‘Without mentioning my name,’ Zen insisted.
Sanchez-Valdes waved his beringed hand to indicate that this might be taken for granted. Outside the huge unused station building below, the diesel locomotive blew its horn. Luigi Scarpione stood on the platform near by, beckoning frantically.
‘It’s about to leave,’ said Sanchez-Valdes.
Zen turned to him suddenly.
‘What about the Cabal?’
A distant look entered the archbishop’s eyes.
‘What?’
‘Grimaldi’s letter to the newspapers claimed that on the day he died, Ruspanti had been going to meet the representatives of an organization called the Cabal. His other allegations have turned out to be true. What about that one?’
Sanchez-Valdes laughed lightly.
‘Oh, that! No, no, that was just some nonsense Ruspanti dreamed up.’
‘Ruspanti?’
‘Yes, he used it as bait, to tempt us into giving him sanctuary. It’s rather embarrassing, to tell you the truth! He took us in completely with this cock-and-bull tale about some secret inner group within the Knights of Malta which supposedly…’
Zen stared.
‘The Knights of Malta?’
‘Absurd, isn’t it? That bunch of old fogies and social climbers! Mind you, Ruspanti was one of them himself, which lent his claims a certain prima facie credibility. In return for our assistance, he promised to spill the beans on the various political conspiracies which this group was supposedly planning. As soon as we examined his claims, of course, it was evident that there was nothing in them.’
The diesel hooted again, longer this time.
‘Hurry, dottore, or they’ll leave without you!’ Sanchez-Valdes urged. ‘We don’t want to create an international incident by preventing the departure of an Italian train, do we? Incidentally, you’re probably the first person to leave the Vatican by train since Papa Roncalli went on a pilgrimage to Assisi back in the sixties. What about that, eh? Something to tell your grandchildren!’
‘Deuce!’
‘Thirty-forty, isn’t it?’
‘No, no, my friend. It was thirty-forty after you fluffed my last service return.’
‘All right, all right.’
Rackets were raised once more, the fluffy yellow ball sped to and fro, the players pranced about the pink asphalt. The server sported a racy Sergio Tacchini outfit whose top, shorts, socks, trainers and sweatbands were all elements in the same bold abstract pattern. His opponent had opted for a classic all-white image by Ellesse, but it was falling flat. Having just blown the opportunity to save the set, he looked plain rather than restrained, not timeless but out of date.
‘Advantage!’ called Sergio Tacchini confidently.
‘It was out!’ whined Ellesse.
‘Says who?’
‘I saw it cross the line! It was nowhere near!’
‘Oh! Oh! Gino, don’t try this stuff on with me!’
‘I tell you…’
‘All right, let’s get a neutral opinion.’
The server turned to the man who was looking on from the other side of the tall mesh netting which surrounded the court.
‘Hey, you! You saw that shot? It was in, wasn’t it?’
‘Come off it, Rodolfo!’ his opponent objected. ‘If they let the guy up here, he must work for you. Do you think he’s going to tell his own Minister that his shot was too long?’
‘On the contrary, everyone knows I’ll be on my way once this reshuffle finally hits. I can’t even get a cup of coffee sent up any more. In fact, he’s going to give it your way, Gino, if he’s got any sense. For all anyone knows, you could be his boss next week!’
He turned again to the onlooker, a gaunt, imposing figure with sharp, angular features and a gaze that hovered ambiguously between menace and mockery.
‘Listen, er — what’s your name?’
‘Zen, Minister. Vice-Questore, Criminalpol. I’m afraid I didn’t see the ball land.’
Rodolfo returned to the base-line shaking his head.
‘Fine, we’ll play a let. I don’t need flukes to beat you, Gino. I’ve got in-depth superiority.’
He skied the ball and whacked it across the net with a grunt suggestive of a reluctant bowel motion. Zen clasped his hands behind his back and pretended to take an interest in the progress of the game. Fortunately there were other distractions. Despite being located on the least illustrious of Rome’s seven hills, the roof of the Ministry of the Interior still afforded extensive views. To the right, Zen could admire the neighbouring Quirinal and its palace, once the seat of popes and kings, now the official residence of the President of the Italian Republic. To the left, the ruined hulks of ancient Rome’s most desirable residential quarter gave a rural appearance to the Palatine. In between, the densely populated sprawl of the city centre, covered by a veil of smog, resembled the treacherous marshland it had once been. In the hazy distance below the hills of the far bank of the Tiber, the dome of St Peter’s hovered, seemingly weightless, like a baroque hot-air balloon.
The sun was hidden behind a skin of cloud which diffused its light evenly across the flat roof. The Ministry’s complex system of transmitting and receiving aerials, towering above like ship’s rigging, increased Zen’s sense of detachment from the mundane realities of life in the invisible streets far below. The train which had carried him back to Italy that morning consisted of four empty wagons which had discharged their duty-free imports and one flat-bed laden with the mosaics which were the Vatican’s only material export. Zen had looked back from the cab of the superannuated green-and-brown diesel locomotive at the massive iron gates closing behind the train, just as all the Vatican gates still did at midnight, sealing off the one-hundred-acre City State from its encircling secular neighbour. The complexities of the relationship between the two were something that Zen was only beginning to appreciate now that he found himself trapped between them like a speck of grit caught in the bearings of power.
Despite his promise to Sanchez-Valdes, he had every intention of filing a full report on the Ruspanti affair. The first rule of survival in any organization is ‘Cover thyself.’ No matter that Moscati had told Zen that he was on his own, that it was between him and the Vatican, that the Ministry didn’t want to know. None of that would save Zen if — or, as now seemed almost inevitable, when — the tortuous and murky ramifications of the Ruspanti affair turned into a major political scandal. If Zen failed to keep the Ministry fully briefed, this would either be ascribed to devious personal motives or to twitchings on the strings by which one of the interested parties controlled him. Either way, his position would be untenable. A man as sophisticated as Sanchez-Valdes must have known this, so Zen assumed that the real purpose of that ‘walk in the woods’ had been to pass on information which the Curia could not release officially, to smuggle a message out of the Vatican in much the same way as Zen himself. It was now up to Zen to make sure that the message got through.
Under normal circumstances, his section chief would have been the person to go to, but after hearing Tania recount Moscati’s gloating remarks about their relationship Zen didn’t trust himself to handle the conversation with the necessary professional reserve. Then he recalled something that Moscati had said when they had spoken on the phone the previous morning. ‘Result, the Minister finds himself in the hot seat just as the entire government is about to go into the blender and he had his eye on some nice fat portfolio like Finance.’ So the Minister was not only aware of Zen’s gaffe, but had been politically embarrassed by criticism from the ‘blue-bloods at the Farnesina’, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who would have sustained the full wrath of the Apostolic Nuncio. By the time the Vatican goods train drew into the station of San Pietro F.S., Zen had decided that this was a case for going straight to the top. That way, when the lies and obfuscations started, he would at least know their source. He would speak to the Minister personally, tell him what had happened and what Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes had said. Then, later, he would write up a full report of the incident (with an editorial slant favourable to him, naturally) to be filed in the Ministerial database as permanent proof, dated and signed, that he had fulfilled his duties.