The Assassini (52 page)

“Brother Leo,” I said. “My name is Driskill. I’ve come to see you from Paris. Robbie Heywood gave me your name.”

He blinked at me, one of those innocent faces that always looks surprised. He pointed a grubby finger at me as if I’d said the magic word. “Robbie,” he said. “And how is Robbie?” He didn’t sound Irish. His intonation
and pronunciation were indefinable. Probably Irish at birth, a life lived elsewhere. I told him that Heywood had died and left it at that for the time being. He listened, busied himself with a gunnysack full of fertilizer, tying it shut, gathering up some trowels, a small spade. He nodded intermittently. I couldn’t tell how much sense he was making of what I told him.

“Paris,” he said. “You’ve come all the way from Paris. So Robbie’s dead. Used to call him ‘the Vicar.’ He “sent you to see me? I am, I admit it, frankly amazed. I cannot quite believe it. After all these years. We’re rather off the beaten track here. But,” he argued with himself, “do I not have the evidence looking me directly in the eye? Amazed, I am. The Vicar! I would have enjoyed seeing him again.” His eyes popped wide, innocently, and he seemed to have known what I was thinking earlier. “Oh, enjoyment is no longer outlawed here. Such a relief. A blessing. An obstreperous, nosy man, but a good companion during some dark days. Good Lord.” He shook his head, bushy eyebrows catching the wind. “Dead. Old time is on the wing. The shadows are gathering, deepening.” He smiled at me happily.

“He didn’t live out his span,” I said. “Robbie Heywood was murdered in Paris a week ago—”

“But who would do such a thing?”

“A man who came through time, from forty years ago, a man he trusted … a man who tracked him down and didn’t give him a chance. Less than a month ago my sister, a nun, Sister Valentine, was murdered by the same man. Robbie Heywood believed that you could shed some light on this killer … who he is, where he came from, why he is killing. Again.”

“May I ask,” he said calmly, “why he killed your sister?”

“Because she was researching a book that apparently dealt in some detail with what was going on in Paris during the war. Torricelli, the Nazis, the Resistance, something he called’ ‘the Pius Plot.’ And a man, a phantom, called Simon—”

“Stop, please.” He smiled at me so gently, as if he
were beyond earthly matters, guilt and sin and murder. “You seem very well informed about very ancient, very secret matters. I hardly know what to think of you, Mr. Driskill.”

“I’ve come a long way to hear your story. People have died—”

“How well I know,” he mused enigmatically.

“—beginning with Father LeBecq in a graveyard in Paris forty years ago—no, of course, he wasn’t the beginning. Who knows where it began? My sister, your old friend Heywood, they were just the most recent additions. It began long, long ago—and I have code names you might be able to identify.” The words and questions and ideas were tumbling out of me too quickly and he was drawing back. I was too much for him to handle. I saw it in his eyes, dimming for a moment as I spoke. I broke off, allowing the surf to drown the words.

His eyes swept out across the distant sea, where it might lead you to believe it was tranquil and quiet. “I am rather afraid of you, Mr. Driskill—if Mr. Driskill is in truth your name. You see,” he went resolutely on as I began to object, “I’ve known there would be someone and there would be a due bill of sorts. Because there were things happening then, things that could never be forgotten as long as any one of us survived, any of us who knew the whole story … or even parts of it. I’m afraid I knew as much as any of us. Surely too much to be allowed to live if someone wanted to cover up the past, erase it. Someone would remember Leo someday and they would wonder if he was still alive and then they would have to find out.” He cupped his chin in his hand, arms crossed on his chest. “It’s taken rather longer than I’d thought it would. And now I wonder, are you that man? And if you are, which one of them sent you?”

He lowered his gaze, seeing the waters grow more troubled as they swarmed toward the base of the cliffs. I called his name but the wind and the pounding waves drowned it out. I reached out, grabbed his arm. Harder than I’d intended. He turned gently and the innocence of his face shone on me like God’s grace.

“I need your help,” I said. I wasn’t much of a salesman. I was too far gone to make a pitch and the wind was sucking my breath away, making me feel weak. This little man was one of the keys I had to have. “I must hear you, in your own words … the truth—”

“You want to hear my story. I understand.” He spoke softly, as if amazed by a secret revelation, one I couldn’t know, but somehow I heard him, made out every word. “It was all so long ago.” He cocked his head and gave me a fatalistic, philosophical nod. “You will have to convince me—I may have lived the useful years of my life, but I have no desire to die sooner than is necessary. Do you understand? I have said you make me afraid. If you have come to kill me—if you have truly come from
them
—if you’ve come from Rome to kill me … then there’s little I can do to stop you. But if you have come, as you say, in search of the truth, then I will tell you my story. So, come walk with me and tell me again who you are. Let us exchange stories, yours for mine.” He smiled again. He said he was afraid but he wasn’t. He didn’t have a fearful bone in his body. “And if you have come from
them
, maybe I can convince you I’m nothing but a harmless old man, no danger to you and your masters—who knows?”

“Them,” I said. “Who are they?”

“Young man, whoever you really are, you know perfectly well who
they
are. Why else would you come so far? Come, come, we’ll walk on the cliffs. We’ll not dissemble. I’ll give you a chance to kill me.” He chuckled to himself as if the joke were somehow on me. I fell into step beside him.

During the Second World War the Catholic Church was as concerned, indeed obsessed, with survival as any other European institution. Conduct of affairs had to be designed and executed with extreme care and diligent attention to the state of the war, to the shifting balance of power, to
realpolitik
. Further complicating matters was the issue of individual morality coming into conflict with the somewhat less luxurious morality of the organization,
as Brother Leo’s story was destined to prove. The role of the Church was rendered increasingly ambiguous by the fact that in the twentieth century it had no army of its own, no means of forcing its policies or its independence from outside interests. In the first place, the course the war was taking at any given moment had to be taken into account; in the second place, some attention had to be paid to the overt horrors being systematically perpetrated by the Nazis—they were simply difficult to ignore no matter how much one might wish to; and in the third place, there was the fact, with its uncertain consequences, that the Church was led by Pope Pius, whose ties to Germany were strong, deep, and basically mystical.

Exemplifying this confusion of morality, aims, and effects, there arose a curious response: a cadre of Paris’s activist Catholics—priests, monks, some laymen—were recruited by a priest who would be known to them as “Simon Verginius”—that is, Simon. He bound them together by a sacred oath of secrecy that would last a lifetime. They would never reveal their brotherhood’s existence, nor would they ever reveal their identities to anyone outside the group. As long as the oath was intact, they were safe from discovery.

But, of course, there were problems even from the institution of these first principles, Brother Leo assured me with a weary shrug. “I will simply raise the questions for the moment, providing no answers,” he said. “First, whose idea was it, this cadre, to begin with? Not Simon’s surely. There were orders coming from someone in Rome—at least that was my assumption as a young man caught up in events and wanting to play a part in things. Someone, somewhere was guiding the hand of Simon … because there was an inner proof. Conflict. Simon rebelled against some of the orders, and that was our undoing.”

The aims of this group were to protect the Church from the misfortunes of war, to enrich the Church from the spoils of the war, and to keep the Church strong and beyond the conflagration, the firestorms of ambition and
insanity that were, in fact, the war. In a nation, in a great city ruled by Nazi invaders, the implications such aims carried with them were obvious, but inevitably at odds with the morality of some individuals. Brother Leo let me think that one over as he went on with his tale.

The men in the group were known to one another by code names. Leo said he’d forgotten them, the result of trying very hard to bury them in the distant past. He insisted that he’d forgotten how many of them there were and he wouldn’t budge on that point. Christos, yes, there was the one called Christos, he admitted remembering that name, and I’d soon find out why. At the time they were, he said, a perfectly Catholic group: totally authoritarian, nobody daring to openly voice questions, not even thinking about questions as such, except in the quiet of one’s own mind when the defenses were down. Orders were given, orders were carried out. Decisions were left to others. These men saw themselves accurately as weapons in the service of the Church. It was a time of war and the Church had never cowered before secular armies: well, not
often
. Historically it had raised its own armies, sent its own soldiers to the battle, to die if necessary, to kill if killing was called for. Now, in Paris, the Church had raised a new army to call its own and it would do what had to be done. Brother Leo wouldn’t look at me just then but I understood: killing had been called for all right, and killing they had done.

“It was a time for carrying out orders,” he said. “Any orders. All orders. Don’t say it, Mr. Driskill—I agree with you … following orders is the last pallid excuse of the murderers of those days. A concentration camp guard at Treblinka, a priest stalking a victim in a Paris slum …” He shrugged, staring at the sea with the shadows lengthening and the wind getting colder. “I am not excusing myself, nor any of us. I am telling you how it was, that’s all. Sometimes the order was to kill a man. For the greater good, of course. It was always for the Church. We believed we were saving the Church, didn’t we?”

But more often than not it was something else. Usually
it was a matter of trading. Back onto the tightrope they went. Trading loyalty, trading actions the group could perform, trading for the good of the Church. Trading with the Nazis, with the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Gestapo. And in return the Church benefited: a not unreasonable share of looted art treasures which made their way by this means and that back to Rome, the spoils from the rape of the Jews who were simply never seen again. When it was necessary, Simon’s little band, with Christos often in charge of the mission, kept tabs on the Resistance and seemed to have no choice but to betray their French friends, to throw bones to the Nazis, to maintain the fragile balance between working
with
the Resistance here,
with
the Nazis there, but always
for
the Church which as an article of faith they
knew
must outlast the Resistance fighters, the Nazi invaders, and the war itself.

But there were times when it was not simply trading, not the simple act of betraying the Resistance on one hand or sabotaging the Nazis on the other. There were times when the Nazis wanted a man to die. Why didn’t they kill the offender themselves? Brother Leo had pondered that one at length. Was it a test of the cadre’s willingness to work with the occupiers? Or was it the simple imposition of their will?

Brother Leo remembered one occasion when the rift between Simon and Christos came into the open. There was going to be trouble, sooner or later, within the ranks, Brother Leo was sure of that. It had boiled up over the matter of the Resistance priest.…

Father Devereaux was the priest who had gotten too good at the Resistance business. An SS officer had been kidnapped and subsequently found in the garbage dump serving a village near Paris. The culprits were unknown but the village had seen some Resistance sympathy, due in large part to the attitude of Father Devereaux.

The SS required a symbolic response. The priest must die and the Catholics led by Simon were given the job of killing him. Simon reported to the group that it was not possible, he was going to tell the SS the answer was no.
But Christos, the tall, wraithlike priest from Paris, argued that the preservation of good relations with the Nazis was more important than the life of one trouble-making priest. It was a war, he said, and in wars men died as a matter of course. For the greater good, Father Devereaux must die as the SS had ordered.

Christos argued the long view. A life here and there, put them in the scale with the Church, with the existence of the cadre. “You see, Mr. Driskill,” Brother Leo said softly as the rush of the sea calmed, said it casually as if it hardly mattered, “we were the reborn
assassini
, back at work for the Church.…” A few murders didn’t weigh much. And they weren’t even murders! They were battlefield casualties. A realist, Christos called himself, a pragmatist. Some of their little band found him brutal, ruthless. But he insisted and they obeyed and Simon stayed his hand, didn’t stop them, but played no part in what happened in the village the night Devereaux was killed. Christos bent some of them to his will, Brother Leo observed. “But not Simon, not little Sal, not me, and not the Dutchman. We took our lead from Simon. We stood with him, not with Christos.…”

But there were other occasions, nasty jobs with deadly consequences, and they all did as they were told. Simon, all of them. And no matter how the war ended, the Church had to be ready to ally itself with the winner. The Church must survive.

Did Rome know?

Did Pope Pius know?

Unthinkable, unaskable questions. But Simon had come from Rome to Paris.…

Brother Leo spoke deliberately, calmly, his hands rubbing his cheeks which were pink and chapped from the cold wind, or smoothing the wiry fringe of white hair against his skull only to have the wind pluck it, rearrange it at once.