The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Jean-Paul LeBecq, the father of Guy and Etienne, had been a very conservative Catholic and a sympathizer with the Nazi puppet government set up at Vichy with Marshal Pétain as its figurehead. Guy was a priest. Etienne was working at the gallery, heir to his father’s business. Under the elder LeBecq’s gaze, he had no choice but to echo his father’s political sentiments. Early in the war Jean-Paul was incapacitated by a stroke and Etienne, in his mid-twenties, took over the gallery completely. And discovered that the old man had been acting as a kind of diplomat without portfolio moving to smooth the relationship between the Nazi force of occupation and the Catholic Church in Paris. It was important to keep the channels of communication open because each of the great monoliths needed the other. It was during this time that Etienne had met Klaus Richter, who was working the same side of the street, connecting the army of occupation with the Church. Everything she said was fitting with the tidbits of information Richter had given me. She knew very little of Father Guy LeBecq’s involvement in any of this during the war years, only that she’d always been told he died a hero’s death—that phrase again—during the war. Nothing more.

  By keeping her ears open while working as her father’s closest assistant, and while hearing him out when he slipped into one of his fits of depression, Gabrielle learned that old Jean-Paul had been handling the art treasures looted by the Nazis from private art collections, most of which were owned by Jews. Once Jean-Paul’s health removed him from an active role in the business, his tasks feel to young Etienne.

  “But what did the Nazis need a dealer for?” I asked. “They were simply taking what they wanted.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but don’t forget the Church. They wanted their share of the loot … in return for their cooperation with the Nazis.”

  “But what did this cooperation really amount to?”

  She shook her head. “In time of war—who knows?”

  “But the rest of this you’re telling me, you know it to be fact?”

  “Don’t be such a lawyer! I wasn’t there, if that’s what you mean. But I’m sure of it, yes.” She was impatient with me. “It’s been eating at my father all these years—why would he make it up? Yes, that’s the way it was—”

  “But how can you be sure?”

  “Because of what came later—because of what I saw my father go through! I’ve tried to put it out of my mind, but first your sister and now you, you’ve brought it all back to life. I’m ashamed of what my father has done.…”

  “Gaby, the Church and the Nazis in bed together during the war isn’t a very pretty picture, but it’s not exactly a scoop either. The Church did a lot of things during the war it couldn’t be proud of. Your father, you can’t be too hard on him. It sounds to me like he was caught in the middle, the agent moving looted art from the Nazis to the Church—Gaby, there was a war on, who knows what pressures they put on him … he was a young man, following in his father’s footsteps.”

  But I was thinking: was this it? Was this what Val had discovered? No, it was just too much a part of the past, the distant past. One point in an old indictment. Who would care now? How could anyone be hurt by accusations forty years old?

  “But it didn’t stop when the war ended,” she said. “That’s the point! That’s the worst part. My father became their creature! They set him up with the galleries in Cairo and Alexandria after the war so he could continue to ship artworks without anyone taking notice … they kept the whole thing going!”

  “They? Who? The war was over—”

  “It is so simple for an American to be naive! Not us, not here, we can’t afford your view of the world—not when Germans with newly minted past lives began showing up in Cairo, rich, powerful, advising the government. The Nazis, Ben, the Nazis—they’d hidden away millions and millions of dollars worth of art treasures, of gold and jewelry and precious stones of every imaginable kind … but all the loot was useless to them. What could they do with it? They had to have money—some way of converting it into money. There were Nazi survivors everywhere—the Condor Legion in Madrid, Die Spinne, all the old SS men who were getting out of Europe to Africa, to Egypt, to South America, to your precious righteous United States, the old guard who dreamed of a Fourth Reich—it wasn’t just Mengele and Barbie and Bormann, there were hundreds and hundreds of men we’ve never heard of, and they all needed money. One way of funding them, setting them up in businesses and fat investment portfolios, was by selling off the art. But it wasn’t easy finding a buyer they could trust—so they had to turn it into a kind of blackmail, too, don’t you see?”

  “You’re telling me they sold the stuff to the Church? And that’s how they’ve been funding themselves—”

  “The surviving Nazis had the Church in a tight spot. Buy this stuff from us or else …” She watched me, waiting for the penny to drop.

  “Buy it or we tell the world how we supplied you with looted treasure during the war! There’s the blackmail … but they were actually giving the Church something for its money!” I sighed, sank back on the low couch, careful of my back. “I will be goddamned. The Church had made a pact with the devil.”

  “It was—is—a delicate balance,” she said. “The Church isn’t powerless—they could reveal the hiding places of a lot of men who were once war criminals. So the Nazi survivors fear the Church, too—it’s a compact of mutual fear. And my father was caught between them … and he, too, got something out of it. He got rich for his complicity, for his sins. I don’t know the mechanics, but they used my father to sell, buy, smuggle, and distribute out of Europe and eventually into the Church’s possession. And he funneled the payments to the Nazis—”

  “By way of Klaus Richter,” I said.

  She nodded. “I think that’s the way it worked. I can’t prove it, but my father told me enough so I could fill in the rest of the picture. That’s what my father has been afraid of all these years—that he would be found out. My father is a weak man. He has no stomach for these games. Richter looks on him as a weak link. So Richter is the man who held my father’s leash. Richter was the watcher … and now I’m afraid my father has cracked under the pressure of his own … guilt.…” She was crying softly.

  I went to her, knelt beside her. She reached out to me and I held her. She couldn’t seem to stop crying, and she was trying to talk but the words were muffled. Then she looked up at me, her face glistening, and she kissed me. A little later she led me to the bedroom. We made love in the hungry ways strangers do, each of us doubtless searching out the momentary hiding places we needed. When she was asleep I got up, put some clothing back on, and went to stand at the top of the wooden stairway leading down to the beach. The cold wind dried the sweat on my face. I couldn’t quite remember if the exertion of the past couple of hours had hurt my back. The dressing still seemed to be in place and I was none the worse for wear.

  I watched the moonlight on the water and in the stillness, with only the throb of the waves against the shore, I tried to reach my sister, Val, tried to ask her if this was it … if this was all.…

  Perhaps she’d stumbled on this ring of art thieves dating back to the war in the way that I had: some clergy, some old, unrepentant Nazi rogues stuck away in odd corners of the globe with their ill-gotten paintings and statuary and Fabergé eggs, with their tattered dreams of a world in their hands. Not nice, but not enough to bear upon the choice of a new pope, not enough to kill Val and Lockhardt and Heffernan for: it didn’t compute. No. I’d found an ugly detail in the corner of the huge tapestry that was the Church … but that was all.

  But there was the photograph. And Richter had dealt with the Church, and there sat three clerics, two of whom were dead and one who just might be elevated to the Throne of Peter very soon. And I had Gabrielle’s word that this was all still going on—this flow of artworks and money. And if she was right, then there were men within the Church today who were involved in continuing the old game of mutual blackmail.… There would be someone within the Churc
h who was the Nazi master—

  Maybe someone from long ago. Or someone new, carrying on the tradition.

  D’Ambrizzi was the surviving link on the Church side.

  How could I be sure that a revelation now might not destroy Cardinal D’Ambrizzi’s chances at getting that top job? D’Ambrizzi, my marvelous playmate that summer and fall of 1945 …

  Val had been close to him. Sister Elizabeth knew him well.

  The facts bounced around in my head, and I couldn’t seem to hold them still. Where did Paris in the present day fit in? Val had spent much of the last several months of her life in Paris digging at something buried there … but what? And Paris then? Hell, everybody had been in Paris back then!

  I was wondering where Etienne LeBecq might have gone, thinking of how much I wished I could ask him a few questions, when I heard something behind me. Gaby had wrapped herself in a heavy robe and was standing in the doorway.

  “I think I know where my father is,” she said. “He and Richter used to talk about a place, a Catholic place, where they could go if they ever wanted to get away from it all. They’d laugh about it. Richter said it wasn’t necessarily the end of the world but you could see it from there.…”

  “A Catholic place? What does that mean? A church? Or a monastery? A retreat house?”

  “I don’t know. But I know what they called it.”

  “What, Gaby?”

  “L’inferno.”

  3

  1. Claude Gilbert 2–81

  2. Sebastien Arroyo 8–81

  3. Hans Ludwig Mueller 1–82

  4. Pryce Badell-Fowler 5–82

  5. Geoffrey Strachan 8–82

  6. Erich Kessler

  The folder Elizabeth found among Val’s belongings had been disappointing because it derived its thickness from twenty-odd blank pages. Only the top sheet contained the list of names followed by dates. All but Erich Kessler, for whom there was no date. Whatever background information she’d gathered was gone. Probably she’d carried the lot with her in the Vuitton briefcase which had been taken when she was killed.

  One other sheet in the folder was just short of utter blankness. There was a mixture of capital letters that conveyed nothing to Elizabeth. A code of Val’s impervious to interpretation. It didn’t look breakable. But she took it with her anyway.

  At the office, madness reigned, but she found a moment the next day to take Sister Bernadine aside over two cans of Coke and give her the list.

  “Here’s a special task, Sister,” she said. Sister Bernadine was having a cigarette, the one she allowed herself in the afternoon, and she always looked more grown-up and intelligent when she smoked. It was all an illusion since she was admirably grown-up and intelligent whether smoking or not. Elizabeth handed her a Xerox copy of the sheet with the names. “You will recognize one or two of these names, as I did. I’m betting they are all dead, probably died on these dates. Covers roughly the past eighteen months. What I want is the obituary data as it appeared in their hometown papers, as it were. And render it in English for me, just so I won’t make, some dumb mistake. Okay?”

  “Good as done, Sis. But it could take a bit of time—”

  “Well, bring the mighty jackboot of the Mother Church down on any necks that require it. It’s important. And keep it to yourself.”

  Sister Elizabeth knew that there was nothing else in the world like the Secret Archives of the Vatican.

  Twenty-five miles of shelving. Thousands upon thousands of volumes too heavy for one person to lift.

  She knew that it was nicknamed “the Key of St. Peter” by historians. Without that key there would have been no meaningful history of the Middle Ages.

  Somewhere within the Archives were the answers to questions that have perplexed scholars through the ages.

  Did the Orsini prince strangle his wife Isabella on her marriage bed in the sixteenth century … or did he hire someone else to do it?

  Who was St. Catherine? With her long blond hair was she, in fact, Lucrezia Borgia?

  What secrets are hidden in the seven thousand weighty volumes of indulgences? What was the payment required for the absolution of sin? For the necessary exemptions from ecclesiastical law? Money and treasure of all kinds, yes. But what in the way of personal services to the pope and his princes?

  What was the plot behind the theft of the Petrarch manuscripts? Was it a last-minute improvisation because the golden seals themselves were out of reach?

  And was the answer to the question perplexing the twentieth-century nun Sister Elizabeth also somewhere in the Archives? What had Val been working on? And why did she have to die?

  Perhaps the answer lay in one of the nearly five thousand papal registers, beginning with Innocent Ill’s letters in 1198, all bound in volumes the size of world atlases with the ink having turned golden with the passing centuries.…

  Of all the fondi, as each collection of documents was called—and no one even knew how many fondi there truly were—there is one fondo, called the Miscellanea, which alone fills fifteen rooms. Its contents remain uncatalogued, a grab bag.

  It had been said countless times and with good reason, God only knows what reposes within the Secret Archives.

  All the records of Galileo’s trial.

  The correspondence of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

  The personal letters of Pope Alexander Borgia and the women who loved him—Lucrezia, Vannozza dei Cattanei, and Julia Farnese.

  The records of the Sacred Rota involving the most intimate testimony relating to annulments.

  The archives of the Congregation of Rites, the deliberations leading to beatification and canonization, including all the reports of the Devil’s Advocates.

  The complete records of the trial of Monaca di Monza, which revealed the most intimate details of the life of the Nun of Monza and the others of the convent.

  The fondo relating to the nunciature of Venice which came to the Archives in 1835 following the fall of the Republic of Venice and contained the stories of three religious institutions suppressed rigorously in the seventeenth century.

  It was all part of Sister Elizabeth’s—and even more particularly, of Val’s—background, knowing what kinds of material could be found in the Archives. And Elizabeth had heard all the stories from Val about the near impossibility of finding, by plan, what you wanted to find in the vastness of books, parchments, buste, or folders.

  She knew about the tiny room opening off the Meridian Chamber in the Tower of the Winds. In that square room was a bookcase which contained nine thousand buste. Uncatalogued, unstudied, unknown. To inventory those nine thousand folders would require two scholars working on nothing else but their contents for nearly two centuries. One bookcase.

  The only meaningful index to the Secret Archives was devised long ago by Cardinal Garampi and collected in many volumes. It is incomplete, inexact, and altogether frustrating. He also wrote it in his own code.

  She also knew about the gambler’s chance. It was what made the Secret Archives worth the effort.

  She knew about the hundred-years rule—that the archives relating to the past century are closed. Absolutely closed.

  And she remembered Curtis Lockhardt talking to them about the hundred-years rule. “Without the rule,” he had said, “half of the men who run the world would have to kill themselves. Thank God for the hundred-years rule. We Catholics know how to handle these things. Saints be praised.”

  The Secret Archives of the Vatican were served by a total staff of seven men, overseen by one of their own number who is called the prefect.

  Elizabeth was meeting Monsignor Petrella in half an hour in the Court of the Belvedere, home of the Secret Archives. Monsignor Petrella was the prefect. Monsignor Sandanato, who had spoken with him on her behalf, was the closest thing to a friend Petrella had, but even Sandanato did not know what she was going there for.

  In half an hour she would begin trying to learn what in the Secret Archives had so fascinated Sister Va
l during the final months of her lifetime.

  St. Peter’s Square lay in cool, bright early morning sun and shade as she crossed it, passed along the Leonine walls, and entered Vatican City through the Gate of St. Anne, strode purposefully past the Osservatore Romano building to the Court of the Belvedere next to the Vatican Library.

  All her papers were in order, including the letter from the pope that had come with her job and her identification card with her photograph. But it was Sandanato’s emphasis on the Curtis Lockhardt connection that had speeded everything up, smoothed the way. And because of him she was also given browsing privileges in certain areas, and browsing was never allowed. Curtis Lockhardt had personally raised millions to aid the Secret Archives in preservation technology. “Someday,” he had joked, “I’m going to walk in and find that Petrella has named the Xerox room after me.”

  Monsignor Sandanato was waiting just inside the door, in the jarringly modern room with the floors of light marble and a big table where she would sign in.

  “I was in here about a month ago to have a look at Michelangelo’s letters,” he said as they walked to the reception room. “Petrella’s an arrogant man, but he’d met his match. He told me I couldn’t see them just now and I wanted to know why not. Turned out the Holy Father had checked them out a while back and Petrella was afraid to nag him about returning them. Of course, no one else gets to check anything out. Ah, there he is. Tonio, my friend!”

  The large reception room was furnished with antiques Callistus had sent over from the papal apartments. On a low table there was a tapestry of St. Peter sailing on stormy seas, not a bad warning for anyone about to begin working in the Secret Archives.

  Monsignor Petrella looked like an elegant courtier with an invulnerable duchy of his own. He was tall and blond, wore a long black cassock, and his face was well preserved, vain, disturbingly unlined for a man in his fifties. He welcomed her with a thin smile and a firm handshake. Having delivered her, Sandanato excused himself to get back to the cardinal, and Elizabeth was alone with Petrella.