The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

“Then,” I said, feeling cold and sick to my stomach, betrayed, “we have nothing more to discuss, Sister.” I told myself it was just the Catholics being Catholics. I’d let myself get too close to her. I’d let myself trust her. The old seduction.

  Father Dunn had insisted on taking her to the airport. When he came by to get her it was not a happy parting. Tight-lipped, curt nods, and she was gone. It may have been that everything she said was true and inevitable. But I didn’t want to hear it.

  If I had let her convince me, if I’d let it all end there and allowed my sister’s murder to go unquestioned, like Father Governeau’s half a century before, I could not have lived with myself. It wasn’t a question of what I wanted to do. I was facing what I had to do.

  If I didn’t, who would speak for the dead?

  I spent the rest of the afternoon working myself into a truly rotten mood. The argument with Elizabeth had whipped me: it was so sadly fundamental. I believed in the reality of what had happened to Val; for Elizabeth reality was all the rest of life—her life in Rome, her commitment to the way things were, the reality of the Church. I had hoped—hell, I had assumed—that our shared love of my sister would make us natural allies in the search for her killer. I was convinced she had led me to feel that way: I knew I hadn’t been imagining it. But I should never have assumed, not with a nun, not with one of them. Because when it came to the Church, brave talk was cheap: when the Church seemed to be involved in murder, then Sister Elizabeth had backed away.

  When Sandanato got back from New York he found me sitting looking at my father’s painting while the light slowly faded from the afternoon. I looked up as he dropped his coat on a chair and went to warm his hands at the fireplace. I told him he looked a little the worse for wear which was ridiculous coming from me. It was an English idiom he’d missed so I explained it and he nodded, slumped down in a chair with a doleful smile on his dark, haunted face.

  “Klammer,” he said, “certainly does wear one down. I don’t know how Father Dunn stands it. It’s difficult to have a conversation with the man. Nothing he says seems to follow logically from anything that went before. My brain is tired. And I’m cold. I’ve been cold ever since I got here. He made me go for a walk with him. Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the ice skaters. Beautiful. But cold.” He shivered, leaned toward the fire. “And you don’t look so wonderful yourself.…”

  “Lousy day,” I said. I needed a friend, a pal. I felt comfortable with Sandanato, which surprised me. Feeling easy with Dunn was simple: everything about him encouraged it. But the aura of tension Sandanato carried with him had kept me at a distance until now—I don’t know, maybe it was the fact that I’d been sinking back into thinking like a Catholic. Maybe I recognized that tension because I’d carried it around for so long myself.

  “Where’s Sister Elizabeth? I’ve been looking forward all day to the cocktail hour, the three of us.” I remembered what I’d said to Elizabeth. Now I wondered: did he love her?

  “She’s gone.” I saw the smile fade. “Dunn took her to Kennedy. She’s on her way to Rome.”

  “Ah. She must keep to that schedule of hers. The tyranny of her Filofax.”

  “She’s what made my day so rotten.”

  “Really? I thought the two of you were great friends.”

  “Well, not after today, I guess.” He was curious and I wanted to talk to someone, so I told him what had happened between Elizabeth and me, how she’d reacted to my determination to find out why Val had been murdered. He listened patiently, sympathetically. When I ran down and finally sat quietly staring at the fire, he took his time replying. He made us a couple of scotches with water and paced the length of the Long Room, where he stood contemplating my father’s painting of Constantine.

  “Women,” he sighed. “They do see things differently, don’t they? We are the avengers, they are the healers. It is as it should be. Sister Elizabeth wants life to go on; she sees your sister’s death as a terrible aberration. Not to be dwelt upon. You see? But a man, he must do something if his sister is killed.… I am Italian, I know how you feel … but, but, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Reason is on her side.” He shrugged expressively, resigned. “You must see that. They could kill you, that’s obvious.”

  “They? Who are they?!’

  “Who knows? I think it is possible we may never know.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m going to find out.”

  “You are very much like your sister. I can see her when I look at you, my friend. I can hear her when you speak. And like her, you are both wrong and fearless. It is a dangerous combination. She was like a keg of dynamite with a fuse lit. You are the same.”

  “You’d feel the same way I do.”

  “Yes, and you’d be telling me I had no chance. Your emotions are killing you. Think—they know you, you don’t know them. That’s really all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “My need is greater than theirs.”

  “Ah. How do you know this? You have no idea what stakes they are playing for, do you?”

  I brushed the implications aside. Logic was the last thing I wanted to hear. “What do you think about Dunn’s theory? That a priest is the killer.”

  “I confess I do not know what you Americans get up to. It’s always guns and shooting. Maybe it is some crazy priest.” The idea seemed to exhaust him.

  “It’s not a crazy priest,” I said. “There’s something bad going on inside the Church. A pustule has burst and killed three people—the Church is in trouble and somebody’s trying to solve the problem with a gun.” I decided to let my curiosity run. Elizabeth had said Sandanato was either a Vatican insider or a monk. I suspected he was both. She’d also called him D’Ambrizzi’s conscience. “What is going on inside the Church? You must know it all. The pope is supposed to be dying … you’ve got three fresh murders. Is there some connection? Is the Church tearing itself apart? Is it civil war?”

  “The Church is always tearing itself apart.” He was smoking a Gauloise, his fingers nicotine-stained, his eyes in their customary squint. A comma of black hair had fallen across his forehead and he brushed it back. Was he thirty-five? Forty? I wondered how long he would last. He looked the type to burn himself out. Elizabeth had said Val thought he was a zealot, a maniac. It didn’t seem likely: what Val had meant, no doubt, was that he disagreed with her. I was wondering what he thought of my sister when he began talking about her.

  “Your sister is a case in point,” he said. “No one could question the sincerity of her beliefs though many doubted her wisdom. But she had become a runaway train. The publicity, the books … by her nature she was the sort of person who rips and tears at the fabric of the Church. She was committed to the idea of changing the Church.”

  “I take it you doubted her wisdom.”

  “Your sister and I approached the Church differently. I was fascinated by the work of the Church, the systems of faith, by the Church as it was, as it had always been. Your sister was in her heart a humanist first, a Catholic second. I knew the Church was by nature a closed society. She believed that Church positions could or should be determined in some democratic way. I was concerned about man’s soul and the means to his salvation. She believed in the Church as a kind of mighty welfare agency, devoted to the lives of its children on earth—”

  “And you figure it’s every man for himself?”

  “The Church can do only so much,” he said, smiling, refusing to take the bait, “and foremost it must deal with questions of eternal salvation. That is, after all, the point of the Church’s existence, isn’t it? Secular governments are supposed to deal with the living conditions of their citizenry. But not the Church. And to the extent that it involves itself in such pursuits it weakens its role as moral center. The Church is not about now. It is about forever. People are prone to forget that these days; they want life better now, they want a vote … You turn to the Church with a prayer, not a vote. There are other places to vote.”


  “So you and my sister were in fundamental opposition.”

  “Don’t make too much of it,” he said. “I sometimes find myself in disagreement with my boss, Cardinal D’Ambrizzi. These days disagreement is the standard within the Church—”

  “Then you don’t think my sister was killed for her beliefs?”

  “I have no idea why she or Lockhardt or Heffernan were murdered.”

  I was thinking about Val, Sandanato, and Drew Summerhays’s description of Lockhardt at work. How could they all have been so deeply, utterly, totally involved in the same Church? It seemed to me that they were each dealing with very separate Churches of their own.

  “I’m going to find out.” I sounded like a broken record. Maybe I meant I was going to discover whose Church was the real Church … or whose Church was destined to prevail. Maybe I could stop the kaleidoscope, freeze it long enough to see the pattern clearly.

  “I must tell you then, my friend, my advice is the same as Sister Elizabeth’s. Think twice, then make yourself think again. You’ll be out of your element. And if you let it be, it will sort itself out. You’re getting into something you really have no chance of understanding.” He ground his cigarette out. “But if you’re determined, why don’t you come to Rome, fly back with me? Ask some questions, talk to Cardinal D’Ambrizzi—I understand you knew him when you were a child. I’m sure he would enjoy seeing you.”

  “Maybe my search will bring me to Rome,” I said, sounding ponderous and unable to do anything about it. “But not now. I don’t want the entire power structure of the Church telling me to butt out and mind my own business.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know how it is. The Church is very jealous of its secrets.”

  “I’m sorry, too, but I’m committed to this—”

  “We’re all involved in seeking the truth of what has happened—”

  “That’s the difference. It’s like ham and eggs. The pig’s committed. The chicken is only involved.”

  The implication dawned on him, bursting through his formal command of English, and slowly he smiled, nodding that he understood.

  Sandanato let you know where he stood. He wasn’t afraid of telling me how and why he and Val parted company. I appreciated his willingness to put me in the picture as he saw it. He was, I decided, truly a Vatican lifer. He could keep his view of the Church’s role apart from his personal relationships, yet when it counted, I was sure he’d back the Church to the hilt. The rest of the time he was happy to debate, conduct the intellectual exercise. He could blend theory and practice, balance them. After all, he was not only D’Ambrizzi’s conscience: Elizabeth had said he was also the cardinal’s chief of staff, and the cardinal was a worldly man. And in the end you could bet the house that he’d bring theory and practice together for the greater good of the Church as he saw it. Talking with him in the wake of my quarrel with Sister Elizabeth calmed me down, gave me a clearer set of bearings. I knew where he stood. But nothing changed my mind and I left Monsignor Sandanato in no doubt of that.

  We went into Princeton together and took Margaret Korder to dinner at a little French place and talked primarily about the dogged efforts of the press to get to my father and me. At least they had the murders in New York City to occupy them. Sandanato bade her farewell in the lobby of the Nassau Inn, saying he hoped he would see her next in Rome. I told her I’d see her at the house in the morning.

  It was a clear and frigid night. The moon was a silver stage prop. The stars were twinkling in the limitless depths of blue-black sky. Sandanato was leaving the next day. When we got to the house he went upstairs to pack. I was planning to visit my father the next day and tell him that I was going to track back through Val’s last weeks—that my first stop was Alexandria. I had to know what she’d done those last days in Egypt. I was contemplating my itinerary when Sandanato came back downstairs.

  He stood before me with a sheepish smile, an old pair of ice skates dangling from his hand. “I found these in the closet. I learned to skate once. I was ten and my father took us to Switzerland for a holiday. I haven’t skated since. Do you think we might go out and try it?” He looked at his watch. “Ten o’clock. I’ll probably never get another chance. And I could use the exercise. I’d sleep better.”

  It was so silly and unexpected that I jumped up and told him we could, indeed. The pond in back which was fed by the stream that circled and curled all through the countryside was frozen. I’d even noticed a couple of kids skating when Summerhays and I had taken our walk. For the first time in days I felt positively lighthearted. I found a pair of skates in a heap of old outdoor gear in the back hall, and we struck off toward the pond. This was something Val would have understood. As we walked across the crisp lawn together I could almost hear her laughing at us.

  The moon was bright, nearly full, and the pond lay like a shiny silver dollar past the black silhouettes of the orchard. The chapel looked like an old-fashioned painting with the moonlight draped over the steeple. But I tried to ignore all the associations, my sister crumpled behind the wooden pew, the tree from which a killer had hanged Father Governeau.

  We sat on the frozen ground changing from shoes to skates, laughing at ourselves, making jokes about who would be the worse skater. There was a sprinkling of dry snow blowing. My fingers were ice-cold as I fumbled with the laces, pulling them tight. The pond was relatively smooth, showing signs that the kids who’d skated the stream over from New Pru had had the foresight to bring a broom.

  We staggered upright, holding on to each other as we edged onto the ice, two ridiculous figures, him in his black overcoat and me in my trench coat, pussyfooting across the slippery smoothness, testing our ankles. Muscle memory took over. I pushed off and glided a bit, wobbly, but without falling. In a few minutes I was sweating from the unfamiliar exertion, hearing myself grunting and panting, hearing in the back of my mind Val’s distant laughter. The basic skill was coming back to me, and when I finally coasted to a stop I saw Sandanato swooping along, suddenly teetering, arms waving comically, and then he sat down hard and looked toward heaven as if pleading for divine intercession. He was slipping and sliding, trying to get up, and I tottered over to give him a hand and like two men in a silent movie we were both trapped in our clumsiness and collapsed together, sitting with our legs stretched out before us, gasping for breath, laughing. We finally managed to right ourselves. Moist white clouds were billowing from his mouth and nostrils. “Mother of God,” he muttered, “whose idea was this?” He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a pack of cigarettes and, panting, lit one, dropped the little gold lighter back into his pocket. He gave me a determined, stern-jawed look and pushed off again, managing to stay upright as his outline grew dim against the dark background.

  The dry snow was biting at my face, and I felt the sweat drying, cracking like ice. I watched him for a few moments, hoping it was as much fun as he’d expected. Then I went back to concentrating on my own endeavors, feeling my muscles stretching and relaxing, getting into the rhythm of my movements. My God, Val used to get hysterical watching me skate. She called me a trained bear. I was dripping with sweat when I chanced to see another fellow who’d come out that night to inaugurate the skating season.

  Sandanato and I were at opposite ends of the oblong pond. I could just make him out. He wasn’t so much skating as slowly, methodically, keeping from falling.

  I was skating where the mouth of the stream entered our pond. The other fellow was fifty yards away in the moonlight, skating downstream toward me, his arms gently swinging as he came. I slowed as he approached, watching him, envying him his grace. I skated some big lazy circles, proud of myself for not crashing in an ungainly heap, though I wobbled rather badly when I modified my balance to wave to the newcomer.

  He raised a hand casually in greeting. He was a much better skater, coming on steadily, the wind catching his coat and swirling it behind him. He was wearing a black fedora, and as he skated up to me I saw the moonlight flashing on the
lenses of his glasses.

  “Nice night,” I said as he came close. I was breathing hard. His face was reddened by the wind. He was an older man, his face etched with deep lines, a strong face with a strong nose, and a wide, thin mouth.

  “Yes, nice night,” he said, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t stopping, why he was coming at me. Stupidly, I thought maybe he didn’t know how to stop. And then in the last split second I knew there was something wrong.

  He was holding something in his hand, low against the folds of the black coat. It was gleaming in the moonlight.

  I turned away, toward Sandanato, who was still struggling to stay afoot a good fifty yards in the other direction, willing my legs to move, to get me some room, to get away from the man, but I wasn’t going anywhere, I was slipping and sliding like a man caught in a nightmare, overcome with terror and soaked with freezing sweat and unable to get away, and I felt his hand on my shoulder, oh God, oh Christ, he wasn’t knocking me down, he was trying to steady me … oh shit, steadying me for the gleaming blade.…

  I tried to cry out to Sandanato, may have actually done so, just as I felt it, the pain arcing across my back from under my right arm. It was a sliver of cold, clean pain, like an icicle sliding under my skin, and I felt myself falling, saw the ice rushing up to meet my face, trying to brace myself, wanting to thrash my legs, hoping to trip him, and as his hand was trying to hold me up, I heard his voice muttering under his breath, just a moment, Mr. Driskill, steady, steady, and I heard the swish of his arm as he made another sweep with the blade and I heard it ripping through the fabric of my trench coat and then I was on the ice, trying to turn over on my back but suddenly robbed of the strength to do so.…

  My face hit the ice hard and I felt my nose go, tasted a gush of blood, one eye against the ice, and with the other I saw the blades of his skates beside my face. I struggled to turn my head and I saw his face again. I was staring into the flat glass lenses, which seemed bottomless, empty, and while I looked up at him, feeling my back growing warm and wet, I saw his black fedora tip from his head in slow motion, slowly settle onto the ice, revealing silver hair combed straight back, wavy, incredibly silver in the moonlight.