To Kill the Pope (18 page)

“Something like that,” Martinius said, nodding. “But you are the one who drew that conclusion. I'm just agreeing with you . . . But I can tell you that my pal, the new Soviet KGB
rezident
here, whom I knew elsewhere in the past, thinks along similar lines. He is scared to death that somebody, like the U.S., will suddenly proclaim the ‘truth' and all hell will break loose. He says that it would be a ‘provocation' worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis, no matter who did the provoking. I told him he need not worry. We're not about to discover anything or proclaim anything. It's old stuff, best to be forgotten.”

Martinius paused and finished his beer.

“I didn't tell him, but I'll tell you, old friend,” he said at length. “Just for your ears. My instructions are
not
to investigate the pope business, not to ask questions, not to listen, not to report anything back to Langley.”

“You mean, ‘see no evil, hear no evil'?” Tim asked.

“You could say that,” the Station Chief agreed. “But, if you
care, you may wish to nose around the other Western intelligence people. Not the Italians. They threw in the towel a long time ago and they are happy with the way things are. Circlic in prison for life and all that. Don't bother with the Brits—they're on the same wavelength as us. I'm not sure, however, what the French may or may not know about what almost happened to their venerated compatriot. You know, the guy who ran their intelligence outfit, the SDECE, was a real genius. His name was Alexandre de Marenches. Have you ever heard about him? You should. . . .”

Martinius rose to leave, putting his arm around Tim.

“And, by the way, speaking of strange characters, did you know that our old friend Jake Kurtski is in Rome? I wonder why . . .”

*  *  *

Back in his room at Villa Malta, Tim Savage pondered over what Martinius had told him. The CIA's behavior was certainly odd, and Martinius had no reason to invent explanations. What he had said was consistent with the CIA documents and Senate transcripts Tim had studied. Tim understood the policy rationale, astonishing as it sounded, but remained puzzled over the fact that the Agency had halted all investigations of its own. Whatever the White House may decide on policy, it is not in the nature of an intelligence organization to quit acting like one. And now Tim began to remember other little and big things that had perplexed him as he plowed ahead with his task.

It was perfectly plausible for Monsignor Sainte-Ange to complain, as he did to Tim that first day, that the CIA had not tried very hard to investigate the shooting on St. Peter's Square notwithstanding the U.S. government's promises to the Holy See. The private secretary was presumably unaware that the western powers, starting with the United States, had resolved not to risk a confrontation with the Soviets over the attempt against Gregory XVII—unless his French secret service friends had told him so, which was possible. Tim had no idea, but, he reasoned, the very perspicacious monsignor may have figured it out by himself. By the same token, Sainte-Ange would have understood that Interpol, the international police organization based in the French city of Lyons, had chosen—or had been strongly advised—to stay out of the papal matter altogether.

Under the circumstances, the pope and the monsignor were justified in launching their own secret investigation, even though Gregory XVII had announced publicly during a televised visit to the Turk's prison cell that he had forgiven him in Christian spirit and that the Holy See considered the subject closed. There was, of course, a profound difference between public pronouncements and private, secret enterprises, and Tim remembered that Sainte-Ange had told him at the outset that the decision to conduct the new investigation was taken after Italy had formally discontinued its efforts to arrive at the truth.

This constituted the perfect excuse, should questions ever be raised as to why Gregory XVII had reopened the subject after piously closing it for the benefit of world public opinion. Tim had now reached the conclusion that the pope and his private secretary had always been determined to find out who had ordered the assassination and why, but had to await the moment when they could quietly take matters into their own hands. And that moment had arrived. Tim wondered whether Gregory XVII and Sainte-Ange would reveal the truth, should he succeed in uncovering it, unless it happened to suit them for whatever reasons of the Holy See's interests as they saw it. Such as tying up the loose ends of the pontificate.

Tim's attention centered increasingly, especially after his chat with Paul Martinius, on all the bizarre pieces he was coming across as he sought to assemble facts that made sense. It struck him that Sainte-Ange had explained that the decision on the secret investigation had been made because “last week” the Italians had terminated their inquiries. But this could not have been entirely correct, Tim suspected, because his selection for the mission clearly had been made somewhat earlier: Sainte-Ange could not have suddenly picked him out of the air. Tim knew from both his CIA and Vatican experience that it took time to find the right person for a highly sensitive assignment, and Sainte-Ange obviously knew for weeks, if not longer, what the Italians were planning to do. So why had Sainte-Ange been imprecise or less than fully truthful with him?

Then, there was the strange case of
L'Osservatore Romano,
the official Vatican daily newspaper. Going through the mass of material
Angela kept sending him, Tim was intrigued by an editorial in
L'Osservatore
a few months after the shooting in the square that “something keeps all this from adding up” and that Circlic's approaching trial “could carry us past the confines of surrealism because of the evident disparity between small questions that may perhaps never be answered and great ones that will assuredly never be answered.” Tim was aware that the editorial contents of
L'Osservatore
had to be approved daily before press time by the Vatican's Secretariat of State, sometimes by the Cardinal Secretary of State himself, and that the newspaper spoke for the Holy See. This fact made it even more interesting to Tim that the bizarre editorial about Circlic had used the word “conspiracy.”

Why, Tim asked himself, would the Vatican conclude publicly, even prior to the trial, that a “conspiracy” had been afoot, that it touched on “surrealism,” and that “great questions” surrounding the Turk's criminal act would “never be answered”? Did Gregory XVII and Sainte-Ange know something, then or now, that the monsignor had not been prepared to share with Tim? Was he being used as a decoy or, in CIA parlance, as a “cut-out” to serve a purpose he could not decipher? Tim was beginning to think that if, indeed, there was a conspiracy, it was a conspiracy of silence on the part of all involved—including Sainte-Ange. Troubling Tim more and more, the crucial question was, what did the monsignor know and when did he know it?

Tim Savage was uneasy: Was it all smoke and mirrors?

*  *  *

Several weeks after his conversation with Paul Martinius, Tim attended a dinner at the Jesuit headquarters on Borgo Santo Spirito to honor an elderly French Jesuit priest on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Chatting with him at the end of the evening, while they finished their cognac, Tim made a passing reference to the assassination attempt on Gregory XVII, remarking how fortunate it was that the pope, the old Frenchman's countryman, had survived it. He was just making conversation. But the priest stiffened, looked around, then whispered, “Too bad that they paid no attention to the warning!”

“The warning? What warning?” Tim asked, perplexed.

“Well, the warning from Alexandre de Marenches, of course,”
the Jesuit answered impatiently. “I thought everybody here knew about it . . .”

“I'm afraid I do not know,” Tim told him. “I'm sort of new here. Can you tell me about it?”

“Certainly,” the Frenchman said. “It's not a secret as far as I'm concerned. Less than two years after the attack on the pope, de Marenches, you know, the great French spymaster, spoke in a newspaper interview in Paris of the warning he had sent to the Vatican. I think it was
Le Figaro.
He said that he had warned the highest people in the Vatican two years
before
the assassination attempt that a plot was being hatched against the pope, but that nobody had paid the slightest attention. Imagine! Not to pay attention to such a warning!”

A bell rang in Tim's head. De Marenches was the French secret service chief that Paul Martinius had made a point of mentioning to him that night at the bar. Of course, Tim thought, Paul
was
pointing him in a direction that had not occurred to him. Perhaps pieces were finally beginning to fall into place. The next day, Tim telephoned Angela to request a copy or a Xerox of the interview in
Le Figaro,
though he was unable to provide a date. Twenty-four hours later, Tim had the clipping in hand. This is what de Marenches had to say:

“At the beginning of that year, two years before the attack, the threat was so serious that I sent a general and a top-ranking officer to Rome to warn the head of the Church.”

After reading the article, Tim asked Angela whether there was anything in the files of the Papal Household about de Marenches and the warnings he had claimed to have sent. Angela called him back three days later.

“I can't locate anything about any warnings, except for that
Figaro
interview,” she said. “De Marenches died a few years ago. But you might be interested to know that about two and a half years after the shooting on the square, one of de Marenches' principal aides, a colonel named Bernard Nut, was found mysteriously dead in Nice, in the south of France, and there appears to have been some kind of connection between his death and the conspiracy against the Holy Father.”

Tim, who listened to Angela's voice with breathless attention and pleasure, noticed that she had used the word “conspiracy” in the
most natural fashion. Was that an accepted “fact” in the papal entourage? But the warning story was utterly confusing as well. The next batch of materials from Angela included a newspaper interview with Ferdinando Imposimato, a judge on Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation, who at the time of the shooting was in charge of all investigations in the Rome metropolitan region. Imposimato's version was diametrically opposed to de Marenches' account. “De Marenches,” the Italian judge declared, “did not cooperate at all with Italian justice . . . In fact, on three separate occasions we asked Paris for additional information and Paris replied: send us a written request. We sent a list of questions to SDECE and Paris answered with five lines, which said absolutely nothing.”

So, Tim asked himself again, who was lying and who was telling the truth, if anybody? He was also surprised that, judging from the documents he had read, the CIA had missed de Marenches'
Figaro
interview, which was unlikely, or chose to ignore it, which would be consistent with what Paul Martinius had told him about the Agency's overall attitude toward the Gregory XVII situation. In fact, Tim now realized, Martinius had deliberately put him on the scent of de Marenches.

*  *  *

“The American knows about de Marenches and the warning,” Monsignor Saint-Ange told Gregory XVII when they sat down at dinner at the pope's small private dining room, adjoining the pantry and the kitchen.

“How did he find out?” the pope asked.

“Well, Angela came to see me this morning to say that Savage had inquired whether we had anything in our files concerning de Marenches' warning,” the monsignor said. “He had heard somewhere about the
Figaro
interview and, at his request, Angela had sent him a clipping. That was all right because he could have easily obtained the newspaper elsewhere. But, naturally, I informed the Sister that we had nothing among our papers that dealt with warnings.”

“Does the American know that the warning wasn't heeded?” Gregory XVII persisted, “and why it wasn't heeded?”

“I doubt it,” Sainte-Ange murmured. “But he may well come up with something along those lines now that he is aware that there
was a warning. De Marenches may be dead, but there are others, still alive today, who may talk if Savage stumbles upon them. But, Holy Father, we chose in him the best investigator available for your mission and, consequently, we must assume that he will get to the bottom of lots of things we would prefer he ignored. We can't have it both ways, I guess . . .”

“Yes, I can see that,” Gregory XVII mused. “Still, I have the uneasy feeling that, at this stage, it's not entirely clear who is investigating whom and what . . . We may wind up being investigated by the American before he discovers who had tried to murder me . . . Perhaps we should have left well enough alone . . .”

Romain de Sainte-Ange chose not to comment.

*  *  *

At his office at the American Embassy, Paul Martinius finished drafting a cable to CIA headquarters at Langley and called for the Station's cypher clerk to encode the message. The key sentence informed his superiors that “the Vatican, at the highest level, has opened a secret investigation into the assassination attempt against Gregory XVII” and that “it is being conducted by a former Agency officer, an old friend from Vietnam.” Martinius added that he awaited instructions on how to deal with this situation, if at all, apart from watching it the best he could.

*  *  *

It was now mid-June. Rome was insufferably hot and the Vatican was drowning in pilgrims and tourists. Tim's room under the tile roof of Villa Malta was a furnace. Sitting by the window in an old stuffed armchair and sweating profusely, for the Jesuits somehow failed to discover air-conditioning, Tim held his ledger and manila folders in his lap, the rest of his files spilling over onto a nearby small table and the floor. He was attempting to sum up what he had learned during the first month of his investigation. His conclusion was that, apart from history and some recent events, he knew precious little—and what he thought he knew was insufferably confusing.