The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

“Horstmann,” he said, “is the kind of man who apparently believes in evening the score. All the way back to zip.”

  In the afternoon I bundled up in the old sheepskin and took a hatchet and a saw outside into the snow. It was still falling, large wet flakes, quiet, still. I passed by the huge skylight that slanted up from ground level and looked inside, down into the main room. The warmth of the house made the snow melt on the glass while it piled up all around. I saw my father standing at the turntable sifting through phonograph records in well-worn jackets. His shoulders were slumped, and when he’d placed the disc on the spindle he used a cane, walking slowly back to his chair by the fire. He lowered himself carefully and sat staring into the flames. Defenses down, he wasn’t the same man. He looked like a man—suddenly too old, too frail—who hadn’t long to live. I wished I hadn’t seen him.

  The wooded hillside sloped upward for perhaps a hundred yards, dotted with rocky outcroppings among the thick black-green clumps of evergreens and the spindly trunks of oaks and elms and poplars. At the crest it leveled off and descended slightly to a lake of no great size, where I’d first gone sailing and swimming. It was an inhumanly cold little lake. Now it would be frozen over. I set off climbing and discovered there was more breeze than I thought. The pillowy flakes seemed suddenly smaller and sharp-edged, designed to sting.

  I noted a couple of potential Christmas trees as I climbed headdown toward the summit. I was drawn there by a sense of the past, I suppose. It had been several years since I’d been there last. Not since boyhood had I gone there with any regularity. Within twenty yards of the top I stopped, leaned against a tree to catch my breath. It was at just that moment that I got a whiff of something that surprised me. I smelled the remnant of a pungent fire made of branches and pinecones.

  It didn’t take long to find the source. Beneath one of the clusters of rock, tucked back under the shelf for shelter, was a damp, blackened pile of ashes, partially kicked over with snow. There was still the faintest wisp of smoke, only a dying gasp, and the aroma of wet, burned pinecones. But someone had warmed himself at that fire during the night. I looked down the eighty yards toward the lodge. Through the trees that dark gray afternoon the glow from the great skylight was plainly visible, a yellow blur of light. Smoke curled away from the chimneys. The wind blew snow down the back of my neck. I was perspiring from the climb.

  Someone had crouched by the fire through the night, waiting, huddling for warmth close to the fire; but why? I could see nothing before me but a mountainside deep with drifted snow and our own lodge.

  I began looking for some indication of arrivals and departures. There were footprints trailing off, but within only a few yards they blurred and were filled in and became indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. I followed one such beginning that seemed to have come down from the lake. I tracked it back, watched it disappear, and then I was at the crest, looking down across the frozen surface of the lake. There was no one in sight, and the wind was cold, with teeth like the saw I was carrying. My eyes were full of tears and my face felt as if it were about to crack from the gale. I turned back and slowly sank into the deeper snow drifted among the trees.

  The light was going.

  I still had the tree to fell, whether someone else was on the mountainside or not, watching me or not. Who might find himself in such an isolated place, so far from the road, from any road, so late at night? The answer, of course, was no one. The idea was preposterous. Whoever had been there had intended to be there and nowhere else. But who? Why? Had they for some reason been watching my father? Or, for that matter, had they been looking for me? Waiting for my arrival?

  Fighting the inclination to look over my shoulder, I settled on a tree, used the hatchet to hack away the lower branches, then got down on my knees and went to work with the saw. I half expected the faint crunch of someone’s tread in the snow, heard too late, the clout to the back of my head. But none came. Too many movies clattering around in my head.

  With the tree finally down on its side I took a look around again, unwound the heavy woolen muffler, and sat down on the stone the unknown camper had pulled near the fire and used for a chair. Below me, in the gathering darkness, the skylight seemed even brighter. And in the lodge my father listening to his music, trying to put on a front for me, wanting a Christmas tree, contemplating his own idea of the heart of darkness.

  I sat on the stone for quite some time, thinking about that region where I thought I’d been but about which my father had disagreed. I never doubted that he had been there, at the deepest, darkest place, where hope and sanity were gone, but why had he mentioned the part about my mother? What would my mother with her life of wealth and ease and privilege have known about? But what could I have been thinking?

  My mother had killed herself. Twice. Once by drowning her private pain in alcohol, then by going off that balcony.… Perhaps she’d gone deeper into darkness than any of the rest of us.

  Why, I wondered, had she done it? It wasn’t a question I’d ever given much attention to. She was my mother and some mothers did crazy things. Mothers of friends at school had behaved strangely, mothers and fathers. Alcohol, suicide, these were not unknown to children who were my friends and they were part of life, you never asked about such things.

  “Mother …”

  When I sobbed that word, almost without knowing it, I heard her voice again, as if she were there beside me. I was staring at the last of the footprints, now almost entirely filled with fresh snow, and she might have been alive in the shadows behind me. The footprints shouldn’t have been there, neither should my mother, but I could hear her voice as I did in my dreams, only this time it was different, I heard her with utter clarity, no muffled voice in the hallway at night, this time I heard clearly what she’d said to Val and what she’d been saying to me for so many years, and it was different, it wasn’t what I’d been hearing, it was different and it meant something else very, very unlike what I’d been hearing.

  Hugh did it …

  It was Hugh …

  Hugh did it …

  It was Hugh in the orchard …

  Hugh. Not you, as Val and I had heard it.

  We were kids. We’d thought we were catching hell.

  And our mother had been telling us that our father had murdered Father Governeau.

  Val must have remembered it, too. That was what had been on her mind when she got back to Princeton and started asking questions about Governeau.…

  Family history, family lies.

  Slowly, not knowing what the hell to do, I dragged the Christmas tree down to the lodge. Not until I was almost there did it occur to me to wonder if someone was vatching.

  I wrestled the tree into the big room. It was seven feet high and full, a perfect tree. My father had brought boxes of ornaments in from storage. Boxes of tinsel, a couple hundred electric tree lights in red and green and blue. He watched me struggling to get the tree into the stand, giving me encouragement, holding the tree straight while I screwed the damn thing into place. He was trying hard to act as if he felt fine, as if this were just another Christmas at the lodge. But he stopped frequently to rest, his breath came raspily, and when he poured us each a drink the bottle was shaking in his weak hand. He looked up at me, eyes watery, blinking, where once they could have frozen the water in the glass.

  Hugh did it … it was Hugh …

  When the tree was secured and it was fully dark outside my father took his drink to the kitchen to do some pasta for our dinner. I heard him shuffling around, banging pots and pans.

  I went to my bedroom and took the envelope from among the shirts and underwear and gear I’d packed in the suitcase for the trip to the lodge. I sat on the edge of the bed and took the dog-eared photograph from the envelope, sat there slowly turning it in my hands, trying to make myself realize that my sister Val was truly dead, that she’d never come bursting into my room again, that I’d never hear her laugh, and most of all that I’d never sit down before the
fire again and remember all the same stuff together, all the life only the two of us knew, all the things we’d ever said to each other. It wasn’t easy, convincing myself that she was gone forever.

  I looked at the photograph.

  Who had taken the picture of Torricelli, Richter, D’Ambrizzi, and LeBecq?

  Archduke. That’s what gave everything a shape that made sense.

  Summerhays. That had surprised my father. Well, of course it had. How could it not?

  Summerhays, Indelicato, and Sandanato had conspired to save the Church, their Church, their way, and that had included killing my sister.…

  She’d had a lot on her mind when she got back to Princeton. She had inevitably wanted to tell Father and me about what she’d discovered about the cancer eating at the Church.… But she’d also remembered what my mother had been saying. Hugh did it …

  Now I was facing decisions of my own. What could I tell my father? Was there any point in bringing up what my mother had said? Was it true? And if my father had killed Father Governeau—which certainly explained why it was covered up—why had he done it?

  Of course it mattered. But that didn’t tell me what to do.

  And someone was out in the cold and snow and dark watching us. Should I tell him? Would he have any idea who it might be? I wished to God I knew.…

  Dinner was quiet, my father picking at his pasta as if his mind were far away. He managed to tell me a couple of funny stories about his nurses, Peaches, Margaret Korder’s mother-hen concern, the stack of Artie Dunn’s novels I’d left for him. He’d tried to read a few of them and said they weren’t his cup of tea “but the covers weren’t bad.” That was my father’s idea of a joke. Finally he looked at me and said, “You’ve got something on your mind, Ben—”

  “You as well,” I said.

  “Well, we might as well talk about things. Watching you tie yourself in knots is giving me indigestion. Unless I’m having another heart attack. And if I am, promise me one thing—promise you’ll let me die.” He pushed his chair back. “I’m just about ready to make my exit. Now, let’s go trim the tree.”

  I got the damned lights draped around the vast green girth. My father handed me the colored glass balls and tiny reindeer and snowmen and little frosted mirrors. While I tried to figure out how to say the things I needed to say, he began talking. As he rambled on I found myself thinking it would all have been so much simpler if my father hadn’t had the heart attack. I was used to hating this man. He’d very nearly ruined my life. He’d once told me I should have succeeded in killing myself. Everything I’d ever done had offended him, irritated him, humiliated him, and enraged him. I had failed to become a priest and ever after I was unwelcome in his heart and mind. Maybe that was what D’Ambrizzi had meant: forgive yourself for failing your father. It was doubtless good advice, rather easier to take than to act upon. But now my father had done me the final unfairness: he’d gotten old, he’d gotten sick and almost died, and the hatred had gone out of him.

  And I was left alone with my own sense of having failed my father, as well as with my own festering, guilt-ridden hatred of him. I knew it was wrong and as a result I felt my hatred turning back on myself. I looked at what was left of him and I was seeing the memory of his obsessive coldness and contempt and harsh, unforgiving judgments, all of it fading before my eyes.…

  “I’ve been thinking, Ben,” he said, handing me a tiny Santa Claus in a green sleigh full of presents, “about all this Nazi-Church business, all these connections, this mutual blackmail, the Pius Plot, all this Archduke stuff. It’s all so insidious, Ben, but it’s almost over, this generation of men is going to be gone soon. They’re dying out, it’s inevitable. Is it really so important now?”

  “Aside from the murders—aside from that there’s the art stockpiled in the subbasement of Indelicato’s villa. And it’s going to last a long time.”

  “Fine. The Church will benefit. Nazis don’t endure. Art does. Chalk one up for the Church.”

  So far as I could tell, he was wandering up a blind alley, directly away from what mattered. “Look, Dad, don’t you want to get through the reasons Val had to die? Isn’t that really why I’m here?”

  “I thought you came to have Christmas with your father—”

  “She knew it all, everything—”

  “No, no, I’m not so sure we should go over all this now, Ben.”

  “Wait a minute, just hold on.” I finished dangling another little doodad on a limb and stood up straight. He was fumbling around with a small mountain of tinsel. “We’re talking about Val. Don’t you want to know why Horstmann followed her all the way to Princeton? Why he had to kill her? Who ordered it? Why he had to kill Lockhardt, Heffernan, and your daughter?”

  “Ben—” He handed me a clump of tinsel.

  “Because Indelicato and Archduke were afraid of her. Because they were afraid of what she knew, afraid she’d tell you and me and Lockhardt … that’s why they tried to kill me, using Sandanato to set me up, because she might have told me the story already, before they killed her. They’d have killed you, but then you had your heart attack, so they must have decided to wait and see what happened to you.… But then after Ireland they stopped trying to kill me, maybe even before that, maybe they got the word to stop after the one attack on me. Why did they stop? I wish I knew. I wish I knew how deep Archduke runs in all this. They decided to kill other people who could hurt them but not me—why?”

  My father poured out two glasses of Laphroaig with some ice and handed one to me. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said, clinking his glass against mine.

  I waited for him to say something, anything, but he walked, instead, over to the tree and draped some glittering strips of tinsel on several branches.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder why Val started asking all the questions about Father Governeau?” I had to get him into it, get his attention, make him react. “Didn’t that seem odd right from the beginning? The last day of her life and she was asking about the murder of Father Governeau—it was murder, there’s no point in arguing about it. I just couldn’t see the connection—it was what she’d found out about the Church in the past and present that brought her home … and what does she do when she gets here? Starts asking about Father Governeau. There had to be a connection. Val didn’t do silly, pointless things. It took some time, but I figured it out, at least part of it anyway—”

  “Did you? You must be very clever, Ben. I’m damned if I know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you drink some of that and get on with the tree.” He was leaning against the face of the fireplace, swirling the scotch in his glass. The flames reflected in the prism of the cut crystal caught my eye, a violent rainbow. Ragged as his face appeared, he was really a picture of ease in his gray slacks and yellow button-down and pearl-gray cashmere sweater. There was some life back in his eyes. It was the change in my attitude. My frustration was suddenly reflected in those flat icy eyes. He loved the aggression he read in me. He fed on it. It gave him strength.

  “Val came with her questions about Governeau because she’d remembered something our mother told both Val and me. I just got it straight after all these years—”

  “Your mother? You’re dragging her poor soul into this? Sober or under the influence of her demons?” The fire crackled and the winter wind whistled in the chimney. “Are you barking up a tree you can’t climb, son?”

  “You killed Father Governeau,” I said. “That’s what Val had on her mind.”

  “Well,” my father said after a long pause, “he was murdered.” His voice was smooth and calm, the way I’d heard it once or twice before in my life. Worlds were moving in his brain. “You’re on the right track there. But not by your sainted father. If I’d killed the miserable bastard, I’d have admitted it and I’d have been a hero. A hero, Ben. But I didn’t kill him—I just made a fool of myself and caused myself a lot of trouble, but there wasn’t a whole helluva lot else I could do. I strung him up out in t
he orchard—look, I was half nuts and half in the bag and it all had begun to have something of the quality of a Halloween prank, like tipping over outhouses.… I pulled every damned string I could get my hands on to cover up the truth. You can believe me or not. There are risks a man has to take, Ben.” He sipped the scotch and watched me.

  “What are you saying? Why cover up something that could do you no harm and make you a hero?”

  “Chivalry. Don’t be a dull boy, Ben. It was your mother who killed Governeau. Made a damn good job of it, too, she did.”

  I felt my legs shaking. The tree seemed to sway. He was slipping away from me, the man I had hated for so long. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother was a strange woman—God, how awful and pedestrian that sounds! She was very ill for a very long time. It wasn’t just her drinking, and I’m damned if I’ll go into that any further with you, her son. She deserves some dignity, and what I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave her or anyone else with much of that valuable commodity. When it came to bashing in Father Governeau’s head, well, I’ll tell you what happened because I am an eyewitness.” He sighed, frowning. “I wish you’d left all this alone, I truly do. You’re my son, but you’re a kind of monster, Ben—you don’t know when you’re well off, it’s in your nature. What the hell gets into you? You can’t just behave yourself. Neither could Val. It’s some aberrant gene, I suppose. And it’ll all turn out to be my fault.” He freshened up his drink. “I wasn’t supposed to be home that night. I had a meeting in New York. Damn near half a century ago, but I remember it in detail. Meeting got canceled at the last minute, I drove home. Got to Princeton about nine-thirty. Winter, snowing, cold. There was an old Chevy parked in the drive and the lights were on in the chapel. I didn’t give it a thought. I put my car in the garage and did all my usual banging around, went inside.… Well, they’d heard me coming, things weren’t going too well in the house. Father Governeau didn’t have anything on but his undershirt and socks, like some old stag film, and your mother was naked—remember, son, you’ve accused me of murder and I’m explaining what actually happened, you brought all this on yourself and you’re stuck with it. She was pushing him away—fighting him off supposedly, all for my benefit, you see, and he was standing there in the Long Room, sexually excited and very confused, seeing me standing in the doorway, he was looking right at me, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights, they’d obviously been on the floor before the fireplace … and while he was staring at me, wilting and doubtless trying to figure out what he was going to say to the bishop when word of this got back, your mother blindsided him with a very heavy Waterford sherry decanter … scratch one very surprised philandering priest. You look like you could use a refill, son.”