To Kill the Pope (23 page)

“Obviously, I'm going to France,” Tim said. “As soon as I can get organized.”

“And have you thought of touching base—gently—with Interpol? They're in Lyons, you know, and the Secretary-General there is an old pal of mine. A Frenchman who gets around a lot. Tell him I sent you. His name is Raymont Quindelle.”

“Sure, but you know I can't tell him what I'm really after.”

“That's alright,” Martinius said. “Just stick to your interest in Islamic organizations in general because of the Holy Father's hopes for better relations with Islam and so on, and old Quindelle may surprise you. Muslim terrorists are very much part of his
dossier
these days and he may welcome the opportunity of chatting with a great scholar like you. He must have heard about you. Why, he may even know that you just came back from Istambul!”

The Station Chief laughed, poured them more Gavi di Gavi, and signaled a hovering waiter for menus.

“It's a very small world we spooks live in, remember?”

*  *  *

“You may have bitten off more than you can chew,” Father Blás, the Jesuit General Superior, told Tim. “Or, to mix metaphors, you may have stirred up a hornet's nest.”

They were eating alone in the General's private dining room at the Borgo Santo Spirito Jesuit headquarters. Tim had called to request an appointment at the office, but the Spaniard had invited him to dinner.

“We'll be more relaxed that way,” he said. Their conversation was in English, Father Bias having studied in the United States for his doctorate in sociology, and being at ease with colloquialisms and Americanisms.

Sainte-Ange had insisted that the investigation be conducted in absolute secrecy, but Tim quickly realized that he could not function in a total vacuum. Especially after Istambul, he felt he required advice and guidance from a few men he trusted implicitly; Paul Martinius and Father Blás clearly qualified as confidential advisers.

Giving the General Superior a full report on his Istambul discussions, not failing to express gratitude to the Polish Jesuit who had put him in touch with the Gray Wolves, Tim wound up expressing his quandary over the meaning of the “French Brethren.” He also mentioned having learned about de Marenches' warning at the anniversary party for the elderly Jesuit priest earlier in the year.

“Yes,” Father Blás said, turning around in his hands his cognac ballon. He was a tall, thin man with melancholy eyes, oddly reminding Tim of Don Quixote. “We have known for a long time about the warning. And you should know that it came to us from our Jesuit brothers in Paris, long before the
Figaro
interview. De Marenches had many Jesuit friends, and I daresay that our brothers in France continue to cultivate their friendship with his organization. We are often interested in the same thing, but I must confess that we've never been able to establish what precisely de Marenches had included in his warning, whether he had provided names, identities,
modi operandi,
and so on . . . At this end, only the pope and Sainte-Ange may know what the warning contained. By the way, you should stay at the Jesuit Residence in Paris so that your visit there will appear to be routine. I'll let them know to expect you.”

“Thank you, Father,” Tim said, “but do you suppose that they also have contacts with the Muslim community in France, especially
with religious leaders? I have my own
entrée
to French Islamic scholars, but I wouldn't mind having another access road.”

“I would imagine so,” the Spaniard told him. “Even so, I suspect that you will have a hard time identifying the ‘French Brethren' who had hired the assassin among the mass of Muslims in France. Whoever they are, they must be very well hidden from view. I have to assume that they are dedicated terrorists of some kind and that they know how to cover their tracks . . . When I lived in Lebanon, I had a chance to become somewhat familiar with the operational tactics of groups like the
Hezbollah
—and they have to be taken seriously. These groups usually have very little in common with one another, but share tactical experiences. The most important thing is that they all are meticulous planners.”

“Getting back to de Marenches for a moment,” Tim asked, “did the Paris Jesuits who informed you about the warning mention anything about Muslims or ‘French Brethren'?”

“No, not really,” Father Blás replied. “There may have been a passing allusion to a vague possibility of de Marenches having some Muslim involvement in mind, but that was all. Sorry, my boy.”

“One more question, Father: Did the Holy Father, as far as you know, pay any attention to the warning? Did he do something about it?”

“I don't think so,” the General Superior said slowly. “He must have had reasons for choosing to trust the protection and the mercy of God. And about
that,
he was right in the end!”

The Spaniard rose from the table to signify the end of the dinner.

“What you have, Tim, is dynamite,” he said. “Be very careful with it.
Vaya con Díos!”

*  *  *

Past the passenger terminals and airline hangars at Fiumicino Airport near Rome, Alitalia's In-Flight Food Service occupies an indistinguishable, three-story whitewashed building with loading docks for its trucks delivering meals to planes. Late on a Saturday afternoon in early July, Jake Kurtski parked his small rental car at a side entrance, leaned comfortably against his seat, and lit a cigar, calmly awaiting a man he had not seen in over thirty years.

Presently, the side door opened and the man stepped out in the
setting sun, looked around, and walked slowly toward the rental car. He was short and compact, probably in his fifties. He wore a driver's coveralls. Squinting, he approached the parked vehicle, peering at the figure behind the steering wheel.

“Holy God,” he exclaimed in Polish. “This is really you, Jacek Kurtski?”

“It's
Jake,”
Kurtski corrected him. “Get in. We have to talk.

“Thirty-five years ago, I saved your ass and your life at the Magdeburg camp,” he went on. “Remember? The life at the D.P. camp? Fine. So now you are going to pay that debt, my dear Grochowski. You will do what I'll tell you to do, when I'll tell you to do it.”

“How did you find me here?” Grochowski asked in awe. “After all these years?”

“That's my business,” Kurtski told him. “Your business is to follow my orders and keep your mouth shut—if you want to hang on to your life. You'll hear from me again before too long. Now get out of the car!”

P
ARIS APPEARED
to Tim Savage to be a city abandoned by panicked inhabitants fleeing the Black Plague when he arrived there the first week of August, a day so hot that even pigeons hid under the eaves of Notre-Dame. Parisians themselves had vanished for a month along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, in the mountains and in the countryside, from the Loire Valley and Dordogne to Lake Annecy and the Languedoc. The only human presence, it seemed, were foreign tourists, and Tim was convinced, from their sounds and appearance, that most of them were Americans.

Scanning
Le Monde
during the short flight from Fiumicino to Orly, Tim came across a short, page-one story about the forcible occupation of a parish church in Chamblac, a small town in Normandy, by followers of the Pius V Fraternity, which the reporter described as an “Integrist” organization and whose militant members evidently had not gone away on vacations. “Integrist,” Tim knew, came from the Latin
integratio,
meaning a renewing or restoring, and it was used in connection with extreme conservative groups in Church opposing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and other modernizing steps. It was just one more quarrel inside the French Church, a subject of no particular interest to him.

But the next two stories in
Le Monde
did command his attention at once. One reported another massacre of villagers in Algeria by an Islamic terrorist organization; this was a topic Tim had followed closely while working at his commission office. Algeria, even more than Egypt or the Sudan, had become the country to watch for every Islam scholar and African and Middle Eastern policy planner. The other story recounted the latest episode of violence between “young Arabs” and Turkish immigrants and the riot police in an industrial Parisian suburb that was home to thousands
of Muslim families, mainly unemployed refugees from overseas. It was part of the “Muslim Belt,” as the article put it, where even the toughest French
gendarmes
hesitated to enter after dark. Was this where he might have to go in his quest for the “French Brethren,” Tim wondered uneasily.

*  *  *

After his return from Istambul, Angela had sent Tim a copy of
The Mystery of Marie Roget
by Edgar Allan Poe, the famous whodunit featuring Auguste Dupin as the detective hero. “You may find it amusing, if not helpful,” she had written in an accompanying note.

Tim, who at this stage fervently welcomed anything helpful, had smiled with appreciation reading Dupin's admonition that “not the least usual error in investigations . . . is the limiting of the inquiry to the immediate, with total disregard of collateral or surrounding events. I would divert inquiry from the trodden and unfruitful ground of the event itself, to the contemporary circumstances which surround it.” And he remembered from a Georgetown class in legal logic that “absence of evidence is
not
evidence of absence.”

As the plane now began its approach to Paris, Tim suddenly remembered Dupin's words, struck by their immediate relevance to his own investigation. Yes,
contemporary circumstances,
he thought, but what were they—or what
are
they? Dupin seemed to be trying to tell him to look for broader horizons. Again, Tim was intrigued by Sister Angela: nuns were not habitual readers—or fans—of Poe, or admirers of the great Auguste Dupin. She certainly was a remarkable woman, with her most unusual mind, her literary knowledge, and her quiet sense of humor. Dupin, of course, fitted his mission perfectly. And there were other aspects of Angela's
persona
that Tim was finding exceedingly attractive, and more and more on his mind, not excluding impure thoughts. He enjoyed the thoughts. More than once he dreamed about her very beautiful face and, since they were dreams, about her very beautiful body. And he hardly knew her.

Dupin's advice notwithstanding, there was no pattern of
contemporary circumstances
surrounding the assassination attempt against Gregory XVII that Tim could discern. Alright, he admitted, there was the alleged Muslim connection and his discovery
of the “French Brethren,” but thus far it told him nothing about the crucial
circumstances.
And there were no clear
circumstances
surrounding other great contemporary acts of terrorism and violence, most of them unresolved—even apart from the American assassinations of past decades.

In August 1980, less than a year before the attack on the pope, for example, eighty-six persons were killed when a bomb went off at the Bologna railway station when a train from Rome had come to a stop. An organization identified as “Fascist” had taken the responsibility for this act, but nobody knew why the “Fascists” had done it. No visible
contemporary circumstances,
other than the entirely irrelevant fact that Bologna had a communist mayor and fascists hated communists. Some years later, the commander of the Vatican's Swiss Guards and his wife were shot and killed by a Swiss Guards corporal who then killed himself. This hit as close to home as imaginable, inside the Vatican perimeter, but, likewise, there were no signs of conspiracies and no
circumstances
surrounding the tragedy. It probably had nothing to do with Gregory XVII, but Tim felt he had to look into the Swiss Guards shooting, just in case he found a clue; all he found were hints that the commander and the corporal may have had a homosexual relationship.

Even when people “killed for God,” or said they did, patterns—as distinct from personal motivations—could not be traced or established in a broader fashion. St. Stanislaw, the bishop of Kraków in Poland, was killed in the eleventh century on the orders of the king whom he had denounced. In the twelfth century, Thomas à Becket was murdered at his altar on the orders of England's King Henry II—he was a “turbulent” and “meddlesome” priest in the eyes of the sovereign. In El Salvador, eight centuries later, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated at his altar by right-wing military leaders to whom he was a politically “turbulent” priest. Was Gregory XVII, too, a politically “turbulent” and “meddlesome” priest to a sovereign or a madman, who had to be “killed for God?”