The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “And then?” Peaches prompted her.

  “I never saw Father Governeau again.” Edna took another cookie, turning it slowly in her roughened fingers, staring at it. “Until I saw his picture in The Trentonian. He was dead … I just couldn’t believe it.”

  “Priests do die,” I said.

  “But not like that! By his own hand! I’d never have believed it, not in a million years.” She looked up at me. “But I thought you’d know all about Father Governeau, Mr. Driskill.”

  “Why’s that, Edna? I’ve never heard of him before.”

  “Well, it was your orchard and all, what he hanged himself in … I just thought you’d know, that’s all. ’course you was so little …”

  “We never talked about it,” I said.

  We were driving back toward Princeton with the defroster and wipers working on the frozen mist dimpling the windshield. I said, “Why was Val asking questions about the hanged priest? He hangs himself in our orchard and Val, never having shown the slightest interest in him before, turns up all these years later wanting to see Sam Turner’s files.”

  Dunn stared at the slippery road. “Speaking as a writer of books, the hanged priest may be a red herring—”

  “But she did ask to see the file. That’s a fact. And I’ve got another fact for you—the person, your homicidal priest if you insist, who killed my sister also stole her briefcase, whatever notes she may have been carrying with her. Notes for her book or anything else. It’s gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  I told him and he nodded. “One book of mine, you wouldn’t believe the reams of notes. The immortal Wodehouse said that the notes for one of his novels filled many more volumes than the manuscript itself. It took me eight years to plot that book of mine and I wrote it four times.” He hummed tunelessly for a moment. “Hanged priest. Forty-plus years later she asks about the hanged priest and another priest kills her and steals her briefcase. We’re already out there in the gap, my friend. When you’re alone in the fog in no-man’s-land, when you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been, when you’re but there in the gap … the trick is not to step on a land mine. You’ve got to move carefully. Or the priest will come at you out of the night and kill you, too.”

  When we pulled into the drive leading up to the house the wind hit the car sideways, shook it.

  “You were good at pinning the tail on the donkey,” I said. “I saw you do it three times in a row. How’d you do that?”

  “The only possible way. I cheated. Kids are very easy to fool. They love it. They expect it from a priest and I wouldn’t want to let them down. It’s all part of the great seduction.… It’s the way we’ve always done it, you know that. Take a young mind in its formative years”—he smiled at me, holding the wheel in the frozen ruts, the snow graying in the headlights—“and seduce it. It’s yours forever.”

  “Thank you, Miss Jean Brodie.”

  There was a police car parked in the forecourt. A cop was waving a red flashlight at us. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Driskill. Chief Turner figured we’d best keep an eye on the place for a few days. We’re gonna switch off every four hours or so.” He looked cold and his nose was red.

  “Why don’t you come inside, then?”

  “That’s okay, sir. It’s warm in the car. Chief says we stay in the car. I got me a thermos of coffee, I’m fine.”

  “As you wish. I appreciate it.”

  Dunn watched the cop go back to his car. “We’ve gotten a bloody nose since last night, Ben. You know what my dad used to say to me? I’d come home from school, all banged up from a schoolyard scrap, he’d say, ‘Artie, nobody ever died of a bloody nose yet.’ So, get some sleep. Take a look at things tomorrow.”

  I went inside. The house was quiet in the way that a sailboat on Long Island Sound is quiet in the night. It creaked, it moaned, almost seemed to give underfoot. The fire was reduced to a clump of faintly glowing coals. I placed a couple of logs among them and pulled one of the leather chairs closer and watched the fire come back to life.

  Father Dunn’s remarks about cheating the kids, how easy it was, how the Church set out to seduce the minds of the young, came back to me and made me smile. He was a rascal. And he never had told me what his job was. But he had access to Archbishop Cardinal Klammer. And to cops who told him inside stuff. And what had Peaches said? Dunn had big-deal pals in Rome.…

  I was feeling the pull of the Church, the insidious beckoning finger stretching toward me, the seduction. The march of my thoughts was disorderly and ragtag, darting from the Vuitton briefcase to the priest dangling from the limb in our orchard to some other priest calmly pressing the gun to the back of my sister’s head to yet another priest unerringly pinning the tail on the donkey every time, and I was too worn out to impose my will on the mental chaos. There was no fighting back.

  It had been so long since I’d thought of myself as a Catholic. A long time since I’d been a Catholic. Damn. Being a Catholic … it had been love and hate, right from the beginning.

  It was less a dream than a memory bobbing to the surface. Between waking and sleeping, I saw the bird and smelled the wet wool and the years slipped away, and I found myself back in the darkening March afternoon so long ago.

  A wet, cold day: spring had not yet declared itself. From the schoolroom window I saw the piles of dirt-encrusted snow melting away into the mud, the wet gravel driveway curving from the tree-lined street. The clouds lay low and gray over the town. The schoolroom was overheated, but I sensed the wind and the smell of the rain.

  I was eight years old and scared half to death. I had loused up my catechism earlier in the day and Sister Mary Angelina had swept down on me, marched the length of the aisle between the desks, mouth clenched, eyeballs peeled back, holding the triangular metal ruler in her white, bony hand. I couldn’t take my eyes from the thin, bloodless lips, the pale and unlined face, the habit rustling softly as she approached. The radiators hissed. My classmates turned solemnly, eyes wide, glad it was me and not themselves.

  I heard her voice but was too frightened to fully comprehend her remarks. I stuttered, botched my response, forgot what I had memorized so carefully the night before. Tears sprang. The metal ruler flashed and the skin split across my knuckles. I saw a thin red line traced across my hand. I felt the hot flush blotching my face. I was crying. I swallowed against the need to cry out, heard the resulting shameful whimper.

  I moped quietly through the rest of the day, kept my eyes downcast, managed to avoid Sister Mary Angelina’s gaze. But the fear, and what I was beginning to recognize as hatred, was building to an eight-year-old’s crescendo, leaving me shaking in the boys’ toilet, running cold water across my knuckles. After lunch I returned to class, my plan in place. Benjy Driskill had had enough. I thought it over, tracing the arcs of possible consequences, and couldn’t see how anything could be worse than an endless train of confrontations with Sister Mary Angelina.

  At afternoon recess I worked my way to the back of the school which loomed against the grayness, all porches and turrets and recessed windows. Deep red building stones, black trim with dim yellow lights glowing from within. A fortress. I was about to escape.

  I waited in the shrubbery near an old unused coach house. The afternoon dragged on, no one came looking for me. The schoolday ended, the other kids burst out, ran for home or to waiting cars. My plan had extended only so far as not having to return to class. Once the grounds were empty of children and nuns I felt wonderfully daring, alone. Ground fog clung to the wet grass, formed itself around the evergreens.

  As I stood shivering, however, another hour passed and darkness began overpowering the afternoon, and I discovered that having escaped Sister Mary Angelina was not altogether enough. The excitement at the moment’s triumph faded. It was time to go home and face that music. I was edging along the high black iron fence when I saw the bird.

  It was impaled on one of the arrow-s
haped points at the top of the fence. It was dead and decomposing, little more than a straggly handful of feathers stuck with blood to the spindly skeletal remains. It hung there, an open glittering eye, unblinking, shiny, staring malevolently at me.

  In my eyes, terrified at not knowing my catechism for Sister Mary Angelina, paralyzed at the sight of the painting of the gaunt, agonized Christ crucified and dripping with gore just outside the door of the third-grade room, the bird was incomprehensibly evil, the climax toward which the long, unhappy day had been building.

  I couldn’t face Sister Mary Angelina anymore, the black eyes burning behind the flat, round discs, the pale white face like a kind of clown’s that turned again and again to stare me down in my dreams.…

  I bolted, slipping and falling, running across the wet, half-icy grass. I reached the gravel path and tore down toward the towering black gate and the freedom beyond, away from the nuns and the dead bird.

  Panting, dripping with sweat, I looked up as I approached the gate. My mother was coming up the walk. She didn’t look happy.

  Turning, I ran blindly back up the gravel path toward school.

  And suddenly I was overwhelmed in a cloud of heavy, damp black wool. The scent overwhelmed me, like a gas, like the ground fog. I swung my arms, beating at the cape, struggling to free myself, but strong arms enfolded me, held me tight. I was crying, frightened, and ashamed and sick.

  It was Sister Mary Angelina.

  When I saw her face through the tears, all I could make out were the piercing eyes behind the glasses … the bird skewered on the point, the bleeding Christ, the darkness of the school halls … I saw the hatred and the fear, all the powdery white women in long black robes, the ravens swooping down on me.…

  “Benjy, Benjy, it’s all right, dear, really, it’s all right, don’t cry.…”

  Sister Mary Angelina’s voice was soft and she was kneeling beside me on the muddy gravel. The arm around my shoulders, her arm, softened its grip, and through the fists I’d flung before my eyes I saw that she was smiling gently, eyes shining and warm. I tried to speak but could only cough and hiccup and she was sheltering me with her arms, patting my back, cooing softly in my ear. “Don’t cry, Benjy, there’s nothing to cry about, nothing atali.…”

  Everything in my small universe was spinning, nothing made sense, but I couldn’t deny her touch, the loving voice.

  She seemed young, not an old lady. She seemed someone else, a different Sister Mary Angelina. She was motioning my mother to wait. Whispering to me. Her woolen cape was dragging on the gravel, getting dirty, and she didn’t seem to care.

  I leaned against her shoulders, burying my face in the dampness. Inexplicably, everything was all right.

  Sister was a person. And with that realization my first rebellion against the Church had ended.

  Somehow nothing had been what it seemed.

  The hatred had been put down by kindness. And Sister Mary Angelina had been transformed, metamorphosed. She had become someone to turn to.

  No one ever explained to me how it had happened. But I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to cling to her and feel her arms around me and the strength of her body.

  It took me a long time to understand that the great seduction had just begun.

  I was half awake when I heard the pounding at the front door. I shook loose from the past, yawned, and tottered across the Long Room into the foyer. The cop was calling my name while he had a go at the door.

  When I opened it he wasn’t alone. I felt my heart leap in my chest.

  In the shadows behind him, outlined by the lights from the taxi swinging around on the gravel, was a woman. I couldn’t see her face, but the sense of her was so familiar, someone I’d seen before.

  “She says she’s come from Rome, Mr. Driskill.” The cop’s voice was going on, but I wasn’t hearing him.

  I was staring past him.

  It was Val. Something was wrong and I blinked like a fool, trying to come wide-awake. The height, the shape of the hair, the silhouette there and then gone as the headlights swept past her. Val.

  She stepped forward into the hall light.

  “Ben,” she said. “It’s me, Sister Elizabeth.”

  4

  DRISKILL

  Sister Elizabeth.

  We stood in the Long Room. The shadows from the fire flickered across her face, in the hollows, shone in her green eyes. She took my hand, said things about Val, shook her head, her thick hair swaying: there was something about her physical presence that filled the room, crowded everything else into the shadows. She was tall and broad-shouldered, wore a heavy sweater falling low on her hips, a dark skirt, high, dark boots. Her eyes fixed me, alive with candor and energy.

  She told me how Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had given her the bad news, how she’d put the magazine in the hands of her managing editor, packed a bag, and grabbed the first flight to New York. She’d had a limousine waiting to take her to Princeton. “I’m starving,” she said finally. “Do you have horse? I could eat a horse and chase the rider.”

  Ten minutes later we were sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by what looked like an explosion in the Empire Diner. She wasn’t a woman to hang back when it came to food. She looked up from the task. “It’s tomorrow morning for me.” She seemed to be building a four-story sandwich. “I always need explanations when I start to eat. Growing girl, that worked for years and years, but once I passed thirty I had to come up with some new material. You wouldn’t have a Diet Coke on you by any chance?” She went to work with the mustard pot.

  “No Diet Coke, I’m afraid.”

  “No, too much to hope for. Impossible to get in Rome. Any chance for a beer?”

  I got her a beer and made a sandwich for myself. When I finished she said, “Maybe I’ll have just one more sandwich … well, how about a half, okay?”

  “You’ve got a beer mustache, Sister.”

  “Always happens. I can stand it if you can. Pete’s Tavern. Irving Place. I remember.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Why? Look, I’m a nun but I’m also an earthling. I’ve been known to not only have a good time but remember it, too. Ben …” She uncapped another Rolling Rock and poured it.

  I remembered it, too.

  My sister had come to New York a couple of winters ago to receive one of those humanitarian-of-the-year awards from a national women’s group. She gave a speech at the Waldorf in a gilded pillared hall where I’d once attended a dinner welcoming the Yankees back from spring training. A thousand people were eating creamed chicken and peas and she worked the room like a Las Vegas pro, towing me along in her wake as she filtered through the shoals of heavy hitters.

  But after the dinner and the speech she’d arranged to meet another nun, a friend from Georgetown and later Rome. She took me by the hand. “You’ve got to meet her, you’re going to hate each other!” And her mischievous laughter floated back at me from childhood.

  The friend turned out to be Sister Elizabeth, and the first thing I noticed was how much alike they looked as they stood together in the dark blue lobby of the Waldorf with the great ornate clock saying it was ten o’clock. Thick wavy hair, shiny eyes, both well-tanned, live-forever healthy, Val’s face more oval and her friend’s rather heart-shaped. Sister Elizabeth and I shook hands, and when she smiled at me she had a slightly smart-ass, Jesuitical look, tilted her head a few degrees to one side as if she were challenging me to keep up with her. Val was watching us expectantly, two people who meant a lot to her. Sister Elizabeth surveyed me with a flat gaze. “So, at last I meet the fallen Jesuit.”

  I glanced at Val. “Blabbermouth here has apparently spilled the family’s beans.”

  When Elizabeth laughed the irony was colored with warmth. “We are not going to hate each other, are we?”

  “Well, in any case, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.”

  We wound up at a cocktail party being given by a friend of some Jesuits who were particular fans of
my sister’s. The apartment looked down on Gramercy Park. Lots of smoke and wine and arch conversation, full of jokes about the pope. Poor Val was the center of everything.

  I gravitated to the cooling drafts of a partially opened window. It was just past Thanksgiving but a snowstorm had closed in on the city. Everything was turning white, giving Gramercy Park the look of a Christmas display window. Sister Elizabeth came to stand beside me, asked me if I thought anyone would be offended if we were to duck out for a walk in the snow. I didn’t think so. Father John Sheehan, S.J., whom I’d known for years, gave her an appraising look as we passed into the hallway, made a circle of thumb and forefinger to me, nodded appreciatively. He had no idea she was a nun.

  The snow was deep and she frolicked like a little girl allowed up late, kicking it with her leather boots, making big soft snowballs to throw at the trees past the iron fence. Gramercy Park had been turned into a snowy cloister, shadows like monks moving quietly to the chapter house. We walked past the dim lights glowing in the downstairs bar at the Players Club, then went off down Irving Place, where parked cars were turning into low ridges of snow.

  We stopped at Pete’s and had a beer at the scarred, ancient bar with the photo of Sinatra looking down on us like an icon, or the abbot of his own special order. She told me about her job at the magazine in Rome and I told her how peculiar it felt to be surrounded by Catholics, the first time in years. She asked me how my wife, Antonia, was and I told her that she wasn’t my wife anymore. She just nodded and took a drink of beer that left foam on her upper lip.