The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “It was a time for carrying out orders,” he said. “Any orders. All orders. Don’t say it, Mr. Driskill—I agree with you … following orders is the last pallid excuse of the murderers of those days. A concentration camp guard at Treblinka, a priest stalking a victim in a Paris slum …” He shrugged, staring at the sea with the shadows lengthening and the wind getting colder. “I am not excusing myself, nor any of us. I am telling you how it was, that’s all. Sometimes the order was to kill a man. For the greater good, of course. It was always for the Church. We believed we were saving the Church, didn’t we?”

  But more often than not it was something else. Usually it was a matter of trading. Back onto the tightrope they went. Trading loyalty, trading actions the group could perform, trading for the good of the Church. Trading with the Nazis, with the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Gestapo. And in return the Church benefited: a not unreasonable share of looted art treasures which made their way by this means and that back to Rome, the spoils from the rape of the Jews who were simply never seen again. When it was necessary, Simon’s little band, with Christos often in charge of the mission, kept tabs on the Resistance and seemed to have no choice but to betray their French friends, to throw bones to the Nazis, to maintain the fragile balance between working with the Resistance here, with the Nazis there, but always for the Church which as an article of faith they knew must outlast the Resistance fighters, the Nazi invaders, and the war itself.

  But there were times when it was not simply trading, not the simple act of betraying the Resistance on one hand or sabotaging the Nazis on the other. There were times when the Nazis wanted a man to die. Why didn’t they kill the offender themselves? Brother Leo had pondered that one at length. Was it a test of the cadre’s willingness to work with the occupiers? Or was it the simple imposition of their will?

  Brother Leo remembered one occasion when the rift between Simon and Christos came into the open. There was going to be trouble, sooner or later, within the ranks, Brother Leo was sure of that. It had boiled up over the matter of the Resistance priest.…

  Father Devereaux was the priest who had gotten too good at the Resistance business. An SS officer had been kidnapped and subsequently found in the garbage dump serving a village near Paris. The culprits were unknown but the village had seen some Resistance sympathy, due in large part to the attitude of Father Devereaux.

  The SS required a symbolic response. The priest must die and the Catholics led by Simon were given the job of killing him. Simon reported to the group that it was not possible, he was going to tell the SS the answer was no. But Christos, the tall, wraithlike priest from Paris, argued that the preservation of good relations with the Nazis was more important than the life of one trouble-making priest. It was a war, he said, and in wars men died as a matter of course. For the greater good, Father Devereaux must die as the SS had ordered.

  Christos argued the long view. A life here and there, put them in the scale with the Church, with the existence of the cadre. “You see, Mr. Driskill,” Brother Leo said softly as the rush of the sea calmed, said it casually as if it hardly mattered, “we were the reborn assassini, back at work for the Church.…” A few murders didn’t weigh much. And they weren’t even murders! They were battlefield casualties. A realist, Christos called himself, a pragmatist. Some of their little band found him brutal, ruthless. But he insisted and they obeyed and Simon stayed his hand, didn’t stop them, but played no part in what happened in the village the night Devereaux was killed. Christos bent some of them to his will, Brother Leo observed. “But not Simon, not little Sal, not me, and not the Dutchman. We took our lead from Simon. We stood with him, not with Christos.…”

  But there were other occasions, nasty jobs with deadly consequences, and they all did as they were told. Simon, all of them. And no matter how the war ended, the Church had to be ready to ally itself with the winner. The Church must survive.

  Did Rome know?

  Did Pope Pius know?

  Unthinkable, unaskable questions. But Simon had come from Rome to Paris.…

  Brother Leo spoke deliberately, calmly, his hands rubbing his cheeks which were pink and chapped from the cold wind, or smoothing the wiry fringe of white hair against his skull only to have the wind pluck it, rearrange it at once.

  Then came the final night, toward the end of the bitter winter of 1944.

  The time had come again to kill a man.

  But the Nazis knew nothing about it. Nor did the Resistance. Not a soul but the assassini knew that an important man would be killed.

  For the good of the Church. To save the Church.

  It was Simon’s mission and the most elaborate undertaking they’d attempted. It required more planning, more transport for which they relied on the Resistance, more supplies which also came from the Resistance.

  Dynamite. Two machine guns. Hand grenades.

  They were going to change the course of history and save the Church in a single audacious strike.

  They had to hole up in a woodsman’s hut on a hillside overlooking a stretch of train track hidden from outside view by thickly wooded slopes. The train was bringing the great man to Paris for a secret meeting with high Nazi officials. Reichsmarshal Goering was rumored to be among the participants.

  They were going to blow the track. And if the train wreck didn’t kill the great man, they were going to shoot him and anyone who tried to stop them.

  But it all went wrong.

  The Germans knew. The great man was tipped off. Someone told them, someone inside the operation.

  “The great man wasn’t even on the train,” Brother Leo said. “We were betrayed … it was a terrible mess, only a few of us survived. Several of our men were killed, tracked down and killed in Paris afterward when a man we called the Collector came to find us if he could.… Well,” he said, shaking his head, wiping his hand across his mouth, “it was a long time ago. Simon knew everything was over but he also knew who had betrayed us. We were all so scared, running for our lives. Simon was going to take care of us—we didn’t know how. We believed in him, we trusted him … we knew he’d take care of us. He did, he told us what to do, and then he went to meet the traitor … Christos, you see. He was the one … he was always more of a Nazi than anything else.… The Dutchman, little Sal, and I followed Simon that night, we wanted to be there if he needed us, we knew Christos carried a gun.”

  The night was cold, icy shreds of snow blowing on a cruel wind. February of 1944. A small, weedy cemetery in one of the drearier reaches of Paris, a run-down church attached. A loose shutter banging in the night. Ice like broken glass on tops of gravestones. Bent, withered weeds poking up through puddles of ice. Mice dying of hunger and cold scuttling underfoot.

  Simon and Christos, in the dim light, across the gravestones.

  Leo, the Dutchman, and little Sal crouching in the shadows outside the fence. Leo was afraid his button of a nose would freeze. Sal kept muttering prayers: his life as a priest had taken some unexpected turns, leading to the freezing graveyard in the middle of a lonely night, fear all around.

  Christos was telling Simon that he’d betrayed no one, that he didn’t understand what had happened, yes, there must have been a traitor, yes, there was still a traitor, but he didn’t know who it was.…

  Simon told him it was over, Christos was a Nazi, had always been a Nazi, and it was all coming to an end tonight. “You murdered the Resistance priest Devereaux, and you betrayed us to your Nazi friends—”

  “Devereaux was a liability, a threat to us all. He had to die!”

  Simon’s voice was lost when he spoke but Christos shrank away from him, then Simon’s voice came again. You murdered a decent, honorable man. The wind whipped at them. Leo turned to the Dutchman, who shook his head, put his fingers to his lips. A dim yellow light in the church refectory was extinguished. A cat leapt from behind a headstone, yellow chips in his eyes, and a mouse died.

  No, said Simon, it cannot be for the good of any Church. It cannot be God
’s work—

  And what you were planning for the man on the train, that was supposed to be God’s work!

  You collaborate with the Nazis, who are godless pagans, yet you say it is for the good of us all, for the good of the Church. All right—maybe it is. Simon was speaking slowly, into Christos’s face, but Leo heard every word. But killing Father Devereaux—that betrays the Church. Betrays God. Betrays us all. And now you have betrayed us again. The man on the train deserved to die … and instead we lost men. Because of you … and now it’s over, this is the last night …

  Christos took a gun from the pocket of his threadbare overcoat which he wore over his cassock. Leo backed away from the fence, stepped on the cat.

  Perhaps if the cat had not screeched and pounced on another doomed, glad-to-be-out-of-it little mouse, a blur of hungry eyes and moth-eaten fur, then perhaps Christos might have shot Simon dead on the spot and left the body to freeze hard as a plank, might have changed the world in his own way.

  But the cat did screech and pounce, and as it did Christos’s head turned a fraction of an inch, his concentration was tugged by surprise from its purpose, and Simon, with an agility surprising in so powerfully built a man, was on him with all the finality of the plague.

  Immensely powerful arms were around him, clasped behind Christos’s back, as if they were dancing among the headstones in an ungainly rite, among the cats and the mice, and they seemed to embrace for a long time, their faces almost touching, their faces shiny with sweat and racked with the passions of death, the old passion, and finally there was a grating sound, a cracking, a grunt of dispelled air, a man deflating.

  And Christos was dead.

  The killer was hardly winded.

  He dragged the body over toward the fence and pushed it with his foot, wedging it in between a headstone and some dark, wet shrubs, kicked the feet out of the path, and calmly walked away, was swallowed by the darkness, the cold and windy night.

  With Christos’s death the assassini had died, too. So far as Brother Leo knew. In the summer Paris was liberated, the war’s outcome was a foregone conclusion, though dark days for the Allies still lay ahead, between now and the end. But it was over for the little band of killers.

  Leo stretched his arms out in the last of the day’s sunshine like a man doing an exercise. The cloud cover, purple and blue and shading to black at the horizon, was closing down on the last rays.

  “After the night he killed Christos I never spoke with Simon again … never saw him again.”

  Brother Leo moved among the gravemarkers, kneeling here and there to straighten a basket of flowers, or remove dead blooms which he called deadheads, or tug at dried-up, recalcitrant weeds. The sun was sinking, the wind stiffening, driving the temperature lower still. I shivered but not entirely from the cold. Simon was coming clearer in my mind, coming to life. And I knew about Christos now. Christos the Nazi priest. But I would always think of him by another name, dying in the night.

  “What did you do then? After Christos was dead and Simon was gone, I mean. And by the way, I’m not entirely in the dark—for instance, I know Christos was a man called Father LeBecq, the son of the art dealer. But Simon … who was Simon?”

  He ignored the question, just went on. He had his own agenda. “After that night, I went back to my regular work in Paris and that was the end of it. At least for a while. Until the Collector came from Rome, that is.”

  “Ah, yes. The Collector. What was his name when he was at home?”

  “Don’t be so impatient, Mr. Driskill. We have plenty of time here. Very little else, but plenty of time.”

  “You can’t blame me for being curious,” I said. “Who was the Dutchman you mentioned? And little Sal, the priest whose life was turning out so differently from what he’d expected? Whatever happened to them?”

  “I suppose we all went back to our former lives, the lives we’d gone right on living during the days. At least for a while, that is—”

  “I know, I know. Until the Collector came.”

  “Precisely. Came to collect us, you see.” He levered himself to a standing position with his hand on one of the old stones. Dead, once-yellow flowers were scattered at the base of the stone. “Simon was the only great man I ever met. Do you understand? He knew no loyalty other than to God and to the Church. I may look back now and say that things were done that shouldn’t have been done, but it was a bad time for everyone, a battle to the death. Simon, however, was like no other man—and even the saints themselves made mistakes, didn’t they?”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” I said.

  “And so it was with Simon. But a great man. His courage was simply boundless.”

  “So who the hell was he?”

  “Mr. Driskill, please.”

  “But you knew him. I mean really knew him—”

  “Let’s say I observed him. We spent some nights hiding in barns together. He talked to me. He argued the point of what we were doing—was it right, was it truly for the good of the Church … He argued every side of the issue, and I listened. He was a far more intelligent man than I. He was a great student of the past, of all that we call history. It was Simon Verginius who told me about the Concordat of the Borgias.”

  He led me back out of the graveyard, strolled slowly down toward the cliffs.

  “The what?” I was shouting against a sudden explosion of ocean against the rockface.

  He leaned against a twisted tree, pushed his hands down into the pockets of his muddy trousers. He spoke again as if it weren’t all that important, just a bit of distant wartime history. The sea took a rest.

  “Simon said it was the concordat, the agreement made between Pope Alexander, the Borgia, with the society of men who did his—what did Simon call it?—yes, his ‘heavy work.’ His killing. Simon said we were the descendants of these men from five hundred years before, he said we were a living part of the history of the Church. He told me that he had personally seen and handled the concordat—” Leo stopped, looking down into the rolling foam, his face a model of serenity, an emblem signifying his accommodation with his past.

  “Did he describe it? Does it still exist?”

  He smiled, tolerating my latest impatience. “So many things disappeared during the war and in the aftermath. But Simon was obsessed by the fate of the concordat itself, the parchment on which it was written. You see, he said it contained the names of the faithful men who had served Pope Alexander. He said it contained as well the names of the unbroken line of descent, inked in as the centuries passed, of all the men since Alexander drew it up. I wasn’t so sure, it sounded so fanciful … but then, the history of the Church is heavy-laden with secret documents, isn’t it? It sounded so very Catholic to me. Simon was afraid that it would fall into the hands of the Nazis during the war—then he feared they would forever hold it as a club over the Church.”

  “Are you saying he actually had this thing in his possession back then?”

  Leo nodded.

  “How did he come by such an amazing document?”

  “He never told me.”

  “Maybe he was lying, maybe he was just pulling your leg—”

  “Simon? Lie? Never!”

  “But how can you be sure?”

  He looked at me from the corner of his eye, slyly, from the distant towers of great age. “I know. I knew him, for one thing. That’s how I can be sure.”

  “Tell me the rest of it. You could be holding the fate of the Church in your hands.” A list of the assassini …

  “I doubt that, Mr. Driskill. That’s Jesuitical talk.”

  I wasn’t going to impress him with my quest, with all I’d been through. He’d been through more, and now his struggle with life was over and I couldn’t intimidate him or impress him or coax him or force him into anything that wasn’t on his agenda. He’d thought it through a long time ago. “I was a Jesuit once,” I said.

  He laughed immoderately. “Driskill,” he said, “what a piece of work you are! A
re you by any chance an honest man?”

  “More or less,” I said. In my world nobody asked you a question like that. What were you supposed to say?

  “Well,” he sighed, “as for the concordat—When Simon left the graveyard the Concordat of the Borgias was on his mind … as history. And it was like a license, a charter—would you agree? Its history validated it, didn’t it? When the assassini are needed, when they can serve the Church, they live again.” He looked up at me, round eyes wide. “I wouldn’t want the responsibility of deciding when, would you, Mr. Driskill?”

  “Just tell me what happened to the concordat.”

  “Oh, he sent it north. For safekeeping. In fact …” His face was pink, almost merry, like Santa Claus in the school play. “He sent it north with me! He trusted me, you see.” He showed me his teeth, small and white and somehow fierce. “With me and another fellow. The Dutchman who’d been there outside the graveyard that last night. He’d come to me with a letter and a packet. The letter was from Simon, it told me to take this packet, the concordat, and go with the Dutchman, make a run for the north country … oh, I’ll tell you it was an adventure! We went as Breton fishermen, ran the Channel to England. Cloak and dagger. But we made it. God must have wanted us to finish Simon’s job.” He looked out at the darkening sea, reliving the moment of triumph.