The Assassini (80 page)

“Don’t leave yet. The evening has just begun.”

Monsignor Sandanato had just appeared in the crowd, pushing his way toward the subject of the popping flashbulbs.

D’Ambrizzi drew me back toward Indelicato. “You see?”

Sandanato was breathless, his face gleaming and gaunt.

“Eminence, please, excuse me.”

Indelicato turned slowly, magisterially, the thin smile fading. “Yes, Monsignor?”

“I’ve just come from the Holy Father, Eminence. He has sent me to you. He wants to see you now.” Any tighter and Sandanato would have snapped right before us.

Indelicato nodded, turned away from the well-wishers and the television people. The anchorman said, “Eminence, does this mean that you are the pontiff’s choice?”

Indelicato stared at the anchorman in amazement, whispered, “The Holy Father has no vote,” and brushed past him, stopping in front of D’Ambrizzi. “You heard, Giacomo? Why not pledge me your support?”

“You’d better hurry, Fredi. He might change his mind.”

“You find this amusing?”

“Good-bye, Fredi.”

Sandanato, avoiding D’Ambrizzi’s eyes, plucked at Indelicato’s sleeve as he passed. “Do you wish me to accompany you, Eminence?”

Slowly Indelicato—as if passing some secret sentence—shook his head. “Not necessary, Monsignor.”

The word had spread almost instantaneously through the crowd, a kind of electrical charge. The pitch of voices had risen with that special frisson that comes with being at the heart of a moment, a moment of history. Was the
papacy of Callistus ending? In his last hours was he making known his own hopes about a successor? Would his last wish carry weight? What would the morning bring?

D’Ambrizzi’s heavy hand was on Sandanato’s shoulder. “You’ve done well, Pietro. I thought Callistus might need a messenger tonight. Well … so be it. Now, you must join our little supper party. I won’t take no for an answer.”

S
tanding near the double door through which she’d entered the private dining room, Sister Elizabeth reflected on just what Cardinal D’Ambrizzi might still have in store for them. The room was small and comfortable, cozy beneath two small chandeliers. The waiters were from the Hassler staff. Using the hotel seemed like a concession to Driskill and herself: he was a few floors from his room, she was across the square from the Order’s headquarters. For some reason—it seemed rather sinister to her—D’Ambrizzi had made her promise to stay there overnight rather than return to her Via Veneto flat.

Now the cardinal was speaking to a man with a huge mole’s nose, so vast the room for a moment seemed to revolve around it. Driskill stood listening to Drew Summerhays, whom Elizabeth had met at Val’s funeral. Driskill’s face was remote, emotionless, but there was a desolate look in his eyes: lost, tired, or puzzled nearly to exhaustion? She thought she alone knew him so well.

D’Ambrizzi as the Ringmaster was a remarkable sight. He had controlled, stage-managed, their entire evening—the whole time they’d been in Rome, if it came to that. But his arrival at the party, the mysterious descent into Indelicato’s netherworld … she was still trying to cope with the room full of Nazi treasure. The dollar value had increased—what? Tenfold, a hundredfold, maybe a thousand times in forty years? Whatever, it was surely a priceless collection.

Now Drew Summerhays was standing by a drinks
cabinet with a glass of sherry and at his elbow a short stocky man who said nothing. Someone seemed to have taken a potato peeler or a sharpened rasp to his throat on some long-past occasion. A gray-haired man with broad stooped shoulders stood talking with Monsignor Sandanato: she was introduced to him, saw his large, moist eyes with purple bags beneath: he was Dr. Cassoni. As she circled the room she met the man with the mole’s nose; an old journalist from Paris whose name was Paternoster.
Our Father
 … Clive Paternoster.

She wondered if Archduke was among them at that moment: it would be so like D’Ambrizzi to bring Archduke the Betrayer to the center ring of his little circus. D’Ambrizzi, the death-defying high wire aerialist. Working without a net.

Father Dunn was weaving among the guests, a word here, a word there, finally finishing up with a sherry in hand at D’Ambrizzi’s elbow. The conversation was general. She heard herself joining him, the only woman, as always. There were pointed jokes about the television show and Indelicato’s venture into self-promotion. There were speculations on the health of the Holy Father, as there were bound to be at every dinner that evening in Rome. There were comments on the circus that would begin when Callistus finally died and the cardinals journeyed from the corners of the earth to choose his successor. Father Dunn was unable to resist an observation on Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s ambition to be the first American pope.

Dinner passed in the same superficially untroubled manner, suspense gathering steam as the guests began to wonder just why they’d been chosen to share the cardinal’s largesse. Inevitably the subject of Indelicato’s departure for the Vatican was raised, and a nervous hush fell across the table. But D’Ambrizzi smiled broadly and said that there was no point in staring so hard at him, he had no idea what might be on the papal mind that night. He let a chuckle rumble deep in his chest and the conversation level returned to normal.

She had maneuvered herself into the chair next to Ben, who gave her a thankful smile. But his eyes bore
that distracted look. He said next to nothing. Finally she asked him if he was all right.

“Yes, sure,” he said. “No, of course I’m not. But—I don’t know. Is this how it all ends? Is this what it comes to? Nothing?” He was speaking softly, his voice leaking tension. No one else was able to hear him. His face remained blank, emotionless. “So maybe there aren’t any more murders. But is that supposed to satisfy us? What about Val? What about you and me? It’s a goddamn miracle we’re alive, either one of us, and now it just peters out, sputters to a halt … and that’s the end of the story?”

She nodded, knowing how he felt, “They’re keeping us boxed out. What more can we do?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to know who gave Horstmann his orders. But everybody’s a drinking buddy all of a sudden and maybe I’m not very sophisticated, but I still want to know who the hell took the brain dive off your balcony, who gave Horstmann the list of victims, who’s the bastard … I want to kill Simon, whoever he is, and then I want to find Horstmann and I want to kill him. I know I sound totally nuts but some grudges are worth holding.” She’d never heard bitterness so deep. “I am a payback man. I was as a football player. I am as a lawyer. And I am now. This just isn’t fair. Everybody gets to try to kill us, but we don’t get a shot at them. Well, bullshit. I want my shot.” He grinned suddenly at her. “I’ve earned it.”

She reached out and put her hand over his. It felt perfectly normal. Everything was different now that she’d screwed up her courage and visited his hotel room and cut through all their silly posturing and self-righteousness and pride. Now she could take his hand and give it a squeeze and not feel she had to launch into an awful lecture full of priggish nonsense about the Church knowing best. She’d believed all that back in Princeton, but now, in Rome, she no longer knew what to believe.

D’Ambrizzi was calling for attention, snapping his whip to get them all to jump up onto their boxes and mind their manners. Supper was gone and she had not the vaguest notion of what she’d eaten. Across the table
Sandanato was steadying himself, hands flat, bracing himself. His eyes didn’t seem capable of focusing. His forehead had broken out in beads of perspiration. He wiped his deep, darkened eye sockets with the back of his hand. His gaze wavered across hers, moved on toward D’Ambrizzi. D’Ambrizzi. Sandanato’s fallen idol.

“I thank you all for indulging me.” D’Ambrizzi had risen and was speaking calmly, seemingly in excellent spirits. “You may wonder why I was taken with such a determined desire to be your host tonight … well, there is a point. Sister Elizabeth, you were Sister Valentine’s closest friend. Ben Driskill, she was your beloved sister. Thus, Sister Valentine was your entry card. Father Dunn, my old friend, confidant, trusted ally through the years … in a time of crisis I would naturally turn to you for help and guidance … and the series of murders which began a year and a half ago qualifies in this old peasant’s mind as a crisis. Drew Summerhays, fifty years I’ve known you, worked with you, plotted and counterplotted with you and against you in war and peace—and you are a good man in a crisis. Clive Paternoster, you have known so much for so long, you and Robbie Heywood, that it would have been grossly unjust to withhold from you the final chapter.… I only wish that Robbie could have been with us tonight—he’d have been hugely amused by all the melodrama. My friend and personal physician, Dr. Cassoni—you are also the Holy Father’s doctor, you made no protestations about keeping me informed of his condition. And the pontiff’s health has been at the very center of this whole business—only when his illness struck could the killing begin.

“And you, Pietro, Monsignor Sandanato, my faithful aide-de-camp through so many battles, so often my greatest strength … no man has a greater belief in the necessity of saving our Church from its enemies. So you must be included tonight.” He smiled around the table, taking them all in.

Ben Driskill said, “You missed one of us. The little one over there. I’ve seen him before … he chased me through the streets of Avignon. But we weren’t introduced.”

D’Ambrizzi said, “Drew?”

Summerhays said, “Marco Victor. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, my bodyguard. He travels with me. Ben, I wish you hadn’t run from me that night in Avignon. You know you have never had anything to fear from me … surely you know that.”

“Sure,” Driskill said. “We’re all pals now.”

Sister Elizabeth knew what he was thinking. Summerhays is Archduke, the cold son of a bitch. Wake up, Saint Jack, this is the man, the traitor—

“Now,” D’Ambrizzi said, “we are all accounted for. And I will begin the story we all, each of us, have reason and right to know. Be patient, my friends, it is a story worthy of the Borgias … it is a story the likes of which our Church has survived before and will again.”

It was the second lecture Elizabeth had heard from D’Ambrizzi in a very short time. She was an impatient woman. But she couldn’t remember ever wanting to hear anything quite so much in her life. She whispered to Driskill, “Here it comes.”

“Let’s hope so,” he muttered. “I’ve had just about enough buildup.”

“We are all concerned here tonight with the Holy Father’s condition.” The customary smile that could take you off your guard had faded as D’Ambrizzi began to speak. “The next stage in the Church’s history will soon begin. A new pope will be chosen to serve arid take the lead in shaping the future, ours and the world’s. But first our beloved Callistus will die. We are old friends, Sal di Mona and I, and now it seems that he—the younger man—will precede me in death. I knew about his illness even before he himself did. It was Dr. Cassoni who identified the tumor and the serious worsening of his heart condition. He came to me in simple humanity, asking me what I believed he should do—how he should handle the news with the Holy Father. I gave him my opinion. Callistus is a man of great courage and perspective. Tell him the truth. This was two years ago. Callistus and I spent many a midnight hour going over the situation, talking about the old days, talking about the future
 … things we had done together, things we’d hoped to do, and those things which now we would never do.

“Most of you in this room know things about my work in the war, back in the days when I was carrying out a unique papal mission in Paris. I did things which a world at war seemed to require. Things that at another time I’d have found horrible, impossible to contemplate, beyond me. But I did them then. Salvatore di Mona knew these things. He was with me in those days, long before anyone ever dreamed of little Sal’s
papacy
.…

“Not long after I learned of his illness, something else caught my attention. Men who knew about my Paris mission—these men were dying. And I quietly investigated—
they were being killed
. It was no coincidence. Someone had a reason and I had to discover why.…

“Sister Valentine eventually came to me with her own discoveries—she alone had seen the pattern in the killings. She connected them without at first understanding why or how they fit together. But she was a prodigious researcher. She burrowed into the Torricelli papers in Paris, she saw Robbie Heywood, she attacked the Secret Archives for historical precedents, she pieced the story together, she followed the trail of looted treasure and Nazis and this ‘Simon’ she’d uncovered and she worked her way right to Alexandria and the Church’s involvement in the mutually beneficial relationship with Nazi survivors. She had excavated four decades and more, and she found an old snapshot on Klaus Richter’s office wall in Alexandria and there was her old friend Giacomo D’Ambrizzi.…” He clasped his hands before him, almost in prayer. “The past is always waiting for us, it comes alive and lashes out at us when we least expect it. One of God’s little jokes. He keeps us humble.

“Sister Valentine laid it out for me, told me she believed the
assassini
were back at work, she had all the old code names, she had theories about who they were. Did she know I was Simon? She never said … but she wanted me to know she’d uncovered much of what had been going on during the war. Now it was all happening again, she said, the
assassini
were back and they were killing people again. She wanted to know why … and I
had to be very careful. I had to deny everything, I had to tell her she had run astray of pure myth and sheer coincidence, much as I had to tell Sister Elizabeth later on when she followed in Val’s footsteps. Of course I included my faithful Sandanato in all of this. And he backed me up in my misleading of these two remarkable detectives, though he knew a good deal of my previous exploits. He was my protégé, he was the young man I had educated in the ways of the Church, he was the one who received my living legacy, my knowledge, my experience. But I also turned to an old friend of mine to investigate in some detail the five recent murders as well as to check on what Val was doing—this delicate task fell to my trusted colleague, Father Dunn. And he concluded by backing up all of Val’s contentions … but who was doing the killing? And why?