The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  She began to figure out the code during the walk to Vatican City.

  Let’s say SA meant Secret Archives. Then she thought she knew what TW meant.

  She went to Monsignor Petrella, the prefect, and asked him to take her to the Tower of the Winds.

  When they’d reached the elegant room with the zodiac on the floor, Petrella cast an anxious look about the contents. “You realize how unusual it is to leave anyone to browse through the buste here. It is, to all intents and purposes, never done. But for Sister Valentine an exception was made. A friend of the late Mr. Lockhardt …” He shrugged and that said it all. “He was such a friend to us here at the Archives. The same exemption will be made for you, Sister.”

  “I am in your debt, Monsignor. Val spent a good deal of time up here, did she?”

  “Yes, she seemed to have—let me see, what did she say? Ah, yes, she said she’d ‘struck a vein’ here.”

  “Then I will mine it, Monsignor. If I can find it.”

  Monsignor Petrella nodded, smiling thinly.

  Alone she surveyed the room, trying to understand the remainder of Val’s code. Maybe it had nothing to do with the Tower of the Winds. But then, maybe it did.

  She couldn’t find a Roman numeral IV that seemed relevant. That stopped her for a while. The fourth bookcase? Fourth from where? You had to have the location of the first to find the fourth.…

  Stymied, she spent several hours searching fruitlessly through the folders, leaving her sweaty, dusty, and discouraged. Maybe she was on the wrong track altogether. She wondered if Driskill was having this much fun poking around Alexandria in search of another of Val’s trails. Fun! She wondered about his wound, then forced him out of her mind.

  But she did keep pushing her way through the material, randomly searching for something, anything. Assassini. That was her goal, had to be, it was all she had to go on. Assassini and five dead men on Val’s list. Five dead but one still left alive. Erich Kessler. Why had Val thought he’d be the next to die?

  She continued picking through the folders aimlessly, doubtful now about the point of what she was doing—combing endlessly through bits and pieces of papers, hoping for another reference to assassini. In her heart she knew it was a fool’s job. But she wasn’t ready to quit yet. She might as well get it out of her system. A few more wasted days, so what? The world wouldn’t stop turning.

  She stood up, brushed herself off, as Val must have before her, and went to the window, gazed out over Vatican City, suddenly unsure of what day of the week it was, uncertain as to whether she had attended mass a few hours before, or had that been yesterday? In this unguarded moment she was disconcerted by recognition of a quality she’d shared with Val—the special ability to submerge herself in a job to the exclusion of the outside world. It had always been her way, from the time she was little. Work had always taken precedence over the rest of her life. Val, however, had been able to encompass more. She’d submerged herself in a career even more demanding than Elizabeth’s, but she had also found a way to cope with Curtis Lockhardt. But that was Val’s way, Val’s life. Elizabeth felt the breeze on her face at the window, the warmth of the sun. She wasn’t Val and she couldn’t live her life as Val had lived hers. But she had to face the limitations she’d imposed on her life—what they had kept her from.… Suddenly she thought of another way of looking at Val’s code.

  Forget IV. Go on to SW. The only SW she knew was the abbreviation for southwest. And the tower room was based on the zodiac and the compass. She got her directions straight and turned to the southwest corner. There, crammed between bookcases, was a small leather-strapped trunk reminiscent of a man’s fancy hat box of the nineteenth century. TK. Trunk. Val!

  PBF.

  She undid the straps and carefully lifted the hard leather lid.

  There, neatly packed in its own carton, was the original typescript of Pryce Badell-Fowler’s 1934 manuscript, Ecclesiastical Power and Policy. It had apparently gone uncatalogued for half a century, had slipped through the nets of the hundred-years rule, had been stuffed into the inconspicuous little trunk, left to gather dust and be found in some distant future by a scholar or an attendant yet unborn.

  She knelt beside the trunk, picked up the manuscript, stared at the name. Pryce Badell-Fowler. PBF. Murdered in his converted barn near Bath only six months before. One of the five …

  Clipped to the title page were two sheets of the author’s stationery, his name simply engraved at the top, under it Bath—England.

  The first sheet was dated 4 January 1931, a letter to Pope Pius XI, essentially a bread-and-butter letter thanking His Holiness for arranging “access to certain materials heretofore untapped by scholars.”

  The second letter, dated 28 March 1948, addressed to Pope Pius XII, observed that the author had only to take “one or two final steps before completing at long last my second volume. As you know so well, I have had to confront the issue of the Church’s use of professional assassins to further policy in the past. I appreciate your reserve in discussing such matters for attribution, but I am also grateful for your candour in our less formal conversations. I need hardly add that I fully appreciate the sensitivity which arises when we pursue this matter into our present century, as in the matter of the late Benito Mussolini. I can only hope that you, Holiness, in your great wisdom, can understand equally my need to press on in my researches.”

  The letters were a window into the past. Mesmerized by the almost palpable presence of the Englishman in the room, she began reading, skimming, fluttering the pages, hoping. Near the end of the manuscript she found it.…

  Little is known, or can be fully documented, about the assassini (Badell-Fowler wrote). They lope through the darker chapters of medieval and Renaissance sub-history like the misshapen wild dogs who prowled the outskirts of Rome and were known at times to feast on the flesh of the unwary, the infirm, or slow of foot, or those whose fearlessness was born of a mistaken belief in their own invulnerability.

  Some of these scoundrels and bravos were pledged until death to the popes: these men were the pope’s assassins, according to what little written evidence has survived the Church’s determined efforts to erase them from history. While rumors continue to persist that documentary evidence exists hidden deep in the dank recesses of certain remote monastery chambers, none has come to light within living memory.

  The pope’s assassini reportedly came into being during that period when the Church, in obsessive secrecy, built and then solidified the power of the Papal States. During the extraordinarily corrupt and bloodstained reigns of Pope Sixtus IV, Pope Innocent VIII, and finally Pope Alexander VI, the father of Cesare Borgia, the assassini flourished, torturing and murdering political enemies of the papacy, not only in Rome but throughout the more far-flung city-states of Italy, as well.

  They did their heinous work by means of poison, the dagger, strangulation. Among their many victims, the Colonna and Orsini families of Rome, who sought to undermine the Church’s authority so that their own power and influence might grow, come most readily to mind. Both families were decimated by the assassini and finally forced to flee before the lines were wiped out entirely—men, women, and children.

  It has been argued that a more terrible and more fanatically dedicated secret organization has never existed within western culture. The assassini risked everything in the service of the pope. They must not be confused with the everyday street ruffians of the day who ran nearly unchecked throughout Rome, nor with the killers-for-hire who were employed by all but the lowliest of families needing murder done in their behalf. The assassini were cut from bolts quite different in quality: they were often highborn, sometimes even dukes and members of the clergy who had bought their offices with awesome, arrogant ease, and sometimes clerical zealots who saw their work as the ultimate service one might render the Church.

  One of the foremost of the assassini is said to have been none other than the bastard son of Ludovico Sforza, senior statesman of Mila
n. As the various city-states aligned themselves with Rome and participated financially, the list of those contributing to the treasure of the assassini grew … always in absolute secrecy. Very often the assassini drew from the ranks of the illegitimate sons, or the second and third sons of a great house, and frequently they called upon members of the clergy to carry out specific tasks. Apparently their numbers grew quickly. The Papal States had to be protected at any cost.

  Not only did Cesare Borgia roam the streets at night with his armed guards in a kind of blood lust, carrying out vengeance in the name of the Church, but others like him followed his example.

  During the reign of Pope Julius II, a benign and unifying pope, the presence of the assassini began to fade. They went into a kind of eclipse, slipping between the cracks of history. For several centuries they were heard of only sporadically, then only at times when stresses threatened to pull the Church apart.

  During the Jesuit Inquisition in central Italy the assassini resurfaced, and for a time the mere mention of the word was enough to cause fear and trembling among the enemies of papal policy.

  But then, the Inquisition having ended, they were gone. They had slipped away again, disappeared into the pit of darkness from whence they had come, where they lay still, in the blackness and stench, waiting.

  There was nothing more about the assassini, only that brief teaser for what Elizabeth presumed the second volume would have dealt with. Badell-Fowler’s evaluation was certainly open to question, but then, what Church historian’s were not? Church history was a welter of contradictions by its nature; stories were twisted by the fires of jealousy, vengeance, and long-held familial hatreds. Elizabeth had a tough time imagining Cesare Borgia roaming through the streets in a drooling blood lust since, in her view, he was one of the most able and civilized men of his time. It sounded to her as if Badell-Fowler had been badly taken in by the bad press the Spaniard had gotten in the Italian press of the day. Better to look at Cesare as what he was, the model for Machiavelli’s prince.

  But that hardly mattered.

  It was the continuing thread of the assassini that fascinated her.

  Following the final page of the manuscript, she found a sheet of Badell-Fowler’s notes, handwritten in black ink, in a firm, bold script. They were cryptic but the subtext was there.

  1949.

  How many of them were there? All dead? NO!

  Wartime activities.

  Simon the leader?

  Pius Plot …

  Betrayed by …?

  Elizabeth tried to sit quietly and make her heartbeat slow down. She didn’t know what most of it meant, not specifically, but she felt as if she were somehow among them, the assassini. Val had read this: now they were sharing it.

  The trick now was to stay alive. She had been sucked into a maelstrom where the clergy could be recruited to do murder—Dunn may have hit it right on the button when he’d held up that piece of torn black raincoat. The man who killed Val, who came out of the night to try to kill Ben—he could be a priest, not a man in fancy dress! Badell-Fowler had believed that, Val must have known it, and now Elizabeth could almost feel them beside her, urging her on, offering what help they could. The sense of kinship was real, something almost sanctified.

  She copied the handwritten list Badell-Fowler had made.

  She sat quietly, listening to the soft, insistent mutterings of the ventilation system, the ancient currents of dry air rustling the countless pieces of paper, the pulse of the Secret Archives.

  Badell-Fowler had been killed because of what he knew about the assassini. The work of a lifetime had been destroyed in the fire. No, good sir, they were not all dead, not in 1949, and not now. Something now had made it imperative that this old man, survivor of so many years, must finally be killed.…

  Slowly a reflective smile spread across her face.

  She had no idea what Ben Driskill had accomplished, wherever he might be. But she had dragged the assassini back through the centuries where they’d been buried. She had placed them in the twentieth century, where they had gone back to work.

  Now, dammit, she could wrap it up and present it to Ben Driskill. She could prove to him that she wasn’t what he thought she was, that she wasn’t a disloyal, mindless party-line papist who swallowed her nun’s theology and cared for nothing but the Church, the Church, the Church. She’d make him understand that she wanted to find Val’s killer as much as he did. It was her quest too, wherever it might lead.

  If it was a petty reaction, a petty feeling of triumph, then so be it. She could live with that. So long as she could prove to him he was wrong about her.

  She had to tell someone. Who better than Val’s closest ally in the hierarchy of the Church? If Val were still alive, if she’d built her case to her own demanding satisfaction, she would inevitably have turned to Saint Jack himself.

  She had called Sandanato, told him she’d made some real headway on what Val had been doing, and needed to discuss it with Cardinal D’Ambrizzi. He’d gotten back to her at the office within the hour. His Eminence had cleared his evening schedule and would be delighted if she’d join him for dinner in his private Vatican apartment.

  The intervening hours were spent going over the presentation she wanted to make. In such a masculine world she was at a marked disadvantage: she could wreck her case before it was half made if she didn’t watch her step. All it would take would be a hint of female gushiness, any kind of sloppy, breathless enthusiasm. They’d love to write her off, not because they disliked or mistrusted her, but because it was a part of them, instinctive: she was a woman, a nun, and therefore no one that really mattered, not in the end. The attitude didn’t even make her angry. It was a given. She had to live with it. So she’d gathered her findings, got her shit together, as Val would have said, and imposed a cool, analytical order on her story.

  Now the cardinal and Sandanato had heard her out and the dinner dishes had been cleared. D’Ambrizzi had been attentive throughout her recital, watching her quietly from beneath his heavy, wrinkled eyelids. Sandanato had been equally quiet, barely eating any of the excellent fare provided by the cardinal’s favorite chef. He always gave the impression of running on nerve and cigarette smoke. When she finally came to a full stop and picked up her coffee cup, the cardinal shifted his massive girth and spoke.

  “It seems to me, Sister, that I remember a certain amount of controversy about this Badell-Fowler of yours, long time ago. After the war.” He was slowly rolling the cognac in the snifter, inhaling the fumes. Sandanato had lit a cigar, was rubbing one tired eye with his knuckle. “He’d written something tying the Church to Mussolini’s intelligence service. Hardly a secret! But what can you expect from an Englishman? Wasn’t he also critical of Pius XII’s German connections? Handholding with the Nazis, rumors of plundered art treasures? Some people found it all rather explosive at the time and he became rather unpopular in these hallowed precincts.” He chuckled deeply in his chest. “Then?” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Silence. These gadfly fellows have a way of just fading away. In any case, it all seemed such old news today. Nothing deader than an old scandal.”

  Sister Elizabeth leaned forward intently. “But laying aside what people thought and did then, Eminence, Badell-Fowler was murdered only months ago and his work, all of what might have gone into his second book, the assassini book—it was all burned to ashes. He was an elderly man, but they couldn’t wait for him to die. They had to kill him now.” She took a deep breath, looking for any hint of condescension in his face. Seeing none, she went on. “And the old scandals become part of accepted truth sometimes. No one would deny now that some of those less than honorable stories were quite true. The Church was up to its ears in that stuff during the war—”

  “My dear,” D’Ambrizzi said gently, “the Church has always had one foot in the muck, along with everyone else. And has always had its great and good men. Sometimes the good and the bad even coexist in the same man.” He looked at the monsign
or. “Nothing more interesting than such cases, don’t you agree, Pietro? We’ve all known such men … and the Church is always only the sum of its men. And women, of course.”

  “No one actually knows what was lost in the fire,” Sandanato said. “Why would he have waited so many decades if he’d had something as dramatic as you suggest, Sister?”

  “I have no idea. I’m just working with what I do know. We know that Badell-Fowler was seeking to learn the whole story of the assassini. We know he was one of the murder victims … and we know his work was destroyed. I believe the work was as much the target as the man himself. Don’t you both see this? Or am I crazy?” She shook her head. “No, I’m not making this up … all these people including Sister Val have definitely been killed. In less than two years. Is it possible they are not connected?”

  “It would seem on the face of it to be unlikely.” The cardinal seemed content to continue the discussion. He wasn’t shutting her up. “It’s this assassini idea that makes one skeptical.”

  “But,” she said, “someone must have known Badell-Fowler had a barn full of dynamite … explosive because it pointed at them. Is that so farfetched? Why else kill him and destroy the evidence? Val was so much smarter than I am—if I’m this far into it, where was she? She was killed for the same reason Badell-Fowler was … more or less. What I’d give to see whatever he’d compiled!” She pulled at the reins of her enthusiasm, not wanting to blow it now. “If he traced the assassini deep into this century … if he named names, names of killers within the Church—” She sank back in her heavy, ornately carved chair. “Well, just think of it! Murderous operations within the Church, directed from within the Church. Which brings us to the ultimate question, doesn’t it? Directed by whom?” She put her coffee cup down and carefully lifted her cognac to her lips, took a sip just to shut herself up.

  “The poor old assassini,” D’Ambrizzi mused, shaking his huge head. “A sturdy old bugaboo. Whipping boy of Church history. Frankly, I admit to doubting the existence of Badell-Fowler’s second volume. I’ve been around this place a long time, I think I’d have heard of such a book—I do have my sources, too, you’ll agree? No, Sister, it’s ancient history and rather questionable at that.”