The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Yet Sister Elizabeth would have understood the old bishop’s dilemma. It was like an amputation you underwent upon entering the Church: the Church cut away your morality and replaced it with something of its own, something unnatural and contrived and prescribed. There was no room for simplicity anymore, no room for right and wrong. Expediency was the new morality and you accepted it.

  I looked back at Elizabeth and it seemed forever since I’d seen her. Back then I hadn’t been sliced open by Horstmann, I hadn’t faced the idea of myself-as-murder-victim, I hadn’t yet turned into a hunter, I hadn’t gone to war. Back then I hadn’t carried a gun. It had been forever since I’d seen her. I’d almost died myself. I’d caused the death of a scared little man in Egypt. I’d put a name to the silver-haired priest. I’d visited the monastery in hell. I’d found another murder in Paris. I was a different man from the fellow who’d said good-bye to Elizabeth. But she wouldn’t have changed. She was still the creature of the Church, owned by it, instructed by it, purveyor of its official stories. She wanted to believe she was something better and finer, more like my sister, but she was wrong. She thought she knew so much but she knew only the party line. She was caught in the web from which Val had miraculously freed herself, that was the difference.

  I knew all of that, but none of it mattered when I remembered how I’d laughed with her and made vast inroads into the contents of the refrigerator and unraveled some of the ominous riddle Val had left behind and gone to see the old cop on the shore and learned that Father Governeau had been murdered and the murder covered up.… All that had been so good. And then the performance had dropped away and I’d butted up against the real Elizabeth.

  She was a nun. And that was the last thing in the world I wanted to let myself in for. I couldn’t win, not in a struggle with the Church, with her vows. I couldn’t risk it. I knew all about nuns. I always had, from the day I found the dead bird hanging on the school-yard fence.… You could never know what they thought. You trusted them and depended on them and all, of a sudden they were telling you they weren’t women, they weren’t human, they were nuns. But I’d been lulled by Sister Elizabeth. She’d blurred the lines, blunted the warnings I’d learned by heart, smudged the distinctions between herself and other women. Then I’d let her hurt me.

  Hurt. That was the second reason, the bad one, that made the whole idea of Elizabeth so wrong. I’d loved my sister and the Church had killed her. If I let myself fall in love with Elizabeth, I knew the Church would somehow kill her, too. Another innocent would die. I knew it.

  Of course, she would think me mad even to contemplate her in such terms. After all, she’d proven it, she was a nun. She’d betrayed my trust.

  I was driving through a sudden squall, rain spitting out of the thick mist. I felt the wet cold sweeping at me from the ocean and then I saw the first low beehive cells, a thousand years old, and the broken ruin of stone walls and the gray, moss-speckled shape rising from the cliffs …

  The monastery of St. Sixtus.

  I’d read about such places but I’d never seen one, never seen anything like it. I felt as if the earth and the weight of centuries were slipping away and I was plummeting backward through time and space to the sixth century, when St. Finian had prescribed the kind of asceticism that went with the desolation of the scene stretched out along, the barren, rock-strewn bluff and shoreline before me. It was a beehive monastery, St. Sixtus, a creation native to this Irish coast with its fury of frothing, pounding, ceaselessly slamming ocean breakers. The beehives of piled stones were dwarfed by both the sea and the cliffs, as well as by the later additions to the monastery which had probably been built over a period of more than a thousand years.

  St. Finian and his successors had ordered an almost inhuman kind of ascetic endurance for the monks who were expected to survive on a minimum of sleep and food, hideous scourges, and interminable masses. The monks were forbidden from using any beasts in the tilling of their stony fields. Instead, they harnessed themselves to the plows. The asceticism pervaded the orders, whether a monk chose the life of a hermit or vowed eternal wandering. It was all a uniquely Irish kind of severity. Never before in history had even the traditional monastic refuge been thought to endanger true self-abnegation.

  St. Columban had always been one of my special favorites. His penitential—the table of punishments for even the slightest carnal stirrings—was the kind of thing that made you wonder about saints in general, Irishmen in particular. The ideas of sodomy and masturbation drove him into paroxysms of sadism. One image had stuck with me from the first day I researched him as a seminarian. The naked monk, standing alone up to his neck in the rough seas along just such a canker of coastline as lay before me, dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, singing psalms until his vocal cords ruptured, until his blood ran cold, until he gave up the struggle and slid beneath the water … For what? What was the point? Was it simply that they were all crazy, had nothing better to do with their dementia? Sometimes an enemy of the Church would be caught among them, an infidel, a sodomizer, and he would be crucified on the sandy, rocky shingle and the cross driven into the sand upside down so that the tide would just possibly drown him before he died of suffocation or loss of blood.… I couldn’t forget those old stories a quarter of a century after reading them, now that I set my eyes on this dying place for the first time.

  I drove off the narrow, rutted path and got out of the car, felt the sting of the wind and the scythe of the damp, salty, acrid spray filling the air. The Irish coast was the perfect place for these red-eyed, maniacal monks who could never scourge themselves unto satisfaction. Rocky, barren lumps rose from the bay and the crumbling cliffs of the shoreline were split as if by hammer blows. Ravines angled away from the water like fistulas, crags and promontories bearing crippled, stunted trees crumbled wetly, and a wilderness of thorn and gorse crowded through slots in the rocks. Someone I’d read a long time ago wrote that the uninhabited and the uninhabitable seemed to these monks “as so many invitations to the pain they sought for their earthly lives.”

  Maybe it was an atavism harbored deep in my genetic matrix. The fact was I had to walk among the relics of that other world, had to see what it all looked like from the vantage point of some benighted pilgrim washed ashore five hundred years before by capricious fate and unmanageable gales. Behind me now the sea thundered, shuddered up along the stretch of uneven rocky beach that lay pale and helpless between the angry, brooding cliffs that threatened it as well as me like a giant pair of jaws. Caves, dark fenestrations, peered like impenetrable black eyes down upon me. The poor long-ago bastards had made monasteries, surrounded by the implacable sea and the barren, unforgiving marshlands, as if what they really wanted was to hide not only from the world but even from God, hoping somehow to be overlooked, forgotten, if not forgiven.

  The sprawling monastery’s single large building was made of packed, unshaped stones, the lower reaches painted with a damp dark-green beard of moss, the upper with moss and lichen dried to a sickly brown. A tower capped by a cross against the lowering clouds, no sounds but the chill wind and the surf pounding like a wildly amplified water torture, a nervous breakdown demanding possession of your soul.

  I walked among the beehive huts, avoiding the loose stones that had come free centuries before and rolled off by themselves. I looked inside, into the darkness, but there was no sign of life, only the smell of birds and the sea. How could they have lived in such places and at the same time created the ornamental art at which we still gaped, goggle-eyed, the books, the work of the goldsmiths, continuing the work of Germanic and Celtic prehistory? What sort of geniuses were they? I didn’t know the answer, couldn’t even begin framing an answer, which probably helped explain why the wheels had come off my faith so long ago.

  Eventually I went back to the car, breathing hard against the sucking power of the constant gale. I knew why they had never been able to add anything to the noble history of monastic architecture. It was the Irish in them. They dist
rusted whatever it was that endured, anything that might presume to beauty or eternity. Better to wander, or to hide away in a cave, and disappear eventually, return to the past, like the Latin words scraped from the vellum, erased, to make way for the new that must then in its time be scraped away, too.

  I drove on up the narrow path, dragging the past behind me like a huge corpse.

  I had to get moving. I had work to do.

  I found Brother Leo in what passed for a garden, a patch of vegetables and a few flowers at the top of a cliff, just outside a wall of stone that had crumbled away many centuries ago. He was kneeling in the wet, dark earth, and he looked up at me as I leaned into the gale and pushed my way toward him across the close. He waved cheerfully, as if he knew me, and went back to his weeding and planting. I climbed over the remains of the wall, slipping on the wet moss, and found I was winded once more. He looked up at me again, said something blown away out of earshot, and smiled. His face was old and round and wizened, rather distracted in an amiable way, earnest in his determination to finish whatever he was doing. He wore black trousers wetly crusted with mud, a black turtleneck sweater up around his thin, wrinkled neck and jowls. His hands were bare, caked with mud, and there was a streak of mud on his cheek where he must have scratched an itch. At last he finished the job, patted the earth flat around some rather weary-looking stems I couldn’t identify, and stood up. He wiped his hands on a muddy bit of toweling.

  “Brother Leo,” I said. “My name is Driskill. I’ve come to see you from Paris. Robbie Heywood gave me your name.”

  He blinked at me, one of those innocent faces that always looks surprised. He pointed a grubby finger at me as if I’d said the magic word. “Robbie,” he said. “And how is Robbie?” He didn’t sound Irish. His intonation and pronunciation were indefinable. Probably Irish at birth, a life lived elsewhere. I told him that Heywood had died and left it at that for the time being. He listened, busied himself with a gunnysack full of fertilizer, tying it shut, gathering up some trowels, a small spade. He nodded intermittently. I couldn’t tell how much sense he was making of what I told him.

  “Paris,” he said. “You’ve come all the way from Paris. So Robbie’s dead. Used to call him ‘the Vicar.’ He “sent you to see me? I am, I admit it, frankly amazed. I cannot quite believe it. After all these years. We’re rather off the beaten track here. But,” he argued with himself, “do I not have the evidence looking me directly in the eye? Amazed, I am. The Vicar! I would have enjoyed seeing him again.” His eyes popped wide, innocently, and he seemed to have known what I was thinking earlier. “Oh, enjoyment is no longer outlawed here. Such a relief. A blessing. An obstreperous, nosy man, but a good companion during some dark days. Good Lord.” He shook his head, bushy eyebrows catching the wind. “Dead. Old time is on the wing. The shadows are gathering, deepening.” He smiled at me happily.

  “He didn’t live out his span,” I said. “Robbie Heywood was murdered in Paris a week ago—”

  “But who would do such a thing?”

  “A man who came through time, from forty years ago, a man he trusted … a man who tracked him down and didn’t give him a chance. Less than a month ago my sister, a nun, Sister Valentine, was murdered by the same man. Robbie Heywood believed that you could shed some light on this killer … who he is, where he came from, why he is killing. Again.”

  “May I ask,” he said calmly, “why he killed your sister?”

  “Because she was researching a book that apparently dealt in some detail with what was going on in Paris during the war. Torricelli, the Nazis, the Resistance, something he called’ ‘the Pius Plot.’ And a man, a phantom, called Simon—”

  “Stop, please.” He smiled at me so gently, as if he were beyond earthly matters, guilt and sin and murder. “You seem very well informed about very ancient, very secret matters. I hardly know what to think of you, Mr. Driskill.”

  “I’ve come a long way to hear your story. People have died—”

  “How well I know,” he mused enigmatically.

  “—beginning with Father LeBecq in a graveyard in Paris forty years ago—no, of course, he wasn’t the beginning. Who knows where it began? My sister, your old friend Heywood, they were just the most recent additions. It began long, long ago—and I have code names you might be able to identify.” The words and questions and ideas were tumbling out of me too quickly and he was drawing back. I was too much for him to handle. I saw it in his eyes, dimming for a moment as I spoke. I broke off, allowing the surf to drown the words.

  His eyes swept out across the distant sea, where it might lead you to believe it was tranquil and quiet. “I am rather afraid of you, Mr. Driskill—if Mr. Driskill is in truth your name. You see,” he went resolutely on as I began to object, “I’ve known there would be someone and there would be a due bill of sorts. Because there were things happening then, things that could never be forgotten as long as any one of us survived, any of us who knew the whole story … or even parts of it. I’m afraid I knew as much as any of us. Surely too much to be allowed to live if someone wanted to cover up the past, erase it. Someone would remember Leo someday and they would wonder if he was still alive and then they would have to find out.” He cupped his chin in his hand, arms crossed on his chest. “It’s taken rather longer than I’d thought it would. And now I wonder, are you that man? And if you are, which one of them sent you?”

  He lowered his gaze, seeing the waters grow more troubled as they swarmed toward the base of the cliffs. I called his name but the wind and the pounding waves drowned it out. I reached out, grabbed his arm. Harder than I’d intended. He turned gently and the innocence of his face shone on me like God’s grace.

  “I need your help,” I said. I wasn’t much of a salesman. I was too far gone to make a pitch and the wind was sucking my breath away, making me feel weak. This little man was one of the keys I had to have. “I must hear you, in your own words … the truth—”

  “You want to hear my story. I understand.” He spoke softly, as if amazed by a secret revelation, one I couldn’t know, but somehow I heard him, made out every word. “It was all so long ago.” He cocked his head and gave me a fatalistic, philosophical nod. “You will have to convince me—I may have lived the useful years of my life, but I have no desire to die sooner than is necessary. Do you understand? I have said you make me afraid. If you have come to kill me—if you have truly come from them—if you’ve come from Rome to kill me … then there’s little I can do to stop you. But if you have come, as you say, in search of the truth, then I will tell you my story. So, come walk with me and tell me again who you are. Let us exchange stories, yours for mine.” He smiled again. He said he was afraid but he wasn’t. He didn’t have a fearful bone in his body. “And if you have come from them, maybe I can convince you I’m nothing but a harmless old man, no danger to you and your masters—who knows?”

  “Them,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “Young man, whoever you really are, you know perfectly well who they are. Why else would you come so far? Come, come, we’ll walk on the cliffs. We’ll not dissemble. I’ll give you a chance to kill me.” He chuckled to himself as if the joke were somehow on me. I fell into step beside him.

  During the Second World War the Catholic Church was as concerned, indeed obsessed, with survival as any other European institution. Conduct of affairs had to be designed and executed with extreme care and diligent attention to the state of the war, to the shifting balance of power, to realpolitik. Further complicating matters was the issue of individual morality coming into conflict with the somewhat less luxurious morality of the organization, as Brother Leo’s story was destined to prove. The role of the Church was rendered increasingly ambiguous by the fact that in the twentieth century it had no army of its own, no means of forcing its policies or its independence from outside interests. In the first place, the course the war was taking at any given moment had to be taken into account; in the second place, some attention had to be paid to the overt
horrors being systematically perpetrated by the Nazis—they were simply difficult to ignore no matter how much one might wish to; and in the third place, there was the fact, with its uncertain consequences, that the Church was led by Pope Pius, whose ties to Germany were strong, deep, and basically mystical.

  Exemplifying this confusion of morality, aims, and effects, there arose a curious response: a cadre of Paris’s activist Catholics—priests, monks, some laymen—were recruited by a priest who would be known to them as “Simon Verginius”—that is, Simon. He bound them together by a sacred oath of secrecy that would last a lifetime. They would never reveal their brotherhood’s existence, nor would they ever reveal their identities to anyone outside the group. As long as the oath was intact, they were safe from discovery.

  But, of course, there were problems even from the institution of these first principles, Brother Leo assured me with a weary shrug. “I will simply raise the questions for the moment, providing no answers,” he said. “First, whose idea was it, this cadre, to begin with? Not Simon’s surely. There were orders coming from someone in Rome—at least that was my assumption as a young man caught up in events and wanting to play a part in things. Someone, somewhere was guiding the hand of Simon … because there was an inner proof. Conflict. Simon rebelled against some of the orders, and that was our undoing.”

  The aims of this group were to protect the Church from the misfortunes of war, to enrich the Church from the spoils of the war, and to keep the Church strong and beyond the conflagration, the firestorms of ambition and insanity that were, in fact, the war. In a nation, in a great city ruled by Nazi invaders, the implications such aims carried with them were obvious, but inevitably at odds with the morality of some individuals. Brother Leo let me think that one over as he went on with his tale.

  The men in the group were known to one another by code names. Leo said he’d forgotten them, the result of trying very hard to bury them in the distant past. He insisted that he’d forgotten how many of them there were and he wouldn’t budge on that point. Christos, yes, there was the one called Christos, he admitted remembering that name, and I’d soon find out why. At the time they were, he said, a perfectly Catholic group: totally authoritarian, nobody daring to openly voice questions, not even thinking about questions as such, except in the quiet of one’s own mind when the defenses were down. Orders were given, orders were carried out. Decisions were left to others. These men saw themselves accurately as weapons in the service of the Church. It was a time of war and the Church had never cowered before secular armies: well, not often. Historically it had raised its own armies, sent its own soldiers to the battle, to die if necessary, to kill if killing was called for. Now, in Paris, the Church had raised a new army to call its own and it would do what had to be done. Brother Leo wouldn’t look at me just then but I understood: killing had been called for all right, and killing they had done.