The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “So,” he went on, turning back to me, “we kept it out of the hands of the Nazis. It’s here, you see. We brought it here to this place, St. Sixtus. Like so many of the Irish monasteries, this one has always been a repository of Church documents from the Middle Ages on. A tradition. Things preserved for centuries. Out of the way and safe.”

  “You’re telling me it’s here? Right here?” Blood was pounding in my head. A list of assassini …

  “Yes, of course. The archivist, Brother Padraic—very old man, failing now, I’m afraid—he has it, it’s hidden here, somewhere in the St. Sixtus archives. Through these forty years Padraic and I have become great friends. Now it’s time for both of us to get the thing off our consciences. We had no plan to do so, but now you’ve come, you may be God’s answer to our final doubts about what was done in His name back then. We will die soon … but you may be the answer to our prayers. We are just two simple old men.” He sighed again but without a scintilla of sorrow for himself. “I suggest that I give you the concordat for your disposal … I mean, it is mine to give, is it not?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “The man who came north with me, the Dutchman, is long, long gone. Lost. And Simon? Well.” He shrugged again.

  “Is Simon alive? You know that?”

  “Oh my, yes, Simon is still alive. And little Salvatore.” A tiny grin played across his small features. “All very grand now,” he said enigmatically.

  “Why not just tell me, for God’s sake?” My voice was trembling with frustration. And I was so goddamned cold. “Who was Simon? Who the hell is Simon?”

  “If I don’t give it to you, it will quite probably be lost forever. Padraic and I will die, the concordat will remain in our vaults here for a century, maybe two. But if I give it to you … tell me, will you do me, the Church, a service?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you the Concordat of the Borgias if you will take it away and deliver it for me—could you arrange that?”

  “Deliver it where? To whom?”

  “To whom he says! To Simon, of course. It was his in the old days. Take it home to Simon for me.”

  “You’ll have to tell me where—”

  “Obviously. Who and where.”

  “You baffle me, Brother Leo.”

  “Do I?”

  “You were all killers. All of you.”

  “I thought perhaps I’d explained the circumstances. The war, all that madness …”

  “And now you’re at it again.”

  “Not me, as you can see. The others, whichever of them may be left, they must answer for themselves.”

  “You’re going to tell me who Simon is?”

  “Yes. In due time.” He looked into my eyes for a long moment. “Someone still killing,” he mused. “Killing for the Church. Ah, Mr. Driskill, I worry about my sins.” He stood still for what seemed like forever. “Still killing to save the Church. But Robbie Heywood? Your sister?” He turned back to me, his face suddenly tired and filled with worry. “Goodness,” he said, “I am so out of touch.”

  I had to stay calm. I couldn’t run the risk of scaring the old man. But I was coming apart inside from sheer excitement. So close now, so near some answers. Simon was alive, I’d have his name, I’d know where he was.… But it would all have to be done Brother Leo’s way.

  Which was why I found myself soaked to the skin and scrambling down the rough escarpment by means of a natural set of footholds. I’d been to two monasteries since this thing had gotten hold of me, and I longed for something else. Smooth green lawns, privet hedges, a birdbath in a courtyard, a gently tolling bell. That was what monasteries had meant to me. Peace and the time for quiet reflection. No more.

  We were halfway down the cliff face when dark clouds scudded quickly in off the sea and let us have it, full force, pelting down for all they were worth, drenching us. Leo looked back at me, water streaming down his face, called something about “a spot of weather, we’re used to it around here,” and I ducked my head, followed. Down, down, through brush and sharp rock and slipping crumbs of cliff, down until we stood on a battered strip of sand invisible from the top. It was actually a small inlet, shielded by large boulders rising out of the water fifty yards away, with surf running up the sand and slipping quietly in among the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. He beckoned to me again and we went across the cement-hard, wetly packed sand, threading a path in among the rocks which were slippery and treacherous to footfall.

  “Cave,” he said, pointing.

  We sheltered in its mouth. He took a tiny pipe from his hip pocket, along with a cracked oilskin pouch with a few shreds of tobacco gathered in the corner. He filled the little bowl, lit it, puffed, and rubbed his hands together. While the downpour blew wildly a few feet away, he explained that the cliffs were honeycombed with similar caves, all of which were part of the monastery, hermit hideaways for those who’d found the beehives of stone too luxurious. Some of the caves, including the one where we stood, led finally into the bowels of the monastery itself. There was a point, it turned out, to his showing me this particular cave.

  He told me it led into one of the hidden chambers where the secret documents were stored in special caskets. The domain of the archivist, Brother Padraic.

  “Can you find this place again?” he asked me, rubbing the bowl of his pipe against the cold palms of his hands. “Can you get down the cliff at first light? It can be tricky.”

  I said I supposed I could.

  “Good. Be careful. First light, then. We’ll have the world to ourselves then, and Brother Padraic and I will meet you here. We’ll hand over the bloody concordat, some instructions as to what you’re to do with it, and that’ll be that. I trust you, Mr. Driskill. I trust the dear God who sent you to me. And then I’ll be done with the whole business after all these years—I’ll have rid myself of the memories.…” He puffed, watching the rain blow across the cave’s entrance. “We all have sins, don’t we? Some greater than others. All we can do is confess, repent, pray for mercy. We took lives ih the name of the Church.” He couldn’t stop talking about it now that he’d started. I wondered if he’d spoken with anyone else about it once he’d gotten to St. Sixtus. He’d told Padraic, I assumed. But it must have built up in him until he began to tell me, this stranger he was betting on, for better or worse. “Is that one sin or two? We killed and we blamed it on the Church. Two, I think. Let me tell you something, Mr. Driskill. It is often argued that from our first communion onward we consume the Church. It is a lie, my friend, It’s the Church that consumes us. It’s like a riddle, is it not?”

  The rain stopped, the storm clouds lingered, brought night to the monastery and its inhospitable shore, and he led me back along the spit of sand in the direction from which we’d come. He excused the surreptitious aspects of my visit but said he thought it far better that I keep out of sight. The fewer the questions, the better off we’d be. I pointed out to him that I’d already been seen by several monks in the main building while I was enquiring as to his whereabouts, but he shrugged it off. “I’ll lie,” he said happily, “tell them you’re an American cousin and already gone. If anyone asks.” The small sins didn’t matter.

  He told me I could spend the night in one of the beehives. He’d bring me bread, cheese, wine, and a blanket. While he went off to fetch these necessities I pulled the rented car farther down off the shoulder of the road, parked it behind and among a screen of stones, broken walls, and high weeds. Anybody who saw it, particularly in the darkness, would have to be looking hard for it. I waited for Leo’s return, standing beside the beehive wrapped in my old macintosh like a coast watcher from another, less secret war.

  He came back with the provisions as well as a couple of thick candles. We huddled in the center of the stone beehive. I tried not to think about the pervasive damp and the slipperiness of the walls. He uncorked the homely bottle of red wine and I swilled it down with chunks of fresh soda bread and sharp white cheese. He went over the plans for the morning, a
nd just as he was about to leave I spoke a name.

  “August Horstmann,” I said.

  He was ducking to get through the low-cut opening in the beehive, his hand up to brace himself against the archway. “What did you say?” He spoke, standing stock-still with his back to me.

  “August Horstmann. Was he the man you called the Dutchman?”

  He turned slowly, small mouth pursed, regarding me with an air of disappointment. “I don’t like being made a fool of, Mr. Driskill. I expect a man to be square with me, not be leading me on and laughing behind my back—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You knew it all along and let me blither on like an old crock …”

  “Nonsense. I was guessing.” I didn’t tell him about the Dutchman killing the old Vicar, Heywood.

  “Horstmann’s the man who came north with me. The Dutchman. We brought the concordat here, to St. Sixtus. He left like a shadow when night came … and I stayed. He was a brave man. Fearless, that Dutchman.”

  I was exhausted and the cold and damp weren’t doing my back any good. It was wet and sticky, felt like the bandage was stuck to the flesh with wet, hardening cement. So the various throbbings and achings made sleep difficult to come by. I kept shifting in the blankets I’d wrapped around myself under the trench coat but there was no such thing as a comfortable position. The waxy candle guttered in the drafts; black smoke curled away. The sea thrashed as if it were at my doorstep. But I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep even in my bed at home.

  The connections kept breeding among themselves. Horstmann and Leo. Together they had brought this concordat of the Borgias from Paris to the north coast of Ireland. Forty years ago. Simon Verginius had given it to them, to keep it safe, out of the hands of the Nazis. Paris. Assassini. Simon. Concordat. Horstmann … LeBecq in the graveyard, his brother propped against the nosewheel of an airplane in the Egyptian desert forty years later, the two deaths somehow connected. My sister Val … Richter, Torricelli, D’Ambrizzi, LeBecq caught by the camera so long ago … the Collector … Little Sal, the Dutchman, Leo crouching in the cold … Father Governeau on my sister’s mind the day she died …

  Leo. There was no point in telling him that his comrade on that long and perilous flight from the Nazis was still abroad in the land, like the spirit of evil.

  But I couldn’t keep Horstmann from invading my thoughts, finally settling in like another occupying army. I felt as if I were no longer alone in the ancient monk’s beehive. Horstmann was there beside me. He’d been there in Paris, anticipating me, killing Heywood to keep me from finding out about the assassini, and he’d failed. And he’d tried to kill me in Princeton and he’d failed and I knew he’d keep trying to kill me until one of us was dead … and in the desolation of that night with the rain dripping through the chinks in the stones I wondered if I had any chance at all against him. Or would he just keep trying to kill me on through time, forever and ever and ever, as if we were both trapped in the inner precincts of hell.

  I yawned, shivered, rolled myself ever more tightly in the blankets. I was safe in the beehive. He couldn’t possibly know where I was.… Still, he’d been there, forty years ago he’d been there, right there, at old St. Sixtus.

  I had to get hold of myself. I had to keep the fear of Horstmann from overtaking me and running me off. But he was so implacable a killer, so determined, so ruthless, killing to protect the secrets, Simon’s secrets, and I could feel him, hear his breathing and his footsteps behind me.…

  Could I turn it around now, I wondered, could I turn hunter and hunt him until he dropped? How could I hunt someone invisible? Could I hunt him and corner him and kill him for Val and Lockhardt and Heywood and Monsignor Heffernan? And for myself? Could I bring myself to kill anyone? If I could, I knew who it would be.

  He was so overpowering in his madness, so far beyond my powers of comprehension, like all the great mysteries of the Church. I felt like a man pursued by a mythical beast that could render itself invisible whenever it chose, then reappear in a puff of brimstone, give me enough of a glimpse to keep me in the chase, then disappear once again as I rushed headlong toward my own doom. It seemed to me that I had no choices. I’d have to continue, press on until it was over.

  My reactions to Leo were ambivalent. He bothered me. He was so clearly a kind, decent old man, yet I was repelled by his story of the assassini in Paris. The pragmatic betrayal of the Resistance in order to remain in the good graces of the Nazis—still, I supposed it was a fairly accurate microcosm of the Church’s attitude in those days. Pius wouldn’t even excommunicate Hitler! And there was Leo’s reaction to Simon. Leo seemed to find him saintly. This Simon, who had by whatever means come to possess this concordat, struck me as a killer at the least, maybe worse.… But it all must have been terribly complicated and who the hell was I to judge anyway? I wanted to find a man and then kill him.

  What had happened to Simon after the war?

  Who was he? And was he still giving Horstmann his orders?

  As I went to sleep at long last I was thinking of Sister Val, wondering what she and Sister Elizabeth would have made of all this.…

  The first time I jolted awake it was with a peculiar realization, the subconscious ticking away. I was thinking of Val dead in the chapel and the way my father had spoken to me late that night, coping with his grief, and the sound of his body crashing down the steps come morning. Time was jumbling it all together and when I woke again I was cold, perspiring heavily, my stomach in a knot. I shook my head, trying to clear away the dreams. I saw Elizabeth in the doorway of the house when she’d arrived unexpectedly and I had thought she was my sister, Val.

  Later on it was the knife flashing through the moonlight, the sting and the ice against my face and Sandanato calling to me from far away.

  Jesus, what dreams!

  I didn’t sleep anymore and first light came early.

  When I left the beehive a cold wind was whipping a palpable fog. It hit my face like a wet glove. It was impossible to see more than an arm’s length ahead. In no time I was soaked through again, stumbling over the uneven landscape, working my way along the top of the cliff feeling like a fool trapped on Conan Doyle’s deadly Grimpen Mire with the hound baying, where a misstep guaranteed eternity. I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes and the hound of the Baskervilles wasn’t after me, but my thoughts during the fitful night had left me tired and on edge and I was trying to keep my fears under control and my wits at hand.

  I inched slowly along the cliffs, and wherever I looked there was nothing but thick fog. No monastery, no sheer drop to my left, no breakers against the rocks, nothing. So I went slowly and Eliot’s lines kept running through my mind.

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

  And in short, I was afraid.

  I came to the crumbling wall at the graveyard, frisked my memory for the lay of the land, felt for the slippery footholds in the cliff until I found them. I felt I’d been at it for hours already, clammy and wet and confused by the fog. In short, I was afraid.

  I held on to the clumps of gorse and the bits of cracked ledge and the odd protrusion of root, praying that nothing came loose, and felt my way, step by step, down the face of the cliff. Fog acted as a buffer, muffling the crashing of the waves. It also blinded me, disoriented me, but heightened some of my other senses: the reverberation of the waves traveled through the sheets of stone, left my legs quaking, as if the cliff were about to split open.

  Panic stopped me somewhere between the top of the cliff and the beach. I thought I was going to lose my footing and pitch forward into gray oblivion. I waited, hanging on the wall, until the worst of it had passed, then felt with my foot for the next step. Slipped. I grabbed hard at the tangled hook of root with my right hand and it pulled slowly from the crevice where it had taken hold. I heard myself cry out as I fell, twisting in the air like a cat, scraping my hands r
aw, reaching for some salvation, and there was none.

  I landed on all fours, my head hanging like a whipped dog, choking on my own terror. At most, I’d slipped and fallen six feet before landing on the sand. I’d almost reached the bottom and I hadn’t known it, hadn’t sensed it with the enveloping fog. Fighting for breath, I sat back, leaning against the wet rocks, wiping the condensed moisture and sweat from my dripping face. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I felt like throwing up. And I was sick of the whole bloody horror.

  I’ll never know what I might have done if I hadn’t been able to penetrate the fog. I might still be sitting there, catatonic, an uninhabited body that had once contained a man. But unexpectedly the wind swirled in off the water, carrying with it gusts of rain, and blew some gaps in the fog and I caught a glimpse of the sand wandering away to my right and I knew where I was.

  I stood up, knees on fire from the fall, palms bloody in patches, rain blowing in my face, and set off toward the cleft in the rocks where I would find Leo and Brother Padraic. I went cursing them both for making the job next to fucking impossible. Adrenaline was pushing me on. If I’d encountered the dark angel of my nightmares just then, I’d have ripped him limb from limb, his flickering blade notwithstanding, or I’d have died trying. Which was, I supposed, far more likely.

  The tide was receding. I saw gulls flapping like ghosts, in and out of the fog banks. I got to the entrance of the cave, stood on the ledge inside its mouth where Leo had smoked his pipe and told me that it was the Church that consumed us, not the other way around. But Leo wasn’t there now which didn’t make any sense to me. I’d taken forever getting to the cave. He and Padraic should have been coming from inside the monastery: wasn’t that what he’d implied, that some of the caves wound their way back into the cellars of the main building itself? They should have been waiting for me.