The Assassini (79 page)

D’Ambrizzi had slipped away and joined us in the shadows behind a grove of potted palms. Dunn turned. “Eminence.”

The cardinal had Sister Elizabeth in tow. “This one”—he inclined his head toward her—“still maintains the belief that I am not Jack the Ripper. I hope to demonstrate that fact to you, Benjamin, as the evening goes on. As for my dear friend Indelicato, he believes he’s putting an end to the career of old Saint Jack tonight.” He shrugged. “And what if he does? Would it be such a tragedy? Well, yes, it might be something of a tragedy for the Church.”

“What
do
you want for the Church?” I asked.

“What do I want for the Church? I suppose I don’t want it to fall into the hands of the Iron Masters—my name for them. The old guard, the ultraconservatives. I don’t want Indelicato to take it over and turn it back into a kind of baronial preserve. It’s too late for that. That’s the heart of it.”

“Indelicato seems very confident tonight,” I said.

“And why not? He has me under his heel, does he not? Horstmann was Simon’s creature, everyone agrees on that … and I was Simon … I tried to kill a pope, I led a band of killers, and now I am supposed to have reactivated Horstmann. It all fits into the long, dark history of the Church and Indelicato thinks he can prove it. How in the world can I stop him from blackmailing me out of the picture? It would—if I may say so—take an act of God. Of course, I believe in God.” He smiled beneath the broad, hooked beak, gently fingering an ivory crucifix on his chest. “And God is well known to help those who help themselves. But now, are you intent on seeing this television program?” We all indicated we weren’t. “Neither am I. Come with me. Quietly. I have something to show you.”

He led the way down a deserted corridor, down a flight of stairs that hooked around a corner into a dark,
cavernous basement, lit only by occasional ceiling lights. He touched a switch on the wall and the great hulking shadows were revealed as wine racks. Thousands of bottles stretching away. Dunn said, “I’ve heard it’s the finest cellar in Rome.”

D’Ambrizzi shrugged. “I am no judge of wine. As long as it’s rough and the color of blood I’m happy. A peasant.” He was moving between the racks. “We will not be disturbed down here. I have something you must see.”

Elizabeth said, “How can you be sure we won’t be—ah—interrupted?” She was looking over her shoulder as if expecting a Swiss Guard S.W.A.T. team at any moment. “Isn’t this off limits?”

“Sister, I have known Manfredi Indelicato for more than fifty years. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other. He always has his spies watching me. But he sees me as an unsophisticated bull in a china shop. About me, he believes what he wants to believe. In any case, he would never believe that I have my spies in his personal employ … members of his household staff. He occasionally uses something he could learn only from his spies. Thus, he gives himself away … and identifies his spy for me into the bargain. I, however, never use what I learn about him. I merely note it for future reference.” He grinned like a crocodile. “I use it only obliquely, you see. I am the subtle one, not Manfredi.” He beamed self-consciously. “He’s prepared to kill me tonight. If he must, he will … or so he believes. But do I appear worried to you? Please, Sister, be assured—we are quite safe here. I have been here before. What I am about to show you I’ve seen several times, just to assure myself it was real.… Come, follow me.”

The dust from the bottles, the smell of the wooden racks, the coolness of the cellar: I was inhaling all of it, wondering why we were there. When he came to the final rack against the wall D’Ambrizzi reached up and gently pushed the rack sideways. I heard a whirry, softly grinding sound and the rack, as well as the wall itself, slid away on invisible bearings, giving access to yet another room. D’Ambrizzi beckoned us to follow.

“Manfredi is an arrogant man. Another man with a secret room beneath his villa would install an alarm system-, a series of television cameras—this is the age of technology. But then, the people who installed the system might leak and there could be nothing worse.… Manfredi is so certain of his inviolability, so deliciously egocentric, he believes himself to be utterly impregnable. No one could know about this crypt—no one could know what he has hidden here. But he is mistaken. Giacomo D’Ambrizzi knows …”

The room was deeper yet beneath the level of the ground and, in contrast to the vast wine cellar, it was clean and free of the trappings of great antiquity. There were two large humidifiers and an air filtration system, temperature gauges, automatic sprinklers in case of fire. Everything was in crates of all sizes and shapes. The room was the size of two tennis courts.

“This, my friends,” D’Ambrizzi said, “is the loot of World War Two. All in Manfredi Indelicato’s basement. Come, look at these crates. Come.” He waved us down two flights of stairs onto the concrete floor, among the crates. “Look … look!”

The crates were stenciled in black with eagles and swastikas of the Third Reich. Some had names inscribed in more faded black ink. Ingres. Manet. Giotto. Picasso. Goya. Bonnard. Degas. Raphael. Leonardo. Rubens. David. There was no end to it. Scrawled in red on many of the crates was the word
Vaticano
.

“It’s all very safe here,” D’Ambrizzi said. “He has taken great care with the environment. Very fond of art, Manfredi. Runs in the family. And this stuff is going to have to be safe for a very long time. Because most of these pieces have rather detailed histories. Provenances. They may have to be kept in hiding for another century. If Fredi becomes pope, he will surely see that it all goes to the Church—”

“And if you become pope?” I asked.

“I have hardly thought about it. I would not be a free agent. I suppose I’d think of something. Maybe Indelicato will try to keep it in his own family.” He sighed. “It’s really something of an albatross, isn’t it, this treasure?
Since we’re not supposed to have it at all. I thought you might enjoy seeing it, seeing what Indelicato was up to back then. If you inspected the crates carefully, you’d see that some of it was earmarked for Goering or Himmler or Goebbels or Hitler himself. But Indelicato took it … with my help, I admit, on occasion—”

“But why Indelicato?” Elizabeth asked. “He was in Rome during the war, he had nothing to do with the
assassini
in Paris … you were the one making sure the Church got its share of the loot—”

“Well, I had no heart for it, you see. But Fredi, he was at Pius’s right hand when the whole
assassini
business was conceived. It wasn’t only Pius who gave me the unpleasant job of going to Paris to do the dirty work. It was Indelicato that Pius turned to for a suggestion. And Indelicato saw a way to get rid of me. Even then we were natural rivals. He believed it was unlikely that I would survive the Paris assignment. He supposed the Nazis would eventually have enough of my contentious behavior and simply kill me. Oh yes, Indelicato monitored my work very closely.”

“Did he know about your plan to kill Pius?”

“Oh my, yes, of course. It was Indelicato who was tipped off to the plot. It was Indelicato who further cemented his relationship with Pius by ‘saving his life.’ Pius never forgot.”

“So, who told Indelicato? Who betrayed you?”

“Someone I trusted, someone who knew everything. For a long time I didn’t know … at the beginning, of course, I was sure it was LeBecq. Now I know it wasn’t.”

“Who was it?”

He shook his head, wouldn’t answer.

Elizabeth said, “But how did Indelicato wind up with all the booty?”

“Pius was a grateful man when it was convenient for him. He gave it into Fredi’s keeping as a reward for services rendered. For saving the papal hide. For all I know, Indelicato may have blackmailed him.” That thought made him smile.

“Well,” Father Dunn said, “it was an appropriate
gesture. The Indelicato family has always taken pride in its collections. They have always collected.”

Then it hit me, better late than never.

“The Collector,” I said softly.

D’Ambrizzi nodded. “Yes. It was Indelicato whom Pius sent to Paris to find me … that is, to build the case against me for catch-all disobedience, for killing LeBecq, for plotting to kill Pius himself. But we held firm, held silence in the face of his probing. Eventually I realized he was going to have me killed—he’d have been rid of me forever. Yes, Pius called him ‘the Collector.’ It was a little joke, a play on words. Fredi had been sent to Paris to collect
me
. In any case, as soon as the war was over, it was Indelicato who handled the Vatican end of what you referred to as ‘the mutual blackmail’ with the escaping Nazis. Fredi was a kind of clockwork spider, weaving his web of blood and fear and iron self-righteousness, the Nazis and the art and the Church. Those days are the key to his entire rise. The serious, ascetic figure, the King of the Curia. Indelicato has been a busy man. One of us, I suspect, is going to have to die so that the other might succeed—”

“Nonsense, Giacomo! Your various delusions, your sense of melodrama, have blinded you!” It was His Eminence Cardinal Indelicato in the doorway behind us. “What do I have to fear from you? Or you from me? And why all this talk of dying? Has there not been enough killing?” His dark eyes, so like Sandanato’s, flickered from one face to another, a half smile on his thin lips. In that moment he reminded me of Sandanato, someone only a step from martyrdom and fanaticism. Elizabeth’s story that Sandanato had defected to Indelicato’s camp after a lifetime of loyalty to D’Ambrizzi made sense, if only in terms of Indelicato’s face. Never had two men been more unlike each other than the cardinals in question. Except, perhaps, in their ambitions, their ruthlessness.

D’Ambrizzi turned to us with a tolerant smile. “I owe my friends here an apology. I knew you would have me watched, Fredi, and I wanted you here. They’d never have come if I’d told them—but I am trying to prove a
point to them. A tour of the treasure chamber was in order.”

“But I’m afraid you’ve given the wrong impression. These are the gifts bestowed upon the Church by various states both during and after the war. I lease this space to the Church for storage. It’s all down on paper and perfectly proper.”

D’Ambrizzi laughed. “Why tell this to me, Fredi? I’m the one the Germans allowed to steal it! You are an amusing fellow sometimes, in spite of yourself.”

“As always, my friend, you are too kind. But you must realize that our rivalry—as you see it—is at an end. We are old men, Giacomo. We must escape from the past. Surely we will live out our days in peace—”

“Do you think so, Fredi? Really?”

“Of course. The long war is over. I have your memoir now, the story you wrote and left in America so many years ago … at least, it will soon be in my possession. I will destroy it. And so your claws will be dulled. Whatever you insist on dredging up from the tragedy of the past will be irrelevant jabbering—”

“And forty years after the events we have our second Nazi pope!” D’Ambrizzi couldn’t keep the laughter out of his voice. “What a joke! And who is it that procured my memoir, as you call it?”

Indelicato stared at him and then let the question slip away. “You see, you are hostage to the past.
Nazi
is no longer a word with any meaning.”

“Perhaps that’s one of the things that’s wrong with the world. For me, it will always have meaning, I assure you.”

“You are paralyzed in the past. For you there is always a war, always killing to be done. Well, Simon, your killing is over at last. Now you must contemplate the fate of your eternal soul. You have such a lot of blood on your hands. You have murdered so much of the past. But, Giacomo, you have not murdered me!”

“I assume this is all for their benefit,” D’Ambrizzi said, turning slightly toward us. “Well, you may convince them. But I must say it’s you, Fredi, you
are
the past.
While you live, the evil of those days lives. You are the spirit of evil that infects our Church. Evil. Pure evil …”

“Ah, my poor Giacomo! Up to your chin in blood, the man who tried to murder the pope—and you call me evil! You should seek out your confessor if you still have one, my friend, while there is still time.”

They stared at each other, all the smiles gone, like two prehistoric creatures, all but extinct, ready to thrash it out. After what they had been through and what they had done, extinction held no fears for them.

I broke the silence, faced Indelicato. “Who warned you of the plot to kill Pius?”

“I will tell you—”

“No!” D’Ambrizzi shouted. “There’s no point!”

“Archduke. It was the man we called Archduke. He knew where the real hope for the Church lay. He knew then. He knows now.”

Cardinal Indelicato led our peculiar little group back to the festivities. He walked side by side with D’Ambrizzi, their arms linked. Father Dunn and Elizabeth and I followed, watching them, outwardly two old friends engaged in a formalized ritual. Maybe that was all it was, a ritual, a gavotte they’d been dancing for half a century. Maybe their emotions weren’t involved. Maybe their emotions had died long ago and what was left was sheer plotting. Whatever the truth, I wanted to see how the dance ended.

The viewing of the television show was just concluding as we stood in the vast foyer outside the ballroom doors. The applause was still rippling away as the footmen opened the doors and the crowd milled out upon us. The American anchorman was swept along until he saw Cardinal Indelicato. Then the two of them stood together while we moved away. Flashbulbs were going off, everyone was exclaiming at the brilliance of the show. Indelicato was giving his thin smile, inclining his head humbly, fingers touching the bejeweled crucifix.

I turned to Father Dunn. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t keep any of it straight anymore. It was supposed to end tonight. The big flash of lightning … 
the truth. And what do we get? The villains decide it’s old home week. And what did Indelicato mean about getting his hands on D’Ambrizzi’s memoirs? You said Peaches found the damn things—”

I felt D’Ambrizzi’s hand on my arm before Dunn could answer.