The Assassini (15 page)

I was half awake when I heard the pounding at the front door. I shook loose from the past, yawned, and tottered across the Long Room into the foyer. The cop was calling my name while he had a go at the door.

When I opened it he wasn’t alone. I felt my heart leap in my chest.

In the shadows behind him, outlined by the lights from the taxi swinging around on the gravel, was a woman. I couldn’t see her face, but the sense of her was so familiar, someone I’d seen before.

“She says she’s come from Rome, Mr. Driskill.” The cop’s voice was going on, but I wasn’t hearing him.

I was staring past him.

It was Val. Something was wrong and I blinked like a
fool, trying to come wide-awake. The height, the shape of the hair, the silhouette there and then gone as the headlights swept past her. Val.

She stepped forward into the hall light.

“Ben,” she said. “It’s me, Sister Elizabeth.”

S
ister Elizabeth.

We stood in the Long Room. The shadows from the fire flickered across her face, in the hollows, shone in her green eyes. She took my hand, said things about Val, shook her head, her thick hair swaying: there was something about her physical presence that filled the room, crowded everything else into the shadows. She was tall and broad-shouldered, wore a heavy sweater falling low on her hips, a dark skirt, high, dark boots. Her eyes fixed me, alive with candor and energy.

She told me how Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had given her the bad news, how she’d put the magazine in the hands of her managing editor, packed a bag, and grabbed the first flight to New York. She’d had a limousine waiting to take her to Princeton. “I’m starving,” she said finally. “Do you have horse? I could eat a horse and chase the rider.”

Ten minutes later we were sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by what looked like an explosion in the Empire Diner. She wasn’t a woman to hang back when it came to food. She looked up from the task. “It’s tomorrow morning for me.” She seemed to be building a four-story sandwich. “I always need explanations when I start to eat. Growing girl, that worked for years and years, but once I passed thirty I had to come up with some new material. You wouldn’t have a Diet Coke on you by any chance?” She went to work with the mustard pot.

“No Diet Coke, I’m afraid.”

“No, too much to hope for. Impossible to get in Rome. Any chance for a beer?”

I got her a beer and made a sandwich for myself. When I finished she said, “Maybe I’ll have just one more sandwich … well, how about a half, okay?”

“You’ve got a beer mustache, Sister.”

“Always happens. I can stand it if you can. Pete’s Tavern. Irving Place. I remember.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Why? Look, I’m a nun but I’m also an earthling. I’ve been known to not only have a good time but remember it, too. Ben …” She uncapped another Rolling Rock and poured it.

I remembered it, too.

My sister had come to New York a couple of winters ago to receive one of those humanitarian-of-the-year awards from a national women’s group. She gave a speech at the Waldorf in a gilded pillared hall where I’d once attended a dinner welcoming the Yankees back from spring training. A thousand people were eating creamed chicken and peas and she worked the room like a Las Vegas pro, towing me along in her wake as she filtered through the shoals of heavy hitters.

But after the dinner and the speech she’d arranged to meet another nun, a friend from Georgetown and later Rome. She took me by the hand. “You’ve got to meet her, you’re going to hate each other!” And her mischievous laughter floated back at me from childhood.

The friend turned out to be Sister Elizabeth, and the first thing I noticed was how much alike they looked as they stood together in the dark blue lobby of the Waldorf with the great ornate clock saying it was ten o’clock. Thick wavy hair, shiny eyes, both well-tanned, live-forever healthy, Val’s face more oval and her friend’s rather heart-shaped. Sister Elizabeth and I shook hands, and when she smiled at me she had a slightly smart-ass, Jesuitical look, tilted her head a few degrees to one side as if she were challenging me to keep up with her. Val was watching us expectantly, two people who meant a lot to her. Sister Elizabeth surveyed me with a flat gaze. “So, at last I meet the fallen Jesuit.”

I glanced at Val. “Blabbermouth here has apparently spilled the family’s beans.”

When Elizabeth laughed the irony was colored with warmth. “We are not going to hate each other, are we?”

“Well, in any case, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.”

We wound up at a cocktail party being given by a friend of some Jesuits who were particular fans of my sister’s. The apartment looked down on Gramercy Park. Lots of smoke and wine and arch conversation, full of jokes about the pope. Poor Val was the center of everything.

I gravitated to the cooling drafts of a partially opened window. It was just past Thanksgiving but a snowstorm had closed in on the city. Everything was turning white, giving Gramercy Park the look of a Christmas display window. Sister Elizabeth came to stand beside me, asked me if I thought anyone would be offended if we were to duck out for a walk in the snow. I didn’t think so. Father John Sheehan, S.J., whom I’d known for years, gave her an appraising look as we passed into the hallway, made a circle of thumb and forefinger to me, nodded appreciatively. He had no idea she was a nun.

The snow was deep and she frolicked like a little girl allowed up late, kicking it with her leather boots, making big soft snowballs to throw at the trees past the iron fence. Gramercy Park had been turned into a snowy cloister, shadows like monks moving quietly to the chapter house. We walked past the dim lights glowing in the downstairs bar at the Players Club, then went off down Irving Place, where parked cars were turning into low ridges of snow.

We stopped at Pete’s and had a beer at the scarred, ancient bar with the photo of Sinatra looking down on us like an icon, or the abbot of his own special order. She told me about her job at the magazine in Rome and I told her how peculiar it felt to be surrounded by Catholics, the first time in years. She asked me how my wife, Antonia, was and I told her that she wasn’t my wife anymore. She just nodded and took a drink of beer that left foam on her upper lip.

When we left Pete’s we ran into Val and Sheehan and the four of us walked all the way back up Lexington to midtown, laughing and horsing around like kids. We weren’t thinking of Val as a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize. We were for a moment rediscovering childhood and pretending that everything would turn out all right in the end. But it hadn’t, and now my sister was dead.

“Ben, we’ve got to get down to cases. I loved your sister. But I haven’t cried for her yet. I don’t know what’s the matter.” Sister Elizabeth wiped the foam from her upper lip, squeezed the napkin into a tight little ball.

“Neither have I. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted us to—”

“People always say that. Maybe it’s true. Anyway, I’m too angry to cry.”

“Exactly, Sister.”

She wanted to know everything, and I told her. Lockhardt, Heffernan, Val, my father. Father Dunn and the theory of the priest killer. All of it.

“Well,” she said, “you’re right about the briefcase. It was her version of my Filofax. She took it everywhere. She had it the last time I saw her. Stuffed with papers, notebooks, Xeroxes, pens, Magic Markers, historical atlases, scissors—she kept her whole work world in that briefcase.”

I said, “They killed her, stole the briefcase. What was she working on that was so important?”

“And important to whom? What made Lockhardt and Heffernan as well as Val such threats to them?”

“What would Lockhardt and Heffernan have on their minds?”

She gave me a shocked look. “You really are out of touch with the Church! Believe me, those two guys were talking about electing the next pope. That’s the only thing anyone in Rome is talking about, and Lockhardt and Heffernan take Rome wherever they go. Who were they backing? Lockhardt always had an angle; I’ve heard people say he could tilt the scale. No kidding.”

“But where would that leave Val? Wouldn’t her support be the kiss of death for any candidate?”

She shrugged. “Depends … of course, she was so
tight with D’Ambrizzi, the connection from childhood, your father and Saint Jack, all that history—”

“I don’t see her playing papal politics—”

“But it
was
Lockhardt’s field of play.”

“But it was
Val’s
briefcase.”

“True,” she admitted. “Too true.”

“Maybe Heffernan was just a bystander. Maybe Val and Lockhardt were the intended victims.”

“If that’s the case, if Lockhardt was the object, why not kill him someplace easier? Now, think about this, Ben—how did the killer even know of the appointment at the Palace? Don’t you see? We’ve got an internal proof here.” She was talking fast, making all sorts of leaps, and I was trying to keep up. “The secretary who’s so sure he was a priest? Well, she’s probably right. Who but a priest, somebody inside the Church, could possibly know about a meeting between hotshots like Lockhardt and Heffernan? Val said Lockhardt was the most secretive man in the world with the possible exception of her father. Lockhardt
had
to be secretive with all the stuff he was into.” She took a deep breath, rushed onward. “So you know he didn’t tell anyone about the meeting. And Heffernan, he was an old poker player, close to the vestments. No, this is an in-house job.” She stopped as if taken aback by the conclusion, an ambush of her own making. “At least murder is an old Church tradition. But somehow you think of that sort of thing as history, not something that could happen now.”

“She was scared when she called me. She wanted to talk something over with me. Peaches said she was into some pretty heavy research that worried her. You were as close to her as anyone. What was she afraid of? Did she ever give a hint?”

“The last time I saw her was in Rome. About three weeks ago. She’d been working like a madwoman. In Paris, in Rome. In the Vatican Library, the Secret Archives. Not an easy thing to arrange. She didn’t tell me what she was working on but it was old, I mean really
old
, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that’s all she said about it—”

“But how the hell could
that
get her killed? What was
she doing in Paris? I thought this book was about World War Two—”

“She’d been working there all summer. She had a flat. She did come to Rome every so often, she’d dive into the Secret Archives, then go back to Paris. When I saw her last she was heading for Egypt. Alexandria. I called her the Desert Fox after Rommel, all the stuff from the war she was digging into.”

“The fourteenth century, World War Two, the hanged priest in our orchard—did she ever mention that one to you?”

“Never.”

“But she comes home with all this other stuff on her mind and the first thing she does is ask Sam Turner about that old suicide.” I felt my impatience growing and I couldn’t stop it.

“Right before she left for Egypt I was really bugging her to tell me what she was after and finally she’d had enough of my pestering her. She told me to lay off. She said I was better off not knowing. ‘Safer, Elizabeth,’ she said to me, ‘you’re safer not knowing.’ She was protecting me—but from what? Well, from getting killed, it turns out. It’s something about the Church.” She bit her knuckle, eyes narrowed. “Something
inside
 … something so
wrong
—and she’s found out about it—”

“In the fourteenth century?” I asked. “Someone reaches out from the fourteenth century and kills her? Or at the other end, some nut who wants to be pope blows her away? Come on, Sister!”

“When it’s the Church, Ben, you just never know. It’s like an octopus. If one tentacle doesn’t get you, another one will. That was the title of the new book, by the way.
Octopus
.”

I heaved a sigh that shook the rafters. “If we only had a solid idea of what she’d uncovered, we’d have a motive. She didn’t tell you because she thought it would put you in danger. She was going to tell me but didn’t have time before they got her. But she must have told Lockhardt—”

“Or they thought she did. Same thing.”

“So maybe they think she told me. Over the phone, maybe. That’s an encouraging idea. Lockhardt and Val—how close were they?”

“I
think
she’d finally have left the Order and married him. He was a good man. He represented everything she needed: access, freedom to write and research, power. He was a little scary but—”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, so much influence, all the secrets he knew. I find that kind of scary. Val didn’t; she loved it. He was a big help to me, too. He provided me with an apartment in Rome, got me lots of introductions … even Cardinal Indelicato, who is very, very hard to reach. And, of course, he was so close to D’Ambrizzi.” She held up crossed fingers. “Lockhardt, D’Ambrizzi, and the cardinal’s shadowman, Sandanato. And Val. Whenever Lockhardt was in Rome, the four of them hung out together. There was really only one thing holding her back from marrying Lockhardt—”

“Father.”

“Right. She didn’t know how to handle it with him.”

“She didn’t need his blessing—”

“Ben, she
wanted
it!”

It was nearly two o’clock and the winds of the night were hammering at the house like the last of the hobgoblins.

She said, “How did Artie Dunn get into this, anyway?”

“By chance.” I told her about the meeting at the Nassau Inn with Peaches. “What are you making faces for?”

“Dunn. He’s a joker in any deck.”

“You know him?”

“I interviewed him once in Rome. About his novels, how they fit into his conception of the priesthood. He’s very glib and well-connected. He does this I’m-just-an-everyday-kind-of-guy routine and then D’Ambrizzi sends a limo for him. He knows all those guys. Including the Holy Father. It’s just hard for me to believe Artie Dunn does anything by chance—”

“Believe me, I met him by accident—”

“I’m sure you did. I just mean there’s a whole lot more to him than meets the eye. And I’ve never met a soul who knows what he actually
does
.”