The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “Famous saying. I’m sure of that.”

  “Sounds like Billy the Kid, then.”

  “Yes. Probably was Billy the Kid, now that you mention it. Yes, I’m sure it was.”

  “Bill Bonny.”

  “Right. William Bonny.”

  “Well, he was full of bilge and died very, very young.”

  “He’d have died much younger if he’d carried a cap pistol, Father.”

  “Nonetheless, Ben.” He pushed open the door of the toy shop.

  In the store he spoke passable French to the young shopgirl.

  “We’ll have two of those,” he said, pointing to the display case.

  “The revolvers?” she said in English.

  He nodded. “Two of them.”

  “Do you wish a box of caps, too?”

  “Oh, we don’t want to actually fire them. Do we, Driskill?”

  “I certainly don’t.”

  “There you are,” he said to the girl. “Just the guns. No ammunition.” He smiled at that.

  When we left the shop the rain had thickened. He handed me my toy gun. “Put it in your pocket. Just in case.” He winked at me. I stuffed the gun into my raincoat pocket. “Now. Don’t you feel better?”

  “You baffle me,” I muttered.

  He put his hand into the trench coat pocket and squeezed the butt. A childlike grin spread across his pink face. He was smoking his pipe and had it upside down so the rain wouldn’t enter the bowl. “The gun-toting padre. Suits me. Perhaps I’m the stuff of legend after all.”

  “It’s a plastic toy.”

  “Well, it’s all illusion and reality. We’re just blurring the line a little.” He glanced at his watch. “Four o’clock. Time to go see Clive.”

  The Peugeot taxi labored grumpily up the hill to the Place de la Contrescarpe. The rain was puddling in the square and the tramps had their fire going as they’d had a few days before. The lights of Tabby cats shone warmly through the window, like reflections of polished brass.

  Clive Paternoster had settled into the table by the window. His glasses balanced precariously on his mole’s nose which he was blowing violently. It was the season for colds. His grubby old mac hung on a hook by the window, and he got halfway out of his chair, welcoming us.

  We had cognacs all around. The two of them puffed their pipes, filling the window cubbyhole with the woodsy, smoky fug.

  “So, you found him in Ireland,” Paternoster said to Father Dunn.

  “Brought him back alive,” Dunn said.

  “Tell me, did you find Brother Leo? Is he well?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I found him.” I paused, suddenly unprepared to answer the most obvious possible question. “He’s fine,” I said at last. “He’s just fine.” The lie came from a newfound protectiveness I felt about Paternoster. I didn’t want to draw him into the circle any further.

  “Well,” Father Dunn said, “did you have any luck at this end?”

  “It’s magic sometimes, I reckon.” Paternoster looked around proudly, from Dunn’s face to mine and back again. “Maybe I haven’t lost the old touch yet. The Vicar would have been proud of me. I lit up the old network like a pinball machine. No, no, don’t worry—most discreet men in the world. I gave them a story, put all the scraps together … yes, Father, in short, I know where Erich Kessler is.”

  “Good work, my friend. The jackpot.” Dunn’s Irish eyes were smiling. “Now, what’s the story?”

  “I know where he is and … I know who he has become.”

  Erich Kessler had taken the name Ambrose Calder.

  He was living near Avignon.

  He would see us because he remembered Artie Dunn.

  He gave specific instructions on what we were to do.

  Ambrose Calder wasn’t taking any chances.

  Father Dunn had had an idea back in New York that Curtis Lockhardt might have kept a flat or house in Paris, that he might have given the use of it to Val while she’d been working in Europe. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me: I’d assumed she must have bedded down at the Order’s Paris installation. Fortunately Dunn had contacted Lockhardt’s New York office, explained the situation as persuasively as possible, and they had kindly arranged for Dunn to pick up a key to a Paris address. The address, not surprisingly considering Lockhardt’s tastes, was as prestigious and pricey as they come: just off the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a stone’s throw, more or less, from the Elysée Palace, where the president of France lives, the American embassy, and the nearly incomparable Bristol. Long ago my father had had a falling-out with the management of the Bristol and we had switched our patronage to the George V; I’d always had a certain warm place in my heart for the Bristol, a hotel that could lose my father’s business and totter on uncaring.

  We didn’t know if Val had ever used the place, but with key in hand we took a taxi through the rainy gloom across the river. It pulled over not far from the intersection with the rue La Boétie. I remembered an odd moment from the past: Bishop Torricelli had taken Val and me to number 19 rue La Boétie and introduced us to croissants. We had thought they were about as delicious as anything could be, buttery with fruit preserves slathered this way and that. We’d eaten them day after day, and had our first cups of café au lait, settled on just the proper color it should be, and the bishop had peered down his Shylockian nose and told us how a famous writer had, at the age of thirteen, consumed the croissants from number 19 as eagerly as we had, long ago. I had pursued the story, assuming it was some Frenchman I’d never heard of. It had been 1856 and 1857 when the boy had developed his taste for croissants and he hadn’t been a Frenchman after all but an American I vowed to read later on. And I did. Henry James. Number 19 rue La Boétie. Croissants. It all came back to me in a flash, getting out of the taxi, turning my collar up against the rain and wind, seeing the street sign. Remembering a summer’s day, the bishop, the croissants and the coffee and my little sister in a pink dress with a pale green bow at the back and a pink hat with a bow to match and now it was thirty-odd years later and she was dead and I was following her last footsteps and they were probably still selling the perfect croissants at number 19 and I’d given up on Henry James when I’d bogged down in the middle of The Golden Bowl. I missed my sister, that was the absolute hell of it. No more croissants with Val.

  It was a quiet, gray building exuding dignity and money. The gated iron doorway should have guarded a crown prince at the very least, or secrets beyond price. The building looked impervious to change, death, and taxes. But of course Lockhardt was dead and Val was dead and maybe she had used the building.

  There was a concierge’s office and Dunn went in briefly after we’d let ourselves in the front door. He came back humming to himself and we ascended to the top floor in the rickety wire cage. The central core of stairway wound narrowly around the elevator. You could see the cables through the open grating of the floor. “Penthouse,” Dunn said.

  We stepped out of the elevator. There were flowers on an occasional table, thick gray carpets, a large mirror. Very subdued. Lockhardt’s apartment was one of two on the floor.

  Inexplicably, the door to his apartment stood six inches open. Dunn glanced at me and shrugged, put his forefinger to his lips. I pushed the door all the way open and led the way inside.

  There was a cool breeze in the hallway, and you could hear and smell the rain. There was a window open somewhere. There was a faint gray light coming from a doorway all the way across the width of an elegant living room with chandelier, a rococo fireplace, gilt-framed mirrors, some understated drawings, low furniture covered in dropcloths. Halfway across the room I stopped and listened.

  Someone was crying, low-pitched, deep sobbing. It was a haunting, incredibly sorrowful sound, matching the soft, insistent throb and drip of the rain on the roof and running from the eaves. Through the fog outside, through the darkness, I could just pick out the blurred lights on the Eiffel Tower.

  Then I was standing in the doorway, look
ing into the small study where the windows were thrown open. A dim light was on in the corner and the curtains were twisting in the wind. Someone was sitting behind the desk, head in hands, quietly sniffling, oblivious.

  I must have made some slight sound, because the face turned up to look at me. It wasn’t a quick, frightened movement but slow, as if nothing really mattered.

  For a moment I thought I was having a bizarre hallucination, the face was so unexpected.

  It was Sister Elizabeth.

  How can I explain the conflict of emotions that flashed past me in the instant of recognition? I had thought about her so frequently since I’d last seen her, had at times summoned up memories of her and at others willed them not to come. Now here she was at the least expected moment and the emotional range she’d put me through back in Princeton was replicated in a matter of seconds, delight and warmth and affection giving way like quicksand to the plunge into the harsher realities of our parting.

  She was wearing the suit the Order favored, and her long, tawny hair was held back with clips, revealing the width of her forehead, the wide, straight eyebrows, the wide-set eyes that I knew were green. The raincoat was thrown across the corner of the desk which was otherwise bare. Her face was streaked with tears.

  I might so easily have relaxed my grip, gone to her, put my arms around her, held her regardless of who or what she was … what she was, that was the blade turning.… She was so desperately beautiful, so sad, and then her face drew itself together and she wiped her eyes with her knuckles like a little girl and she saw me and she smiled at me, the happiness on her face so palpable, so powerful in its emotional impact—I wanted to reach for her but I knew that if I did I would be utterly, irrevocably lost. She was as dead to me as Val. My whole life, all that I learned, was the proof.

  I was staring at her when Artie Dunn came in, sized up the situation, said, “Faith and begorra, what next?”

  Father Dunn was just the sort of priest who would know a perfect little restaurant nearby, this one in the rue St.-Philippe-du-Roule a little over a block’s walk away. It was dark and heavily beamed and firelight threw shadows helter-skelter everywhere. The smell of garlic and full-flavored wine-scented sauces hit you right away. The baguettes were warm and fresh, the vin du pays full of character and vigor. It woke me up, wandered to my brain in record time, and coaxed me out of the surprise and discomfort I’d felt upon discovering Sister Elizabeth.

  She said she hadn’t eaten all day and looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week. Her face had lost its pink-cheeked look of health, and her eyes were hollowed, red-rimmed. Neither she nor I spoke much in the immediate aftermath of our meeting, so Dunn carried the brunt of the conversation. It didn’t seem to bother him. He herded us to the restaurant, got us seated, ordered and approved the wine, and set the agenda for what turned into a long evening’s discussion. He suggested that she should tell us what brought her to Paris and so she did, though the story came in fits and starts and was punctuated by food: crusty onion soup, pleurote mushrooms with garlic, pâté thick with garlic and green pistachios, sweet butter, beef stew which was their own speciality, two and a half bottles of wine. The meal would have been memorable if the story had not been unforgettable.

  As it was, I kept struggling to keep the pieces in place, kept trying to fit them into what I’d discovered. It was like trying to keep a delicately balanced kaleidoscope from shifting and creating a new pattern. But it did keep shifting and I had to keep refitting it into my own patterns. She was becoming the old Elizabeth, eating like a farmhand, getting her strength back, and I had to struggle to keep my heart from going out to her. That night in Paris she was everything I’d fallen in love with in Princeton and I had to hold all my feelings in check. The one thing I couldn’t let her see was a hint of how I felt. Then, of course, I would be at the mercy of the nun. Behind that facade lived the Church.

  Her story took a certain chronological form in my mind. It began with her finding the names of the five murder victims Val had listed in the folder. Claude Gilbert. Sebastien Arroyo. Hans Ludwig Mueller. Pry ce Badell-Fowler. Geoffrey Strachan. All dead, all with a connection to Paris either during or after the war, and all involved in one way or another with the Church. And all of them important for some reason to Val.

  Elizabeth had followed Val’s footsteps and, like Val, had discovered the existence of the assassini. And she had pursued them through the centuries, as far as the rise of Mussolini in the 1920s. She had made a pretty sound connection to World War II with the five victims and their murders. Anybody could have poked holes in the theory, but they’d have run into murders and documents and circumstances that fairly begged to be linked. It simply made sense except for one blank: what motivated the murders so many years after the events of the war years?

  Elizabeth nodded when I raised the question, and said that was the objection D’Ambrizzi and Sandanato had raised.

  “And what kind of answer did you have for them?”

  “Isn’t it pretty obvious? What’s happening in the Church worth killing for? What’s the big prize? The election of a successor to Callistus …”

  “But what had these five victims to do with a new pope?” Dunn smiled at her kindly.

  “Look, I didn’t say I had the answers.” She was full of impatience. “I’m raising some questions that need answering—you’re nowhere if you don’t have the right questions. Val used to say that, over and over. It’s all in the questions, she’d say. And I want to get back to Val’s list. There was a sixth name on that list. And he doesn’t seem to exist. We can’t find anything about him. But there was no date of death following his name. Did Val think he was dead? Or did she think he was the next to die? Erich Kessler. His name is Erich Kessler—”

  “You are kidding!” It just popped out of me. I looked at Dunn. “How in the name of God could Val have found out about him?”

  “All that matters,” Dunn said, “is that she did.” He looked up at us from his wine. “I mean, you can understand why they’d want to kill him, too. Hell, Ben, he probably knows everything.…”

  “Wait a minute—you know who he is!” Elizabeth’s spirit was back. She gave us an exasperated look. “Well? Who?”

  That’s the way the evening went, our stories interlocking, and getting out of hand until Dunn would step in and pull it all back together again. But the articulated structure rising before us was worth the trouble, worth the interruptions and the leaps of imagination back and forth through time.

  I told her we had to get through her story as best we could before we got to mine, and she grudgingly went along. She was just as she’d been back at the kitchen table in Princeton in the middle of the night, alive and determined and full of the excitement of discovery. It sounds sappy, but in the midst of the nightmare we were suddenly having a good time.

  She had taken her findings to D’Ambrizzi, and his faithful shadow minister, Sandanato, had told them the whole story because the cardinal was the man in the Church Val had respected most and loved, the man she’d known the longest, since childhood. And—anger flashed in her green cat’s eyes—they had refused to take her seriously, had refused to admit the idea of the assassini was anything more than an old anti-Catholic bogeyman. She tried not just once, but twice, and D’Ambrizzi had lost patience with her. Furious, she had decided to come to Paris. She had thought of the apartment Val must have used there … but then, everything had changed a few nights before. Then D’Ambrizzi had had to take her seriously.

  I said, “And what so momentous happened a few nights ago?”

  But Dunn interrupted. Wait. He wanted to know more about what D’Ambrizzi had said about this mythical beast, the assassini.

  She said he told her it was all a fabrication based on some glimmer of truth from hundreds of years before. Badell-Fowler was an old crackpot; no one had ever taken him seriously. He accepted none of it: the five murdered men, the destruction of Badell-Fowler’s researches—those were all things that just happe
ned, nothing particularly ominous in them. No connections, no shadowy implications. No assassini. And he’d never heard of anyone named Erich Kessler.

  Dunn sighed, pushed his bowl of stew away, and dabbed at the corners of his mouth with linen. “I’m very sorry to hear all that. Very sorry, indeed. You’d say he took you seriously, would you?”

  She nodded. “He takes me seriously. And even if he didn’t, he certainly took Val seriously. And he knows I’ve been working on Val’s agenda—”

  “Could he be trying,” I said, “to keep you from getting killed?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. That could be part of it. But I know him. I think he’d tell me the truth and then try to convince me to stay out of it. He wouldn’t just lie, he respects me and what I do, what I am—”

  “Sister,” Father Dunn said, “I don’t want you to take offense, but you’re mistaken. D’Ambrizzi is a cardinal. It’s the Church of Rome we’re talking about here.” He smiled gently, his pink face crinkling in his most avuncular manner. “I speak as a priest and as a student of the Church. D’Ambrizzi may like you. I’m sure he does. What’s not to like? But he doe§ not respect you, he does not respect your work. You are a woman, that’s not good. You are a nun, that’s worse. And you are a journalist, full of questions and principles and standards by which you like to measure people … and a lot of people won’t measure up. That’s when the red lights start flashing, Sister. And being an American just makes it worse—because Americans just won’t listen to reason. He’d lie to you as a matter of normal precaution, he’d lie to you reflexively. Believe me, you are the enemy to guys like D’Ambrizzi. And I love the old bastard.…”

  She didn’t flinch, looked him straight in the eye. “I hear you. I really do. But—lie to me?”

  “Sister, he already has.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Did you ever come across the name Simon? Simon Verginius?”

  “Yes. In Badell-Fowler.”

  “D’Ambrizzi knows a great deal about the assassini. He was up close and personal with Simon Verginius in Paris, he was involved with the assassini.… Simon Verginius was the code name of a priest sent by Pope Pius—”