The Assassini (56 page)

Incomprehensible.

To die was not enough.

The ritual—so ancient, so brutal, so damning for eternity—had been called for, and God had given him the strength to carry it out.…

The fog had blotted out Driskill. Horstmann had not been willing to wait for him.

Driskill.

Horstmann had begun to think of him as a hound of hell. Driskill was the devil’s work. The fog had saved him this time or he’d have taken Leo’s place on the cross.

Why wouldn’t he die?

On the ice that night in Princeton, Horstmann had killed him. But he would not die. It was as if he were being saved for some other fate.

But how could that be? And where was he now? What had he done upon finding Brother Leo in the fog, drained of blood and turning blue with the cold—

Had he been afraid?

No. He didn’t think Driskill was afraid. Driskill was a merciless, godless man, and he was not afraid. He was not afraid to die, yet he was full of sin. He should by rights have feared death, the punishment for his sins, what lay in wait for him in the final darkness. But he was not afraid.

It made no sense.

Where was Driskill now? Was he following? Who, he wondered, was hunting whom? The thought perplexed him. But God was on his side.

Horstmann slipped his eyeglasses back into place and told himself that there was nothing to worry about. No man possessed greater vigilance than he. No man.

So he closed his eyes, holding the leather briefcase in his lap. The Concordat of the Borgias safe at last. It was for him a living thing, a kind of disembodied heart, pulsing with the blood and the commitment that would cleanse the Church at last.… He remembered the night in Paris when Simon had entrusted it to him and Leo and sent them on their mission, the mission that had turned Leo into a virtual hermit and himself into a wanderer, telling them to wait for the time when they would be summoned again to save the Church.…

* * *

The spools of audio tape whirled slowly and the voices filled the room, a little tinny without enough bass, but then, the quality of the fidelity had not been the point.

He was in Alexandria a week ago, give or take a few days. While there he had a meeting with our old friend Klaus Richter—

You’re joking. Richter? Our Richter? From the old days? You told me he was the one who frightened you!

None other, Holiness. And he did frighten me, I assure you
.

Your candor becomes you, Giacomo
.

The draperies were drawn, shutting out the gray light of a cloudy morning. Across the pine-bordered lawn one might have seen the brown haze rounded like a lid over Rome. A gardener was trimming the hedges with something like a chain saw, judging by the sound of it. The angry whine penetrated the draperies hanging heavily at the open windows and French doors. It sounded like a monstrous wasp trying to decide upon a victim.

And he saw another man who subsequently killed himself
.

Who was that?

Etienne LeBecq, Holiness. An art dealer
.

There was a long pause.

We also have a report from Paris that a journalist, an old chap by the name of Heywood—

Robbie Heywood. You remember him, Giacomo. Terrible loud jackets, he’d talk your arm off and drink you under the table, given half a chance. God’s love, I remember him … how does he come into this?

Dead, Holiness. Murdered by an unknown assailant. The authorities have no clues, of course
.

“Antonio! This is a genius of sorts! How incredibly underhanded this all is! How did you get these tapes?”

In the library of the villa which was the home of Antonio Cardinal Poletti, whose brother was an Italian diplomat stationed in Zurich and whose other brother was in the business of making and distributing unsavory films in London for a small but demanding market, five
men sat with cups of breakfast coffee and rolls and fruit close at hand. And a very large problem in their laps.

Poletti was forty-nine, a small man with a bald head and alarmingly hairy arms and legs, all of which was in full view since he wore his tennis costume. The other four included Guglielmo Cardinal Ottaviani who was sixty and widely regarded to have the most exaggerated “attitude problem” in the entire College of Cardinals but was a man whose very irascibility rendered him powerful and persuasive: he was feared; Gianfranco Cardinal Vezza, one of the eldest of the elder statesmen of the Church, a man who carefully maintained his reputation for increasing balminess so that he might all the more easily spring the iron jaws of his traps on the unwary; Carlo Cardinal Garibaldi, a chubby “club man” among the cardinals, a natural politician who had learned much of what he knew best at the feet of Cardinal D’Ambrizzi; and Federico Cardinal Antonelli. They were arranged in a variety of dark red leather chairs and couches, surrounded by entire walls of books—several of which Cardinal Poletti had himself written. Garibaldi’s question went unanswered as the tape played on.

But what has he to do with any of this mess?

Sister Valentine saw him in Paris while doing her research. Now he’s dead. There may be a connection—

You’ll have to do better than that, Giacomo. I’ll send someone to Paris and check this out
.

Good luck to him. Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence. Knifed on a street corner. Such things happen
.

Nonsense. The Church is under attack and Heywood was a victim. It’s obvious
.

Cardinal Poletti leaned across the coffee table and punched the stop button. He looked slowly from one face to another.

“The heart of the matter,” he said. “Did you hear it? ‘The Church is under attack.’ That’s what I wanted you to hear Indelicato himself say … he sees it for what it is, an attack.” He frowned at his coffee which was cold by now. “It is better that we lay our plans now than try to accomplish everything at the last minute when we’re
up to our ears in foreigners—Poles and Brazilians and Americans! Give those people enough rope and they hang us all, they hang the Church. You know I’m right.”

Cardinal Garibaldi spoke again without moving his plump lips, like a ventriloquist temporarily in search of a dummy. “You say these voices—Callistus, D’Ambrizzi, and Indelicato, eh? Well, there’s a nasty genius to it, Antonio. How did you get these tapes? Where did this discussion take place?”

“His Holiness’s office.”

“How extraordinary. You put a bug in his office! No need to look so startled. I’m up on the latest terminology.”

“It must be the influence of that brother of yours,” Cardinal Vezza murmured. He stroked the white stubble on his chin. He often forgot to shave these days.

“Ah, but which brother,” Ottaviani said, striking one of his attitudes, his smile like a sickle wound, “that is the question. The diplomat or the pornographer?” He cackled softly under his breath, enjoying young Poletti’s discomfort.

Poletti glared at him. “You’re more of an old woman with each passing day.” He stood up, bouncing on the balls of his Reebok-shod feet, his simian legs bowed, and picked up his American-made Prince tennis racquet. He practiced a few crisp backhands, presumably picturing Ottaviani’s face on the imaginary balls. “Always disagreeable,” he muttered.

Cardinal Vezza, who was a large, slow-moving man, struggled forward in his chair. As usual, he was having trouble adjusting his hearing aid. “I had reference to the diplomat, of course. Aren’t embassies always being bugged by someone or other? So he should know about this sort of thing.”

Garibaldi repeated his previous question. “Well? How did you do it?”

“I have a distant cousin on the Vatican medical staff. He attached a voice-activated device to the cart bearing His Holiness’s oxygen supply.” Poletti shrugged elaborately,
as if to say such miracles were the stuff of his everyday life. “He is completely trustworthy—”

“No man,” Vezza suddenly shouted, “is
that
trustworthy.” He laughed harshly. He began coughing, a hacking cough that hadn’t caught up with him in seventy years of smoking. He held his cigarette between yellowed fingers with cracked and split nails. He smoked each cigarette to the stubby end.

Antonelli, a tall blond man in his early fifties who looked ten years younger, cleared his throat, a signal for the others to lay off the childish bickering. He was a lawyer, a quiet leader among the College of Cardinals despite his comparative youth. “I presume there is more to the tape. May we hear it?”

Poletti threw his racquet into an occasional chair, crossed back to the table, and depressed another button. The recorded voices resumed and the cardinals fell quiet, listening.

The silver-haired priest … and who is he?

Your network is still an astonishment to me. But where is Driskill?

You’re good at watching people. Maybe you’ve been wasting too much time watching me, Fredi
.

Not closely enough, apparently
.

So now we have nine murders … and a suicide?

Well, who knows, Holiness? It’s a reign of terror. Who knows how many more there are … and how many more there will be
.

Then there was a pause, a muffled crashing sound, a jumble of voices.

Poletti turned the tape recorder off.

“What the devil was all that ruckus?” Vezza looked up, shocked.

“His Holiness collapsing,” Poletti said.

“And how,” Ottaviani said, “is the papal health?” His own sources were utterly accurate. He was testing Poletti and Poletti knew it.

“He’s dying,” Poletti said, flashing an arctic smile.

“I’m aware of that—”

“He’s resting, what can I say? We’re not here to
worry about the man’s health—we’re miles past that! It’s too late for anyone to worry about Callistus, in case that detail has escaped your attention. We’re here to discuss the
next
pope …”

“And,” Ottaviani said—he was a small, narrow man with a slightly twisted spine that gave him the appearance of a caricature by Daumier and that Poletti interpreted as the mark of Cain—“I can only assume that you are gathering evidence in support of your candidate.” He smiled crookedly, an expression that seemed to fit with his deformity.

Poletti surveyed the group, his mouth set tightly so that he might refrain from speaking long enough to avoid blurting out to Ottaviani his deeply felt opinion that he was an intolerable old cripple who’d be better off dragged out, stood up against an anonymous wall somewhere, and shot. Poletti saw himself reflected in a mirror struck through with veins of gold. It was lamentably true that with his small head, long upper lip and small chin and excessive hairiness, he did look like a kind of miracle: a tennis-playing prince of the Church who was also a monkey. He looked away from the mirror. A man could take only so many unpleasant truths in one morning.

“We
are
under attack,” Poletti said, picking up the tennis racquet, pointing it for emphasis. “It
is
a reign of terror. This is the atmosphere surrounding us as we face the election of a new pope. It is appropriate that we never lose sight of this framework when we consider the man we will support—”

“You make it sound like politics,” Vezza said a little sadly. He had stopped shouting and now could barely be heard.

“My dear Gianfranco,” Garibaldi said patiently, “it
is
politics. What else could it be? Received wisdom?”

Antonelli said gently, “The truth is, everything is politics in the end.”

“Well said.” Poletti nodded. “Nothing wrong with politics. Old as time.”

Ottaviani was tapping his fingers together. “My dear friend,” he said to Poletti, “is this old woman”—he
nodded at Garibaldi—“correct in saying that you are about to take on the role of campaign manager for some man you expect us to join you in supporting?” The permanently aggrieved smile seldom left his deeply lined face, a map of pain and the determination to overcome it, to use it.

“I have a name for our consideration, that’s true,”

“Well, go on,” Vezza said. He enjoyed giving the impression that he had a short attention span and was easily bored. His attitude tended to prompt others into offering fresh stimuli. “Trot him out.”

“You heard the tapes,” Poletti said. “There was one voice full of command, one voice that was decisive, one voice that recognized the seriousness of the crisis we face …”

“But he already
is
the pope!”

“No, dammit, not him! Vezza, my old friend, I worry about you at times.”

“He called it a reign of terror, Tonio—”

“That was Indelicato,” Poletti said, straining to control himself. “Indelicato said we are under attack—”

“Are you quite sure?” Vezza persisted. “It sounded like—” He had begun fiddling with his hearing aid again.

“Gianfranco, believe me, it
was
Indelicato!” Poletti implored.

“Videotape would have been preferable to the thing you’ve got rigged up on the oxygen cart, I must say,” Vezza grumbled. “I mean, these disembodied voices … could be anyone, couldn’t it? Do you think we could rig a video camera? Now, then we’d really have something—”

“We
really
have something now. The last thing I expected here was petty quibbling—”

“I’m sorry, Tonio,” Vezza said airily. “I didn’t mean to be ungrateful—”

“Well, you sounded damned unappreciative of my efforts and I am frankly surprised—”

Antonelli interrupted smoothly. “You’re providing us with invaluable information, Tonio, and we are all much in your debt. There can be no question of that. Now, am
I to assume that you are suggesting we gather our support behind Cardinal Indelicato?”

“You understand me perfectly,” Poletti said with relief. “And thank you for your kindness, Federico. Indelicato is the man for these times—”

“Are you suggesting,” Ottaviani said softly, “that there is only one issue worth considering? That we are under some sort of siege? And nothing else matters, is that what you would have us believe? I merely want to explore the crevices of your mind, Eminence.”

Poletti could never be sure whether or not Ottaviani was making a fool of him. “That is what I am saying.”