disappeared. Abandoning the inquisitive tourist in mid-sentence, he clattered down the steel ladder leading to the precipitous stairway, crazily slanted and curved like a passage in a nightmare, which led down to the roof of the basilica. The cupola was riddled with such corridors and stairs, but most had been sealed off, and those open to the public were clearly signposted so as to send visitors on their way with the minimum of delay or confusion. There was nowhere to get lost, nowhere to hide. Minutes after leaving the lantern, Grimaldi was down in the nave of St Peter’s, and knew that he had lost the man he had been given strict orders to keep in view at all costs.
It was clear what had happened. The whole thing had been carefully set up. While the Vigilanza man’s attention was distracted by the supposed Comunione e Liberazione truant, Ruspanti had been whisked away by his female companion. They could be anywhere by now. Grimaldi wandered disconsolately around the basilica, where preparations for the evening Mass were in progress. He was merely postponing the moment when he would have to report back to headquarters and reveal his failure. Then he caught sight of the woman in the grey tweed coat and white silk headscarf, and began to feel that everything might turn out all right after all. When the man in the suede jacket turned up a few minutes later, he felt sure of it. The two did not look at each other, but they were aware of each other’s presence. They were a unit, a team. Only Ruspanti was still missing, but Grimaldi now had no doubt that the Prince would also reappear in due course.
And indeed he had, although not in quite the manner the Vigilanza man had imagined. It certainly wasn’t the perfect outcome, from his point of view, but on the other hand it could have been worse. Rather than going on bended knees to Luigi Scarpione, his boss, and admitting that he had fallen for a trick which shouldn’t have fooled an untrained rookie, he had found himself summoned to the Secretariat of State, no less, in the Apostolic Palace itself, next door to the pope’s private quarters, a sanctum sanctorum guarded by a hand-picked elite of the Swiss Guards, where the riff-raff of the Vigilanza were not normally permitted to set foot. Not only had he set foot there, he’d actually met the legendary Sanchez-Valdes face to face.
Normally, the special security unit to which Grimaldi belonged liaised with the Curia through the archbishop’s secretary, Lamboglia, a cold and charmless man who received minions in his anonymous office in an obscure building off Via del Belvedere, in the Sant’ Anna district. The clergy might need the likes of Grimaldi to do their dirty business, but that didn’t give him entry to a society which had almost as little time for laymen as for women. However, the implications of Ruspanti’s death were so dramatic that this caste system had been temporarily suspended, and on this occasion Grimaldi was received not just by Lamboglia but by Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valdes himself. By all accounts, it was this Latin American who more or less ran the domestic side of the Holy See’s affairs, leaving His Eminence the Cardinal Secretary of State at liberty to devote himself to the complexities of foreign policy.
Unfortunately Grimaldi was unable to savour this exceptional honour as fully as it deserved, since he was preoccupied with the delicate question of deciding exactly how much of the truth to reveal. The aim was no longer simply to disguise his own incompetence. There was more at stake than that. Once the initial shock of the horror he had witnessed had worn off, Grimaldi had dimly begun to perceive possibilities of personal advantage which took precedence even over his innate desire to impress his superiors. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was going to exploit them, never mind how, but in the meantime he wanted to keep all his options open, and that meant not giving too much away.
In the event, his performance seemed to have gone down quite well. Sanchez-Valdes had accepted that Grimaldi’s inability to keep track of Ruspanti’s movements had been due to circumstances beyond his control, namely the press of tourists in the dome of St Peter’s that day. No attempt had been made to reprimand or punish him. Grimaldi was just congratulating himself on his success, when he was called back from the antechamber where he had been sent to kick his heels and introduced to a newcomer, a man he had never seen before. Slightly taller even than Lamboglia, he had fine, slightly wavy hair and a face stretched as tautly over its bones as a drum. His angular nose and square, protuberant chin might have looked strong, but the mouth was weak and indecisive, as were the opaque grey eyes. Or so Grimaldi thought, until they turned towards him. It only lasted a moment, but he felt as though he had never been looked at before.
‘This is Dottor Aurelio Zen, a specialist investigator dispatched by the Italian authorities in response to an urgent request conveyed by the apostolic nuncio,’ Sanchez-Valdes announced. ‘He is lending us the benefit of his experience and expertise to ensure that no possible doubt remains concerning this tragic event. You are to accompany him wherever he wishes to go and to see that he is accorded total cooperation in carrying out his duties.’
Zen shook hands with Sanchez-Valdes, and was accompanied to the door by Monsignor Lamboglia. Grimaldi was about to follow when the archbishop called him back.
‘You need say nothing about the other business,’ he murmured sotto voce.
‘The surveillance?’
Sanchez-Valdes nodded.
‘Or the whereabouts of the deceased prior to today’s events. As far as our guest is concerned, Ruspanti appeared from nowhere to obliterate himself on the floor of St Peter’s. Descendit de caelis, as you might say.’
Grimaldi blushed, shocked by the levity of the reference. The archbishop flapped his right hand rapidly, urging him to join the others.
Lamboglia led Zen and Grimaldi out of the Apostolic Palace by a circuitous route which brought them out directly in St Peter’s. In the nave, workmen were shifting benches into position in readiness for Saturday’s papal Mass, but the area beyond the crossing was still sealed off by plastic tape and patrolled by two uniformed Vigilanza officials.
‘I look forward to hearing from you,’ Lamboglia told Zen, and strode off. After a brief word with the uniformed guards, Grimaldi led Zen over the tape and round the baldacchino. The body had been covered in a tarpaulin borrowed from the sampietrini, the workers responsible for maintaining the fabric of St Peter’s. Once the identity of the illustrious corpse had been established, the ambulance men from Santo Spirito hospital and the cleaning crew had been hurriedly dismissed until further notice. No one was to approach the body and nothing was to be removed or otherwise disturbed without an explicit order to that effect from the office of the Cardinal Secretary of State.
Grimaldi looked away as Zen lifted the tarpaulin to view the tangle of broken bone, unsupported flesh and extruded innards that constituted the remains of Prince Ludovico Ruspanti. He certainly didn’t appear bothered by such things, Grimaldi noted, risking a quick glimpse. Indeed, he seemed almost indecently unimpressed, this hot- shot from the Interior Ministry, squatting over the corpse like a child over a box of hand-me-down toys, lifting the odd item which looked as though it might be of interest, bending down to sniff the blood-drenched clothing and inspect the victim’s shoes.
‘Looks like he thought about slashing his wrists first,’ Zen murmured, indicating the thin red weals on the victim’s wrists. Deliberately unfocusing his eyes, Grimaldi turned his head towards the horror.
‘Preliminary cuts,’ Zen explained. ‘But he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it, so he decided to jump instead.’
Grimaldi nodded, though he could see nothing but a merciful blur.
‘We’re going to have do something about these shoes,’ added Zen.
The offending items, cheap brown suede slip-ons with an elastic vent, stood side by side on the marble flooring. Both were spotlessly clean, as was the stocking covering the victim’s left foot. The other sock was covered in rust-red bloodstains.
Grimaldi was on the point of saying something, but then he remembered that the shoes had been Scarpione’s idea. The Vigilanza boss had appeared at the scene before any of the clerics could get there. ‘Save trouble all round,’ he’d said, giving the necessary orders. Apparently he’d been wrong, but Grimaldi knew better than to get involved.
‘What about them?’ he asked.
Zen looked at him sharply, then shrugged.
‘Very well, I’ll raise it with Monsignor Lamboglia.’
The lift had been shut down for the night, so they had to walk all the way up to the roof of the basilica. They climbed the shallow steps of the spiral staircase in silence. Zen had no small-talk, and Grimaldi had decided to volunteer no information. This official from the Interior Ministry, despite his lethargic manner, might not be as easy to fool as Archbishop Sanchez-Valdes.
They found Antonio Cecchi, chief of the sampietrini maintenance men, in one of a cluster of sheds and
