The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  The experience of St. Sixtus had worked a humiliating transformation, had left me feeling as if I were a frightened animal, running and thrashing in a blood-spattered maze, unsure of the role I was supposed to play: hunter or prey. Hunter or prey, both would die in the end. There was always another hunter. My mood swings lurched drunkenly between the two and, either way, I’d even lost my gun, for God’s sake. My gun, whatever good it might have done me.

  If Artie Dunn hadn’t shown up when he did, I suppose I’d have nursed myself along the crumbling edges of a nervous breakdown for quite some time. I might even have taken the plunge. I wasn’t engulfed in anything as simple as self-pity. I was drowning in flop sweat, choking on my fear. No nightmare—not my mother with her hand reaching out for me, telling me something, not my memories of Val’s head with the singed, blood-caked hair—no nightmare could compare with my morning at the beach. I was going to be seeing Leo nailed to that makeshift cross, feet in the air, the surf drowning him, turning him blue and rubbery, for as long as I lived.…

  But Artie Dunn appeared out of nowhere, right on cue in the land of the leprechaun and, as they used to say in less introspective times, took me out of myself.

  We drove my rented car back to Dublin and then took a plane back to Paris and we never stopped talking. It was like a radio game show I used to listen to under the covers, Can You Top This? What I heard opened my eyes. I’d had the feeling that I was so utterly alone once I’d left Princeton, like an astronaut left behind on the far side of the moon. Listening to Dunn, I was beginning to realize that the rest of the world had been carrying on without me.

  What, I wanted to know, was Artie Dunn doing on the wild coast of Ireland?

  Well, he’d gone to Paris looking for Robbie Heywood, news which brought me up short. It turned out that Dunn had known Heywood there at the end of the war when he had arrived as an army chaplain. He’d discovered Heywood was dead and had found himself talking with Clive Paternoster as I had. Paternoster must have begun wondering who’d show up next on the trail of one Driskill or another. Paternoster had told him about my coming through Paris, taking Dunn quite by surprise, and when he heard I’d gone to Ireland and why, he’d put aside what he’d come to Paris for and taken off in search of me. Why? Because Paternoster had told him about my knowing it was Horstmann who’d killed Robbie, told him about my interest in the assassini. Dunn figured I was in danger since Horstmann was still on the loose. I congratulated him on the quality of his insight and asked him why he’d come to Europe in the first place, why had he come looking for Robbie Heywood?

  “I had to find Erich Kessler,” Dunn said. “I thought about it and I kept coming back to Kessler. More than anyone else, he’s likely to have the answers. Once I’d read D’Ambrizzi’s testament—full of all those damned code names—I knew I’d have to find Kessler, assuming he was still alive.”

  We were on the road back to Dublin and a rain squall had blown up out of nowhere and the wipers were flipping raggedly across the windshield. There was a concert of Gaelic music on the radio and it made more sense to me than what Father Dunn was saying. Who was Erich Kessler?

  “Robbie Heywood,” he went on, “was a place to start looking for Kessler. He always seemed to know everything when it came to Catholics—”

  “This Kessler is a Catholic?” I began.

  “No”—he looked up, surprised—“no, not that I’m aware of—”

  “None of this makes sense to me.”

  “Damn little of it makes any sense to me,” he said, “but I’m working on it. We’ll get it figured out sooner or later.” He smiled reassuringly, but his flat gray eyes, set like stones in the pink cherubic face, were as faraway and remorseless as ever.

  “D’Ambrizzi’s testament,” I said, “and this Kessler—what are you talking about? Next you’ll be telling me you know all about the Concordat of the Borgias.…”

  “The devil I will,” he sighed. “We’ve got a great many blanks to fill in, Ben.” He hunched down inside his heavy lined Burberry, pulled his olive-green felt hat down low over his bushy gray eyebrows. The eyebrows looked as though he’d pasted them on, an amateur’s disguise. “Can’t you do something about the heater in this crate?” He shivered, clapped his gloved hands. “Why don’t you tell me your story since leaving Princeton? It’ll bring me up to speed and it’ll keep you from falling asleep. You look like a man who hasn’t slept in weeks.”

  So I began to talk and I told him about meeting Klaus Richter and the photo on his wall that matched the one Val had left for me in the old toy drum—Richter, LeBecq, D’Ambrizzi, and Torricelli; I told him about Gabrielle LeBecq’s story of her father’s and Richter’s involvement with the art smuggling and the mutual blackmailing of the Church and the Nazis by one another through the years. He interrupted me there with a sharp question.

  “Who is the Vatican connection these days?”

  “I don’t know.” What I did know was that he’d asked the question without a moment’s hesitation about the subject matter.

  I told him about my journey to the monastery in the desert and my conversation with the abbot, how he’d identified Horstmann for me, giving him a name, how Horstmann stayed there at The Inferno and how he got his marching orders from Rome, how that tied Rome and Horstmann to my sister’s murder. And I told him how I’d seen Gabrielle’s father, Guy LeBecq’s brother, a suicide in the desert and I told him how I’d hounded the poor bastard to death, how he’d been so afraid I’d been sent by Rome to kill him, and I told him how Gabrielle and I had looked through his diary and seen his fear written practically in tears and blood, code names … all of it.

  What will become of us? Where will it all end? In hell!

  The code names. Simon. Gregory. Paul. Christos. Archduke!

  The men in the picture. Richter and D’Ambrizzi remained alive. Was the picture enough to damn D’Ambrizzi’s chances in the papal race? What were the four men actually doing? And who took the picture?

  He listened intently as I went through all of it, on to Paris and how I’d just missed Heywood’s murder and read through the Torricelli papers about Simon and the assassini and the “heinous plot,” whatever it was, and how Paternoster had gone ahead and told me about Leo, how Leo had been one of them. I’d followed so closely in Val’s tracks, learned all the same things.

  “Which ought to make you just about ripe for the plucking,” he said grumpily. “Good thing I found you. You need a protector, my son.”

  “It was this morning that I needed you.”

  “I’m too old for that sort of thing. You’ll find I’m a far subtler man than that. I’ll be there when you really need me and no one else will do. Bank on it.” He yawned. “It’s all quite mystifying. What a pity Leo didn’t live to tell you just who Simon actually was. What a help that would be—might lead us to Archduke, too. But,” he mused, “they may all be dead and gone by now—” He cleared his throat like a man with a cold coming on. “Has it occurred to you, Ben, that someone in all this is lying? That’s the problem. We just don’t know who it is.… Someone knows all of this, Simon and all the rest of it, but he’s lying to us.…”

  “You’re mistaken there, Father,” I said. “They’re all Catholics and they’re all lying. But each one is doubtless lying about his own little patch, lying in his own interest. It’s the Catholics, that’s all.”

  “But I’m a Catholic,” he said.

  “That fact never leaves my mind, Artie.”

  “Well, you’re a cheeky fellow.”

  “I understand Catholics, no rose-colored glasses. I was a Catholic once—”

  “And you still are, dear boy. Deep down, you’re one of the flock. One of us. Always will be.” He reached over and patted my arm. “Just having a little crisis of faith. Not to worry.”

  “Twenty-five-year crisis of faith,” I snorted.

  Father Dunn laughed until he started to sneeze. He reached for his handkerchief again. “Don’t you fret. There’s plenty of
time to be saved. You’ll be fine. Now, before I begin my end of this tale—you mentioned the Borgias?”

  I explained what Brother Leo had told me about the peculiar document which was, in effect, a kind of history of the assassini. Names, places, the bloody trail through several hundred years of Church history.

  When I finished, he nodded. “Sounds a bit like stage dressing to me. Probably a nineteenth-century fake to convince somebody to do something awful.” We were almost to the airport and the rain had stopped and the jetliners seemed to skid past, low overhead. “Still, it squares with what I know.”

  “You know about this concordat thing?”

  “I read about it in D’Ambrizzi’s testament. At least that’s what I’m calling it, his ‘testament.’ Does it sound too grand?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s what D’Ambrizzi was writing in your father’s study while you and Val were wishing he’d come out and play games.” He pointed at the car rental kiosk where I could return the car. “Let’s get on the plane for Paris, have a couple of drinks, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “What the hell do you know about it?”

  “Keep your shirt on, Ben.” He flashed me an impatient glance. “I’ve read it.”

  “You’ve … read it …” I just sat there looking at him.

  It was tough, trying to get a handle on Artie Dunn.

  D’Ambrizzi, locked up in the study that summer and fall of 1945, with Val and me running around outside making faces at the windows, trying to get him to come out and play, had for reasons of his own been indulging himself in some first-class reflective voyeurism. Maybe he’d wanted to clear his conscience of things he wished he didn’t know but couldn’t forget. Whatever his reasons, he had obviously felt compelled to put down the story of what he’d seen in Paris during the war. He’d been operating in that foggy gap between the Church and the Nazis and the Resistance: there’d really been no choice, no getting away from it. Attached to Bishop Torricelli’s staff, he’d observed everything that was going on and he hadn’t known quite what to do about it. So he’d written it all down in the home of his American friend—and what the hell was he doing in Princeton, with Hugh Driskill his pal and savior?—and then he’d disappeared. One morning he’d just not been there anymore and Val and I were left wondering What was going on. The old who-was-that-masked-man thing. But now! learned he’d had time to give the manuscript into the safekeeping of the old padre at the church in New Prudence, where it had lain stuck away and forgotten for forty years. He’d gone to the considerable effort of writing it, then hidden it, and presumably forgotten about it. What was the point? Why couldn’t I ever see the point? I kept uncovering things, but they never seemed to give me the answers. Now I had this thing—the story of D’Ambrizzi and his lonely testament—but it only produced a harvest of new questions.

  Monsignor D’Ambrizzi had already been on his way up the Vatican ladder when Pope Pius had sent him to work in Paris under Bishop Torricelli as the bishop’s liaison to Rome. With the German Occupation came a whole new level of responsibility. Keeping a reasonable peace between Torricelli’s force in Paris and the Nazis was a severe test for D’Ambrizzi’s diplomatic skills. He worked hard at it and then one day it grew considerably more difficult.

  A priest arrived from Rome on a mission from the Holy Father. He would be a personal aide to Torricelli, but his mission was in fact the darkest secret D’Ambrizzi had ever confronted: he was drawn into it only because Torricelli had been confused and terrified by the new priest’s story and had turned in utter confidentiality to D’Ambrizzi.

  The new priest, whom D’Ambrizzi in his “memoir” referred to only by the code name Simon, had brought a document from the Vatican to establish the validity of what he was to undertake. A letter accompanying the document explained that it was the secret historical record or register of the Church’s assassini—the Church’s trusted killers, those the popes had used for centuries, dating back to the Renaissance and before. The document was known by the name it acquired when one of the greatest Italian houses produced a pope and reaffirmed the relationship with a cadre of killers drawn both from within and from outside the Church … the Concordat of the Borgias. It was, in effect, the license conferred by the popes to those who killed on papal orders for the good of the Church. It listed many of the names of ancient assassini, the names of the monasteries where they could take refuge in times of crisis (crises in which they’d frequently played an instigatory role, no doubt); and it had been updated as recently as the 1920s and 1930s when the Church was busy allying itself with Mussolini and serving as one of the central sources throughout the world for Italian Fascist spying and intelligence gathering.

  The accompanying letter, bearing the papal seal, instructed Torricelli to re-form the assassini and use it to maintain a good relationship with both the Nazis, primarily, and the Resistance. The assassini was also intended to serve as a useful tool in accumulating certain plunder—treasure of various kinds, art objects, paintings, and so on—for the Church, in exchange for services rendered to the forces of occupation.

  D’Ambrizzi wrote that he watched Torricelli’s nervous compliance as Simon carried out the commission for both of them, watched as Simon recruited assassini, watched as Simon became increasingly disgusted—he loathed everything the Nazis stood for, everything they required him to do. D’Ambrizzi watched as Simon became increasingly aware of Pope Pius’s sympathies for the Nazi cause, his hostility toward the Jews and all other victims of the Nazis, and his refusal to speak out with all the moral power his position conferred upon him against the satanic tyranny ravaging humanity. Inevitably Simon took control of the assassini himself, while Torricelli relievedly looked the other way. Simon cut the linkage between the assassini and Torricelli. In so doing, Simon cut the linkage between the assassini and Pius himself, between the assassini and the Church in any form. The priests and monks and laymen who’d taken up the cause for the good of the Church—they became Simon’s personal army, to be used as he saw fit.

  It was then that Simon Verginius turned them into a tough anti-Nazi group, only infrequently carrying out any Nazi requests whatsoever. Instead of their original aims, the assassini began killing Nazi sympathizers and informers within the clergy and working to hide Jews and Resistance fighters in churches and monasteries.

  When the Nazis came to Bishop Torricelli with a direct order, backed by their typical ominous silkiness, to kill a priest who was causing the Occupation considerable grief, Simon and Torricelli came into open conflict. And Torricelli had to admit to himself that Simon was working and plotting against his and the Church’s orders.

  At about the same time, Torricelli somehow discovered that Simon was planning the assassination of a very important man. There was only one way so far as Simon knew that Torricelli could have discovered the plot. There had to be a traitor among the assassini: one of his trusted cadre had betrayed them.

  Simon attempted to carry out the assassination: he had no choice, the timetable was exact, and the killing could not be postponed. The man was coming to Paris on a special private train routed through the Alps. Everything was ready. As it happened, the Germans had been alerted and they were ready, too. D’Ambrizzi’s story of the disastrous attempted assassination was sketchy. Several of Simon’s team were killed, the others escaped back to Paris, where Simon set about learning who had betrayed them.

  Torricelli frantically convinced him that he hadn’t done so wicked a thing, no matter how much he disapproved of the plot. Eventually Simon tracked the man down—he was the priest Leo had told me about in the frozen graveyard, LeBecq—and killed him. He disbanded the assassini at about this time because, D’Ambrizzi wrote, an investigator was rumored to be on his way from Rome. So far as D’Ambrizzi knew, Simon’s final act as leader of the assassini was to dispatch one or two of his men north to Ireland, to the monastery of St. Sixtus, with the Concordat of the Borgias.

  We were having an after-dinn
er cognac in the first-class cabin of the 727 when Father Dunn reached that point in the story of D’Ambrizzi’s extraordinary memoir. Two questions stuck in my mind, lodged in among the welter of facts that seemed on the face of it to confirm everything Brother Leo had told me.

  Who was on that train? Whose life was saved by the traitor Christos—or Father Guy LeBecq, as I knew him to be?

  And, secondly, I had to wonder why D’Ambrizzi had committed the whole story to paper. Had it been another man I might also have been more curious as to how he could have come to know so much about the assassini. But that wasn’t the case with D’Ambrizzi: he was so involved a man, so alert: he was there, therefore I understood how he could know so much. But what was the idea behind writing it down and then leaving it behind, forgotten?

  I was amazed by the existence of D’Ambrizzi’s testament at all, but I had to point out that it really didn’t add much to what Brother Leo had told me, nor to what I’d learned from Gabrielle LeBecq. I didn’t mean to put a damper on Father Dunn’s revelations, but it was true. All it really did add was the fact that D’Ambrizzi had been able to observe the implementation of Pius’s plot—to activate the assassini.

  Dunn heard me out, then cocked his head and gave me one of his long, out-from-under-the-eyebrows looks.

  “Listen up, Sunny Jim. Did I say I was done?”

  D’Ambrizzi watched and waited as the drama pitting the Nazis and the Vatican against the renegade assassini played itself out. Spring turned to summer of 1944 and in August, Paris was liberated by the Allies and the German occupiers were gone, though the war itself was far from over. Life in the city was chaotic. Necessities were in short supply and a virulent bitterness ran like an epidemic through the population. Those who had collaborated with the enemy occupiers lived in fear of reprisals from vigilante groups bent on revenge. Murder invaded the precincts of Paris and would not be dislodged until its work was done. It was in this atmosphere that the Vatican’s man continued his investigation into the murder of Father Guy LeBecq, the disobedience of Simon’s army of killers, the attempt to assassinate the man on the train—that is, the manner in which the assassini betrayed the mission entrusted to it by the Holy Father.