The Assassini (47 page)

I spent two and a half days digging through the old bishop’s papers, most of them in French and Italian, a few in German, some in Latin, some in English, and when I finally threw in the towel and sagged back in my uncomfortable straight-backed chair I had a migraine and a major brain cramp. I had fought my way through several bushels of paper and I wondered what I had, what it all added up to. It was the third day and the November rain was still slanting against the high French windows.

There were diaries, memoranda, casual notes to himself and to others, letters he sent and letters he received. It was like putting a mosaic together when you had no idea what it was supposed to look like when finished. I kept thinking of Val, trying to understand what she’d been after, but what had she
known
? I was beginning to realize that I was almost certainly never going to understand what had been in her mind. Bits and pieces, yes, but never the whole picture. My perception of her thought processes was further confused by the fact that I was tracking her backward, back toward where she had for some reason begun her quest—but I doubted I would ever reach that point. It was like tramping around the jungle looking for the source of the Nile.

What I read showed that there had been an ongoing struggle between Torricelli and the determined upstart priest, Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, over the issue of the Church’s support of
le Résistance
. D’Ambrizzi had offered aid and comfort to Resistance saboteurs, and it was driving Torricelli crazy since he was the one who had to keep from slipping off the tightrope while dealing with the representatives of the German army of occupation. Torricelli had to deal with the Abwehr, the Gestapo, the casual errand boys, everybody. In the bishop’s view
D’Ambrizzi had gone rogue, was an impetuous hothead consumed by the morality of the situation rather than by the realities; he clearly felt D’Ambrizzi was risking the wrath of the Germans which might come crashing down on the Church in Paris, maybe even all across Europe. Torricelli had even taken his worries to Pope Pius, and the pope had replied that the bishop had better make damned sure that neither D’Ambrizzi nor anyone else within the Church did anything to help the Resistance. There was no doubt in my mind as I read the documents that Pius had been very, very serious. My sister must have been ecstatic at unearthing such extraordinary source material.

There was reference to Richter, the LeBecq family, the matter of the art treasures and where they might be going. Richter was apparently involved in collecting art from the dispossessed Jews for Goering’s private galleries and also in dealing off some to the Church. So this was obviously how Val had been led in search of the contingent that finally surfaced in Alexandria. Torricelli also mentioned someone called “the Collector” coming from Rome to go through artworks to decide what exactly the Church wanted for itself. Who, I wondered, was this Collector? Add that to the list of questions.

And there were tantalizing references to Simon.

Etienne LeBecq had been afraid that Simon had sent me from Rome to kill him … so afraid that he’d finally just gone off and killed himself. Simon, one of the code names. And here he was again. Simon this, Simon that. All in 1943 and 1944. Paris had been liberated toward the end of August of 1944 and life had changed, the Germans were gone.

I had trouble translating much of the stuff about this Simon. There was the language problem and Torricelli’s penmanship had gone to hell as well, as if whenever Simon’s name came into his mind he got very nervous and hurried and flustered. The story seemed to be that in the winter of 1944–1945, while the Battle of the Bulge was raging in the Ardennes, Torricelli had come unglued in a major way by discovering “a plot so heinous that
there is nothing left for me to do but summon Archduke to a secret meeting. Only he can control Simon! What else can I do? He might kill me if I get in his way. I can only tell Archduke and pray he can stop it. Will Simon listen to him? I cannot commit another word to paper.… Whatever my political convictions—and in a world such as this, do I even have political convictions anymore?—I cannot countenance what Simon intends. A miracle I learned of it … What will Archduke say? And Simon—is he good or evil? What if Archduke is behind all this and Simon is only his tool? Will Archduke turn on me if I turn against Simon? But I
must
or the blood of our victim will be on my hands, too!”

I went out alone that evening and had dinner at a little pizza restaurant where the pizza was good, with a couple of fried eggs and anchovies floating in a thin slick of olive oil on fresh tomato sauce with garlic and oregano. I was trying to concentrate on the food because the only other course was to face the brutal conflict between information and intelligence. I inevitably came across the same dichotomy in my practice of law. Somebody working for you would come in and dump a ton of information on your desk—everything from yesterday’s depositions to precedents from seventy-five years ago. What you had to do was somehow turn it into
intelligence
, become your own intelligence agency. You had to push all the pieces of information around in your mind until you began to see the interpretation that would make sense. You had to sift out the irrelevancies, peer for days, weeks, months at the information until you saw the hints of an outline—like the image on the Shroud of Turin or that face on Mars everybody was talking about not long ago. Just a hint could get you started. A hint.

Well, I had lots of hints. Lots of information right on the verge of taking shape.

So it was time to have a pizza and plenty of Fischer beer and walk along the fences enclosing the Luxembourg Gardens and let November rain on you. There was
no point in thinking about what I knew. It was time to let it percolate on its own.

Later that night my mood changed. I was sure that August Horstmann was following me, trying to pick the safest moment to kill me. I was doing what Val had done. He’d killed her. He’d killed Robbie Heywood once he’d decided I was bound to follow Val’s trail all the way back to the old journalist. He must have hung around to finish me off, too.

But maybe he figured that with Robbie Heywood dead the case was closed, the trail dead as my sister. Maybe I was safe. Maybe he hadn’t counted on Clive Paternoster knowing so much.…

And what was this about Horstmann and Heywood being such old pals?

I called my father at the hospital in Princeton.

His voice was weak but distinct. The slurring I’d heard before was gone. He wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, who I was seeing. I told him I was following in Val’s footsteps, that I’d found people left over from Paris during the war: Richter, LeBecq, the nephew who was the last remnant of Torricelli, Clive Paternoster. I told him Robbie Heywood had been killed by the same man—somebody called August Horstmann, a priest the Vicar had once known—who had killed Val, Lockhardt, and Heffernan.

My father spoke softly, sorrowfully. ‘Oh, not Robbie, not the Vicar … Goddamnit …”

“Look, you were in and out of Paris during the German Occupation. Did you ever hear of these code names?” I told him about Simon and Archduke. It was easy to forget that my father just might be a source of information. He’d always stayed so close-mouthed about those OSS years. But now he might remember something and open up.

But for the moment he just punched out a sharp laugh that was distorted into a cough. “Son, what I mainly remember was being afraid of getting my tail shot off by some trigger-happy Jerry. I was afraid of making a mistake
and having to chew up my cyanide pill before I spilled the beans. I’ll tell you one thing, Torricelli was certainly right about D’Ambrizzi working with the Resistance. It drove Torricelli up the wall. It was none of my business, but I’d hear things—that’s how I met D’Ambrizzi, through my Resistance contacts. All I was doing, Ben, was in and out, usually in by parachute, sometimes by fishing boat along the coast of Brittany—do my job, try to get out to Switzerland alive—”

“I remember the movie,” I said.

“Movie!” He coughed again. “Come home, son. Please, Ben, your life’s on the line, whatever the devil’s going on—”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Careful,” he said numbly. “Don’t you understand, careful doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn!” He began coughing again and I couldn’t get him to answer for ten or fifteen seconds. Then I heard a nurse’s voice explaining that he was all right, that he had just a touch of pneumonia in one lung. I wasn’t to worry, everything was under control. His coughing had stopped in the background. I told her to tell him I’d be in touch again soon.

“You said my sister wanted to know about Torricelli and something else. And what? What was that other thing?”

I was sitting in a deep Morris chair between the wooden propellor and a table full of framed photographs and I was working on a glass of Clive Paternoster’s scotch. My host was leaning on the mantelpiece, smoking a venerable pipe he kept polishing against his nose.

“Oh, really, old boy, there’s nothing there for you.” He sniffed and downed some of his scotch, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

“No, no, I’m quite serious. It must have been something—you held it back. Let me be the judge. She was my sister.”

“It’s just that it’s the land of fairies and sprites and little men with green hats and pointed slippers …”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

From the window by the chair I could look down through the bare tree limbs at the weary awning and the lights in the window of Tabbycats. Down there Horstmann had arranged casually to bump into his old friend Heywood, who’d thought he was dead these forty years.

“Well, your sister comes to the Vicar and she’s full of questions about the war years, about Torricelli and, and—”

“And what?”

“And the
assassini
! There, you satisfied? Old Clive sounds a fool!” He puffed nervously on the pipe, the woodsy smell filling the room.

“
Assassini?
I don’t get it. What’s the problem? It’s Italian for assassins. What’s the big thing here, Clive? I just read the word in one of Torricelli’s diaries—”

He stroked his immense nose with the pipe for a moment, burnishing the dark brown bowl. “You read it in his papers, did you—now, that’s rather interesting, I must say. Evidence to support the Vicar’s theory, at any rate.”

“Enlighten me,” I said patiently. He wasn’t the kind of old duffer you could hurry. You’d miss the cream of the jest.

“The
assassini
, man! You tell me you’re a Catholic, yet you profess ignorance of the
assassini
—you astonish me. Your education has been sadly neglected.” He was shaking his head, running his bony hand through the long gray hair that thinned out over the crown of his narrow head.

“Educate me, then.”

“Simply put”—he grinned with the big stained rabbity front teeth—“the
assassini
, my son, were the blighters who did the popes’ killing for them back in the old days, the Renaissance, the Borgia days when poison rings were all the rage. An instrument for carrying out papal policy. Now, the salient point has nothing to do with the Renaissance, as you might have guessed … no, the salient point that your sister had gotten her teeth into was that the
assassini
were rumored to have been
brought back to life … here in Paris during the war. A rumor. I never put much faith in it myself, there were always rumors everywhere you looked, but the Vicar, oh, he was much closer to all that sort of thing than I was. The Vicar was a devoted “intrigue man,” he was in Vienna when they made that picture,
The Third Man
, he never tired of seeing it, never missed a revival. He loved intrigue, believed it, you see—a conspiracy behind every loose brick—that’s why he loved covering the Church, it never let him down! He used to say it made the Reichs Chancellory or the Supreme Soviet look like a child’s idea of the real stuff, said the Church was all intrigue, all conspiracy, whispers in darkened doorways, voices in empty rooms and plotters gathered behind the closed shutters … well, he thought this
assassini
business was too good a fit to pass up.… The Vicar told me at the time that somebody had brought the
assassini
back to life, that they were operating in Paris … as if we didn’t have enough going on in Paris back then …” Paternoster laughed at the memory, tamping the ash down in the pipe’s bowl. “He said they were doing the Church’s dirty work but damned if he knew what the work was! Who were they killing? The Vicar couldn’t figure it out. Or he never told me if he did. But he knew they were on the job and he was bloody sure he knew some of them—”

“Personally?” I asked. “He knew them personally?”

“Yes,
knew
them. They were all men of the cloth as I understood it, these
assassini
. So when your sister asked him about the
assassini
she was right up his alley—got him right on his old hobbyhorse! He told me all about their conversation … I can’t blame him, can you? For telling her? He didn’t see what harm it could do to tell her now, forty years later … so he told her about another old friend of his, Brother Leo.”

“And who was Brother Leo? I need a scorecard.”

“Well, I never met him, but the Vicar said he was one of them … one of the
assassini
.” He sniffed again, blew his nose on a large, soiled handkerchief. “I don’t know if your sister, poor dear, went in search of him—it
wouldn’t have done her any good, but the Vicar thought it would interest her for her book—”

“Why couldn’t she see Brother Leo? Is he dead?”

“Oh, not so far as I know. But he’s at some godforsaken little monastery on the coast of Ireland … St. Sixtus, I think it’s called. I daresay your sister wouldn’t have been welcomed …” He looked at me expectantly, rubbing his enormous, broad nose once again with the kerchief.

“It’s funny, Clive,” I said when I’d thought about it for a few moments. “What harm could telling her about the
assassini
of forty years ago do? None. None at all. But I’ll tell you what happened. I think it just might have made her think the
assassini
were still around. I’ve tried to think what she could possibly have known that meant she had to be killed. And I just couldn’t imagine what it was—how could something from forty years ago have decided her fate now? Well, finding a coven of
assassini
—or just one of them, maybe—that might have done it. That might have been enough to get her killed. That goddamn Horstmann!” Paternoster was looking at me uncomprehendingly. “Horstmann’s one of them, Clive. The Vicar did know him forty years ago, just as he knew Brother Leo. But Horstmann’s still on the job. He killed the Vicar, he came all the way back to Paris for him because he was afraid I’d learn whatever my sister had learned. So he came back from killing my sister and from damn near killing me and he killed the Vicar. But he fucked it up, Clive, he didn’t think about you.” I stood up and slapped him softly on the shoulder.