Cabal - 3 (20 page)

The idea was absurd, of course! He couldn’t contemplate making a personal profit from a piece of evidence which would presumably make it possible to bring the murderers of Ludovico Ruspanti and Grimaldi to justice. Of course, a cynic might argue that there was no chance of the murderers being brought to justice anyway, if the issues involved in the case were anywhere near as extensive as they appeared to be. Such a cynic – or a realist, as he would no doubt prefer to be called – might claim that in this particular case, as in so many others, justice was simply
not an option
, and to pretend otherwise was mere wishful thinking masquerading as idealism. In reality, there were only two possible outcomes. Zen could sell the transcript, thereby solving all his problems, or he could create a host of new problems for himself by setting in motion a major scandal with repercussions at every level of society. A rational man, the realist might well conclude, should be in no doubt which course to choose.

The taxi drew up in the narrow street, scarcely wider than an alley, where Tania lived. Almost at once the door opened and she appeared. It was a measure of what was happening to them that while Zen would once have been glad of a promptitude which allowed them a few extra minutes together, he now wondered whether she was anxious to prevent him seeing who was in the flat.

‘I phoned Tullio,’ she said, slipping in beside him with a seemingly guileless kiss. ‘He sounded very keen. He’ll see you this morning at his office in EUR.’

‘What time?’

‘About ten, he said.’

‘Did you tell him who I was?’

‘Of course not! As far as he knows, you’re just a high-ranking colleague of mine at the Ministry who needs a favour done. Not that Tullio would care. He’s made a pass or two at me himself, if it comes to that.’

Zen inspected her.

‘And did it?’

She sighed.

‘Give me a break, Aurelio!’

It was a windless grey morning, humid and close. The taxi was now wedged into the flank of the phalanx of traffic on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Zen patted her knee.

‘Sorry.’

She flashed him a smile.

‘Shall we eat out tonight?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll be out till about eight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could try that Chinese place behind Piazza Navona.’

Zen grunted unenthusiastically. Oriental cuisine, the latest Roman craze, left him cold. The food was excellent, but it seemed to him an exoticism as irrelevant to his life as Buddhism. The way he looked at it, you were either a Catholic or an atheist. There was no point in shopping around for odd doctrines, however original, nor eating odd food, however delicious.

The taxi dropped Tania first, at the corner of Via Venezia and Via Palermo, then drove round to the other side of the Ministry, where Zen paid it off. Lorenzo Moscati’s jibes had made it clear that their efforts to keep the affair secret had been a failure, but there was still a difference between accepting that people knew what was going on and flaunting it in their faces. The porter ticked Zen’s name off in the ON TIME column of his massive ledger.

‘Oh, dottore! They want to see you up in Personnel.’

Zen rode the lift up to the office on the fourth floor where Franco Ciliani, a tiny balding tyrant given to Etna-like eruptions of temper, presided over the thankless task of trying to complete the jigsaw of staff allocation when over half the pieces were missing at any one time.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as Zen appeared.

‘Ciccillo said you wanted to see me.’

‘That’s not what I mean! As far as I’m concerned, you’re in Milan.’

Zen gestured a comically excessive apology.

‘Sorry, but I’m not, as you see.’

Ciliani gave a brutal shrug.

‘I don’t give a damn where you are
in reality
. That’s entirely your affair. I’m talking about what’s down on the roster, and that tells me you’re in Milan. So when I get a call yesterday asking why you haven’t turned up, I naturally wonder what the hell.’

‘Who did you speak to?’

Ciliani made a half-hearted attempt to locate something in the chaos of papers on his desk.

‘Shit. Sermonelli? Something like that.’

‘Simonelli?’

‘That’s it. Antonia Simonelli.’

‘Yesterday?’ queried Zen, ignoring the little matter of Simonelli’s gender.

‘That’s right. Real ball-breaker. You know what the Milanese are like.’

‘There must be some mistake. Simonelli’s here in Rome. We met yesterday.’

‘I said you’d be there by tomorrow at the latest.’

‘But I just told you …’

‘Told me?’ demanded Ciliani. ‘You told me nothing. We aren’t even having this conversation.’

‘What do you mean?’

Ciliani sighed deeply.

‘Look, you’re in Milan, right? I’m in Rome. So how can I be talking to you? It must be a hallucination. Probably the after-effects of that fever you had.’

Zen stared up at the fault-line of a huge crack running from one end of the ceiling to the other.

‘When did the original notification come through?’

Ciliani consulted his schedule.

‘Monday.’

‘I was off sick on Monday.’

He suddenly saw what must have happened. Simonelli had summoned Zen to Milan on Monday, then decided to come to Rome himself to investigate Grimaldi’s continuing silence. He had then got in touch with Zen direct, but presumably his secretary in Milan – the officious woman Ciliani had spoken to – had not been informed of this, and was still trying to complete the earlier arrangement.

‘Fine!’ said Ciliani. ‘I’ll give Milan a call and explain that your departure was unavoidably delayed due to medical complications, but you have since made a swift and complete recovery and will be with them tomorrow. Speaking of which, it’s tough about Carlo, eh?’

‘What?’

‘Romizi, Carlo Romizi.’

‘Oh, you mean his stroke? Yes, it’s …’

‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

‘What news?’

Ciliani stuck his finger in his ear and extracted a gob of wax which he scrutinized as though deciding whether to eat it.

‘He went last night.’

‘Went? Went where?’

Ciliani looked at him queerly.

‘Died.’

‘No!’

Such was the emotion in Zen’s voice that Ciliani lowered his voice and said apologetically, ‘Excuse me, dottore, I didn’t know you were close.’

We are now, thought Zen. Trembling with shock, he left Ciliani and joined the human tide which was beginning to flow in the opposite direction, as those dedicated members of staff who had reported for duty on time rewarded their efficiency by popping out for a coffee and a bite to eat at one of the numerous bars which spring up in the vicinity of any government building like brothels near a port. Zen scandalized the barman by ordering a
caffè corretto
, espresso laced with grappa, a perfectly acceptable early-morning drink in the Veneto but unheard of in Rome.

He stood sipping the heady mixture and gazing sightlessly at the season’s fixture list for the Lazio football club. From time to time he took a stealthy peek at the idea which had leapt like a ghoul from the grave when Ciliani gave him the news of Carlo Romizi’s death. It didn’t go away. On the contrary, every time he glanced at it – surreptitiously, like a child in bed at the menacing shadows on the ceiling – it looked more substantial, more certain.

The pay-phone in the bar was one of the old models that only accepted tokens. Zen bought two thousand lire’s worth from the cashier and ensconced himself in the narrow passage between the toilet and a broken ice-cream freezer. A selection of coverless, broken-spined telephone directories sprawled on top of the freezer. Zen looked up the number of the San Giovanni hospital. The first four times he dialled, it was engaged, and when he finally did get through the number rang for almost five minutes and was then answered by a receptionist who had taken charm lessons from a pit bull terrier. But she was no match for a man with twenty-five years’ experience as a professional bully, and Zen was speedily put through to the doctor he had spoken to the week before.

All went well until Zen mentioned Romizi’s name, when the doctor suddenly lost his tone of polite detachment.

‘Listen, I’ve had enough of this! Understand? Enough!’

‘But I …’

‘She’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?’

‘I’m simply …’

‘I refuse to be harried and persecuted in this fashion! If it continues, I shall take legal advice. The woman is mad!’

‘Please understand that …’

‘In a case of this kind prognosis is always speculative, for the very good reason that a complete analysis is only possible post-mortem. I naturally sympathize with the widow’s grief, but to imply that the negligence of I or my staff in any way contributed to her husband’s death is slanderous nonsense. There were no unusual developments in the case, the outcome was perfectly consistent with the previous case-history. If Signora Romizi proceeds with this campaign of harassment, she will find herself facing charges of criminal libel. Good day!’

There were two columns of Romizis in the phone book, so Zen got the number from the Ministry switchboard. Carlo’s sister Francesca answered. Having conveyed his condolences, Zen asked if it would be possible to speak to Signora Romizi.

‘Anna’s just gone to sleep.’

‘It must have been a terrible shock for her.’

‘We’ve both found it very hard. They’d warned us that Carlo might not recover, but you never really think it will happen. He had seemed better in the last few …’

Her voice broke.

‘I’m sorry to distress you further,’ Zen said. ‘It’s just that I heard from someone at work that Signora Romizi felt that the hospital hadn’t done everything they might to save Carlo.’

There was no reply.

‘I was wondering if I could do anything to help.’

‘It’s kind of you.’ Francesca’s voice was bleak. ‘The problem is that Anna is finding it hard to accept what has happened, so she’s taking it out on the people there. And of course there’s plenty to complain about. Carlo had a bed in a corridor, along with about thirty other patients, some of them gravely ill. There are vermin, cockroaches and ants everywhere. The kitchen staff walked out last week after some junkie’s relatives held them up at gun point, and the patients might have starved if the relatives hadn’t got together and provided sandwiches and rolls. That’s on top of taking all the sheets home to wash, of course. Meanwhile when the politicians get ill, they go to the Villa Stuart clinic and get looked after by German nuns!’

‘If it’s not too painful, could you tell me what actually happened?’

Francesca sighed.

‘We had been taking it in turns to sit up with Carlo round the clock, so that there would always be a familiar face there at his bedside if he regained consciousness. Last night it was Anna’s turn to stay up. She says she dozed off in her chair and some time in the middle of the night a noise woke her. She sat up to find a doctor standing by the bed, someone she had never seen before. He seemed to be adjusting the controls of the life-support apparatus. When Anna asked him what he was doing, he left without …’

Francesca Romizi’s quiet voice vanished as though the barman pointing his remote control unit at Zen had changed the channel of his life. From the huge television set mounted on a shelf at the entrance to the passage, the commentary and crowd noises of a football match which had taken place in Milan the previous evening boomed out to engulf the bar.

‘Can you speak up?’ Zen urged the receiver.

‘… grew light … cold and pale … nurse was … told her …’

High on the wall above the telephone was a black fuse-box. Standing on tiptoe, Zen reached for the mains cut-out. As abruptly as it had started, the clamour of the television ceased again, to be replaced by the groans of the staff and clientele.

‘Not again!’

‘This is the tenth time this month!’

‘I’m not paying my electricity bill! They can do what they like, send me to prison, anything! I’m not paying!’

‘The government should step in!’

‘Rubbish! The abuse of political patronage is the reason we don’t have a viable infrastructure in the first place.’

Zen covered one ear with his hand and pressed the other to the receiver.

‘I’m sorry, I missed that.’

‘I said, Anna thinks that the doctor who tampered with the electronic equipment was some intern, not properly trained. She’s threatening to sue the hospital for negligence.’

Zen struggled to keep his voice steady.

‘Have you any evidence?’

‘Well, they haven’t been able to identify the doctor concerned so far. But Anna could have dreamed the whole thing, or even invented it to relieve her guilt at the fact that she had been sleeping while Carlo died. Such strong emotions are unleashed at these moments that really anything is possible.’

Zen asked Francesca to convey his profoundest sympathy to Signora Romizi and offered to help in any way he could. As he replaced the receiver with one hand, he reached for the mains switch with the other, and the bar sprang to rowdy life again.

Back at the counter, Zen consumed a second coffee, this time without additives. Like Francesca Romizi, but for very different reasons, he was sceptical about the idea of negligence on the part of the hospital staff. Carlo’s death had no more been an accident than Giovanni Grimaldi’s. From the moment Zen used his name in an unsuccessful attempt to access the Ministry’s ‘closed’ file on the Cabal, Carlo Romizi had been doomed. No wonder the hospital had been unable to trace the mysterious doctor who had visited his bedside in the small hours of the night. There was no doctor, only a killer in a white coat.

The demonstrable absurdity of this response merely guaranteed its authenticity. The comatose Romizi, utterly dependent on a life-support system, could not conceivably have been responsible for the electronic prying carried out in his name at the Ministry the night before. His death had been intended to serve as a message to Aurelio Zen. The Cabal had of course seen through Zen’s feeble attempt at disguise, but they had gone ahead and killed Romizi anyway, knowing that he had nothing whatever to do with it. It was a masterstroke of cynical cruelty, calculated not only to strike terror into Zen’s heart but also to cripple him with remorse. For it was he who had condemned Carlo Romizi to death. If Zen had chosen another name, or used his own, the Umbrian would still be alive.