The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “You said my sister wanted to know about Torricelli and something else. And what? What was that other thing?”

  I was sitting in a deep Morris chair between the wooden propellor and a table full of framed photographs and I was working on a glass of Clive Paternoster’s scotch. My host was leaning on the mantelpiece, smoking a venerable pipe he kept polishing against his nose.

  “Oh, really, old boy, there’s nothing there for you.” He sniffed and downed some of his scotch, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

  “No, no, I’m quite serious. It must have been something—you held it back. Let me be the judge. She was my sister.”

  “It’s just that it’s the land of fairies and sprites and little men with green hats and pointed slippers …”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  From the window by the chair I could look down through the bare tree limbs at the weary awning and the lights in the window of Tabbycats. Down there Horstmann had arranged casually to bump into his old friend Heywood, who’d thought he was dead these forty years.

  “Well, your sister comes to the Vicar and she’s full of questions about the war years, about Torricelli and, and—”

  “And what?”

  “And the assassini! There, you satisfied? Old Clive sounds a fool!” He puffed nervously on the pipe, the woodsy smell filling the room.

  “Assassini? I don’t get it. What’s the problem? It’s Italian for assassins. What’s the big thing here, Clive? I just read the word in one of Torricelli’s diaries—”

  He stroked his immense nose with the pipe for a moment, burnishing the dark brown bowl. “You read it in his papers, did you—now, that’s rather interesting, I must say. Evidence to support the Vicar’s theory, at any rate.”

  “Enlighten me,” I said patiently. He wasn’t the kind of old duffer you could hurry. You’d miss the cream of the jest.

  “The assassini, man! You tell me you’re a Catholic, yet you profess ignorance of the assassini—you astonish me. Your education has been sadly neglected.” He was shaking his head, running his bony hand through the long gray hair that thinned out over the crown of his narrow head.

  “Educate me, then.”

  “Simply put”—he grinned with the big stained rabbity front teeth—“the assassini, my son, were the blighters who did the popes’ killing for them back in the old days, the Renaissance, the Borgia days when poison rings were all the rage. An instrument for carrying out papal policy. Now, the salient point has nothing to do with the Renaissance, as you might have guessed … no, the salient point that your sister had gotten her teeth into was that the assassini were rumored to have been brought back to life … here in Paris during the war. A rumor. I never put much faith in it myself, there were always rumors everywhere you looked, but the Vicar, oh, he was much closer to all that sort of thing than I was. The Vicar was a devoted “intrigue man,” he was in Vienna when they made that picture, The Third Man, he never tired of seeing it, never missed a revival. He loved intrigue, believed it, you see—a conspiracy behind every loose brick—that’s why he loved covering the Church, it never let him down! He used to say it made the Reichs Chancellory or the Supreme Soviet look like a child’s idea of the real stuff, said the Church was all intrigue, all conspiracy, whispers in darkened doorways, voices in empty rooms and plotters gathered behind the closed shutters … well, he thought this assassini business was too good a fit to pass up.… The Vicar told me at the time that somebody had brought the assassini back to life, that they were operating in Paris … as if we didn’t have enough going on in Paris back then …” Paternoster laughed at the memory, tamping the ash down in the pipe’s bowl. “He said they were doing the Church’s dirty work but damned if he knew what the work was! Who were they killing? The Vicar couldn’t figure it out. Or he never told me if he did. But he knew they were on the job and he was bloody sure he knew some of them—”

  “Personally?” I asked. “He knew them personally?”

  “Yes, knew them. They were all men of the cloth as I understood it, these assassini. So when your sister asked him about the assassini she was right up his alley—got him right on his old hobbyhorse! He told me all about their conversation … I can’t blame him, can you? For telling her? He didn’t see what harm it could do to tell her now, forty years later … so he told her about another old friend of his, Brother Leo.”

  “And who was Brother Leo? I need a scorecard.”

  “Well, I never met him, but the Vicar said he was one of them … one of the assassini.” He sniffed again, blew his nose on a large, soiled handkerchief. “I don’t know if your sister, poor dear, went in search of him—it wouldn’t have done her any good, but the Vicar thought it would interest her for her book—”

  “Why couldn’t she see Brother Leo? Is he dead?”

  “Oh, not so far as I know. But he’s at some godforsaken little monastery on the coast of Ireland … St. Sixtus, I think it’s called. I daresay your sister wouldn’t have been welcomed …” He looked at me expectantly, rubbing his enormous, broad nose once again with the kerchief.

  “It’s funny, Clive,” I said when I’d thought about it for a few moments. “What harm could telling her about the assassini of forty years ago do? None. None at all. But I’ll tell you what happened. I think it just might have made her think the assassini were still around. I’ve tried to think what she could possibly have known that meant she had to be killed. And I just couldn’t imagine what it was—how could something from forty years ago have decided her fate now? Well, finding a coven of assassini—or just one of them, maybe—that might have done it. That might have been enough to get her killed. That goddamn Horstmann!” Paternoster was looking at me uncomprehendingly. “Horstmann’s one of them, Clive. The Vicar did know him forty years ago, just as he knew Brother Leo. But Horstmann’s still on the job. He killed the Vicar, he came all the way back to Paris for him because he was afraid I’d learn whatever my sister had learned. So he came back from killing my sister and from damn near killing me and he killed the Vicar. But he fucked it up, Clive, he didn’t think about you.” I stood up and slapped him softly on the shoulder.

  “I say,” he muttered, trying to cope with the flood of new information.

  “My sister somehow found out about the assassini and somebody didn’t like the risk in that, so she had to die before she could get the word out … that’s why Horstmann tried to kill me—”

  “I don’t quite follow you, old bean.”

  “And the beauty part is … Horstmann takes his orders from somebody in Rome.”

  “And he tried to kill you? You’ve lost me—”

  I went on explaining myself to him and drinking his scotch and most of what I said turned out in the end to be quite wrong. But it sounded good that night and I was partly right, too.

  Before I left him, Clive Paternoster fetched his old atlas of the British Isles down from the bookcase. There, with a dirty, chipped fingernail, he pointed out the monastery of St. Sixtus.

  2

  Father Dunn got a personal call from Drew Summerhays the next morning, the day of their two o’clock appointment. “Am I right,” Summerhays said in his thin, reedy voice, “in suspecting that you have personal—or at least not strictly professional—matters on your mind?”

  Father Dunn chuckled, standing by the windows, trying to see the ducks in Central Park without the aid of his binoculars. “Let’s say I don’t expect a bill at the hourly rate.”

  “Well then, let’s say it’s personal and you might indulge a very elderly party and drop by my little house—would that be possible, Father?”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Good. Just come down Fifth all the way to Washington Square. I’m in the little mews off Fifth.” He mentioned the single-digit number. “Till two o’clock, then.”

  Dunn got out of the cab and crossed Fifth to the cobblestone mews that was blocked to automobiles by posts set in cement. Bright cold sunshine threw the scene
into sharp relief. The little house was pristine yellow and white and olive and looked as if it had been freshly painted the day before. The yellow flower-boxes were now planted with miniature evergreens that poked up out of the black potting soil like the tops of huge trees. He tapped the doorknocker which was a reproduction in brass of one of the gargoyles of Notre Dame. It seemed to be smiling, a gargoyle of welcome.

  Summerhays’s man, Edgecombe, answered the door and ushered Dunn into a skylit sitting room, cheery with yellow and white slipcovered couches and chairs. Bookcases, a small formal fireplace with a neatly stacked rack of logs, bowls of flowers freshly cut, and through the French doors at the far end of the room a tiny, carefully maintained garden prepared for winter, still in the sunshine. A recording of one of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies was being dispensed through hidden speakers, each note dropping like a precious stone into a reflecting pool of perfect stillness. Dunn wondered how anyone got such a complete, perfect handle on things; maybe it was this environment that had helped keep Summerhays alive such a long time. It seemed to Dunn that dying, leaving such a world behind, would give death an extra sting.

  He was looking out at the garden when he heard the thin, precise, clipped voice behind him. “Father Dunn, how very nice. You found your way.”

  Summerhays stood ramrod straight and trim, sleekly barbered and smelling of a hint of bay rum, and turned out in a gray herringbone suit, starched white shirt, red and olive club tie, shell cordovan shoes. It was so absolutely perfect that Dunn smiled, jotting down a mental note. This would find a spot in his next book.

  Summerhays sat in one of the slipcovered chairs and Dunn, who felt uncharacteristically self-conscious, perched on the end of the couch. On the white brick wall behind Summerhays was a large painting by Jasper Johns. American flags, reminding you, if you thought about it, that this was the home of a patriot.

  Edgecombe brought a silver coffee service, left it on a low table, and shimmered away.

  Drew Summerhays said, “Father, I am very pleased to see you, but I admit to extreme curiosity. My assumption is that what may connect us at the moment is the Driskill family. Would I be far wrong there, Father?”

  “Direct hit. Look, I don’t want to dance around the edges of this. Shall I plunge right in without even a passing comment on Jasper Johns?”

  Summerhays’s eyes twinkled. “Mr. Johns will never know.”

  “All right, then. Am I right about your long friendship with Hugh and Mary Driskill? You go back a long way?”

  “About as far as there is,” Summerhays said.

  “This isn’t easy.”

  “You’re a priest. You are experienced in discussing delicate matters. So am I. Between us we’ve been talking about the hard things for a century. Let’s just do it, Father.”

  “I have recently heard a remarkable story,” Dunn began. “It is the sort of thing that could be true but needs verification. It’s a farfetched story in terms of the ups and downs of everyday life—”

  “In our businesses there are no farfetched stories.” Summerhays smiled frostily.

  “Well, I’m not altogether sure of that anymore. This one’s about a priest who’s been dead fifty years, a woman who’s been dead thirty years, and one of your closest friends.…”

  Summerhays smiled with a hint of resignation. “I’m not altogether surprised that this should have come up. But it has been a long time.” He leaned forward and carefully poured two cups of coffee. “Cream?”

  “I’ll have mine straight today.” Dunn burned his tongue on the strong black brew. “It’s funny … that’s what she said. She’d been waiting for someone to come to her about this for half a century.”

  “Who could this be?”

  “An old nun, a friend of the Driskill family. Taught Ben and Val. She was close to Mary Driskill. Sister Mary Angelina …”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. I’ve met her. Strikingly attractive woman.”

  “Tell me—I’ve wondered about this, what did Mary Driskill look like?”

  “Mary. Lovely woman, tall, stately, a woman of great natural dignity. Light brown hair, fair complexion, a sense of humor that could sneak up on you. She didn’t make friends easily. That was Mary. She had only one real weakness, that old debil rum … she was so proper, so very well-bred, so restrained, some might even have said Mary was a little on the remote side.” He sipped coffee, held the Spode saucer with his other hand, then placed both cup and saucer on the broad arm of his chair. “In many ways Hugh and Mary were a good match. Not exactly overflowing with emotion.”

  “But they were in love?” Dunn asked.

  “Well, love is not always essential in marriages between such people. Theirs was more a friendly alliance, a great fortune—Driskill’s—absorbing a somewhat smaller one. I’d say it was a sound marriage—”

  “Like a takeover or a merger?”

  “Any way you want to say it, Father. You’re the wordsmith. But where is this line taking us? Sister Mary Angelina was expecting someone to come to her about this thing—what was it?”

  “The death of Father Vincent Governeau.”

  “Ah. That.”

  “Sister Mary Angelina was very close to Mary Driskill, a confidante. Something like a female confessor. Someone she could talk to intimately.”

  “Many women these days prefer the services of a female gynecologist, I’m told. I suppose the principle is much the same.”

  “Mary Driskill came to Sister Mary Angelina several years after the death of Father Governeau who was, you recall, found hanging from a tree in the orchard out by the skating pond.”

  “Indeed, I remember well. I believe, as Hugh’s attorney and adviser, I was the first person he called.” He offered a wintry smile. “A kind of unindicted co-conspirator.”

  “Did anyone ever offer any explanation of why Father Governeau killed himself?”

  “The same weary old reasons,” Summerhays said. “Depression, crisis of faith, alcoholism, all the reasons why priests occasionally slip off the edge.”

  “You bought the suicide story, then?”

  “What are you saying, Father Dunn?”

  “You were satisfied with the suicide conclusion.”

  “Well, he had apparently hanged himself from a tree—”

  “Why do I have the feeling that you know perfectly well that Father Governeau was murdered?”

  “I can’t imagine, Father. Was it something I said?”

  “No. It’s just that you’re too much an inside man not to know. Father Governeau was murdered and strung up afterward … and because Hugh Driskill was and is Hugh Driskill, the truth never came out. I’ve spoken to the cop who investigated the case. There’s no doubt that it was murder. When Sister Valentine came home, the day she was killed, she called the present chief of police just full of questions about the Governeau matter. Think of that, Mr. Summerhays—she’s been doing research in Europe for months, her mind is full of a thousand other things, she’s running for home, she’s just hours from her own death … and she calls the law about Father Governeau! Amazing, isn’t it? Why? I’ll tell you why—I’ll bet you a quarter that Sister Valentine didn’t believe he’d killed himself either. Now, you’re just too much in the know to still be chewing on the old suicide story.…”

  “For the moment, Father,” Summerhays said, smiling thinly, still interested, “let’s say you’re right about Father Governeau’s death. I have the feeling we’ll never get off the dime, otherwise, so far as this conversation goes. Which should be bringing us back to the vicinity of Sister Mary Angelina.”

  “Ten years after Father Governeau’s death, after the war, when she had two children and a husband who was on the cover of Time and was the inspiration for a movie—when her life should have been at its absolute high point, Mary Driskill was drinking herself to sleep every night, she was in all probability undergoing a long-drawn-out nervous breakdown. Is that the way you remember it?”

  Summerhays inclined his head slightly. “
Hugh was very worried about her. Mary was so fragile. It was hard on the children—a succession of nannies, poor Mary would babble on to the children, frighten them … she was very unstable, then, and of course not long after …” He gave a nearly imperceptible shrug of his shoulders. “She died.”

  “I’d bet that really was a suicide,” Dunn said.

  “No, you’d lose. She was intoxicated, she fell, it was poor young Ben who found her. He was fourteen or fifteen, I believe. It was an accident. They couldn’t refuse to bury her in consecrated ground.”

  “ ‘They’ being the Church?”

  “Who else?”

  “All right, back to Mary Driskill. When she was going through this breakdown, this severe depression, she felt unable to turn to the Church. At least not officially. She couldn’t simply make her confession to a priest, not with what she had on her mind. But there was her friend whom she knew she could trust with anything, a woman and the Church—Sister Mary Angelina. She made an arrangement with Sister Mary Angelina, they met at the house in Princeton, the kids were in bed, Hugh was out, and Mary Driskill told the nun about what happened to Father Governeau.”

  “And now,” Summerhays said, “Sister has told you.”

  “That’s right. And I want to know if what she told me could possibly be true. You’re the only person I know who might be able to verify the story. Will you hear me out?”

  “Try and leave without telling me.” Summerhays seemed disconnected from his smile, his eyes distant and clear and icy.

  “Mary Driskill said that she had met Father Governeau back before the war when Hugh was still in Rome working for the Church. Governeau came out to the house to say mass at the chapel a few times. He was a decent, serious, honorable man, a man of God. Mary trusted him. But he fell in love with this pretty young woman who was so alone … it’s 1936, ’37, whenever, I’m not great on dates—”