Cabal - 3 Read Online Free Page A

herself up on one elbow.
    ‘Mine’s one of the old ones, with a bell.’
    They lay side by side, the hairs on their forearms just touching. The noise continued relentlessly. Eventually Tania sat up like a cat, flexing her back, and crawled to the end of the bed.
    ‘It seems to be coming from your jacket, Aurelio.’
    Zen pulled the covers over his head and gave vent to a loud series of blasphemies in Venetian dialect.
     

     
    ‘Your position here is essentially – indeed, necessarily – anomalous. You are required to serve two masters, an undertaking not only fraught with perils and contradictions of all kinds but one which, as you may perhaps recall, is explicitly condemned by the Scriptures.’
    Juan Ramón Sánchez-Valdés, archbishop in partibus infidelium and deputy to the Cardinal Secretary of State, favoured Aurelio Zen with an arch smile.
    ‘One might equally well argue, however,’ he continued, ‘that the case is exactly the opposite, and that so far from serving two masters, you are in fact serving neither .As a functionary of the Italian Republic, you have no locus standi beyond the frontiers of that state. Neither, clearly, are you formally empowered to act as an agent of either the Vatican City State or the Holy See.’
    Zen raised his hand to his mouth, resting his chin on the curved thumb. He sniffed his fingers, still redolent of Tania’s vagina.
    ‘Yet here I am.’
    ‘Here you are,’ the archbishop agreed. ‘Despite all indications to the contrary.’
     
    And just my luck too, thought Zen sourly. Like every other Criminalpol official, he had to take his turn on the night duty roster, on call if the need should arise. In Zen’s case it never had, which is why he hadn’t at first recognized the electronic pager which had sounded while he and Tania were in bed. He shifted in his elegant but uncomfortable seat. Unachieved coition made his testicles ache, a common enough sensation in his adolescence but latterly only a memory. Tania had said she’d wait up for him, but it remained to be seen when – or even whether – he would be able to return to the flat.
    On phoning in, he’d been told to report to the Polizia dello Stato command post in St Peter’s Square. The telephonist he spoke to was reading a dictated message and could not elaborate. The taxi had dropped him at the edge of the square, and he walked round the curve of Bernini’s great colonnade. As part of the Vatican City State, St Peter’s Square is theoretically off-bounds to the Italian police, but in practice their help in patrolling it is appreciated by the overstretched Vigilanza. But this is strictly the small change of police work, concerned above all with the pickpockets and the ‘scourers’, men who infiltrate themselves into the crowds attending papal appearances with the aim of touching up as many distracted females as possible. The high-level contacts between the Vatican security force and the police’s anti-terrorist DIGOS squad, set up in the wake of the shooting of Pope John Paul II, were conducted at a quite different level.
    The patrolman on duty called a number in the Vatican and announced Zen’s arrival. He then waited a few minutes for a return call, before escorting Zen to an enormous pair of bronze doors near by, where two Swiss Guards in ceremonial uniforms stood clutching halberds. Between them stood a thin man with a face like a hatchet, wearing a black cassock and steel-rimmed glasses, who introduced himself as Monsignor Enrico Lamboglia. He inspected Zen’s identification, dismissed the patrolman, and led his visitor along a seemingly interminable corridor, up a set of stairs leading off to the right, and through a sequence of galleried corridors to a conference room on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, where he was ushered into the presence of Archbishop Juan Ramón Sánchez-Valdés.
    The Deputy Cardinal Secretary of State was short and stout, with a face which seemed too large to fit his