The Assassini (33 page)

“No, Gabrielle, I didn’t. I’m just wandering in the dark.” I put my hands on her shoulders, felt the softness of the cashmere slide against her skin, and she came to me, her head buried on my chest. I held her, felt her quaking against me. She was small, her bones made her feel breakable, and she clung to me, a stranger, in her time of fear, and I kissed her sleek hair, inhaled her scent. I wanted to tell her that it would all be all right, that her father was safe, but I couldn’t. Too many people had died. So I held her and let her cry it out. Maybe her father was right. Maybe he was in hell already. There was no comfort in false reassurance now.

With her head still on my chest, she said, “Why do I trust you?”

“What have you got to lose? You know damn well I’m not here to kill anybody. And I’m cute for an older man, maybe?”

She grinned and sniffed.

Then I took a shot in the dark. “Because maybe you know things you haven’t told me … things you know I should know. You trust me because you want to trust me.”

She pulled slowly away. “Here, there’s something else in his diary.” She was flipping through the pages, then stopped. “Here’s the day he saw your sister. He makes no mention at all of her by name … but here, you see, he has written a list of names.”

Simon
.

Gregory
.

Paul
.

Christos
.

Archduke!

She looked at me as I read the names aloud, then she said, “Are they real names, Mr. Driskill? Or are they some kind of code names? Archduke …”

I nodded. “And what does that big exclamation point mean? What makes Archduke so important?”

She said, “There are four men in your little photograph—”

“And I am reasonably sure my sister showed this same picture to your father. He sees the picture, he
doesn’t make a note about my sister—but he writes down these names—”

“But it doesn’t match, don’t you see? There’s one name too many!”

“No, it fits. The fifth man took the picture.”

We stood staring at each other, confusion registering. She said, “Mr. Driskill, would you like to walk on the beach? Maybe the fresh air will clear our heads.”

“Why don’t you call me Ben?”

She was picking up a suede jacket from the back of a chair. “Then you must call me Gaby. Okay?” I smiled, nodded. “Come.” She slid a glass door open and the cold air and the smell of salt filled the room. She kicked off her high heels.

We walked down a wooden stairway to the firmly packed sand. The surf rolled in, shining silvery in the moonlight. The lights of Alexandria glowed off to the east. We reached the point where the sand was damp and packed hard, then set off walking just out of the surf’s reach. For a time we spoke of personal things, my life as a lawyer in New York, the death of the man she was planning to marry in the 1973 war with Israel, my own failure to cope with the Church and the Jesuits, her life as an only child with her father after her mother died. She had known only a couple of American men and she laughed when I said I’d never known an Egyptian girl.

“Everyone expects Cleopatra,” she said softly, putting her arm through mine. The wind was blowing salty spray across our faces when we turned and began the walk back to the house.

I asked her if she thought her father might have called his pal Richter if he’d needed someone to talk with after I’d left him yesterday.

She laughed harshly, a bitter sound in contrast to her normal tone. “Richter? Believe me, he is not my father’s ‘pal’ … he is my father’s jailer!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s go inside. I’m cold. I’ll make coffee and tell you all about Herr Richter and the LeBecq family.”

When we were settled in a room with wall hangings and old Persian carpets and low couches and bowls of
flowers and heavy, squat lamps casting gentle pools of light, she told me a remarkable tale she said she’d pieced together over the years and never told anyone else.

Jean-Paul LeBecq, the father of Guy and Etienne, had been a very conservative Catholic and a sympathizer with the Nazi puppet government set up at Vichy with Marshal Pétain as its figurehead. Guy was a priest. Etienne was working at the gallery, heir to his father’s business. Under the elder LeBecq’s gaze, he had no choice but to echo his father’s political sentiments. Early in the war Jean-Paul was incapacitated by a stroke and Etienne, in his mid-twenties, took over the gallery completely. And discovered that the old man had been acting as a kind of diplomat without portfolio moving to smooth the relationship between the Nazi force of occupation and the Catholic Church in Paris. It was important to keep the channels of communication open because each of the great monoliths needed the other. It was during this time that Etienne had met Klaus Richter, who was working the same side of the street, connecting the army of occupation with the Church. Everything she said was fitting with the tidbits of information Richter had given me. She knew very little of Father Guy LeBecq’s involvement in any of this during the war years, only that she’d always been told he died a hero’s death—that phrase again—during the war. Nothing more.

By keeping her ears open while working as her father’s closest assistant, and while hearing him out when he slipped into one of his fits of depression, Gabrielle learned that old Jean-Paul had been handling the art treasures looted by the Nazis from private art collections, most of which were owned by Jews. Once Jean-Paul’s health removed him from an active role in the business, his tasks feel to young Etienne.

“But what did the Nazis need a dealer for?” I asked. “They were simply
taking
what they wanted.”

“Yes,” she said, “but don’t forget the Church. They wanted their share of the loot … in return for their cooperation with the Nazis.”

“But what did this cooperation really amount to?”

She shook her head. “In time of war—who knows?”

“But the rest of this you’re telling me, you know it to be fact?”

“Don’t be such a lawyer! I wasn’t there, if that’s what you mean. But I’m sure of it, yes.” She was impatient with me. “It’s been eating at my father all these years—why would he make it up? Yes, that’s the way it was—”

“But how can you be sure?”

“Because of what came later—because of what I saw my father go through! I’ve tried to put it out of my mind, but first your sister and now you, you’ve brought it all back to life. I’m ashamed of what my father has done.…”

“Gaby, the Church and the Nazis in bed together during the war isn’t a very pretty picture, but it’s not exactly a scoop either. The Church did a lot of things during the war it couldn’t be proud of. Your father, you can’t be too hard on him. It sounds to me like he was caught in the middle, the agent moving looted art from the Nazis to the Church—Gaby, there was a war on, who knows what pressures they put on him … he was a young man, following in his father’s footsteps.”

But I was thinking: was this it? Was this what Val had discovered? No, it was just too much a part of the past, the distant past. One point in an old indictment. Who would care now? How could anyone be hurt by accusations forty years old?

“But it didn’t stop when the war ended,” she said. “That’s the point! That’s the worst part. My father became
their
creature! They set him up with the galleries in Cairo and Alexandria after the war so he could continue to ship artworks without anyone taking notice … they kept the whole thing going!”

“They? Who? The war was over—”

“It is so simple for an American to be naive! Not us, not here, we can’t afford your view of the world—not when Germans with newly minted past lives began showing up in Cairo, rich, powerful, advising the government. The Nazis, Ben, the Nazis—they’d hidden away millions and millions of dollars worth of art treasures, of gold and jewelry and precious stones of every imaginable kind … but all the loot was useless to them. What could they do
with it? They had to have money—some way of converting it into money. There were Nazi survivors everywhere—the Condor Legion in Madrid, Die Spinne, all the old SS men who were getting out of Europe to Africa, to Egypt, to South America, to your precious righteous United States, the old guard who dreamed of a Fourth Reich—it wasn’t just Mengele and Barbie and Bormann, there were hundreds and hundreds of men we’ve never heard of, and they all needed money. One way of funding them, setting them up in businesses and fat investment portfolios, was by selling off the art. But it wasn’t easy finding a buyer they could trust—so they had to turn it into a kind of blackmail, too, don’t you see?”

“You’re telling me they sold the stuff
to the Church
? And that’s how they’ve been funding themselves—”

“The surviving Nazis had the Church in a tight spot. Buy this stuff from us or else …” She watched me, waiting for the penny to drop.

“Buy it or we tell the world how we supplied you with looted treasure
during the war
! There’s the blackmail … but they were actually giving the Church something for its money!” I sighed, sank back on the low couch, careful of my back. “I will be goddamned. The Church had made a pact with the devil.”

“It was—
is
—a delicate balance,” she said. “The Church isn’t powerless—they could reveal the hiding places of a lot of men who were once war criminals. So the Nazi survivors fear the Church, too—it’s a compact of mutual fear. And my father was caught between them … and he, too, got something out of it. He got rich for his complicity, for his sins. I don’t know the mechanics, but they used my father to sell, buy, smuggle, and distribute out of Europe and eventually into the Church’s possession. And he funneled the payments to the Nazis—”

“By way of Klaus Richter,” I said.

She nodded. “I think that’s the way it worked. I can’t prove it, but my father told me enough so I could fill in the rest of the picture. That’s what my father has been afraid of all these years—that he would be found out. My father is a weak man. He has no stomach for these games.
Richter looks on him as a weak link. So Richter is the man who held my father’s leash. Richter was the watcher … and now I’m afraid my father has cracked under the pressure of his own … guilt.…” She was crying softly.

I went to her, knelt beside her. She reached out to me and I held her. She couldn’t seem to stop crying, and she was trying to talk but the words were muffled. Then she looked up at me, her face glistening, and she kissed me. A little later she led me to the bedroom. We made love in the hungry ways strangers do, each of us doubtless searching out the momentary hiding places we needed. When she was asleep I got up, put some clothing back on, and went to stand at the top of the wooden stairway leading down to the beach. The cold wind dried the sweat on my face. I couldn’t quite remember if the exertion of the past couple of hours had hurt my back. The dressing still seemed to be in place and I was none the worse for wear.

I watched the moonlight on the water and in the stillness, with only the throb of the waves against the shore, I tried to reach my sister, Val, tried to ask her if this was it … if this was
all
.…

Perhaps she’d stumbled on this ring of art thieves dating back to the war in the way that I had: some clergy, some old, unrepentant Nazi rogues stuck away in odd corners of the globe with their ill-gotten paintings and statuary and Fabergé eggs, with their tattered dreams of a world in their hands. Not nice, but not enough to bear upon the choice of a new pope, not enough to kill Val and Lockhardt and Heffernan for: it didn’t compute. No. I’d found an ugly detail in the corner of the huge tapestry that was the Church … but that was all.

But there was the photograph. And Richter had dealt with the Church, and there sat three clerics, two of whom were dead and one who just might be elevated to the Throne of Peter very soon. And I had Gabrielle’s word that this was all still going on—this flow of artworks and money. And if she was right, then there were men within the Church today who were involved in continuing the old game of mutual blackmail.… There would be someone within the Church who was the Nazi master—

Maybe someone from long ago. Or someone new, carrying on the tradition.

D’Ambrizzi was the surviving link on the Church side.

How could I be sure that a revelation now might not destroy Cardinal D’Ambrizzi’s chances at getting that top job? D’Ambrizzi, my marvelous playmate that summer and fall of 1945 …

Val had been close to him. Sister Elizabeth knew him well.

The facts bounced around in my head, and I couldn’t seem to hold them still. Where did Paris in the present day fit in? Val had spent much of the last several months of her life in Paris digging at something buried there … but what? And Paris
then
? Hell, everybody had been in Paris back then!

I was wondering where Etienne LeBecq might have gone, thinking of how much I wished I could ask him a few questions, when I heard something behind me. Gaby had wrapped herself in a heavy robe and was standing in the doorway.

“I think I know where my father is,” she said. “He and Richter used to talk about a place, a Catholic place, where they could go if they ever wanted to get away from it all. They’d laugh about it. Richter said it wasn’t necessarily the end of the world but you could see it from there.…”

“A Catholic place? What does that mean? A church? Or a monastery? A retreat house?”

“I don’t know. But I know what they called it.”

“What, Gaby?”

“
L’inferno.
”

T
he folder Elizabeth found among Val’s belongings had been disappointing because it derived its thickness from twenty-odd blank pages. Only the top sheet contained the list of names followed by dates. All but Erich Kessler, for whom there was no date. Whatever background information she’d gathered was gone. Probably she’d carried the lot with her in the Vuitton briefcase which had been taken when she was killed.