The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

“And Val came all the way to Egypt to see him.”

  “So it would seem.” She looked at her watch. “I must attend to an appointment, Mr. Driskill. But if you have any other questions—” She gave a small Gallic shrug. “Or if you just want to talk, please, call me.”

  She gave me the address of Richter’s office. As soon as I’d left her office I missed her. I found myself hoping I’d come up with a question or two.

  The dingy gray warehouse of Global Egypt Import Export squatted among others of its ilk, one in a flotilla of froglike structures minus any indications of lilypads, jammed against the commercial harbor. Cargo ships, scruffy and nondescript, sat pierside amid the rusty shafts of motorized cranes. Loading, unloading, shrieking gears, belching smokestacks, the smell of oil and gasoline, dissonant Arabic shouts, the sounds of German and English and French, all yelling. If you closed your eyes it might have been any industrial waterfront in the world. And then someone would begin screaming in Arabic and it would all come back into focus.

  Klaus Richter must have been in his early sixties but was built like a Mercedes—to last. He wore his thick white hair in a brush cut probably no different from the old days in the Afrika Korps. He had a dark golfer’s tan, bleached-out yellowish eyebrows, a gold Breitling wristwatch that told everything but the World Series scores, and on his feet Clark’s desert boots. He wore an old, immaculately laundered bush coat and a pale blue chambray shirt open at the neck with wiry white hair poking over the top button. His khaki slacks had a sharp crease. When his secretary showed me in he was lining up a putt on his green carpet. She and I stopped short, he sank the putt into the little tin device. When he hit it there was a clicking ping sound I’d heard before.

  “Julius Boros putter,” I said.

  He looked up, smiling broadly. “Julie gave me the putter twenty years ago. I bought him in an auction, some tournament or other. He won, gave me one of his putters. Best I’ve ever owned.” He was still smiling but his eyes were growing inquisitive. “Do we have business, my friend? Or shall we just talk golf?” He had a German accent but I’d have bet he spoke several languages. I introduced myself, said my call was personal, and he nodded to the secretary to leave us.

  He crossed the large paneled office to his golf bag and slid the putter into its tube. “I’ve played golf everywhere, even at Augusta and Pebble Beach. All the great links in Scotland. And where do I live? The world’s biggest sandtrap!” It was a well-practiced line and he smiled at it. He looked out the window for a moment at the ships and the cranes and the forklifts and the workmen, then turned back to me. “What may I do for you, Mr. Driskill?”

  “I understand my sister came to see you not long ago. A nun called Sister Valentine—”

  “Oh, my God! She was your sister! Oh, my dear fellow, I read about her death—”

  “Murder,” I corrected him.

  “Yes, yes, of course. What a tragedy—simply unspeakable! I had seen her, right here in this office, only a week or so before and then, there she was on television and in the papers. A remarkable woman. You must be proud of her.” He sat down behind his desk which was stacked with sales slips, bills of lading, catalogues, golf tees, golf scorecards, colored brochures. His office walls held hundreds of photographs as if memorializing each of his life’s events. I quickly picked out large shots of a very boyish Klaus Richter standing in the brilliant sunshine with his tank in the desert, another with a pyramid in the background, another holding up a silver tray at a golf club. There was a gold frame on his desk that contained a shot of what I assumed were two sons.

  “My heart goes out to you, Mr. Driskill. Truly. The sands of time are always running, are they not?” As if to illustrate his point, he picked up an hourglass nearly a foot high from the corner of the desk, turned it over, and watched the sand begin sifting to the bottom. “I have seen my share of death. Out there in the Western Desert. Valorous men cut down in their youth. On both sides. We die soon enough in the best of times, don’t we? This sand, it is sand from the Western Desert, Mr. Driskill. Always here so I will never forget the fallen.” He looked up from the hourglass. “Yes, I saw your sister.”

  “Why did she come to see you?”

  He raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. His sunburned scalp shone through the close-cropped white hair. “Well, let me think back.” He sank into his high-backed leather chair and stroked his rocklike chin. “Yes, it was my dear friend Sister Lorraine who called me about her, then sent her over. I must say I was surprised—and yes, flattered, to be frank—by your sister’s interest in this very ordinary old soldier. Did you know she was writing a book about the Church during those trying years of the war?”

  “She had mentioned it to me,” I said. The sound of a jackhammer began outside along the docks. It sounded like a heavy machine gun. “Did she come to interview you? Was that it?”

  “Yes, but I got it all wrong to begin with. I was an aide to Rommel, you see, very junior but still close to the great man. Naturally I thought she had Rommel on her mind—the field marshal, my claim to fame. But no, she wasn’t interested in the desert war, not at all. It was Paris! Paris. When I think of my war, I never think of Paris. Paris wasn’t like a war, you see. No one was shooting at me! We were an army of occupation, Paris was ours, not a city in flames … at least not for a long time. It was what you Yanks called good duty—I could have been sent to the eastern front! But your sister was collecting material about the Church in Paris during our occupation. She was using Bishop Torricelli as a central character. And I had known him during the course of my administrative duties—the Church and the Occupation HQ had need of normal liaison, just doing daily business. Trying to keep the churches free of Resistance cells.” He shrugged.

  I remembered Torricelli, the old man with the candies Val had loved. I remembered his story about my father emerging from a coal cellar somewhere—probably a church—looking like a minstrel. It was odd, at a distance of forty years, imagining a man like Torricelli trying to maneuver his way through the middle ground between Nazis and the Resistance, knowing both Klaus Richter and Hugh Driskill. Well, no one better than a Catholic bishop to do the maneuvering. If my father were to meet Herr Richter now, would they sit in club chairs and trade war stories?

  I was watching Richter as he reminisced about the old days and then my eyes were refocusing on a photograph behind him on the wall: the youthful but by then battle-hardened Klaus Richter standing with a couple of buddies on a gray Paris day with the Eiffel Tower behind them. The face leapt out at me. Turned slightly to look at the landmark, shadows filling in his eye sockets. The face.

  “Tell me,” I said, “did you ever run into a priest in Paris called D’Ambrizzi? Swarthy fellow, big nose, strong as an ox. He is a cardinal now—”

  He interrupted me with a note of surprise in his voice. “Really, Mr. Driskill, I am a Catholic—there’s no need to tell me who Cardinal D’Ambrizzi is! He is one of the most influential men in the Church today … yes, I know who he is. And I would surely remember if I’d ever met him. But no, I never did. How does he come into this? Is this significant?”

  “Not at all. Just curiosity. My sister mentioned him to me once. I wondered if you’d been in Paris at the same time.”

  He spread his hands inclusively. “We might have been, of course. There were a good many clerics and a hell of a lot of German soldiers. It sounds strange now, but we tried not to make a nuisance of ourselves. No more than was absolutely necessary. We understood how they loved their Paris. We loved it, too. Had we won the war, I can tell you one thing. Paris would have changed us, we would not have changed Paris. But the Boche was stuffed back into his cage and the result? We’ve all been Americanized!” His laughter cracked, his eyes waiting for a response.

  “Sometimes I think that’s an all-purpose excuse for the rest of the world.”

  “Perhaps.” He nodded. “Well, to return to your sister—I’m afraid I was a great disappointment to her. I knew Torricelli but only in pas
sing and I never kept any journals or diaries or letters, all the things historians love—”

  An intercom on his desk buzzed and his secretary said someone was in the outer office to see him. He looked up at me, said, “Will you excuse me for just a moment? My dock foreman needs a word with me. Please, stay right where you are. Try out my putter if you like, I’ll be with you in just a second.” He grabbed a stack of yellow sheets and went out to the secretary’s office.

  I went to look at the photographs more closely. The walls contained an incredibly detailed account of his life. I followed them from one wall to the next, and in the darkest corner of the room there was a gap, just a small space where a picture was missing. In the corner—with a long library table covered with manuals and notebooks and price lists and dictionaries in half a dozen languages and file folders and a couple of withering plants tied to stakes, with this cluttered table drawing your attention away from the photos above—the gap could have gone unnoticed for months, years. You’d have had to be looking at the photographs closely to notice it. And I was looking. And there it was. Something missing from the story of Klaus Richter’s life. And I knew where it was.

  I was admiring the Julius Boros putter when he came back. He sat down on the edge of his desk, holding a stack of white sheets, said something about the endless technicalities of running an import-export operation. He was watching the sand running through the hourglass. “Where were we?”

  “Paris.”

  “Yes, yes. Well, I was no help to your sister. She came so far …”

  “Maybe you were more help to her than you thought.”

  “Dear old Torricelli, now, there was a man the historians dream about. He was a pack rat. He kept everything, every menu and every laundry list, every memo. I would bring him papers, he’d file them. Organized, alphabetized, utterly amazing. I always thought it took a tremendous ego, don’t you agree? A man would have to believe in his own importance to preserve everything.” He sighed at the thought. It seemed to me that a man who turned his entire workplace into a photographic history of his own life had an ego of his own. But it was always easy to judge others. I thought I could find my sister’s killers. Ego was everywhere. “Your sister was so patient with me that day. I was running in and out, carrying on a telephone negotiation—she was so understanding but I’m afraid I was a great disappointment to her.”

  We went on for a few more minutes but I’d mined the vein for all I was going to get. He said he had a golf date and I thanked him for his time and left.

  I nodded to the secretary. She was receiving a package from a delivery man. It was small and flat and wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. Outside in the crowded street I saw a blue and white truck standing with the motor running. There was blue lettering in several languages on the side panel. In English it said: The Galleries of E. LeBecq.

  * * *

  The banana-nose profile. D’Ambrizzi leaning forward as if listening to what someone was whispering, the bandit’s mustache drooping darkly. A young, hard-faced man next to D’Ambrizzi: was he wearing a uniform? Something Wehrmacht about the stiff collar … The man next to him, thin-faced, harsh lines slicing his face vertically and shadows filling them in, a face of a man who passed harsh judgments, an eyebrow like a crowbar, a single thick smudge over his eyes … Then the fourth man, who had at first looked to be out of focus, indistinct … but there was something, something about him … two candles on the table, wine bottles, the picture taken with a flash attachment, casting odd shadows on the wall of painted brick behind them …

  I was sitting in a fly-specked, grimy little cantina where workmen were drinking coffee and Cokes and I was trying to keep an eye on the front and side doors of the Global Egypt warehouse. I was drinking thick hot coffee and glancing back and forth from the warehouse to the photograph Val had left for me in the drum. I smoothed it flat and thought about those four men. And I could hear Sister Elizabeth saying no, five, five men.

  Klaus Richter seemed to be a mighty swell guy. He undoubtedly played to a very low handicap and damned if he hadn’t understood how much the Parisians loved Paris. He loved all those snapshots of himself, a life of which he was proud. And Julie Boros gave him one of his customized putters. Sister Lorraine said he was a pillar of the Catholic community. Nice sense of humor, called Egypt the world’s biggest sandtrap … Helluva swell fella.

  And a liar.

  He knew D’Ambrizzi in Paris and he’d lied to me about it.

  I knew he was a liar because I’d found a picture of him in my sister’s toy drum. He was sitting next to D’Ambrizzi in the snapshot. Young, expressionless, a face that had already seen too much by the time he got to Paris. And I was pretty sure where my sister had gotten the picture.

  Val had come to Alexandria looking for a man in the picture and she’d found him. And then the man with the silvery hair had killed her.

  Klaus Richter …

  Sitting in the canteen with the sun shining bright as a new half dollar, I realized for the first time since it had begun that I was truly afraid. I was alone, thinking my own thoughts, no Sister Elizabeth or Father Dunn or Monsignor Sandanato to share them with me. The sun was shining and I was drinking a cup of high octane java and nobody had tried to kill me all day. And I was having chills because I was so damned scared. It just came over me all of a sudden. When I realized Klaus Richter was one of the men in the snapshot … and it was important enough to lie to me about. The chills made my flesh crawl. The fear was making me feel like my back was leaking, like I was soaked with blood.

  I just hated that.

  I hated being afraid. Val had been afraid …

  Klaus Richter came out of the side door an hour later. He was carrying his golf bag. He put it in the trunk of a black Mercedes four-door parked in the alleyway, got in, and drove away with the wind swirling dust and sand in his wake.

  I put the snapshot into my pocket and walked back across the street. I found the secretary away from her desk and the door to Richter’s office open. Somebody was pounding up a storm in his office. I went to the doorway. The secretary had a hammer and was leaning over the library table flailing at the wall.

  I knocked on the door and said, “Excuse me.” She jumped back, turned around with the hammer in her hand, mouth open in surprise. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.

  “I hit my finger,” she said, shaking her hand. “But”—she smiled with wide, dark red lips in a dark face—“I would have hit it even without your help.” She recognized me. “You just missed Herr Richter. He won’t be back now until tomorrow.”

  “Golf, I’ll bet.”

  “Of course. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “It’s not so important, but I thought I might have left my pen behind me.” It was weak but what the hell? “Here, let me do that hammering for you.”

  She held out the hammer and pointed to the nail. It was right where I’d hoped it would be. “What kind of pen?”

  “Fountain pen. Big old Mont Blanc.” I leaned over the table and pulled the bent nail from the wall, steadied another one, and drove it in with two quick blows. “And the picture?”

  She was unwrapping the brown paper package. She folded the paper back and held up the small framed photo. It was a twin of the one in my pocket. I took it from her and she smiled again, shyly. “I’m so glad you weren’t Herr Richter,” she said. “He’s very particular about his photographs, and I wanted to get this one replaced before he noticed it was gone. I put plants and stacks of things over here hoping he wouldn’t see—”

  “What happened to the original?” I’d hung it on the nail and straightened it, filling the empty space. I knew Val had taken it, I could see her spotting it and while Richter had been running out of the room conducting his negotiation slipping it into her Vuitton briefcase. But why? What was so damned important about that picture?

  “I’d never say this to Herr Richter,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “but I’m sure the wo
man who comes in and cleans the office knocked it down while dusting. The glass was cracked, probably, and instead of admitting it, she threw it away—She claims to know nothing, of course. Fortunately Herr Richter had another copy in his photo files. So it’s been a race to get it framed and back on the wall before he noticed.” She was following me around as I pretended to look for my pen. Finally I got down on my knees, slipped it out of my pocket, and “found” it under the desk.

  She saw me out, thanking me for the help. I told her I’d enjoyed every minute of it. I could almost feel Val beside me, patting my shoulder, calling me a goof.

  But what was the big deal about the snapshot?

  It tied Klaus Richter, a legitimate businessman in Alexandria, to D’Ambrizzi forty years before in Paris. During the Occupation. But what made that so important? Why did he lie about it? And why had Val left it for me? What did it have to do with murdering her?

  Back at the Cecil a message was waiting. Sister Lorraine had called, wanted me to call her back. I went up to my room, washed my face, inspected the dressing on my back, and made a gin and tonic, light on the gin. I washed down a couple of pain pills. Stood at the window watching late afternoon settle over the water and the square with the huge statue in the center. The sound of the trams and the buses at Ramli Station, the cool wind blowing steadily off the sea. I finished my drink, staring out over the harbor, watching the shadows lengthen and the lights come on along the Corniche. To my left a yacht club glowed like the promised land where we could all go and have a wonderful, perfect night. So why did Richter have to lie to me? A simple truth and I might have shaken my head at the mystery of Val’s quest and maybe, maybe I might have given up …

  I was way out at the edge of the circle. I was still out there where it was gray and the lights of safety beckoned. I could still say the hell with it and go home. I had one lying German and nowhere else to turn. Egypt wasn’t yielding up much. I supposed I could go back to Richter, confront him about the photo.… I could keep pushing toward the darkness at the center of the circle, the black hole that had swallowed my sister.… That’s where the secrets were, where the answers were. How much did I want to know the answers … would they bring me happiness and peace? And a gentle eternity for my little sister?