The Assassini (74 page)

We stopped for a glass of chilly Orvieto at a café in the Piazza di San Maria. The fountain in the square tinkled and splashed and the kids were playing and the wine was bringing me back to life.

“You’re so fond of telling stories,” I said, “tell me the one about your gun.”

“Oh, it’s a kind of talisman, I suppose. Souvenir of my army days. I studied in Rome after the war, left it with a friend of mine here. I dropped by to see him yesterday, talked over old times. Thought I’d take a look at the old blunderbuss. And I discovered he’d taken good care of my souvenir.” He shrugged. “Don’t make too much of it, Ben.” He signaled to the waiter for more wine. A breeze came up, ruffled its way around the square. The laughter of the girls was like a flurry of coins tossed, ringing, into the fountain. “Now you were going
to tell me why you came to me looking like you’d just been hit by a truck. What’s the problem?”

There was something about talking to Artie Dunn. Maybe it was that nothing ever seemed to surprise him. And he’d caught me when I needed to talk. So I told him about Elizabeth and me, the whole story, starting way back on that snowy night in Gramercy Park when my sister was still alive, what it was like when she turned up in Princeton, how she pulled me through Val’s death. I told him how fresh and alive and bright she’d been and how it was she who’d isolated the
assassini
, given an identity to our enemy when it was only a fleeting shadow of an old man with silvery hair and a knife. She’d picked out the pattern in the ancient tapestry. She’d found the path to Badell-Fowler, she’d found the path into our own era. When it had all looked like a dead end, she had kept pushing ahead … and she’d been right. I told him all that. I told him that I’d fallen in love with her and I told him about what had happened in the Borghese Gardens.

He listened patiently, sipping wine as the breeze freshened, smelling a bit like rain. The water from the fountain splashed the kids.

“Cheer up,” he said. “She’s a woman. Lord Byron said the wisest of all things about women. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of women which, when taken at the flood, leads … God only knows where.’ That says it all, I’m afraid.”

“But under all the up-to-date trappings,” I said, “she’s a nun and I’m a fool.”

“Nonsense. Horse feathers. Our Sister Elizabeth is a modern woman. She happens to have chosen a career that makes certain unusual demands. Get anything else out of your mind. This isn’t the Church of your childhood. Not even the Church of your Jesuit days. It’s all changed. Almost beyond recognition.”

“A vocation’s a vocation,” I said doggedly.

“My dear fellow,” Dunn said blandly, “we’re talking about an intellectually sophisticated woman here—not the child of illiterate peasants, not an unlettered bumpkin who saw Christ sitting in a tree and decided to consecrate her life as his bride. She has the full complement of
doubts, not about her religion perhaps but about the conduct of her life, her own decision-making ability.” He regarded me with a tolerant, reflective smile. “She’s an exceedingly modern woman, which means she’s confused, ambivalent, and a bit of a pain in the neck. That would be true were she a business executive, a professor, or a housewife—she’s simply a nun, which is a little different. Not much, not anymore. She’s not in the throes of a divine calling. Good Lord, the Order doesn’t attract that sort. They want the cloister, those women. The Order specializes in activists and elitists and hotshots, that’s just the way it is. Driskill, I really shouldn’t have to be telling you this—you’re a smart fella.”

He lit a cigar which took a while and I kept trying to put what he’d said together with the Elizabeth I knew.

“The women the Order attracts, well, the Order knows it can’t keep them all. The game is being played with new rules. And Sister Elizabeth is experiencing all the trials of her time. She’s wondering about love, men, children, her personal commitment, her vows, her fear of her own weakness and vulnerability, the idea of failing in her own eyes as well as in the eyes of the Church. My goodness, Ben, you’ve been through a lot of this yourself. Think back. And face it, laddie, it’s not easy being a woman these days. You’re a halfway bright fella, you should be able to figure that out.” He smoked, watching me like a professor waiting for a pupil’s response.

“What, may I ask, makes you such an expert on women? It’s like a nun telling people all about birth control and marriage and abortion. Just maybe you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You want a story? I’ll tell you a story about priests and women. We’ve got to clear some of the cobwebs out of that poor old head of yours, my friend.” He blew a perfect smoke ring and slid the cigar through the hole. “You’d better have another sip of wine.”

He told me a remarkably poignant story about his postwar love affair in Paris with a married Frenchwoman. He had loved her and she him and she had had a daughter who meant a great deal to him. It had all ended very
badly. Both women had died tragically and Father Dunn had a very tough time of it. It was all a long time ago and he told the story quietly as the fountain splashed and the wine flowed and his cigar burned down.

“Priests are far from perfect,” he said. “Just men. We fight with all the same temptations. The acquisition of power, the loneliness, the bottle, women, lust in all its many guises. Salvatore di Mona solved his family’s money problems when he became a cardinal, let alone Pope Callistus. It’s perhaps not so amazing how many people want to come to the aid of a cardinal, any cardinal. The list of alcoholics, adulterers, traitors, no different from most groups of men under lots of pressure. We could both produce a lot of names …” He shrugged. “D’Ambrizzi is just one.”

“D’Ambrizzi?”

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised at what Kessler told us. It’s such a fit. He’s the most worldly of men. Truly a
prince
of the Church. Power beyond your dreams, I assure you. Like Lockhardt, or your father or Summerhays, only operating from the other side of the fence. Birds of a feather. What D’Ambrizzi really loves is the intrigue, all the moves on the board.”

“D’Ambrizzi,” I said mostly to myself. Was it really possible he had ordered the murder of my sister, sent his old silver-haired weapon to kill her … to kill Lockhardt and Heffernan … to kill Brother Padraic and poor Leo.… And my gun was a toy.

We left the café. A fine mist had filled the air and the smell of fruit and flowers and restaurants was overwhelming, like an exotic bazaar.

He showed me the Church of Santa Maria, said to be the oldest in Rome because in the old imperial days Trastevere was a center of Jewish life. A meeting place for Christ’s followers had been required and another Pope Callistus, the first of that name, had founded it. I followed him around a corner to the tiny Piazza di San Callistus—connected to Santa Maria by the Palazzo di San Callistus—which he told me is owned by the Vatican.

“Did the Holy Father take his name from this Callistus?”

“An infelicitous choice if he did.” Father Dunn led me across the square to stand before the palace. “Where the palace now stands there stood the house where the unfortunate Callistus was finally imprisoned and tortured. He was eventually thrown out of the window into a well in the courtyard. That was all some time ago. The year was 222, actually.”

We were standing on a bridge looking down into the Tiber. The mist had just barely turned to rain and it dimpled the river. He was talking to me about D’Ambrizzi and Simon.

“He really was in his element during the war,” he said. “The man was designed for use in a crisis. Built by a firm that meant business, built to last. But I don’t quite make him fit Simon now. I suppose that’s the point though—not to be obvious, I mean. I don’t know, Ben.” He was staring into the black Tiber running in the rain. I heard thunder far away, over Tuscany. We began to walk. There was nothing left to do but wait for D’Ambrizzi and Callistus to finish their conference. Nothing to do but wait and wonder what to do when the waiting was over.

“Come,” he said. “There’s something else I want you to see.”

Ten minutes later we stood across the street from a shabby building, part warehouse, part grocery store with an attached restaurant, it was dark and the wind from the river was cold. He said, “The Church owns this building. The whole block, actually. Not a bad
ristorante
. The owner used to be a priest in Naples. Come on.”

I followed him down an alleyway, back around to the rear of the building. A single dreary automobile, well past its prime and showing it, stood by a metal door that was open an inch or two. “Come on,” he said again. “Don’t be shy.” He pushed the door open and stepped into a narrow, dimly lit hallway that smelled of spaghetti sauce and clams and oregano and garlic. I heard a sound from a room at the end of the hall. Someone was pitching darts into a cork board. There’s no sound quite like it. We stopped just short of the doorway. “Go on in,” Father Dunn said.

There was a man pulling darts from the board. He turned, his hand bristling with the gleaming points.

I hadn’t seen him in such a long time. Not since my sister and I had waited impatiently for him to come outside and play with us. He was wearing a dark gray suit with a pinstripe, a white shirt with a dark tie and a starched collar that sank into his jowls.

Seeing me, his face lit with a broad smile.

He came toward me, stood looking up into my face.

Then he grabbed my shoulders and embraced me.

“It has been too long, Benjamin. You were only little children.” He shook me like a giant doll. He was still very strong. “Benjamin.”

He leaned back to look at me again and I stared into the eyes of Giacomo Cardinal D’Ambrizzi.

Why had Artie Dunn delivered me into the hands of my enemy?

S
ister Elizabeth sat at her desk in the empty office, eyes closed, hands clasped before her on a stack of layout sheets. She had come back to the office from the Borghese Gardens and Sister Bernadine had quickly and efficiently briefed her on the production status of the material ready for press. At the conclusion of the recitation, Sister Bernadine leaned against a file cabinet, pushed one of the drawers shut with her hip, and said, “Look, it’s none of my business, but are you okay? You look a little chewed up around the edges—have you been crying?”

Sister Elizabeth had tilted her head back and laughed softly. “Ahhh,” she said, thinking. “No more than usual, I guess.” Seeing the concern on her assistant’s face, she added, “No, no, I’m fine. But you’re right, I am tired.”

“And there’s the aftershock of that nut getting into your apartment.”

“Probably.”

“You need some real down time, Liz.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”

Now she sat alone at her desk in the quiet, darkened office with the portable Sony radio playing pop music, the volume turned low. She reluctantly opened her eyes to the green glow of the computer screen. She’d called up the D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato comparison she’d entered a few weeks before, stared at the stories of their lives reduced to a few lines of type, the paths they were taking toward the papacy. She wondered about the war years. There now seemed to be no doubt D’Ambrizzi had
been up to something in Paris—how she’d have liked to get her hands on those manuscript pages he’d left behind in New Prudence!—but she was even more curious, at just that moment, about what Indelicato had been doing. Working in Rome. Close to the pope …

The image of the two men as two armies, gathering their supporters, grinding inexorably toward the one goal, stuck in her mind. A lifelong race toward the Throne of Peter. D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato, the peasant and the nobleman, linked together through the years, step by step, enemies and brothers of the cloth.

She fumbled in the dark in search of a half-empty, dried-to-dust package of cigarettes that was six months old. For some unfathomable reason she smoked two cigarettes a month, on average, and now was the time. Her hands were shaking and when she found the package it was empty. It lay among the paper clips and rubber bands and ballpoint pens by loose dried tobacco. Sister Bernadine had beaten her to it.
God, may I have your attention, please? I’ve been through a lot, am I right? So I want a smoke, just one cigarette? Too much to ask for? What they say about You? It could be true
. She pushed the drawer shut and saw her hands, couldn’t take her eyes from the hands.…

Dry, bony, parchment hands, cold hands, blue-veined—the hands of an old nun …

She was sobbing.

She was remembering Val’s hands, how they had always been strong and tanned and supple. Now Val would never be old, never be a dry and barren old woman, mourning the life and the children and the love she would never know.…

She was staring at her hands through the tears.

The telephone was ringing.

She wiped her eyes with a tissue, tried to shake away the tears and the depths of her mood.

She answered and heard a voice she knew and had half expected at the other end. Monsignor Sandanato.

“Listen to me, Sister. Stay where you are. Don’t leave your office. Not with anyone. Wait for me. Do you
understand what I am saying to you? You are in danger. I must speak with you. I’m leaving my office now.”

Sandanato arrived in less than fifteen minutes. He was breathless, his face damp and glistening with a patina of perspiration. His dark olive complexion was blanched. He sat on the edge of the desk, his burning, fevered eyes searching her face. “Where have you been? You were in Paris and then you were gone—this is crazy. I’ve been very, very concerned.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I ran into Ben Driskill and Father Dunn in Paris—”

“Oh, my God,” he sighed under his breath. “Go on.”

“I went to Avignon with them.”

“But why?”

“Why not?” There was no hiding the exasperation. “You have no business giving me the third degree! Remember, they’re two of the good guys. You and the cardinal may not take the
assassini
theory as seriously as I do, but they had found a man who was able to throw more light on all of that—”