The Assassini (37 page)

While the man in the Yankees hat took a look at the source of the noise and the smoke, I went into the cooler darkness of the hotel. The desk was unmanned, the lobby was empty but for a couple of ancient overstuffed chairs and three-legged tables. Shabby with a patina of sand on the floor. A stairway led up to a balcony and a few rooms. A radio was playing music I didn’t understand. A tin Coke sign with Arabic lettering was nailed to a wall. It was late in the afternoon. My car was mortally wounded. I was out in the middle of nowhere looking for a man who might not be there even if I managed against all reason to get where I was going. I was hungry, thirsty, and the wound in my back was killing me. Maybe it was time to go home.

What, I wondered, would Val or Sister Elizabeth say in my place? Sister Elizabeth, damn her and her two-faced phony camaraderie, doubtless having cocktails at the Hassler with a papal nuncio up to his collar in intrigue.… I, too, was sunbaked, a little mad with the heat and discomfort. Well short of my best.

The dogs were barking and the guys standing around the Dodge were laughing at something. A woman in a second Ford coverall came out from a doorway under the stairs and looked me over. In English she asked me what I wanted. I pointed at the Coke sign and said I wanted some with lots of ice. And something to eat. She went away and came back ten minutes later with two hamburgers and a glass of Coke with ice. And so it was that my life and sanity were saved and I didn’t pack it in, didn’t go home.

The transmission was indeed shot. It would be two or three days before they could get the car going again. I discovered that they knew where the ancient monastery called The Inferno was, though they all seemed to feel that going there was an act of lunacy. But, if I was determined, a trucker called Abdul would be coming through in the morning and for a price would doubtless deliver me. For the night I could have a room upstairs. I didn’t have the energy to stay up chatting with my new friends. They weren’t interested in discussing my itinerary so I had a couple more Cokes and went to bed.

Sleep was slow in coming. I did what I could for my back, cleaned up, and lay down on the narrow bed, feeling gritty sand between me and the mattress. I pulled a blanket up to my chin as the desert cooled down. But I couldn’t quite get to sleep.

I went over and over what Gabrielle LeBecq had told me about her father, the Nazi loot, the men in the picture—all the hopeless jumble of lives lived over four or five decades. It was all too complicated. I couldn’t make it come together and result in the murder of my sister. Which was why I was trying to find LeBecq. I felt deep in my weary bones that he was a man on the edge and that I could crack him, push him over, and then dash around and catch him … and make him tell me more.
Someone had to tell me more. Somewhere along the line I would have heard enough and I would know why my sister had been murdered. LeBecq was what I had to work with. If he hadn’t run to the desert I might have written him off. Might have. But once he ran, I had to go after him.

The road had been built during the North African campaign forty-odd years before, had lain in the sun and wind ever since, and every year’s hardness was being driven like stakes into my wound. I clamped my jaw, left my fingerprints in the rusty, dusty dashboard, and prayed for deliverance. Abdul’s truck had been left behind by the retreating Italians. They knew what they were doing then and age had done nothing to improve the old heap. The ride reminded me of something that had made me throw up all over my uncle at a county fair once. But it was the only way to get to the monastery of St. Christopher unless you wanted to walk. As the man said, I might be dumb, but I’m not crazy. The back of my shirt was sticky. I hoped to God it wasn’t blood.

“How much farther?” I screamed over the clanging, but Abdul merely hunched over the steering wheel, grunted, and chewed on his soggy, long-deceased cigar. I squinted through the flies mashed on the cracked windshield, but the road was hidden by blowing dust and sand. Even behind dark glasses I felt my eyeballs getting sunburned. Windburned. Sandburned. I picked up the canteen from the bench seat between us, burned my fingers on the shiny aluminum, sipped the scalding water to keep my lips from splitting. I’d been trapped in the truck for seven hours. I wasn’t quite sure how much longer I could last. And I wondered what kind of men came to a place like this of their own free will.

The fenders up ahead flapped at each swerve and bump, at each chasm in the road and each time the bald tires slipped off into the sand and had to be yanked and wrestled back. The truck was so pitted by sand whipped off the dunes that it looked like a testament to a Chicago gangland war. If it made it to the monastery and came apart for the last time, how would I get back? Or would I
have to join up, once in and never out? Or maybe the silver-haired priest was waiting for me with his blade and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting back.

And then I saw it, like Brigadoon gone horribly awry, taking shape behind the blowing curtain of sand. It loomed, squat, close to the earth, jagged-edged, the color of the dunes beyond, gray and dirty brown. And then it was gone again.

As the truck ground on, Abdul pointed ahead, grunted some more, then applied the remnants of his brakes, metal screeching on metal, and the bouncing and slamming stopped. Very slowly I let go of the dash, wiped my eyes with an oily rag he picked up from the floor, and put my glasses back on.

“Road ends here,” Abdul observed, peeling a wet brown tobacco leaf from the corner of his mouth. “You walk now, buster.” He laughed enigmatically and spit through a hole in the truck where there should have been a window. “I be back tomorrow. I don’t wait. You be ready, buster. You pay now for me to come back. Abdul born long time ago, not yesterday.” He laughed again at his display of quick-wittedness, and I gave him a handful of money.

“Abdul,” I said, “you’re a hell of a buster yourself.”

“You can say it one more time.” He fired up the truck. I grabbed my bag and looked back up the faint pathway. His wheels spit more sand and dust all over me when he took off, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I’d arrived at the absolute asshole of the world and I was perfectly attired for the occasion.

The monastery was a ruin. Guarded by the ghost of a tank.

It sat, sand over the bottom treads, at an angle to the main gate leading into the compound. It bore the markings of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, faded, paint-chipped, the long cannon commanding a wide arc of the road as if it bore one last shell, one last hurrah, like an ancient veteran of the Kasserine Pass waiting to greet Patton with one last, deadly muzzle flash. It was like a dream, a bad dream, with the stench of guns and blood clinging to it. But the cannon commanded an emptiness, a desolation
of sand and weary, lank, windblown palms. The enemy was long gone. History and time had claimed them all, leaving this old derelict sadder than the last Christmas tree on the lot.

An exhausted dog hauled his bones out of the shadows of the low wall surrounding the monastery buildings. He wobbled to a halt, looked at me with a doleful expression of disappointment, and went back to the shadows. He sat down like a folding chair, slowly shaking his head at the buzzing flies. They were as big as my thumb and thought he was playing a game with them. They sounded as if they might eat him then and there, or just possibly carry him back to the wife and kids as a treat, but a few dozen peeled off and followed me into the grounds of the monastery, sensing bigger game. With the flies bouncing off my head and the fiery red heat billowing at me from all sides, I felt like I’d taken a long, mean ride to find refuge inside a light bulb.

There wasn’t a soul in sight. A palm tree drooped over a puddle of muddy, sandy water where another dog lapped between deep breaths. Through the gritty sound of sand sifting against the walls of the main building, past the steady whine of the flies, I could just hear something else. A low rumble, voices, caught on the wind and blown this way and that. I walked toward the rumble and came to the back wall. It was louder, some kind of chanting that stopped as I came to another weathered gate hanging limply from a hinge of rope. I went on through, stopped short, stood in the shade watching the monks.

They were burying somebody.

I stayed in the shade, squinting, watching the shapes being distorted by the shimmering heat waves. I tried to snake my arm around to touch my back, to feel for blood. I knew it was all in my mind. I knew it was just sweat. But I couldn’t reach it. It was too stiff, too tight, and it was hurting like hell. And it was sticky. So I leaned against the wall, watching the monks, trying to make them out clearly, one at a time. I was looking for a tall monk with silver hair and eyes like the business end of that tank cannon.

But, of course, he wasn’t there. They all seemed small
and skinny or potbellied or shrunken or stooped. There was one off to the side, bearded, harsh-featured like someone from the Old Testament who believed in fighting fire with fire. He had a ramrod up his tail and I caught him, alone of the assemblage, taking notice of me. The guest of honor was reclining in a sealed wooden box beside a hole yawning in the spongy, sandy earth. The little graveyard was punctuated by plain wooden crosses, sticking up at irregular angles, speaking for the past, marking the closings of chapters. While I watched, the bearded firebringer went to the grave and began speaking. I was too far away to hear what he was saying, which was just the way I wanted it.

Funerals. The dead passed before me, mirages in my heat and pain. My sister … Lockhardt … I felt the sweat drying on my face, the winds drying it, leaving a salty crust that cracked again and again. I felt myself cracking all over, like something very new or very old thrusting out of its cocoon, being born or emerging from a crypt.

When the casket had been lowered into the grave and the monks had covered it over, I watched them come toward me. They came slowly, like extraterrestrials in a movie. They wore rough robes, a couple in patched trousers, one in jeans faded almost white. Ageless, deeply tanned, or sepulchrally gray, bearded, smelling of sweat and sand, which has its own peculiar scent.

The harsh one who had spoken last passed close to me and stopped. “I am the abbot here,” he said softly, surprising me with a voice that didn’t go with the forbidding face. I tried to speak but my mouth was too dry. “You’re bleeding,” he said. He was looking past me.

I turned. The wall where I’d been leaning was smeared with blood. I wanted to swear but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

“Come with me,” he said. I followed him into the dim halls of the monastery of St. Christopher, the saint who wasn’t anymore.

A big, lumbering monk I hadn’t noticed at the grave-site got me down on my belly on a table in the abbot’s rough-hewn office which was cool and dark, slashes of
light entering through narrow windows in walls three feet thick. His name was Brother Timothy and he had about a seven-day stubble, the bloodshot eyes and wrecked nose of a lifelong boozer, and the touch of an angel of mercy. He peeled the stiff, sticky shirt and bandage away, bathed the wound, and said he’d seen worse. Then he laughed under his breath: “But they was dead!” The abbot was standing near the table, watching. “Brother Timothy,” he said, “is a great wit. He brightens our days.” I lay still, wishing I could take a nap, while a new bandage was fashioned and set in place with thick bands of adhesive. Brother Timothy surveyed his handiwork. He helped me into a sitting position, then busied himself with putting his medical supplies back into a cracked leather doctor’s satchel. He blew his nose on the sleeve of his faded cassock.

The abbot sat down in a wooden chair upholstered with a frayed, thick cushion, laid his hands palm down on the plank table. “Water for our guest, Timothy.”

The big monk shuffled off and the abbot’s eyes came to rest on me like the twin searchlights of curiosity and wariness. “No one ever comes here by chance,” he said, “so I must assume you have some reason for this visit. You’ve come a long way. It shows in your face. You have been the victim of a murder attempt, judging by the looks of your back. And the fact that you’re here at all proves you are a very determined man. What do you seek at the monastery of St. Christopher?”

“A man.”

“I am not surprised. Only a manhunter is likely to overcome the obstacles you’ve faced. What sort of man? And why?”

“A man called Etienne LeBecq. You may know him simply as a man who comes here on retreat …”

“If I know him at all.”

I took the snapshot from my bag, handed it to him. His face showed nothing. I pointed out Guy LeBecq, hoping the resemblance might trigger something in the abbot’s mind. Brother Timothy came back with a pitcher of water and a bottle of aspirin. I gulped down four of
them, swilled the cool water around my teeth, washing the sand away.

The abbot stared at the face in the snapshot, carefully smoothed the sheet flat on the table. The only sound was the sand scraping the walls outside and the strange singing that came from the desert, wind whistling in the sand. He leaned back in the chair and regarded me steadily. “I wonder who you are,” he said obliquely.

He was as unyielding as the landscape. I couldn’t avoid the sense I had that he was suddenly the most important man in my life. I was helpless in such a godforsaken place without his sufferance. All the flesh had tightened back against the underlay of bone: his face looked as if the surroundings had sandblasted it a long time before. He was waiting for me to fill in the blanks, so I did. He took it in, my name, the flight to Egypt. But how had I known where to come? He wasn’t going to let me stonewall him. It was his monastery and his attitude was one of a commandant, though maybe that was what an abbot always was, in the end. I told him about my sister’s murder. I told him LeBecq was someone she had seen shortly before her death. I told him I didn’t have a hell of a lot to go on but LeBecq was something.

“This man, you say he talked with her before she was murdered.” He seemed to have a Belgian accent, if I knew what that was. Maybe French. “What will you do if you find him?”