The Assassini (50 page)

“You know that can’t be true, not for a nun—”

“It’s true when it comes to murder!” She fixed him with her hardest stare. “Your subtext is showing, Monsignor.”

“It is?” He smiled at her and passed his hand across his brow.

“You’re saying that such things have happened before. The cleansing, the purging of dissenters, troublemakers … all to preserve the Church, of course.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Well, it was Sister Valentine’s field, wasn’t it? Violence as policy—it fascinated her—”

“She discussed it with you?”

He nodded.

“That doesn’t mean she approved of it,” she said. “And neither Val nor I would have tried to justify violence as policy, a means to an end. Val was a historian, not an advocate. Most particularly not a devil’s advocate.”

“You know she was an advocate. Advocacy was her life—”

“Not of that!”

“Still, I wonder … the moral dilemma. Evil in the service of good.” The tension was going. Being with her, talking to her, even being at odds with her, made him feel human again, put the bad things out of his mind.

“I find it an entirely impenetrable moral contradiction. I haven’t anything like the wisdom to set it right.”

“But you may someday
have
to solve the contradiction. Don’t you see? You’re following in Val’s footsteps, in her shadow, doing her work … what if you were confronted with the choice, Sister?”

“What choice?”

“If the Church, in the person of a killer, says to you, ‘Cease your work, forget what Sister Valentine was doing … and live. Or persist and be purged, for the good of the Church.’ You would have to choose.”

“In the first place, what’s the point in frightening me?”

“To keep you alive.”

“And in the second place, I will try to avoid the confrontation.”

“I understand, Sister. I sincerely wish for you that luxury. But my wishes and prayers may not be enough. Evil in the service of good—does it become good? We may still need the insight of the Magus—”

She laughed. “You must mean D’Ambrizzi!”

“Magus,” he repeated. “The man with the Janus face, looking both to the future and the past. Maybe he has the answer, after all. So much of his life is a mystery.”
Finally he stood up. “Well, the
assassini
of long ago may have served their purpose—so now in new times, who knows what our problems may force upon the Church? This is truly the heart of darkness, Sister.”

He was putting on his raincoat. She was up and holding it for him. He stopped when she put her finger to her lips, motioning for him to listen to the tape of
Rigoletto
.

The most beautiful scene had just begun, the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile. The melody was both somber and wicked, sinister, rich with the colorings of the solo cello and the double bass.

Sparafucile describes himself to Rigoletto.

One who for a slight fee

Will free you from a rival—And you have one
.

Sparafucile unsheathes his sword …

This is my instrument. Can it serve you?

Sparafucile was one of the
assassini
.

The pain visited Pope Callistus in the dark of night, as it so often did. He roused himself, got out of bed, and paced the bedroom with perspiration popping out on his face, his teeth grinding, waiting for it to pass. Sooner or later there would be an occasion when it didn’t stop and the end would follow quickly. But, he wondered, could he wait for fate to exercise its cruel sentence.

Then it began to lessen and he relaxed his muscles, slowly, fearful that it might return, that it was tricking him. He stood by his desk and picked up the exquisite Florentine dagger he’d been given by Cardinal Indelicato upon his election to the Throne of Peter. He customarily used it as a letter opener, and now that he spent more time in his bedchamber it had found its way to his small desk. The dagger was a costly piece, gold and steel, very old. He watched the blade catch the dim glow from the lamp on the table. He saw his reflection, a blur of features, in the surface of the blade. He wondered how many men the blade had killed.

As the pain faded he rubbed his eyes, then took the towel that lay across the foot of the bed and wiped the
sweat from his face. He lay back down on the bed to wait for sleep to return. He knew it might be a considerable wait. He was surprised to notice that he was still holding the dagger. That was happening more often lately, this business of having no recollection of performing some activity. Where had the dagger come from? He must never have replaced it on the desk.… He examined it, remembering Indelicato telling him how it had been in his family for a long, long time, centuries, how it represented courage and ruthlessness, both qualities he would need as Cardinal di Mona ceased to exist and Pope Callistus was born.

He was thinking more and more of Cardinal Indelicato lately, how he would have been sublimely at home in the KGB or the CIA or MI5 or—he smiled bitterly at the memory—the Gestapo. The tradecraft of the intelligence business was in the man’s blood, at the heart of his nature. And now he was keeping his old enemy D’Ambrizzi under surveillance. Callistus wondered, does Giacomo know he’s being watched? Callistus had to admit Indelicato was getting excellent intelligence from his acolytes. Indelicato had known D’Ambrizzi for so long: he was clearly the man to do the watching. But whom did that leave to watch Indelicato? The pope’s mind was wandering. D’Ambrizzi had always been a match for Indelicato, all through the years, a match and then some.

They were such opposites on the surface: Indelicato so cold-blooded, reptilian with his flickering gaze and expressionless face, and D’Ambrizzi so gregarious, warm, and full of life. But both so merciless when the time came, so unforgiving, so brutal … each hating the other so deeply. They were both so much better equipped to be pope than he, yet he was the one who had been chosen, proving once again what people were always saying about God’s mysterious ways.

Callistus was discovering the error in another old saying. He was discovering that your whole life does not pass before your eyes as you are about to die. No. All that was passing before his eyes was that time in Paris, that night when they crouched by the iron fence and
watched what happened in the little graveyard. The night when they crouched shivering in the cold, watching the tall, thin priest with the unsmiling triangular face and the single thick, unbroken eyebrow, Father LeBecq, Father Guy LeBecq, whose father was the famous art dealer in the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré … it was Father LeBecq who had betrayed them. Now they were only the ragtag survivors, the others all dead by the tracks, and it was Father LeBecq’s doing … LeBecq the traitor among them … it all came down to the Pius Plot, as it became known later in certain quarters, everything hung on the Pius Plot, Simon’s plot, Simon, whom no one ever saw, Simon, who guided them in their work, Simon Verginius, the leader who would never forsake them.…

Through half-closed eyes he saw the dagger, turned it slowly in his hand … sometimes when the pain was truly intense, when all his eyes could see was a red rippling curtain of pain with a tightly wound black hole at the center—at such times he thought about the dagger, how sharp its point, sharp as a Jesuit’s twist of logic, how like a razor its blade … and he thought how easily he could end the pain, an icicle drawn across his throat, his wrists, or driven into his heart, and then peace at last …

Ice …

There was ice in the cemetery that night, all Paris was in the grip of an arctic chill, there were frozen puddles of ice in the graveyard, a patina of ice on the gravestones … the stocky, brutishly constructed man in the cassock waiting in the graveyard for Father LeBecq, one priest waiting for another, and outside the fence, crouching, holding their breath, Sal di Mona, Brother Leo, the blond Dutchman … then the two men in the graveyard, the huddled conversation among the headstones, suddenly the stocky man with the long, powerful arms leaping at the tall man like a huge, misshapen hound, grappling with him, encircling him, crushing the life from him, dropping him like a broken marionette … and the killer standing still, his lungs pumping clouds of vapor into the freezing night, the light of a streetlamp illuminating his face, his
profile … the face he would come to know so well, the face that would be so near for the rest of his life …

The next day His Holiness Pope Callistus felt well enough to call a meeting in his office. It was the same group—D’Ambrizzi, Indelicato, and Sandanato, with two of Indelicato’s young aides waiting in the anteroom. The latter two had been taken into Indelicato’s confidence and were working on certain aspects of the investigation into the murders: In the corner of the office nearest the desk was a rolling oxygen tent with shelves for a variety of other medical paraphernalia. There were now no risks worth taking.

The pope’s weight loss was beginning to show in the face which already bore new, deep worry lines, giving him something of the visage of a sad clown. His face, known so well throughout the world, was changing irrevocably, caving in. He was wearing his contacts for a change, and one of the lenses was giving him trouble. He kept pulling the rim of his eyelid away from the eyeball, making little apologies as he did so. Giving it up, he slumped back in the deslc chair, toying with the Florentine dagger he’d found he was carrying with him.

“Well,” he said, “let’s get on with it. A progress report.” There was no need to define the task. He was interested in only one thing now.

Cardinal D’Ambrizzi took a file folder from Sandanato. The sunlight streaming through the windows increased the impression of pallor, the dark hollows of Sandanato’s cheeks. He seemed to have been drawn even tighter than usual. The pope’s hands were shaking until he dropped them, still clutching the dagger, onto the desk before him. D’Ambrizzi himself looked tired and old, like a man with too many ugly secrets hidden behind his huge, bulging frog’s eyes. Anxiety filled the room like a noxious gas.

“We’ve been looking at Sister Valentine’s final weeks, Holiness,” D’Ambrizzi said. “Where she was, what she may have been doing, trying to pin down the events leading up to her murder. We’ve discovered that Ben
Driskill is tracking backward from her murder. He was in Alexandria a week ago, give or take a few days. While there he had a meeting with our old friend Klaus Richter—”

“You’re joking,” the pope said abruptly. “Richter? Our Richter? From the old days? You told me he was the one who frightened you!”

“None other, Holiness. And he did frighten me, I assure you.”

“Your candor,” Indelicato murmured, “becomes you, Giacomo.”

“And,” D’Ambrizzi continued, “he saw another man who subsequently killed himself.”

“Who was that?”

“Etienne LeBecq, Holiness. An art dealer.”

Callistus’s eyes widened, he felt an adrenaline rush. His heart was beating erratically, leaping in his chest. Thinking: LeBecq, the brother of Father Guy, who haunted his dreams: now forty years later they were both dead, all the sins coming home to roost. Was that it? They had all been deep in the Pius Plot … did that make them all sinners, now called upon to pay up at last?

D’Ambrizzi went on, flipping through papers. “We also have a report from Paris that a journalist, an old chap by the name of Hey wood—”

“Robbie Heywood,” Callistus interrupted softly. “You remember him, Giacomo. Terrible loud jackets, he’d talk your arm off and drink you under the table, given half a chance. God’s love, I remember him … how does he come into this?”

“Dead, Holiness,” D’Ambrizzi said. “Murdered by an unknown assailant. The authorities have no clues, of course.”

Callistus was trying to remember the last time he’d seen Heywood. “But what has he to do with any of this mess?”

“Sister Valentine saw him in Paris while doing her research. Now he’s dead. There may be a connection—”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Giacomo,” Indelicato
said. His voice sounded mechanical, uninvolved. “I’ll send someone to Paris and check this out.”

“Good luck to him,” D’Ambrizzi said dubiously. He shrugged massively. “Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence. Knifed on a street corner. Such things happen.”

“Nonsense.” Indelicato frowned sourly. “The Church is under attack and Heywood was a victim. It’s obvious.”

“It all comes back to Paris,” Callistus whispered. He was slowly turning the dagger in his hands. “And where is our friend Ben Driskill now? And how is his father holding up?”

“His father is on the mend. A slow process. And we seem to have lost Ben Driskill. He flew to Paris. His habit was to stay at the George Cinq but … well, he’s not there. He’s somewhere in Paris. Unless he’s left already.” He turned to the pale, cadaverous cardinal sitting quietly with his legs crossed. “Fredi, Fredi, you are too quiet. I worry when you are so quiet.”

Indelicato leaned back, tapped his fingertips together across his chest. “I am in awe of your resources. The good monsignor here”—he nodded at Sandanato—“is responsible for this outpouring of information?”

“Not this time. Poor Pietro is overworked as it is. No, I’ve simply unleashed my private army—oh, don’t look so worried, Fredi, I’m only joking. I’ve sent out some feelers, asked a few questions—”

“The silver-haired priest,” Callistus said. “And who is he?”

D’Ambrizzi shook his head.

“Your network is still an astonishment to me,” Indelicato said. “But where is Driskill?”

“You’re good at watching people,” D’Ambrizzi said. “Maybe you’ve been wasting too much time watching me, Fredi.” He laughed deep in his great chest.

Indelicato smiled slowly. “Not closely enough apparently.”

Callistus spoke, ignoring the byplay. “So now we have nine murders … and a suicide?”

“Well, who knows, Holiness?” Indelicato said. “It’s
a reign of terror. Who knows how many more there are … and how many there will be.”

Suddenly Callistus stood up, his body stiffening in a kind of bone-jarring rictus, fingers curling, his mouth pulled out of shape and into a ghastly scowl, saliva white on his pale lips, and without uttering a sound he pitched forward across his desk.