The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “The Pius Plot,” she murmured.

  “—sent by Pius to Bishop Torricelli in Paris to form a cadre of assassini to work with the Nazis, to help keep the lid on the Church’s involvement with the Resistance, to help divide the art treasures of the Jews of France … and Simon, whoever the hell he was, balked at murdering people for the Gestapo and the SS, and—”

  “How do you know this?” Her voice wasn’t quite so steady now.

  “Because D’Ambrizzi wrote it all down, back in Princeton after the war. He wrote it and he hid it and now I’ve read it. It’s quite a story. We don’t know why he wrote it but there’s no question about its authenticity.… He wrote it and I read it, Sister. That’s how I know.”

  She bit her lip halfway through the story of the night in question, then pushed on, not hurrying, not sliding past the details, but just telling us about the man, the priest in his cassock, the priest with the milky-white eye that turned into a liquid ruby when she drove the candle’s glass chimney into it, how he’d tried to kill her and how she’d fought him and how he’d gone over the terrace railing at the flat on the Via Veneto.… She bit her lip just that once, that was all. No tears, no floods of emotion, not even any real anger. Just the story.

  When she stopped she caught my eye for the first time. “All I could think,” she said, “was, why hadn’t it been Val? Why hadn’t she been the one to survive? Why hadn’t she sensed the danger and fought off the man in the chapel?”

  “Because it wasn’t the same man in the chapel,” I said. “If Horstmann had come to your room, you; too, would be dead. Believe me.” I swallowed against the dryness in my mouth. “You have no idea how lucky you were.”

  “Horstmann?” she said.

  “By sheerest chance Monsignor Sandanato was in the street below—”

  “The lovesick keeping watch is more like it,” I said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that. This is too serious for joking.”

  “I’m not joking,” I said. “But the hell with it, it’s not important. Go on, go on.”

  Dunn said, “Try not to spat, children.”

  “Sandanato was down below when it happened. He was exhausted by everything that’s been going on. He’s got the world on his mind—the killings, the pope’s illness, D’Ambrizzi and the pope meeting at all times of the night and day, all the jockeying for position among the papabili. He looks like death, sometimes I think he’s ready to crack. That night he was just walking aimlessly, he found himself near my building, he thought he’d see if I was up and willing to talk for a while. He’s taken to confiding in me some of his thoughts about the Church; we have these long discussions, the way Val and I used to talk late into the night—”

  “Ah,” I said, “I remember that … the life of the mind.”

  She ignored me. “Anyway, he heard this scream, he didn’t know what it was, but a woman nearby was screaming, pointing into the darkness above … it was the priest, the man who tried to kill me, falling through the night.… He hit the top of a parked car, bounced off into the street.…” She shuddered. “Where two or three cars ran over him. Not much left. No identification on him … He may not even have been a priest. Sandanato came up to my flat, he was frantic—”

  I shook my head. “I wonder how he knew the priest had fallen from your particular terrace?”

  “I don’t suppose he could have,” she said. “He … just wanted to make sure I was all right.…”

  “There’s no hiding from them,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it was just Horstmann out there, Horstmann getting to them and killing them before I can reach them. But now we know that they aren’t watching just me, they’re watching both of us—”

  “Don’t leave me out, old boy,” Dunn said. “I’m in it as well. Maybe they’re watching me, too.” He emptied out another bottle of wine, shaking the last drop into his glass. He gestured to the waiter for coffee and cognac.

  “So,” I said, “are there more of them? And who gives them their orders? Who is telling them to kill? Who said Sister Elizabeth knows too much, she must die? Who benefits from your death? What does it have to do with the successor to Callistus?”

  She wanted to know what we knew about her mystery man, Erich Kessler, and Dunn told her the story, told her we had run him to ground in Avignon, were about to go there. The Nazi connection again, and Dunn said, “But one of the good Nazis, my dear.”

  “Good Nazis, bad Nazis—” She shook her head, eyes closed. “I thought that was all over a thousand years ago.” Her shoulders slumped.

  By the time we’d lapsed into silence the restaurant was nearly empty, the waiters were clustered in a watchful group, yawning. The firelight had dimmed to a faint glow and it was midnight.

  It turned out that Sister Elizabeth was staying at the Bristol down the street. It was arguably the most expensive hotel in Paris. She smiled distantly as if she had a secret. When we had drawn to within half a block of the hotel so gloriously located on the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a black and shiny limousine, rain beaded on its highly waxed paintwork, slid up to the entrance. “Wait,” she said, motioning us to stop.

  Two men got out of the back of the car while the driver held the door and the doorman hovered with a huge black umbrella. The first man wore a black raincoat and a black slouch hat. He turned back and offered his hand to the second man, who was squat and wore a cassock, heavy shoes. The light caught his face, the banana nose, the folds of his jowls. As he emerged he flicked a black cigarette away into the rain-washed gutter.

  Cardinal D’Ambrizzi and Monsignor Sandanato.

  I grabbed her arm, turned her toward me. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “I told them I was intent on coming to Paris to see if I could turn up any more on what Val was doing before she was killed. D’Ambrizzi, angry as he was, suggested I accompany them since he had to meet with Common Market economists and finance ministers here. After the attempt to kill me, he insisted I get out of Rome while they tried to identify the dead man and … and … whatever. So I took him up on the offer. I’m staying at the Bristol; we all are.”

  “For God’s sake, Elizabeth, be careful what you tell them. Dear old Saint Jack isn’t quite the fellow we thought he was—”

  “All we know,” she said, “is that he may have lied to me about the assassini simply to protect me … to throw me off the track and make me give up. You’re the one who suggested that explanation, Ben. Then you”—she looked at Dunn—“you tell me about this testament he left behind in Princeton—that sounds to me like a man trying to expiate his guilt. Really, what was he supposed to do with what he knew? Run crying to the pope? According to him, the whole bloody mess started with the pope! So, big deal, he lied to me, he wanted me to drop it … and I would have if I could, I would if I had any sense, but I’ve gone so far with Val now—I can’t just give up. And some miserable—bastard—tried to have me killed.” She stopped short, cut off the torrent of words.

  D’Ambrizzi and Sandanato had entered the hotel.

  Dunn was flagging down a taxi, leaving us alone for a moment.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “The last time we spoke you’d decided that enough was enough, it was time to cut out the horseplay and get back to reality. And your reality was that nothing like I suggested could be happening inside the Church, coming from somewhere near the top.… It wasn’t a pleasant discussion, Sister. I wonder, do you still feel the same way? Is the Church still so pure, so far above all this?”

  She looked around as I spoke, as if there might be someone in the night who could help her out. “I don’t know. What do you want from me? I can’t turn on the Church as easily as you can.… It’s my life. Surely you can see that.” She didn’t sound very hopeful. “It looks like you were right. But try to understand how hard that is for me to say. We’re still looking for men who have done these evil things, they may be inside the Church, but that doesn’t mean I have to condemn the whole Church, does it? Ben”—h
er hand fluttered out to touch my sleeve and withdrew as quickly—“believe me, I don’t want to fight with you. We both lost Val … now I have to try to think my way through everything you told me tonight. But please don’t be angry with me, cut me a little slack.…”

  The taxi pulled up to the curb. Dunn was climbing inside, left the door open for me. I turned away from her.

  “Ben,” she said as if she’d only just discovered my name and liked to use it.

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t get Father Governeau out of my mind. Do you know any more about him? What happened to him, why he was in Val’s thoughts that last day? How could he be connected to any of this other stuff? What was Val after?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea whatsoever—”

  “And your father—how is he?”

  “He’s … I don’t know. He’s recovering. I know him, he’ll be all right. Too big a bastard to kill.” I got into the taxi. Father Dunn folded his umbrella.

  Sister Elizabeth stood watching us as we pulled away.

  “What was she saying?” he asked.

  “She wanted to know about Father Governeau. What could I tell her? We may never know about him at the rate we’re going. Val was playing that card, and what does it really matter anymore?”

  Father Dunn sat quietly, staring out the window into the breeze and mist. The Paris night.

  “My throat is killing me,” he muttered at last.

  My mother came to me again in my dreams, as inconclusively as ever. She was reaching out to me, speaking softly, and I strained to hear her. It seemed that if only I could listen just a little harder, concentrate a little more, I could make out the words. It wasn’t just a dream: I was sure of that much. I was remembering something that had actually happened. Why couldn’t I force the issue, make myself remember? Why?

  I woke sweating, shivering, my back stiff and painful. I’d fixed a new bandage that morning and it was wet with sweat. The room was cold, the window open. I got up and worked on a fresh bandage. The scarring was doing well, itched, didn’t seem to leak anymore.

  The next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and rain was slashing at the windows.

  I answered the phone, wondering what the hell Dunn had on his mind that couldn’t wait.

  But it was Sister Elizabeth and she was downstairs in the lobby. She informed me that she was going to Avignon with us in search of Erich Kessler, aka Ambrose Calder. She said she had a prior claim. She’d been looking for him longer than I had. She wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  2

  DRISKILL

  Avignon lay in the slanting rays of sunshine beneath a fleecy cloudbank, the afternoon warm for November, the smell of a cleansing rain lingering in the perfect clarity of the day. The capital city of the Vaucluse, it was situated tight on the eastern bank of the Rhône River. The city itself seemed somehow inconsequential, dominated as it was by the eight-towered fortress built on a mighty rock two hundred feet above the rest of Avignon. It was the Palace of the Popes, dating from the Babylonian Captivity, squatting like a great sleepy despot, sunning itself above its subjects, a monster of legend watching over its loyal, terrified populace. It was colored a pale sandy beige in the glow from the dipping sun.

  I’d visited as a tourist many years before. Now my mind was occupied by thoughts of the complexity of D’Ambrizzi’s nature, the simplicity of Horstmann’s, and the ambivalence of my own feelings toward Sister Elizabeth. But seeing the city again reminded me of what I’d learned about it the first time. It was difficult to imagine such a pleasant spot as the sewer of depravity and corruption Petrarch had described, but of course the Romans had hated the idea of the French popes in any case. Still, it must have been one of the racier stops on the tour back then. The Italians were fond of pointing out that the regular visitations of plague that swept the city during the captivity represented the vengeance of a wrathful God. When it wasn’t the plague, it was the routiers, the private armies of mercenaries who would rampage in off the plains from the direction of Nîmes, requiring both gold, of which there was plenty, and papal blessings, which were if anything even more plentiful, in return for their retiring to pillage and raise hell elsewhere.

  Upon our arrival there was a festive air, crowds milling in the streets, The ramparts built by the popes still circled the city, towers, gates, turreted battlements. The other famous tourist attraction was the Bridge of St. Bénézet, unfinished, sticking out into the Rhône, ending abruptly at the point where it was abandoned in 1680. The river had proved too powerful, so the four-arched bridge ended in midstream, going nowhere but into history, memorialized in the children’s song every French kid knows.

  It all came back to me, what I’d squirreled away about old Avignon. I even remembered that John Stuart Mill had written On Liberty while living in Avignon, had arranged to be buried there in the Cimetière de Saint-Véran. But I wasn’t a tourist anymore, though the thought had occurred to me that I might wind up in the same graveyard if Horstmann was still watching.

  I was returning as something other than a tourist. I hesitated to name what it was.

  A hunter armed with a toy pistol?

  A victim playing out the hand, waiting for the end?

  Maybe it didn’t need a name.

  The three of us made our headquarters at a nondescript businessmen’s hotel and Father Dunn made a call to let Ambrose Calder or his representative know he was in Avignon and following instructions. He came down to the lobby, where we’d been waiting, and told us that arrangements had been made for him, and only him, to see the man who had once been Erich Kessler. Dunn’s plan was first to put his mind at ease and then get word back to us about joining them. “He’s calling the shots,” Dunn said. “All I can do is ask.”

  “Where is he?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Not far from town was all he’d say. A car is coming for me. You two might as well kill time, have a look around town. Then check back here for messages.” He took notice of the worried expression on her face. “It’s going to be all right. Our man Kessler is one of the good guys.” He looked at me with one of his crinkly grins. “Probably.”

  “Unless he’s Archduke,” Elizabeth murmured, but Dunn didn’t hear her.

  Sister Elizabeth and I made an uneasy pair. Flung together by Dunn and circumstances, I felt as if I’d wandered into the enemy camp. I knew how badly I was behaving, how cold and remote I must have seemed to her, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a question of my own survival. I was afraid of her, afraid of the power she had to hurt me and afraid of my feelings about her. I barely spoke to her but couldn’t stop looking at her. She was wearing a gray herringbone skirt with pleats riding on her hips, a heavy blue cable-knit sweater, leather boots, a Barbour field jacket. I knew we should somehow have kept her from coming with us. But she wasn’t easy to stop. As with Val, you’d have to kill her.

  Frustrated and breathless from the crush of bodies, we found ourselves in a crowded square below the massive fortress walls of the palace. The sun had dropped from sight and it was suddenly cold. The palace walls rose like sheer cliffs. Shadows covered the square. Lights were strung in varied colors, carnival style, and the press of the crowd was insistent and damp and oppressive. Menace seemed to fill their laughter, echoed in their innocence.

  At one side of the square a stage had been erected. A commedia dell’arte performance was in ragtag, bawdy progress, il dottore and the other stock characters shouting and capering improvisationally before the packed-in audience. The laughter cracked and rolled, spontaneous, organic, earthy, but all I registered were the masks of the performers which gave them the otherworldly, predatory look of disfigurement. Giant torches flamed at the corners of the stage, shadows leaping and jumping like hidden murderers from another play gathering in the night. All my thoughts were dark and dangerous and sinister. I saw nothing to make me laugh.

  Sister Elizabeth spotted a small empty table on a raised platform outside a
café, beneath blue and red and yellow lights strung on wires between damp, leafless trees, ghosts of summer. We sat down, managed to get a waiter’s attention, sat quietly while he squeezed through the maze of crowded tables. We got bowls of steaming coffee, sat warming our hands, staring at the players.

  “You look so hopeless, Ben. Is it that bad? Or can we finish the job? Aren’t we drawing close to the answers now?” She sipped the coffee with its froth of steamed milk on top. I knew it would leave a little mustache of foam on her upper lip, and I knew she’d carefully lick it off. She asked the questions innocently, her eyes shifting from me, surveying the shadowy crowds, all their heads turned toward the squawk and strut of the performance.

  “I don’t know. Hopeless? Jesus … I’m tired and I’m afraid. Afraid of getting killed and afraid of what I’ll find out. I came apart up there in Ireland, really came apart.…” I was going too far, dropping my guard. “But there’s no point in going into it now. It was bad, very bad. There’s something wrong with me.”

  “You’ve been through too much,” she said.

  “It’s not just that. You’ve been damn near killed and a man died … but you’re not full of despair and fear. Something’s gone wrong inside me. I can’t get rid of the sight of Brother Leo … blue and rubbery and that arm, beckoning to me. The closer I think I’m getting to the end, the real heart of the darkness where all the answers are—Rome, of course, I’m talking about Rome—the more afraid I am. I don’t know, maybe I’m not really afraid of getting killed anymore, maybe that’s not it—but I am goddamned afraid of what I’m going to find out. Val found out, I know she found out everything—” I shook my head and took a scalding swallow of coffee. Anything to break the spell of the confessional. What the hell was the matter with me?

  “You’re exhausted. Mentally and physically. It’s all catching up with you. What you need is rest,” she said.