The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  The Vatican investigator, who came undercover and reported only to Bishop Torricelli (who must, we surmised, have confided to D’Ambrizzi) was a hard-edged, tough-minded, emotionless monsignor whom, D’Ambrizzi wrote, came to be known as “the Collector,” presumably because of his policeman’s mentality, intent on collecting evidence. In D’Ambrizzi’s view, the Collector was no different from the assassini themselves, except that he was representing the Holy Father’s disgust with their refusal to serve the Nazis. The contempt and scorn with which D’Ambrizzi treated the Collector, at least in his memoir, was deeply felt. Or so Dunn, who’d actually read the papers, told me.

  For months the Collector interviewed everyone who had known Father LeBecq, asking his questions openly, by day, as it were; in the dark hours, in secrecy, he dug away at the nether world of people who knew, or might have had hints, of the assassini and their plot to kill the man on the train.

  Simon proved a tough nut to crack, refusing to admit any knowledge whatsoever of the plot, and managing to slide away from that part of the investigation dealing with Vatican orders to work with the Nazis during the Occupation. The Collector pressed on and D’Ambrizzi could see him drawing the noose around Simon’s neck. The Holy Father wasn’t giving up, wasn’t recalling the Collector and writing it off as something he’d have to accept.

  D’Ambrizzi himself, because he knew so much about the assassini activities through his working relationship with Torricelli, was not immune to the Collector’s attentions. A dozen times or more he was called in for sessions that lasted as long as six hours on occasion, going back and forth over the details of the war years in Paris. Along toward the late spring of 1945 it dawned on D’Ambrizzi that the Collector was under a great deal of pressure from the Vatican—the Holy Father—to find the killer of LeBecq as well as those who had planned the assassination of the man on the train. A scapegoat, if necessary, someone to frame. Then there would be the trip back to Rome, to God only knew what fate.

  Simon simply disappeared, as if by magic, a puff of smoke, a conjuror’s best trick. D’Ambrizzi never saw him again.

  Thwarted, the Collector began casting long, hungry glances at Bishop Torricelli himself, who had been, after all, put in charge of the assassini by the Holy Father when Simon was sent from Rome. D’Ambrizzi knew the bishop was as crafty an old clerical veteran as you could imagine, crafty and suspicious with an almost superhuman ability to withdraw into his shell and ride out any storm, unharmed. And he wouldn’t be overly concerned about how he saved himself, who had to pay the price.

  D’Ambrizzi realized that when Torricelli began to look around for a patsy to take the fall, to satisfy the insistent yelping the Collector was hearing from Rome, he was bound to see his faithful aide-de-camp … D’Ambrizzi. Who had been his confidant, to whom he had revealed so many of his fears about the use of the assassini in contravention of Vatican wishes. D’Ambrizzi, the perfect fall guy.

  So D’Ambrizzi made his own move before Torricelli could hand him over to the Collector.

  He turned to an American intelligence officer the evening of the day he’d received the summons to return to Rome for “reassignment.” It was, he reflected in his manuscript, like being called back to Moscow. A wise man knew better than to make that return trip. The American was an old friend who’d been in and out of Paris during the German Occupation: a man he could trust as well as a man with connections. With his help—D’Ambrizzi told the story in some detail—he was able to drop out of sight, escape the Collector’s clutches. Like Simon, he disappeared, with the Collector sniffing the air like a prize hound, momentarily confused but not quite prepared to give up.

  D’Ambrizzi’s American friend got him out of postwar Europe with the identity of a dead priest and brought him back to Princeton, New Jersey.

  His American friend was, of course, Hugh Driskill.

  And in Princeton, Monsignor D’Ambrizzi set down his story.

  When Father Dunn finished D’Ambrizzi’s tale I sat mulling it over, trying to determine if it added up to anything more than an interesting sidebar to the main story as I saw it. The story was twisting and thrashing in my hand like a frantic living thing, as if it were still trying to mislead and maim, all to retain its mystery.

  But it was clear that Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had a great many answers. How one could get him to dig up the past—particularly one in which the Church was using a team of killers sent to aid the Nazis—and relive it with names rather than code names was a hell of a question.

  But it did strike me that we now knew from two independent sources, possibly three if a second hand one such as Gabrielle could be counted, a story about Paris which the Church would surely wish to keep quiet. And Val had found out about it.

  Was there more? Was this enough to kill and die for?

  And who were these people?

  The Collector?

  The man on the train?

  What really happened to Simon?

  And why had there been no mention of the shadowiest figure of them all … Archduke? He was important enough for Etienne LeBecq to have put that exclamation point after his name … important enough for Torricelli to turn to in the time of his greatest crisis.…

  D’Ambrizzi had missed so little. But he had missed the shadowy one—

  Archduke.

  Paris was suddenly glowing brightly far below, and we were sinking swiftly toward it.

  The next morning we found an outdoor café looking at Notre Dame and sat in rattan chairs at a glass-topped table with a Cinzano awning flapping overhead. It was a bright blue morning and warm for mid-November but the day seemed poised on the edge of danger, mirroring our own situation. High white clouds, stacked and folded back upon themselves, loomed like a mountain range behind the great cathedral. The glare of sunshine picked out the faces of the gargoyles grinning down on the rest of the world.

  We breakfasted on soft omelettes damp and rich with butter and herbs and cheese. The café au lait was rich and sweet, and I leaned back to survey the peaceful scene while Father Dunn grunted occasionally from behind the morning’s Herald-Tribune. I was glad for the quiet, the moment’s respite. I couldn’t quite believe that the previous morning, little more than twenty-four hours before, I was staring breathless and terrified at the dead figure of Brother Leo crucified in the surf and beckoning to me, arm flapping, and I was running for my life with a fiend, real or imagined, at my heels. At the thought, which had surfaced during the night like a beast rising from the muck, my heart would seem to freeze, the piston rods seizing up, refusing to beat.

  Finally Father Dunn lowered the newspaper and methodically folded it. He blew his nose. “My cold is worse and I’ve picked up a sore throat. Did you sleep well?”

  “Better than the night before. If I don’t come down with pneumonia, it’ll be a miracle.”

  “Suck one of these.” He handed me a tin of raspberry pastilles. I popped one into my mouth. It was not perhaps the perfect accompaniment for café au lait.

  “So, who is Erich Kessler?”

  The morning had slipped away while we sat quietly. The breeze off the Seine was quickening, had grown sharper and colder in the past hour.

  Dunn regarded me across his coffee.

  “What makes him so important?” I asked.

  “Ah, Erich Kessler … he was always the secret man. He knew the secrets, he kept the secrets, he was a secret. He was the boy genius of German intelligence during World War Two.”

  I hadn’t expected anything like that, but what had I expected? What made him fit into the puzzle? “A Nazi?”

  “Oh, I have no idea. His loyalty was surely to himself, first, last, always. But he was the whiz kid of what came to be known wherever the spooks gathered as the Gehlen Org. He was the personal protégé of General Reinhard Gehlen, the master spy.” He looked at me, letting it sink in. “Gehlen served Hitler, the OSS, the CIA, and the West German Republic, in sequence. One very clever, slippery, opportunistic fellow—and Kessler
learned his lessons well.” Dunn waved to the waiter for more coffee, then warmed his hands on the cup.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Well, he was a survivor, that’s certain. Like Gehlen, young Kessler foresaw how the war was bound to end. He saw it all laid out before him in the maps and in the charts of the enemy manufacturing and manpower estimates and petroleum production—he saw it as early as 1942 when Pearl Harbor still had America feeling around in the dark for its shoes. From ’42 onward he knew the war was nothing but an ego trip for Hitler … a monument to psychopathology. Well, Erich was sure of one thing—Hitler’s big finish wasn’t going to take him down, too. So he made sure he was going to survive. All his intelligence expertise was aimed at getting him through the coming apocalypse.…”

  Working with cunning and extreme discretion, he arranged a contact with the allied intelligence networks in France and Switzerland, deciding against the British or the French, both of whom were taking this Hitler war with considerable bad grace and might choose to be rough on one such as himself, and settling on the Americans. Through an old boyhood friend he sought out an OSS operative, one of Wild Bill Donovan’s cowboys, as Gehlen called them. The OSS man accepted the legitimacy of Kessler’s proposal, became his case officer.

  From 1943 on, Kessler, working through the American, fed information about German intelligence capabilities and findings to the Allies; of even more interest, as the war wound inexorably toward its conclusion, was his expert information about the Russians, who were in fact very secretive in dealing with their allies: Kessler’s American contact knew even in ’43 that the godless commie bastards were the real enemy, knew that what the postwar world would require was massive intelligence about the East. Thus Kessler spent much of the war providing for his future, as did Gehlen, who himself became the preeminent intelligence expert on the Russians in the postwar world and served the CIA with distinction.

  Once the war actually ended, Kessler became a deep-cover American agent, a rover moving easily throughout Europe. What set him apart from other German agents sucked up and put back to work by the victors was his special area of quite eccentric expertise: the Catholic Church. It was widely believed that he knew as much about the activities of the Church during the war years as any man alive. His files on the Church, known in some circles as the Kessler Codex, probably because it sounded like something in a movie, were the cause of a good deal of strife between the Vatican and the Americans. Kessler kept them safe in a Swiss bank vault, carefully reduced to microfilm and smuggled into Zurich in ladies’ lingerie by a commercial traveler. There they remained for several years until he finally put them up for sale. Inevitably the Church was the highest bidder: they had to have them, while the Americans merely wanted them.

  And shortly after the Vatican had acquired the files, Kessler’s Maserati was forced off the Grand Corniche between Nice and Monaco. Only a miracle saved his life. Who had tried to kill him? The Vatican, who simply wanted to ensure his permanent silence? Or the CIA, who had pretty well used him up and were pissed off at him for selling the stuff to the Vatican? Kessler was never quite sure. But he did deeply regret the fact that for some inexplicable reason he hadn’t made an insurance copy of the codex for himself. Thinking about it later on, he’d have given himself a good swift kick in the hindquarters but the irony was that that was no longer possible.

  The automobile “accident” had left him crippled, wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. He spent over a year in a French hospital. Then he went to live in Brazil, trying to lose himself in Rio; then to Buenos Aires, where there were so many old Nazis living on the lam, as it were, that he grew intolerably depressed with all that talk of a Fourth Reich and the Teutonic Knights rising again. From there he went to Brisbane, Australia, but he felt as if he were visiting the moon. Then came a time in Japan.

  He was, however, protecting himself. Each time he moved, he seemed to be moving more deeply into the haze of the past, becoming more of a legend, a colorful memory, losing his definition as time furled itself around him like a highwayman’s cloak. But there were still people who would have preferred him rounded up and shot. Even they finally lost track of him, though it was said they were bound forever to keep looking for him. Maybe they believed that the stories of their determination to find and silence him were enough to keep him forever crouched in his hole.…

  “I ran into him in Paris after the war,” Dunn said, pushing another raspberry pastille around with his tongue. He pulled his scarf tighter around his throat and slipped into his double-breasted Burberry trench coat. The clouds had nearly obscured the morning sunshine. Notre Dame was looking gloomy all of a sudden, not so soaring. “It was hard not to if you moved about. He was ubiquitous. I’d see him, we’d have a few drinks. He intrigued me, he’d had an interesting look at the war, though you had to piece the little clues together to get anything like a picture. He took a liking to me, this irreverent priest, just a smart-ass kid really, and I struck him as a guy who couldn’t take the posturing of the Vatican all that seriously. And I wasn’t afraid to say so—so you might say I amused him. And I don’t flatter myself into thinking I was picking his brains … it was Erich’s game, he picked me clean as a Christmas turkey on the subject of the Church. In any case, I eventually lost track of him. But he was the sort of fellow who was hard to forget … he stuck in the mind, so I picked up passing references to him as time went by. He was, after all, of particular interest to Catholics. The last I heard, someone said he was coming back to Europe … then I read the D’Ambrizzi manuscript, all of the assassini stuff, hot stuff the Church would definitely kill for if it meant keeping it from coming out, and I began to put the story together, Val and Lockhardt and Heffernan dead, a priest the killer, at least so far as we could tell … it didn’t take a genius to make these connections, but what stopped me in my tracks was the remarkable connection between two entirely different eras divided by forty years. And the one person I wanted to talk to about the old days was Erich Kessler. He knew the most and he wasn’t a priest, he wasn’t a Catholic, he had no ax to grind in keeping it all a secret … in fact he had a damn good reason to want to stick it to the Church as hard and deep as he could, if he believed they’d crippled him while trying to kill him.

  “But how the hell was I going to find him?

  “Well, I’d heard the rumors about his coming back to Europe, about his health deteriorating. Was it true? Or was it some kind of disinformation campaign? That would, I had to admit, be just like him. Well, I figured that the Vicar, Robbie Heywood, was as likely to have a line on Kessler as anyone. So I came to Paris and I got a hellish shock … the killer priest had finished off the Vicar … and … and you’d been here before me. You could have knocked me over with a shamrock. It was all getting worse and worse, there was no hiding from murder … but God in His infinite wisdom had spared old Clive Paternoster, who had known most of what Robbie knew. I put Clive on the hunt for Kessler while I went in search of you.… Laddie, I’ve never been so scared in my life—I just knew I was going to find your bloody corpse in Ireland.…”

  Rain had begun to fall. The glorious day had been an illusion, had lost its promise. Reality had descended on Paris like the cap on the parrot’s cage. The city had grown muffled, subdued.

  We walked along the Seine, stopping to leaf through picture books and folios of old dog-eared prints and reproductions in the open-air stalls. Rain was pattering in the orange and brown leaves, dimpling the surface of the river.

  We were waiting.

  We stopped someplace anonymous for pommes frites that led to a croque-monsieur and Fischer beers. In the welter of narrow streets behind the huge Gibert Jeune bookstore serving the Sorbonne students we stopped to stare into the window of a toy shop. Featured there was what appeared to be a Smith and Wesson Police Special. Father Dunn exhibited some familiarity with whatever it was. I remember thinking how real it looked, not at all like a toy. You could almost smell through the pane of glass th
e linseed oil or whatever it is they use for packing weapons.

  Dunn pointed at the toy gun. “Incredible, isn’t it? Fellow could hold up a bank with one of those.”

  “I suppose so. Dillinger broke out of the Greencastle, Indiana, jail with a gun he carved and stained with shoe polish. People will believe anything.”

  “Yes, I suppose they will.”

  “Of course they will,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a job, Father, if it were otherwise. The Church proves the point.”

  “You are a cheeky shit, Ben.”

  “You sound like my father. And I’ll tell you what I’ve told him. It takes one to know one.”

  “You say you lost your gun back there. Up north.”

  I nodded.

  “This is all a tricky business.”

  “I know. People are lying. Everybody’s lying. All I seem to know is that Horstmann isn’t Simon. I’d thought he was.”

  “Tricky. Man ought to have a gun in a pinch.”

  It was all a game. We were playing a game to pass the time.

  “Frankly, Ben, I think we should arm ourselves. What do you think?”

  “I’d hate to depend on that gun,” I said, nodding toward the window.

  “Perfectly good gun, it seems to me. Can’t hurt yourself with it.”

  “Perfectly good until you have to hurt someone else with it.”

  “Good Lord, no good ever came from firing a gun.”

  “Nonsense. There’s an old saying, Father. Never draw your gun unless you intend to fire it. Never fire it unless you intend to put a man in his grave.”

  “You just made that up, Driskill.”