The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  She didn’t want to engage in an argument with the cardinal, but she was damned if she’d just let it drop. “But what about this Simon Verginius? Who was he? And when? Are you saying Badell-Fowler was just a fool?”

  “Gullible, Sister. He was gullible. Finding what he wanted to find. It’s not an uncommon failing among a certain kind of historian. Or journalist, for that matter. As for this Simon … let me tell you about him. I was there, you see. Simon was a convenient myth, a kind of Robin Hood in those Nazi days in Paris. He had a dozen identities, hundreds of deeds attributed to him, an all-purpose hero who couldn’t have been responsible for a tenth of what they said. He wasn’t one man, he was many men. Some brave, some probably criminals, all anonymous … men who did things that are sometimes done in wartime … Your Badell-Fowler came across the stories and fell for them. Many have done so over the years. Believe me, Sister. I was there.”

  “You were there, of course,” she said meekly. “And the assassini is a myth?”

  “So long ago it hardly matters.” He smiled benevolently.

  She bit her lip, clasped her hands in her lap. “But there are murder victims now,” she said softly, figuring she might as well get it off her chest since she might not get another chance. “They’re not mythological. If, I say if, there were something to the idea of the assassini, then wouldn’t these killings be their sort of thing?” She sensed Sandanato looking away, studying his plume of cigar smoke, not wanting to be associated with her irritating theory. “Doesn’t that square with the idea that the killer in New York and Princeton was a priest? Coming from inside the Church?”

  “Yes, yes,” D’Ambrizzi barked, momentarily losing the facade of tolerant calm. “But if it comes from inside the Church, it would be coming from so high, with so much authority … I cannot believe it, Sister.”

  “But isn’t it just as likely some kind of splinter group? Based on the old assassini? Zealots? Someone bent on a reign of terror would simply need men willing to kill—”

  “Where, Sister?” Sandanato asked. “Where would one find such people? Why would one ask them to kill? Why would they be willing to do it? It seems to me too fanciful an explanation—”

  “There’s nothing fanciful about the murders of eight people,” she went on doggedly. “Somebody killed them. Somebody dressed like a priest killed at least some of them if not every damned one—”

  “But say that Badell-Fowler was killed because of his work on the assassini,” Sandanato said. His eyes reached hers through the smoke. She felt almost as if he were touching her. “What about the other four men? They had no assassini connection. Why were they killed?” He frowned, stroking his lips. “You’re constructing an enormous plot of some kind. I ask you, what could be worth it? What could it have to do with this Simon Verginius and the assassini forty years ago? What could be so important?”

  She sneaked a peek at the cardinal.

  “Who knows?” She thought she’d risk it: “Maybe the election of a new pope …”

  Silence dropped over the table like a thick fog. Dammit, now she had gone too far! It was remarkably gauche to have made the remark with D’Ambrizzi himself, perhaps the leading papal candidate, staring at her.

  The cardinal’s face finally broke into his characteristic grin. “Just like Val,” he said. “Sister, I must say you’re a thinker. A real Machiavelli—I mean that as a compliment, by the way. I can see why Sister Valentine valued your friendship so very much.”

  Sandanato poured more espresso into the tiny cups. Candle flames flickered in the drafts from the open windows. The conversation swerved away from Elizabeth’s mission and she knew the moment had passed. She didn’t know quite what to make of their reaction: obviously their skepticism about Church-centered conspiracy theories was part of the drill. But to what extent had she piqued their interest? As the conversation turned, went its own way, she viewed her surroundings again, trying to focus clearly on something, an idea nibbling at the back of her mind. The cardinal’s apartment in the Apostolic Palace was positively baroque, full of priceless antiques, paintings by several of the Italian masters. A Tintoretto which Pius had given him for his service during the war dominated the dining room.

  The tension brought on by Val’s tale from the Secret Archives had ebbed and the cardinal dipped into history, his mind running along tracks of her laying. He let his mind drift over some of the bloodier aspects of Church history, drawing on a vastness of anecdote. As she listened she thought he’d been right about the Church’s duality, always in the mud, always looking to the stars. The Janus face, Val had called it, the Janus face of the Church of Rome.

  D’Ambrizzi spoke of Cesare Borgia and the assassini he had used once, then again, until he succeeded in having Lucrezia’s husband strangled in his bed in the late summer of 1500. He sounded as if he’d been there, an intimate of the Borgias. The murder had been a stroke of policy, aimed at freeing his sister from one marriage so that she might enter into another immensely important marriage, this with Alfonso d’Este, the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara. The alliance that ensued was successful, and Lucrezia had been given an extraordinary going-away party at Halloween of 1501 by dear Cesare.

  “Quite a party,” the cardinal said, eyes closed, as if leafing through his recollections. “Fifty naked courtesans dancing about, picking up chestnuts from the floor with their teeth, while the men had them on the spot. All in all, things worked out quite well. Except for the dead husband, of course. Cesare managed to seize the lands of the Colonnas, slam the Orsinis into prison, and marry into the d’Estes of Ferrara.” His eyes opened slowly. “Not a man to be taken lightly.”

  Sister Elizabeth was thinking about the naked courtesans and the chestnuts while she listened and heard that last phrase. Not a man to be taken lightly …

  “The priest who killed Val and tried to kill Ben Driskill,” she interrupted, forgetting entirely to mind her manners. “The man with the silver hair and the glasses …”

  D’Ambrizzi turned to face her, indulgent. “Yes, Sister?”

  “He’s the right age—very fit but the right age. He’s one of them.… He’s always been one. I’m sure, I feel it … all this talk of Badell-Fowler and the wartime assassini—don’t you see? It all fits … this Simon Verginius that Badell-Fowler thought might be their leader? He’s our silver-haired priest! He’s Simon Verginius! And that’s not all. The Pius Plot in his notes? Think about Pius—what a scoundrel he was, or may have been, all those Germans in his life, the wrong kinds of Germans … Well, it was Pius who was using the assassini during World War Two—probably to aid the Nazis with what you were talking about, Eminence, the plunder of artworks! It fits, doesn’t it? It’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?”

  She sat there smiling at them, well across any boundaries of propriety she’d set for herself and not really stopping to worry about it. Not for a minute or two, anyway. D’Ambrizzi and Sandanato stared at her, then at each other, stymied for the right response.

  Val would have been so damned proud of her!

  Callistus came out of a restless sleep well past midnight and lay in the damp sheets, sweating, his head aching slightly, nothing he couldn’t handle, thanks be to God. He watched the moon through the window directly before him and realized that its white, cool remoteness, its utter lack of involvement, made him think of death. Nowadays it was difficult not to think about death. But even before this illness of his, death had been a constant in his life as a priest. As long ago as he could remember he had always been going to some clerical funeral. Part of the job.

  Thirty years ago he’d been a bright, ambitious monsignor in the Vatican Secretariat of State, right at the epicenter of the Church’s convulsion when Pius XII finally died. Now, there was a colossal, cataclysmic death for you! In the silence of the room, lit only by the moonglow, Callistus heard himself laughing. My God, what a time that had been!

  Pius had been the last of the old-fashioned popes: arrogant, autocratic, contemptuous of what ot
hers might have called simple decency or the common touch. Monsignor Salvatore di Mona had found him morally rigid, in a peculiar way morally bankrupt, and quite possibly insane. Despicable, in light of his behavior during World War II, which the very youthful Sal di Mona had spent partly in the occupied city of Paris. Insane in terms of the “visions” Pius claimed to have in his later years.

  Upon the old bastard’s death Monsignor di Mona, as a rising curial presence, was close enough to the laughable horrors of his funeral arrangements never to forget them. It was quite enough to convince him that you never knew when you might have to pay for your sins. In Pius’s case the bill came late, presented a few hours after the last gasp.

  Pius was well known within the Vatican to have lived beyond his normal span due to the ministrations of the Swiss gerontologist Dr. Paul Niehans, a Protestant for heaven’s sake, who numbered King George V and Konrad Adenauer and Winston Churchill among his patients. All of them were treated with Niehans’s living cell therapy which involved injections of finely pureed tissue taken from the newly killed lambs. When Pius was in his last hours at Castel Gandolfo in the early autumn of 1958, the Jesuits at Vatican Radio had miraculously surmounted normally obsessive curial secrecy by actually broadcasting live the death struggle, including the bedside prayers for the dying. Monsignor di Mona had listened in his office that night, since everything at the Vatican had ground to a halt anyway. He and three fellow priests had established a betting pool on the time of death, which came at four in the morning on October ninth. Di Mona didn’t win the pool but the departure of Pius was prize enough.

  Then the theater of the absurd took over.

  The corpse of the late pontiff was embalmed at Castel Gandolfo by his personal physician, Galeazzi Lisi, and a specialist, Oreste Nuzzi. It was then transported to Rome in a municipal hearse decked out with four gilt angels stuck to the top, festoons of white damask more appropriate to a wedding, and a tacky wooden replica of the papal triple crown which threatened to slip off the roof at each bump in the road.

  Monsignor di Mona was waiting at the Lateran Basilica when this peculiar vehicle arrived. It had never been truer than at that moment: he and a similarly minded friend hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Then, incredibly, they heard what sounded like a pistol shot. His first thought was to cry out to the assassins, You’re too late, you imbeciles! He’s already dead! But it hadn’t been a shot after all. Something had gone wrong inside the hearse. Inside the coffin.

  The Lateran services went quickly and the hearse was quickly dispatched across Rome to the Vatican, where the coffin was hurried into St. Peter’s. Monsignor di Mona, representing the Secretariat, arrived to find out just what was going on and retired, shaking his head in bewilderment. With the weather unusually warm, Pius XII had apparently begun to ferment, building up pressure until the lid of the casket had actually blown off. Lisi and Nuzzi consequently went back to work, laboring through the night to ready their subject for the public lying in state which would begin at seven o’clock on the morning of October twelfth. As it turned out, their problems were just beginning.

  As the day progressed—the visitors streaming past, candles flickering, the remains of Pius encased in a red chasuble with a gold miter on his head—it all began to go wrong again. It was hot in St. Peter’s. Too hot. The deathly pallor of Pius’s face turned green. Everyone was noticing a sickening odor. The real man finally showing through, di Mona thought to himself. Common sense prevailed and the coffin was closed, encased in a leaden casket, and removed at last to a tomb in the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s.

  The reason given for such calamitous events was dazzling, revolving around Lisi’s explanation that he and Nuzzi had used ancient embalming methods—no injections, no surgery, no evisceration—which had been good enough for the early Christians and were surely appropriate for this saintly pope. Lisi went on to sell his story of the papal death agony to the press, and the cardinals governing the Church during the interim between popes banned him forever from setting foot on Vatican soil. In every imaginable way Pius’s end had been a messy one.

  Appropriate in Monsignor di Mona’s eyes then and, now, in Callistus IV’s eyes. The passage of time had done nothing to soften his views. He was smiling both at the recollection of his young self caught up in the ridiculous events of that long-ago October and at the friendships that had taken root even before that, in Paris during the war, when he’d realized what a monster Pius truly was.

  Paris. The very word transported him back in time, brought back memories of old friends and of causes worth dying for, worth doing anything for …

  Callistus rubbed the back of his neck, massaging the dull throb, and got slowly out of bed. The most recent painkiller was wearing off. Dr. Cassoni had told him it was essentially the same thing as heroin, and Callistus had told him to keep any further lurid bits to himself. But D’Ambrizzi had been right: Cassoni was a good man.

  He was wearing a dark blue bathrobe over scarlet pajamas and velvet English slippers. He dumped another pill onto the tabletop, washed it down with a sip of tepid water. He lit a cigarette. The evening breeze sucked the smoke out past the draperies. He pressed a button on his tapedeck and out came Madama Butterfly. Poor Butterfly, ’neath the blossoms waiting …

  He took his cane and left the sitting room, nodded to the male nurse sitting reading by a dim desk lamp, and went out into the hallway. The tapping of the cane sounded like a metronome. Since the crisis of the murders had heightened the tensions in Vatican City, since he’d given Indelicato and D’Ambrizzi their marching orders, Callistus had taken to prowling the corridors of his domain in the wee hours, as if by surveying the calm and quiet of the night, the guards, what he called the night shift, he could put his mind at ease. If only he could believe that somehow all would be well.

  He rapped softly on a door in shadow, loud enough to be heard only if the man within were still awake.

  “Come in, Holiness.” The voice was raspy, animal-like.

  Callistus entered hesitantly. “I didn’t wake you, Giacomo?”

  “No, no, I’m a night dweller these days, I’m afraid—like an old marmoset. Come in, I’m glad for the company. You’ll keep me from thinking.”

  It had not always been quite so comfortable between them. For a time years earlier Giacomo had also sought the Throne of Peter, though they’d never really discussed it. Too many of their fellow cardinals had believed D’Ambrizzi was too useful down in the rough and tumble of the real world … and money had been passed around, palms crossed. Irreplaceable, they’d said, D’Ambrizzi was simply irreplaceable, whereas Cardinal di Mona was, indeed, easily replaced. That was the “official story” back then. Well, D’Ambrizzi had read all the signs and thrown his support to di Mona, the younger man he’d known so long. Ironically, D’Ambrizzi had lived to see the brass ring come around again.

  “The pain is bad?” D’Ambrizzi’s face was shadowed, giving him a sinister aspect.

  “Not so bad. I did some praying before sleep. Then an hour or so later I woke up and began thinking about the death of Pius.”

  D’Ambrizzi smiled. “Black comedy. Some blasphemous young fellow could write a very funny play.”

  Callistus gave a small, hollow laugh. “What do you think of prayer?” He lowered himself carefully into a well-padded armchair.

  “As our friend Indelicato would say, I don’t see the harm. But it’s out of character for you, isn’t it? What drove you to prayer, Salvatore?”

  The sound of his old name cheered Callistus. “The same thing that produces most prayer. Fear. These killings …” He shrugged helplessly. “Where can we start? How do we begin to stop them? Why are these people dying? Why? That’s the important thing.” He shifted in the chair, seeking a more comfortable position. The painkiller was beginning to work. D’Ambrizzi seemed to have no comment. “When I first met you in Paris during the war, you were habitually insubordinate. No, please, hear me out. That was what impressed me so, probably because
I knew that insubordination was beyond me. I heard people talk, I knew what they said about you. You had contacts in the Resistance, you were smuggling Jews out of Germany, you hid them from the Nazis—”

  “Only with the assistance of Reichsmarshal Goering,” D’Ambrizzi said. “His wife, the actress, she was part Jewish—”

  “You even hid them in the coal bins of our churches!”

  “Infrequently, Salvatore.”

  “My question is this, Giacomo. Were you ever scared? So scared that you couldn’t imagine anything worse? Did your faith see you through the fear?”

  “In the first place, there’s always something worse. Always. When it came to dealing with fear—faith never entered my mind, Salvatore. I was always too busy figuring out how to make my escape. Fear … With age, of course, the memory fails. Was I ever scared? Perhaps I was young and strong enough to believe I was invincible, immortal—”

  “That’s sacrilegious, Cardinal.”

  “How true! But the least of my sins. Look at old Pius and all his injections, doing all he could to cheat death.… Of course I was afraid. There was a German officer, he had been an acquaintance of Pius’s before the war in Berlin. Young fellow, no influence, but I had reason to go to his office from time to time. He had known Pius and he kept telling me how he had personally introduced Cardinal Pacelli to Herr Hitler and now look, D’Ambrizzi, he would say to me, Pacelli is pope and Hitler remembers who introduced them. He found that hugely satisfying. Every time he called me to his office—from his window we could look out at the Arc de Triomphe—every time he called me in to see him I had to vomit. Before I went and after I got back. He scared me.”