The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “Then I was wandering and staggering around in the fog and I saw Father Leo strung up on that cross, upside down, all blue and pink with blood and his arm beckoning to me, flapping, and I saw what Horstmann could do and I knew how overmatched I was. I couldn’t stop him. And I was going to be next.… It wasn’t just fear, Elizabeth. It was something so much worse. I was empty, I couldn’t imagine fighting back anymore.” I caught her eye for an instant. I wanted her to understand. I wanted her to absolve me of the unspeakable sin of terror. “I felt as if I’d become one with him, the killer and the victim, two signatories to the same agreement—he would kill and I would die.

  “And I broke and ran. Like a child with the bogeyman right behind him. He was inside me, we were the same being—I ran and ran and I didn’t stop running until I was in the car, my heart didn’t stop racing until I was miles and miles away—you see, I didn’t know that kind of fear existed.”

  I kept walking, hands in pockets, staring at the ground, as if I were alone with my cowardice. Just then I was alone.

  “I understand,” she said. “You can’t blame yourself. Yours was the only sane reaction.” She very nearly touched me. But she drew back before the impulse had hold of her.

  “I wasn’t simply afraid,” I said. “I had lost my hope and my will to survive. I didn’t know if I could find it again. I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t know what good I’d be anymore. The fear is still with me, I can’t shake it—”

  “You’ll find yourself,” she said. “It’s your nature. You’ll be all right. You’re like your father, unbeatable.” The words were out of her mouth before she could bite them off. She knew better than to compare me with my father.

  “That’s the second thing I realized. I am like my father. He made me, you see. Created me, formed me. Not with love, not by setting me an example and encouraging me … but by despising me. He despised what he saw as my weakness and he turned me into a tough, unforgiving son of a bitch. I just can’t help it. I am my father’s son. I realized that after Ireland—I was sick of myself, but I knew what I wanted. I know what I want. I know what I have to do and I’ll do it.… But there’s nothing left inside me. And there’s only one way to fill the void—”

  “You see,” she interrupted, “you’ve already begun to recover. You knew what you were doing, you knew what you had to do to put yourself back together.” She tried to smile but it faded. She could see trouble ahead. I hadn’t met with her just to apologize for the rough treatment in Avignon, a tidy return to friendship. She could see I hadn’t finished making a mess at the edges of her life. I was going to be inconvenient and the nun was seeing all the warning signs. “You know …”

  “I do know. That’s the problem. There was only one place in the world I wanted to be—”

  “Please, Ben, stop there.” She took a few steps away, as if she could drift beyond the sound of my voice, blot it out. “Please, don’t—”

  “It was you,” I said. “I wanted to be with you … I wanted to keep from dying and I wanted to be with you. Even more than I wanted to kill Horstmann. It was you, Elizabeth, and I’m damned if I know what to do about it. Everything between us had gone wrong but I remembered—I knew if I could get to you, I could make it all right. But I was so afraid of you, I keep making it worse, everything I do or say is wrong, it’s the past I can’t seem to escape, the Catholics.…”

  She turned and walked away.

  “Dammit,” I said to her retreating back. I felt as if I were speaking an unfamiliar language. “I love you, Elizabeth.”

  She looked back at me for a moment. I thought she was going to cry. Her face was pale. But there were no tears. She, too, looked empty.

  I followed her, reached out and touched her arm. She shook away from me. She wouldn’t look at me. A solitary priest drew abreast of us, looked into our faces, nodded genially, and passed on, his heavy black shoes kicking the skirts of his cassock.

  “Sister,” I said, “you surprise me. I thought you’d have had this all figured out by now.” I slowly released the breath I’d been holding.

  A small boy stood before us, holding a black control box in both hands. Turning slowly on the lake was a large model yacht, trying to catch the wind in its lofty white sails. She watched the sails suddenly billow.

  I sat down on the slope, took her hand, and pulled her down beside me. I knew I couldn’t say anything. I’d said too much: I’d been in control only moments before, but no longer. I waited silently. She fixed her eyes on the white sails.

  “I mean it, you know,” I said at last. “There’s no point in ignoring it. I can’t explain it. I’ve fallen in love with you … I’ve seen myself lose my nerve, my will, and I’ve finally seen myself for what I am—my father’s son. But I’ve found you. It’s like finding hope. A treasure.”

  “You must stop,” she said, her voice choked, trapped. “Please, Ben …” She blinked, eyes glistening. “It’s all wrong, you shouldn’t be saying these things. I’m not the woman for you, how can I be? And you’re not the man for me. There can be no man for me. I am still a sister—” She was crying, wiped helplessly at a tear. “I am in so damn much pain.” She couldn’t go on.

  “Listen to me—”

  “No, I will not listen to you!” Her anger flared like a bonfire. “If you care about me at all, as you say you do, you’ll stop this. You won’t speak like this to me again. You will remember who and what I am … you will respect what I am!”

  Her eyes met mine defiantly, the tears drying on her face. I’d had her for just that moment. An instant of the real Elizabeth at last. But now she was receding like a ghost. I’d done it all wrong, I’d driven her away just as I’d finally touched her. Her eyes were troubled, but her face was whitened with strain, her lips trembling. I didn’t think. I took her shoulders and pulled her to me, kissed her, feeling her mouth so soft, salty with tears. It was all foreign to her: I felt the resolve leave her, felt her shaking in my arms as if anger and defiance were just words and this was something else. I kissed her mouth and her cheek, felt the softness, smelled her hair. Elizabeth …

  Slowly, gently, she pushed me away, her hands between us, where I’d felt her breasts against my chest. I smiled at her, hopeful, and watched unbelieving as she shook her head. No, no, no. I read her face. Fear. She was afraid of me. She might have been a nun, a witch, facing her inquisitor, knowing she would burn, knowing the flames were crackling, knowing the end was at hand.

  She was so deathly pale, staring at me, and I saw it all in her face. Her denial. And I felt it all festering inside me. I might have known I couldn’t trust you. It was in her eyes, the set of her jaw. You’re one of them. I trusted you anyway, it’s my own fault. Her eyes stared at me, through me, as if we’d truly become part of some endless mutual nightmare of impossible, pointless love. You are what you are, not a woman!

  “I didn’t want to talk,” she whispered. “You made me.”

  I could think of nothing more to say.

  “Driskill …” I could barely hear her. “Please … don’t look at me that way, Ben.”

  I stood up. “Are you coming, Sister?” I held out my hand.

  She shook her head. I went away, moving through the clusters of tourists and priests. There were priests everywhere. The word was making the rounds. The pope was dying. Rome was filling.

  The sails had caught the wind now and the little boy let nature take over. His father stood proudly to one side. “Good show, Tony! Good show, old chap!” The English at play.

  When I looked back she was staring at the lake, her shoulders shaking. A priest was bending over, offering assistance.

  Once I left her behind I struck off blindly and didn’t give a damn where I went or what I did. I had to get myself under control and I had to try to deal with what had gone wrong in the idyllic setting of the gardens. And I had to remember what I’d come to Rome for.…

  Reason told me I had no call to direct my anger at Elizabeth: she was what she was. Where
warmth and desire lived she was cloistered, protected, empty. And I had been terribly wrong, made a sorry fool of myself. It was becoming a habit.

  The odd thing was, having her pull the rug from beneath my silly hopes and emotions got the adrenaline going again. It got me back to the point where I’d been before she came to Paris. I was back to having nothing to lose. In a strange way, once I’d begun to recognize the feelings I had for her, I had begun to lose my way. I had given in to fear because suddenly I’d had all the reasons in the world to stay alive: I loved someone, unexpectedly, absurdly, but there it was. By slashing at me like a Horstmann of the soul, she had cut the cords tying me to life, to her. She wasn’t alive inside, not to me, so I was cut free. Maybe she had saved me. I was back to wanting Horstmann, nothing else.

  When I’d calmed the furies, realized I was lonely and needed to talk, there was only one place to go.

  I found Father Dunn in his room at the pension which he preferred to the elegance of the Hassler, where I had taken a room. He said the hotel was part of the Vatican: “Can’t you see the fog of deception that seeps under every door? No, Ben, not the Hassler for me, not this time.” He was sitting at a plain table by a window where his bedroom overlooked the narrow street. He was smoking a cigar, staring at a large package wrapped in oilskin on the table.

  “I saw you coming,” he said through the smoke. “I hoped you’d stop.”

  I nodded at the package. “Get a bargain on a piece of the One True Cross?”

  “Not exactly.” He unwrapped the package, folding the oilskin back, then a cloth that was greasy and reeked of metallic oil.

  A .45-caliber automatic, government issue, lay on the table. A heavy, dull presence in the small room. It was no toy.

  “What kind of priest are you, anyway?” My mouth got dry when he picked it up, hefted it in his right hand. Nobody ever turned out to be what I expected.

  “One who intends to get them before they get me. I’ve already told you that. People are getting killed out there. Horstmann wasn’t impressed by your gun. He probably wouldn’t have thought much of mine either.”

  Then he laughed quietly and wrapped the gun back up, dropped it into his open suitcase, looked at it, and slid it under the bed.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “We need to talk. By the way, I don’t like to bring bad tidings, but you look like a road accident. Maybe you’d better tell me why, my boy. When my life is in danger I like everything explained. Humor me.”

  * * *

  He knew the mysterious geography of Trastevere like the Stations of the Cross. He almost breathed a sigh of relief when we crossed the bridge and were there, as if its secret corners somehow matched his own. He knew it so well that he told me about landmarks which no longer even existed.

  “This is the Piazza San Apollonia. Over there, across the square, that’s where the Church of San Apollonia stood. Gone now, of course. But once it was a home for repentant women. It was August of 1520 when a daughter of a baker, a girl called Margherita, came to them. Margherita … the whole world knows her now. She was Raphael’s mistress, the girl in his great painting, ‘Fornarina’—the baker’s daughter. She was also the model for his Sistine Madonna. And the ‘Veiled Woman’ in the Pitti. Look at the pictures. Perky little breasts, nipples like rosebuds. She came to the nuns four months after Raphael died … even his final work, the ‘Transfiguration’ in the Vatican gallery, includes her, and he painted it right over there, in this same square.” He walked on, pointing at one thing and another, and we passed on into the Via della Lungaretta. He was a masterful psychologist, soothing me, just chatting away while I kept reducing things to a more manageable perspective.

  We stopped for a glass of chilly Orvieto at a café in the Piazza di San Maria. The fountain in the square tinkled and splashed and the kids were playing and the wine was bringing me back to life.

  “You’re so fond of telling stories,” I said, “tell me the one about your gun.”

  “Oh, it’s a kind of talisman, I suppose. Souvenir of my army days. I studied in Rome after the war, left it with a friend of mine here. I dropped by to see him yesterday, talked over old times. Thought I’d take a look at the old blunderbuss. And I discovered he’d taken good care of my souvenir.” He shrugged. “Don’t make too much of it, Ben.” He signaled to the waiter for more wine. A breeze came up, ruffled its way around the square. The laughter of the girls was like a flurry of coins tossed, ringing, into the fountain. “Now you were going to tell me why you came to me looking like you’d just been hit by a truck. What’s the problem?”

  There was something about talking to Artie Dunn. Maybe it was that nothing ever seemed to surprise him. And he’d caught me when I needed to talk. So I told him about Elizabeth and me, the whole story, starting way back on that snowy night in Gramercy Park when my sister was still alive, what it was like when she turned up in Princeton, how she pulled me through Val’s death. I told him how fresh and alive and bright she’d been and how it was she who’d isolated the assassini, given an identity to our enemy when it was only a fleeting shadow of an old man with silvery hair and a knife. She’d picked out the pattern in the ancient tapestry. She’d found the path to Badell-Fowler, she’d found the path into our own era. When it had all looked like a dead end, she had kept pushing ahead … and she’d been right. I told him all that. I told him that I’d fallen in love with her and I told him about what had happened in the Borghese Gardens.

  He listened patiently, sipping wine as the breeze freshened, smelling a bit like rain. The water from the fountain splashed the kids.

  “Cheer up,” he said. “She’s a woman. Lord Byron said the wisest of all things about women. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of women which, when taken at the flood, leads … God only knows where.’ That says it all, I’m afraid.”

  “But under all the up-to-date trappings,” I said, “she’s a nun and I’m a fool.”

  “Nonsense. Horse feathers. Our Sister Elizabeth is a modern woman. She happens to have chosen a career that makes certain unusual demands. Get anything else out of your mind. This isn’t the Church of your childhood. Not even the Church of your Jesuit days. It’s all changed. Almost beyond recognition.”

  “A vocation’s a vocation,” I said doggedly.

  “My dear fellow,” Dunn said blandly, “we’re talking about an intellectually sophisticated woman here—not the child of illiterate peasants, not an unlettered bumpkin who saw Christ sitting in a tree and decided to consecrate her life as his bride. She has the full complement of doubts, not about her religion perhaps but about the conduct of her life, her own decision-making ability.” He regarded me with a tolerant, reflective smile. “She’s an exceedingly modern woman, which means she’s confused, ambivalent, and a bit of a pain in the neck. That would be true were she a business executive, a professor, or a housewife—she’s simply a nun, which is a little different. Not much, not anymore. She’s not in the throes of a divine calling. Good Lord, the Order doesn’t attract that sort. They want the cloister, those women. The Order specializes in activists and elitists and hotshots, that’s just the way it is. Driskill, I really shouldn’t have to be telling you this—you’re a smart fella.”

  He lit a cigar which took a while and I kept trying to put what he’d said together with the Elizabeth I knew.

  “The women the Order attracts, well, the Order knows it can’t keep them all. The game is being played with new rules. And Sister Elizabeth is experiencing all the trials of her time. She’s wondering about love, men, children, her personal commitment, her vows, her fear of her own weakness and vulnerability, the idea of failing in her own eyes as well as in the eyes of the Church. My goodness, Ben, you’ve been through a lot of this yourself. Think back. And face it, laddie, it’s not easy being a woman these days. You’re a halfway bright fella, you should be able to figure that out.” He smoked, watching me like a professor waiting for a pupil’s response.

  “What, may I ask, makes you such an e
xpert on women? It’s like a nun telling people all about birth control and marriage and abortion. Just maybe you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You want a story? I’ll tell you a story about priests and women. We’ve got to clear some of the cobwebs out of that poor old head of yours, my friend.” He blew a perfect smoke ring and slid the cigar through the hole. “You’d better have another sip of wine.”

  He told me a remarkably poignant story about his postwar love affair in Paris with a married Frenchwoman. He had loved her and she him and she had had a daughter who meant a great deal to him. It had all ended very badly. Both women had died tragically and Father Dunn had a very tough time of it. It was all a long time ago and he told the story quietly as the fountain splashed and the wine flowed and his cigar burned down.

  “Priests are far from perfect,” he said. “Just men. We fight with all the same temptations. The acquisition of power, the loneliness, the bottle, women, lust in all its many guises. Salvatore di Mona solved his family’s money problems when he became a cardinal, let alone Pope Callistus. It’s perhaps not so amazing how many people want to come to the aid of a cardinal, any cardinal. The list of alcoholics, adulterers, traitors, no different from most groups of men under lots of pressure. We could both produce a lot of names …” He shrugged. “D’Ambrizzi is just one.”

  “D’Ambrizzi?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re surprised at what Kessler told us. It’s such a fit. He’s the most worldly of men. Truly a prince of the Church. Power beyond your dreams, I assure you. Like Lockhardt, or your father or Summerhays, only operating from the other side of the fence. Birds of a feather. What D’Ambrizzi really loves is the intrigue, all the moves on the board.”