The Assassini (65 page)

A
vignon lay in the slanting rays of sunshine beneath a fleecy cloudbank, the afternoon warm for November, the smell of a cleansing rain lingering in the perfect clarity of the day. The capital city of the Vaucluse, it was situated tight on the eastern bank of the Rhône River. The city itself seemed somehow inconsequential, dominated as it was by the eight-towered fortress built on a mighty rock two hundred feet above the rest of Avignon. It was the Palace of the Popes, dating from the Babylonian Captivity, squatting like a great sleepy despot, sunning itself above its subjects, a monster of legend watching over its loyal, terrified populace. It was colored a pale sandy beige in the glow from the dipping sun.

I’d visited as a tourist many years before. Now my mind was occupied by thoughts of the complexity of D’Ambrizzi’s nature, the simplicity of Horstmann’s, and the ambivalence of my own feelings toward Sister Elizabeth. But seeing the city again reminded me of what I’d learned about it the first time. It was difficult to imagine such a pleasant spot as the sewer of depravity and corruption Petrarch had described, but of course the Romans had hated the idea of the French popes in any case. Still, it must have been one of the racier stops on the tour back then. The Italians were fond of pointing out that the regular visitations of plague that swept the city during the captivity represented the vengeance of a wrathful God. When it wasn’t the plague, it was the
routiers
, the private armies of mercenaries who would rampage in off
the plains from the direction of Nîmes, requiring both gold, of which there was plenty, and papal blessings, which were if anything even more plentiful, in return for their retiring to pillage and raise hell elsewhere.

Upon our arrival there was a festive air, crowds milling in the streets, The ramparts built by the popes still circled the city, towers, gates, turreted battlements. The other famous tourist attraction was the Bridge of St. Bénézet, unfinished, sticking out into the Rhône, ending abruptly at the point where it was abandoned in 1680. The river had proved too powerful, so the four-arched bridge ended in midstream, going nowhere but into history, memorialized in the children’s song every French kid knows.

It all came back to me, what I’d squirreled away about old Avignon. I even remembered that John Stuart Mill had written
On Liberty
while living in Avignon, had arranged to be buried there in the Cimetière de Saint-Véran. But I wasn’t a tourist anymore, though the thought had occurred to me that I might wind up in the same graveyard if Horstmann was still watching.

I was returning as something other than a tourist. I hesitated to name what it was.

A hunter armed with a toy pistol?

A victim playing out the hand, waiting for the end?

Maybe it didn’t need a name.

The three of us made our headquarters at a nondescript businessmen’s hotel and Father Dunn made a call to let Ambrose Calder or his representative know he was in Avignon and following instructions. He came down to the lobby, where we’d been waiting, and told us that arrangements had been made for him, and only him, to see the man who had once been Erich Kessler. Dunn’s plan was first to put his mind at ease and then get word back to us about joining them. “He’s calling the shots,” Dunn said. “All I can do is ask.”

“Where is he?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not far from town was all he’d say. A car is coming for me. You two might as well kill time, have a look around town. Then check back here for messages.” He
took notice of the worried expression on her face. “It’s going to be all right. Our man Kessler is one of the good guys.” He looked at me with one of his crinkly grins. “Probably.”

“Unless he’s Archduke,” Elizabeth murmured, but Dunn didn’t hear her.

Sister Elizabeth and I made an uneasy pair. Flung together by Dunn and circumstances, I felt as if I’d wandered into the enemy camp. I knew how badly I was behaving, how cold and remote I must have seemed to her, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a question of my own survival. I was afraid of her, afraid of the power she had to hurt me and afraid of my feelings about her. I barely spoke to her but couldn’t stop looking at her. She was wearing a gray herringbone skirt with pleats riding on her hips, a heavy blue cable-knit sweater, leather boots, a Barbour field jacket. I knew we should somehow have kept her from coming with us. But she wasn’t easy to stop. As with Val, you’d have to kill her.

Frustrated and breathless from the crush of bodies, we found ourselves in a crowded square below the massive fortress walls of the palace. The sun had dropped from sight and it was suddenly cold. The palace walls rose like sheer cliffs. Shadows covered the square. Lights were strung in varied colors, carnival style, and the press of the crowd was insistent and damp and oppressive. Menace seemed to fill their laughter, echoed in their innocence.

At one side of the square a stage had been erected. A commedia dell’arte performance was in ragtag, bawdy progress,
il dottore
and the other stock characters shouting and capering improvisationally before the packed-in audience. The laughter cracked and rolled, spontaneous, organic, earthy, but all I registered were the masks of the performers which gave them the otherworldly, predatory look of disfigurement. Giant torches flamed at the corners of the stage, shadows leaping and jumping like hidden murderers from another play gathering in the night. All my thoughts were dark and dangerous and sinister. I saw nothing to make me laugh.

Sister Elizabeth spotted a small empty table on a raised platform outside a café, beneath blue and red and yellow lights strung on wires between damp, leafless trees, ghosts of summer. We sat down, managed to get a waiter’s attention, sat quietly while he squeezed through the maze of crowded tables. We got bowls of steaming coffee, sat warming our hands, staring at the players.

“You look so hopeless, Ben. Is it that bad? Or can we finish the job? Aren’t we drawing close to the answers now?” She sipped the coffee with its froth of steamed milk on top. I knew it would leave a little mustache of foam on her upper lip, and I knew she’d carefully lick it off. She asked the questions innocently, her eyes shifting from me, surveying the shadowy crowds, all their heads turned toward the squawk and strut of the performance.

“I don’t know. Hopeless? Jesus … I’m tired and I’m afraid. Afraid of getting killed and afraid of what I’ll find out. I came apart up there in Ireland, really came apart.…” I was going too far, dropping my guard. “But there’s no point in going into it now. It was bad, very bad. There’s something wrong with me.”

“You’ve been through too much,” she said.

“It’s not just that. You’ve been damn near killed and a man died … but you’re not full of despair and fear. Something’s gone wrong inside me. I can’t get rid of the sight of Brother Leo … blue and rubbery and that arm, beckoning to me. The closer I think I’m getting to the end, the real heart of the darkness where all the answers are—Rome, of course, I’m talking about Rome—the more afraid I am. I don’t know, maybe I’m not really afraid of getting killed anymore, maybe that’s not it—but I am goddamned afraid of what I’m going to find out. Val found out, I know she found out everything—” I shook my head and took a scalding swallow of coffee. Anything to break the spell of the confessional. What the hell was the matter with me?

“You’re exhausted. Mentally and physically. It’s all catching up with you. What you need is rest,” she said.

“He’s here, you know. He
is
here. You do know that, don’t you?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “Who?”

“Horstmann. I know he’s here.”

“Don’t say that. Please.”

“But he is. That’s all there is to any of this. Somehow he knows. You must see that. Somehow your precious Church is harboring him. Keeping him informed. He’s not just lucky, Sister. He’s being
told
. Oh, he’s here, right now. Here.”

She watched my outburst, then reached across the table for my hand. I felt her touch, pulled away from her. “So who’s behind it, Ben?”

“I don’t know. The pope, for God’s sake. How should I know? D’Ambrizzi’s a liar, maybe it’s D’Ambrizzi …”

She shook her head.

“Sister, your judgment is suspect. Forgive me, but you’re a loyalist, you’re one of them.” I was flailing in the darkness and I knew it. Just beating my gums. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I never had had the slightest idea.

We sat staring at the scene, locked within our own airtight compartments, unable to intersect or connect or communicate.

“Why do you hate me? What have I done to you other than love your sister and turn heaven and earth to find out why she was killed and by whom? I can’t help wondering—just how have I pissed you off so thoroughly?”

She took me by surprise. I offered the standard coward’s response. “What are you talking about? I’ve got more important things on what’s left of my mind than hating you, Sister.”

“I may be only a nun, like Dunn said, but I am not without a certain feminine sense of—”

“Okay, okay, spare me the details of your feminine intuition.”

“Ben, what is going on? Don’t you remember how things were when we were on the same team in Princeton?”

“Of course I remember. What’s the matter with you? You’re the one who quit the goddamn team! I remember our last conversations—”

“I remember them, too. And I remember the good times—”

“I treated you like a human being, a woman. That was my mistake. I suppose I should apologize—”

“What for? I am a human being and I am a woman!”

“You’re just a nun. Nothing more. That’s all that matters to you. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Why? Why do we have to leave it? Why can’t we clear it up? Your sister was a nun, do you recall? Did she cease being a person? What is your problem here? Did you hate her? Did she put that disgusted look in your eyes? You’re so damned transparent—”

“Val was my sister. You’re on thin ice here. Leave it.”

She sighed, staring at me. Her eyes were potent green fires. Her wide mouth was set, full of intractable tension. “I want to talk. I want to get this cleared up now so we can see this through as Ben and Elizabeth … friends, two people who like each other.…” Her two front teeth bit into her lower lip. Her eyes were so wide, pleading with me. “Whatever we are to each other.”

“All right,” I said. “The problem is your Church, the fact that you are a nun, that the Church—however wicked it may be—is all that ultimately matters to you.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. It was pointless. I wanted her gone, out of my life, erased from my memory. “It’s that simple. I can’t begin to understand any of it. I learned the lesson a long time ago but I forgot it, you made me forget it, I forgot what you’re like, all of you … it’s like a disease, it gets inside you, the Church, the Church, right or wrong. How can you serve it? How can you give yourself up to it, body and soul? It’s not noble, it’s not selfless—it has an endless appetite, it feasts on your life, consumes you like a great institutional vampire, it sucks the life out of you and leaves the husks of men and women in its wake, demanding everything and never relenting.… How could you give your life to the goddamn Church when there’s a real life out there, a place where you could be the person your instincts tell you you could be? I’ve seen that person and you’re killing her in the name of your Church.…”

I don’t know how she kept on an even keel during my tirade. For all I knew it may have been possible for her because she was a nun, one of God’s little jokes on me. Maybe her Church had given her the strength to cope with me as I was just then. She had the good sense to wait it out while the little man brought us fresh bowls of coffee and sandwiches. Maybe she thought she was waiting long enough for me to feel foolish and possibly even apologize. I could have told her, in that case, that there wasn’t enough time. Not if we waited for Gabriel’s trumpet would there ever be that much time.

“I didn’t set out to become a nun, of course. It just sort of happened. No, that makes it sound like an accident and it certainly wasn’t that. On the contrary, it was almost inevitable given the circumstances of my life and my particular personality. When the time came I made a conscientious, conscious decision to devote myself to the work of the Church. I’m going to spare you some of the sappier details … just give you an outline of sorts.

“I grew up in the Eisenhower years—that’s a code word, are you with me? And my parents were very devout Catholics, well off, a Buick Roadmaster and an old Ford Woodie station wagon, my father was a doctor and my mother gave every spare moment to the Church. My grandparents and all my cousins and friends and, well, everyone I knew—all Catholics. My brother Francis Terhune Cochrane, that’s our family name, Cochrane, by the way—he talked about becoming a priest. All the boys did, naturally, and all the girls went through their nun phase. But it was usually just a phase. Naturally.

“When I was ten John Kennedy, a Catholic, was elected president. My God, what rejoicing! We lived in Kenilworth, near Chicago, and Mayor Daley had won—or stolen, they said—the election for Kennedy, and that made it all the better. It was as if we had won
our
civil rights battle. A Catholic in the White House—you and your family must have felt much the same way, though your father would have had a pipeline into the White House, I suppose, and mine was still just a doctor—but, you know, what a brave new world it was! But in what
seemed like no time at all everything began to go to pieces. Everything changed … I was thirteen when Kennedy was murdered. The Beatles came along and turned all the music upside down—pretty amazing stuff for a thirteen-year-old girl. The Rolling Stones, rebellion and smoking dope and people dropping acid and
Hair
and Vietnam and having a boy spreading your legs and touching you when you were all wet for God’s sake and the Catholic guilt! I’m telling you—particularly when you liked what the boy was doing and you liked to do things to him—my God, we are talking mass confusion! And then there was Bobby Kennedy staring up into the bright lights with blood seeping out of his head and Martin Luther King on the motel balcony and Kent State and Woodstock and Bob Dylan and the police riot in Chicago in ’68 and I got a busted lip in the melee.…