When we left Pete’s we ran into Val and Sheehan and the four of us walked all the way back up Lexington to midtown, laughing and horsing around like kids. We weren’t thinking of Val as a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize. We were for a moment rediscovering childhood and pretending that everything would turn out all right in the end. But it hadn’t, and now my sister was dead.
“Ben, we’ve got to get down to cases. I loved your sister. But I haven’t cried for her yet. I don’t know what’s the matter.” Sister Elizabeth wiped the foam from her upper lip, squeezed the napkin into a tight little ball.
“Neither have I. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted us to—”
“People always say that. Maybe it’s true. Anyway, I’m too angry to cry.”
“Exactly, Sister.”
She wanted to know everything, and I told her. Lockhardt, Heffernan, Val, my father. Father Dunn and the theory of the priest killer. All of it.
“Well,” she said, “you’re right about the briefcase. It was her version of my Filofax. She took it everywhere. She had it the last time I saw her. Stuffed with papers, notebooks, Xeroxes, pens, Magic Markers, historical atlases, scissors—she kept her whole work world in that briefcase.”
I said, “They killed her, stole the briefcase. What was she working on that was so important?”
“And important to whom? What made Lockhardt and Heffernan as well as Val such threats to them?”
“What would Lockhardt and Heffernan have on their minds?”
She gave me a shocked look. “You really are out of touch with the Church! Believe me, those two guys were talking about electing the next pope. That’s the only thing anyone in Rome is talking about, and Lockhardt and Heffernan take Rome wherever they go. Who were they backing? Lockhardt always had an angle; I’ve heard people say he could tilt the scale. No kidding.”
“But where would that leave Val? Wouldn’t her support be the kiss of death for any candidate?”
She shrugged. “Depends … of course, she was so tight with D’Ambrizzi, the connection from childhood, your father and Saint Jack, all that history—”
“I don’t see her playing papal politics—”
“But it was Lockhardt’s field of play.”
“But it was Val’s briefcase.”
“True,” she admitted. “Too true.”
“Maybe Heffernan was just a bystander. Maybe Val and Lockhardt were the intended victims.”
“If that’s the case, if Lockhardt was the object, why not kill him someplace easier? Now, think about this, Ben—how did the killer even know of the appointment at the Palace? Don’t you see? We’ve got an internal proof here.” She was talking fast, making all sorts of leaps, and I was trying to keep up. “The secretary who’s so sure he was a priest? Well, she’s probably right. Who but a priest, somebody inside the Church, could possibly know about a meeting between hotshots like Lockhardt and Heffernan? Val said Lockhardt was the most secretive man in the world with the possible exception of her father. Lockhardt had to be secretive with all the stuff he was into.” She took a deep breath, rushed onward. “So you know he didn’t tell anyone about the meeting. And Heffernan, he was an old poker player, close to the vestments. No, this is an in-house job.” She stopped as if taken aback by the conclusion, an ambush of her own making. “At least murder is an old Church tradition. But somehow you think of that sort of thing as history, not something that could happen now.”
“She was scared when she called me. She wanted to talk something over with me. Peaches said she was into some pretty heavy research that worried her. You were as close to her as anyone. What was she afraid of? Did she ever give a hint?”
“The last time I saw her was in Rome. About three weeks ago. She’d been working like a madwoman. In Paris, in Rome. In the Vatican Library, the Secret Archives. Not an easy thing to arrange. She didn’t tell me what she was working on but it was old, I mean really old, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that’s all she said about it—”
“But how the hell could that get her killed? What was she doing in Paris? I thought this book was about World War Two—”
“She’d been working there all summer. She had a flat. She did come to Rome every so often, she’d dive into the Secret Archives, then go back to Paris. When I saw her last she was heading for Egypt. Alexandria. I called her the Desert Fox after Rommel, all the stuff from the war she was digging into.”
“The fourteenth century, World War Two, the hanged priest in our orchard—did she ever mention that one to you?”
“Never.”
“But she comes home with all this other stuff on her mind and the first thing she does is ask Sam Turner about that old suicide.” I felt my impatience growing and I couldn’t stop it.
“Right before she left for Egypt I was really bugging her to tell me what she was after and finally she’d had enough of my pestering her. She told me to lay off. She said I was better off not knowing. ‘Safer, Elizabeth,’ she said to me, ‘you’re safer not knowing.’ She was protecting me—but from what? Well, from getting killed, it turns out. It’s something about the Church.” She bit her knuckle, eyes narrowed. “Something inside … something so wrong—and she’s found out about it—”
“In the fourteenth century?” I asked. “Someone reaches out from the fourteenth century and kills her? Or at the other end, some nut who wants to be pope blows her away? Come on, Sister!”
“When it’s the Church, Ben, you just never know. It’s like an octopus. If one tentacle doesn’t get you, another one will. That was the title of the new book, by the way. Octopus.”
I heaved a sigh that shook the rafters. “If we only had a solid idea of what she’d uncovered, we’d have a motive. She didn’t tell you because she thought it would put you in danger. She was going to tell me but didn’t have time before they got her. But she must have told Lockhardt—”
“Or they thought she did. Same thing.”
“So maybe they think she told me. Over the phone, maybe. That’s an encouraging idea. Lockhardt and Val—how close were they?”
“I think she’d finally have left the Order and married him. He was a good man. He represented everything she needed: access, freedom to write and research, power. He was a little scary but—”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, so much influence, all the secrets he knew. I find that kind of scary. Val didn’t; she loved it. He was a big help to me, too. He provided me with an apartment in Rome, got me lots of introductions … even Cardinal Indelicato, who is very, very hard to reach. And, of course, he was so close to D’Ambrizzi.” She held up crossed fingers. “Lockhardt, D’Ambrizzi, and the cardinal’s shadowman, Sandanato. And Val. Whenever Lockhardt was in Rome, the four of them hung out together. There was really only one thing holding her back from marrying Lockhardt—”
“Father.”
“Right. She didn’t know how to handle it with him.”
“She didn’t need his blessing—”
“Ben, she wanted it!”
It was nearly two o’clock and the winds of the night were hammering at the house like the last of the hobgoblins.
She said, “How did Artie Dunn get into this, anyway?”
“By chance.” I told her about the meeting at the Nassau Inn with Peaches. “What are you making faces for?”
“Dunn. He’s a joker in any deck.”
“You know him?”
“I interviewed him once in Rome. About his novels, how they fit into his conception of the priesthood. He’s very glib and well-connected. He does this I’m-just-an-everyday-kind-of-guy routine and then D’Ambrizzi sends a limo for him. He knows all those guys. Including the Holy Father. It’s just hard for me to believe Artie Dunn does anything by chance—”
“Believe me, I met him by accident—”
“I’m sure you did. I just mean there’s a whole lot more to him than meets the eye. And I’ve never met a soul who knows what he actually does.”
; “I know. I asked him that very question earlier tonight and never did get an answer.”
We were both exhausted. We cleaned up the kitchen and I took her bag, led the way up to a guest room. I was standing in the doorway when she came across the room. “It’s good to see you, Ben. And I’m so damn sorry.” She kissed my cheek.
I closed the door and went off to bed.
After my first meeting with Elizabeth, the memory of Pete’s Tavern and Gramercy Park under the snow fresh in my mind, I’d met Val for breakfast at the Waldorf. Elizabeth wasn’t up yet. Val wondered if I’d had a good time the night before. I said that indeed I had. “Then why the long face?”
I shrugged it off. “Morning brings the harsh realities. Maybe I had too good a time last night. Maybe I resent not being able to keep it going, maybe I’m not crazy about getting older.”
“You and Elizabeth seemed to get along well.” She smiled brightly. “I’m glad. Sometimes she and I are so close it’s scary; we tune in on each other. She’s the other side of me, Ben. We each might just as easily have become the other, exchanged lives.”
“She’s beautiful. Like you.” I grinned.
“Men,” she said. “Men are always falling for Elizabeth. It’s not her fault but it’s made her wary. She’s the belle of the Rome press corps. Putting their best moves on a nun makes it all the more challenging and exciting for the boys. Drives her nuts. That’s why I’m glad she just let herself have fun last night.”
“Will she stay a nun?”
My sister took a long time before answering, nibbling at the crusty pointed tip of a croissant. “Will any of us stay? That’s the real question, Ben. We’re the first of the new nuns. No real connection to the old ways. We choose to live in the world but not by the world’s rules. We’re activists in one way or another and none of us’ really knows if, or for how long, the Church will find us digestible. We give all those bureaucrats in the curia ulcers. We’re forcing the Church to change, we aren’t subtle, we push hard … but the Church can always push back. If they get sufficiently pissed off, we’d better look out. Anyone who gets in the way of the grand strategy—whatever it is—had better look out.”
“What about you? Will you stay?”
“Depends on the pressure, doesn’t it? You got a bellyful and left. My gut feeling is that Elizabeth will stay. She thinks in terms of what is right, she believes in the essential goodness of the Church’s aims—but me? I don’t know. I lack her intellectual commitment, her philosophical involvement. I’m a troublemaker, an egotistical little twerp, a hell raiser. If they let me stay the way I am, sort of a squeaky wheel—well, then, I might stay a nun until I die.” For some reason she reached out and took my hand, as if she were consoling me in some grief she knew awaited me. I told her to eat her eggs before they got cold because I was paying roughly ten dollars an egg. Later on I kissed her good-bye and went back to my office on Wall Street.
We give the curia ulcers. We’re forcing the Church to change, we aren’t subtle, we push hard … but the Church can always push back. If they get sufficiently pissed off, we’d better look out. Anyone who gets in the way of the grand strategy—whatever it is—had better look out.…
I came out of my dreams and memories of Val and Elizabeth, struggled back to the surface. It was six o’clock, dark, windy. Drafts everywhere. I pulled the covers up under my chin. I’d been half dreaming about Val, hearing her voice from the past, and it had pushed me back to the present. Someone had pushed back all right. The fear I’d heard in her voice when she called me made me think it—whatever it was—was even worse than she’d expected.
Were all the answers in the Vuitton briefcase?
If it was so damned important, and if she’d been afraid they—they—were after her, then why did she let them get it? Why didn’t she make it safe somehow?
There was a logical inconsistency in my reading of Val’s behavior. She’d known she was in danger. She must have known she had some kind of dynamite in her briefcase. Val was not an innocent in any sense of the word. She knew how the games were played. She must have discovered where the bodies were buried.… Yet she let them get the briefcase.
She must have left an insurance policy. In case of her death, her murder, the loss of the briefcase—
I sat up like a madman. Of course! She needed a hiding place, a place the bad guys would never look.
I was out of bed and into my old plaid robe, shivering, stubbing my toe on the bureau, fumbling for the lights.
The playroom!
It smelled musty and empty, the shades pulled down, a bit of wallpaper hanging askew. The door swung open like a portal to memory. I could almost see Val, in a short, high-waisted dress and Mary Janes and white socks, in the corner where she kept her books and paints. I’d have been there, too, messing around with my Official All-Star Baseball Game, spinning the pointer on the Joe DiMaggio card, telling her to stop bothering me.…
There was a rustling, skittering noise somewhere in the shadows. A squirrel shot across the floor, peered into the empty fireplace, then disappeared behind some boxes of Val’s things in her favorite corner between the bookcase and window. I turned on the light overhead. The shadowy shapes were revealed as a pedal car modeled on the old Buick, a couple of bicycles, a blackboard, stacked boxes of books, the large bass drum which had appeared one Christmas. Val had beat hell out of it, an ungodly din. Then she’d found a better use.
I crossed the room, knelt on the dusty floor beside the drum. Someone had been there before me. She had left something in her old hiding place, where it would be safe.
The dust was thick on the edges of the drum but the side panel with the grinning clown had been wiped clean. I couldn’t get my fingertips under the panel, so I used the sand shovel from a beach pail set, pried it loose, knocked the damn thing over, made a hell of a racket. But the panel came loose.
I stuck my arm in and felt my hopes take a nosedive.
The space was empty.
But it couldn’t be. She’d been here. She’d knelt beside the drum, she’d left her smudged fingerprints in the dust. She’d used the old hiding place—
Then I found it.
It fluttered down from a crevice where it had been stuck. I nearly brushed it away, thinking it a relic of childhood. But I brought it out of the drum instead.
“What are you doing? Drum practice?”
Sister Elizabeth stood in the doorway. She was wearing baggy striped pajamas, rubbing her eyes, yawning.
“I’m starved,” she said. She was peering into the refrigerator, conducting inventory. “Eggs. Ham, turkey, gorgonzola, onions, butter. This may add up to something. English muffins.” She gazed around the kitchen. I’d given her an old robe of mine. She’d added a pair of Val’s knee socks to the ensemble. She spotted the omelet pan hanging on a hook. “Ah, apples. I’ll chop up some apples, too.” She smiled at me. “Surely you know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and no, I don’t eat this way at home.” She started cracking eggs. “It’s all in the wrist. Like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. So what do you make of it?”
I sat at the kitchen table staring at the snapshot I’d found in the drum. Very old, yellowed and cracked, like something of my father and mother taken at Lago Maggiore in ’36. Only it wasn’t my father and mother. It was a photograph of four men. The tiny trademark on the back of the paper was in French. It was a memory from someone else’s photo album.
“Doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Four guys at a table a long time ago. Looks like a club—brick walls, candle in a wine bottle, lots of shadows—a Left Bank cave. Four guys.” She was chopping onions and apples on the thick board. She was good at it. Fast. I didn’t see any bloodstains. She craned over to take another look at the photo.
“Five.”
“Four,” I said.
“I’ll bet another pal took the picture.” She looked at me and I nodded. “And you do know one of them. The one next to the fourth man. No way to tell the fourth man, we
get mainly the back of his head. But number three, reading left to right, is in profile. Take a close look. Recognize that schnozzola?”
She was right, it was familiar, someone I should have known. But I couldn’t quite place it.
“Well,” she said, “I have the advantage of seeing him rather frequently, a nose like that one doesn’t change.” She had finished chopping. I smelled the butter in the pan. The boiling water was dripping through the coffee in the Chemex, the aroma filling the room. She was whisking half a dozen eggs and a shot of water in a bowl. “It is an early version of Father Giacomo D’Ambrizzi.”
“Of course! No mustache—he had a thick black bandit’s mustache when Dad brought him home after the war. I’d never seen anything like it outside of a Cisco Kid movie. You’re so smart, what’s the point of the picture?”
“I’m only the cook.” She was sautéing the onions and apples in the butter. She had her back to me, working like a professional. “But we know one thing for sure. It is one important picture. She hid it from everyone in the world … but the two of us.”
“Well, it means nothing to me,” I said. “And she never knew I knew about the drum, she couldn’t know I’d look for it there—”
“You’re wrong. Val told me a lot about you, about the time you found the black powder in the basement—”
“You’re kidding!”
“She told me about the famous feet of clay, she told me how she’d hide your Christmas present in the drum, she told me that you’d figured out the drum was her hiding place, but she never let on to you that she knew you knew. She used to put stuff in there that she wanted you to find—it was like a game, Ben. You were the older brother who played tricks on her, but this was one she could play on you—” She stopped short. “Ben, she put that snapshot there for you to find in case anything happened to her. And you found it. It’s the key.” She turned back to the stove, poured the eggs into the pan.
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