‘Like other entrepreneurs, Zeppegno hated paying taxes and wanted to be able to invest his money freely. The answer was to cream off a percentage of his pre-tax profits and invest them abroad. The problem was how to do it. Big businesses have their own ways around the currency control laws, of course. You order a consignment of raw material from a foreign supplier who is prepared to play along. This is duly invoiced and paid for, but the goods in question are never shipped, and the money ends up in the off-shore bank account of your choice. There’s an element of risk involved, but in a big outfit with a complex structure and a high volume of foreign trade the danger is minimal. The bogus orders can be hidden amongst a mass of legitimate transactions, and if all else fails i finanzieri have on occasion been known to look the other way.’
Zen acknowledged the gibe with a blink. The venality of the Finance Ministry’s enforcement officials was legendary.
‘The turnover of a company like Zeppegno’s was far too small to conceal that sort of scam successfully. Which is where the late Ludovico Ruspanti came in. It didn’t hurt that he was an aristocrat, of course. Self-made provincials like Zeppegno tend to retain the prejudices of their class. A title like “Prince” not only helped convince them that their money was safe in Ruspanti’s hands, but reassured them that what they were doing was nothing much to be ashamed of, since a man like him was involved. The procedure itself couldn’t have been simpler or more convenient. You simply wrote Ruspanti a cheque for whatever amount you wished to dispose of. If you preferred, of course, you could hand it over in cash. He deposited the money in his account at the Vatican bank, and it was then transferred — less his fee — to your foreign bank account.
‘The fascinating thing about this arrangement is that while the ensemble constitutes a flagrant breach of the law, each of the individual operations is in itself perfectly legal. There is no law against one Italian citizen donating a large sum of money to another. If the recipient happens to be one of the privileged few who enjoy the right to an account at the Institute for the Works of Religion, it is perfectly in order for him to deposit the money there. And since that institution is extraterritorial, what subsequently happens to the money is of no concern to the Italian authorities.’
She gave a bitter laugh.
‘They talk about the rival claims of London and Frankfurt as the future financial capitals of Europe, but what about Rome? What other capital city can boast the convenience of an off-shore bank, completely unaccountable to the elected government, subject to no verifiable constraints or controls whatsoever and located just a brief taxi-ride from the centre, with no customs controls or security checks to pass through? Ludovico Ruspanti could walk in there with a billion lire, and when he came out again that billion had effectively vanished! Poof!
‘The only weak point in all this was Ruspanti himself. The cut he took counted as unearned income, and of course he couldn’t declare it — even supposing he wanted to — without giving the game away. That was the lever I planned to use to squeeze Ruspanti for information on the whole operation, and I must say I was very hopeful of success. But without him, there is literally no case. I naturally couldn’t help wondering whether this might not have occurred to some of the other interested parties. That’s what I really want to know, dottore. Forget Zeppegno for a moment. You investigated Ruspanti’s death. Tell me, did he fall or was he pushed?’
Zen smiled.
‘Funnily enough, those were exactly the words that Simonelli used when I spoke to him in Rome.’
The magistrate stared at him coldly.
‘ I am Simonelli.’
‘Of course! Please excuse me. I meant Zeppegno, of course.’
He tried to think clearly, but his experiences on the train and in the tunnel seemed to have left him incapable of much more than reacting to immediate events. The only thing he was sure of was the single thread, flimsy but as yet unbroken, which he still held in his hand. It might yet lead him to the heart of this affair, but it would not bear the weight of a judicial process. So although he found himself warming to Antonia Simonelli, he was going to have to stall her for the moment.
‘Ruspanti was murdered,’ he replied. ‘So was the minder the Vatican had assigned to him.’
The magistrate stared at him fixedly.
‘But you were quoted in the papers the other day as saying that the allegations that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Ruspanti’s death were mischievous and ill-informed.’
‘I wasn’t consulted about the wording of that statement.’
He had Simonelli hanging on his every word. The dirtier and more devious it got, the better she liked it. The case she thought was dead had miraculously sprung to life before her eyes!
‘The familiar tale,’ she said, nodding grimly.
Zen stood up and leaned across the desk towards her.
‘Familiar, yes, but in this case also long and complex. You will naturally want to get in touch with the authorities in Bologna, and possibly even go there in person. I therefore suggest that we postpone further discussion on the matter until then.’
She glanced at her watch.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But please don’t imagine that this is any more than a postponement, dottore. I am determined to get to the bottom of this business, whatever the vested interests involved. I hope I shall have your entire cooperation, but if I have any reason to suspect that it is not forthcoming, I shall have no hesitation in using my powers to compel you to testify.’
Zen held up his hands in a protestation of innocence.
‘There’ll be no need for that. I’ve been put in an impossible position in this case, but basically I’m on the side of the angels.’
Antonia Simonelli looked at him with a finely judged mixture of wariness and confidence.
‘I’m not concerned with angels, dottore. What I need is someone who’s on the side of the law.’
The house was not immediately recognizable as such. The address, in a back street just north of the Teatro alla Scala and west of the fashion alleys of Via Monte Napoleone and Via della Spiga, appeared at first to be nothing more than a slab of blind walling, slightly less high than the modern apartment buildings on either side. It was only as his taxi pulled away that Zen noticed the doors, windows and balconies painted on the plaster, complete with painted shadows to give an illusion of depth. The facade of a severe late-eighteenth-century Austro-French palazzo had been recreated in considerable detail, and the fact that the third dimension was missing would doubtless have been less apparent by daylight than it was under the intense glare of the streetlamps, diffused by the pall of fog which had descended on the city with the coming of dusk.
It took Zen some time to locate the real entrance, a plain wooden door inset in the huge trompe I’oeil gate framed by pillars at the centre of the frontage. There was no name-plate, and the grille of the entry-phone was disguised in the plumage of the hawk which rose in fake bas-relief above an illusory niche where the actual button figured as the nippled peak of a massive painted metal bell-pull. Zen had barely touched the button when, without a challenge or a query, the door release buzzed to admit him. Only after he stepped inside did he realize, from the shock he felt, what it was he had been expecting: some aggressively contemporary space defined by the complex interaction of concrete, steel and glass. The punch-line of the joke facade, he had tacitly assumed, must lie in the contrast with something as different as possible from historical gentility.
It was the smell which initially alerted him to his error. The musty odours which assailed him the moment he stepped over the threshold were quite incompatible with the processes of late-twentieth-century life. Nor could they be reproduced or mocked up. Dense and mysterious, with overlapping strata of rot and mould and fume and smoke, they spoke of years of habitation, generations of neglect. He looked around the cavernous hallway, a huge vaulted space feebly lit by a lamp dangling from a chain so thickly encased in dust and spider-webs that it seemed to be this rather than the rusted metal which was supporting the yellowing bulb. He had a sudden urge to laugh. This was a much better joke than the predictable contrast he had imagined. It was a brilliant coup to have the fake and the reality correspond. Evidently the house really was what it had been made to resemble, an aristocratic residence dating from the period when Milan was a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.