The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  He got out and stood on the sidewalk, watched her wave as the car pulled away, and then the blackened window rose and she was gone. Next stop Princeton.

  He’d lived so much of his life in the corridors of power that for a very long time he’d mistaken satisfaction and discreet camaraderie for happiness. Then Sister Valentine had revealed the mysteries of utter happiness, solved the great puzzle. Now he was sure they’d be together for good.

  It was in this frame of mind that he stood gazing down at the skaters gliding rhythmically around the rink. It was true that he was worried about Val. She’d been in Rome, Paris, and had gone as far afield as Alexandria, Egypt, all in the name of research. He had tried to put the pieces together. He knew she’d also been working in the Secret Archives. And then he’d gotten that damned call from Rome.

  From his vantage point at the railing above the ice he smiled at the sight of an elderly priest, full of grace and dignity, skating among the kids. He watched with admiration as the priest with his black raincoat blowing out behind him swept down and plucked a pretty girl from the ice where she’d fallen. He doubted if he had ever seen a more solemn and serene face.

  He glanced at the Patek Philippe, a golden wafer on his wrist. Monsignor Heffernan, only forty-five now, destined for the red hat within the next five or ten years, was waiting. As Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s right-hand man, he had already accumulated considerable power in one of the wealthiest sees of the Church. He was not known for his dignity, certainly not for his solemnity. He was known for getting things done. And for such a hail-fellow-well-met, he was a punctual bastard who expected punctuality in others.

  It was time to go.

  The Church’s involvement with the square block directly to the east of St. Patrick’s Cathedral dated back to the late nineteenth century when it had built a father pedestrian church, St. John’s, on the site which later—after the Church sold the land—saw the construction of the famous Villard houses, which reminded some observers of the austere Florentine dwellings of Medici princes. Too expensive to remain in private hands following World War II, the glorious houses were abandoned and sat waiting, elegant and empty memories of another age.

  In 1948 Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, who was accustomed to looking at them across the traffic of Madison Avenue from his residence at St. Patrick’s, decided to reacquire them. In no time the Church with its countless official selves spread through the magnificent buildings. The Gold Room at 451 Madison became the conference chamber for the Diocesan Consultors. A reception room overlooking Madison became a conference room for the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese. The dining room was transformed into the tribunal’s courtroom and the library became the Chancery office. Pushing down corridors and up marble staircases, the protean entity of the Church spread …

  Times change, however. By the 1970s, the real estate boom of the 1960s had collapsed and the Church found itself unable to unload the Villard houses, which once again sat empty, representing an annual tax burden of $700,000. The economic problem was acute.

  They were rescued by Harry Helmsley, who offered to lease the Villard houses and the adjacent Church-owned properties to construct a hotel. The Archdiocese assisted Helmsley with the red-tape problems, and, in the end, the houses were saved intact, the Church still owned the site, and Helmsley had a long-term lease. He built his hotel around the houses.

  Like a Renaissance prince, he called it The Helmsley Palace.

  It was this palace that Curtis Lockhardt entered beneath the nineteenth-century bronze and glass marquee on Fiftieth. He went directly through the hushed reception area with its mirrors and the rich French walnut paneling, turned abruptly right, and went into the small enclosure that contained a concierge’s desk and the out-of-the-way elevators servicing the topmost floors, the penthouses.

  It was typical of Andy Heffernan to have reserved the Church’s triplex penthouse for the meeting. In the highly political world he inhabited, Curtis Lockhardt was one of Monsignor Heffernan’s trump cards, and he wanted to maintain as much secrecy as he could. Lockhardt was talking about a sum of money so large that not a shred of rumor could be permitted to leak out. The choice of the next pope was on the table, nestling up close to the money. Had they met across the street at St. Patrick’s, the rumors would have beaten them to the street. Power, luxury, worldliness, and secrecy: that was Monsignor Heffernan.

  Lockhardt knew that the Dunhill Monte Cruz 200 cigars and the Rémy Martin cognac Andy favored would be ready. Monsignor Heffernan often remarked off the record that you took all the perks you could get and the more you took the more there were to take.

  Lockhardt got out of the elevator at the fifty-fourth floor and padded through the deep carpeting to the end of a long hallway running parallel to Madison Avenue. There was nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary behind any of the doors. He pressed the buzzer and waited. A voice from a small speaker said: “Come in, Curtis me lad.” It sounded as if the good monsignor might have enjoyed a two-martini lunch.

  Although he was accustomed to luxury, Lockhardt was always impressed by the sight of what lay before him. He stood at the top of a curving staircase with an elaborately carved banister. The huge room below was two stories in height, completely glassed in, with Manhattan spreading out beyond like an isometric map.

  The Empire State Building, the suave art deco spire of the Chrysler Building, the pristine modernity of the World Trade Center towers, beyond them in the bay the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, the Jersey shoreline …

  Radio City, Rockefeller Center, the luminous patch of the ice rink … and almost straight down was St. Patrick’s, its twin steeples rising majestically above Fifth Avenue.

  He felt as if he were standing on a cloud. He held the carved railing as he slowly descended the thickly carpeted stairs. He couldn’t look away from the view. It made him feel like a child confronted by toys beyond his wildest dreams.

  “I’m having a quick pee.” Heffernan’s voice floated out from behind some hidden door. “Be with you in two shakes.”

  Lockhardt turned back to the view, almost mesmerized by the clarity and detail of the city. He was standing with his nose nearly pressed to the glass, staring down at a view of St. Patrick’s that its builders must never quite have imagined. God’s view. It was like looking at a blueprint that had come to life, developed a third dimension rising up at you.

  “God bless our little home.” Monsignor Heffernan, a large man with thinning red hair and a nose that seemed to have been pilfered from a clown, lumbered toward him. He was red with sunburn that was peeling. He was wearing a black shirt and a priest’s dog collar, black trousers, and black tasseled loafers. His watery blue eyes blinked behind a scrim of cigar smoke. He had battled his way up from Irish poverty, South Boston variety. He was already a very important man in his world and by cementing his alliance with the great American kingmaker he was becoming even more so. Conveniently, they were able to use each other, which the monsignor thought was as good a definition of friendship as you were likely to come across. Andy Heffernan was a happy man.

  “You’re looking very fit and virtuous for a rich man, Curtis. Have a cigar.” He pointed to a wooden box on the corner of a cluttered trestle table topped by a slab of glass two inches thick.

  “You’ve twisted my arm,” Lockhardt said. He lit the Monte Cruz with a Dunhill cigar match and savored the flavor. “Where did you pick up the look of a lobster?”

  “Florida. Just back yesterday from a week of charity golf. Great week.” He went to the chair behind the table and sat down. There were several folders, a legal pad, a telephone, the cigars, a heavy ashtray. Lockhardt sat down facing him across the field of glass. “Great guys, Jackie Gleason, Johnny and Tom and Jack, all of them. Lots of great guys down in Florida. Do anything for the Church. Hell of a benefit for the Our Lady of Peace children’s wing. Lotsa golf. You’re not going to believe this, but I missed a hole in one by no less than three
inches! Damned if I didn’t! Shoulda been on the TV—six iron pin high, three crummy inches to the left. I got one in Scotland once, at Muirfield … ah, happy days, a hell of a long way from South Boston. What more can a man want, Curtis? Enjoy, enjoy, we’re a long time dead—”

  “Whatever happened to the life eternal, the choir invisible, big sets of wings—”

  “You and your nuns’ theology! Gimme a break.” Heffernan laughed in his characteristic all-out way that was supposed to make you think he was as wide open as a whorehouse on Saturday night.

  “You want a break and ten million bucks?” Lockhardt smiled back at him and blew a smoke ring. The figure was so large that on the few occasions it had come up specifically in their conversations it had been very rewarding to watch Heffernan’s reaction.

  “Ten million bucks …” Heffernan’s laughter died quickly. That much money was very serious business, even to the right-hand man of Archbishop Cardinal Klammer. Lockhardt always wondered what was going on in the man’s mind when he was talking about holes in one with Johnny Miller and laughing that way. He never seemed to be on his guard. Yet he never seemed to make a mistake.

  “The ten million,” Heffernan said softly, liking the sound of it. He touched his fingertips before him, tapped all ten against one another. “You believe ten million will swing this whole deal?”

  “More or less. I can always come up with more. There’s always a deep pockets reserve.”

  “Like Hugh Driskill, maybe?”

  Lockhardt shrugged. “Andy, you can make any assumption you like. But do you really need to know? Do you really want to know? I rather doubt that.”

  “Whatever you say. You come up with the money, I’ll help you see it into the right hands.” Heffernan sighed like a man who knew he was well off, a smiling Irishman. “Klammer just kills me, Curtis. All this handsoff bullshit, all his deniability rap—”

  “American cardinals are different. They tend to think their votes are sacred things rather than trading chips. I suppose he doesn’t want to touch any of this himself, he doesn’t know it ever happened. Bribes scare them—”

  “Gifts, gifts!” Heffernan made a face. “The B word must never pass our lips. Ten million. What are we actually getting for the money, you and I? Is it, in a word, good for the Jews?”

  “A rock-solid American core of support. You put that together with Fangio, the cardinals Callistus named who owe us … bottom line, Andy, is we name the next pope. The Church stays on track. We see to it.” For a moment his mind stuck, hearing Sister Valentine, hearing her tell him that what she’d turned up could affect the choice of the next pope.…

  “No defections in the ranks?”

  “Why should anyone defect? Saint Jack is seventy-six years old. He won’t last forever and then … well, by then you’ll be wearing the red hat and the Church will have had a great man as pope for a time. And this old Church will have been moved on into the twenty-first century, going the only direction it can go if it’s going to survive. It’s a new world coming, Andy, and the Church has got to hit the ground running. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I gotta hand it to you, you make it simple. The money is certain?”

  “I never deal in mere probabilities, Andy.”

  “Well, this calls for a libation.” Monsignor Heffernan reached for the Rémy Martin on a tray beside two handsome pieces of Baccarat crystal. He poured and handed one glass to Curtis Lockhardt. “To money well spent.”

  The two men stood at the vast expanse of glass, drank a toast against the awesome backdrop of Manhattan. It was as if they stood on a man-made mountaintop, a peak they’d achieved together, Lockhardt leading the way with his faithful monsignor.

  “To jolly old Saint Jack,” Lockhardt said quietly.

  “To the future,” the monsignor echoed.

  It was Heffernan who saw him first. He smacked his lips, looked up, and saw an old priest. Somehow he’d come in unheard, descended the steps while they’d been enjoying the view and congratulating themselves. Monsignor Heffernan cocked his head quizzically, his red face smiling sunnily. “Yes, Father, what can I do for you?”

  Lockhardt turned, saw the priest. It was the skater. Lockhardt smiled, remembering the scene at the ice rink. Then he noticed the gloved hand coming up, and there was something about it …

  While Lockhardt watched, strength draining from his body and being replaced with biological, chemical, uncontrollable shock, he tried in the fractional instant to grasp what was happening. This priest was all wrong. He didn’t come from Curtis Lockhardt’s corridors of power. There was a gun in his hand.

  It made a strange muffled sound, like an arrow hitting a wet target.

  Andy Heffernan was slammed backward against the vastness of glass, silhouetted against the light, arms outstretched as if waiting for the nails to be driven home. The sound came again and the sunburned face came apart—irrevocably apart, ended in every way: the thoughts tumbled through Lockhardt’s brain as he stood; unable to move, to run, to throw himself at this gunman—the face he’d known so many years came apart in an explosion of blood and bone. A web of cracks appeared in the blood-spattered glass wall, radiating away from a hole the size of a man’s fist.

  Lockhardt stared down at what was left of his friend, stared at the slippery crimson trail he’d left on the window. Lockhardt felt his way along the edge of the desktop, moving slowly as if in a dream, moving backward toward the body of Monsignor Heffernan. He was only barely functioning. Everything seemed so far away, dim, as if things were happening at the end of a tunnel.

  Slowly the priest swung the gun around to face him.

  “God’s will,” he said, and Lockhardt struggled to comprehend, struggled to decipher the code. “God’s will,” the old priest whispered again.

  Lockhardt stared into the gun barrel, looked into the old priest’s eyes, but he was seeing something else, a little girl in a frilly bathing suit dancing and laughing and showing off in the rainbow of a sprinkler’s arc, dancing in the sunshine, on the wet, newly mown grass that clung to her toes as she danced.

  Lockhardt heard his own voice, couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Maybe he was calling to the little girl, calling her name, trying to reach her before it was too late, trying to get there, scrambling back into the safety of the past, the safety of the net of time.…

  The priest waited, his face kindly, as if he were giving Curtis Lockhardt time to reach safe ground.…

  Then the old priest pulled the trigger.

  Curtis Lockhardt lay with his head against the glass, where it met the carpet. He was drowning in his own blood, his lungs filling. There was a dimming of his vision, as if night were falling fast now, and he couldn’t quite see the prancing child anymore. In her place he could make out the shape of St. Patrick’s Cathedral blurring far below him. The spires seemed to be reaching toward him, like fingers pointing.

  He saw a black trouser leg beside his face. He felt something blunt pressing against the back of his head.

  Curtis Lockhardt blinked hard, trying to make out the sprightly dancing figure, but instead he took one last look at St. Patrick’s.

  1

  DRISKILL

  I remember that first day quite clearly.

  I was summoned to lunch at his club by Drew Summerhays, the imperishable gray eminence of our well-upholstered world downtown at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. He possessed the clearest, most adaptable mind I’d ever encountered, and most of our luncheon discussions were both illuminating and amusing. And they always had a point. Summerhays was eighty-two that year, the age of the century, but he still ventured down to Wall Street most days. He was our living legend, a friend and adviser to every president since Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign, a backstage hero of World War II, a spy master, and always a confidant of the popes. Through his close relationship with my father I’d known him all my life.

  On occasion, even before I’d joined the firm and subsequently become a partner, I�
�d had his ear because he’d watched me grow up. Once, when I was about to become a Jesuit novice, he’d come to me with advice and I’d had the lack of foresight to ignore it. Oddly enough, in such contrast to his austere, flinty appearance, he was a lifelong football fan and, particularly, a fan of mine. He had advised me to play a few years of professional football once I’d graduated from Notre Dame. The Jesuits, he argued, would still be there when I retired but now was my only chance to test my ability at the next level. He had hoped that fate might deliver me to the New York Giants. It might have happened, I suppose. But I was young and I knew it all.

  I’d spent my Notre Dame years as a linebacker, caked in mud and crap and blood, all scabby and hauling around more than my share of free-floating anxiety and rage. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mayhem stuffed into a two-hundred-pound body. Sportswriter hyperbole, sure, but Red Smith had so described me. The fact was, in those days I was a dangerous man.

  Nowadays I am quite a civilized specimen in my way, kept in one psychological piece by that fragile membrane that separates us from the triumph of unreason and evil. Kept intact and relatively harmless by the practice of law, by the family, by the family’s name and tradition.

  Summerhays hadn’t understood the simple truth that I’d lost whatever enthusiasm I’d ever had for playing football. And my father wanted me to become a priest. Summerhays always thought that my father was a bit more of a Catholic than was, strictly speaking, good for him. Summerhays was a realistic Papist. My father, he told me, was something else, a true believer.

  In the end I hadn’t played pro football and I had gone off to become a Jesuit. It was the last bit of advice I’d ever taken from my father and, as I recall, the last time I ignored a suggestion from Drew Summerhays. The price for my lack of judgment was high. As it developed, the Society of Jesus seemed to be a hammer, the Church an anvil, and the smiling linebacker got caught between. Bang, bang, bang.