The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

  The body hit the back of a couch, banged off onto a coffee table, and sprawled facedown on the floor at the foot of the Christmas tree. The man moved, jerking his legs, struggling to turn over. His gloved fingers were pulling at the black ski mask as if he were choking, suffocating beneath the wool.

  I knelt beside him. I turned him over. The front of the white parka was soaked with blood. There was a neat entry hole on the lower left side of his trunk, just above the waist, and turning him, I saw the shredded exit hole. There was a lot of blood. It hadn’t been a tree limb breaking. He kept pulling at the ski mask. The parka and the mask were embedded with bits of glass. He was coughing beneath the mask, trying to say something.

  I helped him with the mask, pulling it up over his face. The face was scratched and leaking blood through the holes. It was Artie Dunn.

  He looked up at me, licked blood from his lips.

  “What a lousy day,” he whispered. His chest was shaking with a chuckle. “Bastard shot me. Me … I’ve been watching over you … I’m no camper, pal … I knew he’d come after your father … He’s here.…”

  “You knew?”

  “I knew Summerhays wasn’t Archduke, for God’s sake … I knew it was your father, it had to be, and I knew you’d never realize it … oh shit, this hurts.… Sorry about your roof … had to warn you …” His eyes were slightly glazed. He looked around, moving his head slowly, working hard at it. “Your father doesn’t look so great.… You need a protector, Ben, honest to God.” He coughed, licked his dry lips. His saliva was pink. Maybe it was from the cuts on his mouth. “I’ve felt better.… Listen to me—he’s here. He’s come back and he’s out there … I knew he’d come, I waited, watched …” He was panting. I had my arm around his shoulders, was supporting him. His strength was going fast.

  My father was holding his head in his hands, still sitting before the fire. He kept wiping his eyes and smearing blood from his hands across his face. Beneath the blood he was gray, like wet cement. “What’s he saying? Tell me what he’s saying? Who’s here? Who’s come?”

  A voice came from behind me and I’d heard it once before. I’d heard it in the church in Avignon and it had been telling me to go home. Now I knew why he hadn’t killed me when he had the chance. My father had sent the word from his hospital bed in Princeton. My father had spared me alone.

  I turned and looked up into the bottomless eyes of August Horstmann. He was wearing a long black overcoat and a black fedora with the brim turned down all the way around. His eyes stared out from behind the circular lenses. He wore a scarlet muffler. There was snow clinging to his hat and coat. He was utterly calm.

  “He’s telling you that I’ve come for you, Archduke. You knew I’d have to come.” He was standing just in front of the gigantic bear. It seemed to be threatening him from behind and he was unaware. It seemed to be reaching for him.

  I started to speak and he put his hand up. The hand without the 9mm Walther. “I’m not here for you,” he said in his accented voice. He briefly considered me down the long length of his bold nose. I could see the Christmas tree reflected in his glasses. Then he turned to my father. I felt Father Dunn’s hand moving behind me, slowly, in the pocket of his parka. He coughed softly. Horstmann said, “It is time, Archduke. The time for a Judas is as inevitable as death. It is death.” My father was staring at him with a look of disbelief that was slowly transforming itself into something closer to a trance. “You betrayed Simon, and many men died because of you. And now you have led me to slaughter the innocents.… I have come to avenge them, Archduke. There are so many. They are here now. They are all around us. Close your eyes and you will see their faces.”

  My father slowly rose, stood facing him. He closed his eyes.

  “Can you see them, Archduke?”

  He put a bullet in my father’s head. My father fell over backward, his head and shoulders crashing into the fireplace, sparks showering, burning logs cracking through under the weight. Flames reached up, curled around his face, the waves of heat blurring his features as if he were melting. His feet kicked on the floor, a paroxysm, a dance of death.

  Dunn sighed. I felt him sliding something into my hand, something cold and heavy. Then he slumped onto his back again, pink foam all around his mouth. He was breathing slowly, but the stain of the bullet wound was forming an ever-widening circle. I squeezed the butt of the army-issue Colt .45 and leveled it at Horstmann.

  He turned from the mesmerizing sight of my late father catching fire and stared at me. Something in the fireplace was sizzling.

  “I have no quarrel with you,” he said to me. The Walther was pointing at me. He seemed barely to notice the huge automatic in my hand.

  “I should think not,” I said. “I’ve done nothing to you. But you shot my friend Father Dunn and you killed my sister.… Does it surprise you to learn that I couldn’t care less about your excuse? You were led astray—I’ve heard all that. But I have a tough time feeling sorry for what you’ve been through.”

  “I have done what I could to even accounts.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not enough. You’re not avenging my sister. I’m the one avenging my sister. You killed my sister and I swore I’d find you. Now I’m going to kill you. I really have no choice.”

  He smiled at me. “Another toy gun, Mr. Driskill?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s real.”

  The first slug blew his rib cage open and smashed him backward into the arms of the bear, where he hung, unable to deal with the shock, his eyes bulging against the restraints of the sockets. Maybe that first slug killed him, or would have, but it wouldn’t have gotten the poison out of my system. I’d waited a hellish long time, and I wished there were an audience because I felt like making a statement. The gun was doing the talking for me. It was wiping away the frustration. Catharsis. Epiphany with a .45.

  The second slug took off one side of his face and skull and a big hairy chunk of the bear’s shoulder. Unendurable noise.

  The third slug made his throat and chin explode and knocked both him and bear over into the hallway.

  I heard Dunn’s voice weakly behind me.

  “I think you got him, Ben.”

  I called the police and the fire department in Menander and left it to them to get an ambulance out to the lodge, matter of life and death. Then I dragged my father’s charred body from the fireplace. I could smell my father burning. There wasn’t much I could do for Artie Dunn. He would either make it or he wouldn’t. I held him in my arms, trying to talk him into staying alive. I kept telling him to look at the Christmas tree towering above us. I felt the icy wind and the wet snow drifting down through the night onto my face.

  After a while I began to sing softly to myself, Christmas carols, and Father Dunn stirred in my arms and I heard him whispering.

  God rest ye merry gentlemen

  Let nothing you dismay …

  That’s how they found us.

  Snow drifting down on us, the lights of the tree merry and bright, three men shot to pieces, a bear down, and one heathen whose mind had gone for a long walk, wandering aimlessly in the darkness which had engulfed us all.

  REST IN PEACE

  My father’s death had to compete for press coverage and the attention of great men with the passing of His Holiness, Pope Callistus. The papal ticker gave out, by my reckoning, about twelve hours after August Horstmann killed my father. When I viewed it from a fair psychological distance, the whole business took on the look of one of those nineteenth-century English tontines, in which the last member left alive collects the big prize. It looked as if Cardinal D’Ambrizzi was the last warrior standing. Would his prize be the Throne of Peter?

  There was a considerable amount of skullduggery to be pulled off in the immediate aftermath of that last night at the lodge, if extraordinarily unanswerable questions were to be avoided. It never occurred to me to turn to anyone but Drew Summerhays, who was, I suspect, pushed to the limits of his influence to keep the lid fro
m blowing all the way to Rome. He dragged Archbishop Cardinal Klammer from his bed to start pulling strings, and the rest was just a blur so far as I was concerned. Whatever markers he called in, he pulled it off. He constructed an impenetrable cover-up. He hadn’t turned out to be Archduke, but in his veins flowed the blood of both Hercules and Machiavelli.

  When I asked him about why he’d been in Avignon he tried to shrug it away. Pressed, he said only that he’d feared something was “rotten in the heart of things but I wasn’t sure who was behind it. I was trying to keep everything from coming down on you. Ben, I’m sorry for all the prices you had to pay.” For God’s sake, he’d been trying to protect me.

  The story that went out had my father’s ailing heart not unexpectedly failing. Sic transit. We shall not see his like again. Hero of the war, diplomat of the peace, servant to the Church for all the days of his life.

  August Horstmann was quietly buried in a small cemetery serving a largely Catholic village in the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania, near a retirement home for elderly and penniless priests. Father Artie Dunn was taken to a private hospital which was well trained in the discreet care of the very rich, very famous, and very powerful. We knew within twenty-four hours that he would survive.

  For its part in the elaborate charade, the village of Menander was given certain assurances that were bound to be met, without fail, by funds from Church coffers and the deep pockets of anonymous Catholic billionaires, the kind of men who were called upon for very special favors. It was obvious that as my father’s heir I would be expected to make a large contribution toward these civic improvements involving the fire station, the local hospital, a new hockey rink, and the high school gymnasium. Ripples, ripples, ripples, and even in death, Drew Summerhays told me, my father was doing good.

  The state funeral—I call it that because in a very real way that’s what it was—for Hugh Driskill was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The limousines jammed the street, the blue sawhorses were in place, New York’s finest in brass-buttoned tunics and shiny leggings with steam snorting from their horses’ nostrils were out in full force, the sun shone like the clear, perfect light of God, the television cameras watched every arrival and made Klammer happy by making him a talking head on the evening news, the Christmas tree towered over the skaters in the Rockefeller Center skating rink, the shoppers put up with the inconvenience of having the avenue blocked off for a few hours on the morning of Christmas Eve. Once everybody had run out of wind and clichés they took my father and a few of the rest of us away together, and the mighty and the powerful went back to Wall Street and Albany and Washington and London and Rome. A great many of them would gather only a few days hence in Rome for the pomp and circumstance of Callistus’s funeral. The rest of us went only as far as St. Mary’s Church in New Prudence.

  I missed Artie Dunn, who would have kept it all in such crystalline perspective. I missed my sister, but that was becoming a familiar ache that would never be cured. I’d be carrying it with me for the rest of my life. And of course I missed Sister Elizabeth. But she was in Rome, she belonged in Rome, and in the back of my mind I saw her there, imagined the bustle and excitement she must be feeling with the passing of Callistus and the final moves in the game that would crown the new winner, the successor to Callistus. I stood in the spare little graveyard, thinking, remembering. The icy wind, the clear, cold sky with the sun dipping toward a rim of silvery clouds that lay like frost on the horizon. The shadows lengthened quickly across the crusty snow. Peaches was getting to do his bit. Margaret Korder was there, some of his old pals, a former Secretary of State, a retired television anchorman, some of his longtime partners, Drew Summerhays, who had seen so many comrades fallen and buried.

  While we waited for the casket to be unloaded from the hearse and brought to the graveside, Summerhays stood beside me. He looked somewhat self-conscious, as if we shared a disreputable secret which, I suppose, we did, though I had no idea just how much of it he knew. He smiled at me, the familiar wintry look that survived every season.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said softly. “You’ve taken care of everything, every detail. I have no way of thanking you. I wish I did.”

  “Oh, you do, Ben, you do.” The casket passed before us. Peaches was speaking to Margaret Korder. Summerhays seemed to be fighting off the desire to salute the remains of my father. “One day soon it will be my turn. I’ve left a letter saying I want you to handle everything. It won’t be complicated, but there will be some people who will insist on coming and will need special care. There are instructions for you. You’ll make it all go smoothly. I’ll be watching.” He took my arm as we moved slowly toward the freshly dug grave. My father would lie next to my sister on one side, my mother on the other. “Forget all this, everything we’ve been through since your sister’s death.… Do you hear me, Ben?”

  “What are you saying? What are you afraid of now?”

  “I’m much too far along the road to be afraid of anything. What am I saying? I’m saying this—when ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

  “Ah. Well, when it comes to the Church, past or present, ignorance is the condition I aspire to. It’s odd, Drew. Lately I’ve been remembering … faith.”

  “Ignorance and faith. Made for each other. We’ve been proving that for centuries. The Church is far from finished, you know.”

  “That’s the thing that reminds me of faith. If the Church can survive all this …”

  “Your father,” he said at last. “This is all very involved, everything about him. It all stemmed from his commitment to the Church.”

  “It’s only complicated if you think about it,” I said. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying not to.”

  “Well, you are doomed to fail, Ben. Your father was a great man. And in all the ways that matter you are very much like him.” The wind was so cold I felt brittle, as if I might crack. “He never forgave himself for the way he’d handled things with you. But he didn’t know how to fix it.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Drew. We are what we are, each one of us, the sum total of the past.”

  We stood at the graveside and I thought of my sister, all our family, all dead now. I was the only Driskill left. It was a peculiar sensation, seeing the row of graves, seeing the place next to my sister where someday I, too, would seek my rest.

  I was trembling and then I heard the sound of a car drawing up behind us, out by the roadside, nearer Father Governeau’s grave. I heard a car door slam, a muffled, heavy thud. Peaches was saying things about my father, about the Driskills.

  I felt tears on my cheeks and I was too confused to know exactly why.

  The service ended and my father was lowered into his grave and everyone was moving past me, touching me, mumbling all the things people mumble at such times. Then I was alone beside the grave, the darkness gathering quickly.

  “Ben …”

  I recognized the voice, of course, and turned, feeling my heart leap against my ribs.

  She was coming toward me, the wind swirling the long woolen cape, giving her the look of a swaggering freebooter. The toes of her boots kicked feathers of snow. Her long stride quickly covered the ground from the car parked at the side of the road. Her long thick hair was blown across her face and she raked it away with gloved fingers. She looked at me with that steady, level gaze.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. I got lost.…” I was sinking into her eyes, her face, as she spoke. I knew it would happen and there was nothing I could do about it. “It seems we were just here … for Val.” She reached out and took my hand. “How are you, Ben?”

  “I’m all right, Elizabeth. You didn’t have to come all this way.”

  “I know that.”

  “You must be going crazy in Rome … Callistus’s funeral, the cardinals gathering, all of it. You should be setting the odds for the pools.”

  She smiled. “D’Ambrizzi’s leading the field at three to five. Indelicato’s troo
ps are confused and in disarray. The way things are going lots of people think it’s two to one D’Ambrizzi drops dead just before the election.…”

  “Saint Jack’s main chance.”

  She shrugged her broad shoulders, her smile lingering. “It doesn’t really make any difference, does it? Not really?”

  “Doesn’t it? Funny thing for you to say. How long can you stay?” In my mind I saw her walking back to the car, heading back to Kennedy, her courtesy call behind her.

  “That’s pretty much up to you,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m where I want to be, Ben. I’m here.”

  “You’ve thought it through?” It took me a long time to get it out. I was afraid to believe my ears.

  “Ben, that’s a slightly dumb question.” She slid her arm through mine and squeezed me to her. “Now I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up or shut up. As we say in the Church.” There was another slow smile breaking like a perfect morning across her face.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said more to myself than to her.

  She was pulling me along. Her cheeks were pink with the cold. I heard the wind whistling in my ears. In the midst of death I seemed to be coming to life. Had I heard my sister’s ghostly, joyous laughter on the wind?

  “I have a lot to tell you,” I said.

  It was dark by then. We were walking toward the lights and the warmth, toward the little church.

  PACE

  FOR

  Elizabeth

  Bantam Books by Thomas Gifford

  THE FIRST SACRIFICE

  THE ASSASSINI

  PRAETORIAN

  THE WIND CHILL FACTOR