The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  I nodded, splashed more scotch into my glass, sipped. I could hear the wind and the sleety snow snapping at the skylight.

  “She tried to convince me he’d raped her. He was lying there like a walleye, she was naked and babbling and, well, hell, it wasn’t a scene from Burns and Allen. I told her to get dressed and forget she’d ever opened the door for Governeau—of course they’d been carrying on for a long time. I told her to shut up and have a drink. Then I called Drew Summerhays in New York and told him he had to get to Princeton ASAP The kind of guy Drew is, he got up and got the Packard out and was on the scene a little after one o’clock. Your mother was in bed, out cold, and I told Drew what had happened. I didn’t touch a thing until he got there. I had a couple of drinks, Governeau just reclined on the rug. Drew and I decided, most importantly, we couldn’t implicate your mother in this in any way—she was fragile enough, something messy like having an affair with or being raped by a priest, regardless of whether she or I killed him, would have finished her for good. So we dressed the corpse—now, there’s a nasty job for you. We wondered what the hell to do with the body. Drew was for dumping it somewhere, but that’s harder than you think, and then we wouldn’t have had any control over the investigation which might lead back to your mother.… We were both a little groggy. We argued and came up with various ideas and we both got loaded, I’m afraid, and then I said I wanted to make him a suicide and Drew said why the hell not and we carried him out to the orchard and it was snowing like all get out and we strung him up to find later.… There’s no point in telling me I was acting like a nitwit, Ben, because the fact is, it worked! Drew drove the old Chevy off on some country road and left it. I followed him in his Packard, picked him up, he drove on home. Called to tell me the sun was up by the time he got to New York. And that’s all you need to know about that. Your mother and I never—repeat, never—spoke of it again. That’s the kind of people we were, goddammit! And that’s the true story.… I don’t know how you feel about it, but I look at it this way. Your mother was a lonely woman, I wasn’t such a great husband, so she had an affair with a sweet-talking priest. And he paid for it. Governeau was the guilty party, not your mother—I didn’t want that bastard buried in consecrated ground! Well, it was all a long time ago.” He threw a handful of tinsel at the tree. “Relax, Ben. A skeleton in the closet. So what?” He came to me with a bemused smile on his flat, canny face, and turned to look at the tree. “We need more tinsel.” Then I felt his hand on my back, patting me. I smelled, in the shameful recesses of my memory, the wet wool of the nun’s habit, felt the relief again as she reached out to embrace me, the seduction which was so cruel and so fatal, and I was a little boy again. “Surprised you, didn’t I, son?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess you did.” My father’s story was the first time in either of our lives that he’d shared a confidence with die. Idiotically I felt my eyes filling up and I turned away. I couldn’t bear his seeing me in this state. We were pitching tinsel at the tree when a noise came from outside somewhere, a loud crack, a brittle sound blown on the wind. I flinched.

  “Tree limb breaking in the wind,” he said.

  “Was I right about Val? Did she have it all backward, too?”

  He nodded. “Funny, both my children thought I was a murderer. Both my children think too much and wind up not knowing what the hell they’re talking about.” His voice was shifting and I wondered if it was the tide of scotch or maybe something worse. The calm was retreating, anger seeping in. Maybe it really was the scotch. Maybe it was the memory of the awful night nearly half a century ago. Maybe it was me.

  “When did Val tell you all this? Her suspicions?”

  “Ben, I don’t have to go back over all this with you. I’ve lost my daughter and as far as my son goes … there’s been many a time when I’d have been better off without a son—Christ, you come here and accuse me of murder! I should have expected that of you, I guess.” He muttered an oath, then dropped the surge of anger and said, “We need some music, Ben.” He waved me toward the stereo cabinet. “Put on that Beethoven trio. Suits me tonight. You know, there’s a story goes with that trio. I’d met D’Ambrizzi over in Rome back in the thirties, we seemed to hit it off, a couple of young comers, one night one of us had tickets for a concert … it was a damn fine evening, we went together, and it was brilliant, fine playing, and it was this piece. I’ve loved the music ever since. He bought me a recording of it, those big heavy seventy-eights in an album. Beethoven’s Trio Number Seven in B-Flat Major.” He lifted his glass to his lips.

  I went to the stack of LPs and found it under the Kabalevsky cello concerto, the second record in the stack.

  It was the single most heartbreaking and revelatory moment of a misspent life. It was not unlike the instant when I looked down at Val’s lifeless body, smelled her blood and the singed hair. And now I was getting another whiff of burning, the hellfire, the Antichrist. That had been simple, this was different. That had been like a bullet in my own brain. This was new and subtler and so evil there was no name for it in my lexicon. New and worse and unspeakable because it reached into my belly and ripped me open and spilled my own hatred and my father’s until I knew it was the night we would drown in it.

  The recording had been made in 1966 by the Suk Trio, which included Josef Suk and Josef Chuchro and Jan Panenka.

  While it was known formally as the Trio No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Opus 97, it had another name. The piece of music my father and D’Ambrizzi had heard and enjoyed so much that night in Rome before the war, before they had marched onward to their destinies—it had two names. And the other name was written clear across the dog-eared old album cover.

  The “Archduke” Trio.

  I finally slid the disc onto the spindle and set it playing. My hands were shaking.

  I turned back to my father.

  “Val had it all figured out, didn’t she?”

  “I’ve told you, Ben. Your sister was all fouled up—”

  “Val knew it was you. Somehow she figured it out. She knew the whole damn thing …” I was having bad trouble catching my breath. “She knew you were Archduke.”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “She knew you were Archduke. She knew you were in it with Indelicato to stop D’Ambrizzi’s becoming pope—”

  “You fool! You don’t understand any of it!”

  “She came home to warn you that she was going public—you did see her the day she was killed. I don’t give a good goddamn about your alibi, your meeting in New York, nobody ever checked on that and you’re Hugh Driskill, for chrissakes, you could fix an alibi with the President.… She wanted you to convince her that somehow she’d gotten it wrong, that it wasn’t true … and you, you fucking monster, you made sure Horstmann killed her! You had to save the whole dirty plot.… So Val”—I was choking on my rage, a kind of red and purple flare searing and fusing everything balled up inside my head—“so Val had to die ….’ ”

  The music played and the glass fell from my father’s hand and shattered on the stone hearth.

  “I had to save the Church!” He staggered backward, white-faced, and fell heavily on the broken glass. He looked at his hand, smeared with blood, glass driven into the palm. “I had to sacrifice the thing I loved most in the world! It was the Church, Ben, it was the Church!”

  3

  DRISKILL

  They say that confession is good for the soul, but as I listened to my father I began to wonder about his soul. It had been sold so long ago, I couldn’t imagine the confession that might have reclaimed it. The soul was gone, whatever the soul was, and what I saw before me was nothing but wreckage, a man with no center but grief and sorrow and an endless capacity for treachery, all in the name of his God and his ever-abiding damned Church. It was as if he’d worshipped the tiger and served it and killed for it and brought it sustenance and then had become the tiger’s feast.

  He sat on the stone ledge beside the fire, leaned back against the st
one facing, and talked to me, cradling his bloody hands in his lap, the great Hugh Driskill, who might have gone to the White House, who presided over the eternal and monumental fortune and exercised the power it conveyed and which he had enlarged—the great Hugh Driskill, who had seen to the murder of his daughter and the betrayal of his friend and had, by God, saved the life of a pope. Hugh Driskill had covered up a murder committed by his wife and seen to it that the victim was buried outside the boundaries of the Church. Hugh Driskill had looked at the Church of Rome and had decided he knew best, he knew what it was all about, and had spilled enough blood to keep it afloat the way he wanted. He had despised his son and now he was sitting in a puddle of his own blood, his palms impaled on glittering shards of glass, while he made his confession to the same son who returned his hatred in all its festering fullness, who wondered if he had the nerve to pick up the cast iron poker and beat him to death with it.…

  “Indelicato said Val knew too much.” My father’s voice was low. As he spoke he looked from me to his hands and back, as if I might have some reasonable explanation for what had happened to him. His face was smeared with blood. He looked like an Indian on the warpath, but he wasn’t, not anymore. Not by a hell of a long shot.

  “Indelicato,” I said. The dagger protruded from his chest, the elegant gold handle. I saw it all before me again as the fire popped and crackled before me. My father was sweating. He didn’t seem to notice. He was having trouble with his confession. He was struggling to get it right.

  “Indelicato and I, we were all that was left from the old days. And D’Ambrizzi, of course, but he was … unsound, he didn’t understand the Church. He thought he could make it do tricks for him.… Manfredi and I knew about the Church, we knew it was … it is. Its nature is immutable, we serve it, it doesn’t serve us. D’Ambrizzi never grasped that. And his spirit had infected Val—Indelicato told me she was going to bring down the Church as we knew it, she and D’Ambrizzi and Callistus, who was D’Ambrizzi’s creature, but God stepped in to take care of Callistus. But we were up against time, we had to be ready when Callistus died.…”

  He rambled on and I would find myself staring into his face, slick with blood and sweat, or watching the fire, or blocking it all out and hearing only the whine of the wind and the rattle of snow on the skylight. The Christmas tree shone like a child’s dream, perfect and full of wonder.

  “She’d found out about all of it, reconstructed it, it was an impossible accomplishment but Val, well, you know, she kept making shots that weren’t on the table, she did it all her life—”

  “You don’t have to tell me about Val,” I said.

  “Murders. In the war, murders now, she had figured out all of it, D’Ambrizzi and Simon and Indelicato and the Collector and me, the man who saved the pope, only she saw me as something else, she would, oh, she would. The Church had survived so many attacks—Indelicato and I went over and over the ground, trying to figure out another way—but Val’s story, the evidence she’d accumulated, it was too much … too much in this age of instant media, this age of television and investigative reporters who’d get hold of it and shake it and chew it and … you must understand, Ben, for the first time in all of history there was someone who could destroy the Church, turn it into a sideshow, someone who could drag it across every television screen in the world—a nun who was known in every corner of the world for her good works and intelligence and wit and writings, she could do it.

  “Think of her, television loved your sister, she’d have made sure the story didn’t end, it would have gone on and on, reporters would have dug all the way to China, there would have been fatal meltdown, don’t you see that? The pope was dying and then all the stories about the murders of John XXIII and John Paul I would have surfaced and this time they wouldn’t have gone away, they wouldn’t have been covered up and written off as slightly kooky, and then the mess at the Vatican Bank, the suicides and murders and frauds, it would all have been brought out again, only this time Sister Val would have been there to fuel the flames and it would have been out of control.…” He wiped the sweat from his face and some of the glass in his palms scratched his forehead. He’d have liked the symbolism, the bleeding forehead, the crown of thorns, the martyr bleeding for his beliefs, his Church. “It was the triumph of the Antichrist, the end of the Church of Rome … and it was my daughter, Ben, it was the person in my life I’ve loved most … but I told her all this, I couldn’t stop her, she had uncovered all of it, made all the connections. I don’t know how she knew I was Archduke, but she had that miserable photograph she’d stolen from Richter, and she said, ‘I know you’re Archduke … I know you’ve been in it all along, the old OSS agent, the wartime hero, eternal servant of the Church.…’ ” I listened to him talk, but I could hear her voice. She could be tough, like a fighter boring in, all fists and short, quick punches that took your breath away. She had the killer instinct, it was embedded in her nature, and I could hear her, going for the kill. “She said, ‘And you, dear Daddy, took the picture of the others, didn’t you? And you betrayed your friend D’Ambrizzi to that slimeball Indelicato.’ She called Manfredi Indelicato a slimeball—what the hell was going on, Ben? A nun saying that, what did it mean?”

  “It meant Indelicato was a slimeball. She was right.” I wondered if I was smiling at the memory of Val. I think I was. “She was going easy on him,” I said, “in deference to your finer sensibilities.”

  “She didn’t understand that men like Indelicato and Pius—I knew him, Ben, I knew the man—they have the good of the Church at heart, not some passing whim, some cheap momentary morality … my God, Ben, D’Ambrizzi wanted to kill the pope! He had to be stopped. But I was a good friend … I could have killed him! But I loved him … so I betrayed, as she put it, the plot—I was wrong for saving the pope! She was mad, Ben, there was madness all around her! Nothing mattered to her anymore, she’d forsaken her vows. She was Lockhardt’s whore! She was going to destroy it all—you don’t see it, do you? You don’t understand anything I’m saying to you … I did what I could. When I left the house that afternoon, Horstmann was waiting on the road to Princeton. My leaving was the signal for him.…” He was crying. “It was the worst moment of my life. That was the heart of darkness, Ben, and you can’t imagine what it was like.…”

  “Damn, it has been tough for you, Dad. You’ve been through hell—” The impulse to murder was bubbling over, flooding my brain.

  “I’m in hell! My God, don’t you see? I’m in hell and I’m never coming out.…”

  “And people say there’s no justice,” I said. “I just want to get this straight.… You gave Indelicato or Horstmann the sign to kill your daughter. I don’t care when, I don’t care how … but what was her crime? Had Val murdered anyone? Whom had she left for dead by the roadside? Or out in the chapel? She was a nun who loved her Church, who believed in its essential goodness and its power to do good. She wanted to rid it of the evil—and she wasn’t a fanatic, a nut, she had the proof that the inmates had been running the asylum. That was the big difference between you and Val. You don’t believe in the essence of the Church, and she did. She believed in the goodness and decency and kindness and strength of the Church, she knew it would survive and prosper and flower once it was clean again—”

  “But I saved you, Ben! They wanted to kill you—I lay in that hospital … wanting to die because of Val … and you’d been attacked … and I told Indelicato that if you died, then I would go public because there’d be nothing left for me … because the Church would already have gone over the edge into the shrieking pit.… Do you hear me? I saved you and I saved the Church!”

  “Congratulations, Dad.”

  “And then she started on Governeau. She said murder was my style … it was all going to come out … the darkness had taken her and she was pulling me down into it with her.…”

  “I know all about the heart of darkness. I’m looking into it.” I saw Val, the sunlight playing on her, the little gir
l in her red bathing suit, prancing in the arcs of the sprinkler, the sun beading up on her little body so she seemed to be dripping with diamonds, and I moved toward my father. It was time to end the misery. It was time to put him down like the rabid thing he was.

  He shrank back. He knew what was coming. Patricide would have gone rather nicely in the family dossier.

  He lifted his hand to defend himself. His sleeves and sweater were soaked with blood.

  I heard a noise. A rapping noise, a muffled crying out over the wind. I looked behind me. The room was empty but for us. The tree mocked me with its bright lights, its tinsel. The lights were reflected in the eyes of the bear, as if he’d come to life. I heard the rapping turn to pounding and I heard something cracking and it was overhead.

  A man lay on the skylight, arms outstretched, fists beating weakly on the glass, and the glass and the frame were beginning to go.

  Then the sky was falling. The skylight seemed to explode into the room under the weight of the body. The aluminum frame began to twist and pop, pieces splitting apart, glass cracking, then shattering, and then a kind of glittering, shimmering rain of glass and metal rods caught in the light of the fire and the brightly colored bulbs on the tree, and there was a blast of wind and millions of snow crystals swirling down, and my father was screaming somewhere in the back of things and in the middle of the glass and metal and snow a man was hurtling down upon us like a meteorite from a cosmic light show.