The Assassini (5 page)

I
remember that first day quite clearly.

I was summoned to lunch at his club by Drew Summerhays, the imperishable gray eminence of our well-upholstered world downtown at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. He possessed the clearest, most adaptable mind I’d ever encountered, and most of our luncheon discussions were both illuminating and amusing. And they always had a point. Summerhays was eighty-two that year, the age of the century, but he still ventured down to Wall Street most days. He was our living legend, a friend and adviser to every president since Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign, a backstage hero of World War II, a spy master, and always a confidant of the popes. Through his close relationship with my father I’d known him all my life.

On occasion, even before I’d joined the firm and subsequently become a partner, I’d had his ear because he’d watched me grow up. Once, when I was about to become a Jesuit novice, he’d come to me with advice and I’d had the lack of foresight to ignore it. Oddly enough, in such contrast to his austere, flinty appearance, he was a lifelong football fan and, particularly, a fan of mine. He had advised me to play a few years of professional football once I’d graduated from Notre Dame. The Jesuits, he argued, would still be there when I retired but now was my only chance to test my ability at the next level. He had hoped that fate might deliver me to the New York Giants. It might have happened, I suppose. But I was young and I knew it all.

I’d spent my Notre Dame years as a linebacker, caked in mud and crap and blood, all scabby and hauling around more than my share of free-floating anxiety and rage. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mayhem stuffed into a two-hundred-pound body. Sportswriter hyperbole, sure, but Red Smith had so described me. The fact was, in those days I was a dangerous man.

Nowadays I am quite a civilized specimen in my way, kept in one psychological piece by that fragile membrane that separates us from the triumph of unreason and evil. Kept intact and relatively harmless by the practice of law, by the family, by the family’s name and tradition.

Summerhays hadn’t understood the simple truth that I’d lost whatever enthusiasm I’d ever had for playing football. And my father wanted me to become a priest. Summerhays always thought that my father was a bit more of a Catholic than was, strictly speaking, good for him. Summerhays was a realistic Papist. My father, he told me, was something else, a true believer.

In the end I hadn’t played pro football and I had gone off to become a Jesuit. It was the last bit of advice I’d ever taken from my father and, as I recall, the last time I ignored a suggestion from Drew Summerhays. The price for my lack of judgment was high. As it developed, the Society of Jesus seemed to be a hammer, the Church an anvil, and the smiling linebacker got caught between. Bang, bang, bang.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t become the Jesuit my father had hoped for—young Father Ben Driskill, mighty Hugh’s boy, chucking old ladies under their chins at rummage sales, shooting baskets with the neighborhood toughs and turning them into altar boys, giving smelly old wino Mr. Leary the last rites, arranging for the teens’ hayride with Sister Rosalie from the Visitation Convent School, leading the caroling at Christmas … none of that for me. No, I said good-bye to all of it, turned in my rosary, hung up the reliable old scourge, packed away the hair shirt, kissed them all farewell.

I haven’t been inside a Catholic church in twenty years, except to honor my sister Valentine, who picked up the standard that I’d thrown down and became a nun
of the Order. Sister Val: one of those new nuns you kept hearing about, running around raising hell, driving the Church nuts. Val had made the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
and
People
. Old Hugh—to his considerable dismay, at times—had sired a hellion.

Val and I used to joke about it because she knew where I stood. She knew I’d gone inside the Church and glimpsed the machinery glowing red-hot. She knew I’d heard the sizzle. And she knew I’d been burned. She understood me and I understood her. I knew she was more determined than I, had more guts.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy chatting with Drew Summerhays about was football. Unfortunately, as I’d feared, football was on his mind that day. It was the season, late October, and there was no stopping him as we set out on foot for one of his many clubs. He wore his impeccable chesterfield with its perfectly brushed velvet collar, a pearl-gray homburg, his tightly rolled Brigg umbrella tapping the narrow sidewalk where the jumble of financial district workers seemed miraculously to part and make way for him. It had become a raw, blustery day down at our end of Manhattan, heavy smudged clouds like thumbprints moving in after a sunny, perfect morning. There was a taste of winter working its way up the island, starting with us. Grim gray clouds were pressing down on Brooklyn, trying to drown it in the East River.

As we sat down and commenced lunch, Summerhays’s dry, precise voice was going on about a long-ago game I’d played in Iowa City against the Hawkeyes. I made seven unassisted tackles and had two sacks that day, but the play that was lodged in the old man’s mind was the last of the game with Iowa on the Notre Dame four-yard line. The tight end had run a brutal little post pattern, I’d had to fight off two blocks, and when I looked up, the ball was floating toward the tight end in the back of the end zone. We were six points ahead, there was no time left on the clock. The end zone was flooded with receivers alert to the possibility of a tipped ball. So I’d made a frantic leap out of the mud sucking at me and intercepted the pass. Anybody standing there could have
done it. It happened to be me. My nose had been broken to start the fourth quarter and a gash over my eyes had blinded me with blood, but I got lucky and caught the damn thing. The interception became a Notre Dame legend that lasted the rest of the season, and Drew Summerhays, of all people, was remembering it and wanted to hear the whole boring story again.

So while he was bringing down all that old thunder from the skies I remembered how it had felt when it had struck me during a summer scrimmage that I quite suddenly
understood
the game. I could see it all, as if it were a single piece of fabric: the quarterback across the humped tails and helmets of the down linemen, his eyes moving, the cadence of his raw, hoarse voice, yes, I could somehow
see
his voice; I saw running backs tense; as if I could chart the movement of molecules, I saw the receivers shift their weight, strain at the leash. I saw the linemen thinking out their blocking assignments. I saw inside the quarterback’s head, I knew what he was thinking, how the play would develop, how I should react.

And from that day on I understood the bloody game, saw each play developing as if it were in slo-mo. I understood the absolute essence of what was going on and I became one hell of a football player. Made the
Look
All-American team and got to shake hands with Bob Hope on TV. Football.

You tell yourself later on that you learned a lot about life from playing football and maybe you did. You learned about pain, about the wild-eyed crazy bastard down in the silt at the bottom of your psyche; you learned about locker-room jock humor and gung-ho for the Fighting Irish and old grads who turned on you if you lost the fucking game; you learned that just because you were a football player it didn’t mean you were going to get anywhere with the blondes with big tits on the
Bob Hope Show
. If that was life, well, I guess you learned something about life from football.

But nothing I’ve ever known since quite equaled that moment of summer scrimmage when I saw it all so clearly. Drew Summerhays never understood football
like that. And what he understood I simply never grasped. Summerhays understood the Church.

I watched him complete the neat, surgical slicing and spearing of the last morsel of Dover sole which he ate without any accompaniment whatsoever: no salad, no vegetables, no rolls and butter. A single glass of Evian water. No coffee, no dessert. The man was going to live forever, and what I really wanted from him was the name of the person who did his shirts. I had never seen such starch work. Never a ripple, just shirts like perfect fields of snow. I felt like a peasant sopping up the sauce in which the last of my osso buco lay. His face was expressionless, unless patience with my appetite constituted an expression. He urged a choice Fladgate port on me and the wine steward scurried away to the club cellars. Summerhays slipped a gold hunter from his vest pocket, checked the hour, and got to the point of our luncheon, which had nothing to do with Notre Dame and old gridiron exploits.

“Curtis Lockhardt is coming to town today, Ben. Have you ever spent much time with him?”

“I hardly know him. I’ve met him a few times. That’s since I’ve been a grown-up. He used to hang around the house when Val and I were kids.”

“That’s one way of putting it. I’d have described him as your father’s protégé. Almost a member of the family. That’s how I’d have put it, anyway.” He ran a knuckle along his upper lip, then shifted away from the possible implications I might recognize about Lockhardt’s relationship with my sister. Whatever
that
might be. It was none of my business, what your new nuns got up to these days.

“He’ll be seeing me, of course,” Summerhays went on. “And your father, too … ah, thank you, Simmons. Precisely what I had in mind for Mr. Driskill.” Simmons placed the bottle on the table, allowing me the privilege of pouring my own. I slid it around the glass. The port had legs, I had to give it that. Simmons reappeared with a Davidoff cigar and a clipper. In no time at all I decided
that reminiscing about the Iowa game had been a small price to pay.

“And,” Summerhays said softly, “I’d like you to spend some time with him. It occurs to me that given some of the firm’s interests—” He may have shrugged. It was so subtle I may have imagined it.

“Which interests would those be, Drew?” I felt a draw play coming my way. I was being suckered into committing myself too early. If I didn’t watch out, Drew Summerhays would have a first and goal inside the ten.

“I wouldn’t try to mislead you,” he said. “We’re talking about the Church here. But, Ben, the Church is business, and business is business is business.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Drew. You’re saying business is business?”

“You have grasped the essence of my thought.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Two lawyers,” he said, “being cute.” A smile flitted across his thin lips. “You may have heard that the Holy Father is unwell?”

It was my turn to shrug.

“That’s why Lockhardt is coming to town. He’s firming up plans for choosing a successor to Callistus. He may want our counsel—”

“Not mine,” I said. “Most unlikely.”

“And I want you firmly in the picture. It is valuable to the firm that we have sufficient lead time when this sort of decision is being made. Or seriously contemplated.”

I rolled about ten dollars worth of port on my tongue. I puffed a bit on the cigar while he waited with vast serenity. “I thought the College of Cardinals still elected the pope. Did they change the rules and not send me the letter?”

“They haven’t changed anything. They pick the popes exactly as they always have. You know, Ben, you’ve got to keep a firm rein on your anticlericalism. Just a word of advice.”

“It’s served me pretty well so far.”

“Things change. Almost everything changes. But not, as it happens, the Church, not at its heart. You mustn’t
think I would ever ask you to compromise your principles.”

“Thank God for that, Drew.”

The irony was lost on him for the moment. “But the firm works closely with the Church,” he said. “There are things you should familiarize yourself with … things that are somewhat out of the ordinary run. Why not start with our friend Lockhardt?”

“Because the Church is my enemy. I can’t make it any clearer than that.”

“You’re losing your sense of humor, Ben. Your sense of proportion. I’m not suggesting that you aid the Church in any way. I merely want you to listen, to become more informed about our dealings. Forget your personal problems with the Church. Remember, business—”

“Is business.”

“That’s it in a nutshell, Ben.”

It certainly was turning out to be my day for the Catholics.

When I got back to the office Father Vinnie Halloran was waiting for me. I felt a groan welling up inside me. He was a Jesuit, about my age, and I’d known him a long time. The Society had put him in charge of handling the last will and testament of the late Lydia Harbaugh of Oyster Bay, Palm Beach, and Bar Harbor. It was a marginally nutty document that left the bulk of her vast estate to the Society of Jesus. There was a good deal of Jesuitical concern about its ability to withstand the challenge from three understandably truculent, shortchanged heirs presumptive.

“Look, Ben, the dowager empress of Oyster Bay gave two sons to the Jesuits. Is it any wonder that she wanted the Society to benefit in a large way? As her will clearly indicates, let me hasten to add. Hell, it isn’t as if the other three offspring—have you seen them, Ben? God at His cruelest—they aren’t getting shut out. Coupla million apiece for them. Greedy little bastards.” I hadn’t seen Vinnie in his clerical collar more than five times in my life. Today he wore a Harris tweed jacket, a striped
shirt, a bow tie. He looked at me in hopes of encouragement.

“They’re going to offer a lot of evidence that she was a batty old dipsomaniac for the last twenty years of her life. Very persuasive case, in my view. And under the influence she made a patently absurd will. Jesuits camped at her bedside. And so on.”

“Is that any way for
our
mouthpiece to talk?” Vinnie came from money so, contrary to popular belief, money meant a great deal to him. Halloran money from Pittsburgh was nothing like Driskill money from Princeton and New York, but it was enough to get you into certain habits.

“Is this really what the Church had in mind for you, Vincent? Hovering over the doubtful wills of rich old ladies?”