The Assassini (25 page)

In the taxi she rummaged through her Filofax, checking the notes she’d made during the flight, then had the driver take her to the tower on the Via Veneto. She
changed into running gear, slipped the Beatles’s
White Album
into her tape player, and went for a hard forty-five-minute run, working up a sweat, ridding herself of the night’s stiffness.

After an ice-cold shower she stared unhappily at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. No makeup, hair soaking and bedraggled, face drawn, eyes dull. The face staring back at her reminded her of Sister Claire during her novice year. It was Claire who had summoned the Revlon representative to visit “the rookies,” as she always called them, to instruct them in the subtle yet effective uses of cosmetics. “How can you expect to go forth and carry the word of God,” she would say, “if you go around looking like Absolute Hell?” You could hear the capital letters when she spoke. And the lessons had worked. Well, there was no doubt she looked like A. H. at the moment, but ten minutes later she’d repaired the damage of a sleepless night and was ready to face the world, if not the Flesh and the Devil.

Hours later, as the busy reentry day wore to its conclusion, she sat alone in her office, the accumulated crises of the magazine at least momentarily laid to rest, and took her first break just to think. She sipped at a cup of cold coffee, put aside a stack of copy waiting to be proofed, and closed her eyes. Her subconscious had been puffing away all day, trying to excavate Val’s passing remark which had eluded her memory.

Suddenly she opened her eyes. She’d heard a voice in the room with her. It took a fraction of a second, then she realized she’d been talking to herself, no, that wasn’t quite right, she’d been talking to Val, and what scared her was that Val was answering.… It was a memory, of course, just a little time travel. They’d been waiting in the office one evening, Curtis Lockhardt was coming by to pick them up, the three of them were going out to dinner, one of his favorite fancy nightspots, somewhere new, and Val had been excited, her adrenaline pumping overtime. Elizabeth had asked her what was going on and Val had shaken her head, grinning, had said she couldn’t tell her, but she was about to burst with the
news. At dinner Lockhardt had mentioned someone he knew who’d died recently, someone who had something to do with the Church—damn, Elizabeth couldn’t recall the name, had it been an Irishman? That seemed to stick in her mind—and Val’s eyes had caught hers for just an instant and Val had said, “That makes five,” and Lockhardt had stopped short and said, “What was that?” and Val said, “That makes five in a year,” and Lockhardt had said something about this being hardly the time or the place and Val had mimicked Gilda Radner on the old
Saturday Night Live
, said, “Never mind …”

Five in a year …

Then the exhaustion hit her full on and she woke up hours later still at her desk and got home just in time to collapse in sleep for ten hours straight.

Work consumed the next several days.

She followed her normal routine which meant she had to chisel at each day to find seven or eight hours for sleep. There were interviews, editorial and production meetings, printers to schedule, last-minute copy to deal with, translators to pacify into working overtime, press conferences, visiting dignitaries to join for tea at the Order’s headquarters at the top of the Spanish Steps, dinners with one delegation or another from Africa to Los Angeles to Tokyo. From all over the world they came to the Holy City, tirelessly, unceasingly, all the pilgrims, the rich and the impoverished, the saints and the cynics, the selfless and the greedy, bearing the hopes and prayers of their Church, hoping for the best or aiming to line their pockets or determined to work their will upon the immense sprawling creature that was the Church of Rome. And Elizabeth reported, interpreted, and recorded their comings and goings. And she listened; she never stopped listening.

In the days following her return, everywhere she went they were talking about the pope’s health. The journalists had set up pools, predicting the timing of his death. The interest in the betting ebbed and flowed with the rumors. The word was always making the rounds that His Holiness had taken a turn—but whether for better or worse
depended on your informant. The stock of the various
papabili
rose and fell like mercury in a series of thermometers. D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato were the favorites, but others had support as well. Everybody was a handicapper.

And there was the subject of the murders of Sister Val, Lockhardt, and Heffernan in far-off America, where such things might happen on any street corner. Still, even for America it was quite a triple. She was besieged with questions. She fended them off as best she could. She played dumb. She told no one about the killer-priest theory: in Rome that was a fuse she knew better than to light. Not a word had appeared anywhere, and she wasn’t going to be the source of such an incendiary rumor. Consequently, alone with the killer priest ricocheting around in her brain, she began to feel claustrophobic, trapped alone with what she knew perfectly well was the truth.

She needed to talk to someone about it. It was so strange not to have Val.… And she wanted to know about the five in a year. Five
deaths
in a year …

She almost put in a call to Ben, wanting to hear his voice, wanting to make an apology, but whenever she reached for the telephone she drew back; no, she’d do it tomorrow. Tomorrow.

It was a bad dream and he knew it well, the way you might grow used to a terrible running sore, something for which there was no cure, something which stank and infected the rest of your life and left you half mad, obsessed, impotent.

In the moments before waking, in the gauzelike blur of approaching consciousness when a man could almost control the beast within, Sandanato had believed himself to be wandering in the dark place that waited for him every night. Sometimes he managed to give it the slip. Sometimes not. He was moving soundlessly from room to room, but beyond some of the doorways and archways he passed through lay not rooms but chambers floored with burning sand, coppery walls of stone rising all around him, a thousand steps carved in the cliff’s face, a
disc of fiery white in the blue far above him, seen as if by a man trapped forever at the bottom of a poisoned well.…

In his dreams he was always at the bottom of a pit, unable to find a way out, alone and in pain, stumbling in the darkness with the mocking sky inexpressibly far above, out of reach. His dream was always faintly scented with incense and the peculiar odor of burned and blowing sand and scrub brush that had never known rain. In his dream it was always a nameless and dark place, throbbing with its own power, pulsing with black blood trickling forth from springs cut into the cliffs like wounds.

And then the unaccountable would happen. The miracle.

The floor of the valley would tremble underfoot, the black blood would gurgle and foam from the burnished walls of stone, and the stone would be wrenched apart before him and he would see a way out, a pathway cut through the mountain and a vast openness beyond … a desert in gaudy bloom and on the horizon, bathed in a mist of sun and moonlight, inexplicable because it was a dream, a castle, an immensely safe and holy place.…

And in his dream he was no longer alone but flanked by hooded brothers whom he somehow knew, whom he would lead from the prison at the base of the blowing cliffs. He had been made whole and new, baptized in the hot black blood, made a warrior at last, a gladiator of some atavistic order setting forth on a holy mission.

The Valley of Tears, that was the name he gave the hellish place from which he’d escaped.

And then all the images faded, the place of the black blood would recede into the subconscious, and he would open his eyes, his body and the sheets soaked with sweat, and the day would begin.

It was four o’clock in the morning of the first full day Monsignor Sandanato had been back in Rome.

Giacomo Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had conducted most of his life in secrecy, and four o’clock in the morning was a very secret hour.

From behind the wheel Monsignor Sandanato studied
his old mentor’s face in the rearview mirror. The cardinal was slouched in the backseat of the least conspicuous automobile registered in Vatican City—a blue Fiat with a rusty scrape on a rear fender. His mania for secrecy was in full flower. Four o’clock in the dark gray of a cool autumn morning, the back streets of Rome tilting sluggishly, the ancient buildings reaching across toward one another like very feeble old friends. It was like driving through a tunnel.

The cardinal reflexively took a black Egyptian cigarette from an old leather-backed case, stuck it on his lower lip, and lit it. He inhaled deeply and Sandanato, watching through the thick latticework of his eyelashes, saw the cardinal’s fingers, short and stubby and tobacco-stained, the fingers of a peasant. The face staring intently into a volume of Sherlock Holmes bore the stamp of a lover of pleasure, a Borgia. His lips were thick, the teeth uneven and discolored from the constant nicotine, his eyes clear and blue when you glimpsed them behind the hooded lids.

The cardinal wore civilian clothing. It was his obsession with secrecy, but Monsignor Sandanato understood. Even now, sitting quietly in the back of the little car, the old man in the ancient Borsalino, part of his camouflage, wouldn’t speak aloud. It was the fear that the car was bugged. In a high-stakes game, he would say, anything was possible. Loose lips sink ships, they were right, you see.

The hat was pulled down low on his head. Beneath it the once-thick black hair was now white; it lay tight against the massive skull like a cap. His nondescript gray suit was a bit small for him, was boxy, as if passed on to him by a Russian. He was squat, powerfully built, beefy, and intimidating even in his mid-seventies. Growing up in Trieste he’d had a reputation: quick brain, quicker fists.

Through the years Sandanato had had plenty of time to observe the man, the natural disguise he used to such advantage. He had the misleading loose jowls and lips of a garrulous old gossip. His natural posture was a slump. He was somehow always rumpled, no matter how significant the occasion. It was inconceivable to imagine him
pressed and starched and neat, even when he was precisely that. But it was all a false front. A fierce intellect gleamed behind the sybaritic old face. Shrewd with instincts as precise as computer logic. Giacomo Cardinal D’Ambrizzi, one of the most secret of men, had few secrets from Monsignor Sandanato.

From the very beginning, Sandanato knew, the cardinal had been involved in the most worldly affairs of the Church. He had the canny, calculating, game-playing kind of mind required, and those in positions of power had recognized it in the young man from Trieste. Money had always been what he did best. He had begun by raising it and went on to investing it. More than any other single individual in his time, he had built and directed the wealth of the Church.

Along the way the cardinal had learned how malleable the Church itself was, how responsive to a lover’s touch. Like people, the Church could be made to do what the cardinal wished. More than anything else he wanted to preserve the Church, to defend it against the evil and the enemies within and without its walls. It was an overwhelming task, but he had always been the man for it. And Pietro Sandanato had been at his side through the maturity of his power.

The cardinal had often told him of the time when he had recognized his calling, how best he might serve. It had been in a run-down office he’d visited in Naples some fifty-odd years before. Peeling linoleum, the smell of sweat, plates encrusted with pasta stacked on the corner of a cluttered desk. The office of a homely, unlettered tycoon whose hopes for the Church had dovetailed with his own. Father D’Ambrizzi had managed to pry a hundred thousand dollars from the grubby little man in the sweat-stained shirt. That was how it had begun and D’Ambrizzi had known where to channel the money.

Many years later, referring to Cardinal D’Ambrizzi’s control over the Vatican’s vast portfolio of investments, and the almost oppressive security surrounding his movements and actions, an American cardinal had said: “It goes with the territory, plain and simple. You smile at the wrong banker in Zurich or have dinner with the wrong
counselor in Paris, and the New York Stock Exchange and the Bourse go into shock. But, my friend, have you ever wondered where the hell God fits into all this?”

It was true, of course, the cardinal had told Sandanato. His life was bounded by secrecy and security and, indeed, it did go with the territory. But it was also an aspect of his own nature. And so far as God’s work went, the cardinal had long since ceased theorizing. Someday it would doubtless all become clear.

Monsignor Sandanato pulled the Fiat into a half-hidden alleyway and parked in the cul-de-sac, where anonymous, ancient trash was stacked helter-skelter, and doused the headlights. It was the back entrance of a hospital so obscure that it seemed to crouch, a pile of bricks one step from becoming rubble. The clientele was poor and undemanding and no one would suspect that a cardinal would set foot within it. Which was why D’Ambrizzi had chosen it, of course. Just three weeks before, a politician had been kneecapped by the Red Brigades less than fifty feet from the front entry and had still been taken by car to another hospital twenty minutes away. It was the perfect hospital for the cardinal’s purpose.

The dim hallway was empty but for two men in gowns covered with blood. No one paid the slightest attention to the handsome priest and the stubby old man who walked slowly and with a slight stoop. They entered a small room around a dark corner and sat down on the rickety wooden chairs. The cardinal took a copy of Sherlock Holmes stories from his pocket and began reading, his lips moving as he read the English. Sandanato sat upright, waiting.

Dr. Cassoni came in quietly, making apologies. His lined face was grave. He and the cardinal had known each other almost all their lives, which was why he had over the past few months gone along with the covert game the cardinal was playing. Dr. Cassoni’s normal venue was as elegant and moneyed as the little hospital was down-at-heel. Cassoni shook his head dispiritedly.