The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  The cardinal reflexively took a black Egyptian cigarette from an old leather-backed case, stuck it on his lower lip, and lit it. He inhaled deeply and Sandanato, watching through the thick latticework of his eyelashes, saw the cardinal’s fingers, short and stubby and tobacco-stained, the fingers of a peasant. The face staring intently into a volume of Sherlock Holmes bore the stamp of a lover of pleasure, a Borgia. His lips were thick, the teeth uneven and discolored from the constant nicotine, his eyes clear and blue when you glimpsed them behind the hooded lids.

  The cardinal wore civilian clothing. It was his obsession with secrecy, but Monsignor Sandanato understood. Even now, sitting quietly in the back of the little car, the old man in the ancient Borsalino, part of his camouflage, wouldn’t speak aloud. It was the fear that the car was bugged. In a high-stakes game, he would say, anything was possible. Loose lips sink ships, they were right, you see.

  The hat was pulled down low on his head. Beneath it the once-thick black hair was now white; it lay tight against the massive skull like a cap. His nondescript gray suit was a bit small for him, was boxy, as if passed on to him by a Russian. He was squat, powerfully built, beefy, and intimidating even in his mid-seventies. Growing up in Trieste he’d had a reputation: quick brain, quicker fists.

  Through the years Sandanato had had plenty of time to observe the man, the natural disguise he used to such advantage. He had the misleading loose jowls and lips of a garrulous old gossip. His natural posture was a slump. He was somehow always rumpled, no matter how significant the occasion. It was inconceivable to imagine him pressed and starched and neat, even when he was precisely that. But it was all a false front. A fierce intellect gleamed behind the sybaritic old face. Shrewd with instincts as precise as computer logic. Giacomo Cardinal D’Ambrizzi, one of the most secret of men, had few secrets from Monsignor Sandanato.

  From the very beginning, Sandanato knew, the cardinal had been involved in the most worldly affairs of the Church. He had the canny, calculating, game-playing kind of mind required, and those in positions of power had recognized it in the young man from Trieste. Money had always been what he did best. He had begun by raising it and went on to investing it. More than any other single individual in his time, he had built and directed the wealth of the Church.

  Along the way the cardinal had learned how malleable the Church itself was, how responsive to a lover’s touch. Like people, the Church could be made to do what the cardinal wished. More than anything else he wanted to preserve the Church, to defend it against the evil and the enemies within and without its walls. It was an overwhelming task, but he had always been the man for it. And Pietro Sandanato had been at his side through the maturity of his power.

  The cardinal had often told him of the time when he had recognized his calling, how best he might serve. It had been in a run-down office he’d visited in Naples some fifty-odd years before. Peeling linoleum, the smell of sweat, plates encrusted with pasta stacked on the corner of a cluttered desk. The office of a homely, unlettered tycoon whose hopes for the Church had dovetailed with his own. Father D’Ambrizzi had managed to pry a hundred thousand dollars from the grubby little man in the sweat-stained shirt. That was how it had begun and D’Ambrizzi had known where to channel the money.

  Many years later, referring to Cardinal D’Ambrizzi’s control over the Vatican’s vast portfolio of investments, and the almost oppressive security surrounding his movements and actions, an American cardinal had said: “It goes with the territory, plain and simple. You smile at the wrong banker in Zurich or have dinner with the wrong counselor in Paris, and the New York Stock Exchange and the Bourse go into shock. But, my friend, have you ever wondered where the hell God fits into all this?”

  It was true, of course, the cardinal had told Sandanato. His life was bounded by secrecy and security and, indeed, it did go with the territory. But it was also an aspect of his own nature. And so far as God’s work went, the cardinal had long since ceased theorizing. Someday it would doubtless all become clear.

  Monsignor Sandanato pulled the Fiat into a half-hidden alleyway and parked in the cul-de-sac, where anonymous, ancient trash was stacked helter-skelter, and doused the headlights. It was the back entrance of a hospital so obscure that it seemed to crouch, a pile of bricks one step from becoming rubble. The clientele was poor and undemanding and no one would suspect that a cardinal would set foot within it. Which was why D’Ambrizzi had chosen it, of course. Just three weeks before, a politician had been kneecapped by the Red Brigades less than fifty feet from the front entry and had still been taken by car to another hospital twenty minutes away. It was the perfect hospital for the cardinal’s purpose.

  The dim hallway was empty but for two men in gowns covered with blood. No one paid the slightest attention to the handsome priest and the stubby old man who walked slowly and with a slight stoop. They entered a small room around a dark corner and sat down on the rickety wooden chairs. The cardinal took a copy of Sherlock Holmes stories from his pocket and began reading, his lips moving as he read the English. Sandanato sat upright, waiting.

  Dr. Cassoni came in quietly, making apologies. His lined face was grave. He and the cardinal had known each other almost all their lives, which was why he had over the past few months gone along with the covert game the cardinal was playing. Dr. Cassoni’s normal venue was as elegant and moneyed as the little hospital was down-at-heel. Cassoni shook his head dispiritedly.

  “You look terrible,” the cardinal said softly. “You could use a doctor.” He chuckled ironically, lit a cigarette from the gold lighter held by Sandanato.

  “Ah, Giacomo, I feel terrible.” Cassoni slumped down on the edge of the old wooden desk. “And it’s not entirely this ungodly hour, either.”

  Guillermo Cassoni was Pope Callistus’s personal physician. It was D’Ambrizzi who had recommended Cassoni to the Holy Father when the headaches had begun two years before.

  “You’ve mixed up someone’s X rays?” the cardinal inquired with a smile.

  “Far worse, Eminence,” Cassoni said. “I have not mixed up the X rays, the brain scans, and all the rest of it.” He shifted on the edge of the desk and frowned at the cardinal. “Our gamble, yours … we have lost, my friend. The Holy Father cannot possibly last much longer. The brain tumor”—he shrugged—“it’s out of control. He should be in the hospital by now. It amazes me that he has not begun to act … well, erratically. I know, I know, he must remain where he is. He must endure as long as possible. We must increase the medication … but we are talking in terms of weeks now. A month, six weeks, Christmas maybe …”

  “This is inconvenient,” the cardinal said.

  Dr. Cassoni laughed harshly. “It’s not my fault, Giacomo. You’re in charge of the Department of Miracles. His Holiness needs one—”

  “Everybody dies, my friend. Death is nothing. But when you die, that can be important. There is so much to do before—”

  “And so little time,” the doctor said. “It is a common complaint. I hear it every day. Death so often comes at an inconvenient time.”

  The cardinal clucked softly, nodding.

  Monsignor Sandanato heard them going on and on about pain, degrees of incapacitation, names of drugs, side effects. He wanted to scream. But he listened. The three of them in the little room, in the run-down hospital, were the only three men in Rome so close to the truth of the pope’s condition. Not even the subject himself had heard it quite so straight. At such a time, to know could be an immense advantage. Time was so desperately short. There would be a new pope soon. It had to be the right man.

  On the way back down the hallway they passed the men in the bloody surgical gowns. They were talking about tennis and didn’t bother to nod at the priest and the old man. Monsignor Sandanato smelled the blood as he passed.

  The morning was still gray but colored by a faint, light-refracting mist hanging in the air when they left the little hospital. A puffy black cat sat on the roof of the Fiat and left only after de
termined urging by the cardinal. The flat wet tracks dotted the hood’s paintwork.

  “Take me to the country, Pietro,” the cardinal said. “Take me to Campo di Maggiore.”

  The cardinal always enjoyed the sight of Rome at first light. This morning they passed the Castello Sant’ Angelo, where Pope Clement VII had taken refuge from his enemies in 1527. The cardinal always felt a certain sympathy for poor old Clement, beset by French armies and who knew what else. All that Clement was trying to do was hold on to his power. It was all that any pope ever tried to do and now the Church was beset yet again, enemies scaling the ramparts, pikes in hand. The murders were on his mind, culminating with the three Americans. God’s plan? he thought bitterly.

  From the backseat the cardinal saw Sandanato watching him in the mirror. He smiled and folded his hands in his lap and watched the countryside flashing past, not really seeing it. He knew it, he could see it with his eyes closed. But now he was thinking, and he thought best with his heavy-lidded eyes drooping and his mind disengaged from the surroundings. He had put Sherlock Holmes aside.

  The cardinal trusted Sandanato more than any other man he knew. And he took some degree of personal pride in the younger man, like a sculptor might take in a statue which was wholly his own creation, which had turned out just as he had hoped in his dreams it would. Yes, Monsignor Sandanato was the cardinal’s man. And if the old man didn’t trust him completely, it was simply that he knew there was ho such thing as perfect trust. Never. Men who trusted too much came to early graves.

  It had been a long climb from the roadside.

  Everything—the car, the trees, the road, their clothing—was covered with a fine patina of dust, which reminded the cardinal of time spent years before on Sicily. Only there the dust had been ochre and red and the sun had left the old dogs dying in the streets.

  Sandanato took the cardinal’s arm when he stumbled on a stone and together they climbed out of the bright sunshine into the shade and sat beneath a gnarled tree as old as Christendom. It was cool in the shadow of the woods, and the valley below swept away in the day’s brightness, a stream flowing cold and blue, on either side a clean green carpet studded with the odd bit of livestock. A sheep or two, some cows grazing, a man moving slowly as if in a dream. The opposite slope was rock-strewn. The entire scene waited for a landscape painter to do it justice and, the cardinal reflected sadly, justice would no doubt be a hopelessly ordinary daubing sold cheaply to a tourist from a roadside stand.

  They sat beneath the tree.

  “Would you like some of the wine? A bottle of beer? Anything?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” the cardinal said. “Just sit down and relax. You need to calm down—you’ve been under quite a strain.” He was referring to the American trip. “You should always carry a mystery novel with you, Pietro. It passes the time better than your missal or contemplation of the eternal verities. The stories are not demanding, and one can think and read simultaneously. But then, I’ve told you that before. And now”—he looked casually around the hillside—“we are alone. Out of the range of microphones, aren’t we? Now I must hear everything about your trip to Princeton.”

  They had come there first twenty years earlier, this lovely spot where a sixteenth-century diplomat from Naples, Bernardo di Maggiore, was ambushed by Aragonese sympathizers and accused of siding against them in a conflict with the pope. Despite his forthright explanations, he was disemboweled while alive during a day-long ritual and nailed to an olive tree to serve as a warning to those who would oppose the House of Aragon. For his final services to the papacy, he was canonized, made a martyr, and subsequently forgotten.

  Behind the breeze rising from the valley, Sandanato almost heard the cries of Bernardo di Maggiore, imagined the twisted faces of his tormentors, the victim’s final willingness to be slaughtered and rendered and drawn and left a mere scrap of what had once been human but was now something more, something immortal. He might even have died for something important, an idea with meaning, but no one now recalled.… Immortality required no great ideas, after all.

  The cardinal listened to Sandanato’s report. While he took it in he opened a bottle of Chianti and split off a chunk of bread from a fresh loaf. Sandanato talked quietly while they munched and drank and ate cheese. The cardinal kept himself well within check, but the story angered and frustrated him. Death was robbing him—murder was robbing him and he hated it. His own death would have troubled him less; but he was unable to accept the death of his hopes, the commitment he’d made so long ago to the Church. He took a deep swallow of the wine which was so pure it could never give you even a headache. He wiped his mouth. He would have to work fast before the machinery jumped the rails, went hurtling into the darkness. He turned to Monsignor Sandanato.

  “All right,” he said, making a steeple of his hands before his Borgia face. “Now tell me about this Ben Driskill … and what part our Sister Elizabeth is playing in this dangerous game. It’s no place for a woman, Pietro.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me—he was stabbed by the priest while you were just standing there?” She couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  The breeze across the piazza snapped at the fringe on the umbrellas over the tables and patted at the leaves of the palm trees. The exhaust fumes hung like old mourning lace over the traffic. The lunchtime sun was warm for autumn, glowing in a painterly manner behind the haze. The outdoor café was busy, but its restrained quiet was an oasis in the buzz and blur of Rome.

  Monsignor Sandanato had called her the day before from his office at the Vatican and she’d been eager to accept his luncheon invitation. Now she sat with her mouth open, shocked at the story he’d blurted out. He was looking very crisp and calm, but the eyes gave him away, deeper than ever in the purple sockets, and he’d consumed half a bottle of wine by the time she’d arrived. He was choosing his words with care, as if he were carefully editing himself as he went along. It was always the same with the priests: they watched themselves in her presence—she was a journalist and a woman, two of the most dangerous things in the world.

  “No, no, I was way across the ice. I didn’t notice anything until it was too late, then all I saw was someone else out for an evening of skating—it’s a small river or stream that broadens behind the house and the orchard … it must have been the first skating of the season.” He broke off a bit of the herbed fish with his fork and nibbled. “He was gone by the time I reached Ben.… Ben was down on the ice, bleeding. I helped him to the house. So much blood—”

  “But he’s all right now? You stayed in Princeton to make sure—”

  “Yes, yes, of course. He’s recovering; it was a bad wound.” He pointed awkwardly to his back and side. “Luckily it didn’t touch any of the crucial organs … and his father is recovering, too, but he’s an old man, it’s harder.”

  She met his eyes staring determinedly into hers when she looked up. Something about his emotions lay close to the surface, as if the touch of a fingertip might cause him a kind of paralyzing agony. What was he seeking in her eyes? What was he leaving unspoken? She remembered again what Ben Driskill had said: he loves you.

  “So it was a priest who stabbed him?”

  “I can only repeat what Driskill said. I wasn’t close enough to see. He said it was the priest, the silver-haired man who was seen at the Helmsley Palace. Driskill says it has to be the “same man.” He shrugged. A Vespa snarled nearby and sped away into the traffic. The white-jacketed waiters moved elegantly among the tables, above it all.

  “But you didn’t see the priest for yourself?”

  “How could I, Sister? I was too far away at first and then I was trying to keep from falling down getting to Driskill—”

  Sister Elizabeth sighed and put her cutlery aside. The delicate slices of veal lay almost undisturbed on her plate. She sipped the Orvieto, keeping her eyes disengaged. He had a way of holding you with his eyes. Martyr’s eyes, suffering.

  “The who
le thing grows more and more insane,” she said. “Whose bright idea was it to go skating in the first place? Ben told me he hates skating—”

  “I admit it was my idea. It seemed—”

  “I know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Forget it. Bad joke. So it was your idea.”

  “I thought it would be good exercise. A way to clear our heads. How could anyone know this could happen?”

  “What bothers me, Monsignor, is how did the priest know that Ben Driskill was going to be out there skating?”

  “Surely he couldn’t have known, Sister. No, I’ve thought about that. He must have meant to attack Driskill in the house … Then he saw him, the golden chance, and he took it. Getting the skates was a simple matter—they were just inside the back door to the house, and he had been that way before, after all.” The sun had moved, was striking the top of his head, polishing his thick black hair, making a triangle across his forehead like a birthmark.

  “When he broke in and stole Val’s briefcase—yes. That must have been what happened. But, God, the luck!”

  “Good or bad?” Sandanato mused, “Well, maybe there’s a silver lining. It was a bad wound. He might have died, but he didn’t. Maybe surviving will change his mind.”

  “Change his mind?”

  “About going after the killer himself—that’s the real insanity.”

  “Is that what you think, Monsignor?”

  “He wouldn’t stand a chance. Only another killer might have any chance at all. Maybe a close call will change his mind.”

  “I wonder …”

  “Well, I would certainly think again if someone stuck a knife in my back.”

  “I wonder if that’s the effect it will have on him. He’s a stubborn man, very determined. Have you thought that it might just strengthen his resolve?”