The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  Later that night I lay in my old bed beneath the picture of DiMaggio, listening to the wind at the glass and feeling the draft, hearing the usual rustlings in the eaves. I was drifting in and out of sleep and seemed at one moment to be watching Val as she peeled back the side of her drum and left the photograph inside for me to find, at another I was in the hall at the top of the stair watching my father fall.…

  I lay there wishing my mother would stay out of my face for just one night. It was getting to the point where I was half afraid to go to sleep. She’d be there waiting for me, full of her accusations.

  And as I lay there, turning, banging my head against the pillow trying to get comfortable, I remembered Val coming into my room one night, that same room. She wasn’t very old, she was wearing a red flannel nightie and she was crying, rubbing her eyes. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and our mother had been standing in the hall, had ambushed her, you might say, and had started in on her. I remembered the occasion now, who knows why, but there it was, the memory of Val, tear-streaked, sleepy, scared, while I asked her what was the matter.

  She said Mother had been mean to her.

  I asked her what she meant.

  “She said I did it, Ben,” Val had sobbed, “and I asked her what and she just kept saying it, kept saying I did it—”

  “Tell me exactly what she said.”

  “ ‘You did it, you did it, it was you … out in the orchard … you took him, you did it—’ ” Then she started to cry again and said, “But, Ben, I didn’t do it, I promise I didn’t,” and I put my arm around her and told her she could climb into bed with me for the rest of the night.

  I told her that Mother had been having a bad dream, that it wasn’t her fault and she shouldn’t be afraid of her and I don’t recall our ever talking about it again. Maybe because it had to do with the bad thing that happened in the orchard, the thing we weren’t to speak of, the thing found hanging out there.…

  Now, decades later, Mother’s nightmare had survived.

  Val hadn’t, but the nightmare had, and now my mother’s nightmare had become mine.

  2

  DRISKILL

  The drive to the lodge was long and slow because of the dense mixture of fog and snow, all blown to hell by a strong, gusty wind that kept shaking the car. The snow was collecting thickly by the time I got to Everett and saw the detour sign. The bridge had failed a state check, and traffic was being routed off through another small town, Menander. I followed the markers and negotiated the long hill that led under a stone bridge and curved up and to the left. The ascent was abrupt. For a while I was afraid I might not get the traction in the ice and snow to make the climb. The forested hillsides made a maze of dark, leafless tree limbs which seemed hopelessly entangled with one another. Some kids from Menander were sledding among the trees. The tops of the hills were lost in fog. The snow on the road was getting deeper, far deeper in the gullies, and there was ice underneath. If I’d set out an hour later I might have had some real trouble.

  Menander was outfitted for Christmas. Decorations hung on lampposts, and from a banner across the street, the church had a creche lit up by floodlights and snow had built up heavily on the roof of the manger. Joseph, Mary, and the Wise Men looked desperately out of their element. I pulled in at the drugstore which had once belonged to a brother-and-sister team called Potterveld. It was a Rexall now. I called the house and heard my father’s voice. He sounded much stronger than he had on the transatlantic calls. I told him I was about to drop in on him.

  “Well, it’s about time,” he said. “I should have known you’d get home for Christmas. Wouldn’t want to miss your presents. I know you, Ben.” He laughed to show he was kidding me rather than continuing the sniping war that had gone on so long. “You’d better step on it. It’s getting dark up here and snowing hard.”

  “I’ll be there in under an hour,” I said.

  For some reason, as I guided the car ever more carefully along the increasingly treacherous, twisty stretch of road—for some reason, maybe because my father’s voice made me feel kindly toward him, I got to thinking about that day several centuries earlier when the sun was shining and Gary Cooper was sitting on the porch talking to my dad about the movie. The OSS adventures that came to life on the screen for me, seeing my dad’s great, heroic escapades, running across the airstrip with Nazi bullets chewing up the dust at his heels.… The sunny day, little Val prancing around showing off, Cooper sketching for us … magic. Those days, viewed again through my mood, wore a perfect roseate glow. But Cooper was long dead, Val was dead, my father’s heroic OSS days were just a memory … a story … a movie … it had all, as everything did, turned to dust.

  The lodge sat on the rounded-off top of a mountain, the naked trees and prickly evergreens and firs and pines surrounding it. The light from the hidden sun was fading as I drove up the driveway from the road. The snow was deep on all sides, like frosting on a cake. Pristine, perfect flakes drifting through the branches, piling ever deeper. The lodge was a massive affair. It looked as if it were made of mammoth Lincoln Logs. Snow covered the pitched roof, nearly a foot deep. Smoke curled away from one of the fireplace chimneys rising higher yet. One slanted roof began at ground level, leaving one story of the main living room below ground at one end. That roof was mainly a skylight, faced to the north, for the benefit of my father’s painting. There were lights in the windows, and when I pulled the car up to the flagstone walk the front door swung open and there was my father standing with the light behind him, waving to me. He was a little gaunt, but his broad shoulders were still square beneath the heavy dark blue sweater. I couldn’t recall ever having been welcomed anywhere by my father before.

  My father’s manner was uncharacteristically warm, or at least not aggressive, that first night. Some of his piss and vinegar had doubtless been drained off by his illness, yet I wanted to believe that we were possibly entering on a new phase of our relationship. Better late than never: I’d thought all the same thoughts about him before.

  We horsed around in the kitchen together and eventually ate a long, leisurely dinner of grilled steaks, baked potatoes, salad, and a robust claret and powerful coffee with chicory. The questions he had couldn’t be avoided, obviously, but we started on them slowly, very careful when it came to Val’s murder. But slowly I told him how it had all developed. It was the first time I’d tried to relate the story and it made for a long evening, through which his interest and energy never flagged.

  Names I mentioned jogged his memory, tapped into his pool of anecdotes. Torricelli and Robbie Heywood and Klaus Richter, countless memories of D’Ambrizzi and the war and the adventures with the Resistance. He told me stories he’d never told me before, stories about dropping into occupied France from planes flying only high enough to make sure the parachutists didn’t get killed by landing, or coming ashore by rubber rafts from submarines, eluding German patrols, connecting with Resistance cells, meeting with D’Ambrizzi in the damnedest places. It was all a game, I could hear it in his voice, scary most of the time, but everybody was younger then and there was a war on and you had to do your bit.…

  “You knew Richter? He was a German officer—”

  “Look, son, he was working with D’Ambrizzi in Paris and I was working with D’Ambrizzi. These things happen. I was having a fairly unusual war.”

  “But did Richter know you were OSS?”

  “Of course not, Ben. What are you thinking of? D’Ambrizzi probably told him I was an American trapped in Paris when the war broke out. I don’t know—”

  “But you could have been betrayed by anyone who knew who you were.”

  “Well, not to Klaus Richter; he didn’t give a damn about me or who was going to win the war—he had his own work to do. Everybody was engaged in their own little war. People like LeBecq, all the rest of them—”

  “You knew LeBecq?” It was disconcerting, realizing that my father had been there then, that I had all these years later followed in
his footsteps. “You knew D’Ambrizzi killed him for betraying the Pius Plot?”

  “Sure.” My father poured himself fresh coffee and clipped the end off a cigar, held a flame to it. “The Pius Plot, now, there was a crazy idea—” He puffed a couple of times. “If ever there was one. D’Ambrizzi was playing with fire on that one. He was way out of bounds.”

  “Was it really so terrible?” We’d moved into the long skylight room. Wind blew the snow overhead, across the glass. A fire blazed in the fireplace which was made of rough slabs of fieldstone. We sat across from each other in deep slipcovered chairs. In the distant corner beside the arch leading to the dining room stood the towering Kodiak bear, arms out to embrace whoever chanced near. “D’Ambrizzi made a pretty good case for Pius as a Nazi sympathizer, a kind of war criminal.”

  “The man wanted to murder the pope in cold blood. Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit crazy? Pius was no war criminal. He had to be very careful on a continent entirely dominated by the Axis … the fate of millions of Catholics was in Hitler’s and Pius’s hands. So, what if Pius couldn’t make quite the moral choices D’Ambrizzi would have—so what? D’Ambrizzi was trafficking with Nazis every day.” He stared into the fire.

  “On Pius’s orders,” I said.

  “Look, D’Ambrizzi was a great man, I’m not saying he wasn’t. But he had a tendency to go off the deep end occasionally. Kill the pope … But it never happened, so …” He shrugged. My father had never conversed with me in this manner: he was taking me into his confidence, man to man, as he’d never done before.

  “It never happened,” I said, “because Archduke betrayed the whole thing. And all D’Ambrizzi’s people died—”

  “Not all.”

  “Did you ever have any dealings with Archduke?”

  “Well, I wasn’t there when that particular balloon went up, but I naturally heard things. Then the time came to get D’Ambrizzi the hell out of there. I liked the guy, he was a good man. The Vatican was on his tail, so I brought him out.” He watched me through the cigar smoke.

  “What about you and Archduke?”

  “Never met the man.”

  “Do you know who he was?”

  “Can’t say as I do. It’s all over now, what difference does it make?”

  “It matters because it’s still all tied up with what’s going on now … the murder of Val—”

  “You’re confusing past and present, Ben.”

  “No, I almost understand the connection between past and present, Dad. I’ve just about got it … it’s a man, it’s a couple of men. Indelicato was one, tying past and present together. But there’s another and it’s Archduke. I think Archduke is still alive, that he betrayed D’Ambrizzi a long time ago and allied himself with Indelicato then … and I believe he was allied with Indelicato now, to keep D’Ambrizzi from becoming pope by making sure Indelicato did. Of course everything’s up for grabs now, with Indelicato dead.”

  “You give this Archduke a great deal of credit,” he said. “Do you have any idea who he is?”

  “I’m sure I know.”

  “And?”

  “You won’t like it.” I took a deep breath. “Summerhays.”

  “What?” He banged his huge palm on the arm of the chair. “Summerhays? Why in the name of God Summerhays?”

  “He was your control out of London in the OSS days?”

  My father nodded, a small smile of surprise on his broad, flat face.

  “He had you and plenty of other sources inside both France and Germany. He had access to all the intelligence coming to London from Europe.… He had a long history of deep involvement with the Church, he knew Pius both before and after he became pope … he’s a traditional conservative in Church matters … he taught you and Lockhardt how it’s all done—face it, Dad, he’s the logical Archduke, like it or not!”

  “And you’re telling me he’s still at it. It’s a hard one to swallow, Ben.”

  “It’s hard to swallow what’s been going on for the last eighteen months, tidying up the past. Dad, you can help me on this, you can help me prove it … Summerhays trusts you.”

  “Oh, now, Ben, I don’t know about that. My God, Drew Summerhays … I haven’t thought about all these things in a long time.”

  “But you’ve had your memory refreshed by reading the papers D’Ambrizzi left behind when he disappeared from Princeton.”

  He nodded, laughing softly. “Sure, sure, but Summerhays—you really surprise me there, Ben. You’re on the wrong track, you must be. Yes, I read D’Ambrizzi’s brief, Peaches told me about it—”

  “With a little prodding, I understand.”

  “So you’ve been talking to young Peaches. He told you the story of that old padre who used to brag to me?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I did badger poor Peaches and he finally admitted he’d found the papers. I read it all. Interesting stuff so far as it went, but what does it really amount to? I don’t know. The Church sponsored something like a Resistance cell, there was some art theft involved, a little murder, lots of code names … all very old news, isn’t it? What did you make of it?”

  “It had a ring of authenticity,” I said. “Did you ever get wind of the idea that Indelicato was the Collector? Did you know that Indelicato was the man Archduke went to with the Pius Plot story?”

  “Maybe, Ben. Who knows anymore?” My father looked up at the sudden blast of wind smacking the side of the lodge. A draft whispered across the floor. “But yes, I found out that Indelicato was the man they sent after D’Ambrizzi. Of course. I’m the one who got him out of Europe with Indelicato in hot pursuit.”

  “Well, it was Horstmann who’s been doing the killing. Did you ever come across him over there?”

  The memories were wearing him out, but though his face was drawn his eyes were bright and he didn’t seem to want to stop talking. “No, I don’t believe I ever knew him. But that’s not surprising. D’Ambrizzi had a pretty involved network—”

  “Assassini,” I said.

  “Call them what you will, he had them. Most of what he was up to had nothing to do with me, Ben. I could use a brandy. Don’t argue. It’s good for my heart.”

  I poured us each a snifter and he sipped, rested his head on the back of the chair.

  “Think about it, Dad. What if we could somehow reveal Summerhays for what he is … he’s as much a killer as Indelicato, he was in on it, plotting, killing …”

  “Ben, I’m mighty tired all of a sudden. We’ll talk tomorrow. I really do want to hear all the rest of it. But I’m bushed.” He stood up slowly, but I knew better than to help him. He stopped at the foot of the stairs that led up to the balcony and the second-floor bedrooms. The snow was rattling on the skylight. From the windows I locked at the snow building up. My car had a fresh layer of snow, six inches anyway. “Ben, I’ve had an idea. Tomorrow you’re going to go out and get us a Christmas tree.” He sighed. “I miss your sister, son. Dammit.”

  When I got up it was past midmorning and my dad was frying bacon and eggs. We sat at the dining table. I ate a prodigious amount. I reminded myself of Sister Elizabeth. He brought the coffeepot to the table and told me he wanted to hear the rest of it, how it all turned out.

  I told him. I told him D’Ambrizzi’s explanation as he’d presented it to our little party at the Hassler. I assumed that if D’Ambrizzi could pass on everything he did that night to all those people, I could certainly tell his old comrade in arms. My God, he’d even told Summerhays. So I told my father everything. I wanted his help, if we could come up with a way to land Summerhays. I told him everything but why Val had had to die: that she’d learned the truth, that she’d tied it all together and that she was coming home to tell her father and brother.…

  I wanted to make sure he could handle all that, the rough stuff. So I waited. He didn’t ask about Val, so I decided to wait some more.

  But otherwise, I told him everything. How Indelicato died, how we found him, how D’Amb
rizzi had—how could I say it to him? How D’Ambrizzi had spoken from the past, as Simon, and given Salvatore di Mona his last instructions … to kill Cardinal Indelicato.

  My father looked at me over the rim of his coffee cup. His eyes were hollow, circled in purple, as if he’d been up all night. “Well, as a student of Church history, I must say that a pope committing a murder is not entirely unheard of. Even eliminating his most likely successor—it’s all been done before. Nothing new under the sun or the dome of St. Peter’s.” The tired eyes bored into me. Something had changed from last night. We weren’t enemies, but we weren’t pals anymore, either. It was as if the world had come between us, by stealth, in the dark of night.

  I told him how Sandanato had betrayed D’Ambrizzi by working with Indelicato and my father spoke up.

  “They all believed they were doing the right thing, didn’t they? That’s the tragedy, Ben. That’s always been the central tragedy of the Church. Indelicato and Sandanato and Archduke wanted what was best for the Church … D’Ambrizzi … your little sister … even Peaches, for all I know, wants what’s best for the Church … Callistus was willing to kill for the Church in 1943 and he did kill for the Church now. That’s the hold it has on people. Do you see what I mean, Ben? Have you ever believed in anything enough to kill for it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “Most men, I think, would ultimately kill for something. Not that they ever have to face up to it.”

  “The heart of the Church,” I said, “is the heart of darkness. I’ve been there. I’m just back. And I don’t believe it’s full of great guys trying to do the right thing.”

  “You haven’t been to the heart of darkness, son. You haven’t even come close. I’ve been there. Your mother even got there. But not you. There is no worse place, and when you get there, there’s no mistaking it. You’ll know.”

  I told him how Sandanato had died.

  My father went to the window, stared out into the steadily falling snow.