The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “I came here,” he said gently, “because I deserve this place. I earned it. I saw evil in my monastery, years ago in the Dordogne, sodomy and corruption of all kinds, so I took God’s sword into these hands. I had a vision in my cell … I watched them from the corner of my eye when we were in the chapter house reading the Rule. They befouled the place. I went to their cells in the middle of the night, found them locked together, and I put an end to their corruption with my own hands. My cassock was stiff with blood.… I left on foot—in a daze—and no one came after me.… Two years later I had made my way to this place.… Unaccountably, years later, Pius XII took notice of me, letters were sent and received, and I was named abbot.”

  He didn’t say a word about LeBecq until we had concluded a sparse dinner in the dining hall. I was too tired to press the issue or even to notice much of my surroundings. The aspirin on an empty stomach had provided me with at best a fuzzy perspective. But my back pain had eased and the hole in the dike had not come unplugged, thanks to Brother Timothy.

  “Come,” the abbot said, “the night air will do you good. Then an early bed. If you don’t mind sleeping on a dead man’s pallet.” He almost winked at me.

  “What is that supposed—” But he had stood up and was leaving the table. I followed him.

  It was cold outside. We walked in silence beneath the pop-art moon in a black sky. It looked like a hole seen from the inside of a great metallic orb.

  “I know your Etienne LeBecq, of course,” he said.

  “I thought you might.”

  “He’s come to us from time to time for many years, a rather reclusive man, but I’ve spoken with him in reflective moments. A strong faith, made me feel a weakling. We would speak of the Church and its role, how each of us has a job however unexpected it might be. He never knew it, but he was a great comfort to me when I have questioned my faith … his belief in our Church abided, Mr. Driskill. But somewhere deep inside himself he carried a terrible secret. What? He never told me.” One of the dogs had followed us out into the night and had begun to sniff and dig at the sand in the valley between two of the rolling dunes. “He was here a few months ago, only for a night or two—I forget. Time means nothing here. He came and went, he didn’t ask questions. Sometimes he seemed to try to hide from his soul.… As for information, I cannot help you, Mr. Driskill. If he had a past or future, I know nothing of them. We have no worldly goods here, nothing to call our own … nothing, that is, but our individual pasts. Most of us have no future but what you can see. But our pasts, we guard them most jealously. If a man’s past has been a happy one, then why would he be in this place? And if it has been unhappy or wicked … no one wants to speak of it.”

  The dog had dug with increasing fervor, had gotten below the top layer of sand.

  “He smells death,” the abbot said, going to the dog, gently shoving him away with his foot. He saw my quizzical expression. “Here is where we found the body of one of our older men. I spoke with him only briefly, but he was a talkative man, a bit of an old woman. Then one morning he was nowhere to be seen. A few days passed, I’d known he was near the end, I wanted to give him time to die as he chose … alone in the desert. He was babbling of green fields the last time we spoke. I’m sure in his mind that’s where he died, in those green fields. Then the dog found him … apparently he had walked over the dune, composed himself, and just let go. His choice. We respect a man’s choice. The dog found him half covered with sand, his hand sticking up, looking like a tiny gravestone. So we buried him today, as you arrived.” He scratched the dog’s floppy ears, rubbed his thin, moth-eaten hide. “Why did he die as he did? God’s will, that’s all we’ll ever know … he was the lucky one, he had a good death, Mr. Driskill.”

  As he led me to the cell where I would sleep, where the late monk, fleeing from whatever secrets lay in the darkness of his past, had slept, he lit a candle. The shadows flickered against the walls of the tiny cell. A wooden cross above the narrow bed, the pervasive smell of sand and night. A blanket lay folded at the end of the bed. He surveyed the bare room. “Serviceable, if not luxurious, Mr. Driskill.”

  When he turned to leave, I said, “One more question. Just a stray thought. About another man who may have come here and then gone. Maybe returning from time to time—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he’s a priest or a monk or even a layman like LeBecq. But you would remember him … tall, very fit but in his seventies I suspect, round gold-framed glasses, silver hair combed straight back from a point in front … remarkable eyes, no bottom to them …”

  The abbot stood in the doorway, the shadows playing across his harsh features. He shared some of the fitness I’d just described and he must have been as old. But he, too, was timeless. I waited, watching him, watching a spider make its way up the wall and stop, as if to listen.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “I know such a man. Brother August … but I know nothing of him. If he is the same man, he lived here for a long time, two or three years, impervious to the toll this place takes. Said very little. Attended to his prayers. Then—it was quite astonishing—the bandit who drives the truck to bring us supplies, this scoundrel brought a letter for Brother August … this is an unheard-of event, do you understand? A letter from Rome … and then the next day he was gone, rode away with the bandit in the truck.” He shrugged.

  “I wonder, do we have the same man in mind—”

  “Striking to look at,” the abbot said. “How can I say this? He was not like the others here. He wasn’t punishing himself, he was simply going about his business, as if he were conditioning himself for something. Amazingly strong man but with very gentle manners. An educated man. Sometimes he would go into the desert for days at a time, then return, without discussion, fit as ever … sometimes he seemed indestructible … no human frailty …”

  “Yes. Brother August,” I said. “He is the man, I feel sure.” The abbot had the effect of making me talk in an unnatural manner. I couldn’t help it. I felt like a man reading lines. The news of Brother August had caught me unawares. I was struggling with the idea. Now I knew something about this man and it had come from out of nowhere. “When did he leave here?”

  “Time,” the abbot mused. “Two years ago. That would be my guess.” He shrugged again at the idea of time and its measurement.

  * * *

  I lay awake for hours, thinking, now I know something about him. The mystery is not quite so deep and dark. Brother August. Two years in this hell, then someone in Rome had summoned him … sent him on his mission. Two years later my sister and Lockhardt and Heffernan are dead. A two-year journey from The Inferno to New York and Princeton. I was bone-tired but I kept turning over bits of information, looking up from the heavy work and seeing a glitter of the knife blade, a clue, a bit of unforeseen evidence. I was too tired and too amazed at the threads of the story, too curious as to what the threads would result in, what kind of tapestry—I was too weary and too excited to sleep but too weary to sort through the mountain of facts and implications that had been accumulating all around me. I finally slept an empty sleep and came awake slowly, shivering under the thin blanket. My back was pushing uncomfortably against the wooden frame of the bed. I twisted slowly around, trying to settle myself without pulling my bandage loose, refusing to open my eyes and admit I was awake. First I thought I heard something, a scuttling sound on the packed-earth floor. What kind of creatures roam the desert at night? The nervous reaction crossed my mind: if I had to get up, what might I step on? The scuttling stopped as if something knew I’d sensed its presence. It was nearly pitch-dark in the cell. A narrow slash in the wall let in a blade of moonlight which proved inadequate once I forced my eyes open. A curtain hung at the door with the night beyond.

  Then I smelled something. Someone.

  And the hair on the back of my neck began to rouse itself.

  Someone was in the cell with me.

  As my senses began to cl
ick in, slowly, too slowly, I heard the breathing, someone trying not to make a sound. The man-smell of sweat-soaked garments moved closer. The breathing quickened. He was closing in on me. The bit of moonlight was blacked out by his shape coming closer. I saw flat on my back, I saw in memory and nightmare, the blade plunging downward at me.…

  “I’ve got a gun on you,” I croaked, hearing my voice shake. Everything stopped: the shuffling, the breathing, everything but the smell. I was afraid of something nameless and faceless, but I knew it was the priest, come to finish me off. He’d been watching me the whole time, had followed me. “Touch me, you bastard, and you die—” I was bluffing for my life. It was all a bad joke.

  “It’s Brother Timothy.” The voice was soft and high-pitched. “I bandaged your back … you have nothing to fear from me. Please, put down your gun. I have a candle. May I light it? I must speak with you.”

  I heard a match scrape across a striker; the flame flared a few feet from my face. The large shape came into view. Brother Timothy smiled, his double chins cascading like falling pastries. I took my hand from beneath the blanket, pointed a finger at him and said, “Pa-choo, pa-choo.”

  He giggled like a man trying to prove he hadn’t forgotten how, then the smile faded. The candle glowed. I longed for the warmth of a real fire. “What can I do for you,” I asked, “now that you’ve scared me half to death?”

  “I had to see you alone. The abbot wouldn’t approve of my meddling, but I must. What I have to tell you—I haven’t told even him. But I heard you telling him the story about this man you call LeBecq and I saw his picture … and I knew I had to tell you what I saw.…” He was panting hard, his face glistening with sweat even in the cold. He licked his lips, went back to the doorway and stuck his head out past the curtain, ducked back in again. “He’s everywhere,” he said apologetically, “always noticing things. There are stories about the abbot, stories of second sight … nonsense, of course, but I do wonder who he is,” he mused almost dreamily, then lurched back to the present. “We must not waste time.” He wiped his brow on his voluminous sleeve, looked at me with his bright little eyes.

  “Go on,” I said, pulling the blanket tight.

  “The man LeBecq, I have seen him. He is out in the desert now. You can see him. I’ll take you to him. You can see for yourself.”

  * * *

  I followed his immense bulk out of the monastery compound, past the cells where the monks groaned and snored and muttered in their sleep. The moonlight might have been coating the scene with ice. The whole thing had the look of a road company Fort Zinderneuf. The wind kept a steady shifting of sand nipping at you, swirling up into your eyes. Outside the gate the huge Panzer tank loomed ghostlike, casting a strange moon-shadow with its long snout of cannon barrel.

  Timothy set off at a brisk pace, keeping to the hard-packed sand. I couldn’t judge the distance, just kept my head tucked down and followed my guide and tried to pretend my back didn’t hurt. We passed straggly palm trees, crossed between rolling dunes, always making good time. After a half-hour march Timothy stopped, plucked at my arm. “Just ahead in the flat beyond the next rise. I’ll take you straight to him.”

  Next thing I knew we’d crested the ridge of sand and I was looking at the airplane I’d seen in the photograph LeBecq had kept in his office at the gallery. It looked frozen and silver, glistening with condensation in the moonlight. I didn’t see LeBecq. What was he doing staying out in the desert when he could have stayed at the monastery? Timothy had slogged down to stand beside the plane, leaning with one hand on the wing. He beckoned to me, called something which the wind tossed away.

  On my way down the dune I saw LeBecq. He was sitting on the sand, leaning back against the nosewheel. He wasn’t paying any attention to us. It was the middle of the night. He was sleeping and whatever sounds we were making the wind was blowing away.

  When Timothy went to stand in front of LeBecq, pointing at him, urging me to hurry, I realized something was wrong.

  When I circled around the wingtip I saw that LeBecq’s head was angled oddly. There was a black hole in his temple, a small inward-turned crater. A small .22-caliber pistol lay on the sand near his hand. His mouth was open, making a tiny circle. Sand insects were crawling in and out of his mouth. Then I saw the hole in his temple appear to move, but it was more insects drawn to the blood. He was beginning to swell. Sitting out in the sun for a day or two doesn’t do a corpse a bit of good. His toupee had come slightly askew from the jolt of the slug.

  I bent down, scooped up the gun, and dropped it into my jacket pocket.

  Timothy had found him earlier in the day, but when he’d gotten back to the monastery there was the other funeral and then I had wandered in and the rest of the day had gotten away from him.

  “Your friend put an end to his troubles,” Brother Timothy said. “They must have weighed very heavily on his mind. For a good Catholic, too.… It’s too bad. I must bring him back now.” He leaned down and began to tug at the lapels of LeBecq’s jacket.

  “I’d go easy with that,” I said. “He’s pretty ripe. You’d be better off to come back tomorrow, a couple of you, put him in a bag or something so he doesn’t sort of all run out.”

  “You’re right.” He nodded his huge round head. “Then we’ll bury him.”

  “What about notifying his daughter?”

  “He has a daughter?” Brother Timothy looked up at the moon. “The abbot will know what to do.”

  We walked back to the monastery more slowly than when we’d been coming the other way. One of the hounds had wakened and was wandering around sniffing the night air. He seemed glad to see us. That was the level on which I was noticing things. In my mind I kept seeing the hole in LeBecq’s head … the blackened, singed hair that belonged to my sister Val.…

  “Brother Timothy?”

  “Yes, Mr. Driskill?”

  “I killed that man back there.”

  “You did?”

  “I murdered him just as surely as if I’d pressed the gun to his head. I was his personal nightmare, all his sins coming back to haunt him, and I wouldn’t go away. I was all his fears and sins wrapped up in one neat package.… I was nemesis dropping in out of the blue and he ran like a crazy man into the desert … and then he sat down and looked his fate straight in the eye and knew there was just the one way to get free of all of it.…”

  “Was he a terrible man?”

  “No, not terrible at all.”

  “Now he’ll burn forever in a fiery pit.”

  “Do you really believe that, Timothy?”

  “I was taught that.”

  “But do you really believe it?”

  “Do you really believe you killed him?”

  “I killed him. Yes.”

  “Well, I believe he’ll burn forever in a fiery pit.”

  “It’s a question of faith, then?”

  “Faith. That’s right. A man who kills himself burns forever.”

  I may have slept later on. The night was endless. I thought about everything all over again and no matter how I worked it out I came up with the same result. But for me the poor bastard would still be alive. Maybe it was my Catholic conscience. I thought about Sister Elizabeth, about how she’d betrayed my trust, but that didn’t seem like such a deal breaker now. She hadn’t killed anybody. My last thought that night was about her, and then my dreams, too. I wanted to tell her what I had done.

  I wanted her to hear my confession.

  I was waiting for Abdul, saw his dust cloud, then heard the shrieks of his infernal machine before I actually glimpsed the thing itself. The sun was burning straight down, leaving no shadow where I stood with my bag, shielding my eyes with a hand for a visor. The past twenty-four hours had taken forever. I felt like a leper. No one had said good-bye, not even Brother Timothy. I knew it was just their way, nothing personal, but it made for a lonely departure. I took one last look at the forgotten place, shimmering insubstantially in the heat, looking as if it m
ight just evaporate one day and no one would mourn it or its company of the damned. Then I climbed into the truck where Abdul, my deliverance, waited for me, grinning with his uneven, sand-colored tooth stumps and the soggy cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth.

  As we parted the blowing dust and sand like a sinking tugboat in stormy seas, I asked him if he remembered a man he’d picked up and described Brother August. He nodded, spat, told me that nothing was free, most certainly not information. I gave him some more money and he stuffed it into his shirt pocket, told me I was a damn good buster. He was wearing a ratty old safari shirt and a straw hat with what looked like a bullet hole in the crown. He laughed like the bandit he was and scratched a wet armpit, nearly losing control of the truck.

  He remembered the silver-haired man. But he’d driven him to a village on the Mediterranean and left him there. He hadn’t seen him since. I’d paid for nothing. But it didn’t really matter. I knew what I needed to know about Brother August. He got his orders from Rome.

  5

  Having worked her way through the horrors of the House of Vespasiano Sebastiano and the suppression of the Tuscan monastery of the assassini, Sister Elizabeth dreaded returning to the nunciature of Venice fondo. It was claustrophobic, oppressive with the evil and the bloodletting. She was, therefore, contemplating how next to approach the problem of the Secret Archives when among her own papers she found the sheet from Val’s folder that was inscribed with what looked like a simple, impenetrable code. She’d never really paid any attention to it before, but now she did.

  SA TW IV SW. TK. PBF.

  Elizabeth doodled on another sheet, copying the cipher again and again, trying to think with Val. What had she meant? She slept on it, woke up turning it over in her mind. She couldn’t shake it from her memory. It was like the phone number of a lover, imprinted on your brain, which made her smile at the memory of a long-ago college-boy lover. He might as well have been a contemporary of those Renaissance princes she’d been reading about. All a long time ago, long gone. History.