The Assassini (57 page)

Vezza said, “Indelicato? Isn’t that rather like picking the head of the KGB to be premier?”

“You have some problem with that?” Poletti said, eyeing him warily. “It seems to me the proper response to the situation. We are at war—”

“If we are at war,” Garibaldi, always the confident club man, observed, “shouldn’t we choose a general? Like Saint Jack, for instance?”

“Please,” Poletti sighed, “could we save the canonization for later and just call him D’Ambrizzi?”

“D’Ambrizzi, then,” Ottaviani said. He grimaced with pain, arranging his back against the cushions. “He seems to me a man worthy of our consideration. A forward-looking man—”

“A liberal,” Poletti said. “Call him what he is. Do you relish the idea of rushing about parceling out condoms—”

“What?” Vezza said, head snapping up.

“Condoms, French letters, rubbers,” Garibaldi said from behind a small grin.

“Good Lord,” Vezza muttered. “What about them?”

“If D’Ambrizzi were pope, we’d be passing them out on the steps of our churches after mass, we’d be up to our chins in female priests, queer priests …”

“Well, I’ve known plenty of queer priests in my day, but do you really think D’Ambrizzi would encourage that?” Vezza made a doubtful face. “I mean, I’ve heard Giacomo say things which make me doubt—”

Antonelli interrupted again, full of deference but implying that he would offer up the last word on the subject. “Cardinal Poletti was, if I may say so, indulging in a bit of hyperbole. He was merely pointing out a tendency in Cardinal D’Ambrizzi which could, if followed to its logical conclusions, lead to the idiocies he described. Am I right, Tonio?”

“Utterly, my friend. You have captured my attitude to perfection.”

“Perhaps,” Antonelli said, “we could take a sounding in light of this tape recording and what Tonio here has had to say. What do we think—in a preliminary sense only, of course—of Indelicato as our man?”

Garibaldi said with a diplomatic nod, “He could be just the man for a hard job. He’s not afraid to take drastic steps, not afraid to make an enemy. The stories I could tell—”

“The stories we could all tell,” Vezza said sleepily. “He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor—”

“How would you know?” Poletti interjected, staring grimly at the old man ringed in smoke.

“—but he certainly takes his work seriously. I could live with him. Better than many of the criminals and nitwits I’ve seen wear the red hat in my time.”

“And you, Ottaviani,” Antonelli said. “What about you?”

“What about an African?” he said impishly. “Or one of the Japanese, perhaps? Or an American, if it comes to that.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ,” Poletti said, ignoring the smile spreading across Ottaviani’s face, “don’t be foolish!”

“I merely wanted to see if Vezza recognizes an attempt at clerical humor.” Ottaviani smiled fleetingly at the old man.

“What?” Vezza said.

“On the whole,” Ottaviani said, “I find Manfredi Cardinal Indelicato a cold-blooded, only marginally human machine, a kind of butcher—”

“Don’t be shy,” Antonelli said. “What do you really think?”

“I’d never turn my back on him. He would have been at home as the Grand Inquisitor … in short, he would be the perfect man for the Throne of Peter.”

Poletti’s head jerked about to stare at Ottaviani. “You mean you would support his candidacy?”

“I? Did I say that? No, I don’t think so. I’d support his assassination but not his elevation. No, I’m more inclined to support D’Ambrizzi, a thoroughly corrupt and worldly man, a captive of his own pragmatism, who would emerge no doubt as a much-beloved world figure … something of a movie star. How could any true cynic not find it appealing?”

The preliminary meeting of the Group of Five was winding down. Eventually Ottaviani and Garibaldi had been ferried off by their drivers and Antonelli had waved good-bye from his Lamborghini Miura, glossy, in clerical black. Vezza leaned on his cane and stumped along the tiled veranda, listening to Poletti droning on about one thing or another. Vezza had kept his hearing aid volume turned low throughout much of the meeting because he already knew what everybody was bound by history and personality to say. He was seventy-four years old, a man with a long memory who had heard just about everything. Much of what he himself said he didn’t bother to listen to because he’d heard it before as well. Indelicato, D’Ambrizzi: he really didn’t give a damn which way it went because he believed that the group of which he had been a dues-paying member for forty years—the curia—always got its way. It always had, so far as he could tell. He’d never seen the pope who hadn’t in the crunch knuckled under to the Vatican professionals. What he’d just half dozed through was a curia coven meeting. He’d attended a great many such gatherings, stared into many a boiling, bubbling cauldron of clerical desires. This one, because of Antonelli’s involvement, carried some extra weight. If the name they finally came up with was indeed Indelicato’s, then Indelicato stood an excellent chance. Vezza just didn’t find himself terribly interested. He had
learned three months before that his kidneys were failing him. The way things were going, even Callistus might outlast him. The name of the next pope was low on his list of concerns, but one question lingered persistently in his mind.

Vezza and Poletti were standing on the edge of the driveway in the cool hilltop breeze waiting for the black Mercedes to be brought around. Vezza turned up the volume on his hearing aid.

“Tell me, young Tonio,” he said, “about that tape of yours. Somebody on it is talking about nine murders—did I hear that accurately?”

“It was His Holiness.”

“Well, I am a very elderly man with a hearing problem, so I may have missed something somewhere along the way. But for the sake of clarity, let’s try to remember the murders … there’s Andy Heffernan and our old friend Lockhardt in New York, the nun Sister Valentine in Princeton, and the journalist Heywood in Paris. The suicide is the LeBecq fellow in Egypt, though I must say his name means nothing to me … four murders and a suicide. Now, help me out on this in case I’ve missed something. By my reckoning I come up five murders short. How do you figure it? Who were the other five?”

Poletti saw the black Mercedes nose its way past the high hedges bordering the gateway to the driveway. Thank God this conversation wasn’t going to last much longer. Vezza had a way of asking the most irritating, most pertinent questions.

“Come, come,” the old man said. “Help an aging colleague. Who were the other five?”

“I don’t know, Eminence,” Poletti said finally. “I simply don’t know.”

At the outermost edges of his mind Callistus heard the striking of the grandfather clock on the other side of the bedroom but it wasn’t part of reality. Somewhere in the fringe of consciousness he knew he was stretched out on his bed, two o’clock in the morning, the night watch being tolled by that god-awful clock, a gift from an
African cardinal, carved by a primitive tribe obviously obsessed with sexual duality. But he heard it striking, he felt the closeness of the night. He seemed to be more alive at night now, at home in the darkness. He sighed within the ninety percent of his brain that was asleep and he could hear it, he could hear the snow rattling quite clearly against the roof and the walls as the wind blew it down the mountain pass, through the pines that drooped with heavy, snow-laden boughs.

He, Sal di Mona, stood in the doorway of the woodsman’s hut, a thick scarf wrapped around his throat and covering the lower half of his face. The mountain wind seemed never to stop. Looking down the moonlit defile, he thought his eyeballs would freeze. All the color had been bled out of the scene. The snow was white, everything else was black as coal. The trees, the outcroppings of rock, the shadows, the footprints stitched down the mountainside to the black ribbon of railway track that he and Simon had inspected an hour before. The stream ran along the tracks, moving like a twisting shred of funereal ribbon.

Back inside the hut the six others were either dozing, eyelids fluttering, or reading by candlelight. One was soundlessly saying the rosary. Simon got up from the primitive chair, put his book into the pocket of his coat, and lit a cigarette. He looked into Sal di Mona’s eyes and smiled. “A long night,” he said, brushing past and going outside where he stood solid as a boulder, staring out across the gash cut between the mountainsides, the smoke of his cigarette curling back through the doorway.

The woodsy, dank smell of the single room had been transformed by their arrival. Now it smelled of the grease on the machine guns, of warm, sweating bodies and the fire now reduced to banked embers. It was hot and cold at the same time. Nothing was normal, nothing real. The plan that had once seemed so heroic had drawn in on them: all the heroics were gone. Now they were a group of frightened men risking everything to kill another man coming through the pass on the early morning train. There was nothing heroic about it. There was just the
apprehension, the fear, the knot in the stomach, the trembling in the knees, the sensation of looseness in the bowels.

Sal di Mona had never killed a man. He wasn’t going to kill the man on the train. He wasn’t being given one of the guns. His job was to handle the grenades, bring the train to a stop on the damaged track. The others—two of the others, the Dutchman and another man, led by Simon—were using the guns. Outside he could hear the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow as Simon circled the hut, then went off to the lookout post they’d set up on a shelf of rock, giving a clear view down the length of track. It would be more than two hours before they saw the telltale column of smoke from the train engine, but Simon, like Sal di Mona, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t quite sit still.

An hour later they were all dozing except for Simon, who leaned against the log wall smoking a cigarette, and little Sal, who stared at his missal by candlelight but saw none of it.

Suddenly Simon was crouching, moving across the room, quenching the candle’s flame between thumb and forefinger.

“There’s somebody outside,” he whispered. “Someone moving.”

He tugged at Sal’s arm, pulling him toward the low door at the back of the hut where the roof sloped down and almost touched the rising hillside. The Dutchman was awake, too, and the three of them crawled outside, poking out beneath the eaves, in the shadow of a woodpile.

In the stillness the sounds of soldiers reached them. The clicking sound of metal on wooden gunstocks and cold gun barrels, the cracking of feet through the snow, the low whispers. They were somewhere in the trees, a dozen of them slowly revealed as they moved down to approach the hut from the front. They didn’t know about the door in the back. They seemed unhurried.

“Germans,” Simon whispered. Sal di Mona saw the moonlight reflect in the round lens of a soldier’s glasses.

“But how …”

“How do you think, Father? We have been betrayed.”

Simon ducked back in through the low crawlspace. He was going back inside to wake the others, but the shadows had all moved out of sight, around the front of the hut. Sal di Mona was trying to understand what was going on, but it was all moving too fast. He had two grenades in the pockets of his coat. The Dutchman was holding the machine gun.

The Dutchman pointed up the hill toward the thick stand of trees, pushed Sal’s shoulder, whispered something. They had gotten twenty yards across the moonlit snow and they heard more sounds of metal clicking, clear in the stillness. Then the sound of something smashing at the door of the hut. Shouts in German.

The crack of gunfire, the pop-pop-pop sound, and out of breath they flung themselves into the shelter of the trees.

Everything, absolutely everything was going wrong.

Sal di Mona reflected for the thousandth time that he was not cut out for this damn war stuff.

He heard an explosion, then another, shouts and screams of confusion and pain.

The bulky figure of Simon appeared at the back of the hut, scrambling in the snow. Then he stopped, turned back to face the hut, his arm looping in an arc through the air, something bounced on the roof, disappeared over the front. Then it exploded, more shouts, and Simon came struggling up the hill.

He was panting when he reached them. “They’re all dead and dying by now,” he gasped. “Some of the Germans, too.” He took Sal’s grenades, pulled the pins, and launched them back down the hill. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving.” The grenades exploded, blew the back off the hut.

No one followed them, but they could hear German soldiers stamping about, calling to one another.

By first light they had reached the road, where they
waited nervously for the beat-up old truck to pick them up. It was right on time.

Four men were dead and they were alive and it was all over.

He could smell the explosions, couldn’t get them out of his head.

The next day back in Paris they learned that the great man they had intended to kill hadn’t been on the train after all.

When he woke up in the papal bedchamber he was soaked with perspiration and chilled to the bone and he could still smell the grenades going off, could still see the moonlight reflecting on the glasses worn by a German soldier in the shadows, and Simon struggling up the hill toward them after he’d bounced the grenade off the roof.…

“Giacomo? Is that you? What are you doing here? How long have you been here?”

A gray dawn was gathering stormlike over Vatican City, but that was a carryover from the dream, the memory. It had stormed that morning after the night in the mountains and the roads had been slick with rain that was almost ice. Now, this morning, was just another morning four decades later, another morning in the death of Pope Callistus.

“I couldn’t sleep,” D’Ambrizzi said. “I need only three or four hours a night. Sometimes less. I came in here about an hour ago. I’ve been thinking about so many things, Holiness. We need to talk.” He sat in the armchair by the window, wearing a striped silk robe, his slippered feet cocked on the bottom shelf of the rolling cart containing the various medical equipment now required for the pope’s health. “How are you feeling?”