The Assassini (24 page)

The dry snow was biting at my face, and I felt the sweat drying, cracking like ice. I watched him for a few moments, hoping it was as much fun as he’d expected. Then I went back to concentrating on my own endeavors, feeling my muscles stretching and relaxing, getting into
the rhythm of my movements. My God, Val used to get hysterical watching me skate. She called me a trained bear. I was dripping with sweat when I chanced to see another fellow who’d come out that night to inaugurate the skating season.

Sandanato and I were at opposite ends of the oblong pond. I could just make him out. He wasn’t so much skating as slowly, methodically, keeping from falling.

I was skating where the mouth of the stream entered our pond. The other fellow was fifty yards away in the moonlight, skating downstream toward me, his arms gently swinging as he came. I slowed as he approached, watching him, envying him his grace. I skated some big lazy circles, proud of myself for not crashing in an ungainly heap, though I wobbled rather badly when I modified my balance to wave to the newcomer.

He raised a hand casually in greeting. He was a much better skater, coming on steadily, the wind catching his coat and swirling it behind him. He was wearing a black fedora, and as he skated up to me I saw the moonlight flashing on the lenses of his glasses.

“Nice night,” I said as he came close. I was breathing hard. His face was reddened by the wind. He was an older man, his face etched with deep lines, a strong face with a strong nose, and a wide, thin mouth.

“Yes, nice night,” he said, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t stopping, why he was coming at me. Stupidly, I thought maybe he didn’t know how to stop. And then in the last split second I knew there was something wrong.

He was holding something in his hand, low against the folds of the black coat. It was gleaming in the moonlight.

I turned away, toward Sandanato, who was still struggling to stay afoot a good fifty yards in the other direction, willing my legs to move, to get me some room, to get away from the man, but I wasn’t going anywhere, I was slipping and sliding like a man caught in a nightmare, overcome with terror and soaked with freezing sweat and unable to get away, and I felt his hand on my shoulder, oh God, oh Christ, he wasn’t knocking me
down, he was trying to steady me … oh shit, steadying me for the gleaming blade.…

I tried to cry out to Sandanato, may have actually done so, just as I felt it, the pain arcing across my back from under my right arm. It was a sliver of cold, clean pain, like an icicle sliding under my skin, and I felt myself falling, saw the ice rushing up to meet my face, trying to brace myself, wanting to thrash my legs, hoping to trip him, and as his hand was trying to hold me up, I heard his voice muttering under his breath,
just a moment, Mr. Driskill, steady, steady
, and I heard the swish of his arm as he made another sweep with the blade and I heard it ripping through the fabric of my trench coat and then I was on the ice, trying to turn over on my back but suddenly robbed of the strength to do so.…

My face hit the ice hard and I felt my nose go, tasted a gush of blood, one eye against the ice, and with the other I saw the blades of his skates beside my face. I struggled to turn my head and I saw his face again. I was staring into the flat glass lenses, which seemed bottomless, empty, and while I looked up at him, feeling my back growing warm and wet, I saw his black fedora tip from his head in slow motion, slowly settle onto the ice, revealing silver hair combed straight back, wavy, incredibly silver in the moonlight.

Then he picked up the hat and he wasn’t there anymore. I heard the silky whisper of the blades as he skated away. It had all taken ten seconds, and I couldn’t seem to make myself move, and then poor Sandanato was panting and struggling toward me, reached me on his knees. I saw a tear in the trouser knee, and I heard him saying
Can you hear me, can you hear me?
and I kept answering him and he couldn’t seem to hear me at all, and then his voice was growing fainter and fainter and then it was gone and I felt my face freezing against the smooth ice.…

T
he blues.

That’s what her mother had called them. Elizabeth had never been one for falling prey to them—she was too active for that, too busy with the external world—but when they reached out and grabbed her on the 747 back to Rome she recognized them for what they were. The blues.

They had nothing to do with the shock and sorrow of Val’s death. You could do your best to deal with all that. Your religious training helped you fight that. But the blues got under your skin, seeped into your bloodstream in a way that the Church and faith and discipline couldn’t stop them, got hold of you when you weren’t paying attention, and then it was too late. Then there was hell to pay.

It was the little girl on the plane who gave it a shape she could identify. The little girl in the seat ahead of her, six or seven years old, peering over the top of the seat at her in the darkened cabin. They might have been the only two passengers who weren’t asleep. The little girl with huge shining dark eyes and a short broad nose and a very solemn mouth and a blue and gold ribbon tied around her ponytail: it was the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, and Elizabeth felt the eyes staring at her.

Elizabeth smiled into the solemn face which came alive. She rested her chin on the back of the headrest. “My name is Daphne. My father calls me Daffy. I’m whispering because I don’t want to wake my mother. What’s your name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“My mother is a light sleeper. So I have to be quiet and tiptoe and stuff. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I was thinking.”

“Me, too.” The little head nodded knowingly. “I was thinking about my friends. I’ll see them tomorrow. What were you thinking about?”

“Friends, same as you.”

“Will you see them tomorrow?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Do you live in Rome?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“We have a house in Chicago but my daddy works in Rome so we live there, too. Where’s your house?”

“Via Veneto.”

The little face brightened. “I know where that is. Via Veneto. Do you have a little girl? She and I could play together.…”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t … I wish …”

“What? What do you wish, Elizabeth? Do you wish you had a little girl?”

“Yes, Daphne. I wish I had a little girl. Just like you.”

“Really?” She giggled behind her hand.

“Really.”

“You can call me Daffy if you want.”

That did it all right. The blues. It was a long night for Elizabeth.

She felt as if Val’s spirit were overtaking her on the plane that night. Something was nagging at her, Val trying to tell her something, but it wasn’t quite getting through. She put the headphones on and slipped one tape after another into her tape player. Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, Moody Blues, Jefferson Airplane, Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, Gustav Leonhardt’s recording of Bach’s concerti for harpsichord in F and C, one tape after another from her bag, her pen scratching at the pages in her Filofax while her mind dashed on elsewhere in search of Val.…

Val. She was trying to pull in her signal like some
distant station’s, but she couldn’t do it. There was something Val wanted her to remember. It would come back, she told herself, it was bound to come back to her.

That was all bad enough, but when her thoughts turned to Ben it was even worse. She felt lousy about the way they’d left things between them. She hated the way she’d behaved, the argument. The fact was, he was right, absolutely right, and she wondered how and why she’d screwed everything up. She
had
wanted to work together to find out what had happened to Val; she’d been excited by the whole business, it had helped her cope with Val’s death: finding the retired cop down at the bleak November shore, hearing about the murdered priest so long ago, theorizing late into the night with Ben and Father Dunn—

So why had it ended so badly, with her sudden sanctimonious defense of the Church? What had gotten into her? Maybe it was plain, simple fear catching up with her. It had hit her hard, with the clenched fist of realism, that Val was dead. Murdered, as if the truth that she’d sought had turned against her, struck her down.

Fear. Fear for herself if she pursued the inquiry, fear for Ben if he insisted on going after the killer. Her dearest friend was dead and she herself was sick with cowardice and she hated herself for it. She’d been a coward and … and she had trouble in the final instant quite believing that the Church could have reached out and killed Val to protect itself. She could believe so many things about this battle-scarred old Church, but not quite that.

Yet she’d never been the Church’s tame little spokesperson, its apologist. No more than Val had been. She’d never been what Ben had accused her of being. And it wasn’t fair that he should think that of her … 
not fair
!

Then Daphne had poked her head over the chair and they’d had their little chat and Elizabeth had recognized the blues. And no, it had nothing to do with Val, nothing to do with the Church. Well, not exactly, anyway.

Daphne had set her thinking about little girls and love. Looking into the shining saucer eyes, she saw herself full of eager hope and expectation so long ago in Illinois, her life before her like an endless circus. She had looked into the child’s eyes and felt the quickening pulse, the flutter
of the heart, the glimmer of love. The pang people were always writing songs about. Daphne. The little hand over the giggling mouth, Mother was a light sleeper, wishing Elizabeth had a little girl …

Love.

Love was a problem for Elizabeth. When her guard was down, it could waylay her, fill her heart, start a tear of longing in the corner of her eye. The thing was, it always came from nowhere, and when it started—not often, she was adept at staying busy, fighting it off, declaring to herself that it was a complication she neither wanted nor needed—but when it started it was like an illness, a fever, that sapped her vitality, could hang on for days. The pit of the stomach, ache in the heart longing for the warmth, the touch, the dependency of another human being … What was it but a longing for love, what was simply denied her by her vocation?

There were times when the longing took hold of her. Looking into Daphne’s eyes and thinking that she’d never have a Daphne of her own. Talking at the kitchen table, cooking up a storm in the coziness, watching Ben Driskill sitting there watching her …

Watching Ben Driskill watching her
.

It had been good sharing the snowy night in Gramercy Park with him, drinking beer at Pete’s Tavern. And it had been good these past few days, sharing time with Ben even in such unhappy circumstances. In the house together, knowing they were under the same roof, hearing him moving around even when they weren’t in the same room, talking to the old policeman together, sitting together before the fire, finding the picture in the drum … sensing Ben’s irony and pain when it came to the Catholics, even feeling the weight of his anger directed at her … He was life, he was out there in the battle, he was willing to take the risks—

Damn! Her imagination was running wild, but, but …

She had led Ben on, she had wanted them to team up, there was an inevitable male/female component to the time they spent together: how could there not be?

But there wasn’t supposed to be. No getting away from that.

But she’d enjoyed him so much. And been so furious when he’d suggested that Monsignor Sandanato was obviously in love with her. Her face had caught fire at that because of what she’d been thinking about Ben and she’d wondered, was he laughing at her? It had been such a crazy thing to say.… He
had
been laughing at her, damn him, the nun as love object, ha-ha, that’s a good one!

And she’d had those edgy little sensations a nun wasn’t supposed to have and she’d thought Ben had sensed them, was laughing at her lack of experience, her self-consciousness.

Was that why she’d turned on him at the end?

Was her defense of the Church, her denial of the attitudes in him she’d been encouraging all along—was it because she had felt humiliated by him?

Or was it simply because she feared she might be falling in love with him?

Another woman—not a nun—might have thought an evening spent together in the past and a few days cloaked in the sorrow of a loved one’s death hardly added up to an opportunity to fall in love. But another woman’s relationship to men would have been entirely different. A nun was attuned to dealing with men, most of them priests, in a certain way, a very special way, that canceled out the romantic, the sensual. If you had any sense.

Her feelings for Ben weren’t like that.

So she’d turned on him and made him despise her.

Nice work, Sister.

She arrived in Rome red-eyed and exhausted, her head pounding. Daphne gave her a good-bye hug with her mother looking proudly on, and Elizabeth felt again the magnetic pull of the huge, glistening eyes. Neither Daphne nor her mother, of course, could have guessed she was a nun.