The Assassini (39 page)

Then I smelled something. Someone.

And the hair on the back of my neck began to rouse itself.

Someone was in the cell with me.

As my senses began to click in, slowly, too slowly, I heard the breathing, someone trying not to make a sound. The man-smell of sweat-soaked garments moved closer. The breathing quickened. He was closing in on me. The bit of moonlight was blacked out by his shape coming closer. I saw flat on my back, I saw in memory and nightmare, the blade plunging downward at me.…

“I’ve got a gun on you,” I croaked, hearing my voice
shake. Everything stopped: the shuffling, the breathing, everything but the smell. I was afraid of something nameless and faceless, but I knew it was the priest, come to finish me off. He’d been watching me the whole time, had followed me. “Touch me, you bastard, and you die—” I was bluffing for my life. It was all a bad joke.

“It’s Brother Timothy.” The voice was soft and high-pitched. “I bandaged your back … you have nothing to fear from me. Please, put down your gun. I have a candle. May I light it? I must speak with you.”

I heard a match scrape across a striker; the flame flared a few feet from my face. The large shape came into view. Brother Timothy smiled, his double chins cascading like falling pastries. I took my hand from beneath the blanket, pointed a finger at him and said, “Pa-choo, pa-choo.”

He giggled like a man trying to prove he hadn’t forgotten how, then the smile faded. The candle glowed. I longed for the warmth of a real fire. “What can I do for you,” I asked, “now that you’ve scared me half to death?”

“I had to see you alone. The abbot wouldn’t approve of my meddling, but I must. What I have to tell you—I haven’t told even him. But I heard you telling him the story about this man you call LeBecq and I saw his picture … and I knew I had to tell you what I saw.…” He was panting hard, his face glistening with sweat even in the cold. He licked his lips, went back to the doorway and stuck his head out past the curtain, ducked back in again. “He’s everywhere,” he said apologetically, “always noticing things. There are stories about the abbot, stories of second sight … nonsense, of course, but I do wonder who he is,” he mused almost dreamily, then lurched back to the present. “We must not waste time.” He wiped his brow on his voluminous sleeve, looked at me with his bright little eyes.

“Go on,” I said, pulling the blanket tight.

“The man LeBecq, I have seen him. He is out in the desert now. You can see him. I’ll take you to him. You can see for yourself.”

* * *

I followed his immense bulk out of the monastery compound, past the cells where the monks groaned and snored and muttered in their sleep. The moonlight might have been coating the scene with ice. The whole thing had the look of a road company Fort Zinderneuf. The wind kept a steady shifting of sand nipping at you, swirling up into your eyes. Outside the gate the huge Panzer tank loomed ghostlike, casting a strange moon-shadow with its long snout of cannon barrel.

Timothy set off at a brisk pace, keeping to the hard-packed sand. I couldn’t judge the distance, just kept my head tucked down and followed my guide and tried to pretend my back didn’t hurt. We passed straggly palm trees, crossed between rolling dunes, always making good time. After a half-hour march Timothy stopped, plucked at my arm. “Just ahead in the flat beyond the next rise. I’ll take you straight to him.”

Next thing I knew we’d crested the ridge of sand and I was looking at the airplane I’d seen in the photograph LeBecq had kept in his office at the gallery. It looked frozen and silver, glistening with condensation in the moonlight. I didn’t see LeBecq. What was he doing staying out in the desert when he could have stayed at the monastery? Timothy had slogged down to stand beside the plane, leaning with one hand on the wing. He beckoned to me, called something which the wind tossed away.

On my way down the dune I saw LeBecq. He was sitting on the sand, leaning back against the nosewheel. He wasn’t paying any attention to us. It was the middle of the night. He was sleeping and whatever sounds we were making the wind was blowing away.

When Timothy went to stand in front of LeBecq, pointing at him, urging me to hurry, I realized something was wrong.

When I circled around the wingtip I saw that LeBecq’s head was angled oddly. There was a black hole in his temple, a small inward-turned crater. A small .22-caliber pistol lay on the sand near his hand. His mouth was open, making a tiny circle. Sand insects were crawling in and out of his mouth. Then I saw the hole in his
temple appear to move, but it was more insects drawn to the blood. He was beginning to swell. Sitting out in the sun for a day or two doesn’t do a corpse a bit of good. His toupee had come slightly askew from the jolt of the slug.

I bent down, scooped up the gun, and dropped it into my jacket pocket.

Timothy had found him earlier in the day, but when he’d gotten back to the monastery there was the other funeral and then I had wandered in and the rest of the day had gotten away from him.

“Your friend put an end to his troubles,” Brother Timothy said. “They must have weighed very heavily on his mind. For a good Catholic, too.… It’s too bad. I must bring him back now.” He leaned down and began to tug at the lapels of LeBecq’s jacket.

“I’d go easy with that,” I said. “He’s pretty ripe. You’d be better off to come back tomorrow, a couple of you, put him in a bag or something so he doesn’t sort of all run out.”

“You’re right.” He nodded his huge round head. “Then we’ll bury him.”

“What about notifying his daughter?”

“He has a daughter?” Brother Timothy looked up at the moon. “The abbot will know what to do.”

We walked back to the monastery more slowly than when we’d been coming the other way. One of the hounds had wakened and was wandering around sniffing the night air. He seemed glad to see us. That was the level on which I was noticing things. In my mind I kept seeing the hole in LeBecq’s head … the blackened, singed hair that belonged to my sister Val.…

“Brother Timothy?”

“Yes, Mr. Driskill?”

“I killed that man back there.”

“You did?”

“I murdered him just as surely as if I’d pressed the gun to his head. I was his personal nightmare, all his sins coming back to haunt him, and I wouldn’t go away. I was all his fears and sins wrapped up in one neat package.… I was nemesis dropping in out of the blue and he ran
like a crazy man into the desert … and then he sat down and looked his fate straight in the eye and knew there was just the one way to get free of all of it.…”

“Was he a terrible man?”

“No, not terrible at all.”

“Now he’ll burn forever in a fiery pit.”

“Do you really believe that, Timothy?”

“I was taught that.”

“But do you really believe it?”

“Do you really believe you killed him?”

“I killed him. Yes.”

“Well, I believe he’ll burn forever in a fiery pit.”

“It’s a question of faith, then?”

“Faith. That’s right. A man who kills himself burns forever.”

I may have slept later on. The night was endless. I thought about everything all over again and no matter how I worked it out I came up with the same result. But for me the poor bastard would still be alive. Maybe it was my Catholic conscience. I thought about Sister Elizabeth, about how she’d betrayed my trust, but that didn’t seem like such a deal breaker now.
She
hadn’t killed anybody. My last thought that night was about her, and then my dreams, too. I wanted to tell her what I had done.

I wanted her to hear my confession.

I was waiting for Abdul, saw his dust cloud, then heard the shrieks of his infernal machine before I actually glimpsed the thing itself. The sun was burning straight down, leaving no shadow where I stood with my bag, shielding my eyes with a hand for a visor. The past twenty-four hours had taken forever. I felt like a leper. No one had said good-bye, not even Brother Timothy. I knew it was just their way, nothing personal, but it made for a lonely departure. I took one last look at the forgotten place, shimmering insubstantially in the heat, looking as if it might just evaporate one day and no one would mourn it or its company of the damned. Then I climbed into the truck where Abdul, my deliverance, waited for
me, grinning with his uneven, sand-colored tooth stumps and the soggy cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth.

As we parted the blowing dust and sand like a sinking tugboat in stormy seas, I asked him if he remembered a man he’d picked up and described Brother August. He nodded, spat, told me that nothing was free, most certainly not information. I gave him some more money and he stuffed it into his shirt pocket, told me I was a damn good buster. He was wearing a ratty old safari shirt and a straw hat with what looked like a bullet hole in the crown. He laughed like the bandit he was and scratched a wet armpit, nearly losing control of the truck.

He remembered the silver-haired man. But he’d driven him to a village on the Mediterranean and left him there. He hadn’t seen him since. I’d paid for nothing. But it didn’t really matter. I knew what I needed to know about Brother August. He got his orders from Rome.

H
aving worked her way through the horrors of the House of Vespasiano Sebastiano and the suppression of the Tuscan monastery of the
assassini
, Sister Elizabeth dreaded returning to the nunciature of Venice
fondo
. It was claustrophobic, oppressive with the evil and the bloodletting. She was, therefore, contemplating how next to approach the problem of the Secret Archives when among her own papers she found the sheet from Val’s folder that was inscribed with what looked like a simple, impenetrable code. She’d never really paid any attention to it before, but now she did.

SA TW IV SW. TK. PBF.

Elizabeth doodled on another sheet, copying the cipher again and again, trying to think with Val. What had she meant? She slept on it, woke up turning it over in her mind. She couldn’t shake it from her memory. It was like the phone number of a lover, imprinted on your brain, which made her smile at the memory of a long-ago college-boy lover. He might as well have been a contemporary of those Renaissance princes she’d been reading about. All a long time ago, long gone. History.

She began to figure out the code during the walk to Vatican City.

Let’s say SA meant Secret Archives. Then she thought she knew what TW meant.

She went to Monsignor Petrella, the prefect, and asked him to take her to the Tower of the Winds.

When they’d reached the elegant room with the zodiac
on the floor, Petrella cast an anxious look about the contents. “You realize how unusual it is to leave anyone to browse through the
buste
here. It is, to all intents and purposes, never done. But for Sister Valentine an exception was made. A friend of the late Mr. Lockhardt …” He shrugged and that said it all. “He was such a friend to us here at the Archives. The same exemption will be made for you, Sister.”

“I am in your debt, Monsignor. Val spent a good deal of time up here, did she?”

“Yes, she seemed to have—let me see, what did she say? Ah, yes, she said she’d ‘struck a vein’ here.”

“Then I will mine it, Monsignor. If I can find it.”

Monsignor Petrella nodded, smiling thinly.

Alone she surveyed the room, trying to understand the remainder of Val’s code. Maybe it had nothing to do with the Tower of the Winds. But then, maybe it did.

She couldn’t find a Roman numeral IV that seemed relevant. That stopped her for a while. The fourth bookcase? Fourth from where? You had to have the location of the first to find the fourth.…

Stymied, she spent several hours searching fruitlessly through the folders, leaving her sweaty, dusty, and discouraged. Maybe she was on the wrong track altogether. She wondered if Driskill was having this much fun poking around Alexandria in search of another of Val’s trails. Fun! She wondered about his wound, then forced him out of her mind.

But she did keep pushing her way through the material, randomly searching for something, anything.
Assassini
. That was her goal, had to be, it was all she had to go on.
Assassini
and five dead men on Val’s list. Five dead but one still left alive. Erich Kessler. Why had Val thought he’d be the next to die?

She continued picking through the folders aimlessly, doubtful now about the point of what she was doing—combing endlessly through bits and pieces of papers, hoping for another reference to
assassini
. In her heart she knew it was a fool’s job. But she wasn’t ready to quit yet. She might as well get it out of her system. A few
more wasted days, so what? The world wouldn’t stop turning.

She stood up, brushed herself off, as Val must have before her, and went to the window, gazed out over Vatican City, suddenly unsure of what day of the week it was, uncertain as to whether she had attended mass a few hours before, or had that been yesterday? In this unguarded moment she was disconcerted by recognition of a quality she’d shared with Val—the special ability to submerge herself in a job to the exclusion of the outside world. It had always been her way, from the time she was little. Work had always taken precedence over the rest of her life. Val, however, had been able to encompass more. She’d submerged herself in a career even more demanding than Elizabeth’s, but she had also found a way to cope with Curtis Lockhardt. But that was Val’s way, Val’s life. Elizabeth felt the breeze on her face at the window, the warmth of the sun. She wasn’t Val and she couldn’t live her life as Val had lived hers. But she had to face the limitations she’d imposed on her life—what they had kept her from.… Suddenly she thought of another way of looking at Val’s code.

Forget IV. Go on to SW. The only SW she knew was the abbreviation for southwest. And the tower room was based on the zodiac and the compass. She got her directions straight and turned to the southwest corner. There, crammed between bookcases, was a small leather-strapped trunk reminiscent of a man’s fancy hat box of the nineteenth century. TK. Trunk.
Val!