The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Then he picked up the hat and he wasn’t there anymore. I heard the silky whisper of the blades as he skated away. It had all taken ten seconds, and I couldn’t seem to make myself move, and then poor Sandanato was panting and struggling toward me, reached me on his knees. I saw a tear in the trouser knee, and I heard him saying Can you hear me, can you hear me? and I kept answering him and he couldn’t seem to hear me at all, and then his voice was growing fainter and fainter and then it was gone and I felt my face freezing against the smooth ice.…

  1

  The blues.

  That’s what her mother had called them. Elizabeth had never been one for falling prey to them—she was too active for that, too busy with the external world—but when they reached out and grabbed her on the 747 back to Rome she recognized them for what they were. The blues.

  They had nothing to do with the shock and sorrow of Val’s death. You could do your best to deal with all that. Your religious training helped you fight that. But the blues got under your skin, seeped into your bloodstream in a way that the Church and faith and discipline couldn’t stop them, got hold of you when you weren’t paying attention, and then it was too late. Then there was hell to pay.

  It was the little girl on the plane who gave it a shape she could identify. The little girl in the seat ahead of her, six or seven years old, peering over the top of the seat at her in the darkened cabin. They might have been the only two passengers who weren’t asleep. The little girl with huge shining dark eyes and a short broad nose and a very solemn mouth and a blue and gold ribbon tied around her ponytail: it was the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, and Elizabeth felt the eyes staring at her.

  Elizabeth smiled into the solemn face which came alive. She rested her chin on the back of the headrest. “My name is Daphne. My father calls me Daffy. I’m whispering because I don’t want to wake my mother. What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “My mother is a light sleeper. So I have to be quiet and tiptoe and stuff. Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Me, too.” The little head nodded knowingly. “I was thinking about my friends. I’ll see them tomorrow. What were you thinking about?”

  “Friends, same as you.”

  “Will you see them tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Do you live in Rome?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “We have a house in Chicago but my daddy works in Rome so we live there, too. Where’s your house?”

  “Via Veneto.”

  The little face brightened. “I know where that is. Via Veneto. Do you have a little girl? She and I could play together.…”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t … I wish …”

  “What? What do you wish, Elizabeth? Do you wish you had a little girl?”

  “Yes, Daphne. I wish I had a little girl. Just like you.”

  “Really?” She giggled behind her hand.

  “Really.”

  “You can call me Daffy if you want.”

  That did it all right. The blues. It was a long night for Elizabeth.

  She felt as if Val’s spirit were overtaking her on the plane that night. Something was nagging at her, Val trying to tell her something, but it wasn’t quite getting through. She put the headphones on and slipped one tape after another into her tape player. Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, Moody Blues, Jefferson Airplane, Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, Gustav Leonhardt’s recording of Bach’s concerti for harpsichord in F and C, one tape after another from her bag, her pen scratching at the pages in her Filofax while her mind dashed on elsewhere in search of Val.…

  Val. She was trying to pull in her signal like some distant station’s, but she couldn’t do it. There was something Val wanted her to remember. It would come back, she told herself, it was bound to come back to her.

  That was all bad enough, but when her thoughts turned to Ben it was even worse. She felt lousy about the way they’d left things between them. She hated the way she’d behaved, the argument. The fact was, he was right, absolutely right, and she wondered how and why she’d screwed everything up. She had wanted to work together to find out what had happened to Val; she’d been excited by the whole business, it had helped her cope with Val’s death: finding the retired cop down at the bleak November shore, hearing about the murdered priest so long ago, theorizing late into the night with Ben and Father Dunn—

  So why had it ended so badly, with her sudden sanctimonious defense of the Church? What had gotten into her? Maybe it was plain, simple fear catching up with her. It had hit her hard, with the clenched fist of realism, that Val was dead. Murdered, as if the truth that she’d sought had turned against her, struck her down.

  Fear. Fear for herself if she pursued the inquiry, fear for Ben if he insisted on going after the killer. Her dearest friend was dead and she herself was sick with cowardice and she hated herself for it. She’d been a coward and … and she had trouble in the final instant quite believing that the Church could have reached out and killed Val to protect itself. She could believe so many things about this battle-scarred old Church, but not quite that.

  Yet she’d never been the Church’s tame little spokesperson, its apologist. No more than Val had been. She’d never been what Ben had accused her of being. And it wasn’t fair that he should think that of her … not fair!

  Then Daphne had poked her head over the chair and they’d had their little chat and Elizabeth had recognized the blues. And no, it had nothing to do with Val, nothing to do with the Church. Well, not exactly, anyway.

  Daphne had set her thinking about little girls and love. Looking into the shining saucer eyes, she saw herself full of eager hope and expectation so long ago in Illinois, her life before her like an endless circus. She had looked into the child’s eyes and felt the quickening pulse, the flutter of the heart, the glimmer of love. The pang people were always writing songs about. Daphne. The little hand over the giggling mouth, Mother was a light sleeper, wishing Elizabeth had a little girl …

  Love.

  Love was a problem for Elizabeth. When her guard was down, it could waylay her, fill her heart, start a tear of longing in the corner of her eye. The thing was, it always came from nowhere, and when it started—not often, she was adept at staying busy, fighting it off, declaring to herself that it was a complication she neither wanted nor needed—but when it started it was like an illness, a fever, that sapped her vitality, could hang on for days. The pit of the stomach, ache in the heart longing for the warmth, the touch, the dependency of another human being … What was it but a longing for love, what was simply denied her by her vocation?

  There were times when the longing took hold of her. Looking into Daphne’s eyes and thinking that she’d never have a Daphne of her own. Talking at the kitchen table, cooking up a storm in the coziness, watching Ben Driskill sitting there watching her …

  Watching Ben Driskill watching her.

  It had been good sharing the snowy night in Gramercy Park with him, drinking beer at Pete’s Tavern. And it had been good these past few days, sharing time with Ben even in such unhappy circumstances. In the house together, knowing they were under the same roof, hearing him moving around even when they weren’t in the same room, talking to the old policeman together, sitting together before the fire, finding the picture in the drum … sensing Ben’s irony and pain when it came to the Catholics, even feeling the weight of his anger directed at her … He was life, he was out there in the battle, he was willing to take the risks—

  Damn! Her imagination was running wild, but, but …

  She had led Ben on, she had wanted them to team up, there was an inevitable male/female component to the time they spent together: how could there not be?

  But there wasn’t supposed to be. No getting away from that.

  But she’d enjoyed him so much. And been so furious when he’d suggested that Monsignor Sandanato was obviously in lov
e with her. Her face had caught fire at that because of what she’d been thinking about Ben and she’d wondered, was he laughing at her? It had been such a crazy thing to say.… He had been laughing at her, damn him, the nun as love object, ha-ha, that’s a good one!

  And she’d had those edgy little sensations a nun wasn’t supposed to have and she’d thought Ben had sensed them, was laughing at her lack of experience, her self-consciousness.

  Was that why she’d turned on him at the end?

  Was her defense of the Church, her denial of the attitudes in him she’d been encouraging all along—was it because she had felt humiliated by him?

  Or was it simply because she feared she might be falling in love with him?

  Another woman—not a nun—might have thought an evening spent together in the past and a few days cloaked in the sorrow of a loved one’s death hardly added up to an opportunity to fall in love. But another woman’s relationship to men would have been entirely different. A nun was attuned to dealing with men, most of them priests, in a certain way, a very special way, that canceled out the romantic, the sensual. If you had any sense.

  Her feelings for Ben weren’t like that.

  So she’d turned on him and made him despise her.

  Nice work, Sister.

  She arrived in Rome red-eyed and exhausted, her head pounding. Daphne gave her a good-bye hug with her mother looking proudly on, and Elizabeth felt again the magnetic pull of the huge, glistening eyes. Neither Daphne nor her mother, of course, could have guessed she was a nun.

  In the taxi she rummaged through her Filofax, checking the notes she’d made during the flight, then had the driver take her to the tower on the Via Veneto. She changed into running gear, slipped the Beatles’s White Album into her tape player, and went for a hard forty-five-minute run, working up a sweat, ridding herself of the night’s stiffness.

  After an ice-cold shower she stared unhappily at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. No makeup, hair soaking and bedraggled, face drawn, eyes dull. The face staring back at her reminded her of Sister Claire during her novice year. It was Claire who had summoned the Revlon representative to visit “the rookies,” as she always called them, to instruct them in the subtle yet effective uses of cosmetics. “How can you expect to go forth and carry the word of God,” she would say, “if you go around looking like Absolute Hell?” You could hear the capital letters when she spoke. And the lessons had worked. Well, there was no doubt she looked like A. H. at the moment, but ten minutes later she’d repaired the damage of a sleepless night and was ready to face the world, if not the Flesh and the Devil.

  Hours later, as the busy reentry day wore to its conclusion, she sat alone in her office, the accumulated crises of the magazine at least momentarily laid to rest, and took her first break just to think. She sipped at a cup of cold coffee, put aside a stack of copy waiting to be proofed, and closed her eyes. Her subconscious had been puffing away all day, trying to excavate Val’s passing remark which had eluded her memory.

  Suddenly she opened her eyes. She’d heard a voice in the room with her. It took a fraction of a second, then she realized she’d been talking to herself, no, that wasn’t quite right, she’d been talking to Val, and what scared her was that Val was answering.… It was a memory, of course, just a little time travel. They’d been waiting in the office one evening, Curtis Lockhardt was coming by to pick them up, the three of them were going out to dinner, one of his favorite fancy nightspots, somewhere new, and Val had been excited, her adrenaline pumping overtime. Elizabeth had asked her what was going on and Val had shaken her head, grinning, had said she couldn’t tell her, but she was about to burst with the news. At dinner Lockhardt had mentioned someone he knew who’d died recently, someone who had something to do with the Church—damn, Elizabeth couldn’t recall the name, had it been an Irishman? That seemed to stick in her mind—and Val’s eyes had caught hers for just an instant and Val had said, “That makes five,” and Lockhardt had stopped short and said, “What was that?” and Val said, “That makes five in a year,” and Lockhardt had said something about this being hardly the time or the place and Val had mimicked Gilda Radner on the old Saturday Night Live, said, “Never mind …”

  Five in a year …

  Then the exhaustion hit her full on and she woke up hours later still at her desk and got home just in time to collapse in sleep for ten hours straight.

  Work consumed the next several days.

  She followed her normal routine which meant she had to chisel at each day to find seven or eight hours for sleep. There were interviews, editorial and production meetings, printers to schedule, last-minute copy to deal with, translators to pacify into working overtime, press conferences, visiting dignitaries to join for tea at the Order’s headquarters at the top of the Spanish Steps, dinners with one delegation or another from Africa to Los Angeles to Tokyo. From all over the world they came to the Holy City, tirelessly, unceasingly, all the pilgrims, the rich and the impoverished, the saints and the cynics, the selfless and the greedy, bearing the hopes and prayers of their Church, hoping for the best or aiming to line their pockets or determined to work their will upon the immense sprawling creature that was the Church of Rome. And Elizabeth reported, interpreted, and recorded their comings and goings. And she listened; she never stopped listening.

  In the days following her return, everywhere she went they were talking about the pope’s health. The journalists had set up pools, predicting the timing of his death. The interest in the betting ebbed and flowed with the rumors. The word was always making the rounds that His Holiness had taken a turn—but whether for better or worse depended on your informant. The stock of the various papabili rose and fell like mercury in a series of thermometers. D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato were the favorites, but others had support as well. Everybody was a handicapper.

  And there was the subject of the murders of Sister Val, Lockhardt, and Heffernan in far-off America, where such things might happen on any street corner. Still, even for America it was quite a triple. She was besieged with questions. She fended them off as best she could. She played dumb. She told no one about the killer-priest theory: in Rome that was a fuse she knew better than to light. Not a word had appeared anywhere, and she wasn’t going to be the source of such an incendiary rumor. Consequently, alone with the killer priest ricocheting around in her brain, she began to feel claustrophobic, trapped alone with what she knew perfectly well was the truth.

  She needed to talk to someone about it. It was so strange not to have Val.… And she wanted to know about the five in a year. Five deaths in a year …

  She almost put in a call to Ben, wanting to hear his voice, wanting to make an apology, but whenever she reached for the telephone she drew back; no, she’d do it tomorrow. Tomorrow.

  It was a bad dream and he knew it well, the way you might grow used to a terrible running sore, something for which there was no cure, something which stank and infected the rest of your life and left you half mad, obsessed, impotent.

  In the moments before waking, in the gauzelike blur of approaching consciousness when a man could almost control the beast within, Sandanato had believed himself to be wandering in the dark place that waited for him every night. Sometimes he managed to give it the slip. Sometimes not. He was moving soundlessly from room to room, but beyond some of the doorways and archways he passed through lay not rooms but chambers floored with burning sand, coppery walls of stone rising all around him, a thousand steps carved in the cliff’s face, a disc of fiery white in the blue far above him, seen as if by a man trapped forever at the bottom of a poisoned well.…

  In his dreams he was always at the bottom of a pit, unable to find a way out, alone and in pain, stumbling in the darkness with the mocking sky inexpressibly far above, out of reach. His dream was always faintly scented with incense and the peculiar odor of burned and blowing sand and scrub brush that had never known rain. In his dream it was always a nameless and dark place, throbbing with its o
wn power, pulsing with black blood trickling forth from springs cut into the cliffs like wounds.

  And then the unaccountable would happen. The miracle.

  The floor of the valley would tremble underfoot, the black blood would gurgle and foam from the burnished walls of stone, and the stone would be wrenched apart before him and he would see a way out, a pathway cut through the mountain and a vast openness beyond … a desert in gaudy bloom and on the horizon, bathed in a mist of sun and moonlight, inexplicable because it was a dream, a castle, an immensely safe and holy place.…

  And in his dream he was no longer alone but flanked by hooded brothers whom he somehow knew, whom he would lead from the prison at the base of the blowing cliffs. He had been made whole and new, baptized in the hot black blood, made a warrior at last, a gladiator of some atavistic order setting forth on a holy mission.

  The Valley of Tears, that was the name he gave the hellish place from which he’d escaped.

  And then all the images faded, the place of the black blood would recede into the subconscious, and he would open his eyes, his body and the sheets soaked with sweat, and the day would begin.

  It was four o’clock in the morning of the first full day Monsignor Sandanato had been back in Rome.

  Giacomo Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had conducted most of his life in secrecy, and four o’clock in the morning was a very secret hour.

  From behind the wheel Monsignor Sandanato studied his old mentor’s face in the rearview mirror. The cardinal was slouched in the backseat of the least conspicuous automobile registered in Vatican City—a blue Fiat with a rusty scrape on a rear fender. His mania for secrecy was in full flower. Four o’clock in the dark gray of a cool autumn morning, the back streets of Rome tilting sluggishly, the ancient buildings reaching across toward one another like very feeble old friends. It was like driving through a tunnel.