The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Well, we never admitted she’d died by her own hand. It was an accident, that goddamned low railing. That gin. That vermouth. An unfortunate and unexpected turn of events. Nobody said a word about suicide. Christ, no! Not a Driskill. But I knew, I knew …

  Smack onto the parquet, still holding the delicate Baccarat crystal all the way down because you never knew when you might want a good stiff one, a last stiff one, and then I came running down the hall, racing down the stairway, and I found her with the glass broken, the jagged stem driven through the fine-boned pale hand like a spike, a tiny nod to Catholicism and its symbols, crucified by the stem of her martini glass. I must have heard the glass breaking, the shell of her skull cracking, splitting, the accumulated mechanical sounds of my mother’s death. When I arrived she was leaning with her back against a massive hand-carved sideboard in the manner of Grinling Gibbons. Sotheby’s subsequently auctioned it off for a nice round fifty thousand, the pocket money of an Arabian gentleman. She was incredibly dead, as if there were gradations of death. Perhaps there are. Blood was smeared across the floor, her hand looked like a clot of hamburger, there was blood running from her mouth, nose, and scalp. Her hair was matted with blood. Her skin had acquired a faint bluish tinge. Her eyes were open. Some blood vessels had burst in the whites and she seemed to be looking at me from the remote other side of all that blood. This entire awfulness had befallen her—yes, literally, befallen her—in a matter of seconds. Somehow she’d had enough motor control, instinct, whatever, to hit the floor at X miles per hour, gather up the remains of her component parts—already dead, my poor mother—and pull herself into a sitting position so her son wouldn’t see her all sprawled with her legs this way and that and her gown hiked up, ungracefully dead.

  Mom. Dead. And there she was in my dreams again, first that ghostly scene in some hallway, Princeton or Park Avenue—this was what I’d well and truly repressed, right from the beginning, knowing so well it must contain the reason, more horrible than I could face or imagine—why she took a dive off the balcony. First that ghostly scene in some hallway, with her reaching out as always, trying to tell me something, her face obscured in shadow or a kind of fog that is known only in Hollywood and in dreams, with the smell of her cologne and powder enveloping us, my straining to hear her, failing, as I’ve been failing all my life, knowing how important it was to both of us and still I couldn’t hear it … and then, years later? months later? she’s going over the balcony railing, the sound, the bloody eyes, the puddle of gin and vermouth and still the smell of her scent mingling with blood and martini and death.…

  And she and poor Etienne LeBecq, my personal victim in this story, were changing places in my dreams, I couldn’t keep them apart in my dreams, it was all mixed up and unforgiving.

  But then, from some prisons there is no escape, there is no freedom ever. It was true that night, it had always been true.

  The Driskills knew all about the prisons of the mind.

  I’d always stayed at the George V but I’d undergone a sea change. Like my sister, I’d begun to watch my back. So when I arrived in Paris I ignored my regular stop and found a tiny, anonymous hotel on the Left Bank, on the Boule Miche. I climbed a narrow flight of stairs next to the tobacconist and on the landing checked in and got my key. There was a small makeshift breakfast room off to the right and a dwarf-sized, rickety cage of elevator. My room was long and narrow and clean, and smelled of furniture polish. It was situated on a corner with one of those insufficient French balconies overlooking the Boule Miche and another, in the large triangular bathroom, looking out on the side street with the bright red lights of a pizza restaurant below. It was a chilly, damp evening with an accompaniment of rolling thunder. The night sky was pink with light. The traffic moved restlessly along the boulevard as if the population had grown itchy and nervous waiting for the rains of November. I knew that by morning the fakery of the night’s cheap lighting effects would be gone and Paris would be wet and gray, as it should be, all its charm and antiquity unchanged.

  The sheets were stiff with starch, the pillows heavy with down, and I was too tired to think. I fell asleep with Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith on my chest. Maybe I would always be an innocent. I could hear Val laughing from far, far away at her big bad brother.

  I woke up late to the sound of knocking at my door. I heard the key turning and the girl who had checked me in came in, smiling, carrying a tray with a basket of croissants and brioches, butter, a jam jug, silverware, coffee, milk, sugar, everything I needed to sustain life. I sat in bed munching away, watching the rain streaking down the long French windows I’d left open through the night. The sky was a perfect pearl-gray. I had the window open in the bathroom and the breeze was cool and bracing on my back while I contemplated my haggard face with its scraggly stubble and eyes that looked like they might be tired and worn out from now on. I stood at the sink trying to repair the damage. It was still thundering, thudding, and reverberating above the soft, steady rain. I changed the dressing on my back after standing under the lukewarm shower. Unless my wishful thinking had gotten the better of me, my back seemed to feel a little better. I swallowed some pain pills for good measure. Standing at the balcony in the bathroom, I felt the cool mist on my face, looked down on people in raincoats walking their dogs, and picking up the morning papers, and standing in the doorways of cafés, smoking their ever-present cigarettes and staring out at the cars hissing along the wet paving with headlamps reflecting in the rain’s slickness. By noon I was ready to go.

  I knew the first move. I knew the place to start.

  It had been ten years since I’d seen Robbie Heywood, whom everyone had always called “the Vicar” according to my father, but I figured he was the sort of tough old bastard who just wouldn’t go off and die on his own. He was probably seventy by now, but his type lived forever. What type was the Vicar? Well, he was a twisty old Aussie newspaperman who’d covered Europe from Paris and Rome since the mid-thirties. Half a century, he’d say, but what’s time to a pig?

  My father had known him for a long time, since 1935 when Father had been working for the Church in Rome. He introduced me to the Vicar in Paris on that same trip when Val and I had also met Torricelli. So my father was the common ground Robbie Heywood and I had shared on my subsequent trips to Paris when I’d looked him up to say hello and treat him to an expensive dinner. My father—we always talked about him—and the Church, that, too, was common ground. Robbie Heywood had always found my adventures among the Jesuits tremendously amusing. He was probably the only person who could have laughed at all that and not provoked me to punch him out. When he thought it was funny, I, too, saw that it was indeed funny. He was, I supposed, a kind of sophisticate that only the Church could breed, a Catholic who never got overheated about the Church, pro or con. Dispassionate, amused, with what he called “a leaven of purest malice.” Robbie had covered the Church extensively, was what my father called a Vatican watcher, an old Vatican hand, and I’d begun thinking about him on the plane ride to Paris.

  I suppose he should have come to mind earlier, once I’d begun thinking about Val having been in Paris doing her research. I’d never heard her mention him, though he’d always been full of questions about her, but that had been a long time ago. I doubted if she’d ever seen him after we first met him as children. For one thing, he wasn’t a woman’s kind of man. And for another, she was a scholar and Robbie was a gossip monger, an outrageous journalist straight from an Australian amateur theatricals production of The Front Page. So, it wasn’t until I was half asleep in the dried-out, pressurized tube rocketing through its own little time warp that the Vicar popped into my head and stuck there, making me wonder if just maybe Val had looked him up.

  The thing that had occurred to me, of course, was that Robbie Heywood was another link to the past.

  He’d been in Paris during the war.

  I called his number but there was no answer. I almost called Tabbycats but then decided to drop in unannoun
ced and surprise the old boy. The walk in the cool rain would do me good. I couldn’t seem to get the feeling of the desert out of my mind, eyes, and bones. You can have the desert, just give me a city huddled in the rain and people everywhere, the smell of gasoline and oil and wet streets.

  Robbie’s apartment was in one of the crumbling, mouldering old buildings in the Place de la Contrescarpe, where Rabelais used to hang out almost five hundred years ago. The Vicar loved the area for its seedy toughness, its antiquity, its history. He’d once shown me the place, 53 rue Mouffetard just down from the Place where workmen found 3,351 twenty-two-karat gold coins in the well in 1939. Louis XV’s money man had hidden them there a long time before. He had just moved into his rooms facing on the Place and recalled the excitement of the discovery as if it had been yesterday. The Vicar could make the past come to life: now I was eager to bring him the kind of story he’d appreciate most. Dirty work, blackmail, and murder, all inside the Church of Rome.

  I set off from my hotel, relaxed by the familiar surroundings, flipping through assorted memories and coming back to the perplexing question of my mother, her death, what had driven her off the balcony—but as I say, I could feel Paris releasing the tension built up within me. I could think about my mother’s death, and my sister’s, but for the first time in a while none of it was making me crazy. I crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain at the Place Maubert, which I knew—thanks again to the Vicar—had a nasty history as a public execution ground. In 1546, in the reign of Francis I, they had taken the humanist philosopher and printer Etienne Dolet and put him to the torch as a heretic there in the Place Maubert. They used his own books as kindling. The Skid Row crowd, soaked with gros rouge and screaming with excitement, must have been the last sounds Dolet heard. Robbie Heywood never passed through the Place without a small salute to the statue of Monsieur Dolet. “Times change,” he would say, “and Paris never lets you forget it.” In the rain the open market that had replaced the stake was in session, bustling.

  I followed the rue Monge until I turned right into the rue du Cardinal Lemoine and followed it into the Place de la Contrescarpe. There was no wind there and the wet leaves stuck like footprints to the sidewalk. The mighty dome of the Pantheon floated like an apparition, a peculiar spaceship either landing or making its getaway in the fog and rain. I was out of breath, stood looking at the second-floor windows of Robbie’s apartment. They were shuttered and streaked with rain that dripped steadily from the eaves. Contrescarpe always looked like a movie set left over from a Jean Gabin tough-guy picture. There was a small grassy patch with trees in the center. The trees looked downcast, wet and black and leafless. The clochards, the tramps and drifters who’d been gravitating to this particular place for centuries, were there, a gray quorum discussing the day’s affairs. They might have been there waiting for my return, unmoved all these years. They were clustered beneath the trees in sweaters and raincoats. A couple of umbrellas glistened like shiny, wet, smooth stones. A few huddled under a lean- to made from a leftover packing crate.

  Tabbycats was still there, a bar and café looking out on the square with a low-slung eyebrow in the form of a faded green and white striped awning. The canvas was swaybacked to begin with and was collecting rain in heavy puddles. The awning wasn’t going to see its way to another summer. The white paintwork looked grimy and in spots had bubbled and burst. I crossed the square, the clochards watching this stranger among them, and went into the shabby old joint the Vicar used for an office.

  The immense slothful tabby lay in posh arrogance at the end of the polished bar, its eyes squinting, staring at me, its tail slowly flicking to and fro like the tongue of a grandfather clock. It was either the same cat who’d always been there or an identical replacement. It seemed never to age. Claude was behind the bar, talking to a balding man with a bullet-shaped head and a large nose that seemed to take up the whole front of his skull like a mole’s. Black-framed glasses straddled the breadth of nose rather uncertainly. He wore a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. The bartender was still Claude but his mustache and hair were gray. “It’s a dive,” Robbie had said the first time he met me there, “it’s my office, Claude the barman is an Aussie, so I can trust him, not one of these fucking Froggies. It’s an honest man’s dump, Your Grace, only dump in this town worthy of the name.”

  Claude came down the bar toward me, the cat waddling along beside him until it stopped abruptly and hissed at me. “Mr. Driskill,” he said. “It’s been a while, sir.”

  “Almost ten years,” I said. “You’ve got a good memory. But the cat doesn’t seem to remember me.”

  “Oh, you’ve not met Balzac before. He’s only in his sixth year now. Randy bastard he is, too. His only job is to water the banana tree there by the door.” It was a new addition. It towered, its girth was awesome. “Balzac here tends it for me. Pisses on it. Twice a day, makes it bloody well grow. Out of fear.” He sighed and I ordered an Alsatian bière.

  “The Vicar been around today? Thought I’d surprise him.” It was thundering again and Balzac cocked his head. Claude set the glass before me.

  “Oh dear,” he sighed. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” He looked down the bar at the man with the mole’s face, nodded to him. “Clive, come over here. This is Ben Driskill, you’ve heard the Vicar spouting off about him.”

  The man came toward me, put out his hand. I shook it. He had a limp and a cane. “Clive Paternoster at your service. Robbie was very upset at the sad news of your sister’s death. Just god-awful, I’m sure you can hear him saying it. He’d seen her several times this past summer, you know. That was how I met her. Ah yes, the dear old Vicar …”

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Don’t tell me he’s working.” I smiled but they weren’t smiling back.

  “You’re three days late, my friend,” Clive Paternoster said, blinking at me past his enormous nose. “The Vicar crashed in flames the other day. He is no more, Mr. Driskill. A comparatively young man. Seventy on the button. I’m sixty-three myself.” He pushed the heavy black frames back into place. “The Vicar is dead, Mr. Driskill, cut down in his prime.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, shock in my voice. “He was a good fellow.” I was thinking: he had seen Val! But why? What had they talked about? Had it mattered? He’d been in Paris in the old days.… “What was it? What carried him off?”

  “Oh, it was quick,” Claude said bitterly, stroking the cat. “He didn’t linger.” He looked sorrowfully at Paternoster.

  “That’s what I meant … cut down in his prime.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Street violence,” Clive Paternoster said softly. “Somebody took a knife to him.” He looked at his black digital watch. “You might as well come along to the funeral. We’re putting the Vicar in the ground within the hour.”

  The Vicar was buried in a small, out-of-the way cemetery in a dreary quarter of the city, not far from a convergence of railway lines. The coffin was plain, the priest not terribly interested and coming down with a cold besides, the grave dark and muddy. The gravel path was brown and wet, the grass cut too short and the color of the gravel. There were six of us mourners, nobody crying or wringing their hands with grief. There was a double row of evergreen trees flanking the path that led to the grave, the extreme symmetry seeming very Parisian. That was how the Vicar made his exit, and it only went to show you that what mattered was the living, not the dying.

  Walking away from the cemetery, Clive Paternoster lit a Gauloise and plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his black raincoat. His shoulders were hunched and he gave the impression of pushing his nose on ahead of him, like a man pushing a giant peanut across Paris with his nose. Rain was dripping from the brim of his hat. “Robbie and I were roommates these last five, six years. People called us the odd couple, y’know, but we got along fine. Two old farts facing up to the end—I lied to you before, I’m nearly seventy myself—two old farts remembering what it was like to be young and full of
mayhem. Hard to believe he’s gone. Between us we covered more than our share of wars, murders, scandals, elections … I got the gimpy leg courtesy of a Mongolian sniper during the Korean fracas.” He pronounced the word frah-kah. “But it was the Church, that’s what you might say brought us together. Became an obsession. Interesting mechanism, the Church. Perfect refuge for scoundrels, of course.”

  “Tell me how he died. Everything you know.”

  He looked up at me curiously, then gave a little mental shrug. He couldn’t resist a good story. “Somebody mugged him about five minutes from our place. I found him on the landing in front of our door, he was sprawled facedown in one of his loud, horrible tout’s jackets, all plaid, y’know, and he’d fallen with his face pushed up against the slats of the railing, you remember what that looks like, and when I came in the downstairs door there was this funny sound, like a clock ticking, steady tock-tock-tock it went, and I’d never noticed it before.… I stood there in the dark stairwell, then I thought I smelled something I’d smelled before—in Algeria in a cell where they’d tortured blokes, lots of that going on in the Algerian fracas”—that word again—“and what I smelled was blood. And when I took that step forward, something dripped on my hat, tock-tock-tock, and I felt it, took my hat off, and it was all sticky, then a big fat drop hit me in the head … blood of course, blood dripping from the landing, and when I got up there, old Robbie was gone, well, almost gone, he was babbling o’ green fields like old Falstaff, y’know … talking about summertime, that’s where he was, I suppose, in some sunny summer afternoon.…”

  He lit another cigarette from the stub of the first one and we kept walking. He made good time with the cane. We were somewhere in Clichy.

  “Well, I followed the blood like an old Indian tracker, Robbie had been knifed in the belly and in the chest, it was a miracle he’d gotten more than ten feet … the Vicar was a strong man, very strong … so I followed the blood, thank God it was a dry day, wasn’t much to it. Blood stopped at the corner of rue Mouffetard and rue Ortolan, which is where it must have happened … probably some clochard from the Place, knew who Robbie was, went round the bend, had a go at him with a paring knife …”