The Assassini (84 page)

The house was empty when I pulled the Mercedes into the drive and went inside. It was clear that nobody had driven up from the road in several days. The house proved the point: chilled, echoing, empty. I wandered around aimlessly, wondering what exactly was going on. No notes. Plenty of evidence that my father had been there, home from the hospital. I thought about the chances of a relapse. I called Margaret Korder at the office in Manhattan and told her I was home and couldn’t seem to find my father.

“Why, Ben, you should have given us warning. He’s up at the lodge in the Adirondacks. And, if I may speak freely,” she said edgily, “he’s being a damned problem. Just impossible, Ben. He had a nurse up there these last few days, but she called me in tears yesterday—he’d
thrown her out. At his most imperious and impossible, from the sound of it. Now I’m not sure what we should do.”

“How did he get there, Margaret? Is he well enough to be alone?”

“Are you kidding? He thinks he’s well enough, but he’s no kid, Ben. Of course he’s not well enough. But try to tell him where he can go and what he can do. He was just on an absolute tear. He had that priest friend of yours, Father Peaches, with him—he drove him up there and stayed several days but he
does
have a job.…” She stopped for breath.

“I think I’ll drop in on the old boy, Margaret. I don’t like his being up there alone. I’ll go up tomorrow.”

“Well, be careful. There’s a big snowstorm headed our way. Chicago got two feet—Ben, when did you get back? What all happened over there?”

“Oh, Margaret, what can I tell you? But I got to New York yesterday.”

“Well, welcome home. Everything cleared up to your satisfaction?”

“Tell me the last time anything was cleared up to anyone’s satisfaction. It just never quite happens, does it?”

“Quite a shock, Cardinal Indelicato’s death. Did you meet him?”

“Yes,” I said. “And it certainly was shocking.” I told her I had to get a move on and she warned me again about the approaching storm. I hung up the telephone, sat wondering how long it would take me to get used to knowing so much I could never reveal, never discuss. What a time Val and I would have had with it!

I ran into the same problem over lunch.

I called Peaches and we met at the Nassau Inn, in the downstairs taproom, where we’d happened into each other on that other cold and snowy occasion when Val already lay dead in our chapel. He drove over from New Pru full of questions about what I’d gotten into “over there.”

I told him it was incredibly complicated, but when
you got right down to it, it really was a Church matter and I had been excluded from any big conclusions. So on and so forth. He gave me a funny look and winked as if to say he knew how they did things in Rome.

“But tell me this,” he said. “Did you find out who killed Val?” There was that deep hurt, the open wound he would never outlive. He figured I owed him this one. “Was it the same guy who attacked you and that monsignor from Rome?”

“The same man. That seems to be the prevailing view, anyway. A mad old priest. Who knows what happened to him? I don’t expect we’ll ever find him or see him again. Look, Peaches, I’m pretty worn out by all this. We’ll have to talk about it later. Right now—well, it’s a maze, it all gives me a headache.”

“I hear you, pal.” He flashed the old grin from boyhood, but his face was tired and lined. It was three o’clock and we were chewing on cheeseburgers and fries. We were the lone customers. We could hear the wind howling outside. “So how are you disposed toward the dear old Church of Rome these days?”

I felt the laughter welling up at the odd question. “It’s funny, Peaches, it doesn’t make any sense, but the Church has never seemed more human to me than it does now. It’s
so
imperfect—you almost have to love the poor old thing.”

I asked him what my father was up to and that led him into the story of how he’d found the D’Ambrizzi manuscript, how he’d taken it to Artie Dunn.

“I ran into Dunn over there,” I said. “He told me about the papers.”

“You did? You saw him? God, what a piece of work he is! When I found the stuff, Artie and I spent quite a night. You should see this condo he’s got. On a clear day you’ve gotta be able to see Princeton … he says helicopters fly
below
his windows!”

“He took me through the basic content,” I said. “It was all pretty mysterious. I know it was D’Ambrizzi’s insurance policy but it was pretty old news.” I saw no point in giving Peaches any reason to get more involved. He was better off entirely out of it.

His eyes were gleaming, cheeks pink. “All those code names, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. The odd thing—all the secrecy and hiding places aside—the odd thing was your dad knew all about it! He said it was none of his business and had never given it another thought … but he knew D’Ambrizzi had given it to the old blabbermouth priest. And now, ten days ago, he’s suddenly got it on his mind. Weird, the way the mind works, Ben, weird.”

Peaches told me the story my father had told him of the drunken, jealous, loquacious priest who’d held the D’Ambrizzi papers and taunted him with them. It rang all too true. I remembered the old nitwit with his gin-laden breath.

“So,” Peaches said, mopping up the last puddle of ketchup with the last fry, “he just seemed to know I knew all about it. It was eerie as hell. He made me get it all out again—”

“Did you tell him about showing it to Dunn?”

He shrugged. “Well … gosh, I don’t think I did. I didn’t want to explain it all, I guess. Anyway, he had me drive him up to the lodge. He has that way about him—I felt like an employee. He can be a very domineering guy.”

“You noticed that, did you?” I said.

“Well, I spent the better part of a week up there, neglecting hell out of my parishioners. I mean, it was great, I tramped around on the mountain … it’s a great place, that huge bear standing in the corner—”

“What else?”

“I made a snowman! I stocked the larder from the supermarket in Everett. I puttered around, I read two novels, I cooked, fetched, and carried for your father.”

“And what did my father do?”

“Read the D’Ambrizzi stuff a few times, didn’t really have all that much to say about it. He brought a lot of records and some sketch pads with him. He played records all the time. We didn’t talk that much … he kept to himself but friendly. It was fine. We talked about you and what you might be doing. He’s recovering pretty well, Ben. But he was worried about you, thought you were asking for trouble digging around inside the Church.
He said you just didn’t understand the Church. I just nodded on cue and let him talk. He took Val’s death very hard, Ben. I heard him crying one night.… I went into his room, asked him if he was okay and he said he was dreaming about Val and then woke up and remembered she was dead. I felt for him, Ben, I’ll tell you that.”

“I’m going up tomorrow,” I said. “He got a nurse after you left but kicked her out. I don’t want him alone up there.”

“You want me to come along, ride shotgun? There’s supposed to be a hell of a snowstorm headed this way.”

“It’s okay, Peach. I’ll be fine. You tend your flock.”

“My flock,” he said. “Poor bastards.”

Alone in the house that night, I couldn’t get to sleep. Indelicato’s death made the national news on television, primarily in the context of speculation regarding the health of the pope, who hadn’t been seen publicly in two months. There was nothing else on the late news about the Church, other than Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s decision to stay in Rome for Indelicato’s funeral. I sat in the Long Room sipping my third Laphroaig double on ice, listening to the wind outside and the sound of snow blowing off the crust, rattling on the windows.

I was trying not to dwell on what had happened since Val’s murder, but it was a pointless attempt. I could think of nothing else: it was as if I’d come to life that day. Finally I finished the drink, slipped into my old sheepskin coat and a pair of Wellies, and went outside.

The cold air filled my lungs and cleared my head. I walked out toward the orchard where, maybe on a night much like this one, someone had strung up the already-dead body of Father Governeau. So long ago. It was the same walk Sandanato and I had taken with the ice skates. The ice lay beyond the orchard, shining in the moonlight. A couple of skaters moved silently like models for Currier and Ives. The blades caught and reflected silver across the ice.

I was drawn inevitably, irresistibly, to the chapel. It wasn’t sentiment: I didn’t know what it was until I was
inside. The door was unlocked, the steps slippery with ice. The night was clouded with freezing mist.

I turned on the lights. What was I doing there? What did I expect? There was no ghost in the chapel, no voice from the darkness.

I sat down on the bench where Val had been sitting when Horstmann had pressed the gun’s smooth snout to the back of her head.

And then I did something I hadn’t done in twenty-five years.

In the house of God, I knelt, bowed my head, and prayed for my little sister’s eternal soul. And in the dim light, my eyes shut, I whispered aloud, still a Catholic, confessed my sins and begged forgiveness from whoever might be dispensing it these days.

Later that night I lay in my old bed beneath the picture of DiMaggio, listening to the wind at the glass and feeling the draft, hearing the usual rustlings in the eaves. I was drifting in and out of sleep and seemed at one moment to be watching Val as she peeled back the side of her drum and left the photograph inside for me to find, at another I was in the hall at the top of the stair watching my father fall.…

I lay there wishing my mother would stay out of my face for just one night. It was getting to the point where I was half afraid to go to sleep. She’d be there waiting for me, full of her accusations.

And as I lay there, turning, banging my head against the pillow trying to get comfortable, I remembered Val coming into my room one night, that same room. She wasn’t very old, she was wearing a red flannel nightie and she was crying, rubbing her eyes. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and our mother had been standing in the hall, had ambushed her, you might say, and had started in on her. I remembered the occasion now, who knows why, but there it was, the memory of Val, tear-streaked, sleepy, scared, while I asked her what was the matter.

She said Mother had been mean to her.

I asked her what she meant.

“She said I did it, Ben,” Val had sobbed, “and I
asked her what and she just kept saying it, kept saying I did it—”

“Tell me exactly what she said.”

“ ‘You did it, you did it, it was you … out in the orchard … you took him, you did it—’ ” Then she started to cry again and said, “But, Ben, I didn’t do it, I promise I didn’t,” and I put my arm around her and told her she could climb into bed with me for the rest of the night.

I told her that Mother had been having a bad dream, that it wasn’t her fault and she shouldn’t be afraid of her and I don’t recall our ever talking about it again. Maybe because it had to do with the bad thing that happened in the orchard, the thing we weren’t to speak of, the thing found hanging out there.…

Now, decades later, Mother’s nightmare had survived.

Val hadn’t, but the nightmare had, and now my mother’s nightmare had become mine.

T
he drive to the lodge was long and slow because of the dense mixture of fog and snow, all blown to hell by a strong, gusty wind that kept shaking the car. The snow was collecting thickly by the time I got to Everett and saw the detour sign. The bridge had failed a state check, and traffic was being routed off through another small town, Menander. I followed the markers and negotiated the long hill that led under a stone bridge and curved up and to the left. The ascent was abrupt. For a while I was afraid I might not get the traction in the ice and snow to make the climb. The forested hillsides made a maze of dark, leafless tree limbs which seemed hopelessly entangled with one another. Some kids from Menander were sledding among the trees. The tops of the hills were lost in fog. The snow on the road was getting deeper, far deeper in the gullies, and there was ice underneath. If I’d set out an hour later I might have had some real trouble.

Menander was outfitted for Christmas. Decorations hung on lampposts, and from a banner across the street, the church had a creche lit up by floodlights and snow had built up heavily on the roof of the manger. Joseph, Mary, and the Wise Men looked desperately out of their element. I pulled in at the drugstore which had once belonged to a brother-and-sister team called Potterveld. It was a Rexall now. I called the house and heard my father’s voice. He sounded much stronger than he had on the transatlantic calls. I told him I was about to drop in on him.

“Well, it’s about time,” he said. “I should have known you’d get home for Christmas. Wouldn’t want to miss your presents. I know you, Ben.” He laughed to show he was kidding me rather than continuing the sniping war that had gone on so long. “You’d better step on it. It’s getting dark up here and snowing hard.”

“I’ll be there in under an hour,” I said.

For some reason, as I guided the car ever more carefully along the increasingly treacherous, twisty stretch of road—for some reason, maybe because my father’s voice made me feel kindly toward him, I got to thinking about that day several centuries earlier when the sun was shining and Gary Cooper was sitting on the porch talking to my dad about the movie. The OSS adventures that came to life on the screen for me, seeing my dad’s great, heroic escapades, running across the airstrip with Nazi bullets chewing up the dust at his heels.… The sunny day, little Val prancing around showing off, Cooper sketching for us … magic. Those days, viewed again through my mood, wore a perfect roseate glow. But Cooper was long dead, Val was dead, my father’s heroic OSS days were just a memory … a story … a movie … it had all, as everything did, turned to dust.

The lodge sat on the rounded-off top of a mountain, the naked trees and prickly evergreens and firs and pines surrounding it. The light from the hidden sun was fading as I drove up the driveway from the road. The snow was deep on all sides, like frosting on a cake. Pristine, perfect flakes drifting through the branches, piling ever deeper. The lodge was a massive affair. It looked as if it were made of mammoth Lincoln Logs. Snow covered the pitched roof, nearly a foot deep. Smoke curled away from one of the fireplace chimneys rising higher yet. One slanted roof began at ground level, leaving one story of the main living room below ground at one end. That roof was mainly a skylight, faced to the north, for the benefit of my father’s painting. There were lights in the windows, and when I pulled the car up to the flagstone walk the front door swung open and there was my father standing with the light behind him, waving to me. He was a little
gaunt, but his broad shoulders were still square beneath the heavy dark blue sweater. I couldn’t recall ever having been welcomed anywhere by my father before.