The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  I leaned over and pressed my cheek to his. He felt warm and dry and had a bit of stubble which may have explained some of the grayness. “Take my hand, Ben,” he said, and I did. “You’re a difficult chap, Ben. You know that. Difficult. Always will be, I suppose.” I leaned back and told him I looked upon my nettlesome nature as part of my charm. “You would, you would,” he said.

  “You’ll be delighted to know that the pope’s emissary is waiting outside.”

  “Oh, my God, am I that bad off?”

  “He’s come for Val, too. A doubleheader.”

  “Ben, you’re a sacrilegious man. A sinner, I’m afraid.”

  “He won’t go away until you see him, you know.”

  “I suppose. Well, Ben, have you satisfied yourself that I’m still alive and kicking?” I nodded. “Don’t be such a stranger. I’ve been wondering when you’d come by.”

  “They told me you were in a coma.” I smiled at him. “So you’re lucky I came at all.”

  “Just my luck.” He grinned weakly.

  “So who’s this private, personal nun you’ve got hanging around?”

  He shook his head. “Water, Ben. Please.”

  I held the plastic pitcher while he sipped through the straw. Then he said, “Let’s get the pope’s man in here. I’m damn tired. Come see me again, Ben.”

  “I will,” I said. I was almost out of the room when he spoke again.

  “Ben … is there any word on the killer? Val, Lockhardt, Andy—they catch anybody?”

  I shook my head. “Same gun, though. Same killer.”

  He closed his eyes. I went back to the waiting room.

  Sandanato was smoking a cigarette, staring out into the courtyard of the old redbrick building. Rain verging on sleet was falling again, and lights had come on in the gathering darkness. He had napped but didn’t look any more rested for it. He was a long way from Rome and looked every mile of it. “He’s awake,” I said. “You’d better grab the chance.”

  He caught my eye, nodded, stubbed out the cigarette, and headed down the corridor.

  Elizabeth came back to the waiting room, the elderly nun from my father’s room beside her. The contrast was striking. The older woman, I was sure, could not imagine being a nun and living Elizabeth’s life. Elizabeth looked at me, spoke to the nun. “So you must know this badly lapsed specimen.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. Her face was so fine in bone structure and texture, she might have been a piece of old porcelain whom age had made only more valuable. Her hair was hidden, of course, her face framed with white. She was so handsome now, I thought how beautiful she must once have been. It was always my luck to find the pretty ones. Those with warts on their noses and beards on their chins I seemed always to forget. “I’ve known Ben for forty years.” There was mischief in her eyes. “But he seems to have forgotten me.”

  It came to me in the nick of time, a flicker of memory.

  “Forget you? Sister Mary Angelina? The very idea! Sister Mary Angelina got me through my very first crisis of faith.”

  Elizabeth said, “Too bad she couldn’t have followed you around for the rest of your life, picking you up each time you stumbled.” She smiled sweetly, eyes flashing.

  “Whatever do you mean, Benjamin?” Sister Mary Angelina fixed me with a look of utter curiosity. “What am I forgetting?”

  “One day at school I got fed up with the whole business. You took a ruler to my knuckles and I ran away, hid in the school yard, then I made a break for it and you nabbed me. I figured the jig was up and I was really going to get it … but instead you put your arms around me, patted me, and told me everything was going to be all right. I’ve never quite gotten over it. And I’ve never quite understood what was going on. So, you may be sure I won’t forget you, Sister.”

  “Isn’t it odd,” she said, “I don’t remember it at all. Not a bit of it. Still, I’m nearly seventy, and maybe I’m beginning to lose a marble or two.”

  “I suppose it was all in a day’s work for you.”

  “Well, one does have so many pupils over the years.”

  “I didn’t know you knew my father so well.”

  “Your father and your mother. Yes, we were always friends. I was visiting Mrs. Francis the day your father was stricken and you brought him in—it was such a shock. Your father, well, one just expects men like Hugh Driskill to go on and on and on.” She searched my eyes, then turned to Elizabeth. “Some men are like that. It’s as if they lack the mortality gene … but of course we’re all in the same boat when it comes to that, aren’t we?” She sighed through a nice fixed nun’s smile. “Ben, it’s good to see you. And you have my deepest sympathy. Sister Valentine, she was such a dear child. But at least your father is coming along very nicely. You will, all of you, be in my prayers.”

  Sister Elizabeth tugged at my sleeve when we were alone, and when I looked at her she was smiling at me shyly. At just that moment I wondered what I’d be doing without her there.

  “Val used to tug at my sleeve,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.” She dropped my sleeve.

  “No,” I said. “I liked it. It felt … right.”

  “Are you going to behave yourself now?” Her voice was so soft.

  “Why start now?” I said. “It’s much too late for that.”

  We were in the car when a thought crossed my mind.

  “Sister Mary Angelina,” I said. “I wonder if she knew Father Governeau? If she was around back then and if he liked the ladies, she might have known him. Or is that stupid?”

  “I wonder,” she said.

  She wouldn’t let me sleep. She burned a hole in my night, in the darkness, in the very idea of rest. I closed my eyes and there she was, her face, almost as if she were coming to me in a dream. But it was no dream. I was wide awake and that was just the way Val wanted it.

  It was as if she’d given me the days to weather the shock of her death. Now she was coming to me and meaning business. So much for grieving, she as much as yelled at me. Now, big brother, what are you going to do about it? Some miserable bastard blows the back of my head off, what are you going to do about that? In my mind she wasn’t taunting me, she wasn’t playing games: she wanted an answer. She was a creature full of action, ready to go. And I’ve done my part, she was saying to me, I’ve taken the risks, I’ve gotten myself killed for my trouble, and I’ve left you enough clues to stock a mystery story.… I’ve raised the issue of Father Governeau and I hid the picture in the drum.… Now, for God’s sake, pick up the ball and run with it.… Oh, big Ben, why can’t I get through to you, you’re such a goof.… Be brave for me, Ben, raise holy hell!

  Along about midnight, with the house asleep, I’d had just about enough of my dear dead sister. Even her ghost was noisy. I should have known it would be. In death she was alive as ever, insistent, determined. I got up and slipped into a robe. She wasn’t going to leave me alone and I was talking to myself when she interrupted me. You’re burying me tomorrow, Ben, you’re burying me … then I’ll really be gone, gone, gone for good.…

  “Don’t pull that on me,” I muttered. “I’ll never be free of you, little sister, and we both know it and wouldn’t have it any other way.” I could hear her calling me a goof, fading away.

  I needed some brandy. Maybe it would help me sleep, or put Val to sleep, if she were—as a ghost—some projection of my own psyche. I went downstairs, hearing the house creaking and moaning in the wind, all the ghosts scuttling about.

  There was a light on in the Long Room.

  Sandanato was sitting in one of the mustard-colored leather chairs, turned with its back to the cold fireplace.

  “It’s freezing in here,” I said.

  There was a bottle of brandy on the table beside him. A snifter held in both hands rested on his chest. A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He slowly looked at me. His eyelids drooped low and his face was haggard with sleeplessness. He showed no surprise at my appearance. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “And I
’m afraid I found the brandy. Did I wake you?”

  “No, no, I couldn’t sleep either. Thinking about the funeral tomorrow. It’s going to be crazy around here. Half the mourners are expecting my sister to rise from the dead and proclaim salvation for all good Catholics, the other half are figuring she had a pact with Satan and has gone directly to eternal hellfire. More or less. My nerves are on edge.”

  He nodded. “You sound as if you have nearly as many problems as I—may I offer you some of your own brandy, Mr. Driskill?”

  “Indeed you may.” He poured a generous measure and I suggested he pour some more. “And … when.” He stopped pouring and handed me the snifter. “Thank you, Monsignor. May sleep find us in due time.” We drank to that.

  “May I ask, are you the painter? It is a remarkable work. Quite remarkable. True feeling. Spirituality.”

  For a moment I hadn’t the vaguest notion of what he meant, then he took a drag from the cigarette and waved his hand toward the end of the room. Then I saw it.

  He’d removed the sheet from the easel. There was no way, of course, that he could have known of my father’s prohibition against the viewing of his works in progress. I strained to see the canvas through the dim light cast by the table lamp.

  “My father. He’s the painter.”

  “A fine sense of theatricality. As well as a grasp of Church history. Has he ever painted any of the great monastic ruins? There are some incredibly dramatic vistas.… But this, this is very fine. You haven’t seen it before?”

  “No, actually I haven’t. He never shows us his work before it’s finished.”

  “Then it will be our secret. The vanity of the true artist.” He unfolded himself from the chair, his profile against the light. His nose had a slightly aquiline aspect. There was a faint patina of perspiration on his face though the room was so cold. “Come, take a closer look. You will, I believe, find it particularly fascinating—if you still have an eye for Catholic things.” He exhaled, a cloud of smoke obscured his features.

  “Still?”

  “Your sister once mentioned that you had spent time as a Jesuit. And then”—he shrugged—“you fell away.”

  “How delicate.”

  “Ah. I must say she put it more in the patois of the street. Your sister has—had—a very colorful grasp of idiom.”

  “I’ll bet she did. I know she did.”

  “Tell me, why did you leave the seminary?”

  “A woman.”

  “Would you say that she was worth it?”

  “Isn’t that in my dossier?”

  “Come, come. What do you mean? There is no dossier—”

  “Forget it. Just a middle-of-the-night remark—”

  “So, was this woman worth it?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps someday I’ll find an answer.”

  “Do I hear the trumpet sound regret?”

  “I think you’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick, Monsignor. I left because of the Virgin. I couldn’t buy her and all the rest of the act anymore—”

  “And you wonder now if she was a good enough reason to leave?”

  “My only regret is that I used her as an excuse. There were so many better reasons.”

  His smile had lost the edge of remoteness. “So much for autobiography. Come, look at your father’s painting.”

  We went to the easel and I turned on another lamp and there was the Emperor Constantine seeing the sign in the sky. In his forceful, primitive style, a storytelling style, my father had captured the moment that changed the history of the West for all time. Monsignor Sandanato regarded the canvas, his chin cupped in his hand, squinting through the smoke, and he began to talk as if I were no longer there, as if he were informing a heathen of what had happened a long time ago on the road to Rome. He was talking about the blood red Church.…

  The history of the Church had always been a cluttered tapestry, full of screaming faces and flayed flesh, soaked in the gore of unbridled ambition and greed and corruption, scheming and plotting and armies on the march. It had always been necessary to balance the worldliness, the evil, and the power, against the goodness, the selflessness, the faith and the hope it held out to man, the hope and promise that made an otherwise intolerable existence somehow endurable. No matter whom the Church was torturing and killing at a given moment, it was men who were doing it, men and not the faith for which the Church stood. Men were always good and bad, but the faith in the idea that Christ had died for our sins, that man in his weakness and frailty was redeemed eternally in Christ—the message of faith always tipped the scale. The good was always greater, that was what they taught us, but sometimes the issue was in doubt. More often than not, it seemed to me.

  “Until the twenty-seventh of October in the year 312,” Sandanato was saying, “it was a relatively simple, if not altogether pleasant business, being a Christian. You might be fed to a lion, or spend your life bent double shackled wrist to ankle, a pack of Roman toughs might beat you to death in an alley for the sheer sport of it, or you might find yourself crucified at the side of a Roman road to serve as an object lesson, but you certainly knew how things stood between you and the rest of the world. Wealth, power, and pleasure were evil … and poverty, faith in God, and the promise of salvation were what your existence consisted of.” This might be Sandanato’s idea of a midnight bull session, but I had to admit it carried me back. I felt strangely comfortable with it, there was no point in denying it. It was making me begin thinking like a Catholic again.

  27 October 312.

  Constantine, a German, thirty-one years old, fluent in six languages, a pagan warrior-king who ruled the West from Scotland to the Black Sea, was preparing for a crucial battle at one of Rome’s great bridges, the Milvian. As dusk came, knowing that the morning would bring the ferocity of battle, Constantine had a vision … and the world ever after was an utterly different place. In the sky, reddish-gold in the glow of the setting sun, he saw the cross of Jesus and he heard a voice, just as Paul had heard it on the road to Damascus. “In this sign you will conquer.” In the morning he joined the battle with his soldiers’ shields and their horses’ heads painted with the sign of the cross. And the battle was won. Rome was his and he had no doubt as to why. The power of Jesus had carried him to victory.

  28 October 312.

  Still drenched in sweat, spattered with blood, and caked with the muck of battle, he demanded to be taken to the Trastevere section of Rome, where a terrified little brown man was brought before him. Miltiades, the pope. Miltiades had spent his life in hiding, ever fearful of capture and the inevitable execution, and he feared the worst. He was so unlearned that he required a translator to understand Constantine’s perfect court Latin. He trembled before the tall, blond Teuton. But the message was clear. He nearly fainted as he listened.

  From now on everything would be different, new, better. Rome would be Christian. The emperor would wear a nail from Christ’s crucifixion in his crown, another would be turned into a bit for his horse so it would always be with him in battle.

  The next day Constantine and his family rode with Miltiades and his first priest, Silvester, past the stadium of Caligula and the temples of Apollo and Cybele to the cemetery atop Vatican Hill, where Constantine knelt in prayer over the bones of Peter and Paul. As the party strolled the cemetery grounds, the emperor sketched out his plans: a basilica in the name of Peter would be built here, over his remains, and Paul’s bones would be removed to that place on the road to Ostia, where he had been killed, where another basilica would be built. But that wasn’t all. Constantine was now a man with a mission. The party went to the Lateran Hill, which was covered by the palaces of the ancient Roman family of Laterani. Constantine flung open the gates: “Henceforth, this is the House of Miltiades and of every successor of the blessed apostle, Peter.”

  Fifteen months later Miltiades was dead and Silvester was pope, crowned by Constantine. Silvester, the first truly secular pope, grasped, with an acuity far beyond that of
Miltiades, the new and undeniable future of the Church. It was Silvester who forged the bond between Church and empire, thereby guaranteeing the first worldwide Church carried forth along those straight Roman roads to every corner of the vast domain. It was Silvester who heard Constantine’s confession. It was Silvester who saw that the triumph of Christ need not wait for the Second Coming. Jesus Christ could reign with the power of Rome throughout the world, governed through the offices of Peter’s successors. The Church seemed unlimited in its scope.

  “For three centuries we had barely existed in the world,” Sandanato said, “hunted and martyred and in hiding. Now Silvester had the great chance to make the Church of the world. Jesus had spoken to Constantine, converted him, and Constantine was the means of converting the rest of the world. Spiritualism was now wedded for good to wealth and pomp and force. With Constantine behind him, Silvester could now harken back to what Jesus had once said to Peter at Mount Hermon.” Sandanato stopped, looked at me, as if waiting for my Catholic memory to supply the quotation. Somehow, from the subconscious depths, it did.

  “ ‘I give unto you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven,’ ” I recited. “ ‘Whatever you allow on earth will be whatever Heaven allows. Whatever you forbid on earth will be whatever Heaven forbids.’ ”

  “Exactly,” Sandanato said. “For the first time in history the successor to Peter had some firepower anyone could understand. And of course he, along with his Church, fell prey to it. More than ever, in the centuries to come, violence haunted us, has never left us in peace.…

  “It’s the price of Constantine,” Sandanato was saying. “Once we accepted the secular power, we had to pay the secular price. With the power came the power seekers, the challengers, those who would have stripped us of our military alliances and the vast wealth at our disposal. Our history is a history of the threats made against us, the compromises we’ve had to make. But, until now, Mr. Driskill, we’ve always known who our enemies are. Even when the challenge was most drastic, we knew what was happening. You’ll of course remember that ungodly hot August of 1870 …”