The Assassini (10 page)

“I’d expect you to take that position. There’s no point in arguing about it. Val and I are Catholics—”

“Funny, how I’m the one with all the scars—”

“If I were you, Benjamin, I wouldn’t presume to know what scars others may try to keep hidden. And perhaps we could, just for tonight, be spared your poor battered psyche.”

I had to laugh. Val would have laughed, too. It was an old battle by now and we both, Dad and I, knew there was no winner. We’d fight on and on until one of us was dead and then, if it had ever mattered before, it surely wouldn’t matter anymore.

“Am I close,” he said, “on this Val and Curtis thing?”

“She never talked about it with me.”

“Just as well, assuming the advice you’d have given her.” Suddenly he put a meaty hand up to his eyes and I realized how close he was to tears. It wasn’t easy, not even for an old warrior. He stood up, halfheartedly poked at the fire. Sparks showered onto the hearthstones.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny two o’clock, a thin, reedy sound like an antique harpsichord. I got up, took a cigar from his humidor, lit it, and went to the far end of the room, stood near his covered easel, stood looking out the window into the rotten night. I was unexpectedly thinking about a dog we used to have, a Lab called Jake, who used to go crazy trying to take a bite out of a basketball. When he died Val insisted on burying a deflated basketball with him so he could get a grip on the damn thing all through dog eternity. Well, my father and I couldn’t seem to get hold of things, what had happened to Val, what had happened to our world.

He yawned and said something about Lockhardt and I turned back questioningly. “Callistus is dying. I don’t know the time projection, but it can’t be long now. Curtis is getting ready in that busy way of his to back another winner.
Pick
another winner. He wants to talk to me. You can bet he’s raising money.”

“Who’s his man?” I asked.

“Someone to lead the Church toward the twenty-first century. Whatever that means.”

“Well, good luck to him.”

“You never know about Curtis. I suppose it might come down to D’Ambrizzi and Indelicato. Fangio, maybe, as a compromise.” He looked at that moment as if he didn’t care: it wasn’t true. He was just worn down.

“Who’s your man?”

He shrugged. He’d played a lot of poker in his time.
He had a candidate, a hole card, for playing at the last moment.

“I’ve never asked you this,” I said, “but I’ve always wondered—why did you bring D’Ambrizzi back here after the war? I mean, it was great for Val and me, he was the perfect playmate, but what was your reason? Did you know him during the war?”

“It’s a long story, Ben. He needed a friend. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“One of your OSS stories? The ones you never tell—”

“Let’s just drop it, son.”

“Suits me.” D’Ambrizzi, Indelicato, Fangio. They were just names to me. Except for my memory of D’Ambrizzi.

My father’s mysterious OSS days tended to give me a bit of a pain. So long ago and he still treated them as state secrets. Once he and my mother had taken us to Paris for a summer holiday, suites at the George V and
bateaux mouches
on the Seine and the Winged Victory at the Louvre and mass at Notre Dame and my first copy of a P. G. Wodehouse from Shakespeare & Co., close by the Seine. In some ways the high point of the trip—no pun intended—was a visit to the Eiffel Tower presided over by one of father’s old friends from OSS days, Bishop Torricelli, who was by then quite an elderly man. He had the longest, most thoroughly hooked nose I’d ever seen, and I’d heard his nickname was Shylock. He carried a pocketful of little anisette candies. Val went for them in a big way. He told us the joke about Jacques and Pierre who had been lunching at the same small out-of-the-way restaurant three or four days a week for twenty years. Finally one day Jacques asked Pierre why they’d been going to the same place for twenty years and Pierre said, “Because,
mon ami
, it’s the only restaurant in Paris from which you cannot see the damned Eiffel Tower!” We didn’t really get it, but Val laughed like a madwoman because she was really hooked on that candy.

I heard my father and Torricelli make a few passing references to Paris under the Nazi occupation and Torricelli joked about my father emerging from a coal cellar
after two weeks of hiding from the Gestapo, how he’d opened his mouth to speak and borne quite a resemblance to Al Jolson singing “Swannee,” all coated in coal dust. It must have been quite a time, dangerous and exciting. But after all, he was my father, just my father, and it was difficult to see him as a spy, dashing through the night to blow up power stations and ammo dumps.

“You know, Ben,” he said, speaking slowly, his brain half submerged in a small lake of Laphroaig, “I hate the idea of having to tell Curtis about this. He hasn’t had to deal much with things that haven’t gone his way. He’s led a happy life, all things considered.”

“Well, he’s in for a rough patch now.” I didn’t give a damn about Curtis Lockhardt. He was one of
them
. And I wasn’t wasting a whole lot of sympathy on my father, who was about as vulnerable as one of the gargoyles hanging on the walls of Notre Dame. I was sorry for my little sister, Val.

“I’ll tell him tomorrow—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’ll be on the tube and in the papers tomorrow. Val’s a celebrity. No, he’ll hear about it before we have to tell him. We’ll have to mop up after his grief. I’m not looking forward to that.”

He fixed me with one of his X-ray stares across the top of his glass. “You can be a reprehensible shit at times, Ben.”

“Like father, like son? It’s all in the genes.”

“Probably,” he said after a while, “quite probably so.” He cleared his throat and finished his drink. “Well, I’m for bed.”

“To face the demons of the dark.”

“Something like that.” He turned in the doorway, gave me a little wave.

“By the way, Dad …”

“Yes? What is it?” The shadows of the foyer were about to swallow him.

“Sam Turner told me Val called him today, asked him questions about the hanged priest—”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hanged priest out in the orchard. We have only
the one, am I right or am I right? What do you make of that? Did she say anything to you about that?”

“Sam Turner’s an old gossip.” My father snapped out the words, impatient with fools. “How should I know anything about that? No, she said nothing to me about that old story—”

“What do you mean—
story
? It did happen … the dangling, frozen priest in the orchard—”

“That’s ancient history. Forget it. We’ll never know what she wanted and that’s just fine. Now I’m going to bed.” He turned away.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“If you have any trouble sleeping, I’ll be awake, in my room, staring at the ceiling, indulging in emotional weakness. So if you want company …” I shrugged.

“Thanks for the offer,” he said. “I think I might say a prayer. May I suggest you try it? If you recall the process, of course

“Very kind of you to care,” I said.

“Well, I say it’s never too late.” There was a hint of a smile in his voice though I couldn’t see his face clearly. “Not even for a lost soul like yours, Ben.”

Then he was gone and I took a long time straightening the coffee things and the drinks table and smoking my cigar and slowly turning off the lamps.

The lights were still on in the chapel.

My bad leg was punishing me for my sins and the scotch hadn’t helped. I limped up the stairs, down the dark and drafty hallway to my old bedroom. The framed photograph of Joe DiMaggio autographed to my father and me hung over the bed. I saw the faint familiar brown stain on the ceiling where one night the rain had poured through a hole gnawed by a squirrel secreting nuts.

I turned on the bedside lamp. The sleet was beating against the windows. Gary Cooper’s sketch of Val and me still sat in its silver frame on the chest of drawers. Odd. I was now the only one of us left alive.

I pumped down a handful of aspirin for my leg pain and tried to escape the banshees of memory gathering on
the lawn beneath my window. I kept twisting and turning and trying to make my leg comfortable, then dozing among troubled reflections and dreams and ghastly, unhappy fantasies. And then somehow I found myself among the Jesuits again, like an out-of-body experience.…

The black-uniformed army among whom I’d once made my life swarmed out of the night toward me, as if they were fuzzy-wuzzies hell-bent on overrunning my positions, reclaiming me for themselves. Which was not necessarily the way it had been, at least not most days. The fact was I had enjoyed much of life as a novice. From the first day I’d found a place among the smart-ass contingent which always seemed to form the core of the Society of Jesus. Professional smart-asses, valued more for their rebellious intelligence than for their piety. Those first weeks of basic training quickly took on the quality of a challenge—a challenge to our sharp-edged smart-ass individuality which we were supposed to submerge in humility, prayer, the tedium of routine, the constant busyness, the sounds and smells of a religious dorm.

Then came the day Brother Fulton, only a couple of years further into the process than we were, called us in for a chat.

“You will have been wondering about some of the more exotic aspects of our happy little order,” he began. Brother Fulton was a classic Jesuit smart-ass: lank blond hair, pointy, foxlike features, pale brown eyes that seemed to deny the possibility of treating anything
too
seriously. “We think of them as penitential practices, nothing to fear, because we are all brave fellows and the Society has our best interests at heart. We are primarily concerned with the strength of the spirit, the vitality and determination and growth of the inner man. However …”

He smiled at the group of intent young men waiting for the other shoe to drop. “However, we must not altogether ignore our physical selves. It is our experience here at Castle Skull—just a little Jesuit humor, men—that a whiff of mortification of the flesh never really hurt anyone. It may even occasionally do some good. Pain, I
assure you, tends to concentrate the mind most wonderfully. But the pain is merely to remind us of our real purpose—you guys all on the right page here?—good, good. Suffice it to say that you will feel pain and your minds—if this thing works like it’s supposed to—will turn to such fit subjects for meditation as your love of God. Are you with me?”

His lively brown eyes danced from one dutifully nodding face to another. “Gentlemen, take a look at these little doodads.” From the drawer in his desk he took out two items and placed them casually on the blotter. “Go ahead, pick them up. Get the feel. Get to know them.”

I took the braided white rope, watched it dangling like a valuable necklace from my fingers. Touching the chain was oddly exciting, almost shameful. I held it gingerly, as if it might come to life and lash out at me, while Brother Fulton went on.

“These little devices, a whip and a leg chain, will aid you. They will make it easier for you to reflect on your devotion to God. And your obedience. The rope or whip is largely symbolic. On Monday and Wednesday evenings you will strip to the waist and kneel beside your beds. The lights will be out. You will hear the tolling of the bell. You will then begin flogging your backs with an over-the-shoulder flicking motion. You keep at it for the length of one Our Father. No big deal.”

“And how about this?” I swung the chain.

“Aha,” Brother Fulton said. “You will notice the little signs on the bulletin boards when you return to your rooms. ‘Whips tonight, chains tomorrow morning.’ An old Jesuit maxim. Benjamin, do you notice anything unusual about the chain?”

“The links,” I said. “One side is filed down so it’s very sharp. The other side is just blunt, rounded off.”

Brother Fulton nodded again. “Which side would you say, just off the top of your head, is supposed to be pressed against the flesh? Blunt or sharp?”

“You bring out the Iron Maiden next,” Vinnie Halloran said, “and I’m going through that door—”

“We save that for the seventh year,” Brother Fulton observed. “You’ll be long gone by then.” He smiled
beatifically. “You keep these things—the flagellum and the chain—under your pillows. The chain is for hurting, I promise you. You will be fastening the chain around your upper thigh, beneath your trousers, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.” He stood up, a gesture of dismissal. “You see the clasp, you figure it out. One thing, though. Tight. Clasp it tight. Nothing worse than feeling your chain sliding loosely down your leg until it rattles on the floor.” He paused in the doorway before leaving. “That happens and you’re going to feel like a real asshole. Mark my words.”

I threw myself into the business of fleshly mortification with customary determination. The chain was no joke. You put it around your thigh, cinched the links tight while it pulled the hair on your leg and pinched the flesh, and fastened it. You stood still while you put it on and adjusted the tension. That wasn’t so bad. But then you started to walk. The muscles flexed. The sharp edges bit into the meat, the welts rose and stung.

Novice MacDonald thought the whole thing was insane, shaved the hair from his thigh, and held the loose chain in place with adhesive tape. No one else would even discuss the chains. It was a private battle and you fought it alone, the best way you could.

It hurt worst of all when you had to sit down. At mass. At breakfast. In class. And the sharpened links raised the welts, then dug the trenches in the flesh. All in a good cause. My father would be proud of me.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
. God. The Society of Jesus. Saint Ignatius Loyola.
Sanctus Pater Noster
. The better to obey, to serve. I would rise above it. I’d be damned if I didn’t rise above it.

We were swimming when Vinnie Halloran spoke up. “Hey, Ben, look at your leg, man. Just look at it.” I refused to look. I’d been seeing it for a couple weeks. “You better take care of that, man. Really, that’s not right. That’s pus and green crud. Look at my leg, little red dots. MacDonald, you know he paints his little red marks on? No shit! But you, you got green stuff running …” Vinnie shivered, shrank within himself.