The Assassini (60 page)

Light switches? No, they were all in the living room … and did she want the lights on? Or not?

Imagination. Shadows? Death?

She moved down the hallway toward the living room. She didn’t know what she could do to defend herself, but she didn’t want to be trapped in the back of the flat … and the kitchen with its knives was all the way across the darkness.

The living room lay in a menagerie of shadows, lumps of furniture, lamps, potted plants, all hiding intruders. Nothing moved. She heard nothing but the breeze on the
terrace, the faint street noises. But the shadows were deep and dark.

She went into the room, stood still, listening.

Maybe the mirror had tricked her. The curtains were still drifting softly. The wind was unexpectedly cold, icy.

Surely the room was empty.

She turned to the terrace. The door was still open, nothing had changed. It had been her imagination. The fear that dwelled in the reptilian brain …

She moved toward the terrace, slid the door open the rest of the way, hearing the sounds from the street increase. She breathed a deep sigh of relief. She went out onto the terrace. The traffic was thick far below. Crowds moving, pushing. Reality. There was nobody creeping around her flat and the reality was a million tourists and nighthawks staying up late and having a good time. She turned to go back inside.

He was standing in the doorway.

A tall man, motionless, watching her. Eight feet away.

He wore a black cassock like the countless thousands you saw every day in Rome. He stood quietly, as if he expected her to speak. Then his mouth moved, but no sound came.

Why was he giving her time, why hadn’t he finished the job in the living room, while her back was turned on the terrace, while she was helpless in the tub? Now she could see him.

He stepped into the light. She saw the whiteness of one terrible eye. She screamed.

Instinctively they both moved at the same moment.

He came toward her and she stepped to the side, grabbed the heavy silver candlestick with the glass chimney.

His hand sank into the soft terry cloth. She yanked away from him, jerked free, and felt her robe pulled open. The eye fixed her unblinking. A dead eye—

Confused, scowling at the sound of her dying scream, distracted by the sudden sight of her nakedness, the man—this priest—stopped grabbing for her, aborted the lunge that would have pinned her against the railing.

In that fractional instant she readied herself for him, and when he came again she drove the candlestick and the glass chimney past his long arms toward the white eye, felt the glass disintegrate and the silver grind on bone.

He gave a muffled cry and she braced herself against the table and rammed her weapon home again, using her entire body to push, and he threw up his hands, the whiteness utterly gone, his face a mask of streaming blood, he groped for her, and she pushed and he staggered back, hit the railing and turned, and she saw that his face was red like a sea of rubies studded with glass like fake diamonds and his mouth was open but no sound was issuing forth …

She backed away from him, staring at his agony.

He rose again to face her.

His arms were spread as if pleading …

Then he slowly toppled over the railing.

She watched him go, arms out, cassock billowing in the wind, floating, turning slowly, but in the end all she could see was the single terrifying eye like a glowing red flare …

F
ather Dunn pulled me back to safety as surely as if he’d found me hanging off one of those crumbling cliffs by my fingernails and given me a hand up. The sight of him coming across the park where the kids played under the watchful gaze of their gossiping mothers, the sight of him swinging along, pipe in the corner of his mouth, representing the real world of sanity, brought me up short, shocked me out of the downward spiral of my feelings about what I’d just done.

I had cracked like an egg freshly laid on a marble slab, I’d cracked and run and there was just no way to make it all right. I had personally led Horstmann to poor Brother Leo and the archivist Brother Padraic, and they had paid for my blundering with their lives. I was as responsible for their deaths as I was for Etienne LeBecq’s, yet somehow I was escaping the consequences of my follies. A charmed life but everyone else was dying.

The experience of St. Sixtus had worked a humiliating transformation, had left me feeling as if I were a frightened animal, running and thrashing in a blood-spattered maze, unsure of the role I was supposed to play: hunter or prey. Hunter or prey, both would die in the end. There was always another hunter. My mood swings lurched drunkenly between the two and, either way, I’d even lost my gun, for God’s sake. My gun, whatever good it might have done me.

If Artie Dunn hadn’t shown up when he did, I suppose I’d have nursed myself along the crumbling edges of a
nervous breakdown for quite some time. I might even have taken the plunge. I wasn’t engulfed in anything as simple as self-pity. I was drowning in flop sweat, choking on my fear. No nightmare—not my mother with her hand reaching out for me, telling me something, not my memories of Val’s head with the singed, blood-caked hair—no nightmare could compare with my morning at the beach. I was going to be seeing Leo nailed to that makeshift cross, feet in the air, the surf drowning him, turning him blue and rubbery, for as long as I lived.…

But Artie Dunn appeared out of nowhere, right on cue in the land of the leprechaun and, as they used to say in less introspective times, took me out of myself.

We drove my rented car back to Dublin and then took a plane back to Paris and we never stopped talking. It was like a radio game show I used to listen to under the covers,
Can You Top This?
What I heard opened my eyes. I’d had the feeling that I was so utterly alone once I’d left Princeton, like an astronaut left behind on the far side of the moon. Listening to Dunn, I was beginning to realize that the rest of the world had been carrying on without me.

What, I wanted to know, was Artie Dunn doing on the wild coast of Ireland?

Well, he’d gone to Paris looking for Robbie Heywood, news which brought me up short. It turned out that Dunn had known Heywood there at the end of the war when he had arrived as an army chaplain. He’d discovered Heywood was dead and had found himself talking with Clive Paternoster as I had. Paternoster must have begun wondering who’d show up next on the trail of one Driskill or another. Paternoster had told him about my coming through Paris, taking Dunn quite by surprise, and when he heard I’d gone to Ireland and why, he’d put aside what he’d come to Paris for and taken off in search of me. Why? Because Paternoster had told him about my knowing it was Horstmann who’d killed Robbie, told him about my interest in the
assassini
. Dunn figured I was in danger since Horstmann was still on the loose. I congratulated him on the quality of his insight and asked him
why he’d come to Europe in the first place, why had he come looking for Robbie Heywood?

“I had to find Erich Kessler,” Dunn said. “I thought about it and I kept coming back to Kessler. More than anyone else, he’s likely to have the answers. Once I’d read D’Ambrizzi’s testament—full of all those damned code names—I knew I’d have to find Kessler, assuming he was still alive.”

We were on the road back to Dublin and a rain squall had blown up out of nowhere and the wipers were flipping raggedly across the windshield. There was a concert of Gaelic music on the radio and it made more sense to me than what Father Dunn was saying. Who was Erich Kessler?

“Robbie Heywood,” he went on, “was a place to start looking for Kessler. He always seemed to know everything when it came to Catholics—”

“This Kessler is a Catholic?” I began.

“No”—he looked up, surprised—“no, not that I’m aware of—”

“None of this makes sense to me.”

“Damn little of it makes any sense to me,” he said, “but I’m working on it. We’ll get it figured out sooner or later.” He smiled reassuringly, but his flat gray eyes, set like stones in the pink cherubic face, were as faraway and remorseless as ever.

“D’Ambrizzi’s testament,” I said, “and this Kessler—what are you talking about? Next you’ll be telling me you know all about the Concordat of the Borgias.…”

“The devil I will,” he sighed. “We’ve got a great many blanks to fill in, Ben.” He hunched down inside his heavy lined Burberry, pulled his olive-green felt hat down low over his bushy gray eyebrows. The eyebrows looked as though he’d pasted them on, an amateur’s disguise. “Can’t you do something about the heater in this crate?” He shivered, clapped his gloved hands. “Why don’t you tell me your story since leaving Princeton? It’ll bring me up to speed and it’ll keep you from falling asleep. You look like a man who hasn’t slept in weeks.”

So I began to talk and I told him about meeting Klaus Richter and the photo on his wall that matched the one Val had left for me in the old toy drum—Richter, LeBecq, D’Ambrizzi, and Torricelli; I told him about Gabrielle LeBecq’s story of her father’s and Richter’s involvement with the art smuggling and the mutual blackmailing of the Church and the Nazis by one another through the years. He interrupted me there with a sharp question.

“Who is the Vatican connection these days?”

“I don’t know.” What I did know was that he’d asked the question without a moment’s hesitation about the subject matter.

I told him about my journey to the monastery in the desert and my conversation with the abbot, how he’d identified Horstmann for me, giving him a name, how Horstmann stayed there at The Inferno and how he got his marching orders from Rome, how that tied Rome and Horstmann to my sister’s murder. And I told him how I’d seen Gabrielle’s father, Guy LeBecq’s brother, a suicide in the desert and I told him how I’d hounded the poor bastard to death, how he’d been so afraid I’d been sent by Rome to kill him, and I told him how Gabrielle and I had looked through his diary and seen his fear written practically in tears and blood, code names … all of it.

What will become of us? Where will it all end? In hell!

The code names.
Simon. Gregory. Paul. Christos. Archduke!

The men in the picture. Richter and D’Ambrizzi remained alive. Was the picture enough to damn D’Ambrizzi’s chances in the papal race? What were the four men actually doing? And who took the picture?

He listened intently as I went through all of it, on to Paris and how I’d just missed Heywood’s murder and read through the Torricelli papers about Simon and the
assassini
and the “heinous plot,” whatever it was, and how Paternoster had gone ahead and told me about Leo, how Leo had been one of
them
. I’d followed so closely in Val’s tracks, learned all the same things.

“Which ought to make you just about ripe for the
plucking,” he said grumpily. “Good thing I found you. You need a protector, my son.”

“It was this morning that I needed you.”

“I’m too old for that sort of thing. You’ll find I’m a far subtler man than that. I’ll be there when you
really
need me and no one else will do. Bank on it.” He yawned. “It’s all quite mystifying. What a pity Leo didn’t live to tell you just who Simon actually was. What a help that would be—might lead us to Archduke, too. But,” he mused, “they may all be dead and gone by now—” He cleared his throat like a man with a cold coming on. “Has it occurred to you, Ben, that someone in all this is lying? That’s the problem. We just don’t know who it is.… Someone knows all of this, Simon and all the rest of it, but he’s lying to us.…”

“You’re mistaken there, Father,” I said. “They’re all Catholics and they’re all lying. But each one is doubtless lying about his own little patch, lying in his own interest. It’s the Catholics, that’s all.”

“But I’m a Catholic,” he said.

“That fact never leaves my mind, Artie.”

“Well, you’re a cheeky fellow.”

“I understand Catholics, no rose-colored glasses. I was a Catholic once—”

“And you still are, dear boy. Deep down, you’re one of the flock. One of us. Always will be.” He reached over and patted my arm. “Just having a little crisis of faith. Not to worry.”

“Twenty-five-year crisis of faith,” I snorted.

Father Dunn laughed until he started to sneeze. He reached for his handkerchief again. “Don’t you fret. There’s plenty of time to be saved. You’ll be fine. Now, before I begin my end of this tale—you mentioned the Borgias?”

I explained what Brother Leo had told me about the peculiar document which was, in effect, a kind of history of the
assassini
. Names, places, the bloody trail through several hundred years of Church history.

When I finished, he nodded. “Sounds a bit like stage dressing to me. Probably a nineteenth-century fake to
convince somebody to do something awful.” We were almost to the airport and the rain had stopped and the jetliners seemed to skid past, low overhead. “Still, it squares with what I know.”

“You know about this concordat thing?”

“I read about it in D’Ambrizzi’s testament. At least that’s what I’m calling it, his ‘testament.’ Does it sound too grand?”