The Assassini (29 page)

But when I saw him I knew the doctors were right. He was parchment-pale, quiet, and Father Dunn’s novels stood untouched on the table by his bed. When I got him to talking I wished I hadn’t. “Sometimes I think I’m going to die after all, Ben. I feel lonely all of a sudden, out of step—”

“Dad, that’s ridiculous and you know it. Besides the army of friends waiting for your call, you’ve got faith—remember? Isn’t now the sort of time when faith is supposed to do the job?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “You’re wrong. Loneliness isn’t a matter of
people
. They don’t matter … I’m tired, I don’t have control of things the way I used to, I don’t understand what’s going on—oh, I don’t really know what I mean. I’m trying to convey something intangible but so damned real. I’ve never felt this way before.” He didn’t say a word about faith. Maybe he didn’t want to discuss it with his son the infidel.

“Look, you’ve had some rough shocks. You can’t just expect to sail through.”

“Well, Ben, I hope you’re right, I hope I make it. I’ll be mighty glad to have you around. We can recuperate together. I’d like to have you stay out at the house for a while, just hang around, welcome me home. The firm can give you a leave of absence for six months … maybe we could take a cruise or go to London and settle in for a bit once I’m fit again …” Just talking about it perked him up. The rest of the conversation didn’t go so well.

He didn’t want me to go after Val’s killer, he didn’t want to know what Val had been doing, why she’d been
killed. He said I was a reckless fool, that I was not only wasting my time but risking my neck. Didn’t I have enough sense to know I’d been warned? Didn’t I know how lucky I was not to have been killed? Didn’t I realize I was turning my back on him when he needed me?

I’d never heard my father ask me a favor, let alone beg. I felt as if I’d never met this man before. That made it easier to walk out on him. Not easy. Just easier. I was my father’s son: I had learned how to turn my back. I saw a tear squeezed out of his closed eye. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve got to go. But I’ll be back—maybe then we can—”

“You’re obsessed, Benjamin. You’re one step from madness and you don’t even know it. You won’t be back, Ben.” He swallowed hard, looked away. “You won’t be back,” he said again.

The tears were running down his gray cheeks. Who was he crying for? Himself? Or Val? Maybe even for his black-sheep son? But no, that was impossible. I’d given in to sentiment for just an instant.

In the welter of religions you find in Egypt, the Muslims, naturally, are vastly predominant, and of course the Copts are the main Christian denomination. But, as everywhere, there was in Alexandria a Roman presence. There were the Jesuits and the Order, priests and nuns, caring for a small but determined enclave of Catholics.

After a sixteen-hour sleep interrupted by two plaintive calls to Muslim prayer, sounds audible in every corner of the city as well as strong enough to seep into my benumbed brain, I telephoned the Order’s office, which turned out to be a school they operated. I was referred to a Sister Lorraine, the mother superior, who quickly acknowledged that she’d seen Sister Valentine during her visit to Alexandria. Indeed, my sister had stayed at the Order’s guesthouse. There was a quick competence as well as a smile in Sister Lorraine’s French-accented English, and she said she’d be glad to see me as soon as I could get to her.

I grabbed a cab outside the hotel and fifteen minutes
later I was shown into her office. Through her windows there was a view across a playing field swarming with uniformed children whose cries and laughter floated upward, happy accompaniment to her day. The playing field was ringed with palm trees.

Sister Lorraine was a small, dark-haired woman, fiftyish, petite, with huge eyes and beaky French nose. She wore a blue suit with a boxy open jacket like those Chanel made famous and a cream silk blouse with a bow at the neck. On the way in I had noticed some nuns wearing the traditional habit. The boss, however, was clearly a modern administrator. Like all the Frenchwomen I’d ever known, she was attractive by some kind of alchemical reaction, an instinct. The whole was so much more appealing than the individual features.

She had read about Val’s murder and been particularly shocked because of their recent meeting. She leaned across the desk, toying with a gold pen, and listened while I told her that I was simply trying to reconstruct my sister’s last weeks.

She nodded her small, dark head knowingly, before I was finished. “Yes, yes, I understand. I only wish I could tell you everything that was in her mind but, alas, one can never know that, is it not so? But I was drawn to your sister, I admired the work she’d done, I was very sympathetic. She, this dear sister of yours, was obviously preoccupied when I met her. She was tense, wary … there is a phrase I’ve heard—she was watching her back. Do you understand my meaning?
Watching her back?
”

“She was afraid?”

“
Oui
. She had a … specific fear. Of something, or someone. Understand, please, this is my
observation
. Your sister did not speak of fear. I observed, I thought to myself, yes, she is watching her back. As if she expected to turn and see a follower. My curiosity was piqued, you know?”

“What did she want from you? Only a place to stay?”

“Ah, more than a bed. She had come here to find a man named Klaus Richter. She gave me no reason beyond mentioning some research she was doing. For a book. Finding Herr Richter was no problem. I know the
man myself. A good German Catholic, a regular churchgoer.” She allowed a mocking smile to wrap itself around the description of the German. “He owns an import-export firm, a large warehouse down on the western harbor front—very different from your harbor at the Cecil. He’s a well-known businessman, well liked from what I’ve heard. An avid golfer, getting his picture in the press. And of course he’s
très, très
German, a slap on the back, a foaming stein, all that. He’s quite prominent in the German Old Guard—veterans of the Afrika Korps who came back to live in Egypt. They visit the cemeteries out in the desert, lay wreaths on the graves of both their fallen comrades and their brave enemies. Richter is much admired by the Egyptian government going all the way back to Nasser. I believe Richter was helpful to him as a go-between in some armament deals years and years ago.”

“And Val came all the way to Egypt to see him.”

“So it would seem.” She looked at her watch. “I must attend to an appointment, Mr. Driskill. But if you have any other questions—” She gave a small Gallic shrug. “Or if you just want to talk, please, call me.”

She gave me the address of Richter’s office. As soon as I’d left her office I missed her. I found myself hoping I’d come up with a question or two.

The dingy gray warehouse of Global Egypt Import Export squatted among others of its ilk, one in a flotilla of froglike structures minus any indications of lilypads, jammed against the commercial harbor. Cargo ships, scruffy and nondescript, sat pierside amid the rusty shafts of motorized cranes. Loading, unloading, shrieking gears, belching smokestacks, the smell of oil and gasoline, dissonant Arabic shouts, the sounds of German and English and French, all yelling. If you closed your eyes it might have been any industrial waterfront in the world. And then someone would begin screaming in Arabic and it would all come back into focus.

Klaus Richter must have been in his early sixties but was built like a Mercedes—to last. He wore his thick white hair in a brush cut probably no different from the
old days in the Afrika Korps. He had a dark golfer’s tan, bleached-out yellowish eyebrows, a gold Breitling wristwatch that told everything but the World Series scores, and on his feet Clark’s desert boots. He wore an old, immaculately laundered bush coat and a pale blue chambray shirt open at the neck with wiry white hair poking over the top button. His khaki slacks had a sharp crease. When his secretary showed me in he was lining up a putt on his green carpet. She and I stopped short, he sank the putt into the little tin device. When he hit it there was a clicking
ping
sound I’d heard before.

“Julius Boros putter,” I said.

He looked up, smiling broadly. “Julie gave me the putter twenty years ago. I bought him in an auction, some tournament or other. He won, gave me one of his putters. Best I’ve ever owned.” He was still smiling but his eyes were growing inquisitive. “Do we have business, my friend? Or shall we just talk golf?” He had a German accent but I’d have bet he spoke several languages. I introduced myself, said my call was personal, and he nodded to the secretary to leave us.

He crossed the large paneled office to his golf bag and slid the putter into its tube. “I’ve played golf everywhere, even at Augusta and Pebble Beach. All the great links in Scotland. And where do I live? The world’s biggest sandtrap!” It was a well-practiced line and he smiled at it. He looked out the window for a moment at the ships and the cranes and the forklifts and the workmen, then turned back to me. “What may I do for you, Mr. Driskill?”

“I understand my sister came to see you not long ago. A nun called Sister Valentine—”

“Oh, my God! She was your sister! Oh, my dear fellow, I read about her death—”

“Murder,” I corrected him.

“Yes, yes, of course. What a tragedy—simply unspeakable! I had seen her, right here in this office, only a week or so before and then, there she was on television and in the papers. A remarkable woman. You must be proud of her.” He sat down behind his desk which was stacked with sales slips, bills of lading, catalogues, golf
tees, golf scorecards, colored brochures. His office walls held hundreds of photographs as if memorializing each of his life’s events. I quickly picked out large shots of a very boyish Klaus Richter standing in the brilliant sunshine with his tank in the desert, another with a pyramid in the background, another holding up a silver tray at a golf club. There was a gold frame on his desk that contained a shot of what I assumed were two sons.

“My heart goes out to you, Mr. Driskill. Truly. The sands of time are always running, are they not?” As if to illustrate his point, he picked up an hourglass nearly a foot high from the corner of the desk, turned it over, and watched the sand begin sifting to the bottom. “I have seen my share of death. Out there in the Western Desert. Valorous men cut down in their youth. On both sides. We die soon enough in the best of times, don’t we? This sand, it is sand from the Western Desert, Mr. Driskill. Always here so I will never forget the fallen.” He looked up from the hourglass. “Yes, I saw your sister.”

“Why did she come to see you?”

He raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. His sunburned scalp shone through the close-cropped white hair. “Well, let me think back.” He sank into his high-backed leather chair and stroked his rocklike chin. “Yes, it was my dear friend Sister Lorraine who called me about her, then sent her over. I must say I was surprised—and yes, flattered, to be frank—by your sister’s interest in this very ordinary old soldier. Did you know she was writing a book about the Church during those trying years of the war?”

“She had mentioned it to me,” I said. The sound of a jackhammer began outside along the docks. It sounded like a heavy machine gun. “Did she come to interview you? Was that it?”

“Yes, but I got it all wrong to begin with. I was an aide to Rommel, you see, very junior but still close to the great man. Naturally I thought she had Rommel on her mind—the field marshal, my claim to fame. But no, she wasn’t interested in the desert war, not at all. It was Paris! Paris. When I think of my war, I never think of Paris. Paris wasn’t like a war, you see. No one was
shooting at me! We were an army of occupation, Paris was ours, not a city in flames … at least not for a long time. It was what you Yanks called good duty—I could have been sent to the eastern front! But your sister was collecting material about the Church in Paris during our occupation. She was using Bishop Torricelli as a central character. And I had known him during the course of my administrative duties—the Church and the Occupation HQ had need of normal liaison, just doing daily business. Trying to keep the churches free of Resistance cells.” He shrugged.

I remembered Torricelli, the old man with the candies Val had loved. I remembered his story about my father emerging from a coal cellar somewhere—probably a church—looking like a minstrel. It was odd, at a distance of forty years, imagining a man like Torricelli trying to maneuver his way through the middle ground between Nazis and the Resistance, knowing both Klaus Richter and Hugh Driskill. Well, no one better than a Catholic bishop to do the maneuvering. If my father were to meet Herr Richter now, would they sit in club chairs and trade war stories?

I was watching Richter as he reminisced about the old days and then my eyes were refocusing on a photograph behind him on the wall: the youthful but by then battle-hardened Klaus Richter standing with a couple of buddies on a gray Paris day with the Eiffel Tower behind them. The face leapt out at me. Turned slightly to look at the landmark, shadows filling in his eye sockets. The face.

“Tell me,” I said, “did you ever run into a priest in Paris called D’Ambrizzi? Swarthy fellow, big nose, strong as an ox. He is a cardinal now—”

He interrupted me with a note of surprise in his voice. “Really, Mr. Driskill, I am a Catholic—there’s no need to tell me who Cardinal D’Ambrizzi is! He is one of the most influential men in the Church today … yes, I know
who
he is. And I would surely remember if I’d ever met him. But no, I never did. How does he come into this? Is this significant?”

“Not at all. Just curiosity. My sister mentioned him
to me once. I wondered if you’d been in Paris at the same time.”

He spread his hands inclusively. “We might have been, of course. There were a good many clerics and a hell of a lot of German soldiers. It sounds strange now, but we tried not to make a nuisance of ourselves. No more than was absolutely necessary. We understood how they loved their Paris. We loved it, too. Had we won the war, I can tell you one thing. Paris would have changed us, we would not have changed Paris. But the Boche was stuffed back into his cage and the result? We’ve all been Americanized!” His laughter cracked, his eyes waiting for a response.