with any luck’ he might ‘find some incriminating material which we can use’. There were various ways you could read that, quite apart from the literal meaning, which was in fact the only one Zen was prepared to discount entirely. The question was not whether Lamboglia had expected him to plant evidence in Grimaldi’s room — that was taken for granted — but what that evidence was to prove. After due consideration Zen had decided to go for broke and frame Grimaldi for the murder. The way things were looking, the Vatican was going to need a scapegoat. Grimaldi would do nicely, particularly if, as Zen suspected, he had been part of the team carrying out surveillance on Ruspanti.
The top floor of the building differed from the others only in that the rectangular circuit of bleak barracks-like corridors was lit by a succession of grimy skylights. The stench of carbolic cleanser was fighting a losing battle against a guerilla force of odours associated with stale food, dirty clothes, clogged drains and night sweats. The only sounds were the murmur of a distant radio and a steady hushing as of rain. Zen made his way along the corridor to a brown-painted door marked 4W, a loosened screw having allowed the 3 to flop over on its face.
There was no sound inside, but as a precaution Zen knocked gently before getting out the wooden box he had removed from the suitcase in his bedroom at home. The door was fitted with a Yale-type lock above the handle and a deadlock with a keyhole below. Zen bent down and squinted into the opening of the lower lock but the key was in position. He frowned briefly, then shrugged. Presumably Grimaldi only used the Yale lock when he went out.
He opened the tool kit and selected a device like a pair of callipers, which he inserted into the upper lock. Zen had acquired the tools during the years he had spent in Naples. He had been directing a plan to bug the beachside villa of a prominent camorra boss when a burglar had broken into the property. He couldn’t arrest the intruder without compromising the original operation, but the burglar didn’t know that, and was delighted when Zen offered to drop all charges in return for the tool kit and a series of masterclasses in its use. It was some time since he had needed to put these skills to the test, but he was nevertheless surprised to find that the lock totally resisted all his efforts.
The lack of play in the lock was so marked that if the lower lock hadn’t had the key in it, he might have thought that the catch was snibbed back. But it had, and an unoccupied room couldn’t very well be locked from the inside. He stood listening to the hushing of the rain and staring at the stubborn door. Wrapping a handkerchief around the door handle, he shoved his shoulder hard against the edge, to see which lock gave. The next thing he knew, the door had swung effortlessly open, depositing him on his knees in the middle of the floor.