The Assassin (8 page)

‘It means nothing to me. Tell me about him. Is he rich?'

‘One of the richest men in the world.' Elizabeth said. She saw him put his coffee down without drinking it and she smiled. ‘He's worth a hundred million dollars, maybe more. He owns newspapers and television networks, real estate oil wells, an airline—I don't know what else. He's a big man politically, too. He has a lot of power.'

‘With all that,' Keller said it slowly, ‘he could be President.'

‘No,' she shook her head. ‘He's never wanted that. But he's suddenly taken it into his head to help someone else be President. I think he feels it's more fun to pull the strings. He's decided to support Casey. You know who he is, surely?'

‘No,' Keller said. His mind was working while the girl talked. He had forgotten her yellow hair, the pale skin showing at the collar of her housecoat where the top buttons were undone. He was thinking about the rich politically powerful uncle. If he was going to point the target he would never have used his niece … But if he were the target … It didn't make sense.

‘Can I ask you something?' Elizabeth said. He drank his coffee and waited. ‘What have you come for? You said you didn't know, but that can't be true. What have you really come for?'

She had a directness which surprised him. She asked a question and expected an answer, without guile. Perhaps American women were like this; perhaps they behaved with equality towards their men. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘You shouldn't keep asking questions; I told you before. The less you are mixed up with me the better, just in case I find myself in trouble.'

‘Oh, you won't,' Elizabeth said. She had a pretty laugh and it was the first time he had heard it. ‘You don't know my uncle. If you're under his wing, nobody can lay a finger on you.'

‘I'm glad to hear that,' Keller said. ‘I feel much easier.'

‘Forgetting about the passport—what are you really, then?' she said. ‘French?'

He nodded. ‘I'm French. Half-French anyway. I think my father was a German, but I don't know. I was brought up in an orphanage and they didn't have much information for me. I know I'm a bastard and that's about all.

‘That makes us both orphans,' Elizabeth said. ‘My parents were killed two years ago. All I have is my uncle, and though I'm fond of him he isn't exactly a second father.'

‘You loved your parents,' he said. ‘You must have had a happy life as a child. That's what gives you that look.'

‘What look?'

‘The look that says, “The world belongs to me!”. I thought it was money. I think it was your happy childhood. You're entitled to that look.'

‘I'm not,' she said. ‘Even if I had it. My childhood was extremely happy because of one person. My mother. She was what made my life from as far back as I can remember. She was the most gentle, interesting, artistic person—how she ever married my father I can't think! He was such a Cameron, just like my uncle. Nothing existed except business and money; he adored my mother but he couldn't have been further from her than we are now to Beirut. They had nothing in common at all, except me.'

‘Maybe your mother loved him,' Keller said. Suddenly he thought of Souha. ‘Women can love without any reason in it. Which is nice, for some men. Like your father.'

‘I don't think she loved him,' Elizabeth said. ‘But she was too kind to let him know it. She was that sort of person. Camerons don't think about themselves like ordinary people; they don't think about whether they're loved or not. They take it for granted they are.'

‘Are you like that too?'

‘No,' she said. ‘No, I've no illusions about myself. In spite of the “look”, or whatever you call it. I thought I was in love once, a long time ago, and I thought he was in love with me. I found out very quickly that it wasn't so. He came. He saw. He conquered. And he went. I believe I mentioned marriage or some silly joke like that. He used to stay in your room,' she admitted. ‘I had it done up for him. But it was a long time ago; four years. Nobody's been there since.'

‘You don't have to explain to me,' Keller said. ‘It's none of my business. By the way, you cook well. I didn't know rich women knew how to cook.'

‘Maybe in Europe they don't. In America we're brought up to be useful, independent. There's none of this servant fetish I find abroad. I can cook, I can sew, I can drive any make of car on the market, and I'm pretty good with children. I don't do a job because—well, I don't need to—and after Mother died I didn't want to be tied down. What do you want for lunch? Or we could go out, if you liked. You've never seen New York! We could have a real tour—Central Park, the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum, the Statue of Liberty! Why don't we do that?'

‘I can't go anywhere,' he said. ‘Someone may telephone. But you don't have to stay here. You don't have to be shut in all day.'

‘What a pity,' Elizabeth said. ‘It would have been fun. I love the city; I would have enjoyed showing it to you.'

‘I would have enjoyed seeing it,' Keller said. He hadn't wanted to go out anyway. Parks and museums were not his line. She looked flushed and young, very young, like a child deprived of a treat. Immature—that was the word for her. Rich and sophisticated, with a knowledge of the world which the women he knew could never claim, but compared with any of them this American girl was basically naive, someone who had looked through the window of life but never opened it. He thought of Souha again, of her hungry face and cavernous eyes, already full of the knowledge which this girl lacked; the knowledge of pain and fear and deprivation. He had always thought of Souha as a child, even when they made love. He had treated Elizabeth Cameron like a woman the day before, and she had crumpled. She had nothing behind her but a lover who didn't want to get married. And not much of a lover either, to have left that innocence behind him.

‘I'm always asking questions,' she said suddenly. ‘I'd like to ask another one. Are you married? Do you have a girl?'

‘I have a girl,' Keller said. ‘In Beirut.' He stubbed out the cigarette and slid back a little from the table. He was not going to talk about Souha to anyone. He was not going to describe her or discuss her. He could imagine what Elizabeth Cameron would think of a refugee from the Arab camps. He stared deliberately at the open neck of her gown. It was made of some soft green stuff, with a long row of velvet buttons. He didn't want to talk about the Arab girl he lived with in Beirut to this girl, with her breasts showing their shape under the row of little buttons.

‘Maybe you'd better get dressed,' he said.

‘All right.' Elizabeth stood up; she saw his eyes on her, and one hand came up defensively. ‘It's none of my business. I'll go out and get something for lunch. You make yourself at home.'

Martino Antonio Regazzi, Cardinal Archbishop of New York, was born in downtown Manhattan, where the Italian immigrants were living in such fecundity that the district was known as Little Italy. His parents were poor even by neighbourhood standards; his father worked in a shoe factory uptown, which closed in the Depression, and for the next three years he drew Assistance, and hung round the streets making a few dollars getting other people cabs, or sweeping, when the weather ran foul. Snow was a godsend because it meant money. There were ten children in the two rooms where the Regazzis lived. All his life until he went to the seminary Martino spent his days and nights in a crowd of bigger and small children, relatives, his mother and father. When his father died it didn't make any more room. He was never alone, never quiet. Life was a noise that altered in volume but never became silence. Even at night it was noisy. Some snored, the baby cried, his mother woke up to feed and crooned while she suckled; the truckle beds with two and three bodies in them creaked. The tap in the kitchen living room had a maddening drip, and a knock that seemed to come only between four and six in the morning. There were big families up above and Sicilians on the floor below. They fought like jaguars, and the woman used to scream and pray when her husband hit her.

It was a nightmare in which to grow up; his family lacked everything material. They were often hungry, nobody ever had new clothes, and when his parents sought comfort behind the old curtain they hung across the corner to hide their bed, the children lay awake and listened. It was the happiest place Martino had ever been in, and in twenty-eight years since the war he had been in many places, from the foxholes in Iwo Jima, to the Archbishop's Palace in New York where he lived. His description of his home and his family was one of the best things he had ever done on TV. It brought a hundred thousand letters, jammed the studio switchboards all night, and won nation-wide coverage.

He had made them live for the watching people of America, his brothers, his sisters—the brother who went to reform school, the other two who went into the Army and got killed, his sisters who married and began their lives in the same environment as their parents. The statue of the Sacred Heart which stood in their kitchen in the place of honour; the lamp which was never without oil, no matter what they had to do without to buy it. The way Regazzi told that story made the professionals cry with envy. He spoke with clarity, with simple phrases describing simple people. He dignified their poverty and their squalid conditions, he spoke of his mother with gentle pride and his father with compassion. He was a poor man who had become a Prince of the Church. He hoped that this title wouldn't deceive anyone into thinking he wasn't still a poor man. As poor in possessions as the Carpenter who had only a seamless cloak when he died. And then the soft narrative became an impassioned attack upon poverty, drawing the distinction between the poor as people and the infamous conditions in which they had to live. Regazzi spoke and socialism thundered from the screen, from the mouth of a Catholic cardinal. It was for this he had exposed his family, described their sorrows, their relationships. To rouse the conscience of the people. And not just his people; but the people of America.

What really made the cynics weep was that they knew he meant it. Those close to him, like his secretary Monsignor Jameson, knew that Regazzi spent an hour in prayer before he made his famous TV appearances. He knew that he prepared for every public appearance, perfected every sermon, presented himself with a film star's flair for the best profile and the winning smile, for just one object. To better humanity in the name of God. Regazzi had many critics; most of them were within the Church itself, where his publicity seeking and rhetoric from the pulpit were disliked and contrasted with the dignified neutrality of his predecessor. Regazzi was in his early fifties. He had a good war record as a young chaplain with the Marines, and a dazzling career as a theologian and sociologist. When he became Archbishop of New York it was part of the revolutionary process taking place within the Catholic Church. The fiery Italian was made Cardinal as a proof that in spite of the conservative element in the hierarchy, reform was blessed by the Vatican. Monsignor Jameson was ten years older than the Cardinal. He liked a quiet life and a comfortable routine. For the last three years he had been chased like a hare, travelling, investigating, following Regazzi into his furious leap into the public eye, and loathing every moment of it all. Privately he described the Archbishop's Palace as a three-ringed circus, with Regazzi in the centre. He would have liked to retire but the Cardinal wouldn't let him. Most of the former Cardinal's officials had been replaced; for some reason Jameson couldn't understand, he was kept on and there was no release in sight.

The Cardinal worked until one or two in the morning, and was saying Mass by six. He expected his secretary to be available, and this meant that while Jameson might doze in a chair in the outer office, he dared not go to bed. It was past midnight, and the Cardinal's light was shining under the door. The Monsignor settled into the chair, trying to get comfortable, and drifted into a light sleep. He woke with a jerk that brought the spectacles balanced on his forehead down on to his nose as if it were a party trick. The Cardinal was beside him. He blinked into the handsome, sallow face, gaunt with secret fasting and regular lack of sleep, and was relieved to see no sign of anger. Regazzi never allowed himself to lag; he sometimes showed impatience with those who did.

‘I have some letters for you, Monsignor,' he said. ‘Will you come in please?'

‘I'm so sorry, Eminence,' Jameson was stammering. ‘I just closed my eyes for a moment to rest them and I must've dropped off …'

‘You're tired,' the Cardinal said. He was behind his desk and in the harsh light of the anglepoise lamp he looked exhausted. Jameson hadn't noticed it before, and he was shocked. The man was driving himself beyond endurance. In the first month after his elevation to the See, someone on the administrative staff had said, ‘The guy's a fanatic. The caretaker told me he spends half the night in the chapel. He thought someone had broken in! We're all going to have one hell of a time with him—you'll see.' And they had seen—those he hadn't replaced with younger men, men who shared his crusading ideals. Only me, Jameson thought wearily, I'm the only one he kept. It'll be another hour before I get to bed!

On a sudden impulse he said, ‘You ought to get some rest, Eminence. You look buttoned up. Give me the letters and I'll have them ready by the morning. You go to bed.'

Regazzi smiled when he was being interviewed; he smiled when he spoke in public and when he was being photographed. Those who worked with him were not often favoured in the same way. He smiled at Jameson then, and patted the top of his desk very lightly. ‘Sit down a moment. I'd like to talk to you.'

It's coming, the older man thought. He's going to tell me I'm being replaced. I'm too old, the job's too much. I gave him the opening by saying
he
was tired. And for some reason he felt disappointed, and not relieved at all.