The Assassini Read Online Free PDF

variety. He was already a very important man in his world and by cementing his alliance with the great American kingmaker he was becoming even more so. Conveniently, they were able to use each other, which the monsignor thought was as good a definition of friendship as you were likely to come across. Andy Heffernan was a happy man.
    “You’re looking very fit and virtuous for a rich man, Curtis. Have a cigar.” He pointed to a wooden box on the corner of a cluttered trestle table topped by a slab of glass two inches thick.
    “You’ve twisted my arm,” Lockhardt said. He lit the Monte Cruz with a Dunhill cigar match and savored the flavor. “Where did you pick up the look of a lobster?”
    “Florida. Just back yesterday from a week of charity golf. Great week.” He went to the chair behind the table and sat down. There were several folders, a legal pad, a telephone, the cigars, a heavy ashtray. Lockhardt sat down facing him across the field of glass. “Great guys, Jackie Gleason, Johnny and Tom and Jack, all of them. Lots of great guys down in Florida. Do anything for the Church. Hell of a benefit for the Our Lady of Peace children’s wing. Lotsa golf. You’re not going to believe this, but I missed a hole in one by no less than three inches! Damned if I didn’t! Shoulda been on the TV—six iron pin high, three crummy inches to the left. I got one in Scotland once, at Muirfield … ah, happy days, a hell of a long way from South Boston. What more can a man want, Curtis? Enjoy, enjoy, we’re a long time dead—”
    “Whatever happened to the life eternal, the choir invisible, big sets of wings—”
    “You and your nuns’ theology! Gimme a break.” Heffernan laughed in his characteristic all-out way thatwas supposed to make you think he was as wide open as a whorehouse on Saturday night.
    “You want a break
and
ten million bucks?” Lockhardt smiled back at him and blew a smoke ring. The figure was so large that on the few occasions it had come up specifically in their conversations it had been very rewarding to watch Heffernan’s reaction.
    “Ten million bucks …” Heffernan’s laughter died quickly. That much money was very serious business, even to the right-hand man of Archbishop Cardinal Klammer. Lockhardt always wondered what was going on in the man’s mind when he was talking about holes in one with Johnny Miller and laughing that way. He never seemed to be on his guard. Yet he never seemed to make a mistake.
    “The ten million,” Heffernan said softly, liking the sound of it. He touched his fingertips before him, tapped all ten against one another. “You believe ten million will swing this whole deal?”
    “More or less. I can always come up with more. There’s always a deep pockets reserve.”
    “Like Hugh Driskill, maybe?”
    Lockhardt shrugged. “Andy, you can make any assumption you like. But do you really need to know? Do you really
want
to know? I rather doubt that.”
    “Whatever you say. You come up with the money, I’ll help you see it into the right hands.” Heffernan sighed like a man who knew he was well off, a smiling Irishman. “Klammer just kills me, Curtis. All this handsoff bullshit, all his deniability rap—”
    “American cardinals are different. They tend to think their votes are sacred things rather than trading chips. I suppose he doesn’t want to touch any of this himself, he doesn’t know it ever happened. Bribes scare them—”
    “Gifts, gifts!” Heffernan made a face. “The B word must never pass our lips. Ten million. What are we actually getting for the money, you and I? Is it, in a word, good for the Jews?”
    “A rock-solid American core of support. You put that together with Fangio, the cardinals Callistus named who owe us … bottom line, Andy, is we name the next pope.The Church stays on track. We see to it.” For a moment his mind stuck, hearing Sister Valentine, hearing her tell him that what she’d turned up could affect the choice