The Assassini (51 page)

Jean-Pierre, the man August Horstmann had found in the Spanish village working as the sexton, wore a long black cassock, a bit frayed at the hem, and the old flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat so common among the rustic clergy. He carried his lunch in a brown paper sack which had been rolled, creased, and grease-spotted many times. No one had paid him any attention on the train. No one, that was, except a little blond girl with her hair in braids who seemed transfixed by his eyes—the white milky remains in one socket, the other one so blue it nearly matched hers. He smiled at her and she stared, sucking her thumb, and he wished he could leave the train before it reached Rome. But, of course, he couldn’t.

Rome was hot at midday when he arrived. Too hot for the season. He was sweating into his thick undershirts. He had grown used to the cool, windy Spanish countryside, the mountains and the brooks and the gentle pace of his work.

Now he stood outside the railway terminal unsure of himself among the tourists, the crowds pushing and hurrying. He wondered fleetingly if he would ever see the little country church again. Would he ever see the silver moon from the window of his small room and smell the fresh clean air and the breeze that carried faint hints of the ocean on it. Would he ever hear the rushing brook below the village, feel it on his feet?

He went in search of a telephone. It was a Vatican number.

Once he made his contact and received his instructions, there was time for a long walk.

He could even visit the Vatican gardens. It had been
such a long time since he’d seen the gardens. He’d been little more than a boy when he’d last visited Rome.

Yes, with the call behind him there was plenty of time to stroll through the city.

He wanted to forget for the moment why he’d come to Rome.

A
nother rented car, another rain-blown afternoon with low, disgruntled clouds scowling down, draped across the rugged mountaintops tracing the northwest coast of Donegal. The mountains seemed to be pitching me downward, closing me off from behind, funneling me toward the rage that was the Atlantic. Donegal was one of the desperately beautiful and poverty-stricken corners of the Irish sorrow, the coastline a place God might have designed for the express purpose of hiding—the wide-mouthed bays created by the drowning of the valleys between mountain ranges, rocky cover and darkness everywhere you looked. The land could no longer support the population that grew older and smaller with the passing of each decade. It was a place of breathtaking natural beauty but also the very heart’s core of all that had gone wrong with the country—the core of denial, the fist shaken in the face of fate. Pure Catholic. Naturally.

Still, the day’s drive was quiet, calm, and my back wasn’t hurting all that much. What lay ahead was a mystery, but I was being driven by the potent combination of fear and irrevocable anger. To my chamber of horrors I’d now added poor old Robbie Heywood, set up and butchered by Father August Horstmann, presumably under orders from someone, something in Rome. I was as ready for whatever lay ahead as I was going to get.

I smelled the peat, cut deep into the earth, and the heather and the honeysuckle. I’d have given almost anything
to forget for a moment the killing and the
assassini
and the Roman intrigues. It was so pleasant to watch the solitary road, the puddles shimmering in its depressions, to smell the wet earth, to find a kind of peace in the sighting of the infrequent whitewashed cottage and the faint orange glow of the sun behind the blue and purple rain clouds.

But I was past all that: I had the uneasy feeling that this mysterious landscape which could transform itself from gentle fields to threatening ocean-racked cliffs with a turn of your head—I had the feeling that it was swallowing me, might never let me go.

Again and again during the long lonely drive, Sister Elizabeth had filled my thoughts.

Why? It made no sense, my thinking about her, wishing as I did that she were beside me, talking and thinking and reassuring me that I was doing the right thing. I had to keep reminding myself that she was nothing to me. My last image of her, the argument in the quiet house, held nothing for me. Yet I had to force myself to remember the essential truth: she was one of
them
, a nun, someone you couldn’t trust. Everything for her was filtered through the prism of the Church, either its secular rules or the mumbo-jumbo. Either way you couldn’t win, not with them.

Look back at Torricelli, I told myself; now, there was a case in point. Poor Torricelli, the quintessential churchman, caught in a vise of Nazis, Catholics, Resistance fighters, and no clear choice for the old bishop. For him it was always a question of tiptoe, tiptoe, along the line, being neither one thing nor the other, ignoring or refusing to acknowledge right and wrong. If you couldn’t decide right and wrong in a world run by Nazis, then you had a problem. Didn’t you?

Yet Sister Elizabeth would have understood the old bishop’s dilemma. It was like an amputation you underwent upon entering the Church: the Church cut away your morality and replaced it with something of its own, something unnatural and contrived and prescribed. There
was no room for simplicity anymore, no room for right and wrong. Expediency was the new morality and you accepted it.

I looked back at Elizabeth and it seemed forever since I’d seen her. Back then I hadn’t been sliced open by Horstmann, I hadn’t faced the idea of myself-as-murder-victim, I hadn’t yet turned into a hunter, I hadn’t gone to war. Back then I hadn’t carried a gun. It
had
been forever since I’d seen her. I’d almost died myself. I’d caused the death of a scared little man in Egypt. I’d put a name to the silver-haired priest. I’d visited the monastery in hell. I’d found another murder in Paris. I was a different man from the fellow who’d said good-bye to Elizabeth. But she wouldn’t have changed. She was still the creature of the Church, owned by it, instructed by it, purveyor of its official stories. She wanted to believe she was something better and finer, more like my sister, but she was wrong. She thought she knew so much but she knew only the party line. She was caught in the web from which Val had miraculously freed herself, that was the difference.

I knew all of that, but none of it mattered when I remembered how I’d laughed with her and made vast inroads into the contents of the refrigerator and unraveled some of the ominous riddle Val had left behind and gone to see the old cop on the shore and learned that Father Governeau had been murdered and the murder covered up.… All that had been so good. And then the performance had dropped away and I’d butted up against the real Elizabeth.

She was a nun. And that was the last thing in the world I wanted to let myself in for. I couldn’t win, not in a struggle with the Church, with her vows. I couldn’t risk it. I knew all about nuns. I always had, from the day I found the dead bird hanging on the school-yard fence.… You could never know what they thought. You trusted them and depended on them and all, of a sudden they were telling you they weren’t women, they weren’t human, they were nuns. But I’d been lulled by Sister Elizabeth. She’d blurred the lines, blunted the warnings
I’d learned by heart, smudged the distinctions between herself and other women. Then I’d let her hurt me.

Hurt. That was the second reason, the bad one, that made the whole idea of Elizabeth so wrong. I’d loved my sister and the Church had killed her. If I let myself fall in love with Elizabeth, I knew the Church would somehow kill her, too. Another innocent would die. I knew it.

Of course, she would think me mad even to contemplate her in such terms. After all, she’d proven it, she was a nun. She’d betrayed my trust.

I was driving through a sudden squall, rain spitting out of the thick mist. I felt the wet cold sweeping at me from the ocean and then I saw the first low beehive cells, a thousand years old, and the broken ruin of stone walls and the gray, moss-speckled shape rising from the cliffs …

The monastery of St. Sixtus.

I’d read about such places but I’d never seen one, never seen anything like it. I felt as if the earth and the weight of centuries were slipping away and I was plummeting backward through time and space to the sixth century, when St. Finian had prescribed the kind of asceticism that went with the desolation of the scene stretched out along, the barren, rock-strewn bluff and shoreline before me. It was a beehive monastery, St. Sixtus, a creation native to this Irish coast with its fury of frothing, pounding, ceaselessly slamming ocean breakers. The beehives of piled stones were dwarfed by both the sea and the cliffs, as well as by the later additions to the monastery which had probably been built over a period of more than a thousand years.

St. Finian and his successors had ordered an almost inhuman kind of ascetic endurance for the monks who were expected to survive on a minimum of sleep and food, hideous scourges, and interminable masses. The monks were forbidden from using any beasts in the tilling of their stony fields. Instead, they harnessed themselves to the plows. The asceticism pervaded the orders, whether a monk chose the life of a hermit or vowed
eternal wandering. It was all a uniquely Irish kind of severity. Never before in history had even the traditional monastic refuge been thought to endanger true self-abnegation.

St. Columban had always been one of my special favorites. His penitential—the table of punishments for even the slightest carnal stirrings—was the kind of thing that made you wonder about saints in general, Irishmen in particular. The ideas of sodomy and masturbation drove him into paroxysms of sadism. One image had stuck with me from the first day I researched him as a seminarian. The naked monk, standing alone up to his neck in the rough seas along just such a canker of coastline as lay before me, dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, singing psalms until his vocal cords ruptured, until his blood ran cold, until he gave up the struggle and slid beneath the water … For what? What was the point? Was it simply that they were all crazy, had nothing better to do with their dementia? Sometimes an enemy of the Church would be caught among them, an infidel, a sodomizer, and he would be crucified on the sandy, rocky shingle and the cross driven into the sand upside down so that the tide would just possibly drown him before he died of suffocation or loss of blood.… I couldn’t forget those old stories a quarter of a century after reading them, now that I set my eyes on this dying place for the first time.

I drove off the narrow, rutted path and got out of the car, felt the sting of the wind and the scythe of the damp, salty, acrid spray filling the air. The Irish coast was the perfect place for these red-eyed, maniacal monks who could never scourge themselves unto satisfaction. Rocky, barren lumps rose from the bay and the crumbling cliffs of the shoreline were split as if by hammer blows. Ravines angled away from the water like fistulas, crags and promontories bearing crippled, stunted trees crumbled wetly, and a wilderness of thorn and gorse crowded through slots in the rocks. Someone I’d read a long time ago wrote that the uninhabited and the uninhabitable
seemed to these monks “as so many invitations to the pain they sought for their earthly lives.”

Maybe it was an atavism harbored deep in my genetic matrix. The fact was I had to walk among the relics of that other world, had to see what it all looked like from the vantage point of some benighted pilgrim washed ashore five hundred years before by capricious fate and unmanageable gales. Behind me now the sea thundered, shuddered up along the stretch of uneven rocky beach that lay pale and helpless between the angry, brooding cliffs that threatened it as well as me like a giant pair of jaws. Caves, dark fenestrations, peered like impenetrable black eyes down upon me. The poor long-ago bastards had made monasteries, surrounded by the implacable sea and the barren, unforgiving marshlands, as if what they really wanted was to hide not only from the world but even from God, hoping somehow to be overlooked, forgotten, if not forgiven.

The sprawling monastery’s single large building was made of packed, unshaped stones, the lower reaches painted with a damp dark-green beard of moss, the upper with moss and lichen dried to a sickly brown. A tower capped by a cross against the lowering clouds, no sounds but the chill wind and the surf pounding like a wildly amplified water torture, a nervous breakdown demanding possession of your soul.

I walked among the beehive huts, avoiding the loose stones that had come free centuries before and rolled off by themselves. I looked inside, into the darkness, but there was no sign of life, only the smell of birds and the sea. How could they have lived in such places and at the same time created the ornamental art at which we still gaped, goggle-eyed, the books, the work of the goldsmiths, continuing the work of Germanic and Celtic prehistory? What sort of geniuses were they? I didn’t know the answer, couldn’t even begin framing an answer, which probably helped explain why the wheels had come off my faith so long ago.

Eventually I went back to the car, breathing hard against the sucking power of the constant gale. I knew
why they had never been able to add anything to the noble history of monastic architecture. It was the Irish in them. They distrusted whatever it was that endured, anything that might presume to beauty or eternity. Better to wander, or to hide away in a cave, and disappear eventually, return to the past, like the Latin words scraped from the vellum, erased, to make way for the new that must then in its time be scraped away, too.

I drove on up the narrow path, dragging the past behind me like a huge corpse.

I had to get moving. I had work to do.

I found Brother Leo in what passed for a garden, a patch of vegetables and a few flowers at the top of a cliff, just outside a wall of stone that had crumbled away many centuries ago. He was kneeling in the wet, dark earth, and he looked up at me as I leaned into the gale and pushed my way toward him across the close. He waved cheerfully, as if he knew me, and went back to his weeding and planting. I climbed over the remains of the wall, slipping on the wet moss, and found I was winded once more. He looked up at me again, said something blown away out of earshot, and smiled. His face was old and round and wizened, rather distracted in an amiable way, earnest in his determination to finish whatever he was doing. He wore black trousers wetly crusted with mud, a black turtleneck sweater up around his thin, wrinkled neck and jowls. His hands were bare, caked with mud, and there was a streak of mud on his cheek where he must have scratched an itch. At last he finished the job, patted the earth flat around some rather weary-looking stems I couldn’t identify, and stood up. He wiped his hands on a muddy bit of toweling.