Telling Cecchi and Grimaldi to wait there, he walked round this semi-circular section of the gallery, inspecting the railing and floor carefully. He sighed heavily and consulted his watch. Then he leant over the railing, looking up at the sixteen frescoed segments into which the interior of the dome was divided. Beneath each segment was a huge rectangular window consisting of thirty enormous panes, like a monstrous enlargement of an ordinary casement. The glass was dark and glossy, reflecting back the glare of the floodlights which Cecchi had turned on as they entered the dome. Each pair of windows was separated by a double pilaster whose cornices supported a ledge topped with what looked like railings.
Zen walked back to the waiting Vatican employees.
‘Is there another gallery up there?’ he asked.
Cecchi nodded.
‘It’s locked, though.’
‘So was this one.’
‘He had a key to this one,’ said Grimaldi, as though explaining the obvious to a child.
Zen nodded.
‘I’d like to have a look at the upper gallery, if that’s possible.’
Cecchi sighed heavily.
‘It’s possible, but what’s the point? There’s nothing to see.’
‘That’s what I want to make sure of,’ Zen replied.
On the landing outside, two doorways faced one another. The one on the right was the lighted public way leading down from the lantern. Cecchi turned to the other, a locked wooden door. After searching through his keys for some time, he opened it, revealing yet another ramp curving upwards into darkness. The ramp ended at a narrow spiral staircase bored through the stonework between the gargantuan windows. At the top, another door gave access to a second gallery in the floodlit interior of the dome, sixty feet above the lower one.
Zen looked over the railing at the vertiginous prospect below. From here, the tarpaulin was a mere scrap of blue. Again he told Grimaldi and Cecchi to wait while he walked slowly round the ledge, running his finger along the top of the railing and examining the floor. He had gone about a quarter of the way round when he stopped abruptly and glanced back at the other two men. They were standing near the door, chatting quietly together. Zen bent down beside the object which had caught his attention. It was a black brogue shoe, resting on its side between two of the metal stanchions supporting the railing. The toe, its polish badly scuffed, protruded several inches over the void.
A moment later he noticed the twine. Thin, colourless, almost invisible, it was tied to one of the stanchions against which the shoe rested. The other end dangled over the edge of the gallery. Zen pulled it in. There were several yards of it. He got out his lighter and burned through the twine near the knot securing it to the metal post. Straightening up again, he stuffed the twine into his pocket with the plastic bag in which the perfume had been wrapped.
Looking over the railing, he studied the scene below. The workmen were still shifting benches further down the nave, but the area below was deserted. With a gentle kick, Zen eased the black shoe off the edge of the gallery and watched it tumble end over end until he could make it out no longer. Whatever sound it made as it hit the floor of the basilica was lost in the squealing and honking of the benches. Rubbing his hands briskly together, Zen completed his circuit of the gallery, returning to the spot by the door where Grimaldi and Cecchi were in conversation.
‘Quite right,’ he told the building superintendent. ‘There’s nothing to see.’
Cecchi sniffed a told-you-so. Zen tapped Grimaldi’s two-way radio.
‘Does this thing work up here?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then get hold of Lamboglia and tell him to meet me by the body in ten minutes.’
He glanced at his watch again.
‘And then call a taxi to the Porta Sant’ Anna,’ he added.
When Zen and Grimaldi emerged into the amplitude of the basilica, like woodlice creeping out of the skirting of a ballroom, Monsignor Lamboglia was waiting for them. Zen regretted not having paid much attention to Sanchez-Valdes’s secretary earlier, since it meant dealing with an unknown quantity at this crucial juncture. If he played it smart, he could be back in bed with Tania in half an hour. He therefore studied the cleric as he approached, trying to gather clues as to how best to handle him. Lamboglia’s gaunt, craggy face, a mask of gloomy disapproval which looked as though it had been rough-hewn from granite, gave nothing away. But the rapid tapping of his fingers and the darting, censorious eyes betrayed the testy perfectionist who loved catching inferiors out and taxing them with inconsequential faults. It was this that gave Zen his opening.
‘Well?’ demanded Lamboglia brusquely, having dismissed Grimaldi with a curt wave of the hand.
Zen shrugged.
‘More or less, yes. Apart from the business of the shoes, of course.’
Lamboglia’s lips twisted in disapproval and his eyes narrowed.
‘Shoes? What do you mean?’
Zen pulled the edge of the tarpaulin back, exposing the victim’s feet and the brown suede slip-ons.
‘The archbishop said you people had learned a thing or two from the way Papa Luciani’s death was handled,’ he remarked contemptuously. ‘You wouldn’t know, judging by this sort of thing.’
By now Lamboglia looked apoplectic. For an instant, Zen caught a glimpse of the little boy, desperate to please, yet finding himself unjustly accused, fighting to restrain the tears, the panicky sense that the universe made no sense. The boy was long gone, but the strategies he had worked out in his misery still determined the behaviour of the man.
‘If you have noticed anything amiss,’ the cleric snapped, ‘then kindly inform me what it is without further prevarication.’
Zen handed him one of the shoes.
‘For a start, these shoes have only ever been worn by a corpse. Moreover they are mass-produced items totally out of keeping with the quality of the victim’s other garments. On top of that, they’re brown. A man like this wouldn’t be seen dead — to coin a phrase — wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. And finally, the stocking on the right foot is stained with blood all the way down to the toe, and must therefore have been uncovered when the body struck the ground.’
After inspecting the shoe carefully, Monsignor Lamboglia nodded. His panic was subsiding, converting itself into a cold anger which would eventually be discharged on the appropriate target.
‘And what conclusion do you draw from these observations?’ he demanded challengingly.
Zen shrugged.
‘You’d need to interrogate your staff to find out exactly what happened. My guess is that when the body was discovered, one of the shoes was missing. Some bright spark realized that this might look suspicious, and since they couldn’t find the missing shoe, a different pair was substituted. But people are superstitious about letting their shoes be worn by a dead man, so they used a new pair. Result, an amateurish botch-job calculated to arouse exactly the sort of suspicions it was meant to allay.’
Lamboglia measured Zen with a cold glare. It was one thing for him to criticize his underlings — and whoever was responsible for this was going to wish he had never been conceived — but that did not mean he was prepared to condone gratuitous insults from outsiders.
‘Nevertheless,’ he pointed out, ‘the problem remains. No one’s going to be prepared to believe that Ruspanti walked up to the dome with one shoe off and one shoe on.’