The Assassini (9 page)

“No. What did she want?”

“Well, that’s what’s so crazy. You’d never guess. She asked what I knew about that priest who hanged himself out in your orchard, back in ’thirty-six, ’thirty-seven, whenever it was. It was the first year I was on the force here, lowest man on the totem pole. About the time you were born. Just one of those nutty things, a priest killing himself in the Driskill orchard. Poor bastard. She didn’t say why she was asking, just said she wondered if we had a file on it.” He shook his head, massaged the gray stubble on his chin.

“Well? Do you have a file?”

“Hell’s bells, Ben. I don’t know. I told her I’d be a
monkey’s uncle if I’d seen one, but I said I’d dig around in the old boxes down in the basement at the station house. I mean we
could
have a file, I suppose. But it’s been a long time, could’ve been thrown out years ago.” He pinched off another sneeze. “I got to thinking about it after we got off the phone and old Rupert Norwich came to mind. He was deputy chief back then, sorta broke me in, then he was chief for twenty-five years—hell, you remember old Rupe, Ben.”

“Gave me my first speeding ticket,” I said.

“Well, Rupe’s in his eighties now, lives down by the shore, down Seabright way. Still pretty spry. I figured I might give Rupe a call on this one … ’course, now there doesn’t seem to be a helluva lot of reason. We don’t know what Sister Val wanted the file for.” He sighed, remembering why there was no reason.

“Why don’t you look around for the file anyway?” I said. “You know Val, she’s always got her reasons.”

“Guess it couldn’t hurt.” He looked me over, staring. “You all right, Ben? Quite a shock—”

“I’m all right. Look, Sam, the way I look at it—ever since she spent that year in El Salvador she’s been on borrowed time—she led a charmed life in some ways. Her luck ran out tonight.”

“She liked it right out there on the edge, damn tootin’, you’re right about that.” He went to the window. “Oh, it’s a shame, Ben. A cryin’ shame.” He paused. “Oh boy, looks like your father’s home. Jesus, I hate stuff like this.” His eyes were bloodshot and his hair was plastered down with rain now. He took off his glasses and wiped them with the soiled bandanna. “You want me to break this to him, Ben?”

“No, Sam,” I said. “This is a job for Superman.”

My father.

You’d go broke mighty quick betting you could shock my father. Or scare him or fluster him or break him. He simply wasn’t prey to the same pressures that regularly cracked the rest of us. His life had been extravagantly colorful for one so obsessively secretive. He was seventy-four years old and knew full well he didn’t look much
past sixty. “Unless you get too damn close,” he’d say. Get close to my father and you deserved a prize. Which was more or less what I’d heard my poor dutiful mother say a time or two.

He had been a lawyer and a banker and a diplomat and the overseer of the family’s investments. In the fifties there had even been a presidential boomlet, which he’d squelched because he was a Catholic and everyone knew what had happened to Al Smith. Averell Harriman had held talks with him about the feasibility of announcing that Hugh Driskill would be his running mate if Harriman got the Democratic nomination but, in the end, my father said no, life behind the scenes suited him better. The truth was, my father didn’t have a great deal of faith in the electorate. He used to say he wouldn’t let them vote on what tie he was going to wear, so why did they have to be consulted on who’d occupy the White House.

As a bright young lawyer he had worked in Rome before the war, in the late thirties, spending most of his time on the matters of Church investments in American companies, banks, and real estate. Some of the investments weren’t awfully pretty and it was best if the Vatican’s involvement were kept hidden. He helped to see to that, and as a result he developed a lot of friendships on the inside, and maybe an enemy or two. “That whole period,” he once told me, “was for the experience. I was smart enough to know that the religion was one thing and the worldly form it took was something else, something that had to fight for survival. I wanted to see how the machinery of the Church worked. It was a much simpler world then, back in the days when Mussolini used the Vatican as a cover for his espionage operations. Talk about a learning experience! It was like getting a doctorate in Advanced Reality. Save your idealism for the religion. The Church is all practice, all mechanics.”

All his life my father had been tremendously rich and bright and discreet. And very, very brave, my old man. He spent a lot of time in Washington when everybody knew we were bound for the war. His knowledge of how the Italian Fascists worked their spies under Vatican auspices came in handy, got him known in certain rather
mysterious circles. He ran across a fellow Irishman, many years his senior, who turned out to be Wild Bill Donovan. When Donovan got around to setting up the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, one of the first bright-eyed lads he brought on board was Hugh Driskill. Donovan was a Catholic and in those exhilarating early days when the issue of the world’s fate was hanging in the balance he had surrounded himself with a bunch of good Catholic boys he could trust and understand. His inner circle even became rather famous, known by its nickname, the Knights Templar, precisely because they were all Catholics. My father was one of Wild Bill’s Knights Templar.

As the war was ending in Europe, right about the time Dad showed up in Princeton with Monsignor D’Ambrizzi in tow, Jack Warner, who was running Warner Brothers, got together with Milton Sperling, the producer, and Fritz Lang, the director, and Ring Lardner, Jr., the writer, and probably around somebody’s pool with the palms and the starlets swaying in unison they began kicking around the idea of an OSS movie. The idea was to commemorate the unsung, secret work of our intelligence services. They were going to create a composite hero, put him in a high-risk, behind-the-enemy-lines, all-purpose story, and run with it in that inimitable Warner Brothers way. It would bear a fictional disclaimer, but on the other hand they wanted a certain authenticity. The movie was the reason Bill Donovan came to the house in Princeton to talk to my father.

As it turned out, the composite figure was going to be a thinly disguised version of Hugh Driskill. One of his adventures in occupied France would form the basis of the plot, something about smuggling a guy out to freedom.

It got exciting for me when Gary Cooper showed up in Princeton one weekend. He was going to star and I was just about overcome with excitement. I can remember sitting on the porch steps with a big glass of lemonade, listening to Cooper, Donovan, and my father shoot the breeze about movies and the war and after a while Cooper took me out to the tennis courts and worked on
my serve with me. My God, Sergeant York and Lou Gehrig were helping me with my serve and Cooper told me that Bill Tilden had told him it was ninety percent in the toss. That night the actor took out a sketch pad and did me and little Val, then one of Father and Donovan and D’Ambrizzi. He told me he’d always figured he’d be a cartoonist until he fell into the acting thing, sort of by chance. Before he left he told me to call him Frank because that was his real name, what his oldest friends called him, like the ones he’d made at Grinnell College in Iowa, he said.

I never saw him again except in the movies. And there he was on the screen the next year, 1946, in
Cloak and Dagger
. The funny thing was, the character he played really was a lot like Father. Hollywood added a standard love interest in the form of a young actress who was making her debut, Lilli Palmer, and it was made clear to me at home that all the mushy stuff was made up, pure fiction.

My father had doubts the more he heard of the Hollywood touches that were being added to the script. I remember Donovan sitting on the porch one summer afternoon with Father and Curtis Lockhardt, his protégé, and Donovan was kidding my dad. He was sitting in an Adirondack chair and I was perched on the steps as usual, swilling Kool-Aid, and I heard him laugh and say, “Well, Hugh, let’s just hope they don’t make you look like too big an asshole!” Father grunted doubtfully and said: “They’ll never let Cooper look like an asshole.” Donovan said: “Tell him, young Lockhardt, tell him he’s got to have some faith about these things.” Lockhardt nodded. “That’s right, Hugh. Faith.” I was listening to them and watching my little sister prancing around in her new red bathing suit, running back and forth through the sprinklers, showing off, hoping everybody was watching her. Even as a child she had an eye on Lockhardt.

Behind me my father said, “My faith has never been in question, gentlemen. It is Mr. Warner and his minions I distrust. From the look of them, I doubt very much that they are papists.”

Donovan roared with laughter and the conversation
turned to the chances of Mr. Cooper having sexual relations with Miss Palmer, who was apparently quite a looker, at which time I was shooed toward the gardens to help Mother, who was crouching among the flowers, wearing a floppy sun hat and smoking a Chesterfield and drinking a martini, weeding.

It was true that my father had been through a great many crucibles of fire in his life and had been hardened and tempered accordingly but that night, with the news of Val’s murder coming down on him, I saw more than the strength and toughness born of experience. All that helped keep the surface under control, but it was his faith, which had never been in question, that kept him from falling apart. I had to hand it to the old bastard. He took it like a man, never flinched.

He came in the front door looking huge and curious and ready for damn near anything. He stood six four, weighed about two forty, had thick gray hair combed back like iron from a widow’s peak. He saw me and Sam Turner behind me and said, “Why, hi, Ben. This is a surprise. Sam … So what’s the problem here?”

I told him and he watched me, his clear blue eyes fixed on mine. When I was done he said, “Give me your hand, son. You look a little peaked. It’s time to hang together, Ben.” I felt his strength as if it were palpable, a charge flowing into me. “She lived the life she wanted and she knew we loved her. She served God and you can’t have a better life than that. She wasn’t sick and she never knew the infirmities of old age. She’s gone to a better place, Ben, never forget that. And one day we’ll all be together again and forever. God truly loved your sister.” His voice never faltered and he put his arm around my shoulders. I’m six two myself and he shook me in his grip. Everything he said was bullshit, sure, but it pulled me together and I knew I was going to be okay. I could handle it.

“Sam,” he said, “who killed my daughter?” He didn’t wait for an answer but just led the way into the Long Room, surveyed the group, said, “I need a bracer.” And he broke out a fresh bottle of Laphroaig.

* * *

Poor Sam Turner didn’t know who killed my sister. He talked quietly with my father for a while. Peaches had a big fire going in the huge blackened fireplace. Father Dunn had become a part of the background once Peaches had introduced him to my father.

Peaches said he’d be glad to stay the night, just to sit up and talk if I wanted him to, but I said I was okay. I don’t think he really wanted to go back to the parish house in New Pru to spend the night with his memories. But in the end Sam Turner left and then Peaches and Father Dunn finished up their drinks and left together, as they’d come. I stood at the window watching them depart. Father Dunn, the millionaire novelist, drove a new Jaguar XJS. Peaches had an old Dodge station wagon with a ding in one fender and mudflaps: it had come with the job.

When I turned back, my father was drizzling more scotch over fresh ice in our glasses. He was a little flushed from the heat of the fire. He handed me my glass. “It’s going to be a long night. This might do some good. What are you doing out here, anyway?”

I told him the story of my day, feeling the single malt coursing through my veins, taking the nerves with it. I sank down in one of the mustard-colored leather chairs and stretched my legs out toward the fire.

He looked down at me, swirling the amber liquid across the ice, shaking his head. “Damn. What did that girl have on her mind?”

“Something to do with her research. Something she’d discovered or stumbled across—maybe in Paris or … well, I just don’t know—”

“You can’t tell me that digging her way through a bunch of musty junk dating back to the war could make her so upset now!” He was exasperated. “World War Two! What’s any of that got to do with being murdered here in Princeton?” He was choosing anger over sorrow.

“Calm down,” I said.

“It’s ridiculous on the face of it. No, looks to me like we’re reading way too much into this. We’re forgetting we live in an age where everyday people die for no reason at all. She went to the chapel to pray and disturbed some
madman trying to get out of the storm. Meaningless death!”

I let him go on trying to convince himself that Val had died randomly, that there was no point to it. He hadn’t heard the fear in her voice. She was too afraid to have died a random death.

“Well,” he was saying, “she called me yesterday from California, told me she and Lockhardt were coming to New York today. Said she’d be home this afternoon and he’d be out tomorrow probably. I had a meeting in New York today, I wasn’t even sure I’d get home tonight. She didn’t say a word about anything bothering her.” He slipped out of his suitcoat and draped it over the back of one of the ancient wooden chairs. He loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves up. “You know what I’ve been worried about, Ben? I’ve had this nagging feeling she might be coming home to tell me she was going to leave the Order and marry Curtis—am I crazy? Is that shot on the table?”

“I don’t know. I’d have thought Curtis was your idea of the perfect son-in-law.”

“It’s nothing to do with Curtis.” My father made a face. “Use your head, Ben. It’s Val. She’s a nun and she was meant to stay one—”

“Like I was meant to be a priest?”

“God only knows what you were meant to be. But Val, she was meant for it, cut out for the Church—”

“Who says so? Not the Church, unless I’ve been reading all the wrong papers. Sounds to me like they’d take up a collection to buy her a one-way ticket. And anyway, isn’t it up to Val? What she does with her life—she’s got a vote, right?” I only barely realized it was all wrong. I was using the wrong tense. There wasn’t any more of Val’s life.