Free Cabal - 3 by Michael Dibdin

dangerously.
    ‘What made you think we did?’
    ‘Well, according to the letter, Ruspanti was living in the Vatican and you were keeping him under surveillance.’
    ‘But you didn’t know that on Friday!’
    ‘It’s true, then?’ Zen asked quickly.
    Lamboglia turned off the tape-recorder, rewound the cassette briefly, and pressed PLAY.
    ‘… keeping him under surveillance .’
    The cleric looked at Zen.
    ‘You were quite right, dottore – your career is at risk. Don’t try and catch me out again. Just answer my questions.’
    He pressed the RECORD button.
    ‘It is your professional conduct on Friday which is the subject of this inquiry, dottore. At that time, you had no reason to assume – rightly or wrongly – that we had any idea that Ruspanti might have been murdered. The word was never even mentioned in the course of your interview with Archbishop Sánchez-Valdés.’
     
    At last, Zen lit his cigarette, then looked round in vain for an ashtray. Irritated by this delay, Lamboglia waved dismissively.
    ‘Use the floor. The nuns will clean it up. That’s what nuns are for.’
    Zen released a breath of fragrant smoke.
    ‘It was precisely the fact that no one mentioned the possibility of murder which I found so significant,’ he said.
    Lamboglia gave a sneering laugh.
    ‘That’s absurd.’
    ‘On the contrary. I wasn’t asked to investigate Ruspanti’s death but to confirm that he had committed suicide. When I offered to do so without more ado, as a good Catholic, the archbishop made it quite clear that he wanted more than that. ‘Do whatever you need to do,’ he told me, ‘whatever must be done to achieve the desired result.’
    ‘Exactly!’ cried Lamboglia. ‘To determine the truth!’
    Zen shrugged.
    ‘No one mentioned that word either.’
    ‘Because it was taken for granted !’
    Zen tapped his cigarette, dislodging a packet of ash which tumbled through the air to disintegrate on the smooth flagstones.
    ‘Then the members of the Curia are a great deal less subtle than they have been given credit for,’ he replied.
     
    Lamboglia rapped the table authoritatively.
    ‘Don’t be impertinent! You had no right to conceal anything from us.’
    ‘Excuse me, monsignore, but Archbishop Sánchez-Valdés explicitly instructed me to take whatever action I considered necessary without consulting him or his colleagues.’
    ‘Yes, but only to avoid compromising your status as an independent observer. No one asked you to cover up a murder!’
    Zen tossed the butt of his cigarette under the table and crushed it out.
    ‘Of course not. It would have been impossible for me to do so if I’d been asked openly. That’s why murder was never once mentioned, despite the fact that there was no sense in calling me in unless there was a real possibility that Ruspanti had been murdered. By the same token, I couldn’t reveal the evidence I subsequently discovered without making it impossible for you to sustain the suicide verdict.’
    And for me to get home to Tania, he thought, for the decisive factor that evening had been his eagerness to return as soon as possible to the bed from which he’d been ejected by the electronic pager. Any hint of what he had discovered would have put paid to that for good.
    ‘Let’s be honest, monsignore,’ he told Lamboglia. ‘You didn’t want me coming to you and saying, “Actually Ruspanti didn’t fall from the gallery he had the key to but the one sixty feet above it.” You didn’t want to know about it, did you? You just wanted the matter taken care of, neatly and discreetly. That’s what I did, and if someone hadn’t decided to give the game away, no one would be any the wiser.’
    Lamboglia stared at him across the table in silence. Several times he seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.
    ‘That’s impossible,’ he said at last. ‘The dome was closed when Ruspanti fell. The killer would have been trapped inside.’
    ‘The killers – there must have been