The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “You know, Ben,” he said, speaking slowly, his brain half submerged in a small lake of Laphroaig, “I hate the idea of having to tell Curtis about this. He hasn’t had to deal much with things that haven’t gone his way. He’s led a happy life, all things considered.”

  “Well, he’s in for a rough patch now.” I didn’t give a damn about Curtis Lockhardt. He was one of them. And I wasn’t wasting a whole lot of sympathy on my father, who was about as vulnerable as one of the gargoyles hanging on the walls of Notre Dame. I was sorry for my little sister, Val.

  “I’ll tell him tomorrow—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’ll be on the tube and in the papers tomorrow. Val’s a celebrity. No, he’ll hear about it before we have to tell him. We’ll have to mop up after his grief. I’m not looking forward to that.”

  He fixed me with one of his X-ray stares across the top of his glass. “You can be a reprehensible shit at times, Ben.”

  “Like father, like son? It’s all in the genes.”

  “Probably,” he said after a while, “quite probably so.” He cleared his throat and finished his drink. “Well, I’m for bed.”

  “To face the demons of the dark.”

  “Something like that.” He turned in the doorway, gave me a little wave.

  “By the way, Dad …”

  “Yes? What is it?” The shadows of the foyer were about to swallow him.

  “Sam Turner told me Val called him today, asked him questions about the hanged priest—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The hanged priest out in the orchard. We have only the one, am I right or am I right? What do you make of that? Did she say anything to you about that?”

  “Sam Turner’s an old gossip.” My father snapped out the words, impatient with fools. “How should I know anything about that? No, she said nothing to me about that old story—”

  “What do you mean—story? It did happen … the dangling, frozen priest in the orchard—”

  “That’s ancient history. Forget it. We’ll never know what she wanted and that’s just fine. Now I’m going to bed.” He turned away.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you have any trouble sleeping, I’ll be awake, in my room, staring at the ceiling, indulging in emotional weakness. So if you want company …” I shrugged.

  “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “I think I might say a prayer. May I suggest you try it? If you recall the process, of course

  “Very kind of you to care,” I said.

  “Well, I say it’s never too late.” There was a hint of a smile in his voice though I couldn’t see his face clearly. “Not even for a lost soul like yours, Ben.”

  Then he was gone and I took a long time straightening the coffee things and the drinks table and smoking my cigar and slowly turning off the lamps.

  The lights were still on in the chapel.

  My bad leg was punishing me for my sins and the scotch hadn’t helped. I limped up the stairs, down the dark and drafty hallway to my old bedroom. The framed photograph of Joe DiMaggio autographed to my father and me hung over the bed. I saw the faint familiar brown stain on the ceiling where one night the rain had poured through a hole gnawed by a squirrel secreting nuts.

  I turned on the bedside lamp. The sleet was beating against the windows. Gary Cooper’s sketch of Val and me still sat in its silver frame on the chest of drawers. Odd. I was now the only one of us left alive.

  I pumped down a handful of aspirin for my leg pain and tried to escape the banshees of memory gathering on the lawn beneath my window. I kept twisting and turning and trying to make my leg comfortable, then dozing among troubled reflections and dreams and ghastly, unhappy fantasies. And then somehow I found myself among the Jesuits again, like an out-of-body experience.…

  The black-uniformed army among whom I’d once made my life swarmed out of the night toward me, as if they were fuzzy-wuzzies hell-bent on overrunning my positions, reclaiming me for themselves. Which was not necessarily the way it had been, at least not most days. The fact was I had enjoyed much of life as a novice. From the first day I’d found a place among the smart-ass contingent which always seemed to form the core of the Society of Jesus. Professional smart-asses, valued more for their rebellious intelligence than for their piety. Those first weeks of basic training quickly took on the quality of a challenge—a challenge to our sharp-edged smart-ass individuality which we were supposed to submerge in humility, prayer, the tedium of routine, the constant busyness, the sounds and smells of a religious dorm.

  Then came the day Brother Fulton, only a couple of years further into the process than we were, called us in for a chat.

  “You will have been wondering about some of the more exotic aspects of our happy little order,” he began. Brother Fulton was a classic Jesuit smart-ass: lank blond hair, pointy, foxlike features, pale brown eyes that seemed to deny the possibility of treating anything too seriously. “We think of them as penitential practices, nothing to fear, because we are all brave fellows and the Society has our best interests at heart. We are primarily concerned with the strength of the spirit, the vitality and determination and growth of the inner man. However …”

  He smiled at the group of intent young men waiting for the other shoe to drop. “However, we must not altogether ignore our physical selves. It is our experience here at Castle Skull—just a little Jesuit humor, men—that a whiff of mortification of the flesh never really hurt anyone. It may even occasionally do some good. Pain, I assure you, tends to concentrate the mind most wonderfully. But the pain is merely to remind us of our real purpose—you guys all on the right page here?—good, good. Suffice it to say that you will feel pain and your minds—if this thing works like it’s supposed to—will turn to such fit subjects for meditation as your love of God. Are you with me?”

  His lively brown eyes danced from one dutifully nodding face to another. “Gentlemen, take a look at these little doodads.” From the drawer in his desk he took out two items and placed them casually on the blotter. “Go ahead, pick them up. Get the feel. Get to know them.”

  I took the braided white rope, watched it dangling like a valuable necklace from my fingers. Touching the chain was oddly exciting, almost shameful. I held it gingerly, as if it might come to life and lash out at me, while Brother Fulton went on.

  “These little devices, a whip and a leg chain, will aid you. They will make it easier for you to reflect on your devotion to God. And your obedience. The rope or whip is largely symbolic. On Monday and Wednesday evenings you will strip to the waist and kneel beside your beds. The lights will be out. You will hear the tolling of the bell. You will then begin flogging your backs with an over-the-shoulder flicking motion. You keep at it for the length of one Our Father. No big deal.”

  “And how about this?” I swung the chain.

  “Aha,” Brother Fulton said. “You will notice the little signs on the bulletin boards when you return to your rooms. ‘Whips tonight, chains tomorrow morning.’ An old Jesuit maxim. Benjamin, do you notice anything unusual about the chain?”

  “The links,” I said. “One side is filed down so it’s very sharp. The other side is just blunt, rounded off.”

  Brother Fulton nodded again. “Which side would you say, just off the top of your head, is supposed to be pressed against the flesh? Blunt or sharp?”

  “You bring out the Iron Maiden next,” Vinnie Halloran said, “and I’m going through that door—”

  “We save that for the seventh year,” Brother Fulton observed. “You’ll be long gone by then.” He smiled beatifically. “You keep these things—the flagellum and the chain—under your pillows. The chain is for hurting, I promise you. You will be fastening the chain around your upper thigh, beneath your trousers, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.” He stood up, a gesture of dismissal. “You see the clasp, you figure it out. One thing, though. Tight. Clasp it tight. Nothing worse than feeling your chain sliding loosely do
wn your leg until it rattles on the floor.” He paused in the doorway before leaving. “That happens and you’re going to feel like a real asshole. Mark my words.”

  I threw myself into the business of fleshly mortification with customary determination. The chain was no joke. You put it around your thigh, cinched the links tight while it pulled the hair on your leg and pinched the flesh, and fastened it. You stood still while you put it on and adjusted the tension. That wasn’t so bad. But then you started to walk. The muscles flexed. The sharp edges bit into the meat, the welts rose and stung.

  Novice MacDonald thought the whole thing was insane, shaved the hair from his thigh, and held the loose chain in place with adhesive tape. No one else would even discuss the chains. It was a private battle and you fought it alone, the best way you could.

  It hurt worst of all when you had to sit down. At mass. At breakfast. In class. And the sharpened links raised the welts, then dug the trenches in the flesh. All in a good cause. My father would be proud of me. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. God. The Society of Jesus. Saint Ignatius Loyola. Sanctus Pater Noster. The better to obey, to serve. I would rise above it. I’d be damned if I didn’t rise above it.

  We were swimming when Vinnie Halloran spoke up. “Hey, Ben, look at your leg, man. Just look at it.” I refused to look. I’d been seeing it for a couple weeks. “You better take care of that, man. Really, that’s not right. That’s pus and green crud. Look at my leg, little red dots. MacDonald, you know he paints his little red marks on? No shit! But you, you got green stuff running …” Vinnie shivered, shrank within himself.

  But I wouldn’t give in. Not to a crummy Jesuit chain. Not Ben Driskill. That was just the way it was.

  It was infected and gangrene had developed. In the end Brother Fulton found me passed out in the john, lying in a puddle of my own vomit. The doctors at St. Ignatius Hospital saved the leg and I was very glad they had. Explaining a missing leg to my father would have been murder. And I was willing to live with the residual pain that flared up from time to time. But what made me feel best was the other thing. I hadn’t given in. Sometimes I lost, anybody could lose. But I never, ever gave in. Not even to the Jesuits. Not even to my father.

  When I woke up there was a dim grayness at the window and I could see my breath in the cold of my bedroom. Dry snow blew along the windowsill, drifted through the open inch to wet my face. The telephone was ringing in the distance. I counted four rings and then it stopped. My watch said it was six forty-five. I next came out of the fog at eight past seven, leaving behind a dream of someone screaming.

  The problem was I didn’t leave it behind. The scream was part of reality, not left over from a dream. And it wasn’t a scream, it was more of a strangled cry and it probably lasted no more than a second, maybe two, and then there was a hell of a crash, like a blind man trying to get out of a burning building.

  My father lay at the bottom of the stairway. His robe was all twisted around him, his arms bent sideways, his face down, resting on the foyer floor. The moment seemed to drag on forever, and then I was kneeling beside him. He looked like someone else, an old man with one eye shut, the other staring up at me. Then the eye blinked.

  “Dad? Can you hear me?” I cushioned his head on my arm.

  One side of his mouth twitched, a smile. The other side did nothing at all. “Telephone,” he said, fairly distinctly. “Archbishop …” He sucked some air through the side of his mouth. “Cardinal … Klammer …” Leave it to my father to get all the titles right. A tear trickled out of the closed eye, seeping away as if jealously guarded.

  “He called? What did he want?”

  “Lockhardt … Heff-Heffernan …” It was so difficult for him to speak. Hugh Driskill had come to this, drooling out of the corner of his mouth at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Lockhardt and Heffernan,” I prompted. Who the hell was Heffernan?

  “Dead …” It was a whisper now, as if he were running down, batteries going.

  “Christ … they’re dead? Lockhardt’s dead?”

  “Murdered … yes-yesterday …” He blinked again. Fingers fluttered at my side. Then he drifted off.

  I called the hospital. Then I went back and sat down beside my father, took his hand in both of mine, willed some of my energy into him, returning the favor.

  I willed my father to live.

  2

  She jogged back to the modern tower on the Via Veneto and stopped to catch her breath in the marble and chrome lobby while she waited for the elevator. Sweat dripped from the tip of her upturned nose. Her tawny brown shoulder-length hair was held in place by a green band. She pulled the earphones out and an old Pink Floyd tape came to an abrupt end. She wiped her forehead on the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt.

  She’d run three miles and was headed to the pool on the roof. She stopped at the eighteenth-floor apartment, shucked off the sweats, got into her bathing suit, wrapped herself in a thick terry-cloth robe, and ran up the three flights to the roof. She had the pool to herself and swam in a serious, disciplined way, pacing herself, thirty laps. The sun was purple, struggling up over the horizon, almost frightening seen through the dust and pollution of Rome.

  By the time she was in her kitchen making coffee, it was six-thirty and she’d been up since five. She’d prayed and jogged and taken a swim and it was time to stop horsing around. It was time to get a handle on the day.

  Sister Elizabeth enjoyed her life. She had not become a nun with unrealistic stars in her eyes: she’d thought it through in her organized way and things had gone well. The Order was proud of her. The apartment on the Via Veneto was owned by Curtis Lockhardt. He had personally spoken with Sister Celestine, who handled such matters for the Order from her office at the top of the Spanish Steps. There had been quick approval for her to move in. The Order tended to treat its members as adults who could be trusted and respected.

  It was Sister Valentine who had introduced her to Lockhardt and made the suggestion about the apartment. Lockhardt had subsequently become Elizabeth’s friend, too, and a valuable source of information useful in her work. It was a perfect example of the synchronicity which in a closed, stifling society like the Church made life so much more pleasant. The trick was always to make the machinery work for you, not against you. Elizabeth was gifted when it came, as it often did, to that arcane art. She was true to herself and true to the Order, and that was the foundation for making the machinery hum. Sister Val called it pushing the right buttons. They both knew how to do it though they weren’t pushing the same sets of buttons.

  She drank coffee and ate toast and took out her Filofax to check the day’s schedule. At nine o’clock there was a delegation of French feminists, Catholic laywomen from Lyons, who were continuing a long-running guerrilla action against the Vatican and wanted coverage in the magazine. God help us all.…

  She had been editor-in-chief of New World, the twice-monthly magazine funded by the Order, for three years. Its original audience had been Catholic women back during the height of the social and religious upheaval of the sixties. It hadn’t taken long for a decidedly liberal attitude to suffuse the magazine; then came the charges of Marxist influences hurled from all sides by enraged conservatives; the result was to turn the liberalism to radicalism, which in turn acted as a magnet not only to all the legitimate voices of the left but to most of the wild-eyed nut cases in Christendom. The outcry had eventually roused Callistus from his pontifical slumber and he’d declared in camera to the powers at the top of the Order that the time had come to put a sock in it. For their own sakes.

  Shortly thereafter Sister Elizabeth was named editor, the first American to hold the job. For the past three years she’d tiptoed along the line, addressing the major issues facing the Church in an even-handed way but dodging nothing: birth control, a married clergy, women priests, abortion, the leftist clergy in underdeveloped and third world countries, the role of the Church in international politics, the scandals at the Vatican Bank—in short, the works.
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  New World had quadrupled its readership, had become a kind of debating society for the Church’s heavy hitters. She’d managed to stay just shy of bringing Callistus blinking back into the daylight. And now it looked as if she would outlast him.

  All through the summer and autumn she, like every other journalist in Rome, knew that Pope Callistus was living on borrowed time. Death was lurking in the Vatican anterooms, clichés abounded in sleek bars, and at fancy parties attended by clergy, and in heavily draped villa drawing rooms overlooking the city. The atmosphere of pure expectation, a kind of unfettered, luxurious fore-play, reminded her of more innocent times, reminded her of her grandfather back in Illinois, in a little town called Oregon which she visited each summer from the family home in Lake Forest. It reminded her of the excitement and anticipation when he took her to the circus.

  A circus was the perfect metaphor. The Pope would die and the circus would actually begin with the tawdry tinkle of the hurdy-gurdy and monkeys on chains, the trumpet fanfare of a Fellini movie and the clowns and all the freaks and aerialists joining hands, dancing, capering across the screen. Always with a few priests thrown in, a bow to local color. Rome was presently in the pre-circus phase, and she remembered her grandmother getting her up early, her grandfather gassing up the station wagon and driving out to the fairgrounds in the cool dawn, cloudless and blue, promising another scorcher. He wanted her to see what went on before the ringmaster cracked his whip and opened the show, wanted her to see that some of the best parts of the circus happened when no one was around to watch. The tigers and the elephants, prowling around or making the earth shake, how they stood on their columnar back legs and reared into the air, showing off … The circus before the show began.

  That was the state Rome was in now. The papabili, the men with eyes peeled and fixed on the main chance, power, a line in the history books—they were gathering like the great elephants and tigers they were, shaking the ground with their weight, prowling with sabre teeth bare in ghastly smiles … the cardinals. The men who did what had to be done to ascend to the Throne of Peter. And their handlers, the power brokers, the deal makers, the fixers. Elephants, tigers, no end of jackals and hyenas, and not a lamb in sight.