The Assassini (4 page)

In 1948 Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, who was accustomed to looking at them across the traffic of Madison Avenue from his residence at St. Patrick’s, decided to reacquire them. In no time the Church with its countless official selves spread through the magnificent buildings. The Gold Room at 451 Madison became the conference chamber for the Diocesan Consultors. A reception room overlooking Madison
became a conference room for the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese. The dining room was transformed into the tribunal’s courtroom and the library became the Chancery office. Pushing down corridors and up marble staircases, the protean entity of the Church spread …

Times change, however. By the 1970s, the real estate boom of the 1960s had collapsed and the Church found itself unable to unload the Villard houses, which once again sat empty, representing an annual tax burden of $700,000. The economic problem was acute.

They were rescued by Harry Helmsley, who offered to lease the Villard houses and the adjacent Church-owned properties to construct a hotel. The Archdiocese assisted Helmsley with the red-tape problems, and, in the end, the houses were saved intact, the Church still owned the site, and Helmsley had a long-term lease. He built his hotel around the houses.

Like a Renaissance prince, he called it The Helmsley Palace.

It was this palace that Curtis Lockhardt entered beneath the nineteenth-century bronze and glass marquee on Fiftieth. He went directly through the hushed reception area with its mirrors and the rich French walnut paneling, turned abruptly right, and went into the small enclosure that contained a concierge’s desk and the out-of-the-way elevators servicing the topmost floors, the penthouses.

It was typical of Andy Heffernan to have reserved the Church’s triplex penthouse for the meeting. In the highly political world he inhabited, Curtis Lockhardt was one of Monsignor Heffernan’s trump cards, and he wanted to maintain as much secrecy as he could. Lockhardt was talking about a sum of money so large that not a shred of rumor could be permitted to leak out. The choice of the next pope was on the table, nestling up close to the money. Had they met across the street at St. Patrick’s, the rumors would have beaten them to the street. Power, luxury, worldliness, and secrecy: that was Monsignor Heffernan.

Lockhardt knew that the Dunhill Monte Cruz 200 cigars and the Rémy Martin cognac Andy favored would
be ready. Monsignor Heffernan often remarked off the record that you took all the perks you could get and the more you took the more there were to take.

Lockhardt got out of the elevator at the fifty-fourth floor and padded through the deep carpeting to the end of a long hallway running parallel to Madison Avenue. There was nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary behind any of the doors. He pressed the buzzer and waited. A voice from a small speaker said: “Come in, Curtis me lad.” It sounded as if the good monsignor might have enjoyed a two-martini lunch.

Although he was accustomed to luxury, Lockhardt was always impressed by the sight of what lay before him. He stood at the top of a curving staircase with an elaborately carved banister. The huge room below was two stories in height, completely glassed in, with Manhattan spreading out beyond like an isometric map.

The Empire State Building, the suave art deco spire of the Chrysler Building, the pristine modernity of the World Trade Center towers, beyond them in the bay the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, the Jersey shoreline …

Radio City, Rockefeller Center, the luminous patch of the ice rink … and almost straight down was St. Patrick’s, its twin steeples rising majestically above Fifth Avenue.

He felt as if he were standing on a cloud. He held the carved railing as he slowly descended the thickly carpeted stairs. He couldn’t look away from the view. It made him feel like a child confronted by toys beyond his wildest dreams.

“I’m having a quick pee.” Heffernan’s voice floated out from behind some hidden door. “Be with you in two shakes.”

Lockhardt turned back to the view, almost mesmerized by the clarity and detail of the city. He was standing with his nose nearly pressed to the glass, staring down at a view of St. Patrick’s that its builders must never quite have imagined. God’s view. It was like looking at a blueprint that had come to life, developed a third dimension rising up at you.

“God bless our little home.” Monsignor Heffernan, a
large man with thinning red hair and a nose that seemed to have been pilfered from a clown, lumbered toward him. He was red with sunburn that was peeling. He was wearing a black shirt and a priest’s dog collar, black trousers, and black tasseled loafers. His watery blue eyes blinked behind a scrim of cigar smoke. He had battled his way up from Irish poverty, South Boston variety. He was already a very important man in his world and by cementing his alliance with the great American kingmaker he was becoming even more so. Conveniently, they were able to use each other, which the monsignor thought was as good a definition of friendship as you were likely to come across. Andy Heffernan was a happy man.

“You’re looking very fit and virtuous for a rich man, Curtis. Have a cigar.” He pointed to a wooden box on the corner of a cluttered trestle table topped by a slab of glass two inches thick.

“You’ve twisted my arm,” Lockhardt said. He lit the Monte Cruz with a Dunhill cigar match and savored the flavor. “Where did you pick up the look of a lobster?”

“Florida. Just back yesterday from a week of charity golf. Great week.” He went to the chair behind the table and sat down. There were several folders, a legal pad, a telephone, the cigars, a heavy ashtray. Lockhardt sat down facing him across the field of glass. “Great guys, Jackie Gleason, Johnny and Tom and Jack, all of them. Lots of great guys down in Florida. Do anything for the Church. Hell of a benefit for the Our Lady of Peace children’s wing. Lotsa golf. You’re not going to believe this, but I missed a hole in one by no less than three inches! Damned if I didn’t! Shoulda been on the TV—six iron pin high, three crummy inches to the left. I got one in Scotland once, at Muirfield … ah, happy days, a hell of a long way from South Boston. What more can a man want, Curtis? Enjoy, enjoy, we’re a long time dead—”

“Whatever happened to the life eternal, the choir invisible, big sets of wings—”

“You and your nuns’ theology! Gimme a break.” Heffernan laughed in his characteristic all-out way that
was supposed to make you think he was as wide open as a whorehouse on Saturday night.

“You want a break
and
ten million bucks?” Lockhardt smiled back at him and blew a smoke ring. The figure was so large that on the few occasions it had come up specifically in their conversations it had been very rewarding to watch Heffernan’s reaction.

“Ten million bucks …” Heffernan’s laughter died quickly. That much money was very serious business, even to the right-hand man of Archbishop Cardinal Klammer. Lockhardt always wondered what was going on in the man’s mind when he was talking about holes in one with Johnny Miller and laughing that way. He never seemed to be on his guard. Yet he never seemed to make a mistake.

“The ten million,” Heffernan said softly, liking the sound of it. He touched his fingertips before him, tapped all ten against one another. “You believe ten million will swing this whole deal?”

“More or less. I can always come up with more. There’s always a deep pockets reserve.”

“Like Hugh Driskill, maybe?”

Lockhardt shrugged. “Andy, you can make any assumption you like. But do you really need to know? Do you really
want
to know? I rather doubt that.”

“Whatever you say. You come up with the money, I’ll help you see it into the right hands.” Heffernan sighed like a man who knew he was well off, a smiling Irishman. “Klammer just kills me, Curtis. All this handsoff bullshit, all his deniability rap—”

“American cardinals are different. They tend to think their votes are sacred things rather than trading chips. I suppose he doesn’t want to touch any of this himself, he doesn’t know it ever happened. Bribes scare them—”

“Gifts, gifts!” Heffernan made a face. “The B word must never pass our lips. Ten million. What are we actually getting for the money, you and I? Is it, in a word, good for the Jews?”

“A rock-solid American core of support. You put that together with Fangio, the cardinals Callistus named who owe us … bottom line, Andy, is we name the next pope.
The Church stays on track. We see to it.” For a moment his mind stuck, hearing Sister Valentine, hearing her tell him that what she’d turned up could affect the choice of the next pope.…

“No defections in the ranks?”

“Why should anyone defect? Saint Jack is seventy-six years old. He won’t last forever and then … well, by then you’ll be wearing the red hat and the Church will have had a great man as pope for a time. And this old Church will have been moved on into the twenty-first century, going the only direction it can go if it’s going to survive. It’s a new world coming, Andy, and the Church has got to hit the ground running. It’s as simple as that.”

“I gotta hand it to you, you make it simple. The money is certain?”

“I never deal in mere probabilities, Andy.”

“Well, this calls for a libation.” Monsignor Heffernan reached for the Rémy Martin on a tray beside two handsome pieces of Baccarat crystal. He poured and handed one glass to Curtis Lockhardt. “To money well spent.”

The two men stood at the vast expanse of glass, drank a toast against the awesome backdrop of Manhattan. It was as if they stood on a man-made mountaintop, a peak they’d achieved together, Lockhardt leading the way with his faithful monsignor.

“To jolly old Saint Jack,” Lockhardt said quietly.

“To the future,” the monsignor echoed.

It was Heffernan who saw him first. He smacked his lips, looked up, and saw an old priest. Somehow he’d come in unheard, descended the steps while they’d been enjoying the view and congratulating themselves. Monsignor Heffernan cocked his head quizzically, his red face smiling sunnily. “Yes, Father, what can I do for you?”

Lockhardt turned, saw the priest. It was the skater. Lockhardt smiled, remembering the scene at the ice rink. Then he noticed the gloved hand coming up, and there was something about it …

While Lockhardt watched, strength draining from his body and being replaced with biological, chemical, uncontrollable shock, he tried in the fractional instant to
grasp what was happening. This priest was all wrong. He didn’t come from Curtis Lockhardt’s corridors of power. There was a gun in his hand.

It made a strange muffled sound, like an arrow hitting a wet target.

Andy Heffernan was slammed backward against the vastness of glass, silhouetted against the light, arms outstretched as if waiting for the nails to be driven home. The sound came again and the sunburned face came apart—irrevocably apart, ended in every way: the thoughts tumbled through Lockhardt’s brain as he stood; unable to move, to run, to throw himself at this gunman—the face he’d known so many years came apart in an explosion of blood and bone. A web of cracks appeared in the blood-spattered glass wall, radiating away from a hole the size of a man’s fist.

Lockhardt stared down at what was left of his friend, stared at the slippery crimson trail he’d left on the window. Lockhardt felt his way along the edge of the desktop, moving slowly as if in a dream, moving backward toward the body of Monsignor Heffernan. He was only barely functioning. Everything seemed so far away, dim, as if things were happening at the end of a tunnel.

Slowly the priest swung the gun around to face him.

“God’s will,” he said, and Lockhardt struggled to comprehend, struggled to decipher the code. “God’s will,” the old priest whispered again.

Lockhardt stared into the gun barrel, looked into the old priest’s eyes, but he was seeing something else, a little girl in a frilly bathing suit dancing and laughing and showing off in the rainbow of a sprinkler’s arc, dancing in the sunshine, on the wet, newly mown grass that clung to her toes as she danced.

Lockhardt heard his own voice, couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Maybe he was calling to the little girl, calling her name, trying to reach her before it was too late, trying to get there, scrambling back into the safety of the past, the safety of the net of time.…

The priest waited, his face kindly, as if he were giving Curtis Lockhardt time to reach safe ground.…

Then the old priest pulled the trigger.

Curtis Lockhardt lay with his head against the glass, where it met the carpet. He was drowning in his own blood, his lungs filling. There was a dimming of his vision, as if night were falling fast now, and he couldn’t quite see the prancing child anymore. In her place he could make out the shape of St. Patrick’s Cathedral blurring far below him. The spires seemed to be reaching toward him, like fingers pointing.

He saw a black trouser leg beside his face. He felt something blunt pressing against the back of his head.

Curtis Lockhardt blinked hard, trying to make out the sprightly dancing figure, but instead he took one last look at St. Patrick’s.