The Assassini (64 page)

I told her we had to get through her story as best we could before we got to mine, and she grudgingly went along. She was just as she’d been back at the kitchen table in Princeton in the middle of the night, alive and determined and full of the excitement of discovery. It
sounds sappy, but in the midst of the nightmare we were suddenly having a good time.

She had taken her findings to D’Ambrizzi, and his faithful shadow minister, Sandanato, had told them the whole story because the cardinal was the man in the Church Val had respected most and loved, the man she’d known the longest, since childhood. And—anger flashed in her green cat’s eyes—they had refused to take her seriously, had refused to admit the idea of the
assassini
was anything more than an old anti-Catholic bogeyman. She tried not just once, but twice, and D’Ambrizzi had lost patience with her. Furious, she had decided to come to Paris. She had thought of the apartment Val must have used there … but then, everything had changed a few nights before. Then D’Ambrizzi had had to take her seriously.

I said, “And what so momentous happened a few nights ago?”

But Dunn interrupted. Wait. He wanted to know more about what D’Ambrizzi had said about this mythical beast, the
assassini
.

She said he told her it was all a fabrication based on some glimmer of truth from hundreds of years before. Badell-Fowler was an old crackpot; no one had ever taken him seriously. He accepted none of it: the five murdered men, the destruction of Badell-Fowler’s researches—those were all things that just happened, nothing particularly ominous in them. No connections, no shadowy implications. No
assassini
. And he’d never heard of anyone named Erich Kessler.

Dunn sighed, pushed his bowl of stew away, and dabbed at the corners of his mouth with linen. “I’m very sorry to hear all that. Very sorry, indeed. You’d say he took you seriously, would you?”

She nodded. “He takes me seriously. And even if he didn’t, he certainly took Val seriously. And he knows I’ve been working on Val’s agenda—”

“Could he be trying,” I said, “to keep you from getting killed?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That could be part of
it. But I know him. I think he’d tell me the truth and
then
try to convince me to stay out of it. He wouldn’t just lie, he respects me and what I do, what I am—”

“Sister,” Father Dunn said, “I don’t want you to take offense, but you’re mistaken. D’Ambrizzi is a cardinal. It’s the Church of Rome we’re talking about here.” He smiled gently, his pink face crinkling in his most avuncular manner. “I speak as a priest and as a student of the Church. D’Ambrizzi may like you. I’m sure he does. What’s not to like? But he doe§ not respect you, he does not respect your work. You are a woman, that’s not good. You are a nun, that’s worse. And you are a journalist, full of questions and principles and standards by which you like to measure people … and a lot of people won’t measure up. That’s when the red lights start flashing, Sister. And being an American just makes it worse—because Americans just won’t listen to reason. He’d lie to you as a matter of normal precaution, he’d lie to you
reflexively
. Believe me, you are the enemy to guys like D’Ambrizzi. And I love the old bastard.…”

She didn’t flinch, looked him straight in the eye. “I hear you. I really do. But—
lie
to me?”

“Sister, he already has.”

“Prove it.”

“Did you ever come across the name Simon? Simon Verginius?”

“Yes. In Badell-Fowler.”

“D’Ambrizzi knows a great deal about the
assassini
. He was up close and personal with Simon Verginius in Paris, he was involved with the
assassini
.… Simon Verginius was the code name of a priest sent by Pope Pius—”

“The Pius Plot,” she murmured.

“—sent by Pius to Bishop Torricelli in Paris to form a cadre of
assassini
to work with the Nazis, to help keep the lid on the Church’s involvement with the Resistance, to help divide the art treasures of the Jews of France … and Simon, whoever the hell he was, balked at murdering people for the Gestapo and the SS, and—”

“How do you know this?” Her voice wasn’t quite so steady now.

“Because D’Ambrizzi wrote it all down, back in Princeton after the war. He wrote it and he hid it and now I’ve read it. It’s quite a story. We don’t know why he wrote it but there’s no question about its authenticity.… He wrote it and I read it, Sister. That’s how I know.”

She bit her lip halfway through the story of the night in question, then pushed on, not hurrying, not sliding past the details, but just telling us about the man, the priest in his cassock, the priest with the milky-white eye that turned into a liquid ruby when she drove the candle’s glass chimney into it, how he’d tried to kill her and how she’d fought him and how he’d gone over the terrace railing at the flat on the Via Veneto.… She bit her lip just that once, that was all. No tears, no floods of emotion, not even any real anger. Just the story.

When she stopped she caught my eye for the first time. “All I could think,” she said, “was, why hadn’t it been Val? Why hadn’t she been the one to survive? Why hadn’t she sensed the danger and fought off the man in the chapel?”

“Because it wasn’t the same man in the chapel,” I said. “If Horstmann had come to your room, you; too, would be dead. Believe me.” I swallowed against the dryness in my mouth. “You have no idea how lucky you were.”

“Horstmann?” she said.

“By sheerest chance Monsignor Sandanato was in the street below—”

“The lovesick keeping watch is more like it,” I said.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that. This is too serious for joking.”

“I’m not joking,” I said. “But the hell with it, it’s not important. Go on, go on.”

Dunn said, “Try not to spat, children.”

“Sandanato was down below when it happened. He
was exhausted by everything that’s been going on. He’s got the world on his mind—the killings, the pope’s illness, D’Ambrizzi and the pope meeting at all times of the night and day, all the jockeying for position among the
papabili
. He looks like death, sometimes I think he’s ready to crack. That night he was just walking aimlessly, he found himself near my building, he thought he’d see if I was up and willing to talk for a while. He’s taken to confiding in me some of his thoughts about the Church; we have these long discussions, the way Val and I used to talk late into the night—”

“Ah,” I said, “I remember that … the life of the mind.”

She ignored me. “Anyway, he heard this scream, he didn’t know what it was, but a woman nearby was screaming, pointing into the darkness above … it was the priest, the man who tried to kill me, falling through the night.… He hit the top of a parked car, bounced off into the street.…” She shuddered. “Where two or three cars ran over him. Not much left. No identification on him … He may not even have been a priest. Sandanato came up to my flat, he was frantic—”

I shook my head. “I wonder how he knew the priest had fallen from your particular terrace?”

“I don’t suppose he could have,” she said. “He … just wanted to make sure I was all right.…”

“There’s no hiding from them,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it was just Horstmann out there, Horstmann getting to them and killing them before I can reach them. But now we know that they aren’t watching just me, they’re watching both of us—”

“Don’t leave me out, old boy,” Dunn said. “I’m in it as well. Maybe they’re watching me, too.” He emptied out another bottle of wine, shaking the last drop into his glass. He gestured to the waiter for coffee and cognac.

“So,” I said, “are there more of them? And who gives them their orders? Who is telling them to kill? Who said Sister Elizabeth knows too much, she must die?
Who benefits from your death? What does it have to do with the successor to Callistus?”

She wanted to know what we knew about her mystery man, Erich Kessler, and Dunn told her the story, told her we had run him to ground in Avignon, were about to go there. The Nazi connection again, and Dunn said, “But one of the good Nazis, my dear.”

“Good Nazis, bad Nazis—” She shook her head, eyes closed. “I thought that was all over a thousand years ago.” Her shoulders slumped.

By the time we’d lapsed into silence the restaurant was nearly empty, the waiters were clustered in a watchful group, yawning. The firelight had dimmed to a faint glow and it was midnight.

It turned out that Sister Elizabeth was staying at the Bristol down the street. It was arguably the most expensive hotel in Paris. She smiled distantly as if she had a secret. When we had drawn to within half a block of the hotel so gloriously located on the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a black and shiny limousine, rain beaded on its highly waxed paintwork, slid up to the entrance. “Wait,” she said, motioning us to stop.

Two men got out of the back of the car while the driver held the door and the doorman hovered with a huge black umbrella. The first man wore a black raincoat and a black slouch hat. He turned back and offered his hand to the second man, who was squat and wore a cassock, heavy shoes. The light caught his face, the banana nose, the folds of his jowls. As he emerged he flicked a black cigarette away into the rain-washed gutter.

Cardinal D’Ambrizzi and Monsignor Sandanato.

I grabbed her arm, turned her toward me. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“I told them I was intent on coming to Paris to see if I could turn up any more on what Val was doing before she was killed. D’Ambrizzi, angry as he was, suggested I accompany them since he had to meet with Common Market economists and finance ministers here. After the attempt to kill me, he insisted I get out of Rome while
they tried to identify the dead man and … and … whatever. So I took him up on the offer. I’m staying at the Bristol; we all are.”

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth, be careful what you tell them. Dear old Saint Jack isn’t quite the fellow we thought he was—”

“All we know,” she said, “is that he may have lied to me about the
assassini
simply to protect me … to throw me off the track and make me give up. You’re the one who suggested that explanation, Ben. Then you”—she looked at Dunn—“you tell me about this testament he left behind in Princeton—that sounds to me like a man trying to expiate his guilt. Really, what was he supposed to do with what he knew? Run crying to the pope? According to him, the whole bloody mess started with the pope! So, big deal, he lied to me, he wanted me to drop it … and I would have if I could, I would if I had any sense, but I’ve gone so far with Val now—I can’t just give up. And some miserable—
bastard
—tried to have me killed.” She stopped short, cut off the torrent of words.

D’Ambrizzi and Sandanato had entered the hotel.

Dunn was flagging down a taxi, leaving us alone for a moment.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “The last time we spoke you’d decided that enough was enough, it was time to cut out the horseplay and get back to reality. And your reality was that nothing like I suggested could be happening inside the Church, coming from somewhere near the top.… It wasn’t a pleasant discussion, Sister. I wonder, do you still feel the same way? Is the Church still so pure, so far above all this?”

She looked around as I spoke, as if there might be someone in the night who could help her out. “I don’t know. What do you want from me? I can’t turn on the Church as easily as you can.… It’s my life. Surely you can see that.” She didn’t sound very hopeful. “It looks like you were right. But try to understand how hard that is for me to say. We’re still looking for men who have done these evil things, they may be inside the Church, but that doesn’t mean I have to condemn the whole
Church, does it? Ben”—her hand fluttered out to touch my sleeve and withdrew as quickly—“believe me, I don’t want to fight with you. We both lost Val … now I have to try to think my way through everything you told me tonight. But please don’t be angry with me, cut me a little slack.…”

The taxi pulled up to the curb. Dunn was climbing inside, left the door open for me. I turned away from her.

“Ben,” she said as if she’d only just discovered my name and liked to use it.

“Yes?”

“I can’t get Father Governeau out of my mind. Do you know any more about him? What happened to him, why he was in Val’s thoughts that last day? How could he be connected to any of this other stuff? What was Val after?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea whatsoever—”

“And your father—how is he?”

“He’s … I don’t know. He’s recovering. I know him, he’ll be all right. Too big a bastard to kill.” I got into the taxi. Father Dunn folded his umbrella.

Sister Elizabeth stood watching us as we pulled away.

“What was she saying?” he asked.

“She wanted to know about Father Governeau. What could I tell her? We may never know about him at the rate we’re going. Val was playing that card, and what does it really matter anymore?”

Father Dunn sat quietly, staring out the window into the breeze and mist. The Paris night.

“My throat is killing me,” he muttered at last.

My mother came to me again in my dreams, as inconclusively as ever. She was reaching out to me, speaking softly, and I strained to hear her. It seemed that if only I could listen just a little harder, concentrate a little more, I could make out the words. It wasn’t just a dream: I was sure of that much. I was remembering something that had actually happened. Why couldn’t I force the issue, make myself remember? Why?

I woke sweating, shivering, my back stiff and painful. I’d fixed a new bandage that morning and it was wet with sweat. The room was cold, the window open. I got up and worked on a fresh bandage. The scarring was doing well, itched, didn’t seem to leak anymore.

The next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and rain was slashing at the windows.

I answered the phone, wondering what the hell Dunn had on his mind that couldn’t wait.

But it was Sister Elizabeth and she was downstairs in the lobby. She informed me that she was going to Avignon with us in search of Erich Kessler, aka Ambrose Calder. She said she had a prior claim. She’d been looking for him longer than I had. She wasn’t taking no for an answer.