The Assassini (2 page)

He wore the black suit with the clerical collar and a black raincoat which furled out behind him like a cape as he moved gracefully among the other skaters, who seemed mostly to be teenagers. It had never occurred to him that the blowing coat might give him a threatening, ominous appearance. His mind didn’t work like that. He was a priest. He was the Church. He had a remarkably reassuring, kindly smile. He was goodness, not someone to fear. Nevertheless, the other skaters tended to make a path for him, watched him almost furtively, as if he might be judging them morally. They couldn’t have been more mistaken.

He was tall with wavy white hair combed straight back from a high, noble brow. His face was narrow with a long nose, a wide, thin-lipped mouth. It was a tolerant face, like a good country doctor who understood life and had no fear of death. His face wore an almost translucent priestly pallor, born of a lifetime spent in dim chapels, badly lit cells, confessionals. A pallor born of long hours of prayer. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles. The skating, the concentration, brought the faintest of smiles to the wide mouth. He was lean and very fit. He was seventy years old.

As he skated he held his hands before him, palms out, as if he were dancing with an invisible partner. He wore black leather gloves that fit like skin. From the loudspeakers came a scratchy recording of a girl singing something from a movie he’d seen on the Alitalia 747 that had brought him to New York. She sang that she was
going to live forever, that she was going to go out and fly …

He weaved among the skating children, slid gracefully among the pretty girls with the tight Guess jeans and long swinging hair and strong, hard-muscled rumps about to burst the seams. Girls of a certain age had always reminded him of frisky colts. He had never seen a naked woman. He’d hardly ever thought about such a thing.

He gently kicked one leg before him, skating on a single blade, deftly switching back and forth, arms slowly pumping the air before him, eyes narrowed as if seeing into the core of time while his body skated onward, powered by the engines of memory. He moved like a great black bird, circling the rink, eyes fixed ahead of him, ice-blue and clear, as if they had no bottom, like a lake high in the mountains. There was no hint of emotion in his eyes. They just weren’t participating.

Some of the girls whispered, giggled as they watched the old priest glide past, austere, formal, yet there was an air of respect in their glances, respect for his skating, the strength and the style with which he moved.

But he was busy thinking about the rest of the day and he barely noticed them. The girls doubtless thought they were going to live forever, and were going to go out and fly, which was fine, but the elderly priest knew better.

Now, ahead of him on the ice, he saw a very pretty girl of fourteen or so fall down abruptly, sit with legs splayed out before her. Her friends were laughing, she was shaking her head, the ponytail bobbing.

He swept down on her from behind, caught her under the arms and lifted her upright in a single, fluid motion. He saw the look of surprise on her face as he flickered past like a mighty raven. Then she broke into a wide grin and called a thank-you. He nodded solemnly over his shoulder.

Soon afterward he looked at his watch. He skated off the ice, returned the rented skates, reclaimed the briefcase from the checkroom. He was breathing deeply. He felt supremely at ease and in control with a nice edge of adrenaline running.

He climbed the stairs out of the rink. He bought a hot pretzel from a vendor, smeared a bit of mustard on the salt-studded surface, stood eating it methodically, then discarded the napkin in a trash can. He walked the length of the arcade of shops to Fifth Avenue. He crossed the street, stood looking up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was not a sentimental man, but the sight of great church buildings—even so recent an example—inevitably moved something in his breast. He had hoped to say a prayer, but the skating had gone on too long, and he could pray inside his head anyway.

He’d come a long way to keep this appointment.

It was time to go.

The man in the bed wasn’t watching the soccer match on the large television screen. One of his secretaries had put the cassette into the VCR and thoughtfully turned it on before withdrawing, but the man in the bed had begun, of late, to lose interest in soccer. If it crossed his mind at all, it was in the form of memory, boyhood matches he’d enjoyed in Turin many, many years before. As for the stuff on the cassette, recently arrived by courier from São Paulo, well, he just didn’t give a damn. The World Cup wasn’t a part of his plans anymore.

The man in the bed was thinking about his own impending death with the sense of detachment that had always served him well. As a young man he’d mastered the trick of thinking of himself in the third person, as Salvatore di Mona. With part of himself standing off to one side, wearing a bemused smile, he’d observed Salvatore di Mona’s diligent, systematic climb through the ranks, had nodded appreciatively as Salvatore di Mona forged alliances with powerful and worldly men, had witnessed Salvatore di Mona reaching the final lofty peak of his profession. At which time Salvatore di Mona had, in a manner of speaking, ceased to exist: at which time he had taken the name Callistus, had become the Vicar of Christ, the Holy Father—Pope Callistus IV.

Eight years as Chairman of the Board: he was neither a modest man, nor a particularly deep one, but he had been both very lucky and extraordinarily practical. He was not much given to the elaborate hocus-pocus that went with his job and he’d always looked upon his career as only marginally unlike that of any CEO of a major multinational corporation.

It was quite true, of course, that only the Emperor of Japan occupied an older office on Planet Earth, but still it had never occurred to him that, for instance, God literally expressed His will through the man who had been Sal di Mona, the bright-eyed eldest son of the prosperous Fiat dealer in Turin. No, mysticism was not his cup of tea, as Monsignor Knox had once said in his charming English manner.

No, Callistus IV was a practical man. He didn’t much care for drama and intrigue, particularly in the years since he’d managed to get himself elected by the consistory of cardinals, a maneuver that had required a certain simple, heavy-handed intriguing of the sort that left no doubt of the outcome. Money systematically parceled out to relevant cardinals with the aid of the powerful American layman, Curtis Lockhardt, had gotten the job done. Cardinal di Mona had built on a solid core of support, headed by Cardinal D’Ambrizzi. The money-bribes, to give the parcels a name—was a tradition that had put more than one sweating
papabili
over the top. Since becoming pope, he’d tried to keep all the curial plotting and whispering and tinkering and slandering to a minimum. But he had to admit that in a hothouse society like the Vatican, he was fighting a losing battle. You couldn’t really alter human nature, certainly not in a place where there were at least a thousand rooms. He’d never been able to get an accurate count, but the obvious reality was simply that if you had a thousand rooms, somebody was always and inevitably up to no good in some of them. All in all, keeping a semblance of control over the curial machinations had pretty much worn him out. Still, it had been amusing as often as not. Now it just wasn’t amusing anymore.

The bed upon which he lay, once the resting place of
the Borgia pope Alexander VI, was an impressive affair that possessed a history he enjoyed imagining. Alexander VI had doubtless put it to better use than he had himself, but from the look of things he was at least going to die in it. The rest of the bedroom’s furnishings could be described only as Apostolic Palace Eclectic—some pieces of Swedish modern dating from Paul VI, a television and a videocassette recorder, huge Gothic bookcases with glass doors once filled with the immense collection of reference works Pius XII liked to keep close at hand, chairs and tables and a desk and a prie-dieu which he’d turned up in a storage room under dust a century or two thick. It was a motley collection, but for the past eight years he’d called it home. Regarding it with a dour glance, he was relieved that he didn’t have to take it where he was going.

Slowly he eased his legs over the edge of the bed and slid his bare feet into Gucci loafers. He stood up, swaying slightly, steadying himself with a gold-knobbed stick an African cardinal had with touching foresight presented him a year previously. He was never entirely sure which of his two afflictions caused which symptoms, but the dizziness he attributed to the brain tumor. Inoperable, of course. So far as he could tell from the doddering curia-approved sawbones who attended him, it was going to be a photo finish as to what actually would carry him off: the heart or the brain. It didn’t make a great deal of difference to him.

Still, there were things to be done in the time remaining.

Who would succeed him?

And what exactly could he do to choose his successor?

Sister Valentine couldn’t seem to stop crying, and it was pissing her off. She’d done some reckless things in her life, she’d sought danger and certainly found plenty of it, and she’d known fear. But that had been the
spontaneous kind of fear that everyone all around her was feeling: the fear of the rifle shot cracking along the lonely road, the fear of one of the truth squads or one of the death squads, the fear of the government troops or the hungry guerrillas coming out of the hills looking for trouble or blood. In some parts of the world that was just your average everyday or garden-variety kind of fear, and it was the kind of fear you knew about going in, the kind of fear you consciously chose.

The fear she felt now was something very different. It was attacking her will and her nervous system like a ravenous cancer. It had come from a long time ago, but it was still alive and it had found her, singled her out, and now she was going home because she could no longer face it alone. Ben would know what to do. Somehow he’d always known.

But first she had to stop crying and shaking and acting like a fool.

She stood at the edge of the patio, her toes dipping off into the damp grass, watching the silver, pitted boulder of moon in the blue-black sky. Tattered clouds drifted past, looking like a corny cover of a Moonlight Sonata album from her childhood. The sound of the surf crashing on the Malibu beach far below blew up the face of the cliffs, rode on the ocean breeze that brushed her bare legs. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her robe, pulled it tighter, and walked across the grass toward the white railing at the top of the cliffs. She watched the surf foam, fan out, and recede, then begin again. A few pairs of lonely headlamps poked along the Pacific Coast Highway. In the distance, through the haze, the Malibu Colony glowed faintly like a spaceship settling down at water’s edge. Fog rode offshore as if it were holding the enemy’s navy at bay.

She moved along the fence until she felt the dying heat from the coals where they’d grilled sea bass for a late supper. Just the two of them, a bottle of Roederer Cristal and sea bass and hot crusty sourdough bread. A meal he was addicted to, accompanied by the same conversation they’d had in Rome, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, all during the past year and a half. Conversation,
debate, argument, call it what you will, it was always the same. She felt herself giving in to him, like a breakwater unable to resist the tide, but she fought not to crumble, wasn’t quite ready to crumble. For God’s sake, she
wanted
to crumble, collapse, fall into his arms, but she couldn’t now. Not yet. Not quite yet. Damn. She was crying again.

She turned and walked back toward the low, sprawling hacienda, past the swimming pool and the tennis court, crossed the flagstone patio, and stood looking through the glass wall with its sliding door. An hour before she’d made love in that bed.

He was a large, solid man with a face like a good-looking bulldog. Determined. His gray hair was cut short and carefully brushed and it never seemed to get mussed. He wore dark blue pajamas with white piping, a monogrammed
CL
on the breast pocket. His right arm lay across the side of the bed where she’d lain earlier, as if he’d gone to sleep to the rhythm of her breathing, her heartbeat. He lay still now. She knew he smelled of their sweat and Hermès’s Equipage. She knew so much about him, more than she had any business knowing. But then, she’d never been a conventional nun. The fact was, as a nun she’d been a royal pain in the ass. To the Church, to the Order. She’d always known what was right: that was the way she’d been born and nothing much had ever happened to change it. She knew what was right and she knew what was wrong and very often her ideas and the Church’s had been at odds. She’d gone her own way and defied
them
to do anything about it. She’d gone public, she’d written two best-sellers, she’d become a heroine of her time in the eyes of a great many people, and the publicity had ensured her safety. She had dared the Church to admit it was too small, too petty, too mean, to include her—and the Church had backed down. She had made herself an indispensable centerpiece in the great facade of the modern Church of Rome, and the only way they could ever get rid of her was—in her view at the time—feetfirst.

But all that had happened before she’d embarked on the researches of the past twelve months. Now, she
reflected wryly, wiping her eyes one more time and sniffling, all the causes and speeches and publicity had only been a warm-up. Nothing, however, could have adequately prepared her for the past year, for the growing fear. She thought she’d seen it all. She thought she’d seen evil in all of its disguises and forms, and love in a good many. But she’d been wrong. She hadn’t known diddly about evil or love, but, by God, she’d been finding out.

Eighteen months earlier Curtis Lockhardt had told her that he loved her. They were in Rome, where she was at the jumping-off point for her new book, which would deal with the Church’s role in World War II. He had been called to the Vatican to take a hand in covering over the ever-growing scandal at the Vatican Bank, which encompassed everything from fraud, extortion, and embezzlement to simple murder. Lockhardt was one of the few laymen that the Church—in this case Callistus IV—would turn to in a time of extreme crisis. Most laymen couldn’t imagine the toughness of mind, the utter ruthlessness that controlling an octopus like the Church required. Lockhardt could: he’d made a career out of precisely those qualities while remaining the most sympathetic and charming and devout of men. As Callistus was fond of saying, Lockhardt sat very near the center of the center of the Church within the Church.