Read The Assassini for Free Online Page B

learned a lot about life from playing football and maybe you did. You learned about pain, about the wild-eyed crazy bastard down in the silt at the bottom of your psyche; you learned about locker-room jock humor and gung-ho for the Fighting Irish and old grads who turned on you if you lost the fucking game; you learned that just because you were a football player it didn’t mean you were going to get anywhere with the blondes with big tits on the
Bob Hope Show
. If that was life, well, I guess you learned something about life from football.
    But nothing I’ve ever known since quite equaled that moment of summer scrimmage when I saw it all so clearly. Drew Summerhays never understood footballlike that. And what he understood I simply never grasped. Summerhays understood the Church.
    I watched him complete the neat, surgical slicing and spearing of the last morsel of Dover sole which he ate without any accompaniment whatsoever: no salad, no vegetables, no rolls and butter. A single glass of Evian water. No coffee, no dessert. The man was going to live forever, and what I really wanted from him was the name of the person who did his shirts. I had never seen such starch work. Never a ripple, just shirts like perfect fields of snow. I felt like a peasant sopping up the sauce in which the last of my osso buco lay. His face was expressionless, unless patience with my appetite constituted an expression. He urged a choice Fladgate port on me and the wine steward scurried away to the club cellars. Summerhays slipped a gold hunter from his vest pocket, checked the hour, and got to the point of our luncheon, which had nothing to do with Notre Dame and old gridiron exploits.
    “Curtis Lockhardt is coming to town today, Ben. Have you ever spent much time with him?”
    “I hardly know him. I’ve met him a few times. That’s since I’ve been a grown-up. He used to hang around the house when Val and I were kids.”
    “That’s one way of putting it. I’d have described him as your father’s protégé. Almost a member of the family. That’s how I’d have put it, anyway.” He ran a knuckle along his upper lip, then shifted away from the possible implications I might recognize about Lockhardt’s relationship with my sister. Whatever
that
might be. It was none of my business, what your new nuns got up to these days.
    “He’ll be seeing me, of course,” Summerhays went on. “And your father, too … ah, thank you, Simmons. Precisely what I had in mind for Mr. Driskill.” Simmons placed the bottle on the table, allowing me the privilege of pouring my own. I slid it around the glass. The port had legs, I had to give it that. Simmons reappeared with a Davidoff cigar and a clipper. In no time at all I decidedthat reminiscing about the Iowa game had been a small price to pay.
    “And,” Summerhays said softly, “I’d like you to spend some time with him. It occurs to me that given some of the firm’s interests—” He may have shrugged. It was so subtle I may have imagined it.
    “Which interests would those be, Drew?” I felt a draw play coming my way. I was being suckered into committing myself too early. If I didn’t watch out, Drew Summerhays would have a first and goal inside the ten.
    “I wouldn’t try to mislead you,” he said. “We’re talking about the Church here. But, Ben, the Church is business, and business is business is business.”
    “Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Drew. You’re saying business is business?”
    “You have grasped the essence of my thought.”
    “I was afraid of that.”
    “Two lawyers,” he said, “being cute.” A smile flitted across his thin lips. “You may have heard that the Holy Father is unwell?”
    It was my turn to shrug.
    “That’s why Lockhardt is coming to town. He’s firming up plans for choosing a successor to Callistus. He may want our counsel—”
    “Not mine,” I said. “Most unlikely.”
    “And I want you firmly in the picture. It is valuable to