The Assassini (55 page)

I held on to the clumps of gorse and the bits of cracked ledge and the odd protrusion of root, praying that nothing came loose, and felt my way, step by step, down the face of the cliff. Fog acted as a buffer, muffling the crashing of the waves. It also blinded me, disoriented me, but heightened some of my other senses: the reverberation of the waves traveled through the sheets of stone, left my legs quaking, as if the cliff were about to split open.

Panic stopped me somewhere between the top of the cliff and the beach. I thought I was going to lose my footing and pitch forward into gray oblivion. I waited, hanging on the wall, until the worst of it had passed, then felt with my foot for the next step. Slipped. I grabbed
hard at the tangled hook of root with my right hand and it pulled slowly from the crevice where it had taken hold. I heard myself cry out as I fell, twisting in the air like a cat, scraping my hands raw, reaching for some salvation, and there was none.

I landed on all fours, my head hanging like a whipped dog, choking on my own terror. At most, I’d slipped and fallen six feet before landing on the sand. I’d almost reached the bottom and I hadn’t known it, hadn’t sensed it with the enveloping fog. Fighting for breath, I sat back, leaning against the wet rocks, wiping the condensed moisture and sweat from my dripping face. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I felt like throwing up. And I was sick of the whole bloody horror.

I’ll never know what I might have done if I hadn’t been able to penetrate the fog. I might still be sitting there, catatonic, an uninhabited body that had once contained a man. But unexpectedly the wind swirled in off the water, carrying with it gusts of rain, and blew some gaps in the fog and I caught a glimpse of the sand wandering away to my right and I knew where I was.

I stood up, knees on fire from the fall, palms bloody in patches, rain blowing in my face, and set off toward the cleft in the rocks where I would find Leo and Brother Padraic. I went cursing them both for making the job next to fucking impossible. Adrenaline was pushing me on. If I’d encountered the dark angel of my nightmares just then, I’d have ripped him limb from limb, his flickering blade notwithstanding, or I’d have died trying. Which was, I supposed, far more likely.

The tide was receding. I saw gulls flapping like ghosts, in and out of the fog banks. I got to the entrance of the cave, stood on the ledge inside its mouth where Leo had smoked his pipe and told me that it was the Church that consumed us, not the other way around. But Leo wasn’t there now which didn’t make any sense to me. I’d taken forever getting to the cave. He and Padraic should have been coming from inside the monastery: wasn’t that what he’d implied, that some of the caves wound their way
back into the cellars of the main building itself? They should have been waiting for me.

I couldn’t see any point in standing, waiting. I headed back into the darkness of the cave, aware I could go only so far before the gloom stopped me. As it turned out, I didn’t have far to go.

A man was waiting for me on a ledge. He looked like he was napping.

But his eyes were wide, sunken into sockets dark as walnuts. I saw the whites like two dim crescents of moon and I knew it was happening all over again and I froze in my tracks like a man who knows he’s already dead, just waiting for the blow. Listening for the footsteps behind me, the figure wafting like a bad dream from the darkness, knife in hand, an end to it all.…

But no one came. I looked back, seeing the shape of a man in the luminous mouth of the cave. No one was there. No one came.

I stepped closer, looked at the old, old man in his cassock. The blood at his throat was still sticky, a scarlet ribbon. I felt it on my fingertips. Brother Padraic …

I leaned on the slippery wall. I swallowed the sourness of fear. I concentrated on the pain in my knees and hands and back. I tried to think, but the mechanism wouldn’t kick in. I couldn’t think. I wanted to get the hell out of the cave. But what was waiting for me outside?

I sloshed back through the shallow water and stood again in the grayness, blinking, trying to get my bearings.

Where was Brother Leo?

Where was the concordat?

I’d have to go back to the monastery … I wasn’t making much sense. I staggered out onto the beach, wandered through the blowing fog, knowing I couldn’t climb the cliff, knowing I had to head back down the beach.

The gigantic boulders suddenly materialized out of the fog and there was something, someone, standing in the water, between the boulders and me. The fog whisked it all away. I went closer to the water, straining to see.
Trying to pick out the figure again. Something was all wrong.

I waded into the water, saw it again.

A cross, plunged into the surf, driven in like a stake. It was waving to me through the fog and rain, beckoning me like Ahab lashed to the whale.…

It wouldn’t come clear in the swirling, blowing fog. The rain was blurring my vision, whipped across my face by the driving wind. Somewhere, in the distance beyond the fog and rain, the sun was glowing, whitening the vapor all around me.

Then I saw it.

Ten feet away as I stood in the frothing water that sucked at my shoes, soaked my feet and ankles.

A rude cross plunged upside down in the sand, tilting sideways as the sea swept back and forth.

An inverted cross. The oldest warning in Christendom.

Nailed to the cross, one hand hanging loose, flapping with the push and pull of the surf, was the waterlogged, already bloated and rubbery and blue-tinged corpse of Brother Leo.

There was no way to put a good face on it.

I panicked. Really panicked. I didn’t try to think it through, I didn’t rely on my reason and experience and come to grips with the situation. I just lost it. I didn’t think about the gun in my pocket and go hunting for the miserable son of a bitch. I didn’t go to the monastery to report a maniac’s work. I didn’t do anything that my life and training had prepared me to do. I ran.

I’d been doing pretty well, I thought, since I’d seen my sister Val’s body at my feet. But with the sight of Brother Leo’s grotesque crucifixion burned into my brain, I half ran, half staggered back along the beach, tripping and falling, a caricature of terror. Somehow I got to the beehive, grabbed my gear, threw it into the car, and scraped the fender against the jagged edge of a milestone, getting the car out of the muck and back onto the narrow road. I wasn’t thinking. I was acting in a blind
rush, speeding as if there were something gaining on me, something I couldn’t elude no matter where I went. It was a rebirth of the worst fears of vulnerable childhood and I was, for a time, that child again, fleeing the monsters of darkness, an old rhyme from a book I no longer remembered repeating itself again and again in my mind.

I drove hard for two hours before I’d calmed down enough to stop beside the road and finish off the bread and cheese left over from the previous night. It grew a little warmer as I drove inland but a thin rain fell steadily. I paid no attention to the countryside, nor to a village where I finally stopped for coffee. Then more coffee, eggs, sausage, broiled tomatoes, toast. My hunger was almost out of control, as if the act of eating would ward off the thing pursuing me. Finally I sat on a bench in a sudden shaft of sunshine and watched some children kicking a soccer ball around a patch of grassy park, watched mothers pushing bundled-up babies in prams, and my heart began to slow down and I began to recover the ability to think.

It had to be Horstmann, not some other phantom banshee. Horstmann. He had brought the concordat north forty years before; now he had come to leave slaughter in his wake. Surely he had come because of me. He had known I was coming to find Brother Leo. He had learned so much from Robbie Heywood before he killed him, then perhaps he’d waited, watched me, followed me … and killed Leo, who had been planning to tell me so much.

But why hadn’t he killed me?

Horstmann had been watching, and having struck had disappeared in the fog.… The soccer ball rolled to my
feet. I booted it back to a girl with pigtails, who thanked me through the space where her two front teeth had once been.

He had the concordat. So I could forget that. Unless I could discover to whom he would eventually give it.

But why hadn’t he just waited in the cave and killed me, too? Why hadn’t he finished the job he started? I’d have been so easy for him this time. But he’d let me live.… Was it because he now had the concordat? How important was it? Had the names of Simon’s
assassini
been added to it? Had it gone beyond that? Were they adding names even now?

No. Crazy.

Did I no longer matter to them? Now that he’d killed the two old men who held the answer to the riddle of the
assassini
, now that he had the concordat, was I mere addendum, a useless, feeble appendage?

So why hadn’t he lopped me off?

Could it be that someone was now protecting me? Had Horstmann been ordered by someone not to kill me? But who could that someone be? There was only one man so far who gave Horstmann orders … Simon Verginius. A long time ago.

Still, Horstmann had tried to kill me once. Why stop? Even if I were nothing more than a loose end, why not tie me up once and for all? Why not kill three in the fog as long as you’ve killed two?

Maybe I’d just been lucky. Being late, maybe I’d avoided another appointment with that knife … maybe he’d gone looking for me in the fog, perhaps we’d passed each other unseen in the fog and I had lived.…

Christ, I was getting nowhere.

And then I found myself thinking of Sister Elizabeth again, wanting to tell her the story of what I’d been through, wanting to see her face and her green eyes, wanting—God help me—to hold her and cling to her.

It was an idiotic line of thought. I had to be in shock.

I sat for a while in the park. Across the brown grass, where the children in puffy parkas played, I saw the railroad station. A small brick building, a shabby outpost
of lonely travelers, grimy with age. I watched a train pull in, wait for no more than a minute or two, then clang scruffily away.

A man was coming out of the station, walking toward me. He strode through the kids, coming toward me. Me. He stopped in front of me and set his bag down.

“They tell me there’s a bus to St. Sixtus stops here.” He turned, looked down the road. “I must say you look worse than I’d have thought possible.” He turned back, looking at me askance. “Your tailor should see you now. You are a disgrace to the idea of excessive privilege.”

“Father Dunn,” I said.

H
e sat in the first-class carriage, his grip full of damp clothing, and watched the blur of sunshine behind the rain squall cast shadows that brought out the texture of the landscape. The train was sparsely populated. Two other priests munched sandwiches, rattled their brown paper sacks, polished apples against the fabric of their black suits.

Horstmann watched them awhile, slowly turning his old rosary, blessed by Pius himself during an audience before the war. Then he put it away and peeled off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose which bore a reddish crease, closed his icy eyes. It had been a long night, talking with Brother Leo, reminiscing about the old days, that long-ago, choppy night they had crossed the Channel in an open boat, clinging to each other for dear life and praying aloud against the howling gale.

Brother Leo had been understandably confused when his old, long-lost comrade had appeared unannounced at his room in the middle of the night. Confusion had been followed in quick succession by hesitancy and fear. But Horstmann had calmed the fears, told him a story about having been sent from the Secret Archives to finally bring the Concordat of the Borgias back to Rome, back to the place it belonged. Yes, he’d come from Simon personally, yes, it was safe now, after all these years. Horstmann had spun a tale that might have been true and Brother Leo had wanted to believe it. Horstmann had told him that a treacherous journalist from New York was on the trail of the concordat,
had stumbled across the story of the secret brotherhood, and that it was now a race, the Church against the
New York Times
, which was bound to reveal everything in the worst possible light and create a great scandal and cause the Church a great injury. And then he had described the journalist. Ben Driskill.

Brother Leo’s instincts had been to mistrust such a story, but his fear of Horstmann’s ghostly materialization had made him want to believe it was true. But Horstmann, with something like regret, had seen the doubt in the little old man’s eyes … 
Little old man
. Chronologically they were almost the same age, but there was more to life than chronology.

That morning in the cave had been a sorry business.

Brother Leo’s doubts had come to life again, he’d sensed something in his old comrade and it had proven his undoing. Brother Padraic hadn’t seemed to be aware he was dying: he’d folded his arms and babbled a bit, as if he thought Horstmann were the angel of death, and had drifted off like a spaceman severed from his support system. Leo had been a problem. He had tried to escape, had cried out to Driskill, and Horstmann had cut him quickly, almost in anger, which was unlike him, and then he’d carried out the ritual. There had been an old cross left over from some service carried out on the beach long ago, maybe even another crucifixion, now worm-eaten and damp through, and it had struck him as an omen, finding it propped against the wall of the cave like timber bracing. Simon would have understood the gesture. Simon had done the same thing once in the French countryside with a priest who had tried to betray them to the SS.…

Brother Leo was no better, no better than the one who had betrayed them in the end and brought them to ruin and scattered them like ashes on the wind. Leo had known the secret of the concordat yet had been planning to give it to a stranger. Simon had long ago left no doubt in their minds as to the sacred need for secrecy. Yet Leo had urged it on Driskill.