As it happened, I remembered it well, as many a seminarian was bound to. It was when the secular world finally turned against the Church. But what occurred that long, agonizing summer a bit over a century ago had really begun in 1823 and stretched twenty-three years through the pontificates of Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI: twenty-three years of papal oppression and dictatorship in the city of Rome and throughout the Papal States, where the pope-kings reigned. Nearly a quarter of a million citizens had been put to death, or sentenced to life imprisonment, or exiled for committing political offenses—that is, for incurring the displeasure of the Church. Books were censored, people were forbidden to congregate in groups larger than three, travel was strictly curtailed, and tribunals were in session everywhere to sit in severest judgment on the accused. The trials were conducted entirely in Latin; consequently, rare was the man who understood of what he had been accused. Justice ceased to exist under these popes, and was replaced by violent caprice, the restoration by Leo XII of the Inquisition and its inhuman tortures, and popes who would not listen to the pleas of the people they ruled. Every town square was decorated with a permanent gallows, always in readiness to receive those who ran afoul of the Church.
Secret societies proliferated. Assassinations became a way of life. And when the people of Bologna, for example, revolted, they were brutally suppressed. Austrian troops seemed always to be responding to a pope’s call, crossing the borders of the Papal States to practice the arts of war on the rebellious citizenry. But the tide of history was running against the old ways, and in 1843 the people—the mob, in the eyes of the Church—took over the city of Rome.
Pius IX was elected pope in 1846 and the world he inherited was a desperate one, at least as viewed from the papal palace. Garibaldi and Mazzini were in full cry and, not long after ascending to the Throne of Peter, Pius fled Rome by night in the open carriage of the Bavarian minister, didn’t stop until he got to Naples, then scurried from one hiding place to another as the Romans proclaimed a republic, symbolically dispensed with the pope, murdered clergy, and despoiled the churches. He was finally able to return to Rome four years later, when the French Army took the city and Mazzini fled to Switzerland and Garibaldi returned to the mountains. Pius IX was back, it was true, supported by the might of a foreign power, but the fact was—and Pius knew it—that the handwriting on the wall of the Lateran Palace was finally indelible.
Pius IX had begun his reign on a wave of popularity and had responded by trying to give his people what they wanted. He expelled the Jesuits, gave the okay for publication of a popular newspaper, razed the ghetto, saw to the first use of a railway in the Papal States: he proclaimed a civil constitution—all in an effort to undo the evils of the past quarter century. But it came to nothing. History, like a runaway coach and six, ran him down. The people wanted the future, not the past, and the future lay not in being owned by the pope but in belonging to the new Italian nation.
A climax had been reached with the assassination of the pope’s prime minister, Rossi, an elegant aristocrat, on the steps of the Quirinal Palace. A crowd had gathered as Rossi left the main doors at the top of the famous steps. Halfway down, the flash of a young man’s dagger, the blade in the throat, then Rossi tumbling and the blood spurting across the steps, the mob growling with pure hatred … and above at the window of his study, Pius watching. That was an image which haunted all my years of study and which has remained, engraved on what was once my Catholic conscience.
In the past, when things of the world had encroached on the power of the papacy, there had always been worldly recourse, an army to be summoned. Silvester I, Leo III, Gregory VIII, Clement VII—they had all withstood the secular challenge by calling for one soldiery or another, but in 1869 there was nowhere left to turn, no army to call upon to save the papacy. A de facto decision had been made in the capitals of Europe: the papacy was through. The Times of London referred to “the final passing of this venerable institution.” When I first studied the period I can recall thinking in amazement, could my father know that things had ever been so bad for the Church? It didn’t seem possible that such a situation had existed without his telling me, warning me, but of course he was simply doing all he could to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Never in all the centuries since the vision had appeared to Constantine had the situation been so grave, but still Pius had a hole card and no choice but to play it. He turned to the power Jesus had conferred on Peter, the power of the spirit. In July 1869 the principle of infallibility was declared by the bishops, as well as what the Church called primacy. The pope was now incapable of error in matters of morals and faith; he must be obeyed. And as primate, his teachings and jurisdiction could not be superseded or replaced by any man or group in all Christianity. The Church had declared the man at its head the ultimate spiritual leader and authority on earth and dared anyone to deny or ignore it.
There was a hollow ring to this claim, however, and no one knew it better than Pius. While the spiritual battle might have been won, in a secular world the secular battle had been lost.
It was not merely a matter of metaphor. The battle was a fact and the French, falling back before the Prussian advance in August 1870, were leaving Rome that day, the nineteenth. General Kanzler’s army of fewer than four thousand was all that stood between the integrity of the last pope-king and General Cadorna’s Italian national army of sixty thousand men less than a day’s march from the walls of Rome. Pius, with nowhere to turn, ordered only a token resistance, then surrender.
King Victor Emmanuel, leading his new nation, had won. Rome would be capital of all Italy. On the twentieth, at sunrise, the Italian cannon commenced firing.
Fewer than five hours later the white flag flew from the dome of St. Peter’s.
In October a plebiscite was held throughout the Papal States. The votes cast in favor of joining the Italian republic numbered 132,681. There were only 1,505 against. In the spring of 1871 the Italian parliament guaranteed the pope’s sovereignty over his reduced world, which would henceforth consist of the Vatican, the Lateran, and the summer home at Castel Gandolfo. Pius bitterly responded then and for the rest of his life: “We will be a prisoner.”
Not until 1929, when Pius XI reached his accommodation with Benito Mussolini with the signing of the Lateran Pacts, was the Church free once more to operate at will in the worlds of power, finance, and politics.
Sandanato’s tiny gold lighter flared; I smelled the Gauloise, felt the blown smoke brush my face.
“Violence is nothing new,” he said, “we both know that. Violence in the Church exercised considerable fascination for your sister. Or so I was told by His Eminence. We’ve always suffered it, but now it’s running amok, isn’t it? And we can’t identify the enemy. You see, we’ve always known in the past who the enemy was. But now we have three freshly dead and we’re afraid and there’s no army to call upon to come crashing in to save us … those days are gone. Here we are, all alone, unarmed, in a darkening world.” I sensed that despite the somber words he was smiling sadly. He seemed to relax when the subject was violence. Maybe he just wanted it out in the open. We were in the middle of murder. He lifted his brandy glass. It was nearly four o’clock, the morning of my sister’s funeral, and I was finally tired, ready for sleep.
“Confusion to our enemies,” he said.
I looked at him sharply. “You can say that again, pal.”
My sister’s funeral passed me by in a foggy blur of activities I performed by rote. It was all happening at one remove from me. I played my part, and rather to my surprise I carried it off all right. Not bad, since I was up to my eyeballs in eagle-eyed Catholics and precious ritual and their half-cocked celebratory mass. I’d always wondered what it really was they were celebrating at the funeral mass. Of course I got the stock answer, all about celebrating the life of the late departed guest of honor. For nearly a quarter of a century all that had struck me as a crock of the best. Never more so than at my mother�
��s funeral. Not my idea of a cause for celebration, poor and lonely and ultimately demented wench she was.
Val’s funeral was different. Hers was a life worth celebrating, a death worth avenging.
Peaches said the mass at the little church over in New Pru. We’d kept the crowd down, maybe fifty or sixty, most of them drawn from the ranks of the mighty, mightier, and mightiest. The President’s representative, a couple of governors, three senators, some cabinet members and lawyers and fixers and all the rest of the riffraff who are determined to believe they make the world go round. There were five or six television crews held at bay by the state police. We did our best, Margaret and Father Dunn and Sister Elizabeth and I, to keep it under control, but it was still tinged with the stains of the “media event.”
I’d never seen Peaches at work before, and I was impressed. It had to be an ordeal for him. The smell of the incense—so well remembered across the years—filled the place. The casket gleamed dully, like burnished gold, and they went through all the rigmarole I recognized from years before. I received communion, first time in all those years, and it was all different—no kneeling at the altar rail the way it used to be, and receiving not only the host but the blood of Christ as well. Maybe the differences made it easier. It didn’t seem real. For God’s sake, it was my little sister up there.
I delivered the eulogy: the surviving brother and all. From the occasional sniffles and at other moments the smiling, nodding heads, I judged it a success. I kept my remarks at arm’s length from my own emotions. Val would have enjoyed it, my kind and sanctimonious words, a joke between us, like so many others. I couldn’t have managed it any other way. I would not have chosen this particular crowd to view my bared soul. When it was over, there was a hymn and the mourners were filing out and the show was pretty much done for.
Val was buried in the graveyard attached to the little church. The gravestones went back a long way. And there was a Driskill family plot. My mother lay there, my father’s parents. Now Val. There was plenty of room for my father and me. No big monuments for us: just stern headstones. Our work, my father used to say, would be our monument. It always made me think of the poem, “Ozymandias,” which I’d memorized at school. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair …
The wind was angry and cold, cutting through us, and I was damned if I’d stand there with my teeth chattering and tears freezing on my face while I watched the box disappear into the earth. I was already bothered by the irrational hatred of her being laid to rest, buried: the hatred coming from the childish but nonetheless powerful notion that it was in fact the conscious, living Val stuck out there in the cold, dark nights to come. I left the small group of close family friends who’d hung around for the final act of the day’s drama and strolled away on my own. Sister Elizabeth and Margaret Korder were stuck with them.
I found myself under the dark gray clouds standing at the black iron railing marking the edge of the cemetery proper. But beyond the railing was a small cluster of overgrown markers. I opened the gate and went through. I’d never noticed those sorry little gravestones before, but now something—my subconscious, or maybe fate—drew me toward them.
Father Vincent Governeau’s grave was covered over with thistle and crabgrass, the stone flat on the ground, his name and the dates small, hardly visible—1902–1936. He wasn’t allowed a grave in consecrated ground.
I must have been standing there longer than I’d realized because Sister Elizabeth had finished up at the graveside and come to join me. She knelt down to inspect what had caught my attention. She was wearing a modified version of the Order’s old traditional habit, one she’d found in Val’s closet. Seeing her in it had thrown me at first. She looked like someone else, someone in costume. When she saw the name on the marker her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God!”
“Poor son of a bitch,” I said. “You can imagine the kind of burial he got from the good fathers of the Church. Swept his whole life under the rug, dropped him down a hole, and pretended he’d never lived at all. Because he was a suicide. When in fact he was murdered. Sister, he belongs inside the cemetery, not out here in the nether regions.…”
Walking back across the graveyard, she took my arm. “You were very good up there, Ben. Val would have been—”
“In stitches. Don’t kid yourself.”
“You were very good, nonetheless. She’d have been proud.”
“You want to hear something funny?”
“What?”
“I don’t even remember what I said.”
“Oh, Ben. If you were half as tough as you act, I’d hate you.”
“Then don’t look too close, my dear. Val knew the truth about me. That’s why she left the snapshot.”
“I wonder …”
“Val spent her whole life fighting for what she believed was right. Get on her wrong side and you’d find out she was an avenging angel. She was a whole lot tougher than I am.”
“Maybe I never really knew her—”
“You knew her. You knew her. Better to admit that to yourself. Now, you’d better prepare yourself for all the hoopla at the house.”
“Did you see Sister Mary Angelina?”
“I didn’t see much of anything.”
“She said she came directly from your father. He wanted her to come back and tell him how it went—”
“What is this, Sister? A November and December romance?”
The house was packed full of people I knew vaguely. I doubted if Val would have known more than one in ten: they were my father’s friends and cronies. The banking community, the CIA pensioners list, Princeton University, presidential aspirants of both then and now, the Church, the law—they were all wolfing down turkey and ham and liquor like refugees from welfare. The Garritys had laid on extra staff. The whole thing was impossible.
Father Dunn was leading the immense Archbishop Cardinal Klammer from group to group like an elephant in the early stages of training. Peaches, Sam Turner, some other locals, were trying not to gawk at all these veterans of Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Sister Elizabeth was assisting Margaret Korder, a pair of ringmasters keeping the circus going.
But the man I was looking for wasn’t there.
The library was off limits for the day. I knew that was where I’d find him.
Drew Summerhays was standing by a window in the book-lined room, thumbing through a first edition of Ashenden that Somerset Maugham had inscribed to my father. Summerhays had introduced them one summer at Cap d’Antibes and they’d hit it off, two of a kind.
He looked up from the book when I came in. He smiled at me with his thin-lipped, bloodless mouth. He was spare as a hoe handle and wore a charcoal-gray suit and vest, a Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold chain-Harvard, of course—the scarlet thread of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole, highly polished black cap toes from Jermyn Street, a black knit tie, a white shirt, a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand. The lawyer. He was a man who played in a league of one anymore.
“Did I ever tell you that Maugham is my favorite author, Ben?”
“Why, no, I don’t believe you ever did.”
“Willie had quite a stammer, y’know. I had a similar affliction as a boy. I cured mine, he cured his. Effort of will. Good a reason as any to make him my favorite writer. Your father was fond of Willie. They used to swap spy stories. Two different wars, of course. What’s the latest on your father, Ben?”
“Putting up a good front. He’s going to make it, Drew. Quite a scare.”
“Your father’s a hard man to scare.”
“I meant me. I was scared. I’m very easy to scare.”
“You and your father,” he mused, then let the phrase drop. He believed my father and I were, beneath it all, birds of a feather, more alike than either of us cared to admit. He’d said so frequently in the past. “So you’re easy to scare. You sound like a man indulging in false modesty. Or a man trying to set me up, you rascal.”
“Just a curious
rascal. I was looking for you, Drew.”
“I came in here to get away from the crowd. Funerals and the gathering that follows—I’m too much aware that I’ll be the main attraction someday soon. Poor darling Val. What a sorry day this is—”
“Were you one of her supporters?”
“I know too much to support anyone in the sense you mean. I wished her well. I respected her views. And on occasion I raised money for her work.”
“So who killed her, Drew?”
“First you have to find out why, Ben. Then who follows.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Why did someone kill my sister? Did she die for her views on the Church?”
“I shouldn’t think so—not for her philosophical attitudes, nor even for her attempts to implement them. But that’s only one man’s opinion. One would have to take an extraordinarily close look at Val’s life … looking for the why. It’s there for the one who looks assiduously. But you must have given all this rather a lot of thought over these past few days. You look at things like a lawyer, you’ve no choice, have you? Gathering evidence, building a case, rebuilding the elephant.” He saw the puzzlement on my face. “You know what Rodin said when they asked him how he would sculpt an elephant. He said he’d start with a very large block of stone and remove everything that wasn’t an elephant. Well, what you have is a floor covered with the chips of Val’s life. Fit them all together and you’ll see the outline of a killer. Val will be gone but you’ll know the killer.” He turned and replaced the book on the shelf.
“I want to know about Curtis Lockhardt. And Heffernan. They were singled out to die along with Val. Val was thinking about leaving the Order to marry Lockhardt—”
“Forget Heffernan, Ben. He got killed because of Lockhardt. By himself he was exactly what he liked to call himself—just another mick priest on the make. Get me my coat, Ben. Let’s take a walk. Let’s talk about the late Mr. Lockhardt.”
The Assassini Page 16