The Assassini (16 page)

“I know. I asked him that very question earlier tonight and never did get an answer.”

We were both exhausted. We cleaned up the kitchen and I took her bag, led the way up to a guest room. I was standing in the doorway when she came across the room. “It’s good to see you, Ben. And I’m so damn sorry.” She kissed my cheek.

I closed the door and went off to bed.

After my first meeting with Elizabeth, the memory of Pete’s Tavern and Gramercy Park under the snow fresh in my mind, I’d met Val for breakfast at the Waldorf. Elizabeth wasn’t up yet. Val wondered if I’d had a good time the night before. I said that indeed I had. “Then why the long face?”

I shrugged it off. “Morning brings the harsh realities. Maybe I had too good a time last night. Maybe I resent not being able to keep it going, maybe I’m not crazy about getting older.”

“You and Elizabeth seemed to get along well.” She smiled brightly. “I’m glad. Sometimes she and I are so close it’s scary; we tune in on each other. She’s the other side of me, Ben. We each might just as easily have become the other, exchanged lives.”

“She’s beautiful. Like you.” I grinned.

“Men,” she said. “Men are always falling for Elizabeth. It’s not her fault but it’s made her wary. She’s the belle of the Rome press corps. Putting their best moves on a nun makes it all the more challenging and exciting for the boys. Drives her nuts. That’s why I’m glad she just let herself have fun last night.”

“Will she stay a nun?”

My sister took a long time before answering, nibbling at the crusty pointed tip of a croissant. “Will any of us stay? That’s the real question, Ben. We’re the first of the new nuns. No real connection to the old ways. We choose to live in the world but not by the world’s rules. We’re activists in one way or another and none of us’ really
knows if, or for how long, the Church will find us digestible. We give all those bureaucrats in the curia ulcers. We’re forcing the Church to change, we aren’t subtle, we push hard … but the Church can always push back. If they get sufficiently pissed off, we’d better look out. Anyone who gets in the way of the grand strategy—whatever it is—had better look out.”

“What about you? Will you stay?”

“Depends on the pressure, doesn’t it? You got a bellyful and left. My gut feeling is that Elizabeth will stay. She thinks in terms of what is right, she believes in the essential goodness of the Church’s aims—but me? I don’t know. I lack her intellectual commitment, her philosophical involvement. I’m a troublemaker, an egotistical little twerp, a hell raiser. If they let me stay the way I am, sort of a squeaky wheel—well, then, I might stay a nun until I die.” For some reason she reached out and took my hand, as if she were consoling me in some grief she knew awaited me. I told her to eat her eggs before they got cold because I was paying roughly ten dollars an egg. Later on I kissed her good-bye and went back to my office on Wall Street.

We give the curia ulcers. We’re forcing the Church to change, we aren’t subtle, we push hard … but the Church can always push back. If they get sufficiently pissed off, we’d better look out. Anyone who gets in the way of the grand strategy—whatever it is—had better look out
.…

I came out of my dreams and memories of Val and Elizabeth, struggled back to the surface. It was six o’clock, dark, windy. Drafts everywhere. I pulled the covers up under my chin. I’d been half dreaming about Val, hearing her voice from the past, and it had pushed me back to the present. Someone had pushed back all right. The fear I’d heard in her voice when she called me made me think it—whatever it was—was even worse than she’d expected.

Were all the answers in the Vuitton briefcase?

If it was so damned important, and if she’d been
afraid they—
they
—were after her, then why did she let them get it? Why didn’t she make it safe somehow?

There was a logical inconsistency in my reading of Val’s behavior. She’d known she was in danger. She must have known she had some kind of dynamite in her briefcase. Val was not an innocent in any sense of the word. She knew how the games were played. She must have discovered where the bodies were buried.… Yet she let them get the briefcase.

She must have left an insurance policy. In case of her death, her murder, the loss of the briefcase—

I sat up like a madman. Of course! She needed a hiding place, a place the bad guys would never look.

I was out of bed and into my old plaid robe, shivering, stubbing my toe on the bureau, fumbling for the lights.

The playroom!

It smelled musty and empty, the shades pulled down, a bit of wallpaper hanging askew. The door swung open like a portal to memory. I could almost see Val, in a short, high-waisted dress and Mary Janes and white socks, in the corner where she kept her books and paints. I’d have been there, too, messing around with my Official All-Star Baseball Game, spinning the pointer on the Joe DiMaggio card, telling her to stop bothering me.…

There was a rustling, skittering noise somewhere in the shadows. A squirrel shot across the floor, peered into the empty fireplace, then disappeared behind some boxes of Val’s things in her favorite corner between the bookcase and window. I turned on the light overhead. The shadowy shapes were revealed as a pedal car modeled on the old Buick, a couple of bicycles, a blackboard, stacked boxes of books, the large bass drum which had appeared one Christmas. Val had beat hell out of it, an ungodly din. Then she’d found a better use.

I crossed the room, knelt on the dusty floor beside the drum. Someone had been there before me. She had left something in her old hiding place, where it would be safe.

The dust was thick on the edges of the drum but the side panel with the grinning clown had been wiped clean. I couldn’t get my fingertips under the panel, so I used the
sand shovel from a beach pail set, pried it loose, knocked the damn thing over, made a hell of a racket. But the panel came loose.

I stuck my arm in and felt my hopes take a nosedive.

The space was empty.

But it couldn’t be. She’d been here. She’d knelt beside the drum, she’d left her smudged fingerprints in the dust. She’d used the old hiding place—

Then I found it.

It fluttered down from a crevice where it had been stuck. I nearly brushed it away, thinking it a relic of childhood. But I brought it out of the drum instead.

“What are you doing? Drum practice?”

Sister Elizabeth stood in the doorway. She was wearing baggy striped pajamas, rubbing her eyes, yawning.

“I’m starved,” she said. She was peering into the refrigerator, conducting inventory. “Eggs. Ham, turkey, gorgonzola, onions, butter. This may add up to something. English muffins.” She gazed around the kitchen. I’d given her an old robe of mine. She’d added a pair of Val’s knee socks to the ensemble. She spotted the omelet pan hanging on a hook. “Ah, apples. I’ll chop up some apples, too.” She smiled at me. “Surely you know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and no, I don’t eat this way at home.” She started cracking eggs. “It’s all in the wrist. Like Audrey Hepburn in
Sabrina
. So what do you make of it?”

I sat at the kitchen table staring at the snapshot I’d found in the drum. Very old, yellowed and cracked, like something of my father and mother taken at Lago Maggiore in ’36. Only it wasn’t my father and mother. It was a photograph of four men. The tiny trademark on the back of the paper was in French. It was a memory from someone else’s photo album.

“Doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Four guys at a table a long time ago. Looks like a club—brick walls, candle in a wine bottle, lots of shadows—a Left Bank cave. Four guys.” She was chopping onions and apples on the thick board. She was good at it. Fast. I didn’t see
any bloodstains. She craned over to take another look at the photo.

“Five.”

“Four,” I said.

“I’ll bet another pal took the picture.” She looked at me and I nodded. “And you do know one of them. The one next to the fourth man. No way to tell the fourth man, we get mainly the back of his head. But number three, reading left to right, is in profile. Take a close look. Recognize that schnozzola?”

She was right, it was familiar, someone I should have known. But I couldn’t quite place it.

“Well,” she said, “I have the advantage of seeing him rather frequently, a nose like that one doesn’t change.” She had finished chopping. I smelled the butter in the pan. The boiling water was dripping through the coffee in the Chemex, the aroma filling the room. She was whisking half a dozen eggs and a shot of water in a bowl. “It is an early version of Father Giacomo D’Ambrizzi.”

“Of course! No mustache—he had a thick black bandit’s mustache when Dad brought him home after the war. I’d never seen anything like it outside of a Cisco Kid movie. You’re so smart, what’s the point of the picture?”

“I’m only the cook.” She was sautéing the onions and apples in the butter. She had her back to me, working like a professional. “But we know one thing for sure. It is one important picture. She hid it from everyone in the world … but the two of us.”

“Well, it means nothing to me,” I said. “And she never knew I knew about the drum, she couldn’t know I’d look for it there—”

“You’re wrong. Val told me a lot about you, about the time you found the black powder in the basement—”

“You’re kidding!”

“She told me about the famous feet of clay, she told me how she’d hide your Christmas present in the drum, she told me that you’d figured out the drum was her hiding place, but she never let on to you that she knew you knew. She used to put stuff in there that she wanted
you to find—it was like a game, Ben. You were the older brother who played tricks on her, but this was one she could play on you—” She stopped short. “Ben, she put that snapshot there for you to find in case anything happened to her. And you found it. It’s the key.” She turned back to the stove, poured the eggs into the pan.

“A photo of D’Ambrizzi in the drum is the
key
?”

She was stirring the eggs as they set. This incredible creature was making me hungry again.

“Maybe D’Ambrizzi isn’t what’s important,” she said.

“You think it’s the other three?”

“Four. Don’t forget the one who took the picture.”

My father’s secretary, Margaret Korder, arrived by nine o’clock and did what she did best: she took over, she fended off, she protected me from the claims of the outside world, just what she’d been doing for my father for thirty years.

Sam Turner arrived with Father Dunn’s friend, Randolph Jackson of the NYPD, a black man who had once played tackle for the Giants. They stayed from noon until just past two. It was more a chat than an official interrogation. Jackson drank orange juice and wondered what might connect his murders in New York and Sam’s in Princeton. I decided there was no point in wandering away from the beaten track of fact. I steered clear of the Church, of Val’s relationship with Lockhardt; I didn’t discuss the briefcase, Val’s planned book, the fourteenth century and World War II, the priest who killed himself in our orchard so long ago. There was no point in dragging them deep inside the Church: they wouldn’t know what to do about it and I wouldn’t know where to begin the story.

When they got up to leave, with Jackson making conversation with Sister Elizabeth, Sam Turner took me aside and told me he couldn’t find any files as far back as our hanged priest. “Name came back to me,” he said. “French. Governeau. Father Vincent. I put in a call to old Rupe Norwich. He was mighty sorry to hear about your sister, Ben. Rupe said he took that file with him
when he retired. I couldn’t believe it—he was a by-the-book man, Rupe was. I told him that was against the law. He said maybe I should come down and arrest him! Quite a guy, old Rupe.”

Jackson and Turner were barely out of sight when Sister Elizabeth and I were in my car and heading toward the Jersey shore, only an hour or so away. It was a gray, cold day. Ice had formed in patches on the road and the wind skidded vengefully out of the gulleys and across the fields which were stiff and brown with early winter.

Sand was blowing from the dunes when we found Rupe Norwich’s frame bungalow. The salty gales had pitted the paint job but the house and lawn had the compulsive neatness you found in the residences of the old parties who had retired and didn’t have enough to do. Norwich was eighty or so and glad for the company. He knew me from when I was a kid and he was sorry as heck about Val and asked about my father. He seemed almost guilty about Val’s being dead and my father stricken while he was so spry.

“I’m not like your daddy, deciding the fate of the world and the Church,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his suspenders and leading us into the living room which had too much furniture in it, too much heat. “But I stay busy. Got to keep your brain alert. Video games,” he said, pointing to his IBM PC, “they’re the key these days. Heck, I fly fighter missions, I play golf, baseball, never leave the house. PCs are the thing. I try to stay current, I listen to music, U2 and the Beastie Boys, ’course Springsteen, he’s a Jersey boy. Then I get out my old Ted Weems 78’s, too, with Perry Como singing. What you see here is a man of eighty-two trying to convince his twenty-eight-year-old granddaughter he knows what’s going on.” He was chirping along, glad to be talking. “Her mother got this Alzheimer’s a few years back, passed away, but I’m just too damn busy with all my stuff here—but you notice what a gabby old fart I am, can’t stop talking, always gotta get my two cents worth in. Sam Turner says you got young Vincent Governeau on your minds. Poor devil.” He sat down in a
rocker once we were settled on the couch. He was skinny and wore a sweatshirt and Reeboks. He was sizing Elizabeth up: he’d done a double take when I’d introduced her as a sister.

“Sam said you might still have the file,” I said.

“I took it with me when I left fifteen years ago ’cause I didn’t want it coming back to haunt Sam. Then I figured the hell with it, I didn’t want it coming back to haunt me either. So I burned it up.” He laughed abruptly. “Destroyed the evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Sister Elizabeth asked.