The Assassini (42 page)

Paris. The very word transported him back in time, brought back memories of old friends and of causes worth dying for, worth doing anything for …

Callistus rubbed the back of his neck, massaging the dull throb, and got slowly out of bed. The most recent painkiller was wearing off. Dr. Cassoni had told him it was essentially the same thing as heroin, and Callistus had told him to keep any further lurid bits to himself. But D’Ambrizzi had been right: Cassoni was a good man.

He was wearing a dark blue bathrobe over scarlet pajamas and velvet English slippers. He dumped another pill onto the tabletop, washed it down with a sip of tepid water. He lit a cigarette. The evening breeze sucked the smoke out past the draperies. He pressed a button on his tapedeck and out came
Madama Butterfly
. Poor Butterfly, ’neath the blossoms waiting …

He took his cane and left the sitting room, nodded to the male nurse sitting reading by a dim desk lamp, and went out into the hallway. The tapping of the cane sounded like a metronome. Since the crisis of the murders had heightened the tensions in Vatican City, since he’d given Indelicato and D’Ambrizzi their marching orders, Callistus had taken to prowling the corridors of his domain in the wee hours, as if by surveying the calm and quiet of the night, the guards, what he called the night shift, he could put his mind at ease. If only he could believe that somehow all would be well.

He rapped softly on a door in shadow, loud enough to be heard only if the man within were still awake.

“Come in, Holiness.” The voice was raspy, animal-like.

Callistus entered hesitantly. “I didn’t wake you, Giacomo?”

“No, no, I’m a night dweller these days, I’m afraid—like an old marmoset. Come in, I’m glad for the company. You’ll keep me from thinking.”

It had not always been quite so comfortable between them. For a time years earlier Giacomo had also sought the Throne of Peter, though they’d never really discussed it. Too many of their fellow cardinals had believed D’Ambrizzi was too useful down in the rough and tumble of the real world … and money had been passed around, palms crossed. Irreplaceable, they’d said, D’Ambrizzi
was simply irreplaceable, whereas Cardinal di Mona was, indeed, easily replaced. That was the “official story” back then. Well, D’Ambrizzi had read all the signs and thrown his support to di Mona, the younger man he’d known so long. Ironically, D’Ambrizzi had lived to see the brass ring come around again.

“The pain is bad?” D’Ambrizzi’s face was shadowed, giving him a sinister aspect.

“Not so bad. I did some praying before sleep. Then an hour or so later I woke up and began thinking about the death of Pius.”

D’Ambrizzi smiled. “Black comedy. Some blasphemous young fellow could write a very funny play.”

Callistus gave a small, hollow laugh. “What do you think of prayer?” He lowered himself carefully into a well-padded armchair.

“As our friend Indelicato would say, I don’t see the harm. But it’s out of character for you, isn’t it? What drove you to prayer, Salvatore?”

The sound of his old name cheered Callistus. “The same thing that produces most prayer. Fear. These killings …” He shrugged helplessly. “Where can we start? How do we begin to stop them? Why are these people dying? Why? That’s the important thing.” He shifted in the chair, seeking a more comfortable position. The painkiller was beginning to work. D’Ambrizzi seemed to have no comment. “When I first met you in Paris during the war, you were habitually insubordinate. No, please, hear me out. That was what impressed me so, probably because I knew that insubordination was beyond me. I heard people talk, I knew what they said about you. You had contacts in the Resistance, you were smuggling Jews out of Germany, you hid them from the Nazis—”

“Only with the assistance of Reichsmarshal Goering,” D’Ambrizzi said. “His wife, the actress, she was part Jewish—”

“You even hid them in the coal bins of our churches!”

“Infrequently, Salvatore.”

“My question is this, Giacomo. Were you ever
scared? So scared that you couldn’t imagine anything worse? Did your faith see you through the fear?”

“In the first place, there’s always something worse. Always. When it came to dealing with fear—faith never entered my mind, Salvatore. I was always too busy figuring out how to make my escape. Fear … With age, of course, the memory fails. Was I ever scared? Perhaps I was young and strong enough to believe I was invincible, immortal—”

“That’s sacrilegious, Cardinal.”

“How true! But the least of my sins. Look at old Pius and all his injections, doing all he could to cheat death.… Of course I was afraid. There was a German officer, he had been an acquaintance of Pius’s before the war in Berlin. Young fellow, no influence, but I had reason to go to his office from time to time. He had known Pius and he kept telling me how he had personally introduced Cardinal Pacelli to Herr Hitler and now look, D’Ambrizzi, he would say to me, Pacelli is pope and Hitler remembers who introduced them. He found that hugely satisfying. Every time he called me to his office—from his window we could look out at the Arc de Triomphe—every time he called me in to see him I had to vomit. Before I went and after I got back. He scared me.”

“What did you think he’d do to you, Giacomo?”

“I had it in my head that someday, just for sport, young Richter might take the Luger out of his huge holster and shoot me. Plant a weapon on me and say I’d tried to kill him. Yes, I was afraid Klaus Richter might kill me.” The cardinal sighed, coughed. “For sport. You know, they suspected me of certain activities—they would have had to execute a priest! Never a popular thing to do at such a time, when priests represented sanity in an occupied country.… I got to thinking later that young Richter must have been a terrible liar, he seemed much too young to have introduced Pacelli to anyone. Perhaps he was trying to impress me. In any case, yes, I was afraid, Salvatore.”

“Then you understand how I feel. I feel as if we are
all on some terrible list, suspected by someone of certain activities—I’m at a loss, Giacomo, I don’t know where to begin to find our way out of this … eight killings …”

D’Ambrizzi nodded. Callistus seemed so small beneath the long robe, so sick, so vulnerable. There seemed to be less of him each day. “You can’t help being afraid. You’re only human.”

“I’m afraid for what is happening to the Church, certainly. And I’m afraid for myself … I’m afraid to die. Not always but some of the time. Is that shameful, Giacomo?” He waited in the silence. “To think—there was a time when you wanted this job of mine.”

“That’s not actually true,” D’Ambrizzi said. “My supporters, I admit, were vocal. Eleven votes. That was my high-water mark in the enclave. Then talk of my ‘indispensable gifts’ arose and my support began to fall away. I didn’t mind, you know. I have a good life, Holiness.”

“How did you vote, Giacomo?”

“For you, Holiness.”

“What on earth for?”

“I thought you deserved it.”

The pope laughed aloud. “That, my old friend, can be taken two ways.”

“At the very least,” D’Ambrizzi said, smiling.

“Tell me honestly,” Callistus said after a moment. “What is this Driskill up to? What
can
he do? Does he know about all the other victims?”

“No. The less he knows, the more likely he is to survive, don’t you agree?”

“Of course. And we can’t have outsiders turning the Church upside down. He’d have to be stopped if he persisted—”

“Exactly.”

“Perhaps he’ll get tired after a time and give up.”

“That is my hope. But I’d have thought that the attack on himself might have dimmed his enthusiasm for the chase. I’d have been wrong, as it turned out.”

“Where is he?”

“Egypt, so far as I know.”

“We don’t know where they will strike again, do we?”

“No.”

“I feel as if history is standing still and we all hang in the balance. What is the pattern, Giacomo? Why these eight?”

Cardinal D’Ambrizzi shook his head.

Callistus turned away and looked out over the moonlit Vatican gardens. “Do you fear death?”

“I once knew a woman who was dying young. We spoke of what awaited her. She comforted me, Holiness, took my hand, told me I must believe her when she said that when the time comes you recognize death as your last best friend. I have never forgotten that.”

“The woman was a saint! She had wisdom … why have I none?”

The pope stood slowly, his mind already elsewhere, lost in memories of another time. The cardinal wrapped his arm around the smaller man’s shoulders, guided him to the window, where they stood staring into the night. There was no need to speak. Below them in the serenity of the gardens a lone priest walked the pathways, slipping in and out of the shadows, there one second and gone the next, like a phantom, like a killer …

Back in his bed Callistus’s mind turned restlessly, relentlessly, back to the past, as if it were a magnet too powerful for his steadily decreasing strength to deny. Paris, it was always Paris, too much for him to resist anymore. For so many years he had kept the memory at bay, refused to acknowledge that any of it had ever happened. He had effectively erased the past, but now it was as if his resources had slipped, the situation falling from his control, and, like magic writing, those days and that story were all reappearing at the end. He wondered if the others had forgotten. Had D’Ambrizzi forgotten? And old Bishop Torricelli, had he repressed it all only to have it return as he lay on his deathbed? And what of the taut, austere man from Rome who had come and knocked on his door in Paris, the man with pain and punishment
in his eyes … Indelicato, the inquisitor, did he now remember it all or not, as he stood only one step from the Throne of Peter himself?

He tossed and turned, trying not to remember but unable to fight the impulse, and he was back in the small churchyard on the wintry night, crouched shivering by the black wrought iron fence. There were three of them, Brother Leo and the tall blond priest and Sal di Mona, and while they watched there was murder done in the tiny graveyard among the tilted, antique headstones. They had held their breath and tried to keep their teeth from chattering and they had watched one priest kill another who had betrayed them all, kill him with his bare hands, snap him like a matchstick, they all three heard the crack of the bones.

Monsignor Sandanato was also having a bad night.

The dinner conversation with Sister Elizabeth had been upsetting though he’d tried not to show his feelings. What did she think she was doing? Who had told her—given her the authority—to complete Sister Valentine’s work? Work that had gotten Sister Valentine killed. What did she think she would do with the results of her digging? So she had identified the eight victims the Church had tried to keep unconnected in the public mind. So she had dug up all the old
assassini
stuff—who out there cared, in a time when scandals within the Church bank and potential schisms were cropping up more or less constantly? So she thought she was putting two and two together, eight murder victims and the idea of the
assassini
. What then? Judging from the way things were going, she was asking to get herself killed and he desperately didn’t want that to happen. The Church couldn’t afford to lose an Elizabeth. And besides that, there were all the other feelings he harbored toward her, feelings with which he was increasingly uncomfortable.

Then there was the problem of Ben Driskill.

Before leaving his Vatican office for dinner in the cardinal’s apartment, he’d received a call from Father
Dunn in New York. Dunn wanted to know if they’d heard anything about Driskill’s travels.

“No,” Sandanato had said, losing patience, “and I must tell you I resent wasting time having to worry about him. We have enough to worry about without Ben Driskill in Egypt irritating the people who may have killed his sister. He must have a death wish! And he has a wound in his back two feet long and two weeks old—Father, is he mad? Doesn’t he realize this is Church business? Why can’t he let the Church handle it?”

“You mean the way the Church is handling it now? That’s a question I wouldn’t raise right now if I were you.” Dunn was chuckling, increasing Sandanato’s annoyance. “And I’ll tell you—Church business-as-usual doesn’t impress Ben Driskill a whole lot. And he is rich, he’s spoiled, he gets his own way, all the Driskills do, they always have. He’s not grabby about it, he’s just sort of relentless. I’ve been asking around about our friend Driskill, and I’m getting a picture of this guy—you know what I think? I think he may just kill somebody himself. If you’re worrying about Driskill, my advice to you would be to start worrying about the other guys.”

“You mean, he’s out of our control, loose, and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“You seem to have grasped the essential message, Monsignor.”

“I’m afraid, whether you are or not,” Sandanato said coldly, “that he will indeed get himself killed.”

“I’m as worried about him as you are. That’s why I’m calling you, to find out if you’ve had any word from him or about him—”

“Well, as I said, the answer is no. And you’re telling me he can’t be stopped?”

Dunn chuckled dryly. “Not by me he can’t.”

“What do you suggest we do, Father?”

“Whattaya say we put prayer to the test, my friend?”

Alone in his spartan apartment, less than a ten-minute walk from the Gate of Saint Anne, Sandanato sat at a small, rickety desk by a window overlooking a quiet back
street two floors below. He poured three fingers of Glenfiddich into a jelly jar, swirled it, watching it bathe the glass. He had once attended a seminar in Glasgow and been introduced to the single-malt whiskies. Italians were not scotch drinkers but a Vatican monsignor could lay his hands on most things. The Glenfiddich was one of his few indulgences. He let the first swallow warm his gullet and belly and closed his eyes, digging his knuckles into the sockets and kneading them slowly. Things were going wrong, and getting drunk just might be the only rational response. He was listening to the great recording of
Rigoletto
. Callas, di Stefano, and Gobbi. Callas was soaring in the “Cara nome” and he waited, marveling at the body she brought to the highest, most rapturous notes.