The Assassini (32 page)

“At the statue of Sa’d Zaghlul in the square. Just outside your hotel. Safe enough?”

“How will I know you?”

“I’ll know you. Eight o’clock.”

She hung up before I could answer with any more dazzling repartee. I went back to the bar and took two pain pills with a third gin and tonic. Then I went up to my room, took a very careful bath, changed the dressing on my wound, sat by the window trying to make notes
about what I’d learned in Egypt. It wasn’t a bad list but when you started adding it up it was a disappointment. Just an accumulation of what might be truths without enough connective tissue. Maybe my mysterious caller could provide some.

A few minutes before eight I put on a pair of soft corduroys and a heavy sweater and went outside into the chilly, steady wind. The massive statue dominated the square. She must have been watching for me because she intercepted me right away as I crossed the street. She was still wearing the tobacco-colored skirt with all the pleats, the matching suede pumps, and a leather jacket. I told her she was a pleasant surprise but she found my attempt at charm immensely resistible. She was very pretty but her face was a solemn mask. The wind couldn’t mess her cap of dark hair. She wore a gold necklace with a heavy amulet.

“Why all the mystery? How did you find me?”

“The Cecil was the first hotel I called.” She shrugged. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come if you knew who I was.”

“So, who are you? You work at the gallery and you’re the prettiest girl in Alexandria—what else?”

“Gabrielle LeBecq. It is my father’s gallery.” She stopped with the statue looming over us. She must have had a very beautiful mother.

“At least you’re not a nun,” I said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” She walked on with her hands jammed into her jacket pockets. “I am not even Catholic. I am Coptic.”

“That’s fine.”

“I don’t understand.” She gave me a perplexed, sidelong look.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I am Egyptian. My mother was a Copt.”

“All right. It really doesn’t matter.” Her mouth was finely formed, delicate little ridges edging up and forming her lips. Gold earrings. “What are we doing here?”

“I must speak seriously with you. Come, have coffee.”

We went across to the Trianon Coffee Shop.

She was quiet, watching me, unsmiling. She didn’t say a word until we had our coffee.

“You must leave my father alone. You must. You must not torment him. He is not well.” She watched me sip the hot, powerful brew. “Say something.”

“I came here to see two men. Your father is one of them. I’m sorry for upsetting him but—”

“I don’t understand what you want from him. He was … sobbing when I got to his office. He’s had one heart attack. He must not have another. He told me who you are. He swore to me that he told your sister everything he could—”

“And what was that, Miss LeBecq?”

“I don’t know. He told me he did what he could.”

“My sister was murdered after she talked to your father. I want to know what he told her.”

She was shaking her head. “My father is a decent man. Her questions had something to do with—I don’t know, forty years ago. What could it matter now?”

“Something mattered enough to somebody that my sister died because she knew. The bottom line is I can’t worry about your father.”

“But my father was an art dealer, he had nothing to do with the war, you must understand.” She bit her lip, near tears. “His brother, the priest, he was older. He died a hero’s death in the war. He was in the Resistance, I think. Something like that.” She brushed at her eyes, long lashes. “My father and his father operated the LeBecq Galleries. My father left France and settled here once that war was over—”

“Why? Why didn’t he stay in Paris?”

“What difference does it make, Mr. Driskill? He came here, eventually he married my mother, and I was born in 1952. He’s a respected man, and you have no right to hound him!”

“What’s his connection to Richter?”

She stiffened. “They are friends, they have done business together, they are good Catholics—but this is not relevant. No, not relevant at all. First your sister comes, then you—”

“Listen to me carefully, Miss LeBecq. Think—how
could something
irrelevant
upset your father so dramatically? Why would he ask me if someone called Simon has sent me to kill him? Why would he ask me if I’ve come to ‘kill us all’? Those are
his
words. Doesn’t sound irrelevant to me. Honestly, does it to you? My sister’s dead and your father is scared out of his wits.… Why is your father so afraid?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he is afraid of … of you! We do know that, don’t we?”

She stood up abruptly.

“Look—”

“Please, I’m begging you,” she said. “Leave him alone. Just go back where you came from and leave our lives as they were.”

She was gone before I could really protest. By the time I’d paid for the coffee and gone outside there was no sign of Gabrielle LeBecq.

I woke the next morning groggy from a handful of sleeping pills. I was funning a fever, nothing terribly dangerous I told myself, and my back didn’t seem any different. But I kept checking it as the afternoon wore on. It was slightly inflamed along the stitching, draining a bit. I had the right pills for that, so I added them to the mix and put the gin on hold.

It was an empty, pointless day, wasted. I tried not to think about the scattershot information I’d picked up from Etienne LeBecq. He was obviously a crucial source, but how was I going to get anything out of him if he didn’t want to talk? I had hit another wall and I wasn’t thinking very creatively but, as they say, even a blind pig occasionally finds a truffle.

I put in a call to Margaret Korder in Princeton. She told me that the story of the murders at the Helmsley Palace and Val’s murder were falling out of the news. No headway was being made by the police and there just wasn’t any news to report. She said that my father was depressed, slept a good deal, and didn’t respond much when people tried to speak with him. He seemed to miss me, and the fact that I’d set off on my quest was the one thing that could get a rise of anger or frustration out of
him. I took all that in and placed a call to the hospital. But my father was resting and they didn’t think he should be wakened. I told them to let him know that I called, that I was fine, and that he shouldn’t worry.

As night was falling across Egypt and the cold wind was getting a little uppity outside my window, the telephone rang. It was Gabrielle LeBecq and she wasn’t playing any games with her voice this time. She was upset and it showed in her breathlessness. She said she’d thought a long time about calling me but then realized I was part of her problems and therefore the person to call. I told her to slow down, keep it all in English since my French was pretty rudimentary, and explain what she was talking about.

She said her father was missing, hadn’t been seen by anyone since he’d left the gallery shortly after he’d spoken with me. He hadn’t come home, had left no message for her. “I’m afraid something very bad has happened to him. He was so distraught after his talk with you.” She took a deep breath. “You’re the reason he’s gone … I only hope that’s all he’s done … if he’s done away with himself—” She choked back a cry of anguish. “Why did you come here? What is all this about—really?”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand … why my sister had to die—”

“Then I must speak with you again. Come here … I’m at home. There are things I must tell you, show you … you are, I’m very much afraid, what my father has been waiting for all these years. Please hurry, Mr. Driskill, before it’s all too late.”

She gave me the address and I went downstairs, my fever and back forgotten for the moment, got a cab, and took off. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, did I? The fact was, it was something to do, to create the illusion of getting somewhere.

The house was low and off-white in the moonlight. It looked as if it had grown out of the crest of the dune with a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright. I walked up the long stretch of driveway from the gates, past lots of palm trees and shrubbery and flowers. The house was dark when I
reached it. I looked behind me, thought I heard a noise which wasn’t part of nature. Sister Lorraine was a prophet: I’d started watching my back and that made me think of Val, who hadn’t watched her back quite closely enough there at the end. I listened, watching for moonlight on silvery hair or the knife blade, but I heard only the surf on the beach behind the house and the wind shaking the palms, and I saw no signs of life at all.

The front door was actually two doors, an inner slab of wood, then a separate layer of filigreed black ironwork. I was staring at the doors looking for a buzzer when the wooden slab swung open and I levitated about a foot and felt like I was going to be sick. The iron filigree opened and Gabrielle said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Well, you made a damn good job of it.”

There was a dim overhead light shining down on her face. When she looked up at me I saw that her eyes were red from crying. “Please come in.” She stepped back and for just that fractional instant I had the feeling I was being set up. Then it passed.

She led me through the dark rooms toward a light at the end of the long, wide hallway. In the shadows we’d passed through I saw a Rouault, a Byzantine icon, a pair of Monets with a wall to themselves. There were mounds of low, heavy furniture, potted plants, some tapestries on the walls, thick rugs: everything subtle, understated, made more so by the dim light which came only from the moon at the windows.

“In here,” she said. “I’ve been trying to understand what my father has been thinking. I’ve made a mess.” She looked around his study at piles of papers. The drawers of the desk were open. Three table lamps were turned on. There was a Degas on the wall opposite his desk, which was a heavy, carved affair with gilded corner figures and an inlaid leather top. She straightened a couple of the piles, then leaned her hips against a library table, brushed her dark hair back from her forehead, and lit a cigarette with a heavy table lighter. “Tell me everything you said to my father—there had to be a reason for his … his going away.” The cigarette trembled between her fingers.

“I showed him a photograph taken a long time ago in Paris. During the German Occupation. Then he just seemed to crack up, started talking about my coming to kill him. It made no sense. He was afraid of someone he called Simon and asked me if Rome had sent me.… I agree with you, he was afraid, scared to death. But then he clammed up, asked me to leave.”

“This picture,” she said. She wore a V-necked cashmere sweater and skirt. The sleeves were pushed up on her forearms, gold bracelets clinking. Her face was drawn, tired, faint circles etched beneath her shiny dark eyes. She was close to cracking: it was more than her father being missing for twenty-four hours, it had to be more than that. She was thirty, a grown-up, but there was something going on now she couldn’t handle. “May I see this picture of yours?”

I stood beside her, put it on the table in a pool of light, and she bent over to study it. A pair of glasses hung on a chain around her neck. She put them on to study the picture. “Richter,” she murmured. “And is this my father? I don’t think—”

“He said it was his brother Guy. A priest.”

“Yes, yes, it isn’t my father but there’s a strong resemblance.” She pointed at one of the figures and looked at me inquiringly.

“D’Ambrizzi. He’s a cardinal now. He could become pope soon.”

“And this one? He looks like Shylock—”

“That’s it!” I was whispering because it was so quiet in the house. “I knew there was something about that profile … it’s Torricelli! Bishop Torricelli. It was right at the edge of my mind—he was a very big man among Catholics in Paris during the war. I met him once when I was a boy. Father took us all to Paris after the war. He’d known Torricelli … I remember someone calling him Shylock, a nickname, and my little sister asked what Skylock meant. Torricelli laughed and turned his profile to her and pointed to his nose, an incredibly hooked nose—more like Punch, to my way of thinking. Like the dancing man Lautrec painted.” I stared at the photograph. “My God,” I thought aloud, “now I know them
all … Monsignor D’Ambrizzi, Klaus Richter of the Wehrmacht, Father Guy LeBecq, and now Bishop Torricelli.”

“Is there some point to this picture?” She let her glasses fall to her breasts. “Why show it to my father?”

“I thought he was in it. My sister had this photograph with her when she was killed. It’s all I have to go on … I’ve got to find out what it meant to her. Why did it set your father off and running?”

She was quiet for a long time. I stood looking out at the Mediterranean washing up the shingle of sand. My mind was racing, getting nowhere. I needed help, someone with a mind clearer and more agile than mine. When I turned back to her she hadn’t moved, stood smoking the last of her cigarette, staring at me.

I nodded toward all the papers she’d been going through. “What’s all this?”

She went to the desk. She moved gracefully, swaying elegantly on her high heels. She looked tired and tense and beautiful. I wanted to smash the moment to bits, reconstruct it as something romantic. I wanted to touch her. I tried to force the idea out of my mind. It was a hell of a time to lose my concentration.

“I’ve been going through whatever papers I could find. I’ve been looking for something that would tell me why your sister upset my father so … he hasn’t behaved normally since she saw him.” She pushed some of the debris to one side. “I found his diary. He came home yesterday when he left the gallery—I didn’t know that until I found the diary … when I got home he was gone. He made some notations—this was
after
he talked to you. Here, see for yourself.”

It was a spiral-bound datebook and agenda. He’d written something in French. I wanted to get it exactly right. “Translate,” I said.

“ ‘What will become of us? Where will it all end? In hell!’ ” Her voice cracked. She bit her lip, turning to me. There were tears on her cheeks and her mascara was smeared. “My uncle died a hero’s death … now my father forty years later … I know something terrible has happened.… I know you didn’t mean it to happen—”