The Assassini (21 page)

My sister’s funeral passed me by in a foggy blur of activities I performed by rote. It was all happening at one remove from me. I played my part, and rather to my surprise I carried it off all right. Not bad, since I was up to my eyeballs in eagle-eyed Catholics and precious ritual and their half-cocked celebratory mass. I’d always wondered what it really was they were celebrating at the funeral mass. Of course I got the stock answer, all about celebrating the life of the late departed guest of honor. For nearly a quarter of a century all that had struck me as a crock of the best. Never more so than at my mother’s funeral. Not my idea of a cause for celebration, poor and lonely and ultimately demented wench she was.

Val’s funeral was different. Hers was a life worth celebrating, a death worth avenging.

Peaches said the mass at the little church over in New Pru. We’d kept the crowd down, maybe fifty or sixty, most of them drawn from the ranks of the mighty, mightier, and mightiest. The President’s representative, a couple of governors, three senators, some cabinet members and lawyers and fixers and all the rest of the riffraff who are determined to believe they make the world go round. There were five or six television crews held at bay by the state police. We did our best, Margaret and Father Dunn and Sister Elizabeth and I, to keep it under control, but it was still tinged with the stains of the “media event.”

I’d never seen Peaches at work before, and I was impressed. It had to be an ordeal for him. The smell of the incense—so well remembered across the years—filled the place. The casket gleamed dully, like burnished gold, and they went through all the rigmarole I recognized from years before. I received communion, first time in all those years, and it was all different—no kneeling at the altar rail the way it used to be, and receiving not only the host but the blood of Christ as well. Maybe the differences made it easier. It didn’t seem real. For God’s sake, it was my little sister up there.

I delivered the eulogy: the surviving brother and all. From the occasional sniffles and at other moments the smiling, nodding heads, I judged it a success. I kept my remarks at arm’s length from my own emotions. Val would have enjoyed it, my kind and sanctimonious words, a joke between us, like so many others. I couldn’t have managed it any other way. I would not have chosen this particular crowd to view my bared soul. When it was over, there was a hymn and the mourners were filing out and the show was pretty much done for.

Val was buried in the graveyard attached to the little church. The gravestones went back a long way. And there was a Driskill family plot. My mother lay there, my father’s parents. Now Val. There was plenty of room for my father and me. No big monuments for us: just stern headstones. Our work, my father used to say, would be our monument. It always made me think of the poem, “Ozymandias,” which I’d memorized at school. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair …

The wind was angry and cold, cutting through us, and I was damned if I’d stand there with my teeth chattering and tears freezing on my face while I watched the box disappear into the earth. I was already bothered by the irrational hatred of her being laid to rest, buried: the hatred coming from the childish but nonetheless powerful notion that it was in fact the conscious, living Val stuck out there in the cold, dark nights to come. I left the small group of close family friends who’d hung around for the final act of the day’s drama and strolled away on my own.
Sister Elizabeth and Margaret Korder were stuck with them.

I found myself under the dark gray clouds standing at the black iron railing marking the edge of the cemetery proper. But beyond the railing was a small cluster of overgrown markers. I opened the gate and went through. I’d never noticed those sorry little gravestones before, but now something—my subconscious, or maybe fate—drew me toward them.

Father Vincent Governeau’s grave was covered over with thistle and crabgrass, the stone flat on the ground, his name and the dates small, hardly visible—1902–1936. He wasn’t allowed a grave in consecrated ground.

I must have been standing there longer than I’d realized because Sister Elizabeth had finished up at the graveside and come to join me. She knelt down to inspect what had caught my attention. She was wearing a modified version of the Order’s old traditional habit, one she’d found in Val’s closet. Seeing her in it had thrown me at first. She looked like someone else, someone in costume. When she saw the name on the marker her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God!”

“Poor son of a bitch,” I said. “You can imagine the kind of burial he got from the good fathers of the Church. Swept his whole life under the rug, dropped him down a hole, and pretended he’d never lived at all. Because he was a suicide. When in fact he was murdered. Sister, he belongs inside the cemetery, not out here in the nether regions.…”

Walking back across the graveyard, she took my arm. “You were very good up there, Ben. Val would have been—”

“In stitches. Don’t kid yourself.”

“You were very good, nonetheless. She’d have been proud.”

“You want to hear something funny?”

“What?”

“I don’t even remember what I said.”

“Oh, Ben. If you were half as tough as you act, I’d hate you.”

“Then don’t look too close, my dear. Val knew the truth about me. That’s why she left the snapshot.”

“I wonder …”

“Val spent her whole life fighting for what she believed was right. Get on her wrong side and you’d find out she was an avenging angel. She was a whole lot tougher than I am.”

“Maybe I never really knew her—”

“You knew her. You
knew
her. Better to admit that to yourself. Now, you’d better prepare yourself for all the hoopla at the house.”

“Did you see Sister Mary Angelina?”

“I didn’t see much of anything.”

“She said she came directly from your father. He wanted her to come back and tell him how it went—”

“What is this, Sister? A November and December romance?”

The house was packed full of people I knew vaguely. I doubted if Val would have known more than one in ten: they were my father’s friends and cronies. The banking community, the CIA pensioners list, Princeton University, presidential aspirants of both then and now, the Church, the law—they were all wolfing down turkey and ham and liquor like refugees from welfare. The Garritys had laid on extra staff. The whole thing was impossible.

Father Dunn was leading the immense Archbishop Cardinal Klammer from group to group like an elephant in the early stages of training. Peaches, Sam Turner, some other locals, were trying not to gawk at all these veterans of
Meet the Press
and
Face the Nation
. Sister Elizabeth was assisting Margaret Korder, a pair of ringmasters keeping the circus going.

But the man I was looking for wasn’t there.

The library was off limits for the day. I knew that was where I’d find him.

Drew Summerhays was standing by a window in the book-lined room, thumbing through a first edition of
Ashenden
that Somerset Maugham had inscribed to my father. Summerhays had introduced them one summer at Cap d’Antibes and they’d hit it off, two of a kind.

He looked up from the book when I came in. He smiled at me with his thin-lipped, bloodless mouth. He was spare as a hoe handle and wore a charcoal-gray suit and vest, a Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold chain-Harvard, of course—the scarlet thread of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole, highly polished black cap toes from Jermyn Street, a black knit tie, a white shirt, a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand.
The
lawyer. He was a man who played in a league of one anymore.

“Did I ever tell you that Maugham is my favorite author, Ben?”

“Why, no, I don’t believe you ever did.”

“Willie had quite a stammer, y’know. I had a similar affliction as a boy. I cured mine, he cured his. Effort of will. Good a reason as any to make him my favorite writer. Your father was fond of Willie. They used to swap spy stories. Two different wars, of course. What’s the latest on your father, Ben?”

“Putting up a good front. He’s going to make it, Drew. Quite a scare.”

“Your father’s a hard man to scare.”

“I meant me. I was scared. I’m very easy to scare.”

“You and your father,” he mused, then let the phrase drop. He believed my father and I were, beneath it all, birds of a feather, more alike than either of us cared to admit. He’d said so frequently in the past. “So you’re easy to scare. You sound like a man indulging in false modesty. Or a man trying to set me up, you rascal.”

“Just a curious rascal. I was looking for you, Drew.”

“I came in here to get away from the crowd. Funerals and the gathering that follows—I’m too much aware that I’ll be the main attraction someday soon. Poor darling Val. What a sorry day this is—”

“Were you one of her supporters?”

“I know too much to support anyone in the sense you mean. I wished her well. I respected her views. And on occasion I raised money for her work.”

“So who killed her, Drew?”

“First you have to find out why, Ben. Then who follows.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Why did someone kill my sister? Did she die for her views on the Church?”

“I shouldn’t think so—not for her philosophical attitudes, nor even for her attempts to implement them. But that’s only one man’s opinion. One would have to take an extraordinarily close look at Val’s life … looking for the
why
. It’s there for the one who looks assiduously. But you must have given all this rather a lot of thought over these past few days. You look at things like a lawyer, you’ve no choice, have you? Gathering evidence, building a case, rebuilding the elephant.” He saw the puzzlement on my face. “You know what Rodin said when they asked him how he would sculpt an elephant. He said he’d start with a very large block of stone and remove everything that wasn’t an elephant. Well, what you have is a floor covered with the chips of Val’s life. Fit them all together and you’ll see the outline of a killer. Val will be gone but you’ll know the killer.” He turned and replaced the book on the shelf.

“I want to know about Curtis Lockhardt. And Heffernan. They were singled out to die along with Val. Val was thinking about leaving the Order to marry Lockhardt—”

“Forget Heffernan, Ben. He got killed because of Lockhardt. By himself he was exactly what he liked to call himself—just another mick priest on the make. Get me my coat, Ben. Let’s take a walk. Let’s talk about the late Mr. Lockhardt.”

He wore a soft homburg straight on his head and a black cashmere scarf and black gloves, a black chesterfield with narrow, high-cut arms and very square shoulders. He could have slit a man’s throat with the crease in his trousers. His narrow face was pink in the wind that rustled leaves across the frozen lawn. We headed out past the chapel toward the orchard and the pond beyond where we ice-skated in years gone by.

“Curtis Lockhardt,” Summerhays began as soon as we were clear of the babble of the house, “saw himself in a great many roles, like an actor moving on from one play to another. But at bedrock he knew he was an old-fashioned fixer with a lineage that ran back to Boston in
the years following the Revolutionary War. You might say that Lockhardts had always been fixers, the way other men might work with their hands and could build a shelf or a stair or a chicken coop or a lobster trap.…”

Summerhays described a man who would always be among those composing the “secret government,” the “government within the government,” and the “Church within the Church.” Lockhardt had learned his lessons at my father’s knee.

“But,” Drew Summerhays was saying as we stood among the leafless trees in the orchard where my father had found Father Governeau dangling from a limb, “Curtis always reckoned his greatest accomplishment was taking little Salvatore di Mona and turning him into Pope Callistus IV. You had to hand it to Lockhardt, you really did. He set out to buy a pope and, by God, he did.”

It had come about because he sat on the board of the Conway Foundation in Philadelphia. Lockhardt had watched in curious wonder as Ord Conway, known as “the old fart” by his employees, concluded that he wanted his own personal pope. In the end Ord had turned to Lockhardt and Lockhardt had acquired a pope for 5.8 million dollars and change, fifteen million less than it cost Nelson Doubleday to buy the New York Mets. The fact was, only a very few people even knew you
could
buy a pope. Ord lived two years into the reign of Callistus IV, but then, it was common knowledge that life positively abounded with amusing ironies.

For a time Lockhardt had thought Ord Conway a somewhat dim, conventional old Fascist, the weak tail-end to a great family line. Ord simply liked the Church the way it had been when he was a kid working on his catechism. Lockhardt watched the process, sensed the man’s degree of commitment to undoing a few reforms and reversing the trend toward what he called “a democratic Church.” Ord had always said that democracy was all right in its place, but, goddammit, the Church wasn’t the place. “Catholics,” he used to say, “ain’t supposed to vote on what the fuck they’re gonna believe! They ain’t got a say in it—that’s the whole damn point!”

Lockhardt was working on a plan. The realization
that Conway was only trying to bring back the old days and make peace with his own psyche made him the perfect tool. There was a lovely symmetry to the elements. Conway wanted to believe he would see a return to the Church of his boyhood. Monsignor Andy Heffernan wanted to get on the inside track to a cardinalate. And Lockhardt wanted to preserve the status quo, more or less. It would take some money, but that was no problem: Ord Conway was begging to be separated from some of his. And there would have to be a deal made: the nature of things demanded it. Curtis Lockhardt was in his element.

The birth control clinic in Bolivia was the perfect vehicle. It was liberal but not
too
liberal. That was a sign of how much things had changed. A lot of Catholics in positions of power, if not in that bastion of bureaucratic conservatism the Roman curia itself, believed the clinic was a strong, socially responsible step. It no longer was in opposition to the great subtext of Church teachings, not since Pope Paul’s commission, which had been the pivotal event of the Church’s recent history.