The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  My cheeseburger had just arrived when I heard someone call my name. “Ben! Ben boy, a blast from the past!”

  I looked up into the boyish, blue-eyed face of Terence O’Neale—Father Terence O’Neale, who was between Val and me in age but would always look like a freshman somewhere. Everybody used to call him Peaches because he had one of those perfect peaches-and-cream complexions, eternally youthful, ever innocent. We’d known Peaches forever. We’d played tennis and golf and he’d always contended that I’d gotten him drunk the first time, out back in our orchard. He was smiling down at me, blue eyes glinting, dangling over the chasm of the past.

  “Take a load off, Peach,” I said, and he was sliding into the booth across from me with a beer of his own. He hadn’t started out to become a priest: that was pretty much Val’s doing. Golf and motorcycles and the world beer-chugging record, that’s what Terence O’Neale had seen when he looked into his future. That and a wife and a bunch of kids and maybe a job on Wall Street. Val was supposed to be Mrs. O’Neale. It had sounded fine to me. Now I hadn’t seen him in four or five years but he hadn’t changed. He wore a white buttondown and a tweed jacket. Vinnie would have approved.

  “So what brings you back to the scene of our crimes?”

  “I’m a workingman, Ben. Got a job over in New Pru. I’m the padre at St. Mary’s. It’s a little spooky—I keep looking out during the homily and I keep thinking I’ll see us, you and me and Val.” He grinned at the Lord’s mysterious ways.

  “Since when? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Just since summer. I’ve seen your father. You should have seen him do a double take. I figured I’d catch you at Christmas. Val said she might get a skating party together out back of the orchard. She said I shouldn’t expect you at mass.”

  “She got that right. I’ve been going straight for twenty years, as you damn well know.”

  He plucked a french fry from my plate. “So what are you doing here? Your dad says you don’t get home much.”

  “How true. Of course he’s still wondering if I’m really his son. Maybe there was a mix-up in the maternity ward. It’s the only hope he has left.”

  “You’re awfully hard on the old boy, aren’t you?”

  “Nope. Anyway, I didn’t come out here to see him. I got a call this afternoon from Val, all mysterious and determined to get me out here tonight. So I came through all this crud and she’s not home to meet me.” I shrugged. “When did you see her? What’s this skating party thing? I hate skating—”

  “When she was passing through last summer on her way to Rome, we had dinner. Old time’s sake.” He took another fry. “I think you’re right about that mysterious sound—there’s something going on, she’s been doing some pretty heavy research … she wrote me from Rome, then Paris.” His face clouded for a moment. “She’s writing this monster of a book, Ben. World War Two and the Church.” He made a face. “Not a time the Church likes to brag about—”

  “With good reason,” I said.

  “Don’t look at me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Pius was Pius and I was just a little kid in Princeton, New Jersey.”

  He finished off my fries, grinning at me. I felt a surge of warmth. Val had been pretty serious about Peaches, had told me she might just marry him. They became lovers when she was seventeen.

  Val had felt a good bit of Catholic-schoolgirl guilt when she lost her virginity to him one summer night out in the orchard. Later on, when she got to thinking seriously about the Church, Peaches thought it was a phase. Then he thought she was caving in to pressure from Dad. Then he figured she’d just gone crazy. But Val wanted her life to mean something special—to herself, to the world she lived in, to the Church. Kennedy had been assassinated and Peaches said, hell, you want to save the world, go join the Peace Corps. She wouldn’t fight with him about it. It wasn’t that she needed the Church, she said, but rather that the poor old Church needed her. Val never had any trouble with her ego.

  John XXIII was her idea of a new start after the reign of Pius, whom she counted an embarrassment. But Paul VI seemed willing to lose what had been gained, seemed content to have the Church sink back into the past again. She saw the world changing and the Church needed to keep moving, growing into a new and humanistic role. She saw Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Pope John and she wanted to join them in making a better world. And Peaches, well, if he couldn’t have Val, he didn’t want anybody else. In time he became a priest and it all went to show you that you never knew how things were going to turn out.

  He was walking me down the length of the bar when he noticed the guy he’d been waiting for in the doorway and pulled me over. “Ben, I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

  The man in the doorway was wearing a yellowing old mac and a dark olive snapbrim with a narrow leather band. Bushy gray eyebrows arched outward over pale gray eyes set deep in a pink-cheeked face. A flash of white dog collar peeked from behind his dark green scarf. He was five seven, maybe in his early sixties. The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes made him look like Barry Fitzgerald, who often played priests in forties movies. Fitzgerald had also played a pixilated Irishman in Bringing Up Baby and a crafty old avenger in And Then There Were None: I could see both possibilities in the face before me. There was something distant and cool in the flat gray eyes. They didn’t seem to go with the rest of his crinkly, smiling face. I recognized him from his publicity photos.

  “Ben Driskill, this is the Church’s poet laureate, Father Artie Dunn

  “Faith and begorra,” Dunn said. “Forgive young O’Neale, Mr. Driskill. You aren’t by any chance Hugh Driskill’s boy?”

  “You know my father?”

  “By reputation, of course. I’m told he is not one of my readers.” Dunn’s face cracked into a quick grin. He took his hat off, revealing a bald pink scalp with a fringe of gray hair curling over the tops of his ears and scarf.

  “At his age he can only take so much sex, violence, and confession.” I shook his hand. “Maybe I’ll present him with your collected works at Christmas.”

  I had seen Father Dunn on television once, being interviewed about one of his novels, and he somehow worked the subject around to one of his passions, baseball. Phil Donahue had asked him if, like so many ballplayers, he had any superstitions. “Just the Catholic Church,” he’d said, and the audience was in his pocket.

  “Don’t settle for paperbacks,” he said. “My hardcover jackets are every bit as shameful.”

  Peaches chuckled. “The priest who looks like Tom Selleck is being ravished by a Joan Collins clone in half a dress.”

  Dunn said: “Why don’t you join us, Mr. Driskill?”

  “How about a raincheck? I’ve got to meet my sister—”

  “Ah, a respectable writer. A true scholar and an activist. A unique combination.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so.”

  I left them and walked back to the car. It was fully in character for Peaches, a bit of a free spirit, to know Father Dunn, the iconoclastic priest/novelist whose books were always best-sellers that drove the Church hierarchy quietly nuts. He had devised a manner of somehow producing moral object lessons within the context of stories devoted almost exclusively to sex, power, and money. My father doubtless felt that Dunn had made himself a rich man desecrating the Church. Desecration aside, since Dunn was a diocesan priest free to keep any money he earned, he certainly was well-heeled. Like my sister, he was so well-known that the Church had to exercise considerable restraint in dealing with him. In practice they found it advisable to look the other way.

  It was still spitting sleet and the sidewalks were treacherous. From the shop windows all of the paraphernalia of Halloween stared into the night. Witches rode on broomsticks and bowls overflowed with black and orange candy. Jack-o’-lanterns grinned, gap-toothed. I headed home, eager to sit down in front of the fire in the Long Room with my sister Val and help her get things straightened out.

  * * *

  T
he house was still dark and empty, the rain still blowing in sheets and turning to snow in the headlights, dusting the rutted and freezing mud in the driveway. I pointed the car at the garage and walked ahead in the lights, looked through the windows. There was a car inside. I pulled the doors open. The car was wet. But it had been raining for hours and the engine was cold. I went back to my car, pulled it up by the house, and got back out. It was ten-thirty and I was beginning to worry about her.

  I’m not altogether sure why I walked back out toward the orchard. Maybe I went for a walk because the rain had turned to snow, the first of the year, and the quiet seemed surreal after the chatter of the Nassau Inn. I stopped, called her name just in case she’d had the same impulse, but all I succeeded in doing was start a dog to barking in the black distance.

  I was standing in the orchard before I’d given it any thought, and when I looked around I saw I was under the tree where the priest-we never talked about had hanged himself a long time ago. It seemed like my entire life had been spent living with the stories attached to the house and the orchard—priests from the rubble of World War II and priests working in the garden and saying mass for Mother and priests drinking scotch with Father and the one poor devil who’d hanged himself, all of them stories with the power of myth, stories reflecting this family of mine, its history and concerns and, inevitably, its religion.

  The orchard was always cropping up in family stories, but I’d never been particularly fond of the place. The only reason I’d ever spent any time out there was because Val had liked it. When she was four I taught her to play poker on the grass out of sight of the house. But I’d once eaten an apple and found half a worm inside and the orchard and I had parted company about then.

  We used to have Fritz the gardener show us the exact tree from which the priest had hanged himself. We’d stare at it while Fritz showed us the precise limb and made a face with his tongue sticking out and his eyes rolled back, and then he would laugh and suggest that just possibly the orchard was haunted like the attic. I never even saw a newspaper article or photograph about the tragedy and the poor damned dead priest. I asked my mother about it and she’d brushed the question away, saying, “It was all a million years ago, it was just too terribly sad, Benjy,” and my father had said that it was just bad luck. “He could have picked anybody’s orchard, anybody’s tree. Bad luck he picked ours.”

  By then I’d begun to feel foolish standing out there in the falling snow remembering a suicidal priest of damn near fifty years earlier and wondering where the devil my sister was. She hadn’t been in the house; she hadn’t been in the chapel.

  I walked back and stood looking at the chapel, frosted with snow like something in a fairy tale. The wind had come up from out back, whistling across the creek, through the orchard.

  I climbed the slippery steps and swung the door open again, stared into the damp, cold stillness. The little candle had gone out. I left the door open for the pathetic bit of light it provided and felt along the wall for the light switches. I flipped the first one. The entry was enveloped in a dim grayness, antediluvian. I felt like a diver in the depths of a flooded ruin. I flipped the second switch and another set of dim lights came on in the chapel proper. I heard the leathery flutter of a bat or two overhead in the darkness.

  There were only ten pews divided by a center aisle. I took a few tentative steps, called her name. Never had a room been so empty. The single syllable, Val, ricocheted off the walls and the stained glass windows. I heard the steady drip of a couple of leaks, the roof and steeple needing repair yet again.

  Then in the gloom, between the first and second rows, I saw a flash of red. A red wool and blue leather sleeve, a bit of antique warmup jacket. I recognized it. It was my old letter jacket from St. Augustine. It would have the intertwined SA on the left breast. It didn’t belong on the floor of the chapel.

  In the catacomb of St. Callistus deep below the Appian Way there is the tomb from which Pope Paschal, in the ninth century, removed the body of St. Cecelia. He laid her to final rest in a sarcophagus of white marble under the altar of the Church of St. Cecelia in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. Years ago I visited the catacomb of Callistus and emerged from the darkened gallery into the pool of light where the body of a girl lay in what seemed to be a peaceful sleep. For an instant I felt as if I had intruded on her privacy. Then, of course, I recognized her as the work of the sculptor Maderna, the body of Cecelia as she had appeared to Cardinal Sfondrati in a dream. It was an extraordinarily realistic rendering, and as I looked down at the body of the woman in our chapel I felt as if I, too, like the cardinal of centuries before, were lost in a dream, as if I were confusing this woman with the martyred Cecelia.

  She lay crumpled sideways, fallen where she’d been kneeling in prayer. She lay still, like Maderna’s sculpture, peaceful, her head turned toward the floor, the one eye I could see closed. I touched her hand, the rosary clutched in the cold fingers. She’d worn my old warmup jacket to make the walk from the house to the chapel. The wool was damp. I held her hand. The fingers were stiff.

  My sister Val, always the brave little soldier, full of the courage I lacked, was dead.

  I don’t know how long I knelt there. Then I reached out to touch her face, so empty of her spirit, and I was seeing her as a little girl, hearing the happy lilt of her laughter, and when I touched her hair I felt the crusty blood, felt the singed hair breaking at the touch, saw the smeared wound where the bullet had entered. She’d knelt in prayer and someone had held the gun within an inch of her head and put her out, like quenching a candle. I was sure she hadn’t felt a thing. Maybe, for some inexplicable reason, she’d trusted her killer.

  My hand was sticky with her blood and hair. Val was dead and I was having trouble catching my breath. I rolled her head back the way it had been. My sister, my dearest friend, the person I loved most in the world, was dead at my feet.

  I sat back in the pew, held her hand trying to make it warm and failing horribly. My face was frozen in grief and I didn’t want to cope. I didn’t want to stand up and do something.

  A wisp of cold, a draft, fluttered something caught in a sliver at the corner of the wooden bench. I plucked it from its niche. A triangular piece of fabric, black, waterproofed like a raincoat. I was barely registering it at all, just holding it, something for my hand to do.

  I heard the chapel door creaking, then footsteps on the stone floor.

  The footsteps came down the aisle while I tried to stop trembling. I hoped Val’s killer had returned to have a go at me. I’d kill him with my bare hands. I wanted to die killing him. I looked up.

  Peaches was peering down at me. He’d taken one look and everything was registering on his face. All the color had drained away, no more peaches and cream. His mouth had slackened open but he wasn’t saying anything.

  Beside him Father Dunn was staring down at her. She looked so lonely. “Oh shit,” he whispered in a tone of infinite sadness.

  I thought he was commenting on my sister, but I was wrong. He reached down and took the bit of black fabric from my hand.

  It didn’t take long for the machinery of death to start clanking away. Sam Turner, the police chief, arrived with a couple of his cops and shortly thereafter an ambulance and a doctor with his black gladstone bag. Sam Turner had been a friend of the family’s all my life. He’d obviously been awakened and brought back out into the hellish night: his gray hair was doing a Dagwood Bum-stead, and his face wore a gray fuzz outlining his drooping dewlaps. He wore a plaid shirt and windbreaker and corduroys and green Wellies. He shook my hand and I knew he was hurting, too. He’d known Val from when she was a little girl and now he was heading through the rain and snow to the chapel to see how it had ended.

  Peaches, tight-lipped and pale, made coffee and brought it into the Long Room on a tray with mugs and fixings. He and Dunn had come on impulse to see if Val had shown up all right: Peaches had been worried about the chance of a car accident. Seeing the light in the cha
pel, they’d come in to find me holding my dead sister’s hand. While Peaches and I drank coffee, Dunn went back to the chapel with Sam Turner. He was probably researching a scene for a novel.

  Turner was wet and cold when they came back. He took a mug of steaming black coffee and slurped it noisily. Through the window I saw them putting Val’s body, wrapped in an oilcloth bag on a stretcher, into the ambulance. The rain and snow drifted slowly through the lights in the forecourt.

  “Jesus, there’s not much to say, Ben. I’m sealing off the chapel and we’ll get some scene-of-the-crime boys up from Trenton. You don’t have any idea what happened, do you?”

  “Only the obvious,” I said. I thought about Val’s state of mind when she called me, but I couldn’t imagine how to start in on that with Turner. “She just got in today. Called me in New York, asked me to come out and meet her tonight.” I shook my head. “I just assumed she was late, doing some errands. Went into town for a burger, came back, looked around again, found her. That’s it.”

  He sneezed into a red bandanna and rubbed his nose. “Comin’ down with a bug,” he muttered. “It’s funny. I got a call from her this afternoon myself. She mention that to you?”

  “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.”