The Assassini (35 page)

Sister Bernadine nodded. “Yes, I suppose he would have been. Right age for it. Well, he was killed in Brittany, walking along a country road, hit-and-run in a rainstorm. The driver didn’t stop and was never located. A couple of farmers saw it, said the driver never slowed down …”

Elizabeth nodded, dipping a piece of bread in her hot, newly arrived soup. “Next?”

“Sebastien Arroyo. Spanish industrialist, retired but served on several boards, seventy-eight years old. Big playboy before the war, liked to race fast cars, very big art collector. Became a major fund-raiser for the Church … very devout, lots of good works, same wife for nearly forty years. Lived in Madrid and on his yacht. He and his wife were shot down on a dark street in Biarritz with
his yacht in the harbor. Nobody saw it happen, nobody heard anything … very professional job and the general feeling was it must have been Basque terrorists though they didn’t actually claim it.

“Hans Ludwig Mueller was a German scholar and amateur theologian. Seventy-four years old. Fit the mold of the conservative Catholic intellectual. He fought for the Reich during the war but was implicated in an anti-Hitler plot at one time, survived some Gestapo torture. Clean bill of health from the War Crimes Commission people after the war. Confined to a wheelchair in his later years with a bad heart. On a visit to his brother’s home in Bavaria he came to grief—everybody else went out one evening to the theater, when they got back to the house there he still sat in his wheelchair … but someone had cut his throat.”

By this time Elizabeth had lost interest in her food, was picking at it without tasting it. “A nice, quiet killing,” she said. A knife like the knife in Ben Driskill’s back. “Go on.”

“Pryce Badell-Fowler, an English Catholic, historian, seventy-nine years old, widower, had a couple of strokes, lived in the country near Bath. Still working, writing, but not all that spry anymore. Working on some magnum opus, but then something very unpleasant happened that last night at the farm. He worked in a barn that had been converted to a library and office. Fire got started, the whole building went up, the old man, too. But when they found his body, thinking he’d been overcome by smoke, they got a surprise … bullet in the back of the head. Nice? Nice.” Sister Bernadine stopped to take a bite of her lunch and sipped red wine.

“So the fire had nothing to do with killing him.” Sister Elizabeth nibbled at a thumbnail. “Therefore the fire was intended to destroy something …”

“Mmm.” Sister Bernadine looked up. “That’s good. How did you think of that? Detective stories?”

“I just have a nasty mind. What about the next one?”

“Geoffrey Strachan, pronounced ‘strawn.’ He was eighty-one years old, visiting his castle in Scotland. Career civil servant and a Catholic, too. Sir Geoffrey.
Knighted in the fifties for his wartime career. British Intelligence during the war, MI-5 or MI-6, I never can remember those. He always drove his own Bentley, patrolling the perimeters of his land, apparently knew his killer—people in the village swear they saw him driving one Sunday morning with another man in the car, but when the Bentley was found pulled off to the side of the road he was slumped over the wheel—”

“With a bullet in the back of his head,” Elizabeth concluded for her.

“Guessed in one!”

“It was no guess, Sister,” Elizabeth said.

Sister Bernadine sighed, looked up in surprise. “Oh-oh.”

“And what about Erich Kessler?”

“There was no date.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s still alive. I’m still looking for him.”

“Sister, I have a feeling you’d better hurry.”

Elizabeth had trouble sleeping that night. She lay in the huge bed hearing the whine and rumble of Rome from the street below and the impressions of the day tumbled through her mind at a dizzying pace. She had returned to the Archives after lunch but her thoughts had kept returning to the list of the dead, to the one who presumably wasn’t. Val had pieced together the five violent deaths and the pattern had been sufficiently persuasive for her to predict a sixth. But who was Kessler? Why would he be next? What tied him to the other five? Indeed, what did those five have in common that got them killed? Inevitably, why were Val and Lockhardt and Heffernan added to the list? Val knew about the five already dead … Curtis Lockhardt knew Val … Heffernan was with Curtis … was that it?

Unable to sleep, she threw on a robe and went outside onto the balcony overlooking the busy street below. Rome glittered at her feet. The breeze was chilly. She pulled the robe tighter, conscious of the loneliness she couldn’t shake, the memory of the little girl on the plane, all her memories of Val.… My God, how she missed her! What, she wondered, watching the lights making
patterns far below, would Ben Driskill say to the list of names and what they implied? He was the only one she felt she could talk to about any of it, and he was almost as distant as Val. Once again she wished to God she hadn’t been such an ass with Ben. How to undo the damage? Or would she never get the chance? She wondered if he knew what he was getting into … and would he have gone after the killer if he’d known about Val’s list of the dead?

For the next few days she shut out the problems of her relationship with Ben Driskill, her sense of desolation and isolation at the loss of Val, and tried to keep her mind on business. She went back to digging through the nunciature of Venice
fondo
, trying to find something she’d seen earlier, in her first day or two in the Archives. It was infuriating to search through the bits and pieces, looking for it, trying to remember just what it had been. It hadn’t seemed of any particular interest at the time, her eyes had just flickered across it, but something about it had stuck in her mind. Dammit! Once she’d lunched with Sister Bernadine it had begun to seem important to find it again. But she was lost in the maze of paper.

Fed up, she went to the curiously modern Coke machine and took the can out into the courtyard. Two priests were chatting in one corner on a bench, smoking, letting the warm sunshine stroke their pale faces. She was wearing slacks. No way they could know she was a nun. They watched her, smiled, she nodded back. She had not seen another woman in the Secret Archives since she’d begun her work. A man’s world. Still, one of the murder victims was a nun—one of eight. She wondered if the two comfortably fleshy, middle-aged priests across the courtyard could imagine the things filling her mind, the things going on within their Church.

Back on the trail, searching for hints of what Val had been after, she knew she was on the verge of losing it entirely. She had nearly decided to give it up by midafternoon.

And then she found it.

The bell rang. The penny dropped. It kept her going.

A single word.

Assassini
.

By some small trick of the nervous system she had registered the written word without knowing it, without realizing she’d seen it. But it had been there. And somewhere in her cortex the connection had been made.

Assassini
.

She found it scribbled on the back of a menu. A very grand menu, for a dinner given by a very grand personage, no doubt. But there was no clue to the host’s name, nothing to give it away. In fact, the menu might have been something other than an official menu, perhaps a note for a chef. In any case, what she had been searching for was scribbled in Italian on the back of the menu. The word had leapt out, stuck.

She set to jotting down a translation.

Thus, Tricino had doubtless pushed a blade into Massaro, who had apparently made two big mistakes. He had committed incest with his daughter and cuckolded the cardinal, all in one stroke, as it were.

The scribbled, faded note certainly had nothing to do with any of the material in which it was embedded, nor did the obscure menu. No references in the surrounding material to Cardinal S., no Massaro, no Tricino. Yet she had noticed it. Now she wondered,
had Val?

Odd, how the word triggered her memory.
Assassini
.

Assassins. Thugs. A casual word for a fact of life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Anyone with enough power and money could hire them to do what needed to be done … to protect the power and the money. A nobleman set upon by his enemies, a prince with a rival, a rich man with a faithless wife or a mistress who was making trouble … a brother with a sister who knew too
much … the hints found in letters and documents of the time were endless. But always just hints.

And when it came to the Church … well, the Church had specialized in spilling blood. Some said the
assassini
did the pope’s killing for him. But it needn’t have been a pope. A cardinal, a rich priest, you paid up and somebody died. It had been a fact of life.

Elizabeth had even asked one of her Georgetown professors about the
assassini
. Father Davenant had smiled and shaken his head, as if to say, what does a pretty girl want with such information? She had held her tongue. And he had said, “Of course they existed, they were commonplace whenever life was comparatively cheap. Which accounts for the paucity of commentary about them. Crime was not much studied then, it was simply one of the dark parts of life. Unsavory. Unglamorous. My grandfather came from Italy at the turn of the century. He always referred to all villains as
assassini
. He used to tell me that it was with the first
assassini
, hired out of Sicily, that the Mafia was born. And then of course there are all the other legends.…”

Father Davenant had taken a dim view of the legends but not such a dim view of Elizabeth. She had persisted. What legends?

“Sister, are we not historians? What are we talking about here?”

“Look, you’re the historian. I’m just taking the class. A lot of things started out as legends—”

“That sounds good but is not quite accurate.”

“Humor me, then, Father.”

“Just old legends. The hidden monasteries, the pope’s own army of
assassini
 … you can imagine the kind of rubbish people dream up. The Church has always been an inviting target—”

“But surely this is verifiable rubbish—I mean, either it was true or not.”

“There were such people. But beyond that, where would you propose to do the research?”

“The Secret Archives, obviously.”

Father Davenant had laughed. “You are very young, Sister. You cannot imagine the confusion in the Archives.
You simply cannot imagine. They have a special way of hiding things in the Archives. You know how archivists are, they can’t throw anything away. So when they find things of, shall we say, a sensitive nature, they can’t bring themselves to throw it away … so they hide it. In plain sight. It’s really quite diabolical.”

Father Davenant had never bothered to discuss the
assassini
with her again. But he had explained how the archivists hid things. He was quite right. It was diabolical.

She might have spent a year looking. Or she might have turned to the next of the seventeen thousand parchments and documents in the
fondo
and found what she was after. But in fact some organization had been done and the next day she located the documents relating to the suppression of monasteries ordered by the pope, carried out through the offices of the nuncio of Venice. The fate of the monastery of San Lorenzo made chilling reading.

The suppression of this Tuscan monastery in the mid-fifteenth century involved a story that might have served as a subject for one of the period’s infernal tapestries, which have remained hidden in private collections ever since. It featured witchcraft, incest, desecration of the Church, murder, torture, carnal possession of an entire convent of nuns, the worship of pagan idols, tyranny of every imaginable kind, treachery, arson, and politics. The tapestry, had it existed, would have been rich in detail, if not actually cluttered with horrors.

It would have had at its center a Florentine nobleman, Vespasiano Ranaldi Sebastiano, who had himself made a bishop of the Church, paying a wagonful of ducats for the honor. The pope’s family needed money, it was that simple, and no one particularly cared where the money came from.

As a bishop, Sebastiano chose to mock the Church, despoil in every way its dignity, its mission, its holiness. As an officer in Sigismondo Malatesta’s private army, he laid waste to Church lands, raped nuns, pillaged and plundered Church treasure. He took to wearing his bishop’s
vestments and regaling his flock with obscene jests concerning the unlikelihood of the virgin birth. In his castle he practiced the oldest kinds of witchcraft with modern twists of his own devising. He turned a nearby convent into a personal brothel for himself and his hired guard. Examples of torture and degradation were commonplace, but the tales of the occasional escapee were discounted as ravings of the mad.

Sebastiano also provided a haven for
assassini
at his castle. When their number grew too large—he hired them out at a considerable profit, a kind of death league—he turned his attention to the monastery of San Lorenzo, only a day’s ride from Castel Sebastiani, to house them. It was a logical idea, since many of his
assassini
had been recruited from among the monks: after all, Sebastiano was charming, profligate with his hospitality, extraordinarily well educated, possessed of considerable wit and debating skill, and was as well a bishop. His views on the Church were not to be blithely ignored. While little of his writings on the state of the Church survived his own destruction, it was recorded that his arguments were viewed by the Tuscan nobility, the priests and nuns and monks and learned observers, as well reasoned and persuasive, if utterly heretical.

Concluding that what the Church needed most was a cadre of dependable killers, he took over the monastery, murdered those who chose not to be included in his plans, and set up his own Tuscan
assassini
, loyal to Bishop Duke Sebastiano but, nevertheless, available for hire.