The Assassini (36 page)

The pope knew of the bishop duke’s activities but had no particular desire to take him on. The pope believed that it was simply more prudent to let him make his own bed: one of the
assassini
was bound to put an end to him sooner or later. What had Sebastiano actually done? was the question raised at court. He had taken over a run-down, primitive monastery; he’d murdered a few illiterate monks, raped a few nuns who were of little consequence. He practiced some witchcraft, but that was probably just’ to add spice to his sex life. And he commanded
his own army of mercenaries as well as his own jealous
assassini
. Better to leave him alone.

However, such an overweening megalomaniac as Sebastiano was bound to overstep the perimeters of the pope’s noblesse oblige. Sebastiano took umbrage at a remark made by the cardinal-nephew at the time, a twenty-nine-year-old bon vivant posted to Florence, who was reported rather widely to have made an improper suggestion to Sebastiano’s sister Celestina … a suggestion which she had accepted with alacrity.

Being a highly practical maniac, the duke demanded a fitting tribute in return for whatever of his sister’s often shredded honor might have remained at the time of her capitulation. He suggested possibly an equestrian statue of himself cast in gold. The cardinal-nephew declined the opportunity and the duke dispatched Brother Scipione, his most expert and trusted killer, to make a point. The cardinal-nephew was slain in his bedchamber, in his bed, in fact, which he was sharing with Celestina, who unhappily tasted the good monk’s blade as well.

Now that Sebastiano’s evil had struck within his own family, the pope had no choice but to exercise harsh measures. First, he named another nephew, twenty-one years old, cardinal. Second, he raised an army of his own mercenaries, nominally in the employ of the new cardinal-nephew, who sought to avenge the murder of his brother, and sent them to Castel Sebastiani. The monastery was attacked first. All but nine of the
assassini
were put to the knife. The duke, bereft of his most trusted friends and defenders, tried to make a deal. He proved to be as unsuccessful at diplomacy as he had been successful at debauchery. The inhabitants of the castle, less the duke, were herded into a dungeon and burned alive.

The duke himself had his limbs ceremoniously removed. The still-living torso and head were left to die alone in a stretch of sandy, flyblown wasteland.

The pope was pleased at the outcome of the campaign but for the matter of the nine
assassini
who escaped. They were said to have fled toward Spain. Rumors abounded that they had taken refuge in a mountain
monastery that had been long deserted, its exact location unknown. In any case, it was just a story.

The pope troubled himself no further.

The story of Sebastiano and the Tuscan
assassini
left Elizabeth exhausted and depressed. But she couldn’t stop wondering.

What was the difference between what had gone on in the fifteenth century and what was going on now?

She walked back to the flat that night, the horrors of the
assassini
and their masters too vivid in her mind. She had a hellish headache and went to bed early, worn out, confused, bedeviled by the fact that she had no one to discuss it all with over midnight snacks and cups of coffee.

Was there any real point to her researches? She felt as if she’d forgotten why she’d delved into the Secret Archives in the first place. She’d been warned about their power. But no one had warned her about the
assassini
who hovered in the darkness of her room, the ghost of Val, the remembered hurt and anger in Ben Driskill’s face. It was a familiar litany by now. Soon she would have to tell someone.

Soon …

Father Peaches O’Neale of St. Mary’s in New Prudence got along as best he could following the death of Sister Val, the only woman he’d ever loved. He wore his habitually smiling mask as he made his way through the bright, brittle days of an early winter. It was getting dark early, and in the evening, when the winds whined in the eaves of the old parish house and the fire had burned low in the grate, Peaches would occasionally wake up in his easy chair, his brain numbed from good single-malt scotch and David Letterman grinning sourly at a stupid pet trick on the television screen. The scotch was one way of coping with Val’s death, but he was determined not to overdo it. Too many parish priests had gone missing down that lonely road.

So he stayed busy with the youth groups at the church. He worked with the ladies’ aid group. He accepted
every dinner invitation and stayed in touch with Father Dunn. He visited Hugh Driskill in the hospital every day. He watched the old man’s strength fighting to reassert itself. He watched the awesome will exerting itself on the huge, uncooperative body. Undoubtedly Hugh Driskill was slowly but surely coming around. In a way Peaches came to feel that he was becoming a substitute son, a stand-in for Ben, who’d taken off for God only knew where. He knew he wasn’t what the old man wanted, but he was better than no one, nothing. Peaches was someone to talk to about Ben and Val, too, for that matter. Peaches saw the old man thinking, deep in concentration, going over Val and Ben in his mind, but what he was thinking remained a mystery. Another man might have been helpless, but not Hugh Driskill. He’d had no experience at impotency. He was keeping his own counsel while he chatted superficially with Peaches and remembered better days.

Peaches also visited Val’s grave in the little cemetery, mourning not only for her but for what his own life might have been. Sometimes he went outside the fence and stared for a while at Father Governeau’s grave, wondering about that story, thinking how Edna Hanrahan and her girlfriends had had such crushes on the handsome, doomed priest. Peaches tried hard to draw on his faith to survive this period of his life. It was a hell of a test.

Nothing, however, kept him busier than cleaning out the basement, the attic, and a variety of storage cupboards that contained the accumulated junk of his predecessors’ very long lifetimes at St. Mary’s. The men had been hopeless pack rats.

Boxes of letters going back to the thirties. Diocesan reports, financial statements, dozens of scrapbooks crammed with clippings, both pasted in and loose. Enormously heavy boxes of books. Religious tomes, inspirational treatises, best-sellers, travel books, the classics bound in leatherette. Even heavier boxes containing thousands of magazines.
Life, Time, National Geographic, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Saturday Review
, on and on and on. Golf clubs, tennis racquets, croquet mallets and balls,
badminton gear including nets and moth-eaten shuttlecocks. Reams of paper, notebooks, pads, pencils, pens, stamps from a time when two cents bought you a first-class delivery. It was unbelievable. Edna Hanrahan spent hours helping him. There was enough old clothing to stock a rummage sale. Or clothe a club of thespians. They couldn’t throw it away. There was nothing to do but prepare a rummage sale, in fact, and Edna got into the spirit of it.

One evening Peaches settled down in front of his fireplace and his television, a bottle of Glenfiddich at hand, and began digging through a box of scrapbooks dating back to the end of the Second World War. Beneath the top two scrapbooks, however, he came upon a manila envelope, sealed with electrician’s tape, tied with stout twine. The temptation was irresistible. With a Swiss Army knife he cut it open and withdrew some forty-odd pages, handwritten in ink that had faded on the brittle lined paper.

He began reading. He read it through twice and during that time got up twice to pace the room. He also consumed half the Glenfiddich and sat staring at the television while trying to calm himself down. What to do?

He laboriously read it through a third time.

All the times he’d heard the story from Ben and Val, how Hugh Driskill had brought the Italian priest, Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, home from the war, how D’Ambrizzi had locked himself in Hugh’s study doing some kind of work or other that the children were absolutely forbidden to interrupt … Now he, Peaches O’Neale, for God’s sake, knew what had been going on in the study.

He held in his shaking hands the testament of Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, who might any day now become the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.… Here it had lain all through the years, secure in its hiding place, forgotten. Forgotten? He turned back to the first page, the title.
The Facts in the Matter of Simon Verginius
. He turned to the last page, looked at the faded signature, the date.

Then, well past midnight, he picked up his telephone and gave Father Artie Dunn a very big surprise.

* * *

Father Dunn had spent several days sequestered in his apartment in one of the mid-Manhattan towers, high above the city, sealed off from the aftereffects of the murders. He ignored Archbishop Cardinal Klammer’s occasional bleats from the general vicinity of St. Patrick’s. He ignored calls from his agent and from his publisher. He worked on the murders as if they lay at the center of one of his novels: he plotted backward, forward, and sideways, trying to capture the story line in just the right light—so that it was visible in its entirety. Of course he failed, but it was not time wasted. He thought about Val and Lockhardt and Sister Elizabeth and Ben and Hugh and Peaches and D’Ambrizzi and Sandanato and the pope, and he made some notes, tracked down a variety of unknowns, hoping that familiarity would breed understanding. He thought about Val’s travels. What the living hell had the girl been on to? Well, whatever it was, the Driskill family seemed to be involved no matter where you looked.…

The murdered Father Governeau hanging from a tree in the orchard and it was
their
orchard …

World War II and who was dashing about Europe for Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS but Hugh Driskill …

The war is over then, and who should turn up in Princeton but D’Ambrizzi, brought home by Hugh Driskill … but does anybody know why? Artie Dunn wanted to know why. Hell’s bells, the man could become pope anytime now …

Sister Val had been making trouble this past year, scaring hell out of somebody … and somebody finally killed her to stop whatever she was doing. But what had she been doing?

And Ben Driskill simply wouldn’t give up. His approach wasn’t to go off and think about it until it made some kind of sense. He was more of a bull-in-the-china-shop type. It wasn’t the behavior of a lawyer showing through: it was a throwback to the football player.…

What a bunch!

Finally Dunn settled on an approach that wouldn’t have occurred to many other men. Having looked at his
notes and found them too complex, too confusing, he decided to go back to the start, back to the orchard, as it were, with Father Governeau swinging in the cold wintry gale.

He left Manhattan on a sunny windy morning and drove to a convent located off the main road between Princeton and Trenton. It was a gray stone building, once a mansion, surrounded by a green lawn going brown with frost. All the snow was gone but the freeze of the early winter ran deep. He was used to the unearthly stillness. It came with religious installations. He’d felt it a thousand times before.

He waited in the reception area while the old nun at the desk went to fetch Sister Mary Angelina. She came at last with a warm, welcoming smile. But it wasn’t a smile that gave anything away. Sister Mary Angelina came forward, shook hands, and led him into the sitting room which was hung with several reproductions of religious paintings. The room was dry and cheerless, but the nun’s beautiful face, bright and alert, lit it up.

She had retired to the convent after teaching at the elementary school where Ben and Val and Peaches had been students; eventually she’d become principal. She had met Dunn at Val’s funeral.

“And you knew Hugh Driskill and his wife, Mary, back in the old days, isn’t that right?”

“Of course I knew them. Seems like yesterday.”

“You must have known just about every Catholic in the area in those days.”

“Why yes, I expect I did. It comes with being a teacher, don’t you think?”

“So you must have known Father Vincent Governeau, too.”

“Yes, I did. I was here for all of that. Youngish, I was, in those days.”

“I just wonder … what do you remember about Father Governeau?”

Another nun arrived with a silver tea service and set it on the table before the couch where they sat. Sister Mary Angelina moved forward, her habit rustling, and poured. Father Dunn took milk and two lumps. She
turned the angelic professional smile—which Ben Driskill had once found so seductive—on him.

“Is that why you’ve come to see me, Father Dunn?”

“Yes, it is, Sister. Father Governeau.”

“Well, I must say I’ve been expecting you.”

“I don’t understand. How could that be?”

“Well, you or someone like you.”

“You don’t say.”

“It has been my experience that we, most of us, always have to pay the piper. Don’t you agree? I didn’t have the character to pay when the bill was presented—I speak metaphorically, you see? But I’ve been waiting nearly half a century for some man who would come to ask me about Father Governeau—”

“So I’m that man. Why is it you’ve been waiting?”

“Because I know why he died as he did. Once she died, I was the only one …”

“She?”

“Mary Driskill. She knew, too …”

“Why he killed himself?”

She smiled again, full wattage. “Please have a cookie, Father Dunn. Settle back, drink your tea, and I’ll tell you the whole story about Father Governeau, God rest his soul.…”

T
he rented Dodge gave up the battle after three hundred hot, dusty, windy, sandy miles, some of it along the Mediterranean and the long rest of it striking inland toward this place called The Inferno. I pulled in at a wide place in the road where a couple of gasoline pumps stood like the remnants of the Lost Legion, forgotten, but still on guard. There were a couple of sand-colored hounds, one watering a pump, four Egyptians who seemed to be just hanging out, and an attendant who said my transmission sounded like shit to him. He wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a blue Ford coverall. Behind him was a building like a mirage if you don’t expect too much from a mirage, a hotel of sorts baking like a big biscuit in the sun. Two stories, drooping shutters, no name.