The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  He handed the manila envelope with its remnants of electrician’s tape across the table to Father Dunn, who carefully opened it and slid the handwritten manuscript out.

  The Facts in the Matter of Simon Verginius.

  “By none other than one Giacomo D’Ambrizzi.” Peaches O’Neale smiled. “I hereby officially make it your problem.” He was looking better already.

  Eleven hours later the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles were entering the fourth quarter, the midnight quarter, of a football game conducted in a soggy swamp of half-frozen mud. Peaches was slumped wearily before the television set in Father Dunn’s study. Perhaps, he thought, hell is an endless football game played in a mud where you can’t tell which team is which and nobody knows the score and nobody cares anymore anyway. He balefully regarded the remains of a pizza, the empty cans of Diet Coke.

  Dunn looked up from the manuscript and grinned at Peaches. He tapped the manuscript. “This would make a helluva movie.”

  “Sure, sure. What do you make of it? You’ve read it enough times to memorize it—”

  “I was memorizing it, in a way. Tomorrow morning I want you to put this thing in your little black briefcase and take it back to New Pru and put it where you found it. If this thing were to start floating around—well, perish the thought, laddie.” He pointed to his forehead. “I’ve got all I need up here.”

  “So, who was this Simon Verginius? And Archduke? All these code names? Who were they?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s the truth. But I’m going to find out, one way or another. D’Ambrizzi was sure as the devil close to this Simon and all the rest of them.”

  He made a plane reservation for the following evening, first-class, to Paris.

  There was one man he had to find.

  Erich Kessler.

  Sister Elizabeth was working late, although magazine work had nothing to do with what was really on her mind. Word of the pope’s illness, which had been privately known throughout the Roman press corps, was beginning to dribble out, first by way of Roman newspapers and then on television. It could only mean that the disease, or diseases, was not responding to treatment. Things were bad enough that a signal had been passed from somewhere within the curia: it was now time to begin to prepare the world for the death of Callistus IV, whenever it actually came to pass.

  She was looking once again at her notes on D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato, trying to put her finger on the prime dark horse who would join them as the favorites, when Sister Bernadine came bustling in, closed the door, and let her facade collapse. She threw herself down on the couch and blew out a long sigh. She’d just finished a major struggle with the printer and the color separator and was worn out from the constant arguing.

  “I’ve gotten together the next installment of your hit-list bios.” She leaned forward and pushed the folder across the desk toward Elizabeth.

  She opened it and leafed through the sheets. “Anything of special interest?” Her eyes flicked through the material, looking for something, but she didn’t know what.

  “They’re all pretty much of an age—”

  “We knew that.”

  “They were all Catholics.”

  “We knew that, too, Sister.”

  “They were all murdered—”

  “Come on, Sister! Tell me something I don’t know!”

  “And,” Sister Bernadine said with a smile, “they were all in Paris during the war.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes clicked open like a cartoon character’s, and she blinked several times at her colleague.

  “Ahhh … now, that’s something I did not know, Sister. Anything about Kessler?”

  Sister Bernadine shook her head. “Talk about a mystery man!”

  Brother Jean-Pierre had come to the village not far from the Hendaye border-crossing with Spain during the summer of 1945. Those were confused days in France, in both cities and the countryside, and he’d taken advantage of the confusion that came with the arrival of the postwar world to leave Paris and everything that had gone on there. On foot he’d come all the way to the coast of Brittany, then worked his way down that rocky edge of France and come to rest, where he’d remained ever since. Considering what might have befallen him as a result of a very strenuous war, he felt fortunate. He had made himself useful as the handyman for the priest at the threadbare country church. He would blush when they called him by his title, sexton. He tended to the bell, to the polishing and repairing, all the jobs that made him indispensable. And for nearly forty years he had passed largely unnoticed, which wasn’t easy when you thought of how he looked.

  When he’d left Paris they’d been looking for him, led by the priest who’d come from Rome to conduct the investigation. Simon had told him they’d been betrayed and he’d have to go to ground. Jean-Pierre had felt his world shatter. Simon had calmed him down, reminded him of how brave he’d been when they’d been trapped by the Germans and taken to the barn for interrogation. Jean-Pierre had nodded, and when he left Paris he had kept moving, his fear seeming to render him invisible. He was merely one of the walking wounded trudging the back roads of France.

  A couple of weeks after leaving Paris he crested a rocky hill and saw below him a gentle stream, a village large enough to have a church. The steeple drew him like a magnet. He waited under cover of brush until after dark, watching the villagers moving deliberately about their business. When the lights had come on in the small houses and the church seemed deserted, he waited longer still, until the moon was high, lurking in and out among the clouds. Finally he crossed the stream, curled around the village’s outbuildings, and approached the church from the rear. The door was padlocked. With his bare hands he slowly pulled the fittings from the door itself, leaving the lock secure.

  Inside he heard someone snoring. The priest, an elderly man, tall and fat with a full head of fluffy gray hair, had fallen asleep at his kitchen table. He bypassed the tiny kitchen, searched the hallway for the door he wanted. It was easy to find. The nearly empty clothes closet. Yes, the cassock …

  Five minutes later, the bundle under his arm, he crossed back over the stream and faded into the darkness.

  Now, almost forty years later, he still dreamed about the days in Paris, the good times and the bad, as well. He remembered how the end had come—how Brother Christos had been killed and they had all been betrayed and Simon had sent him away in order to save him. He remembered and dreamed, dreamed of the day when he might be called upon to serve again. But the summons had never come and the years had passed and he had worked for the little church in the little country village and that had been all right, too. Simon had said that it was all over and he’d been right.

  Sometimes he dreamed about the weeks he’d spent with Simon hiding in a basement with the cold smell of coal dust thick in the air that last winter. Simon had saved him, Simon had nursed him while his eye had healed.…

  It had been his own fault. He’d been careless. And they’d caught him with the nun who had been the Resistance courier. He’d held them off with the revolver until she’d escaped up the road on her bicycle and then they’d stormed him and taken him and Simon to the barn. It was in the barn that the Germans had gone to work on him. On both of them. They whipped Simon until he collapsed, until the flesh of his back was flayed to the bone, and then they’d turned their attention to Jean-Pierre.

  They’d had at him for two days, trussed up like a side of beef and hung from a hook, they’d finally thought he was done for … yes, when the Gestapo interrogator had heated the knife in the flame and they’d held him down and the interrogator had sliced his eye through and through, yes, they thought he was done for and they’d cut him down and left him in the bloody hay where Simon lay almost dead.…

  But Jean-Pierre had roused himself and taken the pitchfork from the wall and when they came back, he’d done them, first the corporal, then the Gestapo man, he’d done them again and again, hearing the ribs separate and the backbones break, and he’d wakened
Simon and together they’d dragged themselves away, had gotten to the little church where they’d met for their orders, and there the two of them had hidden beneath the false floor of the coal cellar.…

  Sometimes he still dreamed of those days.

  Forty years later. He was polishing the wooden benches in the church and heard the door creak open and saw the light from outside flood across the warped wooden floor. He stood up, turned, and saw the man silhouetted against the light.

  “Jean-Pierre …”

  He took a step toward the figure and shielded his one good eye against the glare.

  Then he saw him, the tall man, his hair now silvery, his eyes clear and pale behind the round lenses. Slowly he saw the man smile.

  “August …”

  The sexton went to him, threw his arms around him, recapturing the past, his own past.

  “Jean-Pierre, Simon needs your help.”

  1

  DRISKILL

  I was too damned tired to care what kind of plane I was boarding, as long as it was headed for Paris and I was on it. Coming back to the real world from what I’d found in the desert was more than a change of geography. Mentally, morally, and philosophically everything changed. The blades inside my head, like some fiendish Cuisinart, altered their pitch, mashing my brains in a different way. Of course, I still wound up with mashed brains.

  It was like trying again and again to score from the one-yard line and failing. They wore you down and finally you had the feeling that you’d never get in again, never put another point on the board. I had seen Gabrielle LeBecq briefly, told her what had apparently happened with her father, and she had called the authorities. She knew I had to go, she understood. I didn’t feel good about leaving her to cope, but I had no real choice. She reassured me that she would have the gallery to run, that she had friends who would see her through. She wasn’t the sort of person who needed three days worth of explanations.

  I tried to get hold of Klaus Richter but was told he had departed for Europe on a buying tour. His schedule would be so erratic that there was no way I could call him, but if I wanted to leave a message for him he called in almost every day. Any message I could think of for Richter just wasn’t the kind you pass through a secretary. Hell, I wasn’t sure what message I had for him … other than to ask him why he’d lied to me and what he’d had to do with Church skullduggery forty years ago—and I’d undoubtedly get just the answer such an overreaching question deserved. I had to remember I was a lawyer. Never ask a question unless you already knew the answer. Lesson one.

  I slept like a dead man the first hour of the flight and then I woke up needing to organize my thoughts, feeling like an intellectual slob for not keeping everything in order. But there was so much to remember, so much happening for which nothing in my life had prepared me. One thing my life as a lawyer had prepared me to do was scratch out acres of notes on legal pads. A lawyer knew he couldn’t keep it all in his head and all this had turned out to be as complicated as anything that had ever floundered through the doorway and flopped hopelessly on my desk. So I got out the legal pad and went to work. I had to know what the hell I was doing by the time I got to Paris.

  My sister had gone all the way from Paris to Alexandria to find Klaus Richter … and maybe Etienne LeBecq, too. I wasn’t clear about that: when she’d come up with LeBecq, that is. But she’d obviously found references to Richter in the papers of Bishop Torricelli in Paris. Richter—I could see him now, sitting behind the desk with his hourglass full of sand from the western desert so he’d never forget the fallen: he’d told me he knew Torricelli, that he’d been a liaison between the Church and the occupying army conducting daily business and trying to keep the Church free of Resistance cells. He’d told me he hadn’t known D’Ambrizzi but the snapshot made a liar out of him. And he’d naturally neglected to tell me he’d been a player in the art deal between the Nazis and the Church, the mutually beneficial looting process that had led to the state of mutual blackmail: We won’t tell about you if you don’t tell about us. And the whole black business was apparently still going on: the Nazi survivors funding some current operations by selling to the Church of Rome … that much seemed simple. Improbable, yes, but simple. Maybe it had degenerated by now into mere blackmail minus the formality of selling the art, but that seemed too simple. No, secrets of forty years ago weren’t enough: something had to be going on now. Maybe, just maybe, it was the approaching election of a successor to Callistus. Maybe, just maybe, across those forty-odd years, it was still all connected.… Fine, Mr. Learned Counsel. But how?

  Then there were the LeBecq brothers. I had one dead LeBecq, strangled, crushed, back broken in a Paris graveyard during the war. Then, briefly, I had a live LeBecq talking about Simon Somebody he feared had sent me—me—from Rome to kill him … “to kill all of us.” Well, all of that had come by express from left field. Simon who? Kill all of whom? Richter and Etienne LeBecq? I was lost in a wallow of confusion. What was it LeBecq had told me? My only protection was my innocence. He said I should hide within my innocence and they still might let me live.…

  Then there was Simon again in the list of names, or code names, Gabrielle and I had found in her father’s diary. Simon. Gregory. Paul. Christos. Archduke!

  Would I ever know who they were? And why there was that enigmatic, irritating exclamation point? What did it say about Archduke? Were they the code names of the men in the snapshot? Plus one?

  And when it came to that snapshot …

  Bishop Torricelli in street clothes, Klaus Richter in his Wehrmacht uniform with the collar open, D’Ambrizzi, Father Guy LeBecq. And the man who took the picture. What the hell were they doing? Had it something to do with Richter’s concern over Resistance operations within the Church? Surely it was Torricelli’s business to keep the Germans from deciding the Church was shielding Resistance fighters. Maybe that was it. Or could it have had anything to do with the dividing up of looted art treasures? Guy LeBecq’s father and brother were involved, maybe the priest was, too. But what was D’Ambrizzi doing hanging around with these characters? And who killed Father LeBecq in the graveyard and why?

  It was driving me crazy. All of it.

  And there were the results of the trip to the monastery.

  One man was dead. As a result of me. Nothing I could do about that, no absolution in stock.

  But I’d given the silver-haired priest with the knife a name. August.

  And I knew he got his orders from Rome.

  It was one thing to suspect something, altogether different to have it spoken aloud, a fact. It chilled me clear through.

  August. Sent from Rome. To kill.

  Who was he?

  And, for God’s sake, who sent him?

  Hours later I woke from an exceedingly troubled sleep, soaked with sweat, my eyes burning, my throat dry, my face greasy with the recycled filth common to the cabins of aircraft. Overheated, recycled, sweating filth, compounded by ritual dehydration, too much in the way of sub-ordinary food and drink that you really didn’t want anyway but it helped pass the time, on and on. The result that night was bad dreams, particularly my old bad dream that I’d spent most of my life repressing, only tonight it had a new spin, making it even more horrifying, the addition of a remembered face—a second remembered face—Etienne LeBecq’s face. In my dream he was still propped up against the nosewheel of his little plane and bugs were crawling in and out of the bullet hole in his forehead and his dead, gaping mouth. He was filled with gases, about to explode like an overinflated doll, but that wasn’t what bothered me most. It was the angle of his head and the hair sticking up and the fact that he was staring at me through bloodshot eyes yet was so obviously dead. The problem was that he, in my dreams, looked like, or reminded me of, or in some other way brought very clearly to mind, the subject of my old recurring dream.

  He looked like my mother.

  It was just that kind of night, when things couldn’t get worse and then they got a lot worse, a
bad plane trip, my brain mulched to thin gruel by all the questions and doubts, bad dreams taking on foul new dimensions, and a gun in my baggage just for good measure. Brave new world that has such a creature in it!

  When my mother went over the balcony railing of our place on Park Avenue I’d heard the noise of her landing from my room. It was a three-story apartment, a triplex they call them now, twenty-some rooms and the carved balcony railing was too low, everybody always said it was a danger, someone was going to take a header one day, and I was in my room listening to a New York Giants football game on the radio which, of course, made it a Sunday. My father was off somewhere and Val was visiting a friend from her school and the staff was having one of their Sundays and I seemed to be there alone except for Mother.

  I heard the sound: not a cry, not a scream, just the sound of what turned out to be breaking glass and her head hitting the inlaid parquet floor of the foyer. Foyer? Actually more of an entry hall, something from a castle somewhere in mythology. A couple of huge paintings, one a Sargent, and some trees in grand embossed pots, a Persian carpet of uncertain provenance, a couple of busts, not so terribly au courant, and Mother dropping through space, through the still air, through dust motes and traces of the smoke from thousands of cigars, dropping like a stone wrapped in one of her filmy things, a nightgown, a robe like gossamer, a martini glass dropping along beside her—no, still clutched in her hand—by God, she wasn’t going to spill a perfectly good drink just because she was committing suicide, not while she still had the strength to hold it as she hurtled down to smack into the inlaid parquet.