Zen shrugged.
‘One has to live with these things.’
Simonelli hitched up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a chunky gold watch.
‘Well, thank you for taking the trouble to come and satisfy my interest in this business,’ he said.
‘Not at all. If that’s all, I’d better be getting back to the Ministry.’
Simonelli raised his eyebrows.
‘Working?’ he demanded coarsely. ‘At this time?’
The magistrate’s manner was so familiar that Zen almost winked at him.
‘Thanks to this Vatican business, I’ve got a backlog of other work to catch up on,’ he confided. ‘I thought I might as well get paid overtime for doing it.’
Simonelli laughed.
‘Quite right, quite right!’
Just inside the hotel’s revolving door, they shook hands again.
‘Perhaps we’ll meet again some time,’ Zen found himself saying.
Simonelli’s eyes were enlivened by some expression which he couldn’t read at all.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised, dottore. I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’
AUTHORIZATION?
Zen gazed at the band of green script which stared back at him, as unwavering as a reptile’s eye. Something had gone wrong, but he had no idea what. True, he was no longer as utterly innocent of computers as he had once been. He had no map to the computer’s alien landscape, and wouldn’t have been able to read it if he had, but he had laboriously learned to follow a number of paths which led to the places he wanted or needed to reach. As long as he stayed on them, he could usually reach his goal, given time. But if by accident he pushed the wrong key, producing some unforeseen effect, there was nothing for it but to return to the beginning.
That was what must have happened now, it seemed. He had intended to open a file in which to enter the outline details of the Ruspanti case which he had passed on orally to the Minister earlier in the day. He wanted to do this now, while they were still fresh in his mind. Then, later in the week, he would call up the file and rewrite it as a proper report, which he would then save to the database as a ‘Read Only’ item, imperishably enshrined in electronic form for any interested party to consult. Something had gone wrong, however. When he tried to open a file to jot down his notes, the computer had responded as though he had asked to read an already-existing file, and demanded an authorization reference. With a sigh, Zen pressed the red ‘Break’ button and began all over again.
The window beside the desk where the terminal was installed was steadily turning opaque as the winter dusk gathered outside. Down below in Piazza del Viminale the evening rush hour was at its height, the gridlocked vehicles bellowing like cattle in rut, but no sound penetrated the Ministry’s heavy-duty reflective triple glazing, proof against everything from bullets to electronic surveillance. Zen gazed at that darkened expanse of glass where he had once caught sight of Tania, seemingly floating towards him in mid-air across the piazza outside. Searching his own personal database, he identified a day shortly before he went to Sardinia for the Burolo case, the day when Tania had come to lunch at his apartment. Although little more than a year earlier, that period already seemed to him like a state of prelapsarian innocence. What was Tania doing now, he wondered, and with whom? Concentrating his mind with an effort, he once again ran through the procedure for opening a file and pressed ‘Enter’. As before, the screen responded with a demand for his security clearance. Infuriated, Zen typed ‘Go stuff your sister.’ AUTHORIZATION INVALID the computer returned priggishly.
It was not until the third time that he finally caught on. He had been scrupulously careful on this occasion, moving the cursor through the menus line by line and double-checking every option before selecting it. When SUBJECT? appeared, he carefully typed ‘Cabal’, the working title he was using for his notes. He was certain that he had observed all the correct procedures, yet when he pressed the ‘Enter’ key, the computer once again flashed its demand for authorization like some obsessive psychotic with a one-track mind. To dispel the urge to stick his fist through the screen, he swivelled round in his chair and stood up — and suddenly the solution came to him, huge and blindingly obvious. The computer was not stupid or malicious, just infinitely literal-minded. If it was treating his attempt to open a file named ‘Cabal’ as a ‘read’ option, it could only be because such a file already existed.
He turned away from the screen as though it were a window from which he was being watched. His skin was prickling, his scalp taut. Grabbing the keyboard, he called up the directory. No such file was listed. That meant it must be stored in the ‘closed’ section of the database, whose contents were not displayed in the directory.
Somewhere in the office behind him a phone was ringing. He reached out blindly, picked up the extension by the computer terminal and switched the call through.
‘Criminalpol, Zen speaking.’
He was sure it must be Tania. No one else would ring him at work at that time. But to his disappointment, the voice was male.
‘Good evening, dottore. I’m calling from the Vatican.’
Zen knew he had heard the voice already that day, although it didn’t sound like either Sanchez-Valdes or Lamboglia.
‘How did you know I was here?’ he asked inconsequentially.
‘We tried your home number first and they said you were at work. Listen, we need to see you this evening. It’s a matter of great urgency.’
‘Who is this?’
‘My identity is not important.’
Zen reduced his voice to a charged whisper.
‘I’m afraid that’s not good enough. I have been assured on the highest authority that my involvement with the Ruspanti affair is over. I’m currently preparing a report on the incident for my superiors. I can’t just drop everything and come running on the strength of an anonymous phone call.’
There was a momentary silence.
‘This report you’re writing,’ said the voice, ‘is it going to mention the Cabal?’
Zen raised his eyes to the glowing screen.
‘What do you know about the Cabal?’
‘Everything.’
Zen was silent.
‘Come to St Peter’s at seven o’clock exactly,’ the voice told him. ‘In the north transept, where the light shows.’
The phone went dead. Zen blindly replaced the receiver, still staring at the word AUTHORIZATION? and the box where the name of the official seeking access to the file would appear. As though of their own volition, his fingers tapped six times on the keyboard, and the box filled with the name ROMIZI. This was a perfectly harmless deception. If anybody bothered to check who had tried to read the closed file on the Cabal, it would at once be obvious that a false name had been used. Poor Carlo Romizi, helplessly comatose in the Ospedale di San Giovanni, clearly couldn’t be responsible.
As he expected, though, the only response was AUTHORIZATION INVALID. Zen sat gazing at the screen until the words blurred into mere squiggles of light, but the message itself was so firmly imprinted on his eyeballs that it appeared on walls, floors, windows and doors long after he had turned off the computer and left the building, imbuing every surrounding surface with a portentous, threatening shimmer.
When he got home, a familiar voice was holding forth in his living room about the philosophy of fashion. Glancing at the television, Zen recognized the young man he had last seen delivering an impromptu press conference in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. He was now perched on a leather and chrome stool, being interviewed by Raffaella Carra about his book You Are What You Wear.
‘… not a question of dressing up, like draping clothes over a dummy, but of recreating yourself. When you put on a Falco creation, you are reborn! The old self dies and a new one takes its place, instantly, in the twinkling of an eye…’
Zen crossed to the inner hallway.
‘Hello? Anyone there?’