The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  “Someone I trusted, someone who knew everything. For a long time I didn’t know … at the beginning, of course, I was sure it was LeBecq. Now I know it wasn’t.”

  “Who was it?”

  He shook his head, wouldn’t answer.

  Elizabeth said, “But how did Indelicato wind up with all the booty?”

  “Pius was a grateful man when it was convenient for him. He gave it into Fredi’s keeping as a reward for services rendered. For saving the papal hide. For all I know, Indelicato may have blackmailed him.” That thought made him smile.

  “Well,” Father Dunn said, “it was an appropriate gesture. The Indelicato family has always taken pride in its collections. They have always collected.”

  Then it hit me, better late than never.

  “The Collector,” I said softly.

  D’Ambrizzi nodded. “Yes. It was Indelicato whom Pius sent to Paris to find me … that is, to build the case against me for catch-all disobedience, for killing LeBecq, for plotting to kill Pius himself. But we held firm, held silence in the face of his probing. Eventually I realized he was going to have me killed—he’d have been rid of me forever. Yes, Pius called him ‘the Collector.’ It was a little joke, a play on words. Fredi had been sent to Paris to collect me. In any case, as soon as the war was over, it was Indelicato who handled the Vatican end of what you referred to as ‘the mutual blackmail’ with the escaping Nazis. Fredi was a kind of clockwork spider, weaving his web of blood and fear and iron self-righteousness, the Nazis and the art and the Church. Those days are the key to his entire rise. The serious, ascetic figure, the King of the Curia. Indelicato has been a busy man. One of us, I suspect, is going to have to die so that the other might succeed—”

  “Nonsense, Giacomo! Your various delusions, your sense of melodrama, have blinded you!” It was His Eminence Cardinal Indelicato in the doorway behind us. “What do I have to fear from you? Or you from me? And why all this talk of dying? Has there not been enough killing?” His dark eyes, so like Sandanato’s, flickered from one face to another, a half smile on his thin lips. In that moment he reminded me of Sandanato, someone only a step from martyrdom and fanaticism. Elizabeth’s story that Sandanato had defected to Indelicato’s camp after a lifetime of loyalty to D’Ambrizzi made sense, if only in terms of Indelicato’s face. Never had two men been more unlike each other than the cardinals in question. Except, perhaps, in their ambitions, their ruthlessness.

  D’Ambrizzi turned to us with a tolerant smile. “I owe my friends here an apology. I knew you would have me watched, Fredi, and I wanted you here. They’d never have come if I’d told them—but I am trying to prove a point to them. A tour of the treasure chamber was in order.”

  “But I’m afraid you’ve given the wrong impression. These are the gifts bestowed upon the Church by various states both during and after the war. I lease this space to the Church for storage. It’s all down on paper and perfectly proper.”

  D’Ambrizzi laughed. “Why tell this to me, Fredi? I’m the one the Germans allowed to steal it! You are an amusing fellow sometimes, in spite of yourself.”

  “As always, my friend, you are too kind. But you must realize that our rivalry—as you see it—is at an end. We are old men, Giacomo. We must escape from the past. Surely we will live out our days in peace—”

  “Do you think so, Fredi? Really?”

  “Of course. The long war is over. I have your memoir now, the story you wrote and left in America so many years ago … at least, it will soon be in my possession. I will destroy it. And so your claws will be dulled. Whatever you insist on dredging up from the tragedy of the past will be irrelevant jabbering—”

  “And forty years after the events we have our second Nazi pope!” D’Ambrizzi couldn’t keep the laughter out of his voice. “What a joke! And who is it that procured my memoir, as you call it?”

  Indelicato stared at him and then let the question slip away. “You see, you are hostage to the past. Nazi is no longer a word with any meaning.”

  “Perhaps that’s one of the things that’s wrong with the world. For me, it will always have meaning, I assure you.”

  “You are paralyzed in the past. For you there is always a war, always killing to be done. Well, Simon, your killing is over at last. Now you must contemplate the fate of your eternal soul. You have such a lot of blood on your hands. You have murdered so much of the past. But, Giacomo, you have not murdered me!”

  “I assume this is all for their benefit,” D’Ambrizzi said, turning slightly toward us. “Well, you may convince them. But I must say it’s you, Fredi, you are the past. While you live, the evil of those days lives. You are the spirit of evil that infects our Church. Evil. Pure evil …”

  “Ah, my poor Giacomo! Up to your chin in blood, the man who tried to murder the pope—and you call me evil! You should seek out your confessor if you still have one, my friend, while there is still time.”

  They stared at each other, all the smiles gone, like two prehistoric creatures, all but extinct, ready to thrash it out. After what they had been through and what they had done, extinction held no fears for them.

  I broke the silence, faced Indelicato. “Who warned you of the plot to kill Pius?”

  “I will tell you—”

  “No!” D’Ambrizzi shouted. “There’s no point!”

  “Archduke. It was the man we called Archduke. He knew where the real hope for the Church lay. He knew then. He knows now.”

  Cardinal Indelicato led our peculiar little group back to the festivities. He walked side by side with D’Ambrizzi, their arms linked. Father Dunn and Elizabeth and I followed, watching them, outwardly two old friends engaged in a formalized ritual. Maybe that was all it was, a ritual, a gavotte they’d been dancing for half a century. Maybe their emotions weren’t involved. Maybe their emotions had died long ago and what was left was sheer plotting. Whatever the truth, I wanted to see how the dance ended.

  The viewing of the television show was just concluding as we stood in the vast foyer outside the ballroom doors. The applause was still rippling away as the footmen opened the doors and the crowd milled out upon us. The American anchorman was swept along until he saw Cardinal Indelicato. Then the two of them stood together while we moved away. Flashbulbs were going off, everyone was exclaiming at the brilliance of the show. Indelicato was giving his thin smile, inclining his head humbly, fingers touching the bejeweled crucifix.

  I turned to Father Dunn. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t keep any of it straight anymore. It was supposed to end tonight. The big flash of lightning … the truth. And what do we get? The villains decide it’s old home week. And what did Indelicato mean about getting his hands on D’Ambrizzi’s memoirs? You said Peaches found the damn things—”

  I felt D’Ambrizzi’s hand on my arm before Dunn could answer.

  “Don’t leave yet. The evening has just begun.”

  Monsignor Sandanato had just appeared in the crowd, pushing his way toward the subject of the popping flashbulbs.

  D’Ambrizzi drew me back toward Indelicato. “You see?”

  Sandanato was breathless, his face gleaming and gaunt.

  “Eminence, please, excuse me.”

  Indelicato turned slowly, magisterially, the thin smile fading. “Yes, Monsignor?”

  “I’ve just come from the Holy Father, Eminence. He has sent me to you. He wants to see you now.” Any tighter and Sandanato would have snapped right before us.

  Indelicato nodded, turned away from the well-wishers and the television people. The anchorman said, “Eminence, does this mean that you are the pontiff’s choice?”

  Indelicato stared at the anchorman in amazement, whispered, “The Holy Father has no vote,” and brushed past him, stopping in front of D’Ambrizzi. “You heard, Giacomo? Why not pledge me your support?”

  “You’d better hurry, Fredi. He might change his mind.”

  “You find this amusing?”

  “Good-bye, Fredi.”

/>   Sandanato, avoiding D’Ambrizzi’s eyes, plucked at Indelicato’s sleeve as he passed. “Do you wish me to accompany you, Eminence?”

  Slowly Indelicato—as if passing some secret sentence—shook his head. “Not necessary, Monsignor.”

  The word had spread almost instantaneously through the crowd, a kind of electrical charge. The pitch of voices had risen with that special frisson that comes with being at the heart of a moment, a moment of history. Was the papacy of Callistus ending? In his last hours was he making known his own hopes about a successor? Would his last wish carry weight? What would the morning bring?

  D’Ambrizzi’s heavy hand was on Sandanato’s shoulder. “You’ve done well, Pietro. I thought Callistus might need a messenger tonight. Well … so be it. Now, you must join our little supper party. I won’t take no for an answer.”

  6

  Standing near the double door through which she’d entered the private dining room, Sister Elizabeth reflected on just what Cardinal D’Ambrizzi might still have in store for them. The room was small and comfortable, cozy beneath two small chandeliers. The waiters were from the Hassler staff. Using the hotel seemed like a concession to Driskill and herself: he was a few floors from his room, she was across the square from the Order’s headquarters. For some reason—it seemed rather sinister to her—D’Ambrizzi had made her promise to stay there overnight rather than return to her Via Veneto flat.

  Now the cardinal was speaking to a man with a huge mole’s nose, so vast the room for a moment seemed to revolve around it. Driskill stood listening to Drew Summerhays, whom Elizabeth had met at Val’s funeral. Driskill’s face was remote, emotionless, but there was a desolate look in his eyes: lost, tired, or puzzled nearly to exhaustion? She thought she alone knew him so well.

  D’Ambrizzi as the Ringmaster was a remarkable sight. He had controlled, stage-managed, their entire evening—the whole time they’d been in Rome, if it came to that. But his arrival at the party, the mysterious descent into Indelicato’s netherworld … she was still trying to cope with the room full of Nazi treasure. The dollar value had increased—what? Tenfold, a hundredfold, maybe a thousand times in forty years? Whatever, it was surely a priceless collection.

  Now Drew Summerhays was standing by a drinks cabinet with a glass of sherry and at his elbow a short stocky man who said nothing. Someone seemed to have taken a potato peeler or a sharpened rasp to his throat on some long-past occasion. A gray-haired man with broad stooped shoulders stood talking with Monsignor Sandanato: she was introduced to him, saw his large, moist eyes with purple bags beneath: he was Dr. Cassoni. As she circled the room she met the man with the mole’s nose; an old journalist from Paris whose name was Paternoster. Our Father … Clive Paternoster.

  She wondered if Archduke was among them at that moment: it would be so like D’Ambrizzi to bring Archduke the Betrayer to the center ring of his little circus. D’Ambrizzi, the death-defying high wire aerialist. Working without a net.

  Father Dunn was weaving among the guests, a word here, a word there, finally finishing up with a sherry in hand at D’Ambrizzi’s elbow. The conversation was general. She heard herself joining him, the only woman, as always. There were pointed jokes about the television show and Indelicato’s venture into self-promotion. There were speculations on the health of the Holy Father, as there were bound to be at every dinner that evening in Rome. There were comments on the circus that would begin when Callistus finally died and the cardinals journeyed from the corners of the earth to choose his successor. Father Dunn was unable to resist an observation on Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s ambition to be the first American pope.

  Dinner passed in the same superficially untroubled manner, suspense gathering steam as the guests began to wonder just why they’d been chosen to share the cardinal’s largesse. Inevitably the subject of Indelicato’s departure for the Vatican was raised, and a nervous hush fell across the table. But D’Ambrizzi smiled broadly and said that there was no point in staring so hard at him, he had no idea what might be on the papal mind that night. He let a chuckle rumble deep in his chest and the conversation level returned to normal.

  She had maneuvered herself into the chair next to Ben, who gave her a thankful smile. But his eyes bore that distracted look. He said next to nothing. Finally she asked him if he was all right.

  “Yes, sure,” he said. “No, of course I’m not. But—I don’t know. Is this how it all ends? Is this what it comes to? Nothing?” He was speaking softly, his voice leaking tension. No one else was able to hear him. His face remained blank, emotionless. “So maybe there aren’t any more murders. But is that supposed to satisfy us? What about Val? What about you and me? It’s a goddamn miracle we’re alive, either one of us, and now it just peters out, sputters to a halt … and that’s the end of the story?”

  She nodded, knowing how he felt, “They’re keeping us boxed out. What more can we do?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to know who gave Horstmann his orders. But everybody’s a drinking buddy all of a sudden and maybe I’m not very sophisticated, but I still want to know who the hell took the brain dive off your balcony, who gave Horstmann the list of victims, who’s the bastard … I want to kill Simon, whoever he is, and then I want to find Horstmann and I want to kill him. I know I sound totally nuts but some grudges are worth holding.” She’d never heard bitterness so deep. “I am a payback man. I was as a football player. I am as a lawyer. And I am now. This just isn’t fair. Everybody gets to try to kill us, but we don’t get a shot at them. Well, bullshit. I want my shot.” He grinned suddenly at her. “I’ve earned it.”

  She reached out and put her hand over his. It felt perfectly normal. Everything was different now that she’d screwed up her courage and visited his hotel room and cut through all their silly posturing and self-righteousness and pride. Now she could take his hand and give it a squeeze and not feel she had to launch into an awful lecture full of priggish nonsense about the Church knowing best. She’d believed all that back in Princeton, but now, in Rome, she no longer knew what to believe.

  D’Ambrizzi was calling for attention, snapping his whip to get them all to jump up onto their boxes and mind their manners. Supper was gone and she had not the vaguest notion of what she’d eaten. Across the table Sandanato was steadying himself, hands flat, bracing himself. His eyes didn’t seem capable of focusing. His forehead had broken out in beads of perspiration. He wiped his deep, darkened eye sockets with the back of his hand. His gaze wavered across hers, moved on toward D’Ambrizzi. D’Ambrizzi. Sandanato’s fallen idol.

  “I thank you all for indulging me.” D’Ambrizzi had risen and was speaking calmly, seemingly in excellent spirits. “You may wonder why I was taken with such a determined desire to be your host tonight … well, there is a point. Sister Elizabeth, you were Sister Valentine’s closest friend. Ben Driskill, she was your beloved sister. Thus, Sister Valentine was your entry card. Father Dunn, my old friend, confidant, trusted ally through the years … in a time of crisis I would naturally turn to you for help and guidance … and the series of murders which began a year and a half ago qualifies in this old peasant’s mind as a crisis. Drew Summerhays, fifty years I’ve known you, worked with you, plotted and counterplotted with you and against you in war and peace—and you are a good man in a crisis. Clive Paternoster, you have known so much for so long, you and Robbie Heywood, that it would have been grossly unjust to withhold from you the final chapter.… I only wish that Robbie could have been with us tonight—he’d have been hugely amused by all the melodrama. My friend and personal physician, Dr. Cassoni—you are also the Holy Father’s doctor, you made no protestations about keeping me informed of his condition. And the pontiff’s health has been at the very center of this whole business—only when his illness struck could the killing begin.

  “And you, Pietro, Monsignor Sandanato, my faithful aide-de-camp through so many battles, so often my greatest strength … no man has a greater belief in the necessity of saving o
ur Church from its enemies. So you must be included tonight.” He smiled around the table, taking them all in.

  Ben Driskill said, “You missed one of us. The little one over there. I’ve seen him before … he chased me through the streets of Avignon. But we weren’t introduced.”

  D’Ambrizzi said, “Drew?”

  Summerhays said, “Marco Victor. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, my bodyguard. He travels with me. Ben, I wish you hadn’t run from me that night in Avignon. You know you have never had anything to fear from me … surely you know that.”

  “Sure,” Driskill said. “We’re all pals now.”

  Sister Elizabeth knew what he was thinking. Summerhays is Archduke, the cold son of a bitch. Wake up, Saint Jack, this is the man, the traitor—

  “Now,” D’Ambrizzi said, “we are all accounted for. And I will begin the story we all, each of us, have reason and right to know. Be patient, my friends, it is a story worthy of the Borgias … it is a story the likes of which our Church has survived before and will again.”

  It was the second lecture Elizabeth had heard from D’Ambrizzi in a very short time. She was an impatient woman. But she couldn’t remember ever wanting to hear anything quite so much in her life. She whispered to Driskill, “Here it comes.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he muttered. “I’ve had just about enough buildup.”

  “We are all concerned here tonight with the Holy Father’s condition.” The customary smile that could take you off your guard had faded as D’Ambrizzi began to speak. “The next stage in the Church’s history will soon begin. A new pope will be chosen to serve arid take the lead in shaping the future, ours and the world’s. But first our beloved Callistus will die. We are old friends, Sal di Mona and I, and now it seems that he—the younger man—will precede me in death. I knew about his illness even before he himself did. It was Dr. Cassoni who identified the tumor and the serious worsening of his heart condition. He came to me in simple humanity, asking me what I believed he should do—how he should handle the news with the Holy Father. I gave him my opinion. Callistus is a man of great courage and perspective. Tell him the truth. This was two years ago. Callistus and I spent many a midnight hour going over the situation, talking about the old days, talking about the future … things we had done together, things we’d hoped to do, and those things which now we would never do.