The Assassini (67 page)

I came to life, hurling myself back into the dense crowd, shoving my way past the same people I’d just disturbed moving in the other direction. Someone swore at me, shoved me angrily with a hand holding a bottle of wine that splashed my sleeve, but I was past, already edging toward the darkness beyond the colored lights.

I had to get away. I took one look back over my shoulder, saw a continuing commotion. The man in the funny hat was coming after me.

I felt the bulge in my coat pocket. The gun.

It was plastic. It was a toy.

I had to get away.

Out of breath, heart pounding, I stopped in a narrow street, then ducked into an alleyway, flattened myself against the crumbling wall. Even the side streets were clogged and streaming with gabbling tourists, actors in a variety of costumes like refugees through time from an old Hollywood back lot. I sagged against the wall to catch my breath. When I looked up I was staring into a man’s glimmering eyes. A hooded face drawn close to mine. I smelled rancid breath as he grunted and, like Death, held
out his hand. His fingers brushed my face and I pulled back, bumped my head, swore at him.

He grunted again, jabbed the hand at me, a beggar dressed as a monk. Not Death, not yet. I brushed the hand away and pushed him backward. I must have frightened him. He stood his ground for a moment, rocking back on his heels, then flinched, his face still hooded by the cowl.

“Get the hell out of my way.”

He looked back at the street. He hadn’t come alone. There were several more hooded figures watching us, like the chorus in a very bad fantasy. We all stood still, then I realized that maybe they really were monks, the
pénitents noirs
who were said to still maintain two chapels in the town. I’d seen them years before, dark figures who marched hooded and barefoot through the streets of Avignon, dating back to the
pénitents noirs
of the fourteenth century, laymen, flagellants, who had counted kings of France in their number. Now they stood staring at me, either actors or monks or thieves, waiting.

I pushed past the one who’d confronted me and went toward the others who blocked my way. I said something angrily. They grudgingly parted for me in absolute silence. I looked down, realized I had a gun in my hand, just visible in the shadows. They backed away, watching me, the gun. Then I was past them, jamming the silly thing back into my pocket.

Back in the street, shouldering against the grain, past knots of street performers, looking for the little man. A fire juggler caught my eye, flames darting through the darkness. Where was Elizabeth? What was going on?

The man in the Tyrolean hat stood near the juggler, his face suddenly illuminated by the burning clubs flying through the air. He was straining to see in the smoky darkness, his eyes swiveling toward me.

I was sure he saw me just as I broke away, bumping into sidewalk tables where people sat with their wine and coffee, bundled up against the chill. I was past a flower cart, past yet another group of commedia players, their hook-nosed masques turning like malevolent birds to peck at me, draw my blood. Looking back past the
onlookers gathered about the capering Arlecchino doing his shtick, I saw the man pursuing me stopped momentarily by the
pénitents noirs
. I ducked around another tight corner while he was trying to extricate himself, ran down the narrow street, turned again, slipping on cobblestones, trying to lose myself.

I had to think. I had to come to rest somewhere. And I had to find Elizabeth.

Summerhays, of all people …

What had brought him to Avignon? What did he know? What was his connection with the little man? Did Summerhays know about Ambrose Calder? Did he know someone had tried to kill Elizabeth? Did he know about Horstmann?

Drew Summerhays had always seemed to know everything.

That’s what my father had always said.

From the doorway where I stood I felt the earth shake and heard a tremendous bang, saw an enormous pattern of comets and meteors, blue and white and pink, showering down from the black sky, casting a shifting patina of garish light. I jerked backward, cracked my head again, this time on a low, rough lintel, felt another shock and heard the bang and awed response from the streets.

They were merely the initial shots of an endless salvo of fireworks raining down from the heights of the palace. The
son et lumière
exhibition I’d noticed announced on handbills and posters earlier. The heavens seemed to twist and froth with gold, green, silver, red, orange, a continuing patchwork of lavish explosions.

I didn’t know where the little man was, but I dreaded him as if he were another furious hound running me unceasingly through the tight, unfamiliar streets. Peering out from my shadowy cubbyhole, I saw yet another group of
pénitents noirs
clustered before a small church squeezed between cafés and shops across a compact square, a splashing fountain merry in the center. Children in down jackets stared intently, like the hooded monks, in the direction of the thunderous, wondrous cacophony unleashed overhead.

The square was packed. Everyone in Avignon was out for the night, viewing one of the countless performances, watching the fireworks, soaking up the sights and smells of a festival. The explosions battered the night like heavy mortar fire.

I couldn’t see the little man, or the pointed crown of his hat, or the feather. Then I began looking for Sister Elizabeth, wondering where she could have gone. I was fighting the Irish panic, the sight of Leo’s beckoning arm.

I set out across the square, heading for the little church. It looked sadly ignored for the moment, dark, unable to compete with the masked actors and the artillery whacking away from the palace.

I slid inconspicuously through the rapt observers and, moving from shadow to shadow, climbed the few steps and crossed to the heavy wooden door with its iron bands, pulled it open only far enough to slip inside, and stood sweating and panting in the darkness, holding the door shut behind me. It seemed larger inside than out and was both stuffy and cold, dry and damp, smelled of candles and wax and smoke and incense. There wasn’t a hint of movement in the air. Candles burned, still, steady, tiny, and the reverberations of the fireworks seemed to snuffle at the stone walls, nudging them ever so slightly. I felt my way along the wall and down one side toward the altar. The pillars were seamed, heavy, thick. Finally I sat down in a wooden chair, of which hundreds were arranged in rows on the smooth stone floor, and took a deep breath. Damn. I was never sure, was I hunter or hunted? Tonight, anyway, the answer was easy.

I was out of ideas, stymied, soaked with sweat. I felt as if my soul had just given up the battle and melted. The toy gun in my pocket banged against the next chair. It sounded like a pillar falling down. Everything was out of control and I couldn’t understand any of it. Who was chasing whom? Who was winning? No, better not ask that one.

I didn’t know what to make of Summerhays, but the little man whose throat had been run through a lawn mower was enough to make me distrust the old man, mentor or” not, enough to make me think of a secret
world, an unholy coven of necromancers, plotting, plotting … as if Summerhays were served by a private curia of his own, as if he were a kind of homemade pope. What was Summerhays up to? He’d always been up to something, why not now? A pope was dying, the game was afoot.…

I felt as if I were watching the strands of a story as old as time being pulled tight, like a net, trapping me, strangling my life away … like a wire biting at my throat.

Had there been a sound behind me?

Something soft, stealthy, almost hidden by the explosions booming outside.

Christ, was I hearing things?

Could he have seen me even in the cramped, crazy crush of the little square? Was he here with me now? Why did I
know
the little man had a knife? Was it the mess that had been made of his throat?

The door at the front of the church was shutting. I almost felt the intrusion of air, like a sigh, from outside in the square.

There was someone in the church with me.

But the dead stillness returned. I felt for the toy pistol. Reflexive idiocy. It caught in the pocket, slid from my fingers, and clattered like the family silver on the stone floor. Damn thing sounded as if it were echoing down the centuries. I retrieved it, waited, dripping sweat from my nose. I was freezing.

Nothing.

I slid off the chair and moved back into the deeper darkness beside one of the pillars. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up, braced, dancing and singing a song. Somehow, through the inky streets and the throbbing crowds, the little bastard had found me, run me to ground in a church.

Perfect.

Wherever he was, he was damn good at being quiet. All I heard was my own breathing and the
crrrummmmmp
of the explosions overhead. The fireworks would go off, I’d see the glow, distorted beyond the stained glass windows. A ghostly angel seemed to be descending, coming down through the bursts of flak.

Then I heard a slight shuffling sound, a footstep or two, but they could have been anywhere, all the way across the rows of chairs or muttering along behind me. Sound slid along the walls, bounced among the pillars, like a children’s ball loose in the street. Somewhere he’d been moving, quietly, carefully, looking for me.

“Mr. Driskill?”

I froze again, clutching my gun, flattening myself against the pillar. Where had his voice come from? All I had to do was reveal myself. And I’d be dead.

“Now, be reasonable, Mr. Driskill. We must talk.”

He was moving on crepe-soled shoes, soundless, like the fog seeping in at night. I moved backward across the side aisle, feeling for the wall behind me. When I reached it, I let out a tiny sigh. A dim patch of grayness lay to my left, where something of the night sky with its flickering explosions, bursting colored lights, filtered through a broken pane or two of stained glass across the way. If I could get across the width of grayness, I could continue along the wall and try to find a doorway, a back door out of the trap I’d set myself.

What I needed was a way out into the night. Any way. How had he followed me? I’d been so sure I’d lost him … yet, here he was.

Who was he? And what was he to Summerhays?

The questions were going off in my head like the explosions in the night sky. I felt like the poor hopeless bastard who’s fallen into the rattler pit.

I sensed a movement, a ripple of atoms and molecules, invisible, silent, but then figuring the hell with it, I took the risk, took the two steps across the faint bar of light, holding my breath, my hand in the pocket clutching the gun, sucking up against the wall, looking back the way I’d come.

The hand came from the darkness, clamping like a vise around my arm. He was breathing very softly beside my ear.

“Mr. Driskill, it’s time for you to be careful … there is a very sharp knife right … here.” I felt the point prick through the jacket and shirt and nip at my back. He
pulled my arm slowly from the pocket of the trench coat. “Give me the gun, Mr. Driskill.”

“Look, it’s …”

“Shhhh.” He took the gun from my fingers. “Oh, Mr. Driskill … this is a … toy.” He handed it back to me. “Be careful,” he said softly.

He pushed me gently into the bar of gray light and I turned very carefully to see him, to see the scar and the silly hat.

But I’d made a mistake. I had the wrong man.

The point bit at me again.

“Go home, Mr. Driskill. Go home and I will pray for you. Go where you can do some good. I do not wish you harm. You. The nun. Just go … away.”

He fixed me with the bottomless eyes, the faint light shifting on the flat lenses.

Horstmann.

Then he was gone.

I was alone in the church.

I
stood at the end of a muddy lane, rutted and slippery, listening to the dogs barking at the moon glimpsed through running clouds. I’d parked the rented Citroen on the wet, sucking shoulder as Dunn had instructed me to do. His call had come through not long after I’d arrived back at the hotel.

“But how the hell am I supposed to know if it’s the right muddy lane?” I was trying to control my temper. It had been a difficult couple of hours.

“Are you all right? You sound a little peaky—”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Well, you’ve got to calm down and get this straight. Is Sister Elizabeth with you?”

“Not exactly. Now, tell me again, which muddy lane?”

“Just park the car,” he’d said, “and get out and hold your breath. You’ll hear the dogs. If you don’t, you’re in the wrong place. Wear your Wellies, my boy.”

Now I could hear the dogs and I turned back to the absurd little car where Elizabeth sat quietly, staring out into the ground fog rising from the wet fields. We had spoken little since I’d found her in the hotel lobby. There was nothing to say. I owed her an apology and it was beyond me. I knew I was right about her and her Church and her priorities, how they would slash and wound me: I couldn’t collapse in the face of the fact that she was also a human being who’d trusted me, talked to me. That wasn’t the issue.

I wanted to tell her the story of what had just happened
to me. Summerhays, the man with the throat. And Horstmann waiting for me, Horstmann with his hand on my arm …

Horstmann.

When I’d realized he was gone, it was too late to find him. There was no sign of him in the crowds in the square before the church. No sign of Summerhays and his companion.

It might all have been a dream. I felt as if there was just the outside shot that I was living in a dream, but of course it wasn’t a dream. I felt like Basil Fawlty having a bad day, hoping it’s a dream, banging his head on his typewriter, and concluding no, no, it’s real. No, no, it was real. It had been Summerhays and it had been Horstmann and I wished I could have told Elizabeth but I couldn’t.

I could deal with the fact of what had happened during the past two hours. What I couldn’t understand was what hadn’t happened.