The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  No one knew for sure what he had stashed away in safe deposit boxes in Zurich, but neither did anyone want to run the risk of killing him and finding out. He was, therefore, thought to be one of the safest men on the planet. His death in a calm, peaceful bedchamber with a dog at his feet and the rest of them baying at the moon was more or less assured by several of the world’s most elaborate intelligence services.

  Only a renegade would want to kill him and risk spilling the beans. So why was he on Sister Val’s list?

  I went back to the car and tapped on the windshield.

  “Come on,” I said. “This is the place.”

  Ambrose Calder was a reedy man with a face and throat and hands of ropy sinew, a hatchet jaw, two days’ stubble of graying whiskers, eyebrows like Brillo pads verging on flight. It was an outdoorsman’s face, the effect of the dogs and their care, wind-reddened with a tracing of veins that seemed to have broken as they stretched across the high, pointed cheekbones. One of the house dogs watched him as if wondering whether or not he ought to growl and bark at the intrusion of all these strangers. Aside from the barking which had faded to an occasional yowl outside, you’d never have known about all the Semoyeds. Calder was drinking slivovitz like water, as if it killed some private pain.

  “So,” he said, “you come to me wanting to find out if I know who’s killing your Catholics.”

  “We want to know rather more than that,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, waving her away like a gnat. “You want to know why. And you want to know who Simon was. Father Dunn has made it all plain enough. And I say, what a curious lot you are! And presumptuous! Why should I tell you any of this? Where are the thumbscrews and the electrodes? Well, I’m going to tell you what I can and the reason is simple enough—there is not a way in the world you’d find out these things otherwise. And in my old age I grow maudlin, I take pity on the children who have stumbled into a game of grownups. Do you see? I help you because a fair fight is always better—I wonder, I actually am curious as to just how much havoc you will create! The Church and its self-importance amuses me … so I place you, prowling cats in the lions’ den. Will you become lunch? Or will you set the pigeons flying, will you confuse and even frighten the lions with their great bloody claws.… Forgive me, I am indulging myself. And before you thank me, wait and see what it benefits you.” He held out his powerful hand. His valet placed a cigar not quite so large as a baseball bat in the huge fingers. Calder scraped a wooden match with his dirt-rimmed thumbnail, watched the flame explode. He lit the cigar, sent smoke billowing in thick clouds.

  “Answers of the kind you seek are never plain and simple,” he said. “Oh, sometimes plainer and simpler than others, as when you’re dealing with dear old Moscow Centre. They always end up operating rather primitively, try as they might not to. It’s the English you have to watch—they’re the clever, crafty devils in this line of country. Second best liars in the world. Go lie down, Foster,” he said to the dog. “That’s a good doggie. Named him after Dulles. The dog is loyal, however. But not even the Brits, devious though they are and thankfully blessed with that nasty ironic humor, can match the Church, the Vatican … there you truly find yourself among the liars, the plotters, the professionals. Their whole world is a house of cards, one big wind of reason blows the whole damned thing to kingdom come—yet by their will they hold it in place, give it body and weight. It is the great illusion … it makes the mightiest secular empires seem childish and feckless by comparison. I admire them for the swine they are. All of us in the illusion business are bound to be swine in the end, at least professionally. We have in fact given the noble barnyard swine a bad name.” His smile was very wide, very thin, and remarkably unamused.

  “You have done an extraordinary job of homework. Torricelli’s papers, putting up with that imbecillc nephew of his—he really ought to be put to the knife, he’s an offense to good taste … old Paternoster, a grand chap … Brother Leo … and you, Sister, all that work in the Secret Archives, nothing short of miraculous, my God, how they hate women! And D’Ambrizzi’s indiscreet memoir finding its way to Father Dunn—almost a proof, I submit, that you are meant by some higher power to press onward. Understand, it’s all the work you’ve put out thus far that got you an audience tonight. Father Dunn was a most effective advocate. I drink to you. All three of you.”

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s my sister. Do you grasp that? That’s why I am here. The Church is nothing to me. The Church killed my sister, she was one of its dedicated servants and it killed her, and I went looking for the son of a bitch who pulled the trigger. But somehow my sister’s death has gotten lost in this ungodly swamp.… I’ve turned over the rock of the Church and it’s just seething and pulsing and festering under there, I’m standing in all this muck—D’Ambrizzi and Torricelli and Nazis, you name it, I’m covered in it—but I want the man who killed my sister. His name is Horstmann and I … I—” I threw up my hands and stood up. The dog had decided that, though overwrought, I was basically okay. He came over and pushed his wet, cold nose into my hand. “How are you, Foster?” I murmured.

  Ambrose Calder listened, watching me through the clouds of smoke. He was wearing a dinner jacket. He was confined to a wheelchair of the old-fashioned variety with a wicker back and side panels. It was pushed by a young man, also in dinner clothes, who looked like a state security interrogator. Once Calder had his cigar going, the young man slipped quietly away.

  “I understand, Mr. Driskill. In your place I would feel much the same, I presume. But the fact is, by seeking your sister’s killer you must suffer the consequences. You have overturned the rock. You are knee-deep in shit. Or look at it this way—it’s like the genie in the bottle. Once he’s out, there’s just no getting him back in again. And when you’ve worked your way through the mess, if you get through the mess, then perhaps you will satisfy your original aim … who knows?” He drank from his glass of slivovitz. “There is no turning back now. Your life is poised in the balance, Mr. Driskill. But I’m sure you realize all that. The trick is to avoid tripping over the rock.”

  “That,” I said, “is why I am here.”

  Calder began to laugh, turned to Father Dunn, and began to talk about World War II days, casually, as if Elizabeth and I were for the moment forgotten.

  The house was immense, falling down in places like a folly of sorts, ancient, shrouded in pines. I couldn’t quite imagine what it would seem in daylight. The central heating left the reaches of the room in cold, but there was a roaring blaze in the baronial stone fireplace that burned the chill from my bones. There was a casket of Davidoff cigars, a very old, dust-encrusted bottle of cognac, crystal snifters with heavy bases, huge cut-glass ashtrays. Calder clipped the end from one of the huge cigars, slid one of the ashtrays toward me, said, “There. I’ve done everything but smoke it for you. Now, to our friend Simon Verginius.”

  Kabalevsky’s cello concerto was drifting romantically from immense speakers as we began to get to the point.

  Elizabeth first described how she found Val’s folder with the five names, the murder victims. Calder listened intently, his jaw clamped down on the cigar. He refilled his glass of slivovitz, smacked his lips.

  “Claude Gilbert,” she said. “Sebastien Arroyo. Hans Ludwig Mueller. Pryce Badell-Fowler. Geoffrey Strachan. They have all been murdered within the last two years. They were all involved, concerned Catholics. Men of distinction. They all spent time in Paris during or after the war.… But—what linked them? What else, I mean … and why did they have to be killed? And why now?”

  “In the first place, it’s a list of four plus a wild card not connected to the others—at least not in the way they are connected to one another. Badell-Fowler was presumably killed because of his work, his study of the assassini, as you have discovered. Put him to one side. He knew about the assassini and had to die for that reason.” Calder’s tone had grown more precise and businesslike, less jocular. He was tilling his own fiel
d now and he knew its every contour. “The other four—I’m rather afraid you’ve got the wrong end of the stick so far as they go. Yes, they are linked but quite differently from the way you assume. Catholics yes, but Catholics with a crucial difference. The Madrid business tycoon, yachtsman, big man in the Church—Arroyo. But did you know he was very close to Generalissimo Francisco Franco himself? Oh, yes, very thick, those two. An adviser to the generalissimo in many arenas.

  “Mueller, the German. Scholar, served the Reich during the war—in the Abwehr. I knew him reasonably well. But he was one of the scary ones—a party man. For a time there was talk he’d been caught in a plot against Hitler. He escaped being hung up on a meat hook, however, survived the war, went back to his career as Herr Doktor Professor. Catholic yes, of course. Had a stroke that left him less than his best. The most interesting thing about that plot against Hitler was that Mueller was an insert. Is the term familiar to you? No? Let’s see, how else to—ah, a plant! He was a plant, a Gestapo plant in the midst of the real plotters—he was a very willing free-lance, an Abwehr man in a Gestapo operation … he betrayed the plot, of course, that was his job, and got a medal for it. I was his case officer at one point after that. I knew of the operation. And he spent some time in Paris during the Occupation.

  “Let’s see … Father Gilbert, the Breton priest. His loyal parishioners bloody near killed him not long after D day. His problem was, he wasn’t a fighter. More of a lover. Figured it was best to go along with the boys running things. Once the Hun had packed up and fled, some of his fellow Bretons took rather a dim view of his wartime activities. Collaborator, they called him, and when they pointed it out to him they had a tendency to be holding boat hooks and meat cleavers. He had a close call … some farmers tarred and feathered him. He was a year recuperating in Rome, theft a somewhat safer constituency was found for him and he took to writing homily-filled slender volumes of imaginary memoirs, diaries of a country priest … with much of the money he earned flowing to his protectors, the Condor Legion, Die Spinne, people like that, the old Nazis.

  “And Geoffrey Strachan, the MI5 man. Sir Geoffrey. Full of honors, put out to grass relatively young, packed off to the family castle in Scotland, not much heard from the last thirty years of his life. Why the sudden retirement? some were heard to ask. Well, there was a slight problem that was swept under the well-worn rug. Strachan was in Berlin before the war, came back to advise Prime Minister Chamberlain, accompanied him to Munich … the problem was merely that Strachan was an agent of the Third Reich, very close to both Doenitz and Canaris. He used to go boar shooting with Goering. The English discovered the truth in ’41, used him for their own purposes, kept it all very quiet and eventually pensioned him off without a breath of scandal. Investigative reporting was not then what it is now, obviously. By the fifties they were so preoccupied with Red spies, an old Nazi seemed positively quaint, you see.”

  The ash on his cigar was two inches long and he regarded it affectionately, as if he hated to part with it. He gently rolled it across the lip of one of the heavy ashtrays, watched it fall.

  “Now,” he said, “do you begin to understand? Try to realize what a complicated world this is. These men were not simply important Catholic benefactors … they were part of a larger world, a world of conflicting goals and methods and motives. Yes, these men were all Catholics, they all floated in and out of Paris in the forties. Did they know about the assassini? Perhaps. Some of them did, I’m sure. But that is not why they were tied together in the minds of … someone. Someone who wanted them permanently silenced.

  “The key, my friends, is that they were all Nazis. That is why they had to die. Catholics who worked for the Nazis. I know. I was in a position to know. Do you understand? Of course you do. You have discovered through LeBecq’s daughter and through the Torricelli collection the connection that existed in those days between the Church and the Reich. I am merely adding to your store of information. These four men knew of the connection, they knew of what Miss LeBecq described as the mutual blackmail … and therefore they had to die.”

  Everywhere you looked, every time you looked, it was all changing. There was never time to get used to the situation as it appeared to be. The murder victims on Val’s list had just been transformed from martyrs, slaughtered innocents, to cynical bastards who’d been on borrowed time too damn long. They were being erased. Another man was erasing his own past. Rewriting his own personal history.

  “Surely you don’t suggest that Curtis Lockhardt was some sort of Nazi.” It was Elizabeth again.

  “Of course not, Sister. He was devious enough, certainly, a great player of odds, a man who hated to back a loser, so he sometimes backed everyone just a bit. But I’d have thought the reason for Lockhardt’s murder was perfectly obvious by this time.” He inserted a finger inside his starched white collar, loosening it. The fire was hot. “He was too close to Sister Valentine. She had to die because of what she knew. He had to die because she might have told him … that was almost certainly the cause of the attack on Driskill here. Fear that she might have gotten the story to him. And you, Sister Elizabeth, were marked for your big fall because you were learning too much and weren’t showing any signs of coming to your senses.” His face was flushed from the slivovitz as much as from the heat, but he was enjoying himself. Every so often he winked at Father Dunn, who would smile back patiently.

  “I wonder,” I said, “about Val’s list. Why was yours the sixth name? Your former name, I mean. You’re the only one who doesn’t share the crucial element—you haven’t been murdered.”

  The dogs began barking outside. The wind had come up.

  Calder wheeled himself over to the window, pulled the drapery aside, stared into the darkness.

  “Sometimes they get nervous,” he said.

  I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind.

  Someone is erasing his past.… People are being erased, the past is being rewritten.… Someone …

  Someone who wants to be pope.

  Calder’s valet came in to stoke the fire, bank the coals, bring a shawl for his master’s shoulders.

  “My circulation is not what it used to be,” our host murmured, then turned to his servant. “Go tend to the hounds. Have Karl check the grounds, walk the perimeters. The normal drill.”

  “Could you address the question,” I asked, “of Simon Verginius, the Pius Plot, the identity of the great man on the fateful train—”

  “And the dog that barked in the night, eh? You begin to sound like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Driskill.”

  “—and the identity of someone called Archduke?”

  “I feel like a waiter taking an order. But, but”—he held up the rawboned hand, waving away my apologies—“what the hell are we here for if not to chat about the old days? What else is there, really, but the old days … those were the days, let me assure you. Where do you want to start? I’ll tell you what I know … right, Father?” He looked at Dunn, who nodded.

  “It all begins with Simon Verginius,” I said.

  “And ends with him, too, perhaps? All right … the debriefing of Ambrose Calder, late of the Third Reich, will continue.” He suddenly slammed his palm down on the table. It was like a horseshoe landing. “Achtung!” For the first time he sounded like a German. There’d been no trace of an accent before, just a vague European-ness, mid-Atlanticness, unidentifiable. “Vee haff vays uff making men talk.…” He laughed. “They used to have Germans in old American movies say that … I was one of those Germans.” He sighed. “Long time ago. Well, to Simon Verginius …”

  Dunn took one of the Davidoff cigars, no longer able to resist the temptation. Elizabeth sat by the fire, legs crossed, hands cupping her knee. Her eyes, green and intense, never seemed to leave Calder’s extraordinary face. She was focusing all that wondrous energy, laser-like.

  “You know, of course, about how Simon came to Paris on a mission from Pope Pius … to form a group of assassini, easier to do in those days than o
ne might imagine in times of peace and calm. The Pius Plot designation was surely a reference to the Holy Father’s plan to use the assassini to carry out covert Church policy. Simon Verginius worked through Bishop Torricelli, made his contacts with the occupation authorities—working in intelligence is how I learned all this, from the German side, of course—and we know he also worked with the Maquis, the Resistance. Pius was hedging his bets and he wanted the Church to get its share of the loot, particularly the art, as well as gold, jewels, whatnot. But art, that was the thing. The thought of Goering and Pius fighting over a Tiepolo always amused me somehow. Greedy men. They’d have ripped it in half rather than give way to the other.

  “Simon subsequently had his falling-out with the Nazis. This we know, this I know. Frankly, I believe his heart was never in it. It wasn’t in his nature to come to Paris and start doing the Germans’ dirty work. Pius made a mistake—the old bastard didn’t make many, but this one is echoing down the years. He merely picked the wrong man.”

  “Not so very mere, then,” Elizabeth said.

  “No so mere,” Calder repeated. “The looting, the killing, the Nazi-Church ties … all that formed a perfect basis for the mutual blackmail. They could keep each other honest, or dishonest, if you prefer, down the dusty halls of time so long as some of the players remained alive and in place. Well, some of them are still in place and Simon knows them all—”