The Assassini (11 page)

But I wouldn’t give in. Not to a crummy Jesuit chain. Not Ben Driskill. That was just the way it was.

It was infected and gangrene had developed. In the end Brother Fulton found me passed out in the john, lying in a puddle of my own vomit. The doctors at St. Ignatius Hospital saved the leg and I was very glad they had. Explaining a missing leg to my father would have been murder. And I was willing to live with the residual pain that flared up from time to time. But what made me feel best was the other thing. I hadn’t given in. Sometimes I lost, anybody could lose. But I never, ever gave in. Not even to the Jesuits. Not even to my father.

When I woke up there was a dim grayness at the window and I could see my breath in the cold of my bedroom. Dry snow blew along the windowsill, drifted through the open inch to wet my face. The telephone was ringing in the distance. I counted four rings and then it stopped. My watch said it was six forty-five. I next came out of the fog at eight past seven, leaving behind a dream of someone screaming.

The problem was I didn’t leave it behind. The scream was part of reality, not left over from a dream. And it wasn’t a scream, it was more of a strangled cry and it probably lasted no more than a second, maybe two, and then there was a hell of a crash, like a blind man trying to get out of a burning building.

My father lay at the bottom of the stairway. His robe was all twisted around him, his arms bent sideways, his face down, resting on the foyer floor. The moment seemed to drag on forever, and then I was kneeling beside him. He looked like someone else, an old man with one eye shut, the other staring up at me. Then the eye blinked.

“Dad? Can you hear me?” I cushioned his head on my arm.

One side of his mouth twitched, a smile. The other side did nothing at all. “Telephone,” he said, fairly distinctly. “Archbishop …” He sucked some air through the side of his mouth. “Cardinal … Klammer …” Leave it to my father to get all the titles right.
A tear trickled out of the closed eye, seeping away as if jealously guarded.

“He called? What did he want?”

“Lockhardt … Heff-Heffernan …” It was so difficult for him to speak. Hugh Driskill had come to this, drooling out of the corner of his mouth at the bottom of the stairs.

“Lockhardt and Heffernan,” I prompted. Who the hell was Heffernan?

“Dead …” It was a whisper now, as if he were running down, batteries going.

“Christ … they’re dead? Lockhardt’s dead?”

“Murdered … yes-yesterday …” He blinked again. Fingers fluttered at my side. Then he drifted off.

I called the hospital. Then I went back and sat down beside my father, took his hand in both of mine, willed some of my energy into him, returning the favor.

I willed my father to live.

S
he jogged back to the modern tower on the Via Veneto and stopped to catch her breath in the marble and chrome lobby while she waited for the elevator. Sweat dripped from the tip of her upturned nose. Her tawny brown shoulder-length hair was held in place by a green band. She pulled the earphones out and an old Pink Floyd tape came to an abrupt end. She wiped her forehead on the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt.

She’d run three miles and was headed to the pool on the roof. She stopped at the eighteenth-floor apartment, shucked off the sweats, got into her bathing suit, wrapped herself in a thick terry-cloth robe, and ran up the three flights to the roof. She had the pool to herself and swam in a serious, disciplined way, pacing herself, thirty laps. The sun was purple, struggling up over the horizon, almost frightening seen through the dust and pollution of Rome.

By the time she was in her kitchen making coffee, it was six-thirty and she’d been up since five. She’d prayed and jogged and taken a swim and it was time to stop horsing around. It was time to get a handle on the day.

Sister Elizabeth enjoyed her life. She had not become a nun with unrealistic stars in her eyes: she’d thought it through in her organized way and things had gone well. The Order was proud of her. The apartment on the Via Veneto was owned by Curtis Lockhardt. He had personally spoken with Sister Celestine, who handled such matters for the Order from her office at the top of the Spanish Steps. There had been quick approval for her to
move in. The Order tended to treat its members as adults who could be trusted and respected.

It was Sister Valentine who had introduced her to Lockhardt and made the suggestion about the apartment. Lockhardt had subsequently become Elizabeth’s friend, too, and a valuable source of information useful in her work. It was a perfect example of the synchronicity which in a closed, stifling society like the Church made life so much more pleasant. The trick was always to make the machinery work for you, not against you. Elizabeth was gifted when it came, as it often did, to that arcane art. She was true to herself and true to the Order, and that was the foundation for making the machinery hum. Sister Val called it pushing the right buttons. They both knew how to do it though they weren’t pushing the same sets of buttons.

She drank coffee and ate toast and took out her Filofax to check the day’s schedule. At nine o’clock there was a delegation of French feminists, Catholic laywomen from Lyons, who were continuing a long-running guerrilla action against the Vatican and wanted coverage in the magazine. God help us all.…

She had been editor-in-chief of
New World
, the twice-monthly magazine funded by the Order, for three years. Its original audience had been Catholic women back during the height of the social and religious upheaval of the sixties. It hadn’t taken long for a decidedly liberal attitude to suffuse the magazine; then came the charges of Marxist influences hurled from all sides by enraged conservatives; the result was to turn the liberalism to radicalism, which in turn acted as a magnet not only to all the legitimate voices of the left but to most of the wild-eyed nut cases in Christendom. The outcry had eventually roused Callistus from his pontifical slumber and he’d declared in camera to the powers at the top of the Order that the time had come to put a sock in it. For their own sakes.

Shortly thereafter Sister Elizabeth was named editor, the first American to hold the job. For the past three years she’d tiptoed along the line, addressing the major issues facing the Church in an even-handed way but
dodging nothing: birth control, a married clergy, women priests, abortion, the leftist clergy in underdeveloped and third world countries, the role of the Church in international politics, the scandals at the Vatican Bank—in short, the works.

New World
had quadrupled its readership, had become a kind of debating society for the Church’s heavy hitters. She’d managed to stay just shy of bringing Callistus blinking back into the daylight. And now it looked as if she would outlast him.

All through the summer and autumn she, like every other journalist in Rome, knew that Pope Callistus was living on borrowed time. Death was lurking in the Vatican anterooms, clichés abounded in sleek bars, and at fancy parties attended by clergy, and in heavily draped villa drawing rooms overlooking the city. The atmosphere of pure expectation, a kind of unfettered, luxurious fore-play, reminded her of more innocent times, reminded her of her grandfather back in Illinois, in a little town called Oregon which she visited each summer from the family home in Lake Forest. It reminded her of the excitement and anticipation when he took her to the circus.

A circus was the perfect metaphor. The Pope would die and the circus would actually begin with the tawdry tinkle of the hurdy-gurdy and monkeys on chains, the trumpet fanfare of a Fellini movie and the clowns and all the freaks and aerialists joining hands, dancing, capering across the screen. Always with a few priests thrown in, a bow to local color. Rome was presently in the pre-circus phase, and she remembered her grandmother getting her up early, her grandfather gassing up the station wagon and driving out to the fairgrounds in the cool dawn, cloudless and blue, promising another scorcher. He wanted her to see what went on before the ringmaster cracked his whip and opened the show, wanted her to see that some of the best parts of the circus happened when no one was around to watch. The tigers and the elephants, prowling around or making the earth shake, how they stood on their columnar back legs and reared into the air, showing off … The circus before the show began.

That was the state Rome was in now. The
papabili
, the men with eyes peeled and fixed on the main chance, power, a line in the history books—they were gathering like the great elephants and tigers they were, shaking the ground with their weight, prowling with sabre teeth bare in ghastly smiles … the cardinals. The men who did what had to be done to ascend to the Throne of Peter. And their handlers, the power brokers, the deal makers, the fixers. Elephants, tigers, no end of jackals and hyenas, and not a lamb in sight.

My God, how she loved it!

She loved the politicking, the intriguing, the nerves of the contestants showing through, rubbed raw in the infighting, the backward glances, the fear of a symbolic knife in the back, in the dark of the confessional, a false step, a word in the wrong ear, a career shot to hell. Who could best manipulate the gathering of cardinals? Who could flatter and cajole and threaten? Would the Americans try to throw their weight and money around? Who would be the most pliant when offered a promise or two? Who knew the best headwaiters in the best restaurants, who would be invited to the best parties, and who would swoop down and pitch camp at the Hassler? Who might have waited too long to strike? Whom might rumor destroy?

That morning Sister Elizabeth wore the navy blue suit with the scarlet rosette in the lapel, the symbol of the Order. She was tall and rangy and had good legs and a very modern figure and Cardinal D’Ambrizzi thought she looked very sexy in the uniform and wasn’t shy about saying so.

She went to mass in a good mood, counting her blessings. She was looking forward to accompanying D’Ambrizzi and a visiting American banker on one of the cardinal’s famed tours of Rome. It was a good time to be watching D’Ambrizzi closely: she was working on a long piece about the
papabili
which would be published as soon as Callistus died, outlining an insider’s view of the likely favorites, among whom no name loomed larger than D’Ambrizzi’s. She was trying to handicap the field: she figured the leaders at about two to one, eight to five
if you took them as an entry. And D’Ambrizzi was one of them. Saint Jack, as Sister Val called him.

In the small church she habitually visited for morning mass, she lit a candle, said a prayer for Sister Valentine. She was eager to hear from her because, when she gave way to it, Sister Elizabeth was worried sick about her. Val was about as tormented these days as you could be, and it wasn’t just the Curtis Lockhardt thing. Elizabeth figured it roughly eight to five she’d leave the Order and marry the guy. And more power to her. No, it wasn’t the Lockhardt thing.

It was all the other stuff Val had hinted at.

Once the Frenchwomen had departed she had a couple of hours to herself. She spent them at her desk, the blinds closed to deflect the bright sunshine, her managing editor, Sister Bernadine, taking all the calls in the outer office. Before her on her desk she arranged the files on the
papabili
. Slowly she read through her notes on the two leading candidates. Then she turned back to her Apple II and divided the glowing screen down the middle, typed in the names of the two men, and proceeded to begin a thumbnail sketch of each.

Wondering what lay behind such skeletal hints at the reality of the two men, she was called back to her schedule by Sister Bernadine. Monsignor Sandanato was waiting downstairs with the limousine.

They rode in a Vatican Mercedes, the four of them—Kevin Higgins, a well-connected banker from Chicago, Cardinal D’Ambrizzi, and Sister Elizabeth in the back with windows open, Monsignor Sandanato behind the wheel. Higgins was an old friend of Sister Elizabeth’s father and greeted her warmly, full of memory-laden small talk. He had not visited Rome in many years and he couldn’t have been more delighted than to return in the company of the cardinal and his friend’s daughter. He must have felt, she reflected, as she herself did whenever the cardinal was holding forth, as if she were seeing the Eternal City for the first time.