To Kill the Pope (32 page)

This angered Kurtski more than anything in years, certainly since Vietnam. In Kurtski's mind, there was a world of difference between strategic political assassinations—as, for example, Phoenix had been in Vietnam—or supervising strategic international terrorism and participating in coups d'état in shitty little countries in Africa or Asia—and just plain individual murder. “For Chris-sakes,” Kurtski had told the Frenchman, he had been “a U.S. Army intelligence officer and a senior CIA officer, and not a
focking
shooter.” Kurtski, after all, had a solid reputation, commanding very high prices for his work and advice, and was treated with professional courtesy by most of the important intelligence services in the world. People understood and appreciated one another in their murky universe.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and Kurtski was among the last to be evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, he concluded that he had no further profitable future with the CIA. The whole climate and culture of U.S. intelligence work was changing after the Vietnam disaster, with the Agency's good name being blackened for all the covert activities, both good and bad, it had undertaken. The best Kurtski could expect at that point was to be put in charge of training recruits at The Farm or something equally demeaning. He knew they would not trust him as a Station Chief anywhere, his patronizing in-house
CIA image defined by the nickname he had acquired in Phoenix: “K.K.,” or “Killer Kurtski.” He was not cut out to be a CIA diplomat.

Kurtski therefore resigned, collected his severance pay, and turned to new pursuits in the very active private sector, as he called it, of the intelligence craft and associated endeavors. He spent several years in the employ of an officially recognized, registered, and respected—though sometimes shady—corporation of international arms dealers in Alexandria, Virginia, just past Washington's National Airport.

The corporation, a billion-dollar business, specialized in global legal and illegal weapons transactions, some of the latter quietly blessed by the U.S. government. Kurtski, not surprisingly, devoted himself to the illegal side of the enterprise, earning more money than he ever had in his life. He lived comfortably in an expensive apartment in a Foggy Bottom deluxe condo in Washington, allowed himself unlimited sex and booze binges when he was in town. He flew around the world first class, stayed at five-star hotels, his peasant physique and body language incongruous in the thousand-or-more-dollar suits from Armani or Savile Row, his sartorial tastes being incongruous as well. But in the frantic life of masses of people jetting across oceans, staying at the best hotels, and eating at the most fashionable restaurants, Kurtski did not stand out any more than any other improbably dressed, free-spending, expense account businessman, which was fine as far as he was concerned. He saw nobody outside of business meetings: He disliked people in general and was disliked in turn—he had always been a self-sufficient loner.

After a time, Kurtski became bored with selling and delivering and buying and transfering used jet fighters, armored cars, mortars, grenade launchers, M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles and whatnot. It was too routine for him. Through his arms salesmanship, however, Kurtski became acquainted with the Fraternity of international mercenaries who were mainly French, Belgian, English, and South African, and easily allowed himself to be talked into contributing his expertise—that was where his Phoenix reputation had proved most valuable—to their various violent undertakings. Knocking over regimes from Guinea-Bissau to Lesotho, the Seychelles,
assorted Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf, and Brunei—though that one had failed and the super-billionaire sultan had preserved his power—was the outfit's principal line of business.

Kurtski, often the main military brain behind the coups, continued to prosper. He also diversified, more from his twisted sense of aesthetics than merely for added profit, into global prostitution rings, facilitating transfers of gorgeous, impoverished adolescent girls from Southeast Asia, and sometimes from North Africa, to classy brothels in Europe. He was not averse to taste the fruit himself, but he would not touch drugs. He had enough sense not to become involved in international drug transactions; he remembered the CIA foolishness in running narcotics from the “Golden Triangle” in Indochina.

In the early 1980s, Kurtski gave up the mercenary life, enthusiastically accepting a fantastic financial offer from his old CIA associates—now Agency bosses—to help oversee the contras' campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. That was great, he thought. Not only did he owe it to his adopted country, the United States of America, but he could get his revenge for Vietnam against the God-damned communists. Kurtski devoted a year or so to the cause of the contras, acting as the chief of staff of the field forces. Every once in a while, he swooped down in a chopper on an advance contras command post to take over interrogations of captured Sandinista prisoners. He enjoyed every moment of it, bringing back memories of Vietnam and of youth. Not infrequently, he crowned an interrogation with a ritualistic point-blank shot to the prisoner's head, an old habit. This, of course, was not murder: it was the continuation of politics by other means.

But soon the contra war had run its course, and Kurtski began to look for a real big score, something that would keep him in luxury for the rest of his life without working—just fucking and drinking to his heart's content. After all, he was now over sixty, and there was not too much time to waste.

*  *  *

As luck would have it, the telephone rang one night at Kurtski's Washington apartment, where he was resting for a week from the jungles of Honduras and Nicaragua. On answering, he heard a voice from his recent past. It was Bob Dennard, the French patriarch
of the great mercenaries, who invited Kurtski to come to Paris for a weekend—all expenses paid—to meet “a new friend.” Kurtski was ready for a change in his life; he no longer really gave a shit about the contras, and he was intrigued by the call. Dennard was a trusted companion who never acted without a precise purpose.

In Paris, at the Left Bank apartment of a woman Dennard knew well, Kurtski was introduced to a young Frenchman in a gray suit who said in his accented English, “Mr. Kurtski, we know all about you and we wish to offer you some very interesting and well-paid work.”

Kurtski sized him up quickly, concluded the Frenchman was businesslike and for real, and replied that he would like to hear more about this “work.”

“But,” he added, “what did you say your name is?”

“I didn't because you don't need to know it,” the man explained. “I could lie and say that my name is Duclos or Lelong or De Gaulle, but why bother? If we decide to cooperate, it is I who shall be contacting you, not the other way around. So my name doesn't matter.”

Kurtski shrugged, saying coldly, “Suit yourself . . . so what do you have in mind?”

The Frenchman outlined briefly, and Kurtski thought with astounding frankness, his superiors' desire to have him set in motion the assassination of Pope Gregory XVII.

“I assume this isn't a joke,” Kurtski said. “But I have to know quite a bit more about it. How do you visualize it, what do you propose to pay me, and like that . . . And, of course, I'd like to think about it. It's rather sudden, don't you think?”

“That's fine,” the Frenchman replied. “For today, I just wanted to meet you. You were highly recommended by Monsieur Dennard and a few other friends. Yes, do think about it. And I have to report back to my superiors what impression I have gained of you. I suggest that we meet in Rome in exactly one month—and take it from there if we decide to proceed . . . I'll call you a few days ahead of time so that you can make it easily on the appointed day.”

Kurtski and the Frenchman met twice in Rome to go over the
emerging plan. At their last meeting they agreed that the best opportunity to kill the pope would be when he flew to the United States in the fall. Meanwhile Kurtski moved to Rome for the duration to start the actual preparations. He picked as his temporary home a small room at Hotel Columbus, the huge gray pile of a building on Via della Conciliazione, a block from St. Peter's Square, where package tours of pilgrims succeeded one another the year round, creating maximal anonymity for its patrons. Kurtski had picked the Columbus in part because of that environment—and in part because he enjoyed waking every morning to see St. Peter's Basilica and the Apostolic Palace when he craned his neck to the left. It gave him a strange sense of identity with the Holy See and the pope he had been retained to help assassinate. He occasionally wondered what Gregory XVII was doing at that moment.

*  *  *

On this particular morning, as his preparatory work to blow up the airborne papal plane had been proceeding smoothly, Kurtski received a telephone call in his room from the young Frenchman. The man sounded gravely preoccupied and there was urgency in his voice. He told Kurtski he needed to see him immediately, proposing that they meet at the sidewalk café below, directly across from the Columbus.

“Our plans have changed drastically,” the Frenchman said as soon as he sat down at the little round table, without greetings and the usual pleasantries.

“There is a new priority,” he continued almost breathlessly, not his normal businesslike self. “We may have been penetrated. We think we know the identity of the penetrator. He must be killed before we can go ahead with our plans concerning the pope. Unless he is liquidated, as soon as possible, our entire project will be exposed and it will collapse. And my superiors believe that you, Mr. Kurtski, are the man to perform the killing. Nobody else can do it for us. Nobody knows you, nobody knows about our arrangements, nobody can tie you to us. Moreover you are not French. You're perfect for the job.”

“Now, wait just a goddamned minute,” Kurtski told him, his temper rising. “What do you take me for? I'm not a professional
gunman. This isn't what I do. Just forget this whole
focking
idea. There's no way I'm going to go and kill somebody on your say-so, do you understand?”

“You have no choice, Kurtski,” the Frenchman said. “You have to cease all your planning for the assassination of the pope until you dispose of the penetrator. It's that simple. And if there is no plan to kill the pope, there'll be no more payments to you. But, on the other hand, you will be paid extra for killing this man . . .”

“I don't care,” Kurtski barked. “I won't do it, okay?”

“No, not okay,” the Frenchman hissed. “If you refuse, we'll denounce you to the authorities both in France and Italy as the chief plotter against the pope. You see, I've taped our conversations, and we can edit them selectively. And you have no idea who we are! You can't accuse anybody because there's nobody for you to accuse.”

Kurtski turned red, his heart beating fast, his breath dangerously shallow.

“You cocksucker,” he roared back in rage, defeated and helpless for the first time in his adult life. “So who's the man you want killed?”

“He is a compatriot of yours,” the Frenchman said. “He's a Jesuit priest named Timothy Savage. He's in France right now. In the South. We'll meet again tomorrow—I'll tell you later where—and I'll have all the details for you . . .”

Back in his room at the Columbus, Kurtski threw himself on his bed, panting in fury, fearing a heart attack. He felt his normally high blood pressure skyrocketing, his bloated belly pumping inside like a bellow. He grabbed a dead cigar from an ashtray on the bedside table, chewing on it hard to steady his nerves.

“I can't believe it, I can't believe it,” he kept repeating to himself “And it's that
focking
Savage, of all the people in the world.”

*  *  *

In Toulouse, Tim Savage was pendering his next step. Having heard and read so much by now in general terms about the Cathar “heresy” and the murderous papal crusade nearly seven centuries ago to eradicate it, he decided that he needed to know considerably more about the Cathars. He had to understand, for example, whether Leduc's own heresy had in any way been inspired by the
Cathars or whether the archbishop had deftly appropriated for his own ends, and accordingly twisted, the Cathar legend, still so powerfully alive and greatly admired in the Languedoc. After all, Cathar leaders had always been know as “the Perfect”—the word
Cathar
being Greek for
perfect.
And it also seemed quite relevant, Tim thought, to determine whether the surge of Protestantism there in the aftermath of the Reform—another historical gem he had unearthed—had formed some sort of antipapist bridge of protest between the Cathars and the modern “integrists.” Rome, in any event, had never been very popular in the Languedoc.

To concentrate on his homework on the Cathars, back to the tedium of academic research, Tim had selected—on the recommendation of his friend, the Toulouse priest-librarian—an extraordinary bookstore in the village of Le Somail on the southern bank of the Canal du Midi. The canal is the seventeenth-century hand-dug waterway linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean along the Pyrénées, one of the most spectacular engineering feats in Europe, sponsored by Louis XIV. The bookstore, Tim had been informed, was not only the Languedoc's, but possibly the world's, greatest depository of Cathar literature and Troubadour lore, and the abode of perhaps the leading living scholar of the Cathar experience.

To reach Le Somail, Tim drove in his rental car from Toulouse to Carcassonne, the ancient walled city, along the Autostrade des Deux-Mers, the Route of the Two Seas, which parallels the great canal. He discovered in the process French drivers' unshakable devotion to tailgating at speeds in excess of eighty miles per hour. From the autostrade, Tim veered to the southeast over secondary highways en route to the bookstore village. For this expedition, Tim had chosen to travel as a “civilian,” in sports attire the French call
très cool,
their phrase for casual chic, which also means elegant footwear, but no socks.