The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Poletti glared at him. “You’re more of an old woman with each passing day.” He stood up, bouncing on the balls of his Reebok-shod feet, his simian legs bowed, and picked up his American-made Prince tennis racquet. He practiced a few crisp backhands, presumably picturing Ottaviani’s face on the imaginary balls. “Always disagreeable,” he muttered.

  Cardinal Vezza, who was a large, slow-moving man, struggled forward in his chair. As usual, he was having trouble adjusting his hearing aid. “I had reference to the diplomat, of course. Aren’t embassies always being bugged by someone or other? So he should know about this sort of thing.”

  Garibaldi repeated his previous question. “Well? How did you do it?”

  “I have a distant cousin on the Vatican medical staff. He attached a voice-activated device to the cart bearing His Holiness’s oxygen supply.” Poletti shrugged elaborately, as if to say such miracles were the stuff of his everyday life. “He is completely trustworthy—”

  “No man,” Vezza suddenly shouted, “is that trustworthy.” He laughed harshly. He began coughing, a hacking cough that hadn’t caught up with him in seventy years of smoking. He held his cigarette between yellowed fingers with cracked and split nails. He smoked each cigarette to the stubby end.

  Antonelli, a tall blond man in his early fifties who looked ten years younger, cleared his throat, a signal for the others to lay off the childish bickering. He was a lawyer, a quiet leader among the College of Cardinals despite his comparative youth. “I presume there is more to the tape. May we hear it?”

  Poletti threw his racquet into an occasional chair, crossed back to the table, and depressed another button. The recorded voices resumed and the cardinals fell quiet, listening.

  The silver-haired priest … and who is he?

  Your network is still an astonishment to me. But where is Driskill?

  You’re good at watching people. Maybe you’ve been wasting too much time watching me, Fredi.

  Not closely enough, apparently.

  So now we have nine murders … and a suicide?

  Well, who knows, Holiness? It’s a reign of terror. Who knows how many more there are … and how many more there will be.

  Then there was a pause, a muffled crashing sound, a jumble of voices.

  Poletti turned the tape recorder off.

  “What the devil was all that ruckus?” Vezza looked up, shocked.

  “His Holiness collapsing,” Poletti said.

  “And how,” Ottaviani said, “is the papal health?” His own sources were utterly accurate. He was testing Poletti and Poletti knew it.

  “He’s dying,” Poletti said, flashing an arctic smile.

  “I’m aware of that—”

  “He’s resting, what can I say? We’re not here to worry about the man’s health—we’re miles past that! It’s too late for anyone to worry about Callistus, in case that detail has escaped your attention. We’re here to discuss the next pope …”

  “And,” Ottaviani said—he was a small, narrow man with a slightly twisted spine that gave him the appearance of a caricature by Daumier and that Poletti interpreted as the mark of Cain—“I can only assume that you are gathering evidence in support of your candidate.” He smiled crookedly, an expression that seemed to fit with his deformity.

  Poletti surveyed the group, his mouth set tightly so that he might refrain from speaking long enough to avoid blurting out to Ottaviani his deeply felt opinion that he was an intolerable old cripple who’d be better off dragged out, stood up against an anonymous wall somewhere, and shot. Poletti saw himself reflected in a mirror struck through with veins of gold. It was lamentably true that with his small head, long upper lip and small chin and excessive hairiness, he did look like a kind of miracle: a tennis-playing prince of the Church who was also a monkey. He looked away from the mirror. A man could take only so many unpleasant truths in one morning.

  “We are under attack,” Poletti said, picking up the tennis racquet, pointing it for emphasis. “It is a reign of terror. This is the atmosphere surrounding us as we face the election of a new pope. It is appropriate that we never lose sight of this framework when we consider the man we will support—”

  “You make it sound like politics,” Vezza said a little sadly. He had stopped shouting and now could barely be heard.

  “My dear Gianfranco,” Garibaldi said patiently, “it is politics. What else could it be? Received wisdom?”

  Antonelli said gently, “The truth is, everything is politics in the end.”

  “Well said.” Poletti nodded. “Nothing wrong with politics. Old as time.”

  Ottaviani was tapping his fingers together. “My dear friend,” he said to Poletti, “is this old woman”—he nodded at Garibaldi—“correct in saying that you are about to take on the role of campaign manager for some man you expect us to join you in supporting?” The permanently aggrieved smile seldom left his deeply lined face, a map of pain and the determination to overcome it, to use it.

  “I have a name for our consideration, that’s true,”

  “Well, go on,” Vezza said. He enjoyed giving the impression that he had a short attention span and was easily bored. His attitude tended to prompt others into offering fresh stimuli. “Trot him out.”

  “You heard the tapes,” Poletti said. “There was one voice full of command, one voice that was decisive, one voice that recognized the seriousness of the crisis we face …”

  “But he already is the pope!”

  “No, dammit, not him! Vezza, my old friend, I worry about you at times.”

  “He called it a reign of terror, Tonio—”

  “That was Indelicato,” Poletti said, straining to control himself. “Indelicato said we are under attack—”

  “Are you quite sure?” Vezza persisted. “It sounded like—” He had begun fiddling with his hearing aid again.

  “Gianfranco, believe me, it was Indelicato!” Poletti implored.

  “Videotape would have been preferable to the thing you’ve got rigged up on the oxygen cart, I must say,” Vezza grumbled. “I mean, these disembodied voices … could be anyone, couldn’t it? Do you think we could rig a video camera? Now, then we’d really have something—”

  “We really have something now. The last thing I expected here was petty quibbling—”

  “I’m sorry, Tonio,” Vezza said airily. “I didn’t mean to be ungrateful—”

  “Well, you sounded damned unappreciative of my efforts and I am frankly surprised—”

  Antonelli interrupted smoothly. “You’re providing us with invaluable information, Tonio, and we are all much in your debt. There can be no question of that. Now, am I to assume that you are suggesting we gather our support behind Cardinal Indelicato?”

  “You understand me perfectly,” Poletti said with relief. “And thank you for your kindness, Federico. Indelicato is the man for these times—”

  “Are you suggesting,” Ottaviani said softly, “that there is only one issue worth considering? That we are under some sort of siege? And nothing else matters, is that what you would have us believe? I merely want to explore the crevices of your mind, Eminence.”

  Poletti could never be sure whether or not Ottaviani was making a fool of him. “That is what I am saying.”

  Vezza said, “Indelicato? Isn’t that rather like picking the head of the KGB to be premier?”

  “You have some problem with that?” Poletti said, eyeing him warily. “It seems to me the proper response to the situation. We are at war—”

  “If we are at war,” Garibaldi, always the confident club man, observed, “shouldn’t we choose a general? Like Saint Jack, for instance?”

  “Please,” Poletti sighed, “could we save the canonization for later and just call him D’Ambrizzi?”

  “D’Ambrizzi, then,” Ottaviani said. He grimaced with pain, arranging his back against the cushions. “He seems to me a man worthy of our consideration. A forward-looking man—”

  “A liberal,” Poletti said
. “Call him what he is. Do you relish the idea of rushing about parceling out condoms—”

  “What?” Vezza said, head snapping up.

  “Condoms, French letters, rubbers,” Garibaldi said from behind a small grin.

  “Good Lord,” Vezza muttered. “What about them?”

  “If D’Ambrizzi were pope, we’d be passing them out on the steps of our churches after mass, we’d be up to our chins in female priests, queer priests …”

  “Well, I’ve known plenty of queer priests in my day, but do you really think D’Ambrizzi would encourage that?” Vezza made a doubtful face. “I mean, I’ve heard Giacomo say things which make me doubt—”

  Antonelli interrupted again, full of deference but implying that he would offer up the last word on the subject. “Cardinal Poletti was, if I may say so, indulging in a bit of hyperbole. He was merely pointing out a tendency in Cardinal D’Ambrizzi which could, if followed to its logical conclusions, lead to the idiocies he described. Am I right, Tonio?”

  “Utterly, my friend. You have captured my attitude to perfection.”

  “Perhaps,” Antonelli said, “we could take a sounding in light of this tape recording and what Tonio here has had to say. What do we think—in a preliminary sense only, of course—of Indelicato as our man?”

  Garibaldi said with a diplomatic nod, “He could be just the man for a hard job. He’s not afraid to take drastic steps, not afraid to make an enemy. The stories I could tell—”

  “The stories we could all tell,” Vezza said sleepily. “He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor—”

  “How would you know?” Poletti interjected, staring grimly at the old man ringed in smoke.

  “—but he certainly takes his work seriously. I could live with him. Better than many of the criminals and nitwits I’ve seen wear the red hat in my time.”

  “And you, Ottaviani,” Antonelli said. “What about you?”

  “What about an African?” he said impishly. “Or one of the Japanese, perhaps? Or an American, if it comes to that.”

  “Oh, for the love of Christ,” Poletti said, ignoring the smile spreading across Ottaviani’s face, “don’t be foolish!”

  “I merely wanted to see if Vezza recognizes an attempt at clerical humor.” Ottaviani smiled fleetingly at the old man.

  “What?” Vezza said.

  “On the whole,” Ottaviani said, “I find Manfredi Cardinal Indelicato a cold-blooded, only marginally human machine, a kind of butcher—”

  “Don’t be shy,” Antonelli said. “What do you really think?”

  “I’d never turn my back on him. He would have been at home as the Grand Inquisitor … in short, he would be the perfect man for the Throne of Peter.”

  Poletti’s head jerked about to stare at Ottaviani. “You mean you would support his candidacy?”

  “I? Did I say that? No, I don’t think so. I’d support his assassination but not his elevation. No, I’m more inclined to support D’Ambrizzi, a thoroughly corrupt and worldly man, a captive of his own pragmatism, who would emerge no doubt as a much-beloved world figure … something of a movie star. How could any true cynic not find it appealing?”

  The preliminary meeting of the Group of Five was winding down. Eventually Ottaviani and Garibaldi had been ferried off by their drivers and Antonelli had waved good-bye from his Lamborghini Miura, glossy, in clerical black. Vezza leaned on his cane and stumped along the tiled veranda, listening to Poletti droning on about one thing or another. Vezza had kept his hearing aid volume turned low throughout much of the meeting because he already knew what everybody was bound by history and personality to say. He was seventy-four years old, a man with a long memory who had heard just about everything. Much of what he himself said he didn’t bother to listen to because he’d heard it before as well. Indelicato, D’Ambrizzi: he really didn’t give a damn which way it went because he believed that the group of which he had been a dues-paying member for forty years—the curia—always got its way. It always had, so far as he could tell. He’d never seen the pope who hadn’t in the crunch knuckled under to the Vatican professionals. What he’d just half dozed through was a curia coven meeting. He’d attended a great many such gatherings, stared into many a boiling, bubbling cauldron of clerical desires. This one, because of Antonelli’s involvement, carried some extra weight. If the name they finally came up with was indeed Indelicato’s, then Indelicato stood an excellent chance. Vezza just didn’t find himself terribly interested. He had learned three months before that his kidneys were failing him. The way things were going, even Callistus might outlast him. The name of the next pope was low on his list of concerns, but one question lingered persistently in his mind.

  Vezza and Poletti were standing on the edge of the driveway in the cool hilltop breeze waiting for the black Mercedes to be brought around. Vezza turned up the volume on his hearing aid.

  “Tell me, young Tonio,” he said, “about that tape of yours. Somebody on it is talking about nine murders—did I hear that accurately?”

  “It was His Holiness.”

  “Well, I am a very elderly man with a hearing problem, so I may have missed something somewhere along the way. But for the sake of clarity, let’s try to remember the murders … there’s Andy Heffernan and our old friend Lockhardt in New York, the nun Sister Valentine in Princeton, and the journalist Heywood in Paris. The suicide is the LeBecq fellow in Egypt, though I must say his name means nothing to me … four murders and a suicide. Now, help me out on this in case I’ve missed something. By my reckoning I come up five murders short. How do you figure it? Who were the other five?”

  Poletti saw the black Mercedes nose its way past the high hedges bordering the gateway to the driveway. Thank God this conversation wasn’t going to last much longer. Vezza had a way of asking the most irritating, most pertinent questions.

  “Come, come,” the old man said. “Help an aging colleague. Who were the other five?”

  “I don’t know, Eminence,” Poletti said finally. “I simply don’t know.”

  At the outermost edges of his mind Callistus heard the striking of the grandfather clock on the other side of the bedroom but it wasn’t part of reality. Somewhere in the fringe of consciousness he knew he was stretched out on his bed, two o’clock in the morning, the night watch being tolled by that god-awful clock, a gift from an African cardinal, carved by a primitive tribe obviously obsessed with sexual duality. But he heard it striking, he felt the closeness of the night. He seemed to be more alive at night now, at home in the darkness. He sighed within the ninety percent of his brain that was asleep and he could hear it, he could hear the snow rattling quite clearly against the roof and the walls as the wind blew it down the mountain pass, through the pines that drooped with heavy, snow-laden boughs.

  He, Sal di Mona, stood in the doorway of the woodsman’s hut, a thick scarf wrapped around his throat and covering the lower half of his face. The mountain wind seemed never to stop. Looking down the moonlit defile, he thought his eyeballs would freeze. All the color had been bled out of the scene. The snow was white, everything else was black as coal. The trees, the outcroppings of rock, the shadows, the footprints stitched down the mountainside to the black ribbon of railway track that he and Simon had inspected an hour before. The stream ran along the tracks, moving like a twisting shred of funereal ribbon.

  Back inside the hut the six others were either dozing, eyelids fluttering, or reading by candlelight. One was soundlessly saying the rosary. Simon got up from the primitive chair, put his book into the pocket of his coat, and lit a cigarette. He looked into Sal di Mona’s eyes and smiled. “A long night,” he said, brushing past and going outside where he stood solid as a boulder, staring out across the gash cut between the mountainsides, the smoke of his cigarette curling back through the doorway.

  The woodsy, dank smell of the single room had been transformed by their arrival. Now it smelled of the grease on the machine guns, of warm, sweating bodies and the fire now reduced to b
anked embers. It was hot and cold at the same time. Nothing was normal, nothing real. The plan that had once seemed so heroic had drawn in on them: all the heroics were gone. Now they were a group of frightened men risking everything to kill another man coming through the pass on the early morning train. There was nothing heroic about it. There was just the apprehension, the fear, the knot in the stomach, the trembling in the knees, the sensation of looseness in the bowels.

  Sal di Mona had never killed a man. He wasn’t going to kill the man on the train. He wasn’t being given one of the guns. His job was to handle the grenades, bring the train to a stop on the damaged track. The others—two of the others, the Dutchman and another man, led by Simon—were using the guns. Outside he could hear the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow as Simon circled the hut, then went off to the lookout post they’d set up on a shelf of rock, giving a clear view down the length of track. It would be more than two hours before they saw the telltale column of smoke from the train engine, but Simon, like Sal di Mona, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t quite sit still.

  An hour later they were all dozing except for Simon, who leaned against the log wall smoking a cigarette, and little Sal, who stared at his missal by candlelight but saw none of it.

  Suddenly Simon was crouching, moving across the room, quenching the candle’s flame between thumb and forefinger.

  “There’s somebody outside,” he whispered. “Someone moving.”

  He tugged at Sal’s arm, pulling him toward the low door at the back of the hut where the roof sloped down and almost touched the rising hillside. The Dutchman was awake, too, and the three of them crawled outside, poking out beneath the eaves, in the shadow of a woodpile.

  In the stillness the sounds of soldiers reached them. The clicking sound of metal on wooden gunstocks and cold gun barrels, the cracking of feet through the snow, the low whispers. They were somewhere in the trees, a dozen of them slowly revealed as they moved down to approach the hut from the front. They didn’t know about the door in the back. They seemed unhurried.