“Was he robbed?”
“No, that was funny. Made me think it was a fellow who went psycho—”
“Yes, I suppose so.” There was nothing else to say. Maybe he really had been killed by a maniac, maybe there was no connection to any of my troubles, and maybe the moon was made of green cheese. And maybe I was off the edge with my suspicions.
We finally caught a taxi and went back to Contrescarpe. Clive Paternoster showed me the corner where Robbie was knifed. We followed the path he took trying to get home and went inside, stood in the stairwell, climbed the stairs to the landing where he finally bled to death. Paternoster’s charwoman had scrubbed the stained carpet and most of the blood had come out. Now there was an even more obvious trail of bleached-out spots marring the tatty old carpet.
He took me inside the apartment and I saw the place where the two crusty old bachelors had made their home among all the mementoes of two long careers. There were so many bits and pieces. A wooden propellor from the Battle of Britain, crossed oars from a Henley regatta, a cricket bat from a match at Lord’s, a photo of the Vicar and the Fuehrer, the Vicar with Pope Pius, Clive Paternoster with Pius and Torricelli, de Gaulle having dinner and Jean-Paul Belmondo smoking a cigarette and Brigitte Bardot on Paternoster’s lap and Yves Montand and Simone Signoret and Paternoster, Hemingway and the Vicar with their arms around each other’s, shoulders beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Quite a pair of lives, once wide ranging, once part of the history of their times, but now drawing in, tightening, growing smaller. Paris, Place de la Contrescarpe, Tabbycats, the bloody street corner, the bleach spots on the carpet, the little apartment with the souvenirs that would someday wind up for sale in an odds and ends flea market deep in a side street …
The clochards had a fire going and were clustered around it, ignoring the evening’s cold drizzle. There were two huge frying pans, black cast iron with toweling wrapped around their handles, full of sizzling garlic sausages and onions and peppers and chunks of potato. Bottles of cheap red wine, long crusty loaves of bread, a kind of clochard’s picnic. It smelled wonderful, mixing with the smell of the rain and the autumn fading into early winter. As I watched, one of the tramps doused the contents of both skillets with wine. It sizzled and steam puffed away in a cloud.
Clive Paternoster and I were sitting at the one table in the window. Balzac was contemplating the banana tree. We were having dinner, pot au feu after a coarsely grained garlicky pâté with cornichons, a very nice Margaux. “I’m not saying the Vicar didn’t have his faults,” Paternoster said, dipping bread into the thick gravy, “but I miss the man. We knew all the same things, we could talk. We could remember. You get a little older and it’s not so bad, sitting around on a rainy evening, remembering. He wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t half bad.”
“What did my sister want to see him about?”
“All the old World War Two malarkey. She wanted to know about Torricelli and—” He stopped himself, his eyes flickering up at me from their crinkly sockets. His eyebrows were shaggy, like a hedge in need of trimming.
“And? What? Don’t stop.”
“She was very interested in everything from that period. Anything we could remember. I was there, too, of course. Torricelli! Now, there was a beauty! God, wasn’t he the slick and slippery old devil. He knew the facts of life and the way of the world—a twisty old heathen! But then, he had to be, didn’t he? Man in the middle and not wanting to be odd man out. Nazis on one side, the Church on the other—talk about the frying pan and the fire! Particularly after D’Ambrizzi got here from Rome. He was a pistol, that one.” He shook his head, recalling those days. “He drove Torricelli crazy.”
“What all did you tell my sister?”
“Oh, she met with the Vicar on another occasion when I wasn’t available.” He shrugged. “So I don’t know—but the main thing was he called Philippe Bloody Tramonte about the papers—”
“What papers?”
“Tramonte’s the old bishop’s nephew, a runty little git, poofter if you ask me, but he’s very grand indeed. He’s the chap in charge of Torricelli’s collected papers. Calls it ‘the Archive.’ I mean, really! If you want to know what your poor sister was up to, you’ll have to take a look at the rummy old Archive.” He laughed disparagingly. “I’ll call Tramonte in the morning if you like, set it up for you.”
We were having our second cups of coffee when I asked him the question that had been knocking so insistently at the back door. “Do you know if the Vicar had another visitor recently—a priest, tall man, roughly the same age as you two? Distinguished-looking man, silver hair, very fit—”
Paternoster wrinkled his mole’s nose, his eyes widened. “You do get around! I commend you. How, may I ask, did you know?”
My blood was running cold, but every lawyerly instinct I had was up and saluting. It was coming together, another connection. “A shot in the dark. He was one of the last people to see my sister.”
“A bringer of bad luck, then.”
“What did he want from the Vicar?”
Paternoster shrugged. “He just showed up one day. Robbie and I were standing right outside here, one morning last week. Dammit, it was the day before he was killed. This silver-haired priest was suddenly standing there … introduced himself to the Vicar … said he was, let me see, it was Father August Horstmann, I think that was it. Yes, August Horstmann. And the Vicar did a bit of a double take, then he said a funny thing … he said, ‘Bless me, August! I thought you’d been dead these forty years!’ And then he introduced me and I went on about my business and the two of them went off together … old pals.”
“Old pals,” I said.
“That night I asked him about this fellow and the Vicar didn’t have much to say about him. I gathered that Father Horstmann was someone he knew during the war—”
“In Paris,” I said softly. “During the war.”
And the next day the Vicar was dead. Four days ago.
I had the feeling that Clive Paternoster was a very lucky man.
And August Horstmann had known I’d find my way to Robbie Heywood.
After another of my routinely hellish nights—hellish because I couldn’t stop being scared anymore—it was a relief to see the anemic gray light outside my window above the Boulevard Saint-Germain and notice a couple of swallows sitting on my balcony railing staring at me. I was tired and the tension that came from being afraid I was being watched by Horstmann had jammed the hot poker into my back again. Still, being up and awake was better than being in bed with my dreams.
By midmorning I was standing only a ten-minute walk away from my hotel, pressing a button next to an ancient, warped wooden door with hinges like anchors. A long wall stretched away on either side, blocking any view of the house within or its interior courtyard. It could have been any of a thousand such arrangements in Paris. I rang the bell again after a five-minute wait. An old caretaker who looked like original seventeenth-century equipment pulled the door open. It needed oil. The day was gray and misty. Splotches of dampness spotted the stucco walls. Wet gravel in the courtyard crunched underfoot, reminded me of the little cemetery in Clichy the day before. The caretaker clanged the door shut and spit through his mustache and pointed to the doorway in the foundation. He walked away, hunchbacked, a rake in his hand, and when I looked back at the darkened doorway a man in a crimson velvet jacket with some shiny, worn patches was standing there waiting for me.
Philippe Tramonte looked like he’d been designed by Aubrey Beardsley: thin, pale, tall, the velvet jacket, pearl-gray slacks with creases that might have been laid on with a pen, black tasseled loafers. The hooked Shylockian nose with its bony bridge proved the genetic linkage to his uncle, the bishop. A huge amethyst ring set in gold on his little finger: it looked as if it were intended for kissing. His voice was high and thin, his English heavily accented but expert, and his sighs—gargantuan, expressive, overwhelming—accompanied us on our way to the Archive much in the manner of Maurice Jarre bac
kground music. He wanted me to understand that his role of archivist was a hugely taxing one. I sympathized. Things were tough all over.
He led me down a long hallway to what had once been a very grand drawing room, now somewhat in decline. The ornate molding was chipped. A frayed carpet about the size of Atlantis but infinitely older filled the center of the room. Two long trestle tables with chairs and lamps were centered on the carpet. An enormous easel stood at one end beneath a tapestry of your typical knight slaying your typical fire-breathing dragon caught in the act of making off with a blonde. Some things, across the centuries, never change. The easel was empty, but my mind flashed on the painting my father had done of Constantine having the vision that reshaped the Church and the western world forever. My father always preferred the large themes. No knights, dragons, or blondes for him.
Tramonte showed me to a wall of glass-fronted bookcases and explained that he understood I was interested in the papers my sister had inspected. He was, of course, much too burdened with his own concerns to express any sympathy about her death. He pointed languidly at the matching boxes on the shelves. They were labeled 1943, 1944, and 1945. Those were the ones. He sighed, his narrow chest quaking, and asked me to please be careful, keep the material in the order I found it, and replace each box as I finished with it. I told him he was too kind. He nodded, receiving his due, and pattered away, leaving me alone. I took the first box of papers to one of the tables, long and dark and highly polished, and got out my notepads and went to work.
I spent two and a half days digging through the old bishop’s papers, most of them in French and Italian, a few in German, some in Latin, some in English, and when I finally threw in the towel and sagged back in my uncomfortable straight-backed chair I had a migraine and a major brain cramp. I had fought my way through several bushels of paper and I wondered what I had, what it all added up to. It was the third day and the November rain was still slanting against the high French windows.
There were diaries, memoranda, casual notes to himself and to others, letters he sent and letters he received. It was like putting a mosaic together when you had no idea what it was supposed to look like when finished. I kept thinking of Val, trying to understand what she’d been after, but what had she known? I was beginning to realize that I was almost certainly never going to understand what had been in her mind. Bits and pieces, yes, but never the whole picture. My perception of her thought processes was further confused by the fact that I was tracking her backward, back toward where she had for some reason begun her quest—but I doubted I would ever reach that point. It was like tramping around the jungle looking for the source of the Nile.
What I read showed that there had been an ongoing struggle between Torricelli and the determined upstart priest, Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, over the issue of the Church’s support of le Résistance. D’Ambrizzi had offered aid and comfort to Resistance saboteurs, and it was driving Torricelli crazy since he was the one who had to keep from slipping off the tightrope while dealing with the representatives of the German army of occupation. Torricelli had to deal with the Abwehr, the Gestapo, the casual errand boys, everybody. In the bishop’s view D’Ambrizzi had gone rogue, was an impetuous hothead consumed by the morality of the situation rather than by the realities; he clearly felt D’Ambrizzi was risking the wrath of the Germans which might come crashing down on the Church in Paris, maybe even all across Europe. Torricelli had even taken his worries to Pope Pius, and the pope had replied that the bishop had better make damned sure that neither D’Ambrizzi nor anyone else within the Church did anything to help the Resistance. There was no doubt in my mind as I read the documents that Pius had been very, very serious. My sister must have been ecstatic at unearthing such extraordinary source material.
There was reference to Richter, the LeBecq family, the matter of the art treasures and where they might be going. Richter was apparently involved in collecting art from the dispossessed Jews for Goering’s private galleries and also in dealing off some to the Church. So this was obviously how Val had been led in search of the contingent that finally surfaced in Alexandria. Torricelli also mentioned someone called “the Collector” coming from Rome to go through artworks to decide what exactly the Church wanted for itself. Who, I wondered, was this Collector? Add that to the list of questions.
And there were tantalizing references to Simon.
Etienne LeBecq had been afraid that Simon had sent me from Rome to kill him … so afraid that he’d finally just gone off and killed himself. Simon, one of the code names. And here he was again. Simon this, Simon that. All in 1943 and 1944. Paris had been liberated toward the end of August of 1944 and life had changed, the Germans were gone.
I had trouble translating much of the stuff about this Simon. There was the language problem and Torricelli’s penmanship had gone to hell as well, as if whenever Simon’s name came into his mind he got very nervous and hurried and flustered. The story seemed to be that in the winter of 1944–1945, while the Battle of the Bulge was raging in the Ardennes, Torricelli had come unglued in a major way by discovering “a plot so heinous that there is nothing left for me to do but summon Archduke to a secret meeting. Only he can control Simon! What else can I do? He might kill me if I get in his way. I can only tell Archduke and pray he can stop it. Will Simon listen to him? I cannot commit another word to paper.… Whatever my political convictions—and in a world such as this, do I even have political convictions anymore?—I cannot countenance what Simon intends. A miracle I learned of it … What will Archduke say? And Simon—is he good or evil? What if Archduke is behind all this and Simon is only his tool? Will Archduke turn on me if I turn against Simon? But I must or the blood of our victim will be on my hands, too!”
I went out alone that evening and had dinner at a little pizza restaurant where the pizza was good, with a couple of fried eggs and anchovies floating in a thin slick of olive oil on fresh tomato sauce with garlic and oregano. I was trying to concentrate on the food because the only other course was to face the brutal conflict between information and intelligence. I inevitably came across the same dichotomy in my practice of law. Somebody working for you would come in and dump a ton of information on your desk—everything from yesterday’s depositions to precedents from seventy-five years ago. What you had to do was somehow turn it into intelligence, become your own intelligence agency. You had to push all the pieces of information around in your mind until you began to see the interpretation that would make sense. You had to sift out the irrelevancies, peer for days, weeks, months at the information until you saw the hints of an outline—like the image on the Shroud of Turin or that face on Mars everybody was talking about not long ago. Just a hint could get you started. A hint.
Well, I had lots of hints. Lots of information right on the verge of taking shape.
So it was time to have a pizza and plenty of Fischer beer and walk along the fences enclosing the Luxembourg Gardens and let November rain on you. There was no point in thinking about what I knew. It was time to let it percolate on its own.
Later that night my mood changed. I was sure that August Horstmann was following me, trying to pick the safest moment to kill me. I was doing what Val had done. He’d killed her. He’d killed Robbie Heywood once he’d decided I was bound to follow Val’s trail all the way back to the old journalist. He must have hung around to finish me off, too.
But maybe he figured that with Robbie Heywood dead the case was closed, the trail dead as my sister. Maybe I was safe. Maybe he hadn’t counted on Clive Paternoster knowing so much.…
And what was this about Horstmann and Heywood being such old pals?
I called my father at the hospital in Princeton.
His voice was weak but distinct. The slurring I’d heard before was gone. He wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, who I was seeing. I told him I was following in Val’s footsteps, that I’d found people left over from Paris during the war: Richter, LeBecq, the nephew who was the last remnant of Torricelli, Cli
ve Paternoster. I told him Robbie Heywood had been killed by the same man—somebody called August Horstmann, a priest the Vicar had once known—who had killed Val, Lockhardt, and Heffernan.
My father spoke softly, sorrowfully. ‘Oh, not Robbie, not the Vicar … Goddamnit …”
“Look, you were in and out of Paris during the German Occupation. Did you ever hear of these code names?” I told him about Simon and Archduke. It was easy to forget that my father just might be a source of information. He’d always stayed so close-mouthed about those OSS years. But now he might remember something and open up.
But for the moment he just punched out a sharp laugh that was distorted into a cough. “Son, what I mainly remember was being afraid of getting my tail shot off by some trigger-happy Jerry. I was afraid of making a mistake and having to chew up my cyanide pill before I spilled the beans. I’ll tell you one thing, Torricelli was certainly right about D’Ambrizzi working with the Resistance. It drove Torricelli up the wall. It was none of my business, but I’d hear things—that’s how I met D’Ambrizzi, through my Resistance contacts. All I was doing, Ben, was in and out, usually in by parachute, sometimes by fishing boat along the coast of Brittany—do my job, try to get out to Switzerland alive—”
“I remember the movie,” I said.
“Movie!” He coughed again. “Come home, son. Please, Ben, your life’s on the line, whatever the devil’s going on—”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Careful,” he said numbly. “Don’t you understand, careful doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn!” He began coughing again and I couldn’t get him to answer for ten or fifteen seconds. Then I heard a nurse’s voice explaining that he was all right, that he had just a touch of pneumonia in one lung. I wasn’t to worry, everything was under control. His coughing had stopped in the background. I told her to tell him I’d be in touch again soon.
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