To Kill the Pope (28 page)

Thus Tim was discovering that Christians and Muslims in the south of France had active dealings and links long centuries before the appearance of the waves of North African Muslim immigrants in the second half of the twentieth century. That was one aspect of Islamic history that was wholly alien to Tim, but now, as he perused Professor Dufourcq's scholarly, if rather obscure, fat volume, it dawned on him that in this part of Europe old religious traditions never died—and that in some unsuspected
way they might hold the key to the mystery of the “French Brethren.” And it was quite a history.

The Koran, for example, had been translated from Arabic into Latin by Robert de Ketton, a scholar employed by Pierre the Venerable, the Abbot of Cluny, as early as 1143, under the title of “Dialogus.” And what struck Tim the most was the translator's emphasis on violence as proscribed by the Koran, apart from the Holy Wars, the Jihads, and battle against Christian crusaders. Muslims also regarded Jews and Christians as “People of the Book”—the Old and New Testaments—thereby deserving Muslim protection. According to
suras
in the Koran, Muslims, too, venerated Christ though they refused to believe that Jews had killed Him and that resurrection had occurred. And under Moorish rule in the South of France, Christians were free to worship their God. Tim wondered whether Muslims there today were aware of this past of tolerance amidst frequent warfare. But, he felt, new vistas might be opening before him.

*  *  *

In the remote past, Muslims had been the powerful, noble rulers over the Christian majority in Languedoc and Roussillon. Today's Muslims there were an inferior, often unemployed and destitute and not infrequently violent, minority. It was among them that Tim hoped to locate the “French Brethren.” It was most unlikely that the North African immigrants remembered, let alone knew about, the medieval Christian Crusades against the “Infidels” of the Middle East or about Muslim slaves held in Languedoc after
reconquista.
Or that their main oppressor was Guilhem-of-the-Curved Nose. There would have been more up-to-date reasons for involvement in the conspiracy against Gregory XVII.

On the first day of September, a clear, sunny day with a pleasant breeze blowing from the Pyrénées, Tim set out into the streets of Toulouse to track down the leads he had received from Al-Kutas in Paris and from the Jesuit priest-librarian at the residence. Together, they added up to a dozen names of individuals, several community associations, religious centers, one mosque, and a few business establishments. Muslims in Toulouse, some residing legally and others illegally, some born in France and some in North Africa, probably exceeded one hundred thousand, a significant
and remarkably well-organized segment of the city's population. After Paris and Marseille, they were the largest Muslim concentration in France, and their numbers grew continuously from steady arrivals from across the Mediterranean and from their high birth rate. Most were Algerians who had fled—and were still fleeing—from the utter misery of a collapsed national economy and from the rising violence and killings by the military and the police on the one hand and Islam fundamentalists on the other. Their children and grandchildren, born in the Languedoc, formed the increasingly radicalized—politically and religiously—new Muslim generations. The youths were bilingual, in Arabic and in French, and they congregated around Toulouse's mosques, always in attendance at Friday services.

“You must bear in mind that there is a powerful strain of fundamentalism among Muslims here,” the priest librarian told Tim as they sat at a table among stacks of books. “It's a phenomenon that predates Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution in Iran and the rise of Islamic militancy in Algeria, but has been greatly influenced and strengthened by both. It also feeds on poverty and despair, of which there is plenty here. We, the Jesuits—or, at least, I—watch this fundamentalism grow with concern because I fear that it encourages other religious fundamentalisms, and there's a powerful Christian fundamentalist tradition in the Languedoc, a very special one, with roots in the first millennium. And, inevitably, it polarizes politics in the south in a dangerous shift to the right as a reaction to ‘these Arab troublemakers.' With your interest in Islam, you ought to pay attention to it, too.”

“Yes, I certainly will,” Tim said. “It is, in fact, my top priority.”

The Muslim presence in Toulouse and its nature were quite evident to Tim as he walked through the prosperous downtown and penetrated Muslim neighborhoods, which existed painfully and angrily as segregated and isolated fiefs. Crossing the vast Place du Capitol from the marble-pillared town hall to the luxurious Grand Hôtel de l'Opéra, where wealthy tourists stay, Tim gained a glimpse of the city's social infrastructure. It was quite uncomplicated: Muslims dominated all that was menial or temporary in the realm of breadwinning work. In the center of the beautiful Place du Capitol, the pavement was being repaired by a crew of North
Africans in orange coveralls. Along Rue de Metz and Rue d'Alsace-Lorraine, the principal shopping streets with expensive boutiques, crews of immigrants swept the sidewalks with huge brooms. Luckier were the doorman at the Grand Hôtel, splendid in his medieval attire, and at least two waiters at the outdoor café under the arcades of the Place du Capitol: Their work was lighter and cleaner, and unquestionably better paid, what with tourists' tipping. They must have belonged to old-time Muslim families in Toulouse. North African men and women tended a row of rickety stands in front of the town hall, selling cheap clothes and footwear, ragged old paperback books, and fruit and vegetables. The priest librarian had told Tim that the best jobs to which the immigrants could aspire were as unskilled workers at the Aérospatiale, the immense aeronautical complex where the Concorde and Airbus were manufactured by the European consortium. And at the bottom of this social infrastructure lay, pure and simple, hopeless unemployment, bitterness, violence, and crime.

The Muslim neighborhoods stretched across a seeming labyrinth of narrow streets on the other side of Garonne River that bisects Toulouse, worlds away from the elegant midtown. In slacks and a windbreaker, not to arouse special attention, Tim strolled through these neighborhoods day after day to capture their character, mood, sights, and sounds. The streets were mainly chains of small houses with peeling paint, a few ill-maintained apartment buildings, and an infinity of tiny shops with signs in flowing Arab script. In one neighborhood, Tim counted five small mosques.

Women in cream-colored headscarves hurried to and from homes and shops. There were few men in the streets, but youths with nascent mustaches and insolent looks in their eyes congregated at street corners, smoking, chatting, cursing, and waiting for something—anything—to happen. As Tim walked past a group of four or five youths with menacing miens, the oldest of them pulled out a long knife from his jacket pocket, pointing it at him, and shouting laughingly in Arabic, “Go away, son of a pig! Next time we'll butcher you!”

Tim stopped, smiled warmly, and replied in his best classic Arabic, “And may Allah bless you, too.” He left stunned silence behind him.

*  *  *

As on covert missions in Cairo seventeen years ago, Tim now began discreet visits to homes and offices in the Muslim districts of Toulouse. Again, his fluency in Arabic—though the language spoken by North African immigrants differed considerably from that of the Georgetown University linguistics institute and of Cairo—made a world of difference in how he was received after ringing the bell or knocking on the door. First impressions are crucial. Unlike in Cairo, however, Tim chose not to disguise his identity in Toulouse. In Egypt, he had to conceal his CIA identity under the cover of an American economic assistance official. In Toulouse, he had decided that honesty was the best policy, and he dressed in black Jesuit attire. Priests were a common sight in the Languedoc, and nobody, not the French, not the Muslims, seemed to pay any special attention to Tim—after his first slacks-and-windbreaker outing. And more than once, he spotted priests in long black cassocks in the streets of Muslim neighborhoods and at offices of immigrant social assistance associations. Islam, after all, Tim remembered, was the last frontier to conquer by the Roman Catholic Church.

He felt a sense of relief as he turned, at last, to legwork, dealing with live human beings other than librarians and scholars. As usual in serious intelligence pursuits, the bulk of research—call it sleuthing—was the mortifying tedium of seemingly endless hours in libraries, archives, and files, and exhaustingly guarded interviews and conversations. It was like constructing an intricate cryptogram or solving a crossword puzzle, slowly, painstakingly, until the last pieces, or words, fell into place. Excitement and romance in intelligence work—“action,” as outsiders thought of it from reading spy thrillers—were a very small part of the overall effort. Increasingly, brains replaced brawn, and the agency now adored academics with multiple doctorates. Tim, of course, believed in the academic aspect of intelligence—that was what he was doing every day as an Islam scholar back at the Vatican—but it was invigorating to be back on the street once more.

Tim's first potentially promising visit was to the oddly named North African Beneficial Association of St. Sernin—the sign over the storefront was in Arabic—because of its proximity to the St. Sernin
Basilica; this particular Muslim community was in downtown Toulouse. Entering the cramped, seedy office, Tim asked to see the Association's secretary-treasurer, whose name he had been given in Paris by Al-Kutas. He had already gone to three home addresses, meeting barely concealed hostility. Tim knew that his Toulouse conversations would be exceedingly difficult—he had to ask directly at some point why the “French Brethren,” who clearly were a Muslim group in the south of France, had arranged to hire Agca Circlic to kill Gregory XVII five years ago. He had, consequently, prepared himself the best he could for these interviews, to the extent of forcing himself to think in Arabic to formulate and verbalize his thoughts, not an easy mental task after seventeen years away from the language. In Vietnam, Phoenix's violence and village murders and torchings were the method of extracting information. In the south of France, persuasion, skill, subtlety, and empathy would be Tim's tools—in French and Arabic.

The young man at the desk in the storefront office had gone inside through an open, narrow passage to fetch the secretary-treasurer, and Tim looked around as he waited. The walls were covered with posters depicting impoverished women and children and urging donations in Arabic script, and a poster in French, exclaiming,
S.O.S. RACISME!
the name of the militant organization of all imaginable minorities in France and of many French themselves that quite effectively fought the pervasive, deep-seated racism of a society that had long ruled over a colonial empire. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity did not apply to minorities and immigrants on the soil of metropolitan France—as it had not applied to the natives in Indochina before the French armies had been shattered and expelled after the battle of Dienbienphu in 1954. Tim had learned to appreciate it during his tour in the subsequent
American
war in Vietnam, and now all the images of the lethal action he had helped to trigger in the Mekong Delta came rushing back as he stared at the
S.O.S. RACISME!
poster in the small office in Toulouse.

A hefty, middle-aged man in a pink business shirt without a necktie and wearing a tight brown suit came in from behind, squinting at Tim with suspicious eyes. He had a deep scar across his left cheek, giving his olive-skinned countenance a slightly sinister appearance.

“Bonjour, mon Père,”
he said in French, then shifted to English to ask, “Are you English or American? I am the secretary-treasurer of this Association. What can I do for you?”

“I am American,” Tim replied, “and I came to see you on the suggestion of a friend in Paris.”

“Oh, yes, you are the American Jesuit I was told to expect,” the man said flatly, without enthusiasm. “So, what can I do for you?”

Tim decided to take his chances with Arabic and openness. He had to assume that as a result of his Paris conversations, Muslim community leaders and elders in the South, to whom he was being sent, had some idea of his interest.

“The Stalingrad mosque imam with whom I had the great pleasure of speaking the other day,” he said, “gave me the impression that I could learn in Toulouse important things about Agca Circlic, the Turk, and the attack on the pope. The imam believes that I should know the truth.”

The secretary-treasurer lit a Gauloise, filling the room with acrid cigarette smoke. He silently thought over Tim's words, then stared grimly at him.

“I don't know what you should know or not,” he said slowly in his guttural Maghreb Arabic. “It's not for me to say. And this isn't the place to discuss it.”

“What, then, should I do?”

The Algerian raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Perhaps you would like to return here tomorrow after dinner,” he said. “Perhaps you will then meet some other people, if they come. But it's possible that they will decide not to come. I can't promise you anything . . . It's up to you.”

Tim bowed his head slightly in gratitude, ready to leave the office, but the man motioned him to stay.

“How is it that you speak Arabic so well?” he asked. “I never heard of American Jesuits who speak Arabic. I am curious . . .”

Tim brightened up. The question was a marvelous opportunity to break the ice, establish a personal rapport, and prepare for the meeting that might take place the following evening—if he was lucky and made a good impression now.

“Well,” he answered with a conquering smile, “I was fortunate
to be able to study the history of Islam as well as Arabic at a great Jesuit university in Washington many years ago. In fact, I have a doctorate in Islamic history and culture. I am very proud of it. You know, Jesuits are deep believers in learning and education, especially about other cultures and societies. We are teachers and often missionaries. Back in the sixteenth century, for example, the first Jesuits arrived in China, learned the language, and gave Confucius his world fame by latinizing his Chinese name, Kong Fuzi, which means the Very Reverend Master Kong, or Kongzi. I think the Jesuits were impressed realizing Confucianism to be a monotheistic religion as is Christianity—and as is Islam. I also lived in Cairo for a time . . .”