‘As I mentioned the first time Your Excellency honoured me with an audience, whatever the Church decides is good enough for me.’
Sanchez-Valdes looked at Zen with amusement.
‘You’re a great loss to the Curia, dottore,’ he remarked, shaking his head. ‘A very great loss indeed! But then of course they already accuse us of creaming off the best administrators in the country.’
He got to his feet, sighing.
‘Thank you, Enrico, that will be all.’
After a momentary hesitation, Lamboglia left sullenly. When the door had closed behind him, Sanchez-Valdes walked over to the window. He pulled aside the screen of the net curtaining, allowing a beam of raw sunlight to enter.
‘What a lovely morning.’
He turned to Zen.
‘I think we should take a walk, dottore.’
Zen stared at him blankly.
‘A walk?’
‘That’s right. A walk in the woods.’
‘Have you heard the one about the whore and the Swiss Guard?’ asked the archbishop.
Zen, who was lighting a cigarette, promptly choked on the smoke. When the fit of coughing had subsided somewhat, he shook his head.
‘I don’t think I have.’
Sanchez-Valdes’s face beamed with expectation.
‘This new recruit has just arrived in Rome, fresh from the mountains. On his first evening off duty he decides to explore the city a little. He wanders out through the Sant’Anna gate and down into the Borgo, where he is accosted by a lady of the night.’
He paused to inspect a flowering shrub in the rockery they were passing.
‘“It’s just like my friends told me,” thinks Hans. “These Roman women can’t resist a blond hunk of manhood like me.” When they reach Asphasia’s business premises, she says, “Before we go any further, let’s settle the little matter of the fee.” The Swiss smiles complacently. “Out of the question! I wouldn’t dream of accepting money from a woman.”’
Zen laughed politely.
‘I heard that one from Scarpia, the head of the Vigilanza. His real name is Scarpione, but Paul VI always called him Scarpia, like the police chief in Tosca. No one was sure whether it was a mistake or a joke, and Montini wasn’t the kind of person you could ask, but somehow the name stuck, perhaps precisely because anyone further removed from Puccini’s villain would be hard to imagine. Poor Luigi is all home and family, mild and jovial to a fault. But you’ll be able to judge for yourself.’
They passed an elaborate fountain in the form of an artificial grotto from which a stream issued to pour over a series of miniature falls while two stone cherubs watched admiringly from the pool below. The path they were following led straight uphill through a coppice of beech trees. Except for a faint background murmur of traffic, they might have been deep in the country.
‘Anyway,’ Sanchez-Valdes went on, ‘that joke sums up the way the Vigilanza regard their colleagues in the Cohors Helvetica, as Nordic yokels with a superiority complex, so stupid they think they’re smart. The Swiss, for their part, look down on the security men as jumped-up traffic wardens. This conceit is perhaps understandable in a corps which not only enjoys an unbroken tradition of service stretching back almost five hundred years, but is charged with responsibility for guarding the person of the Holy Father. As for the Vigilanza, their duties are indeed fairly mundane for the most part, but there is a small elite unit within the force which undertakes more specialized and sensitive tasks. The existence of this unit is officially denied, and we never discuss its operations. If I’ve decided to make an exception in your case, it’s because you already know too much. The Ruspanti affair has got completely out of control, and we must proceed as they do with forest fires, separating off the affected area and letting the flames burn themselves out.’
Perhaps affected by this metaphor, Zen ground his spent cigarette out with exaggerated caution, creating an unsightly smudge of soiled paper and tobacco shreds.
‘There’s no filter,’ he explained awkwardly. ‘It’ll wash away as soon as it rains.’
He felt constrained to apologize by the extreme tidiness of the gardens. There was something not quite real about the Vatican, he was beginning to feel. It was like Rome devoid of Romans, peopled instead by a quiet, orderly, industrious race. There was no litter, no graffiti, no traffic. Cars were parked strictly within the painted boxes allotted for the purpose, and the few people about walked briskly along, intent on their business. The grass was not only neatly trimmed and innocent of used condoms, spent syringes and the sheets of loose newspaper used as curtains by courting couples in their cars, it was also a richer, more vibrant shade of green, as though it were part of the divine dispensation that the Holy City received more rain than the secular one without the walls. Trees and shrubs, hedges and flower-beds, all appeared vibrant and vigorous, like illustrations from a theological textbook exemplifying the argument from design. In principle, this was all extremely pleasant. In practice it gave Zen the creeps, like a replica which everyone was conspiring to pass off as the real thing.
‘Among the responsibilities of this special Vigilanza department,’ Sanchez-Valdes was saying, ‘is the covert surveillance of individuals living or working within the Vatican City State whose activities have for one reason or another attracted the attention of my department. Until last Friday, one of these was Prince Ludovico Ruspanti.’
The archbishop broke off as they approached a team of gardeners at work resetting a rockery. He nodded at the men, who inclined their heads respectfully. Once they were out of earshot again, Sanchez-Valdes resumed.
‘As you are no doubt aware, Ruspanti was under investigation by the Italian judiciary for his part in the illegal export of currency. What you probably do not know, since the matter was sub judice, is that his part in this alleged fraud consisted of recycling large sums through his account at the Institute for the Works of Religion. In short, the Prince was accused of using the Vatican bank to break Italian law. After the scandals surrounding the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, we clearly could not be seen to be sheltering him from justice. But although we had our own reasons for allowing Ruspanti the temporary use of a grace-and-favour apartment while he sorted out his affairs, we weren’t naive enough simply to leave him to his own devices.’
Zen looked up at the crest of the hill above them, where the mighty bastion of the original fortifications was now crowned with the transmitting aerials of Vatican Radio.
‘In that case…’ he began, then broke off.
Sanchez-Valdes finished it for him.
‘In that case, we should know who killed him, just as the anonymous letter to the papers claimed. Yes, we should. The problem is that the official assigned to Ruspanti on the day he died was…’
‘Giovanni Grimaldi.’
The archbishop gestured as though to say ‘There you are!’ The alley they were following had reached a round-about from which five others led off in various directions, each with its name inscribed on a travertine slab mounted in a metal stand. Sanchez-Valdes turned left along a straight gravel path running along the foot of a section of the original Vatican walls, towering up thirty metres or more to their machicolated battlements.
‘Grimaldi was presumably debriefed before. I arrived that Friday,’ Zen commented.
Sanchez-Valdes nodded.
‘He said he had lost Ruspanti among the throng of tourists up on the dome of St Peter’s and was trying to find him again in the basilica when the body fell. At the time there seemed no reason not to believe this. The first thing which alerted our suspicions was the disappearance of the transcript which had been made of Ruspanti’s telephone conversations. Ah, there’s Luigi!’
A plump man with carefully permed silvery hair and a benign expression stood by a pine tree beside the path, watching them approach. Zen felt a surge of revulsion. He suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of this place where even the chief of police looked like a parody of a kindly, absent-minded village priest.