I couldn’t see any point in standing, waiting. I headed back into the darkness of the cave, aware I could go only so far before the gloom stopped me. As it turned out, I didn’t have far to go.
A man was waiting for me on a ledge. He looked like he was napping.
But his eyes were wide, sunken into sockets dark as walnuts. I saw the whites like two dim crescents of moon and I knew it was happening all over again and I froze in my tracks like a man who knows he’s already dead, just waiting for the blow. Listening for the footsteps behind me, the figure wafting like a bad dream from the darkness, knife in hand, an end to it all.…
But no one came. I looked back, seeing the shape of a man in the luminous mouth of the cave. No one was there. No one came.
I stepped closer, looked at the old, old man in his cassock. The blood at his throat was still sticky, a scarlet ribbon. I felt it on my fingertips. Brother Padraic …
I leaned on the slippery wall. I swallowed the sourness of fear. I concentrated on the pain in my knees and hands and back. I tried to think, but the mechanism wouldn’t kick in. I couldn’t think. I wanted to get the hell out of the cave. But what was waiting for me outside?
I sloshed back through the shallow water and stood again in the grayness, blinking, trying to get my bearings.
Where was Brother Leo?
Where was the concordat?
I’d have to go back to the monastery … I wasn’t making much sense. I staggered out onto the beach, wandered through the blowing fog, knowing I couldn’t climb the cliff, knowing I had to head back down the beach.
The gigantic boulders suddenly materialized out of the fog and there was something, someone, standing in the water, between the boulders and me. The fog whisked it all away. I went closer to the water, straining to see. Trying to pick out the figure again. Something was all wrong.
I waded into the water, saw it again.
A cross, plunged into the surf, driven in like a stake. It was waving to me through the fog and rain, beckoning me like Ahab lashed to the whale.…
It wouldn’t come clear in the swirling, blowing fog. The rain was blurring my vision, whipped across my face by the driving wind. Somewhere, in the distance beyond the fog and rain, the sun was glowing, whitening the vapor all around me.
Then I saw it.
Ten feet away as I stood in the frothing water that sucked at my shoes, soaked my feet and ankles.
A rude cross plunged upside down in the sand, tilting sideways as the sea swept back and forth.
An inverted cross. The oldest warning in Christendom.
Nailed to the cross, one hand hanging loose, flapping with the push and pull of the surf, was the waterlogged, already bloated and rubbery and blue-tinged corpse of Brother Leo.
There was no way to put a good face on it.
I panicked. Really panicked. I didn’t try to think it through, I didn’t rely on my reason and experience and come to grips with the situation. I just lost it. I didn’t think about the gun in my pocket and go hunting for the miserable son of a bitch. I didn’t go to the monastery to report a maniac’s work. I didn’t do anything that my life and training had prepared me to do. I ran.
I’d been doing pretty well, I thought, since I’d seen my sister Val’s body at my feet. But with the sight of Brother Leo’s grotesque crucifixion burned into my brain, I half ran, half staggered back along the beach, tripping and falling, a caricature of terror. Somehow I got to the beehive, grabbed my gear, threw it into the car, and scraped the fender against the jagged edge of a milestone, getting the car out of the muck and back onto the narrow road. I wasn’t thinking. I was acting in a blind rush, speeding as if there were something gaining on me, something I couldn’t elude no matter where I went. It was a rebirth of the worst fears of vulnerable childhood and I was, for a time, that child again, fleeing the monsters of darkness, an old rhyme from a book I no longer remembered repeating itself again and again in my mind.
… one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a fearful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
I drove hard for two hours before I’d calmed down enough to stop beside the road and finish off the bread and cheese left over from the previous night. It grew a little warmer as I drove inland but a thin rain fell steadily. I paid no attention to the countryside, nor to a village where I finally stopped for coffee. Then more coffee, eggs, sausage, broiled tomatoes, toast. My hunger was almost out of control, as if the act of eating would ward off the thing pursuing me. Finally I sat on a bench in a sudden shaft of sunshine and watched some children kicking a soccer ball around a patch of grassy park, watched mothers pushing bundled-up babies in prams, and my heart began to slow down and I began to recover the ability to think.
It had to be Horstmann, not some other phantom banshee. Horstmann. He had brought the concordat north forty years before; now he had come to leave slaughter in his wake. Surely he had come because of me. He had known I was coming to find Brother Leo. He had learned so much from Robbie Heywood before he killed him, then perhaps he’d waited, watched me, followed me … and killed Leo, who had been planning to tell me so much.
But why hadn’t he killed me?
Horstmann had been watching, and having struck had disappeared in the fog.… The soccer ball rolled to my feet. I booted it back to a girl with pigtails, who thanked me through the space where her two front teeth had once been.
He had the concordat. So I could forget that. Unless I could discover to whom he would eventually give it.
But why hadn’t he just waited in the cave and killed me, too? Why hadn’t he finished the job he started? I’d have been so easy for him this time. But he’d let me live.… Was it because he now had the concordat? How important was it? Had the names of Simon’s assassini been added to it? Had it gone beyond that? Were they adding names even now?
No. Crazy.
Did I no longer matter to them? Now that he’d killed the two old men who held the answer to the riddle of the assassini, now that he had the concordat, was I mere addendum, a useless, feeble appendage?
So why hadn’t he lopped me off?
Could it be that someone was now protecting me? Had Horstmann been ordered by someone not to kill me? But who could that someone be? There was only one man so far who gave Horstmann orders … Simon Verginius. A long time ago.
Still, Horstmann had tried to kill me once. Why stop? Even if I were nothing more than a loose end, why not tie me up once and for all? Why not kill three in the fog as long as you’ve killed two?
Maybe I’d just been lucky. Being late, maybe I’d avoided another appointment with that knife … maybe he’d gone looking for me in the fog, perhaps we’d passed each other unseen in the fog and I had lived.…
Christ, I was getting nowhere.
And then I found myself thinking of Sister Elizabeth again, wanting to tell her the story of what I’d been through, wanting to see her face and her green eyes, wanting—God help me—to hold her and cling to her.
It was an idiotic line of thought. I had to be in shock.
I sat for a while in the park. Across the brown grass, where the children in puffy parkas played, I saw the railroad station. A small brick building, a shabby outpost of lonely travelers, grimy with age. I watched a train pull in, wait for no more than a minute or two, then clang scruffily away.
A man was coming out of the station, walking toward me. He strode through the kids, coming toward me. Me. He stopped in front of me and set his bag down.
“They tell me there’s a bus to St. Sixtus stops here.” He turned, looked down the road. “I must say you look worse than I’d have thought possible.” He turned back, looking at me askance. “Your tailor should see you now. You are a disgrace to the idea of excessive privilege.”
“Father Dunn,” I said.
4
He sat in the first-class carriage, his grip full of damp clothing, and watched the blur of sunshine behind the rain squall cast shadows that brought out the texture of the landscape. The train was sparsely populated. Two other priests munched sandwiches, rattled their brown paper sacks, polished apples against the fabric of their black suits.
Horstmann watched them awhile, slowly turning his old rosary, blessed by Pius himself during an audience before the war. Then he put it away and peeled off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose which bore a reddish crease, closed his icy eyes. It had been a long night, talking with Brother Leo, reminiscing about the old days, that long-ago, choppy night they had crossed the Channel in an open boat, clinging to each other for dear life and praying aloud against the howling gale.
Brother Leo had been understandably confused when his old, long-lost comrade had appeared unannounced at his room in the middle of the night. Confusion had been followed in quick succession by hesitancy and fear. But Horstmann had calmed the fears, told him a story about having been sent from the Secret Archives to finally bring the Concordat of the Borgias back to Rome, back to the place it belonged. Yes, he’d come from Simon personally, yes, it was safe now, after all these years. Horstmann had spun a tale that might have been true and Brother Leo had wanted to believe it. Horstmann had told him that a treacherous journalist from New York was on the trail of the concordat, had stumbled across the story of the secret brotherhood, and that it was now a race, the Church against the New York Times, which was bound to reveal everything in the worst possible light and create a great scandal and cause the Church a great injury. And then he had described the journalist. Ben Driskill.
Brother Leo’s instincts had been to mistrust such a story, but his fear of Horstmann’s ghostly materialization had made him want to believe it was true. But Horstmann, with something like regret, had seen the doubt in the little old man’s eyes … Little old man. Chronologically they were almost the same age, but there was more to life than chronology.
That morning in the cave had been a sorry business.
Brother Leo’s doubts had come to life again, he’d sensed something in his old comrade and it had proven his undoing. Brother Padraic hadn’t seemed to be aware he was dying: he’d folded his arms and babbled a bit, as if he thought Horstmann were the angel of death, and had drifted off like a spaceman severed from his support system. Leo had been a problem. He had tried to escape, had cried out to Driskill, and Horstmann had cut him quickly, almost in anger, which was unlike him, and then he’d carried out the ritual. There had been an old cross left over from some service carried out on the beach long ago, maybe even another crucifixion, now worm-eaten and damp through, and it had struck him as an omen, finding it propped against the wall of the cave like timber bracing. Simon would have understood the gesture. Simon had done the same thing once in the French countryside with a priest who had tried to betray them to the SS.…
Brother Leo was no better, no better than the one who had betrayed them in the end and brought them to ruin and scattered them like ashes on the wind. Leo had known the secret of the concordat yet had been planning to give it to a stranger. Simon had long ago left no doubt in their minds as to the sacred need for secrecy. Yet Leo had urged it on Driskill.
Incomprehensible.
To die was not enough.
The ritual—so ancient, so brutal, so damning for eternity—had been called for, and God had given him the strength to carry it out.…
The fog had blotted out Driskill. Horstmann had not been willing to wait for him.
Driskill.
Horstmann had begun to think of him as a hound of hell. Driskill was the devil’s work. The fog had saved him this time or he’d have taken Leo’s place on the cross.
Why wouldn’t he die?
On the ice that night in Princeton, Horstmann had killed him. But he would not die. It was as if he were being saved for some other fate.
But how could that be? And where was he now? What had he done upon finding Brother Leo in the fog, drained of blood and turning blue with the cold—
Had he been afraid?
No. He didn’t think Driskill was afraid. Driskill was a merciless, godless man, and he was not afraid. He was not afraid to die, yet he was full of sin. He should by rights have feared death, the punishment for his sins, what lay in wait for him in the final darkness. But he was not afraid.
It made no sense.
Where was Driskill now? Was he following? Who, he wondered, was hunting whom? The thought perplexed him. But God was on his side.
Horstmann slipped his eyeglasses back into place and told himself that there was nothing to worry about. No man possessed greater vigilance than he. No man.
So he closed his eyes, holding the leather briefcase in his lap. The Concordat of the Borgias safe at last. It was for him a living thing, a kind of disembodied heart, pulsing with the blood and the commitment that would cleanse the Church at last.… He remembered the night in Paris when Simon had entrusted it to him and Leo and sent them on their mission, the mission that had turned Leo into a virtual hermit and himself into a wanderer, telling them to wait for the time when they would be summoned again to save the Church.…
* * *
The spools of audio tape whirled slowly and the voices filled the room, a little tinny without enough bass, but then, the quality of the fidelity had not been the point.
He was in Alexandria a week ago, give or take a few days. While there he had a meeting with our old friend Klaus Richter—
You’re joking. Richter? Our Richter? From the old days? You told me he was the one who frightened you!
None other, Holiness. And he did frighten me, I assure you.
Your candor becomes you, Giacomo.
The draperies were drawn, shutting out the gray light of a cloudy morning. Across the pine-bordered lawn one might have seen the brown haze rounded like a lid over Rome. A gardener was trimming the hedges with something like a chain saw, judging by the sound of it. The angry whine penetrated the draperies hanging heavily at the open windows and French doors. It sounded like a monstrous wasp trying to decide upon a victim.
And he saw another man who subsequently killed himself.
Who was that?
Etienne LeBecq, Holiness. An art dealer.
There was a long pause.
We also have a report from Paris that a journalist, an old chap by the name of Heywood—
Robbie Heywood. You remember him, Giacomo. Terrible loud jackets, he’d talk your arm off and drink you under the table, given half a chance. God’s love, I remember him … how does he come into this?
Dead, Holiness. Murdered by an unknown assailant. The authorities have no clues, of course.
“Antonio! This is a genius of sorts! How incredibly underhanded this all is! How did you get these tapes?”
In the library of the villa which was the home of Antonio Cardinal Poletti, whose brother was an Italian diplomat stationed in Zurich and whose other brother was in the business of making and distributing unsavory films in London for a small but demanding market, five men sat with cups of breakfast coffee and rolls and fruit close at hand. And a very large problem in their laps.
Poletti was forty-nine, a small man with a bald head and alarmingly hairy arms and legs, all of which was in full view since he wore his tennis costume. The other four included Guglielmo Cardinal Ottaviani who was sixty and widely regarded to have the most exaggerated “attitude problem” in the entire College of Cardinals but was a man whose very irascibility rendered him powerful and persuasive: he was feared; Gianfranco Cardinal Vezza, one of the eldest of the elder statesmen of the Church, a man who carefully maintained his reputation for increasing balminess so that he might all the more easily spring the iron jaws of his traps on the unwary; Carlo Cardinal Garibaldi, a chubby “club man” among the cardinals, a natural politician who had learned much of what he knew best at the feet of Cardinal D’Ambrizzi; and Federico Cardinal Antonelli. T
hey were arranged in a variety of dark red leather chairs and couches, surrounded by entire walls of books—several of which Cardinal Poletti had himself written. Garibaldi’s question went unanswered as the tape played on.
But what has he to do with any of this mess?
Sister Valentine saw him in Paris while doing her research. Now he’s dead. There may be a connection—
You’ll have to do better than that, Giacomo. I’ll send someone to Paris and check this out.
Good luck to him. Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence. Knifed on a street corner. Such things happen.
Nonsense. The Church is under attack and Heywood was a victim. It’s obvious.
Cardinal Poletti leaned across the coffee table and punched the stop button. He looked slowly from one face to another.
“The heart of the matter,” he said. “Did you hear it? ‘The Church is under attack.’ That’s what I wanted you to hear Indelicato himself say … he sees it for what it is, an attack.” He frowned at his coffee which was cold by now. “It is better that we lay our plans now than try to accomplish everything at the last minute when we’re up to our ears in foreigners—Poles and Brazilians and Americans! Give those people enough rope and they hang us all, they hang the Church. You know I’m right.”
Cardinal Garibaldi spoke again without moving his plump lips, like a ventriloquist temporarily in search of a dummy. “You say these voices—Callistus, D’Ambrizzi, and Indelicato, eh? Well, there’s a nasty genius to it, Antonio. How did you get these tapes? Where did this discussion take place?”
“His Holiness’s office.”
“How extraordinary. You put a bug in his office! No need to look so startled. I’m up on the latest terminology.”
“It must be the influence of that brother of yours,” Cardinal Vezza murmured. He stroked the white stubble on his chin. He often forgot to shave these days.
“Ah, but which brother,” Ottaviani said, striking one of his attitudes, his smile like a sickle wound, “that is the question. The diplomat or the pornographer?” He cackled softly under his breath, enjoying young Poletti’s discomfort.
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