‘Any other messages?’
Tania leafed through the mail for the Criminalpol department, which she planned to deliver when the pressures of business permitted.
‘Just a telegram.’
‘Let’s have it.’
Tania tore open the envelope and read the brief typed message.
‘It sounds like some loony,’ she told him.
‘What does it say?’
‘“If you wish to get these deaths in the proper perspective, apply at the green gates in the piazza at the end of Via Santa Sabina.”’
He grunted.
‘No name?’
‘Nothing. Don’t go, Aurelio. It could be a nutter.’
She sounded nervous, memories of Vasco Spadola’s deadly vendetta still fresh in her mind.
‘When was it sent?’
‘Just after five yesterday afternoon, from Piazza San Silvestro.’
He yawned.
‘All right. I’d better ring Moscati now.’
‘What’s it all about, Aurelio? He said it was in the papers.’
‘Well, well. Fame at last.’
Tania said nothing.
‘I’ll ring you later about tonight,’ he told her. ‘And don’t worry. It’s just work, not life and death.’
The letters had been faxed from the Vatican City State to the Rome offices of five national newspapers about ten o’clock on Monday evening. The time had been well chosen. The following day’s editions were about to go to bed, while most people in the Vatican had already done so. There was thus no time to follow up the startling allegations which the letter contained, still less to get an official reaction from the Vatican Press Office, notoriously reticent and dilatory at the best of times.
The anonymous writer had thoughtfully included a list of the publications to whom he had sent copies of the document. The editors phoned each other. Yes, they’d seen the thing. Well, they were undecided, really. They weren’t in the habit of printing unsubstantiated accusations, although these did seem to have a certain ring of authenticity, and if by chance they were true then of course… Nevertheless, in the end all five agreed that it would be wiser to hold back until the whole thing could be properly investigated. Chuckling with glee at their craftiness in securing this exclusive scoop, each then phoned the newsroom to hold the front page. Here was a story which had everything: a colourful and notorious central character, a background rife with financial and political skulduggery, and — best of all — the Vatican connection.
Aurelio Zen read the reports as his taxi crawled through the dense traffic, making so little progress that at times he had the impression that they were being carried backwards, like a boat with the tide against it. He had bought La Stampa, his usual paper, as well as La Repubblica, II Corriere della Sera, and, for a no-holds-barred view, the radical II Manifesto. Each served up the rich and spicy raw materials with varying degrees of emphasis and presentation, but all began with a resume of the affair so far which inevitably centred on the enigmatic figure of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti, an inveterate gambler and playboy but also a pillar of the establishment and a prominent member of the Knights of Malta. Unlike the vast majority of the Italian aristocracy — most notoriously the so-called ‘Counts of Ciampino’ created by Vittorio Emanuele III before his departure into exile from that airport in 1944 — the Ruspantis were no parvenus. The family dated back to the fifteenth century, and had at one time or another counted among its members a score of cardinals, a long succession of Papal Knights, a siege hero flayed alive by the Turks, the victim of a street affray with the Orsini clan and a particularly gory uxoricide.
After unification and the collapse of the Papal States, one junior member of the Ruspantis had sensed which way the wind was blowing, moved to the newly emergent power centre in Milan and married into the Falcone family of textile magnates. The others remained in Rome, slowly stagnating. Ludovico’s father, Filippo, had succumbed to the febrile intoxications of Fascism, which had seemed for a time to restore some of the energy and purpose which had been drained from their lives. But this drunken spree was the Ruspantis’ final fling. Filippo survived the war and its immediate aftermath, despite his alleged participation in war crimes during the Ethiopian campaign, but the peace slowly destroyed him. The abolition of papal pomp and ritual in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was the last straw. Prince Filippo took to his bed in the family palazzo on Lungotevere opposite the Villa Farnesina, where he died anathemizing the ‘antipope’ John XXIII who had delivered the Church into the hands of the socialists and freemasons. Lorenzo, the elder of Filippo’s two sons, had been groomed since birth for the day when he would become Prince, but in the event he survived his father by less than a year before his Alfa Romeo was crushed between an overtaking truck and the wall of a motorway tunnel. And thus it was that Ludovico, to whose education and character no one had given a second thought, found himself head of the family at the age of twenty-three.
The young Prince appeared at first a reassuring clone of his late brother, doing and saying all the right things. As well as joining such exclusive secular associations as the Chess Club and the Hunting Club, he also put himself forward for admission to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, like every senior Ruspanti for the previous four hundred years. He hunted hard, gambled often, and busied himself with running the family’s agricultural tenuta near Palestrina. His political and social opinions were reassuringly predictable, and he expressed no views on the controversial reforms instituted by John XXIII, or indeed on anything else apart from hunting, gambling and running the aforementioned country estate. The only thing which caused a raised eyebrow among certain ultras was the reconciliation with the family’s mercantile relatives in Milan. This event, which most people considered long overdue, unfortunately came too late for the Falcone parents, who had paid the price of their high industrial and financial profile by falling victim to the Red Brigades, but Ludovico went out of his way to cultivate his cousins Raimondo and Ariana — to such an extent, indeed, that malicious tongues accused him of having conceived an unhealthy passion for the latter, a striking girl who had never fully recovered from her parents’ death. Such improprieties, however, even if such they were, occurred a world away, in the desolate, misty plains of Lombardy. Where it mattered, in the salons of aristocratic Rome, Ludovico’s behaviour seemed absolutely unexceptionable.
Nevertheless, as the years went by the family’s financial situation gradually began to slide out of control. First sections of the country estate were sold off, then the whole thing. Palazzo Ruspanti was next to go, although Ludovico managed to retain the piano nobile for the use of himself and his mother until she died, when he sold up and moved to rented rooms in the unfashionable Prenestino district. Friends and relations were heard to suggest that marriage to some suitably endowed young lady might prove the answer to these problems. Such things were a good deal rarer than they had been a hundred years earlier, when a noble title counted for more and people were less bashful about buying into one, but they were by no means unheard of.
Ludovico, though, showed no interest in any of the potential partners who were more or less overtly paraded before him. This indifference naturally added fuel to the rumours concerning his love for Ariana Falcone, whose brother Raimondo had recently and quite unexpectedly achieved fame as a fashion designer. Other versions had it that Ruspanti was gay, or impotent, or had joined that inner circle of the Order of Malta, the thirty ‘professed’ Knights who are sworn to chastity, obedience and poverty — cynics joked that Ludovico would have no difficulty with the final item, at any rate. Then there was the question of where all the money had gone. Some people said it had been swallowed by the Prince’s cocaine habit, some that he had paid kidnappers a huge ransom for the return of his and Ariana’s love-child, while others held that the family fortune had gone to finance an abortive monarchist coup d’etat. Even those who repeated the most likely story — that Ludovico’s inveterate love of gambling had extended itself to share dealing, and that his portfolio had been wiped out when the Wall Street market collapsed on ‘Black Monday’ — were careful to avoid the charge of credulous banality by suggesting that this was merely a cover for the real drama, which involved a doomsday scenario of global dimensions, involving the CIA, Opus Dei and Gelli’s P 2, and using the Knights of Malta as a cover.
Thus when word spread that Ruspanti had taken refuge with the latter organization following his disappearance from circulation about a month earlier, the story was widely credited. The official line was that Ruspanti was wanted for questioning by a magistrate investigating a currency fraud involving businessmen in Milan, but few people were prepared to believe that. Far larger issues were clearly at stake, involving the future of
