The Assassini (53 page)

Then came the final night, toward the end of the bitter winter of 1944.

The time had come again to kill a man.

But the Nazis knew nothing about it. Nor did the
Resistance. Not a soul but the
assassini
knew that an important man would be killed.

For the good of the Church. To save the Church.

It was Simon’s mission and the most elaborate undertaking they’d attempted. It required more planning, more transport for which they relied on the Resistance, more supplies which also came from the Resistance.

Dynamite. Two machine guns. Hand grenades.

They were going to change the course of history and save the Church in a single audacious strike.

They had to hole up in a woodsman’s hut on a hillside overlooking a stretch of train track hidden from outside view by thickly wooded slopes. The train was bringing the great man to Paris for a secret meeting with high Nazi officials. Reichsmarshal Goering was rumored to be among the participants.

They were going to blow the track. And if the train wreck didn’t kill the great man, they were going to shoot him and anyone who tried to stop them.

But it all went wrong.

The Germans knew. The great man was tipped off. Someone told them, someone inside the operation.

“The great man wasn’t even on the train,” Brother Leo said. “We were betrayed … it was a terrible mess, only a few of us survived. Several of our men were killed, tracked down and killed in Paris afterward when a man we called the Collector came to find us if he could.… Well,” he said, shaking his head, wiping his hand across his mouth, “it was a long time ago. Simon knew everything was over but he also knew who had betrayed us. We were all so scared, running for our lives. Simon was going to take care of us—we didn’t know how. We believed in him, we trusted him … we knew he’d take care of us. He did, he told us what to do, and then he went to meet the traitor … Christos, you see. He was the one … he was always more of a Nazi than anything else.… The Dutchman, little Sal, and I followed Simon that night, we wanted to be there if he needed us, we knew Christos carried a gun.”

The night was cold, icy shreds of snow blowing on a
cruel wind. February of 1944. A small, weedy cemetery in one of the drearier reaches of Paris, a run-down church attached. A loose shutter banging in the night. Ice like broken glass on tops of gravestones. Bent, withered weeds poking up through puddles of ice. Mice dying of hunger and cold scuttling underfoot.

Simon and Christos, in the dim light, across the gravestones.

Leo, the Dutchman, and little Sal crouching in the shadows outside the fence. Leo was afraid his button of a nose would freeze. Sal kept muttering prayers: his life as a priest had taken some unexpected turns, leading to the freezing graveyard in the middle of a lonely night, fear all around.

Christos was telling Simon that he’d betrayed no one, that he didn’t understand what had happened, yes, there must have been a traitor, yes, there was still a traitor, but he didn’t know who it was.…

Simon told him it was over, Christos was a Nazi, had always been a Nazi, and it was all coming to an end tonight. “You murdered the Resistance priest Devereaux, and you betrayed us to your Nazi friends—”

“Devereaux was a liability, a threat to us all. He had to die!”

Simon’s voice was lost when he spoke but Christos shrank away from him, then Simon’s voice came again.
You murdered a decent, honorable man
. The wind whipped at them. Leo turned to the Dutchman, who shook his head, put his fingers to his lips. A dim yellow light in the church refectory was extinguished. A cat leapt from behind a headstone, yellow chips in his eyes, and a mouse died.

No
, said Simon,
it cannot be for the good of any Church. It cannot be God’s work—

And what you were planning for the man on the train, that was supposed to be God’s work!

You collaborate with the Nazis, who are godless pagans, yet you say it is for the good of us all, for the good of the Church. All right—maybe it is
. Simon was speaking slowly, into Christos’s face, but Leo heard
every word.
But killing Father Devereaux—that betrays the Church. Betrays God. Betrays us all. And now you have betrayed us again. The man on the train deserved to die … and instead we lost men. Because of you … and now it’s over, this is the last night …

Christos took a gun from the pocket of his threadbare overcoat which he wore over his cassock. Leo backed away from the fence, stepped on the cat.

Perhaps if the cat had not screeched and pounced on another doomed, glad-to-be-out-of-it little mouse, a blur of hungry eyes and moth-eaten fur, then perhaps Christos might have shot Simon dead on the spot and left the body to freeze hard as a plank, might have changed the world in his own way.

But the cat did screech and pounce, and as it did Christos’s head turned a fraction of an inch, his concentration was tugged by surprise from its purpose, and Simon, with an agility surprising in so powerfully built a man, was on him with all the finality of the plague.

Immensely powerful arms were around him, clasped behind Christos’s back, as if they were dancing among the headstones in an ungainly rite, among the cats and the mice, and they seemed to embrace for a long time, their faces almost touching, their faces shiny with sweat and racked with the passions of death, the old passion, and finally there was a grating sound, a cracking, a grunt of dispelled air, a man deflating.

And Christos was dead.

The killer was hardly winded.

He dragged the body over toward the fence and pushed it with his foot, wedging it in between a headstone and some dark, wet shrubs, kicked the feet out of the path, and calmly walked away, was swallowed by the darkness, the cold and windy night.

With Christos’s death the
assassini
had died, too. So far as Brother Leo knew. In the summer Paris was liberated, the war’s outcome was a foregone conclusion, though dark days for the Allies still lay ahead, between now and the end. But it was over for the little band of killers.

Leo stretched his arms out in the last of the day’s sunshine like a man doing an exercise. The cloud cover, purple and blue and shading to black at the horizon, was closing down on the last rays.

“After the night he killed Christos I never spoke with Simon again … never saw him again.”

Brother Leo moved among the gravemarkers, kneeling here and there to straighten a basket of flowers, or remove dead blooms which he called deadheads, or tug at dried-up, recalcitrant weeds. The sun was sinking, the wind stiffening, driving the temperature lower still. I shivered but not entirely from the cold. Simon was coming clearer in my mind, coming to life. And I knew about Christos now. Christos the Nazi priest. But I would always think of him by another name, dying in the night.

“What did you do then? After Christos was dead and Simon was gone, I mean. And by the way, I’m not entirely in the dark—for instance, I know Christos was a man called Father LeBecq, the son of the art dealer. But Simon … who was Simon?”

He ignored the question, just went on. He had his own agenda. “After that night, I went back to my regular work in Paris and that was the end of it. At least for a while. Until the Collector came from Rome, that is.”

“Ah, yes. The Collector. What was his name when he was at home?”

“Don’t be so impatient, Mr. Driskill. We have plenty of time here. Very little else, but plenty of time.”

“You can’t blame me for being curious,” I said. “Who was the Dutchman you mentioned? And little Sal, the priest whose life was turning out so differently from what he’d expected? Whatever happened to them?”

“I suppose we all went back to our former lives, the lives we’d gone right on living during the days. At least for a while, that is—”

“I know, I know. Until the Collector came.”

“Precisely. Came to collect us, you see.” He levered himself to a standing position with his hand on one of the old stones. Dead, once-yellow flowers were scattered at
the base of the stone. “Simon was the only great man I ever met. Do you understand? He knew no loyalty other than to God and to the Church. I may look back now and say that things were done that shouldn’t have been done, but it was a bad time for everyone, a battle to the death. Simon, however, was like no other man—and even the saints themselves made mistakes, didn’t they?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” I said.

“And so it was with Simon. But a great man. His courage was simply boundless.”

“So who the hell was he?”

“Mr. Driskill,
please
.”

“But you knew him. I mean
really
knew him—”

“Let’s say I observed him. We spent some nights hiding in barns together. He talked to me. He argued the point of what we were doing—was it right, was it truly for the good of the Church … He argued every side of the issue, and I listened. He was a far more intelligent man than I. He was a great student of the past, of all that we call history. It was Simon Verginius who told me about the Concordat of the Borgias.”

He led me back out of the graveyard, strolled slowly down toward the cliffs.

“The what?” I was shouting against a sudden explosion of ocean against the rockface.

He leaned against a twisted tree, pushed his hands down into the pockets of his muddy trousers. He spoke again as if it weren’t all that important, just a bit of distant wartime history. The sea took a rest.

“Simon said it was the concordat, the agreement made between Pope Alexander, the Borgia, with the society of men who did his—what did Simon call it?—yes, his ‘heavy work.’ His killing. Simon said we were the descendants of these men from five hundred years before, he said we were a living part of the history of the Church. He told me that he had personally seen and handled the concordat—” Leo stopped, looking down into the rolling foam, his face a model of serenity, an emblem signifying his accommodation with his past.

“Did he describe it? Does it still exist?”

He smiled, tolerating my latest impatience. “So many things disappeared during the war and in the aftermath. But Simon was obsessed by the fate of the concordat itself, the parchment on which it was written. You see, he said it contained the names of the faithful men who had served Pope Alexander. He said it contained as well the names of the unbroken line of descent, inked in as the centuries passed, of all the men since Alexander drew it up. I wasn’t so sure, it sounded so fanciful … but then, the history of the Church is heavy-laden with secret documents, isn’t it? It sounded so very Catholic to me. Simon was afraid that it would fall into the hands of the Nazis during the war—then he feared they would forever hold it as a club over the Church.”

“Are you saying he actually had this thing in his possession back then?”

Leo nodded.

“How did he come by such an amazing document?”

“He never told me.”

“Maybe he was lying, maybe he was just pulling your leg—”

“Simon? Lie? Never!”

“But how can you be sure?”

He looked at me from the corner of his eye, slyly, from the distant towers of great age. “I know. I knew him, for one thing. That’s how I can be sure.”

“Tell me the rest of it. You could be holding the fate of the Church in your hands.”
A list of the assassini …

“I doubt that, Mr. Driskill. That’s Jesuitical talk.”

I wasn’t going to impress him with my quest, with all I’d been through. He’d been through more, and now his struggle with life was over and I couldn’t intimidate him or impress him or coax him or force him into anything that wasn’t on his agenda. He’d thought it through a long time ago. “I was a Jesuit once,” I said.

He laughed immoderately. “Driskill,” he said, “what a piece of work you are! Are you by any chance an honest man?”

“More or less,” I said. In my world nobody asked
you a question like that. What were you supposed to say?

“Well,” he sighed, “as for the concordat—When Simon left the graveyard the Concordat of the Borgias was on his mind … as history. And it was like a license, a charter—would you agree? Its history validated it, didn’t it? When the
assassini
are needed, when they can serve the Church, they live again.” He looked up at me, round eyes wide. “I wouldn’t want the responsibility of deciding when, would you, Mr. Driskill?”

“Just tell me what happened to the concordat.”

“Oh, he sent it north. For safekeeping. In fact …” His face was pink, almost merry, like Santa Claus in the school play. “He sent it north with me! He trusted me, you see.” He showed me his teeth, small and white and somehow fierce. “With me and another fellow. The Dutchman who’d been there outside the graveyard that last night. He’d come to me with a letter and a packet. The letter was from Simon, it told me to take this packet, the concordat, and go with the Dutchman, make a run for the north country … oh, I’ll tell you it was an adventure! We went as Breton fishermen, ran the Channel to England. Cloak and dagger. But we made it. God must have wanted us to finish Simon’s job.” He looked out at the darkening sea, reliving the moment of triumph.

“So,” he went on, turning back to me, “we kept it out of the hands of the Nazis. It’s here, you see. We brought it here to this place, St. Sixtus. Like so many of the Irish monasteries, this one has always been a repository of Church documents from the Middle Ages on. A tradition. Things preserved for centuries. Out of the way and safe.”

“You’re telling me it’s here? Right here?” Blood was pounding in my head.
A list of assassini …

“Yes, of course. The archivist, Brother Padraic—very old man, failing now, I’m afraid—he has it, it’s hidden here, somewhere in the St. Sixtus archives. Through these forty years Padraic and I have become great friends. Now it’s time for both of us to get the thing off our consciences. We had no plan to do so, but now
you’ve come, you may be God’s answer to our final doubts about what was done in His name back then. We will die soon … but you may be the answer to our prayers. We are just two simple old men.” He sighed again but without a scintilla of sorrow for himself. “I suggest that I give you the concordat for your disposal … I mean, it is mine to give, is it not?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “The man who came north with me, the Dutchman, is long, long gone. Lost. And Simon? Well.” He shrugged again.