The Assassini (3 page)

She had known Curtis Lockhardt all her life. When she had been Val Driskill thirty years earlier, dancing on her parents’ lawn in the sweeping arcs of the sprinklers, in her ruffled bathing suit, looking like a fancily wrapped piece of candy, ten years old, Lockhardt had been a youthful lawyer and banker bearing the imprimaturs of both the Rockefellers and the Chase. He had frequently visited the house in Princeton to talk money business and Church business with her father. As she pranced, showing off, glistening wet and tanned in the sunshine, she’d heard the ice clinking in their glasses, seen them from the corner of her eye sitting in white wicker chairs on the shady porch.

“You were an enchanting sprite at ten,” he told her
in Rome that night, “And at fifteen you were a sexy tomboy. Damn near beat me at tennis.”

“You kept watching me, not the ball.” She was grinning at him, remembering how she’d known he was finding her desirable as she dashed about the court, the breeze blowing her tennis skirt and drying the sweat on her face until she could feel the saltiness crack. She’d liked him, admired him. She’d been fascinated by his power, the layman who could make the priests sit up and listen. He was thirty-five at the time and she had wondered why he’d never married.

“By the time you were twenty I was flat out scared to death of you. Afraid of the effect that I knew you were having on me every time I saw you. And I felt like such a fool. And then … do you remember the day I took you to lunch at The Plaza, the Oak Room with the murals of fairyland castles in mountain kingdoms, and you told me what you intended to do with the rest of your life—remember? The day you told me you were going inside, joining the Order? My heart did a half gainer into the tomato bisque. I felt like a spurned lover … and the fact was, had I been entirely sane, I’d have been looking on you as a girl, as Hugh Driskill’s daughter … a child.

“But the point was, of course, that I wasn’t sane. I was in love. And I’ve stayed in love, Val. I’ve watched you, followed your career, and when you came to Los Angeles I knew I’d have to start seeing you again.…” He shrugged boyishly, and the years fell away. “The bad news was that I was still in love with a nun, but the good news was that I knew the wait had been worth it.”

Their love affair had begun that night in Rome in his apartment high above the Via Veneto. And he had also begun the campaign to persuade her to leave the Order and marry him. Betraying those vows—coming to his bed—had been the easy part. Those vows had always been the coercive part of her job, the necessary evil, the price she’d paid for the opportunity to serve the Church, to serve humanity through the powerful instrument of the Church. But leaving the Order, leaving the framework within which she’d built her life—that had proved to be beyond her thus far.

Now, only an hour earlier, out of their mutual frustration they had quarreled coldly, regretfully, neither accepting the other’s inability to understand, but still loving, always loving. Finally they had found consolation in passion, and then he had slept and she had slid from the bed, gone outside to think. To be alone with the things she couldn’t dare tell him.

Before her, out of the night and wispy fog, wings flapped, a gull swooped down, a blur going past her, and landed on the patio. It strutted for a moment, peered at itself in the glass, took wing as if frightened by its reflection. She knew just how it felt.

Suddenly she thought of her best friend, Sister Elizabeth, in Rome, in whom she had seen certain mirror images of herself. Elizabeth was also an American, several years younger, but so bright, so incisive, so understanding. Another modern nun, doing the work she wanted, but not the troublemaker Val was. They had known each other at Georgetown when Sister Val had been in the doctoral program, Elizabeth a precocious, liberal M.A. candidate. They had forged a friendship that had lasted through nearly a decade of extreme tensions within the Church. And in Rome it was to Sister Elizabeth that Val had confided Lockhardt’s marriage proposal. Sister Elizabeth had listened to the whole story and waited before speaking.

“Play it by ear,” she said at last, “and if that’s casuistry, blame it on my basically Jesuitical nature. Situation ethics. Remember your vows but think it through—you’re not a captive, you know. Nobody’s locked you in a cell and thrown away the key, left you to rot.”

Good advice, and if Elizabeth were in Malibu now, she’d have more good advice: what would it be? But then, Val knew what it would be because Sister Elizabeth always went back to it.

“If you’re going to keep sleeping with him, Val,” she’d said, “then you’ve got to get out of the Order. There’s just no sense in going on the way you are. You may think it’s a technicality but, face it, buster, it’s no technicality. You took vows. Anybody can slip. But to
go on slipping, make a way of life out of slipping—no way. That’s just stupid and dishonest. You know it, I know it, and the Supreme Being—she knows it, too.”

Remembering the certainty of Sister Elizabeth’s words, she felt only drained and afraid. The fear was blotting out any other emotions.

It had begun with the research for the book. The damn book! What she’d give never to have thought of the book! But it was too late for that now and it was the fear that had brought her back to the United States, that would take her home to Princeton. It was the fear that made her so hesitant about everything—about Curtis and love and staying in or getting out.… You couldn’t think straight when you were consumed with fear. She had ventured too far in her researches, had kept digging when she should have had the sense to stop short and get out, go home. She should have forgotten what she’d found, attended to her own life, to Curtis. But it wasn’t just for herself that she was afraid. Overshadowing everything else was the greatest fear. Her fear for the Church.

So she’d come back to America, intending to lay it all out for Curtis. But something had warned her, told her to stop, something she hated identifying. What she had discovered was a kind of infernal device, a bomb that had been ticking for a long, long time. Curtis Lockhardt either knew about it, or—God help him—was part of it, or he knew nothing at all of it. No, she couldn’t tell him. He was too close to the Church, too much a part of it. That much, at least, seemed to make sense.

But the bomb was there and she had stumbled across it. It reminded her of the time at the house in Princeton when her brother Ben, rooting around in the basement looking for the old hickory-shafted golf clubs from their father’s youth, had come across the seven cans of black powder left over from some long-ago Fourth of July. She had followed him down the steps, past all the accumulated mountains of the family’s history, wary of spiders real or imagined that might drop into her hair, and had suddenly become aware of his voice, dropped to a whisper,
telling her for Christ’s sake to go back, and she had said she was going to tell on him for swearing.

Well, that was when he’d told her the house could blow up at any moment because that black powder had been in those cans since before they were born and was damned unstable. The water heater in the same room had a short in it, was shooting sparks. She didn’t know anything about black powder, but she knew her brother Ben, and Ben wasn’t kidding.

He’d made her go into the stone-walled stable while he had carefully, dripping with sweat, carried one can after another up from the basement and out across the back lawn past the family chapel all the way to the edge of the lake at the back of their property, back beyond the apple orchard. When he called the police in Princeton they’d sent some firemen, and the chief of police himself had come in the black DeSoto and they had wetted it all down and Ben was a real hero after that. The policemen gave him some kind of honorary badge, and a week or so later Ben had given it to her, a present, because she’d been a brave soldier, too, and followed orders. She’d been surprised, had cried and worn it every day all summer long, slept with it under her pillow. She was seven and Ben was fourteen and for the rest of her life she’d always gone to Ben when she needed somebody who would be a hero for her.

Now she had this bomb of her own, unstable and capable of blowing the coming papal election to smithereens, and she was going home to see Ben. Not Curtis, not her father—at least not yet. But she knew she would go back to Ben. She always smiled to herself when she thought about Ben, brother Ben, the lapsed—“collapsed is more like it,” he used to say—Catholic. She could lay it all out for him, tell him what had come to light in the Torricelli papers and in the Secret Archives. He would laugh at her predicament and then he’d get serious and he’d know what to do. And he’d know what they should tell their father, how they should approach him with the whole story.…

The Rolls-Royce was waiting at Kennedy when Lockhardt’s private jet arrived, and took them directly through light traffic into the heart of midtown, arriving a half hour ahead of schedule. Lockhardt told his driver to drop him in the short block called Rockefeller Plaza which ran between the RCA Building and the Rockefeller Center ice rink. In the commodious backseat he looked into Val’s eyes, took her hand. “You’re sure there’s nothing you want to tell me now?”

There was so much more behind the question than was showing. He hadn’t told her about the call he’d received a week before, when she was still in Egypt, from a friend at the Vatican. There was concern in high places about what she was doing, the research trail she’d come upon, her determination in pursuing it. Lockhardt’s friend in the Vatican was asking him to find out just what she’d learned, to convince her to lay off.

Lockhardt had too much respect for Val’s motives and work to bring the Vatican’s curiosity into the open. In any case, the Vatican did not impress Sister Val. But he also had a strong sense of self-preservation which he could easily enlarge to include her. For that reason he was disturbed by the inquiry. It never did you any good to have someone in the Vatican all over your case. And the call wouldn’t have been made on a whim. Something was seriously bothering someone, and the word had been passed on. But he couldn’t press Val. She’d tell him what she’d been up to but he had to give her time.

She smiled nervously, shook her head. “No, really. You’ve got plenty on your mind right now. Callistus is dying. And you, my darling man, have got to decide who is going to be the next pope … the vultures are gathering.”

“Do I strike you as a vulture?”

“Not at all. You’re beating the vultures to it, as usual.”

“When it comes to naming popes, I don’t have a vote.”

“Don’t be disingenuous. Didn’t
Time
call you the
cardinal without the red hat?” She grinned at his scowl. “You have a great deal more than a vote. You named the last pope—”

“With your father’s help, Sister.” He laughed. “And we could have done worse—”

“Barely,” she said.

“My God, I love you, Sister.”

“And you’re in a position to name the next pope. Let’s be realistic. And I love you, too. You’re not all that bad for an older man.”

“You’re not supposed to have much basis for comparison,” he said.

“Believe me, I don’t.”

He took her hand. “Val, I wish you’d trust me, too. This terrible secret of yours—it’s driving you crazy. You’re completely worn out. Whatever it is, it’s taking a hell of a toll on you. You’re thin, you’re tired, you look run-down—”

“You sweet-talking, silver-tongued devil—”

“You know what I mean. Take it easy, relax, talk to Ben.… You’ve got to get this off your chest.”

“Curtis, cut me a break on this one, okay? I don’t want to look foolish if my imagination has run away with me. This can all wait until tomorrow. Then maybe I’ll lay it all out for you.” She squeezed his hand. “Now you go see Andy.” She leaned forward and kissed him softly, felt his hand in her hair, cupping her head. His mouth brushed her ear.

He got out and stood on the sidewalk, watched her wave as the car pulled away, and then the blackened window rose and she was gone. Next stop Princeton.

He’d lived so much of his life in the corridors of power that for a very long time he’d mistaken satisfaction and discreet camaraderie for happiness. Then Sister Valentine had revealed the mysteries of utter happiness, solved the great puzzle. Now he was sure they’d be together for good.

It was in this frame of mind that he stood gazing down at the skaters gliding rhythmically around the rink. It was true that he was worried about Val. She’d been in Rome, Paris, and had gone as far afield as Alexandria, Egypt, all
in the name of research. He had tried to put the pieces together. He knew she’d also been working in the Secret Archives. And then he’d gotten that damned call from Rome.

From his vantage point at the railing above the ice he smiled at the sight of an elderly priest, full of grace and dignity, skating among the kids. He watched with admiration as the priest with his black raincoat blowing out behind him swept down and plucked a pretty girl from the ice where she’d fallen. He doubted if he had ever seen a more solemn and serene face.

He glanced at the Patek Philippe, a golden wafer on his wrist. Monsignor Heffernan, only forty-five now, destined for the red hat within the next five or ten years, was waiting. As Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s right-hand man, he had already accumulated considerable power in one of the wealthiest sees of the Church. He was not known for his dignity, certainly not for his solemnity. He was known for getting things done. And for such a hail-fellow-well-met, he was a punctual bastard who expected punctuality in others.

It was time to go.

The Church’s involvement with the square block directly to the east of St. Patrick’s Cathedral dated back to the late nineteenth century when it had built a father pedestrian church, St. John’s, on the site which later—after the Church sold the land—saw the construction of the famous Villard houses, which reminded some observers of the austere Florentine dwellings of Medici princes. Too expensive to remain in private hands following World War II, the glorious houses were abandoned and sat waiting, elegant and empty memories of another age.