The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  I went over and over what Gabrielle LeBecq had told me about her father, the Nazi loot, the men in the picture—all the hopeless jumble of lives lived over four or five decades. It was all too complicated. I couldn’t make it come together and result in the murder of my sister. Which was why I was trying to find LeBecq. I felt deep in my weary bones that he was a man on the edge and that I could crack him, push him over, and then dash around and catch him … and make him tell me more. Someone had to tell me more. Somewhere along the line I would have heard enough and I would know why my sister had been murdered. LeBecq was what I had to work with. If he hadn’t run to the desert I might have written him off. Might have. But once he ran, I had to go after him.

  The road had been built during the North African campaign forty-odd years before, had lain in the sun and wind ever since, and every year’s hardness was being driven like stakes into my wound. I clamped my jaw, left my fingerprints in the rusty, dusty dashboard, and prayed for deliverance. Abdul’s truck had been left behind by the retreating Italians. They knew what they were doing then and age had done nothing to improve the old heap. The ride reminded me of something that had made me throw up all over my uncle at a county fair once. But it was the only way to get to the monastery of St. Christopher unless you wanted to walk. As the man said, I might be dumb, but I’m not crazy. The back of my shirt was sticky. I hoped to God it wasn’t blood.

  “How much farther?” I screamed over the clanging, but Abdul merely hunched over the steering wheel, grunted, and chewed on his soggy, long-deceased cigar. I squinted through the flies mashed on the cracked windshield, but the road was hidden by blowing dust and sand. Even behind dark glasses I felt my eyeballs getting sunburned. Windburned. Sandburned. I picked up the canteen from the bench seat between us, burned my fingers on the shiny aluminum, sipped the scalding water to keep my lips from splitting. I’d been trapped in the truck for seven hours. I wasn’t quite sure how much longer I could last. And I wondered what kind of men came to a place like this of their own free will.

  The fenders up ahead flapped at each swerve and bump, at each chasm in the road and each time the bald tires slipped off into the sand and had to be yanked and wrestled back. The truck was so pitted by sand whipped off the dunes that it looked like a testament to a Chicago gangland war. If it made it to the monastery and came apart for the last time, how would I get back? Or would I have to join up, once in and never out? Or maybe the silver-haired priest was waiting for me with his blade and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting back.

  And then I saw it, like Brigadoon gone horribly awry, taking shape behind the blowing curtain of sand. It loomed, squat, close to the earth, jagged-edged, the color of the dunes beyond, gray and dirty brown. And then it was gone again.

  As the truck ground on, Abdul pointed ahead, grunted some more, then applied the remnants of his brakes, metal screeching on metal, and the bouncing and slamming stopped. Very slowly I let go of the dash, wiped my eyes with an oily rag he picked up from the floor, and put my glasses back on.

  “Road ends here,” Abdul observed, peeling a wet brown tobacco leaf from the corner of his mouth. “You walk now, buster.” He laughed enigmatically and spit through a hole in the truck where there should have been a window. “I be back tomorrow. I don’t wait. You be ready, buster. You pay now for me to come back. Abdul born long time ago, not yesterday.” He laughed again at his display of quick-wittedness, and I gave him a handful of money.

  “Abdul,” I said, “you’re a hell of a buster yourself.”

  “You can say it one more time.” He fired up the truck. I grabbed my bag and looked back up the faint pathway. His wheels spit more sand and dust all over me when he took off, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I’d arrived at the absolute asshole of the world and I was perfectly attired for the occasion.

  The monastery was a ruin. Guarded by the ghost of a tank.

  It sat, sand over the bottom treads, at an angle to the main gate leading into the compound. It bore the markings of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, faded, paint-chipped, the long cannon commanding a wide arc of the road as if it bore one last shell, one last hurrah, like an ancient veteran of the Kasserine Pass waiting to greet Patton with one last, deadly muzzle flash. It was like a dream, a bad dream, with the stench of guns and blood clinging to it. But the cannon commanded an emptiness, a desolation of sand and weary, lank, windblown palms. The enemy was long gone. History and time had claimed them all, leaving this old derelict sadder than the last Christmas tree on the lot.

  An exhausted dog hauled his bones out of the shadows of the low wall surrounding the monastery buildings. He wobbled to a halt, looked at me with a doleful expression of disappointment, and went back to the shadows. He sat down like a folding chair, slowly shaking his head at the buzzing flies. They were as big as my thumb and thought he was playing a game with them. They sounded as if they might eat him then and there, or just possibly carry him back to the wife and kids as a treat, but a few dozen peeled off and followed me into the grounds of the monastery, sensing bigger game. With the flies bouncing off my head and the fiery red heat billowing at me from all sides, I felt like I’d taken a long, mean ride to find refuge inside a light bulb.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight. A palm tree drooped over a puddle of muddy, sandy water where another dog lapped between deep breaths. Through the gritty sound of sand sifting against the walls of the main building, past the steady whine of the flies, I could just hear something else. A low rumble, voices, caught on the wind and blown this way and that. I walked toward the rumble and came to the back wall. It was louder, some kind of chanting that stopped as I came to another weathered gate hanging limply from a hinge of rope. I went on through, stopped short, stood in the shade watching the monks.

  They were burying somebody.

  I stayed in the shade, squinting, watching the shapes being distorted by the shimmering heat waves. I tried to snake my arm around to touch my back, to feel for blood. I knew it was all in my mind. I knew it was just sweat. But I couldn’t reach it. It was too stiff, too tight, and it was hurting like hell. And it was sticky. So I leaned against the wall, watching the monks, trying to make them out clearly, one at a time. I was looking for a tall monk with silver hair and eyes like the business end of that tank cannon.

  But, of course, he wasn’t there. They all seemed small and skinny or potbellied or shrunken or stooped. There was one off to the side, bearded, harsh-featured like someone from the Old Testament who believed in fighting fire with fire. He had a ramrod up his tail and I caught him, alone of the assemblage, taking notice of me. The guest of honor was reclining in a sealed wooden box beside a hole yawning in the spongy, sandy earth. The little graveyard was punctuated by plain wooden crosses, sticking up at irregular angles, speaking for the past, marking the closings of chapters. While I watched, the bearded firebringer went to the grave and began speaking. I was too far away to hear what he was saying, which was just the way I wanted it.

  Funerals. The dead passed before me, mirages in my heat and pain. My sister … Lockhardt … I felt the sweat drying on my face, the winds drying it, leaving a salty crust that cracked again and again. I felt myself cracking all over, like something very new or very old thrusting out of its cocoon, being born or emerging from a crypt.

  When the casket had been lowered into the grave and the monks had covered it over, I watched them come toward me. They came slowly, like extraterrestrials in a movie. They wore rough robes, a couple in patched trousers, one in jeans faded almost white. Ageless, deeply tanned, or sepulchrally gray, bearded, smelling of sweat and sand, which has its own peculiar scent.

  The harsh one who had spoken last passed close to me and stopped. “I am the abbot here,” he said softly, surprising me with a voice that didn’t go with the forbidding face. I tried to speak but my mouth was too dry. “You’re bleeding,” he said. He was looking past me.

  I turned. The wall where I’d been leaning was smeared with blood. I want
ed to swear but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  “Come with me,” he said. I followed him into the dim halls of the monastery of St. Christopher, the saint who wasn’t anymore.

  A big, lumbering monk I hadn’t noticed at the grave-site got me down on my belly on a table in the abbot’s rough-hewn office which was cool and dark, slashes of light entering through narrow windows in walls three feet thick. His name was Brother Timothy and he had about a seven-day stubble, the bloodshot eyes and wrecked nose of a lifelong boozer, and the touch of an angel of mercy. He peeled the stiff, sticky shirt and bandage away, bathed the wound, and said he’d seen worse. Then he laughed under his breath: “But they was dead!” The abbot was standing near the table, watching. “Brother Timothy,” he said, “is a great wit. He brightens our days.” I lay still, wishing I could take a nap, while a new bandage was fashioned and set in place with thick bands of adhesive. Brother Timothy surveyed his handiwork. He helped me into a sitting position, then busied himself with putting his medical supplies back into a cracked leather doctor’s satchel. He blew his nose on the sleeve of his faded cassock.

  The abbot sat down in a wooden chair upholstered with a frayed, thick cushion, laid his hands palm down on the plank table. “Water for our guest, Timothy.”

  The big monk shuffled off and the abbot’s eyes came to rest on me like the twin searchlights of curiosity and wariness. “No one ever comes here by chance,” he said, “so I must assume you have some reason for this visit. You’ve come a long way. It shows in your face. You have been the victim of a murder attempt, judging by the looks of your back. And the fact that you’re here at all proves you are a very determined man. What do you seek at the monastery of St. Christopher?”

  “A man.”

  “I am not surprised. Only a manhunter is likely to overcome the obstacles you’ve faced. What sort of man? And why?”

  “A man called Etienne LeBecq. You may know him simply as a man who comes here on retreat …”

  “If I know him at all.”

  I took the snapshot from my bag, handed it to him. His face showed nothing. I pointed out Guy LeBecq, hoping the resemblance might trigger something in the abbot’s mind. Brother Timothy came back with a pitcher of water and a bottle of aspirin. I gulped down four of them, swilled the cool water around my teeth, washing the sand away.

  The abbot stared at the face in the snapshot, carefully smoothed the sheet flat on the table. The only sound was the sand scraping the walls outside and the strange singing that came from the desert, wind whistling in the sand. He leaned back in the chair and regarded me steadily. “I wonder who you are,” he said obliquely.

  He was as unyielding as the landscape. I couldn’t avoid the sense I had that he was suddenly the most important man in my life. I was helpless in such a godforsaken place without his sufferance. All the flesh had tightened back against the underlay of bone: his face looked as if the surroundings had sandblasted it a long time before. He was waiting for me to fill in the blanks, so I did. He took it in, my name, the flight to Egypt. But how had I known where to come? He wasn’t going to let me stonewall him. It was his monastery and his attitude was one of a commandant, though maybe that was what an abbot always was, in the end. I told him about my sister’s murder. I told him LeBecq was someone she had seen shortly before her death. I told him I didn’t have a hell of a lot to go on but LeBecq was something.

  “This man, you say he talked with her before she was murdered.” He seemed to have a Belgian accent, if I knew what that was. Maybe French. “What will you do if you find him?”

  “Talk to him.” I shrugged, felt the calm, distant eyes regarding me with an almost academic interest, as if nothing were meaningful enough to truly engage his attention. “Can you help me?”

  “I hardly know the answer to that, Mr. Driskill. Help is not something we deal in here. Help and hope, abandoned within these walls. Let me tell you who we are, let me talk to you, Mr. Driskill, so that you will know what you have found here at St. Christopher.” He drummed his fingers preparatory to an explanation I knew better than to interrupt, “We are a kind of foreign legion of monks, only nineteen of us, who never leave, who will … never … leave this place, and a few who come and go from time to time. We pray, we wait to die, we are ignored by Rome. Sometimes a man like your Etienne LeBecq will come here on retreat, to purge the evil he senses in himself. All of us here have faced the evil in ourselves, perhaps like the man you seek. Many of us are dying—incurable illnesses of one kind or another, illnesses we choose not to treat … maybe of pure despair at man’s condition. I am the abbot of the dead, Mr. Driskill, and of the forgotten.”

  The monastery had been founded during the twelfth century, or so the story went, and in the abbot’s view it might well have been so. Founded by the Cistercians, or more accurately by a radical bishop who felt that the Cistercian reaction against the lords of Europe—the monks of Cluny—had not gone far enough. As the Cluniacs had grown more and more worldly, had seen their political and economic power multiply, the Cistercians had sought to flee that world of privilege. A monk pledged to poverty was not intended to live in a world of riches, so the Cistercians withdrew. But their credo—to work—frustrated the need to remain impoverished. Under their tillage, remote and barren valleys and hillsides flourished. The conundrum was impenetrable. Work and poverty seemed incompatible. In 1075 Brother Robert and seven monks from the monastery of St. Michele de Tonnere fled to the forest of Molesme. But by 1098 their efforts had produced a kind of earthly success that frustrated his hope to create a true monastery. Shortly thereafter another group made the perilous journey to Africa, into the silence of the northern desert, where no crops would grow, no wealth and power could possibly accrue, and built this monastery, calling it St. Bernard. Why it had become St. Christopher, and when, the abbot did not know.

  There in the heat and the rankest poverty, far from any of Europe’s worldliness, the asceticism of the monks flourished. Fanaticism, self-denial, an almost unprecedented zeal for the rejection of the flesh, became the rule by which they lived. And they did not live long. Seldom did one reach the age of thirty. More often they failed quickly, were dead in their mid-twenties. “Leave your bodies without these gates,” they importuned the young. “Only souls enter here. The flesh is good for nothing.” Likewise, nothing that was welcomed in the world was welcomed within these walls. No knowledge, no art, no literature, nothing that might normally give a man’s life meaning. No work. Nothing. Nothingness. They waited in the desert for the world to end, believing that only through their own sublime goodness, prayer, and irreducible emptiness might the world of man possibly endure.

  “In the end—it was less than half a century, not a long time, Mr. Driskill, in the end they were all gone, dead, bleaching in the sun, not mourned, not even noticed by the Europeans. After all, there was no one left to carry back the tale … it was generations before anyone from Europe came here again and found what bits of record-keeping survived.” The abbot swatted at a fly. Brother Timothy seemed to have fallen into a doze on a stool in the corner. The abbot had been talking for a long time, as if he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to communicate with someone from the outside world. Beyond his initial questions he seemed devoid of curiosity about my life: he was far more intrigued with recounting his own story, savoring it, taking its measure, evaluating its madness as he spoke.

  “The monastery stood empty then, preserved by the heat and the lack of humidity, for hundreds of years. Think of it, Mr. Driskill … centuries without a prayer, without a single monk, cleansed of all humanity by the passage of time and God’s own elements.” He smiled thinly, wet his lips, went on, a born storyteller trapped in a world without an audience.

  Finally the lost monastery—Hell’s Monastery, or, The Inferno it had become in legend—came under control of the papacy. It was used as a remote place where inconvenient monks or priests might be sent with the relative certainty that they would die in the attemp
t to get there. In any case, they would never come back. Some of them—the real hermits who wanted the supreme test, who wanted the satisfaction of renouncing everything—begged to come here, came on their own, just wandered off in hopes of reaching the place somehow. They came to die in a kind of ultimate spasm of arrogance, a complete, contemptuous rejection of the world.

  The darkness was seeping in at the narrow windows, along with the chill of the desert evening that seemed to come rolling across the wastes like a cloud of mist. The abbot had stopped talking. I wasn’t sure how long we sat in silence. He was watching me as if expecting a reaction. But he was prepared to wait a long time.

  “So why did you come here?” I asked.

  I thought he hadn’t heard me, until he leaned forward, braced his elbows on the table, and made a basket of his fingers. He watched his hands as if proving to himself that they were steady, without a tremor. Still in control.

  “The only discipline we have here,” he said almost in a whisper, “is that we impose on ourselves. We have a few hermits who stay in the desert much of the time. Most of us speak, a few don’t. But the fact is, we’re a very thin strain, weak links, we are all hiding from something here, we have no illusions about perfecting our relationship with God. We have no illusions about the states of grace. No questions about being justified. We have just stopped short of the one last sin of murdering ourselves. Why? Mainly, I suspect, because we are afraid of what awaits us on the other side … or wherever. We hide, we hide in fear and shame because that is what we have become, creatures of fear and shame.”

  His tone lacked any emotion that might have laden the words he spoke. The chill I felt made my flesh crawl and my back hurt, and it had nothing to do with the dropping temperature. I felt as if I had found the geographical equivalent of the emptiness I saw yawning in the silver-haired priest’s eyes.