The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “Simon is definitely still alive, then?” Dunn cleared his throat to show he was still awake and in the game.

  Calder smiled again. “Simon knew everybody in the old days, didn’t he? Torricelli, LeBecq, Richter, Brother Leo, and August Horstmann, a great many more. Simon knew everyone but only a very select handful knew he was the legendary Simon, the Simon whom D’Ambrizzi said was many men.”

  I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and took out an envelope, placed it on the table. That got Calder’s attention. “You brought a prop!” he exclaimed. “Good for you, Mr. Driskill. I performed in amateur theatricals myself once. Long ago. Army days. I always said an actor was only as good as his props! Something in the envelope?”

  I opened the envelope and took out the old snapshot with which I had begun. I smoothed it flat. I pushed it across the table toward Calder. His eyes followed the dog-eared scrap of paper from another age, another world.

  “My sister knew she was in terrible danger,” I said. “This is the one clue she left me.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “That’s it.”

  “She had much faith in you, Mr. Driskill.”

  “She knew me well. She knew I loved her. She knew I never know when I’m licked. She knew the picture would get me started—”

  “And the rest was up to you.” He picked up the snapshot.

  “Torricelli, Richter, LeBecq, and D’Ambrizzi,” I said as if reciting a litany. “All along I’ve wondered who might have taken the picture. It was Simon, wasn’t it?”

  Calder’s thick wiry eyebrows went up, his eyes rose to meet mine. Then he began to laugh, a loud laugh, full of humor at last. He knew a joke I hadn’t heard. I looked at Father Dunn. He shrugged.

  “No, no,” Calder said, calming himself. His eyes were watering. “No, Mr. Driskill, the one thing I can tell you for sure is that Simon Verginius did not take this picture.”

  “What’s so goddamn funny?”

  Calder shook his head. “D’Ambrizzi told the story of Simon in those papers he left behind in America—this is true? Yes. But he refrained from identifying Simon. And Horstmann killed Brother Leo before he could tell you who Simon was.… This leads one to believe Simon wishes to remain anonymous.” He smiled broadly, seemed on the point of laughter again. “You really don’t know who Simon is—”

  “Cut all the bullshit,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “D’Ambrizzi, of course. Simon is dear old Saint Jack! The sly old bastard! Surely, you must see. D’Ambrizzi wants to be pope … and he was Simon … he’s a murderer … and he collaborated with the Nazis … and none of it can come out now, so he must become a murderer again. Who better to be his instrument than a man who is used to doing his killing for him?” He sighed, the wicker in his wheelchair creaking under his weight. “A public relations nightmare, Mr. Driskill, if you see my point,” and he began to laugh again.

  “You tell me that there seems to be no success at all in the Vatican’s investigation, Sister. Well, why should there be? It is a joke! D’Ambrizzi professes to believe that the assassini have always been a legend and Simon Verginius a myth—well he might, well he might! Simon, or call him D’Ambrizzi, is investigating himself. His job is to blur the lines of inquiry. The pope is dying—so how carefully can he oversee the investigation? D’Ambrizzi is in charge. When he succeeds with his own agenda, the killings will stop. The sleeper, Horstmann, will be put back to sleep. Think—when did the killings on Sister Valentine’s list begin? When did D’Ambrizzi learn of the pope’s illness! My reading of it is simple—the latter triggered the former! Let me be frank—if you find prayer efficacious, I suggest that you pray for yourselves and you may yet survive all this.”

  “Archduke,” I said. My mind was staggering here and there like a drunk on a late New Year’s Eve, but I wanted to keep pressing homeward.

  “Ah, yes, Archduke. Well, there you have me. I had good reason to know him—but only at a distance, only as Archduke. I never saw him, never spoke with him except once, in a bombed-out church in the outskirts of Berlin. I don’t know how he got there, or how he got away. He needed to see me, needed to debrief me personally. He had a flair for the dramatic. He was in the priest’s box in the confessional. I went in, couldn’t see him, it was raining and cold, the roof bombed off the church, that awful smell of burned wood that’s soaking wet and lasts forever … Archduke. What he may have had to do with Torricelli, why there was an exclamation point after the name, what LeBecq and the others may have had to do with him, I have no idea. Archduke. Who knows? In the end, he was one of the most secret men … more secret than I, by far. The sort of man who spends his entire lifetime in deep cover.”

  Like Drew Summerhays … Like Kessler himself, as Dunn had described him to me in Paris.

  It had taken so long, but finally it was all taking shape.

  Father Dunn said, “One last thing. I can’t get it out of my mind, maybe it means nothing, but it’s irritating me, not knowing … who was the chap on the train that Simon was setting out to kill? I’ve read D’Ambrizzi’s account of Simon’s career, and now you say that D’Ambrizzi and Simon are the same man—well, maybe, maybe not—”

  “They are the same man,” Calder said softly.

  “But who was, the Great Man on the train?”

  Calder heaved his massive shoulders. “Could have been a Reich bigwig. That would be my suspicion. Goering or Himmler, someone along those lines. Or a prominent collaborator—but no, on the whole I’d bet on the high-ranking Nazi. But that wasn’t in my area. In the end, what difference does it make?”

  “Father LeBecq thought it was important enough to betray,” I said. “Do you know where Archduke was headquartered?”

  “London. Then Paris.”

  Sister Elizabeth said, “And the man the Vatican sent to Paris to find Simon … or to prove that Simon had refused to do what the Vatican wanted him to do—this man we hear called the Collector. Do you know who he was? Isn’t he a significant figure, someone who must have known a great deal of the truth? And who had the trust of Pius?”

  “He must have been all those things, yes,” Calder said. “But by that time my life had grown exceedingly complex itself. The Gehlen Org was coming apart, the war was in its final stages, I was trying to stay alive, but arranging to surrender safely to the Americans was a complicated problem. I was looking for Archduke, figuratively and literally—I had to get word to him, I wanted to come over, preferably in one piece, but he was moving around, London, Paris, Switzerland … I was sweating blood. And I wasn’t paying any attention to what some renegade Catholics were doing in Paris. I have no idea who the Collector was. The Vatican had some enforcers who knew what they were doing … it was one of those tough guys, I suppose … he’s probably dead, all things considered. Archduke may be dead, too, by now. All we know for certain is that Simon is alive.” He looked up, taken by a fresh thought. “If Archduke is alive, then maybe Archduke is behind Simon’s plan to become pope, maybe Archduke is still pulling some strings. Or … or, look at it another way—Archduke knows the truth about Simon, his identity. Maybe Archduke is the next to die.… And maybe Archduke is ready and waiting.” The thought seemed to amuse him.

  I drove the three of us back into Avignon. It was four o’clock in the morning when we reached the hotel. The streets were empty but for street cleaners sweeping up the debris from the previous evening’s revelry. Sister Elizabeth spoke hardly a word. Everything about her was subdued, as if she’d had more bad news heaped upon her than she could handle. The D’Ambrizzi revelation had hit her hard. In the quiet of her solitude she was having to reinvent her world, her Church.

  Father Dunn asked me if I wanted to join him in a nightcap. He took a silver hip flask from his jacket pocket and nodded to a deserted corner of the lobby. A table lamp cast a dim amber glow, and outside on the corner there was a streetlamp swaying in the wind. He took a swig from the flask, handed it to me, and I felt the brandy burning my throat. It
hit my stomach like a depth charge. Immediately I felt light-headed.

  I told him about seeing Summerhays in the crowd. His face played all the proper, startled reactions.

  “Do you know much about Summerhays, Ben?”

  “A fair amount. You’ve got a gleam in that gimlet eye.”

  “I was just thinking. He’s like an older version of Lockhardt, isn’t he?” Casually, as if he were hardly thinking about it, he said, “I wonder what he was doing during the war?”

  “Which one? Civil? Spanish-American?”

  “Yes, my son, he’s old.” His pink face was a mask of sour patience. “Your wit may work wonders with sheltered nuns, not with sophisticated old clerics.”

  “Why don’t we find a sophisticated old cleric and ask him, Artie? I haven’t had much to laugh about lately—”

  “Oh, what a shame. We’ll have to remedy that one day. I was thinking more about the Hitler war.”

  “Now you’re thinking what I’m thinking. Yes, if memory serves, Drew Summerhays was—I don’t know, in a strange sort of out of the ordinary way—one of Wild Bill Donovan’s Knights Templar, y’know, a Catholic, a Yale man, a natural for OSS, but he was more of a strategist than an agent. Look, I’m not quite clear on this, he’s led a life full of secrets, you’d always know you saw only a hundredth of his life. But he was in London during the war. My dad has let things drop about him at various times … he ran OSS men into occupied Europe, into Germany. He was my father’s boss, I’m sure of that. He may even have recruited my father.” I waited, letting it all sink in. “He knew Pius, he probably knew Bishop Torricelli. He’s been in the game since the time of the Borgias—Artie, honest to God, he’s still in the game and you know damn well what his code name was.…”

  “Archduke,” Father Dunn said.

  “He’s the only candidate,” I said. “Unless Kessler was lying to us to keep us off his tail … In that case, Kessler is Archduke. Sitting in his wheelchair at the center of the web, spinning.…”

  “So what the devil was Summerhays doing in Avignon this particular night?”

  “Well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? Summerhays is a better fit … But, the story of my night on the town is only half done.”

  “You amaze me,” Father Dunn said.

  “Sister Elizabeth and I had a problem tonight, a difference of opinion—”

  “I detected a chill on that front.”

  “The point is, I was alone out there in the crowd when I saw Summerhays and his man. When they saw me I suddenly realized I wanted to get the hell out of there, there was something all wrong with that picture. Everything got confused and I was half running from, half looking for the weird little character with the chain-sawed throat and the feather in his hat … anyway, I was found by someone else, as if he knew where I was, as if I’d never been out of his sight, as if—I’m not kidding—he were waiting for me—”

  “Give him a name, Ben.”

  “Horstmann! It was Horstmann, here in Avignon, all of us here in Avignon—”

  “You mean you think he was with Summerhays?”

  “Who the hell knows? Who understands any of it?”

  “Holy Mary, what happened? How did you get away?”

  “He told me to go home. He didn’t kill me, he almost begged me to go home. Try to figure that one out.”

  “Let’s just say that Archduke is Summerhays and Simon is D’Ambrizzi,” Dunn mused. “Both men have deep-rooted reasons for loving and respecting your father, your family, you. And if they are behind all of it, then Horstmann is working for them. That could explain the warning. They want you out of it.…”

  “But in that case they killed my sister,” I said.

  Dunn nodded slowly. “Maybe they did kill your sister. And if they did, they killed her to protect themselves. And that’s all the more reason to save you … an expiation of their guilt. Your father saved D’Ambrizzi’s ass after the war, brought him to America when the heat was on, and Summerhays was your father’s patron on the road to power, God knows what kind of missions your father took for Summerhays during the war, so Summerhays owes him, too … so if they had to kill your sister, his daughter, for God’s sake, can you imagine the agony they must be going through? They don’t want to have to kill Hugh Driskill’s son, too.”

  I hadn’t prayed in twenty-five years, but it was a prayer that leapt to my lips in that awful moment.

  “God grant me the power,” I said, “and I will kill them all.…”

  In the morning we left Avignon.

  Three frightened pilgrims on the road to Rome.

  1

  The cardinals were playing boccie on the lawn of Poletti’s villa. Ottaviani had just rolled the heavy, criss-crossed ball, and it sped across the perfectly manicured green grass with unerring accuracy, dislodging Vezza’s ball and nestling up against the small, gleaming white ball, or “spot.” Vezza moved ponderously toward a wooden lawn chair and slowly lowered himself, like an old building that was still settling. He coughed and wiped spittle from his dry, cracked lips. “Whatever happened to the idea of letting the oldest man win? Where has decency gone?” He sank back in the chair with a heavy sigh. He fumbled in his baggy flannel trousers, brought out a pack of cigarettes and a cheap disposable lighter. “I’ve had enough of this game. You know, they say these things can kill you.”

  Poletti rolled his eyes, said, “Cigarettes are not exactly a newly recognized health hazard.”

  “Not the cigarette, you silly fellow. I know that. I have reference to these sleazy lighters. Explode, they are said to do. Engulf you in fire.” He lit the cigarette. “God was with me that time.” He nodded toward Ottaviani. “Guglielmo cheats. He has always cheated. Why don’t I ever learn?” Vezza’s socks had slipped down low on his ankles, revealing hairless, spindly ankles and calves, unsuitable, it would have seemed, for supporting so large a body. “He thinks he’s allowed to cheat because of his crippled back. No sense of honor.”

  Antonelli, who had been partnered with Ottaviani, sat down on the grass. The sun was bright behind a cloud of pollution. “Gianfranco,” he said to Vezza, “you can’t cheat at boccie. No one can. In that way boccie is wholly abstract, unlike life in every detail.”

  Ottaviani said, “He doesn’t bother me. He’s a bad loser, always has been. He’s had so much experience at it, you’d think he’d have mastered the decorum by now—”

  “I lose only at games, my friend. I always win in the real world.” Vezza’s smile was full of oddly shaped teeth like yellow candy corn.

  “The real world!” Poletti scoffed. “You haven’t noticed the real world since the dawn of time! Why, the real world is as foreign to you as—”

  Cardinal Garibaldi interrupted, his round little eyes in his round face glittering and alert. “Speaking of the real world, where does the matter of the murdered nun stand—”

  “She wasn’t murdered,” Antonelli murmured. “It was the man clad as a priest who died.”

  “Ah, we’re at cross purposes. I was referring to the murdered nun in America, but it’s all the same, isn’t it? So, what of the nun who was nearly murdered? What’s the news?”

  Cardinal Poletti was kicking the balls over toward the heavy gunny sack in which they’d brought them to the lawn. “There is no news. They haven’t yet been able to identify the priest—if priest he was. He had only one eye, apparently—”

  “I’m not surprised,” Vezza said, “after that fall!”

  “No, no, he had only one eye even before he fell.” Poletti sighed wearily. “But he was badly disfigured by the fall—”

  “No, actually you are in error there.” Vezza waggled his ancient, wrinkled finger. “He was not disfigured by the fall. He was disfigured by the landing. And the truck or bus that then ran over him.”

  “The real question which interests me,” Antonelli sighed from beneath the floppy hat that shaded his eyes, “is why did he try to kill the nun, Sister Elizabeth. We know of course that she was Sister Val
entine’s dearest friend … which I presume ties her to Driskill and his lot. But why kill her? And the Americans are playing too big a part in all this. That always leads to no good.”

  “Oh, they’re not such bad chaps,” Garibaldi said diplomatically, “once you get to know them.”

  “My God, man!” Ottaviani said. The corner of his mouth twitched with the pain which seldom left him. “You’re such an appalling innocent! How could you ever have reached your present station? Americans are the very worst. Bulls marauding in the china shop, no attention to tradition and the rules of the game … in short, I like them! They shake things up. And they think we’re the crafty, devious, plotting bastards … they flatter us. I haven’t known a truly crafty, devious cardinal in twenty years! We’re all children compared with our predecessors. And the Americans have charmingly little self-knowledge. They don’t quite understand what vicious, cold-blooded swine they are. Yes, I do like them.”

  “Then you’ll be delighted to hear,” Garibaldi said, “that Drew Summerhays, no less, is here in Rome.”

  “Good Lord,” Poletti said. “The Holy Father may already be dead and Summerhays knows it before we do!” His face showed that he was only half joking.

  “What’s he sniffing around here for?” Vezza snorted.

  “A professional vulture,” Poletti said. He was kneeling in the grass, putting the balls into the gunnysack. The sun was warm for the end of November.

  “And I suppose we’re not?” Ottaviani smiled thinly.

  Poletti took no notice of him. “A pope is dying, then Summerhays will not be far behind. He is bound to be here to force somebody’s hand, push his own man forward.… Who is this man, by the way?”

  Ottaviani shrugged for all of them. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Poletti said, “Indelicato is going to be asking me for a head count. Core support … people he can count on for votes and for rounding up others.” He scanned the faces. The sun was shining in his eyes. He shielded them like an Indian scout.