The Assassini (61 page)

“
What is it?
”

“It’s what D’Ambrizzi was writing in your father’s study while you and Val were wishing he’d come out and play games.” He pointed at the car rental kiosk where I could return the car. “Let’s get on the plane for Paris, have a couple of drinks, and I’ll tell you about it.”

“What the hell do
you
know about it?”

“Keep your shirt on, Ben.” He flashed me an impatient glance. “I’ve read it.”

“You’ve … read it …” I just sat there looking at him.

It was tough, trying to get a handle on Artie Dunn.

D’Ambrizzi, locked up in the study that summer and fall of 1945, with Val and me running around outside making faces at the windows, trying to get him to come out and play, had for reasons of his own been indulging himself in some first-class reflective voyeurism. Maybe he’d wanted to clear his conscience of things he wished he didn’t know but couldn’t forget. Whatever his reasons, he had obviously felt compelled to put down the story of what he’d seen in Paris during the war. He’d been operating in that foggy gap between the Church and the Nazis and the Resistance: there’d really been no choice, no getting away from it. Attached to Bishop Torricelli’s staff, he’d observed everything that was going on and he hadn’t known quite what to do about it. So he’d written it all down in the home of his American friend—and what the hell was he doing in Princeton, with Hugh Driskill his pal and savior?—and then he’d disappeared. One morning he’d just not been there anymore and Val and I were left wondering What was going on. The old who-was-that-masked-man
thing. But now! learned he’d had time to give the manuscript into the safekeeping of the old padre at the church in New Prudence, where it had lain stuck away and forgotten for forty years. He’d gone to the considerable effort of writing it, then hidden it, and presumably forgotten about it. What was the point? Why couldn’t I ever see the point? I kept uncovering things, but they never seemed to give me the answers. Now I had this thing—the story of D’Ambrizzi and his lonely testament—but it only produced a harvest of new questions.

Monsignor D’Ambrizzi had already been on his way up the Vatican ladder when Pope Pius had sent him to work in Paris under Bishop Torricelli as the bishop’s liaison to Rome. With the German Occupation came a whole new level of responsibility. Keeping a reasonable peace between Torricelli’s force in Paris and the Nazis was a severe test for D’Ambrizzi’s diplomatic skills. He worked hard at it and then one day it grew considerably more difficult.

A priest arrived from Rome on a mission from the Holy Father. He would be a personal aide to Torricelli, but his mission was in fact the darkest secret D’Ambrizzi had ever confronted: he was drawn into it only because Torricelli had been confused and terrified by the new priest’s story and had turned in utter confidentiality to D’Ambrizzi.

The new priest, whom D’Ambrizzi in his “memoir” referred to only by the code name
Simon
, had brought a document from the Vatican to establish the validity of what he was to undertake. A letter accompanying the document explained that it was the secret historical record or register of the Church’s
assassini
—the Church’s trusted killers, those the popes had used for centuries, dating back to the Renaissance and before. The document was known by the name it acquired when one of the greatest Italian houses produced a pope and reaffirmed the relationship with a cadre of killers drawn both from within and from outside the Church … the Concordat
of the Borgias. It was, in effect, the license conferred by the popes to those who killed on papal orders for the good of the Church. It listed many of the names of ancient
assassini
, the names of the monasteries where they could take refuge in times of crisis (crises in which they’d frequently played an instigatory role, no doubt); and it had been updated as recently as the 1920s and 1930s when the Church was busy allying itself with Mussolini and serving as one of the central sources throughout the world for Italian Fascist spying and intelligence gathering.

The accompanying letter, bearing the papal seal, instructed Torricelli to re-form the
assassini
and use it to maintain a good relationship with both the Nazis, primarily, and the Resistance. The
assassini
was also intended to serve as a useful tool in accumulating certain plunder—treasure of various kinds, art objects, paintings, and so on—for the Church, in exchange for services rendered to the forces of occupation.

D’Ambrizzi wrote that he watched Torricelli’s nervous compliance as Simon carried out the commission for both of them, watched as Simon recruited
assassini
, watched as Simon became increasingly disgusted—he loathed everything the Nazis stood for, everything they required him to do. D’Ambrizzi watched as Simon became increasingly aware of Pope Pius’s sympathies for the Nazi cause, his hostility toward the Jews and all other victims of the Nazis, and his refusal to speak out with all the moral power his position conferred upon him against the satanic tyranny ravaging humanity. Inevitably Simon took control of the
assassini
himself, while Torricelli relievedly looked the other way. Simon cut the linkage between the
assassini
and Torricelli. In so doing, Simon cut the linkage between the
assassini
and Pius himself, between the
assassini
and the Church in any form. The priests and monks and laymen who’d taken up the cause for the good of the Church—they became Simon’s personal army, to be used as he saw fit.

It was then that Simon Verginius turned them into a tough anti-Nazi group, only infrequently carrying out any
Nazi requests whatsoever. Instead of their original aims, the
assassini
began killing Nazi sympathizers and informers within the clergy and working to hide Jews and Resistance fighters in churches and monasteries.

When the Nazis came to Bishop Torricelli with a direct order, backed by their typical ominous silkiness, to kill a priest who was causing the Occupation considerable grief, Simon and Torricelli came into open conflict. And Torricelli had to admit to himself that Simon was working and plotting against his and the Church’s orders.

At about the same time, Torricelli somehow discovered that Simon was planning the assassination of a very important man. There was only one way so far as Simon knew that Torricelli could have discovered the plot. There had to be a traitor among the
assassini:
one of his trusted cadre had betrayed them.

Simon attempted to carry out the assassination: he had no choice, the timetable was exact, and the killing could not be postponed. The man was coming to Paris on a special private train routed through the Alps. Everything was ready. As it happened, the Germans had been alerted and they were ready, too. D’Ambrizzi’s story of the disastrous attempted assassination was sketchy. Several of Simon’s team were killed, the others escaped back to Paris, where Simon set about learning who had betrayed them.

Torricelli frantically convinced him that he hadn’t done so wicked a thing, no matter how much he disapproved of the plot. Eventually Simon tracked the man down—he was the priest Leo had told me about in the frozen graveyard, LeBecq—and killed him. He disbanded the
assassini
at about this time because, D’Ambrizzi wrote, an investigator was rumored to be on his way from Rome. So far as D’Ambrizzi knew, Simon’s final act as leader of the
assassini
was to dispatch one or two of his men north to Ireland, to the monastery of St. Sixtus, with the Concordat of the Borgias.

We were having an after-dinner cognac in the first-class cabin of the 727 when Father Dunn reached that
point in the story of D’Ambrizzi’s extraordinary memoir. Two questions stuck in my mind, lodged in among the welter of facts that seemed on the face of it to confirm everything Brother Leo had told me.

Who was on that train? Whose life was saved by the traitor Christos—or Father Guy LeBecq, as I knew him to be?

And, secondly, I had to wonder why D’Ambrizzi had committed the whole story to paper. Had it been another man I might also have been more curious as to how he could have come to know so much about the
assassini
. But that wasn’t the case with D’Ambrizzi: he was so involved a man, so alert: he was there, therefore I understood how he could know so much. But what was the idea behind writing it down and then leaving it behind, forgotten?

I was amazed by the existence of D’Ambrizzi’s testament at all, but I had to point out that it really didn’t add much to what Brother Leo had told me, nor to what I’d learned from Gabrielle LeBecq. I didn’t mean to put a damper on Father Dunn’s revelations, but it was true. All it really did add was the fact that D’Ambrizzi had been able to observe the implementation of Pius’s plot—to activate the
assassini
.

Dunn heard me out, then cocked his head and gave me one of his long, out-from-under-the-eyebrows looks.

“Listen up, Sunny Jim. Did I say I was done?”

D’Ambrizzi watched and waited as the drama pitting the Nazis and the Vatican against the renegade
assassini
played itself out. Spring turned to summer of 1944 and in August, Paris was liberated by the Allies and the German occupiers were gone, though the war itself was far from over. Life in the city was chaotic. Necessities were in short supply and a virulent bitterness ran like an epidemic through the population. Those who had collaborated with the enemy occupiers lived in fear of reprisals from vigilante groups bent on revenge. Murder invaded the precincts of Paris and would not be dislodged until its work was done. It was in this atmosphere that the Vatican’s man continued his investigation into the murder of
Father Guy LeBecq, the disobedience of Simon’s army of killers, the attempt to assassinate the man on the train—that is, the manner in which the
assassini
betrayed the mission entrusted to it by the Holy Father.

The Vatican investigator, who came undercover and reported only to Bishop Torricelli (who must, we surmised, have confided to D’Ambrizzi) was a hard-edged, tough-minded, emotionless monsignor whom, D’Ambrizzi wrote, came to be known as “the Collector,” presumably because of his policeman’s mentality, intent on collecting evidence. In D’Ambrizzi’s view, the Collector was no different from the
assassini
themselves, except that he was representing the Holy Father’s disgust with their refusal to serve the Nazis. The contempt and scorn with which D’Ambrizzi treated the Collector, at least in his memoir, was deeply felt. Or so Dunn, who’d actually read the papers, told me.

For months the Collector interviewed everyone who had known Father LeBecq, asking his questions openly, by day, as it were; in the dark hours, in secrecy, he dug away at the nether world of people who knew, or might have had hints, of the
assassini
and their plot to kill the man on the train.

Simon proved a tough nut to crack, refusing to admit any knowledge whatsoever of the plot, and managing to slide away from that part of the investigation dealing with Vatican orders to work with the Nazis during the Occupation. The Collector pressed on and D’Ambrizzi could see him drawing the noose around Simon’s neck. The Holy Father wasn’t giving up, wasn’t recalling the Collector and writing it off as something he’d have to accept.

D’Ambrizzi himself, because he knew so much about the
assassini
activities through his working relationship with Torricelli, was not immune to the Collector’s attentions. A dozen times or more he was called in for sessions that lasted as long as six hours on occasion, going back and forth over the details of the war years in Paris. Along toward the late spring of 1945 it dawned on D’Ambrizzi that the Collector was under a great deal of pressure from the Vatican—the Holy Father—to find the killer of LeBecq
as well as those who had planned the assassination of the man on the train. A scapegoat, if necessary, someone to frame. Then there would be the trip back to Rome, to God only knew what fate.

Simon simply disappeared, as if by magic, a puff of smoke, a conjuror’s best trick. D’Ambrizzi never saw him again.

Thwarted, the Collector began casting long, hungry glances at Bishop Torricelli himself, who had been, after all, put in charge of the
assassini
by the Holy Father when Simon was sent from Rome. D’Ambrizzi knew the bishop was as crafty an old clerical veteran as you could imagine, crafty and suspicious with an almost superhuman ability to withdraw into his shell and ride out any storm, unharmed. And he wouldn’t be overly concerned about
how
he saved himself,
who
had to pay the price.

D’Ambrizzi realized that when Torricelli began to look around for a patsy to take the fall, to satisfy the insistent yelping the Collector was hearing from Rome, he was bound to see his faithful aide-de-camp … D’Ambrizzi. Who had been his confidant, to whom he had revealed so many of his fears about the use of the
assassini
in contravention of Vatican wishes. D’Ambrizzi, the perfect fall guy.

So D’Ambrizzi made his own move before Torricelli could hand him over to the Collector.

He turned to an American intelligence officer the evening of the day he’d received the summons to return to Rome for “reassignment.” It was, he reflected in his manuscript, like being called back to Moscow. A wise man knew better than to make that return trip. The American was an old friend who’d been in and out of Paris during the German Occupation: a man he could trust as well as a man with connections. With his help—D’Ambrizzi told the story in some detail—he was able to drop out of sight, escape the Collector’s clutches. Like Simon, he disappeared, with the Collector sniffing the air like a prize hound, momentarily confused but not quite prepared to give up.

D’Ambrizzi’s American friend got him out of postwar
Europe with the identity of a dead priest and brought him back to Princeton, New Jersey.

His American friend was, of course, Hugh Driskill.

And in Princeton, Monsignor D’Ambrizzi set down his story.

When Father Dunn finished D’Ambrizzi’s tale I sat mulling it over, trying to determine if it added up to anything more than an interesting sidebar to the main story as I saw it. The story was twisting and thrashing in my hand like a frantic living thing, as if it were still trying to mislead and maim, all to retain its mystery.