The Assassini (88 page)

“It meant Indelicato was a slimeball. She was right.” I wondered if I was smiling at the memory of Val. I think I was. “She was going easy on him,” I said, “in deference to your finer sensibilities.”

“She didn’t understand that men like Indelicato and Pius—I knew him, Ben, I knew the man—they have the good of the Church at heart, not some passing whim, some cheap momentary morality … my God, Ben, D’Ambrizzi wanted to kill the pope! He had to be stopped. But I was a good friend … I could have killed him! But I loved him … so I betrayed, as she put it, the plot—I was wrong for saving the pope! She was mad, Ben, there was madness all around her! Nothing mattered to her anymore, she’d forsaken her vows. She was Lockhardt’s
whore
! She was going to destroy it all—you don’t see it, do you? You don’t understand anything I’m saying to you … I did what I could. When I left the house that afternoon, Horstmann was waiting on the road to Princeton. My leaving was the signal for him.…” He was crying. “It was the worst moment of my life.
That
was the heart of darkness, Ben, and you can’t imagine what it was like.…”

“Damn, it has been tough for you, Dad. You’ve been through hell—” The impulse to murder was bubbling over, flooding my brain.

“I’m in hell! My God, don’t you see? I’m in hell and I’m never coming out.…”

“And people say there’s no justice,” I said. “I just want to get this straight.… You gave Indelicato or Horstmann the sign to kill your daughter. I don’t care when, I don’t care how … but what was her crime? Had Val murdered anyone? Whom had she left for dead by the roadside? Or out in the chapel? She was a nun who loved her Church, who believed in its essential goodness and its power to do good. She wanted to rid it of the evil—and she wasn’t a fanatic, a nut, she had the proof that the inmates had been running the asylum. That was the big difference between you and Val. You don’t believe in the essence of the Church,
and she did. She believed in the goodness and decency and kindness and strength of the Church, she knew it would survive and prosper and flower once it was clean again—”

“But I saved you, Ben! They wanted to kill you—I lay in that hospital … wanting to die because of Val … and you’d been attacked … and I told Indelicato that if you died, then I would go public because there’d be nothing left for me … because the Church would already have gone over the edge into the shrieking pit.… Do you hear me? I saved you and I saved the Church!”

“Congratulations, Dad.”

“And then she started on Governeau. She said murder was my style … it was all going to come out … the darkness had taken her and she was pulling me down into it with her.…”

“I know all about the heart of darkness. I’m looking into it.” I saw Val, the sunlight playing on her, the little girl in her red bathing suit, prancing in the arcs of the sprinkler, the sun beading up on her little body so she seemed to be dripping with diamonds, and I moved toward my father. It was time to end the misery. It was time to put him down like the rabid thing he was.

He shrank back. He knew what was coming. Patricide would have gone rather nicely in the family dossier.

He lifted his hand to defend himself. His sleeves and sweater were soaked with blood.

I heard a noise. A rapping noise, a muffled crying out over the wind. I looked behind me. The room was empty but for us. The tree mocked me with its bright lights, its tinsel. The lights were reflected in the eyes of the bear, as if he’d come to life. I heard the rapping turn to pounding and I heard something cracking and it was overhead.

A man lay on the skylight, arms outstretched, fists beating weakly on the glass, and the glass and the frame were beginning to go.

Then the sky was falling. The skylight seemed to explode into the room under the weight of the body. The aluminum frame began to twist and pop, pieces splitting apart, glass cracking, then shattering, and then a kind of glittering, shimmering rain of glass and metal rods caught in the light of the fire and the brightly colored bulbs on the
tree, and there was a blast of wind and millions of snow crystals swirling down, and my father was screaming somewhere in the back of things and in the middle of the glass and metal and snow a man was hurtling down upon us like a meteorite from a cosmic light show.

The body hit the back of a couch, banged off onto a coffee table, and sprawled facedown on the floor at the foot of the Christmas tree. The man moved, jerking his legs, struggling to turn over. His gloved fingers were pulling at the black ski mask as if he were choking, suffocating beneath the wool.

I knelt beside him. I turned him over. The front of the white parka was soaked with blood. There was a neat entry hole on the lower left side of his trunk, just above the waist, and turning him, I saw the shredded exit hole. There was a lot of blood. It hadn’t been a tree limb breaking. He kept pulling at the ski mask. The parka and the mask were embedded with bits of glass. He was coughing beneath the mask, trying to say something.

I helped him with the mask, pulling it up over his face. The face was scratched and leaking blood through the holes. It was Artie Dunn.

He looked up at me, licked blood from his lips.

“What a lousy day,” he whispered. His chest was shaking with a chuckle. “Bastard shot me.
Me …
I’ve been watching over you … I’m no camper, pal … I knew he’d come after your father … He’s here.…”

“You
knew
?”

“I knew Summerhays wasn’t Archduke, for God’s sake … I knew it was your father, it had to be, and I knew you’d never realize it … oh shit, this hurts.… Sorry about your roof … had to warn you …” His eyes were slightly glazed. He looked around, moving his head slowly, working hard at it. “Your father doesn’t look so great.… You need a protector, Ben, honest to God.” He coughed, licked his dry lips. His saliva was pink. Maybe it was from the cuts on his mouth. “I’ve felt better.… Listen to me—he’s here. He’s come back and he’s out there … I knew he’d come, I waited, watched …” He was panting. I had my arm around his shoulders, was supporting him. His strength was going fast.

My father was holding his head in his hands, still sitting before the fire. He kept wiping his eyes and smearing blood from his hands across his face. Beneath the blood he was gray, like wet cement. “What’s he saying? Tell me what he’s saying? Who’s here? Who’s come?”

A voice came from behind me and I’d heard it once before. I’d heard it in the church in Avignon and it had been telling me to go home. Now I knew why he hadn’t killed me when he had the chance. My father had sent the word from his hospital bed in Princeton. My father had spared me alone.

I turned and looked up into the bottomless eyes of August Horstmann. He was wearing a long black overcoat and a black fedora with the brim turned down all the way around. His eyes stared out from behind the circular lenses. He wore a scarlet muffler. There was snow clinging to his hat and coat. He was utterly calm.

“He’s telling you that I’ve come for you, Archduke. You knew I’d have to come.” He was standing just in front of the gigantic bear. It seemed to be threatening him from behind and he was unaware. It seemed to be reaching for him.

I started to speak and he put his hand up. The hand without the 9mm Walther. “I’m not here for you,” he said in his accented voice. He briefly considered me down the long length of his bold nose. I could see the Christmas tree reflected in his glasses. Then he turned to my father. I felt Father Dunn’s hand moving behind me, slowly, in the pocket of his parka. He coughed softly. Horstmann said, “It is time, Archduke. The time for a Judas is as inevitable as death. It
is
death.” My father was staring at him with a look of disbelief that was slowly transforming itself into something closer to a trance. “You betrayed Simon, and many men died because of you. And now you have led me to slaughter the innocents.… I have come to avenge them, Archduke. There are so many. They are here now. They are all around us. Close your eyes and you will see their faces.”

My father slowly rose, stood facing him. He closed his eyes.

“Can you see them, Archduke?”

He put a bullet in my father’s head. My father fell over backward, his head and shoulders crashing into the fireplace, sparks showering, burning logs cracking through under the weight. Flames reached up, curled around his face, the waves of heat blurring his features as if he were melting. His feet kicked on the floor, a paroxysm, a dance of death.

Dunn sighed. I felt him sliding something into my hand, something cold and heavy. Then he slumped onto his back again, pink foam all around his mouth. He was breathing slowly, but the stain of the bullet wound was forming an ever-widening circle. I squeezed the butt of the army-issue Colt .45 and leveled it at Horstmann.

He turned from the mesmerizing sight of my late father catching fire and stared at me. Something in the fireplace was sizzling.

“I have no quarrel with you,” he said to me. The Walther was pointing at me. He seemed barely to notice the huge automatic in my hand.

“I should think not,” I said. “I’ve done nothing to you. But you shot my friend Father Dunn and you killed my sister.… Does it surprise you to learn that I couldn’t care less about your excuse? You were led astray—I’ve heard all that. But I have a tough time feeling sorry for what you’ve been through.”

“I have done what I could to even accounts.”

I shook my head. “It’s not enough. You’re not avenging my sister. I’m the one avenging my sister. You killed my sister and I swore I’d find you. Now I’m going to kill you. I really have no choice.”

He smiled at me. “Another toy gun, Mr. Driskill?”

“No,” I said. “It’s real.”

The first slug blew his rib cage open and smashed him backward into the arms of the bear, where he hung, unable to deal with the shock, his eyes bulging against the restraints of the sockets. Maybe that first slug killed him, or would have, but it wouldn’t have gotten the poison out of my system. I’d waited a hellish long time, and I wished there were an audience because I felt like making a statement. The gun was doing the talking for me. It was wiping away the frustration. Catharsis. Epiphany with a .45.

The second slug took off one side of his face and skull and a big hairy chunk of the bear’s shoulder. Unendurable noise.

The third slug made his throat and chin explode and knocked both him and bear over into the hallway.

I heard Dunn’s voice weakly behind me.

“I think you got him, Ben.”

I called the police and the fire department in Menander and left it to them to get an ambulance out to the lodge, matter of life and death. Then I dragged my father’s charred body from the fireplace. I could smell my father burning. There wasn’t much I could do for Artie Dunn. He would either make it or he wouldn’t. I held him in my arms, trying to talk him into staying alive. I kept telling him to look at the Christmas tree towering above us. I felt the icy wind and the wet snow drifting down through the night onto my face.

After a while I began to sing softly to myself, Christmas carols, and Father Dunn stirred in my arms and I heard him whispering.

That’s how they found us.

Snow drifting down on us, the lights of the tree merry and bright, three men shot to pieces, a bear down, and one heathen whose mind had gone for a long walk, wandering aimlessly in the darkness which had engulfed us all.

M
y father’s death had to compete for press coverage and the attention of great men with the passing of His Holiness, Pope Callistus. The papal ticker gave out, by my reckoning, about twelve hours after August Horstmann killed my father. When I viewed it from a fair psychological distance, the whole business took on the look of one of those nineteenth-century English tontines, in which the last member left alive collects the big prize. It looked as if Cardinal D’Ambrizzi was the last warrior standing. Would his prize be the Throne of Peter?

There was a considerable amount of skullduggery to be pulled off in the immediate aftermath of that last night at the lodge, if extraordinarily unanswerable questions were to be avoided. It never occurred to me to turn to anyone but Drew Summerhays, who was, I suspect, pushed to the limits of his influence to keep the lid from blowing all the way to Rome. He dragged Archbishop Cardinal Klammer from his bed to start pulling strings, and the rest was just a blur so far as I was concerned. Whatever markers he called in, he pulled it off. He constructed an impenetrable cover-up. He hadn’t turned out to be Archduke, but in his veins flowed the blood of both Hercules and Machiavelli.

When I asked him about why he’d been in Avignon he tried to shrug it away. Pressed, he said only that he’d feared something was “rotten in the heart of things but I wasn’t sure who was behind it. I was trying to keep everything from coming down on you. Ben, I’m sorry for
all the prices you had to pay.” For God’s sake, he’d been trying to
protect
me.

The story that went out had my father’s ailing heart not unexpectedly failing.
Sic transit. We shall not see his like again. Hero of the war, diplomat of the peace, servant to the Church for all the days of his life
.

August Horstmann was quietly buried in a small cemetery serving a largely Catholic village in the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania, near a retirement home for elderly and penniless priests. Father Artie Dunn was taken to a private hospital which was well trained in the discreet care of the very rich, very famous, and very powerful. We knew within twenty-four hours that he would survive.

For its part in the elaborate charade, the village of Menander was given certain assurances that were bound to be met, without fail, by funds from Church coffers and the deep pockets of anonymous Catholic billionaires, the kind of men who were called upon for very special favors. It was obvious that as my father’s heir I would be expected to make a large contribution toward these civic improvements involving the fire station, the local hospital, a new hockey rink, and the high school gymnasium. Ripples, ripples, ripples, and even in death, Drew Summerhays told me, my father was doing good.