To Kill the Pope (4 page)

*  *  *

Even as Gregory XVII and Sainte-Ange chatted in the papal study, two men greeted each other warily at a small table set against the wall at Roberto, a busy restaurant on Borgo Pio, just three blocks east of the Sant'Anna Gate, the principal entrance to the Vatican. Borgo Pio, a narrow street of eateries and small shops, starts at Sant'Anna Gate and is commonly known to Romans as the “Vatican Ghetto.” Roberto is patronized mainly by foreign tourists and foreign priests, especially Americans, working at the Vatican.

The two men arrived at the restaurant within minutes of each other. The first was a solidly built, grizzled man with a malevolent face, its hard features frozen like a Notre Dame gargoyle, and bloodshot eyes. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and seemed to be more accustomed to a military uniform than the ill-fitting brown sports jacket and flowery shirt he wore today. He had commandeered the table by the wall, and now he rose at the approach of a much younger man in a well-tailored dark suit.

“It's a lovely day, isn't it, Mister Kurtski?” he said in English,
which he spoke with a pronounced French accent. “And it's a pleasure to see you again.”

“Sure,” the older man replied curtly, “but you're not here to talk about the weather.” His English came with an Eastern European accent and intonation.

“Then let us get down to business and waste no time,” the Frenchman suggested. “When we first met in Paris, I told you how impressed we were with your reputation.”

“Yeah, let's talk business,” Jake Kurtski said. “But first, I want a cold beer. And what do you have in mind, anyway?”

“It is simple. We wish to see the pope dead,” the elegant young man explained. “And we understand that you would know how to go about it.”

Kurtski's expression did not change. The waiter had brought the beer and the old soldier took a deep draft from the bottle.

“Never mind what I know,” he said. “Tell me
your
ideas . . .”

The Frenchman smiled engagingly. “Let me quote from your famous compatriot, Joseph Conrad, on the subject: ‘. . . The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy,',” he told Kurtski. “And Conrad was alluding to bombs. That's from
Heart of Darkness . . .
That's our idea.”

“I don't know who the fuck Conrad was,” Kurtski announced gruffly, pronouncing “fuck” as
“fock.”
He went on: “So you want to blow him out of the sky? You want me to bomb the plane when the pope next goes traveling?”

“That's right,” the young man said. “We want to blow him right into heaven. Can you do it?”

“I don't know. I have to think about it. You know, it's not all that easy with all the security around him and the airplanes,” Kurtski observed.

“Oh, we understand. That's why we're offering you a million dollars if you make it happen,” the Frenchman whispered.

“I'm not sure I can take it seriously,” Kurtski told him. “You guys, whoever you are, seem to
fock
it up every time. “Your Turk
focked
it up on the square. And I know that you tried and failed to get a bomb aboard the Alitalia plane when the pope was going to Portugal: It was really stupid to stick the bomb in the food that was being loaded on the airliner. Of course, it was found. And
wasn't that crazy Spanish priest with the bayonet at Fátima one of your people?”

“Well, yes, and that's why we're now turning to professionals,” the younger man said. “And we also know that, as they say at the Vatican, patience is a cardinal virtue. So we can wait for your answer and your detailed plan as long as necessary. I'll contact you in exactly one month to arrange for another conversation.”

Kurtski nodded and walked out of the restaurant without a word. Passing a fruit stand in front of a food store, he grabbed a
clementina
and began to peel it.

*  *  *

As the sun set over Rome, the Frenchman locked himself in his hotel room a block from Roberto to compose a long coded letter. Then he walked over to the tiny Vatican post office to mail it to an address in a small town in the south of France, not far from the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, a region where road signs read
Pays des Cathars,
the Country of Cathars—those “pure” thirteenth-century battlers for religious freedom.

*  *  *

Naturally, it never occurred to Tim Savage or Kurtski that they were in Rome at the same time, so near one another—and again on a collision course. Vietnam, after all, was such a long time ago.

T
IM
S
AVAGE STEPPED OUT
of the somber mustiness of the Apostolic Palace through the Bronze Doors and into St. Peter's Square, serene in the warm sun of the May morning. The basilica and the imposing
Scala Regia
—the regal staircase—were to his right, the architectural centerpiece of the oval square.

Halting briefly, Tim removed his celluloid dog collar from its neck slots and stuck it in the breast pocket of his black cotton shirt under the short wool jacket of his black clergy suit. Jesuits, as a rule, almost never wear cassocks. With his shirt now open at the neck, he breathed easier as he tried to sort out and compose his thoughts and calm his emotions after Sainte-Ange's thunderbolt had hit him. Passersby glanced at Tim with more than casual interest: He was handsome in a pleasant Black Irish sort of way, standing at six feet, slim and broad-shouldered, with warm, deep blue eyes, high cheekbones, and an aquiline nose. His jet black hairline was beginning to recede, not unnatural past forty. Tim was an affable man who liked people, and even strangers felt it at once.

The piazza before Tim was rapidly filling with groups of foreign pilgrims shepherded by their tour leaders, sloppily dressed tourists from America and Spain and Germany—many of the women in tank tops and unbecoming shorts and men in T-shirts and jeans—and parochial schoolchildren in their neat uniforms playing around the fountain in the center of the square and chirping excitedly like the spring's swallows from Capistrano.

Nie biegaj tak!
—Don't run like this!—a Polish mother was admonishing her knee-pants son. A teenage American girl, her blond tresses impeccably arranged, wondered loudly, chatting with her parents, “Are we going to see the pope in the window?” An elderly South American woman pilgrim, enthralled by the majesty
of the basilica, kept exclaiming,
Por Dios, que maravilla!
Priests in black cassocks and wide-brimmed hats favored by the Italian clergy and dark-robed nuns darted importantly to and fro.

It was very peaceful, but Tim's memories of the day five years ago surged back in a flood. Having been charged with the task of bringing back the past—the real past—he felt great fear that he would not be up to the assignment, not knowing where to turn, how to begin. And an even greater fear was of disappointing the pope whom he admired as a human being, even though he disagreed with some of his stands. Tim had been introduced to Gregory XVII during a Jesuit group visit to the Vatican—the contact lasted one second—and he knew precious little about the pontiff: only that he was a mystic in the twelfth-century tradition of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and a rigorous intellectual in the highest French Cartesian tradition. Tim therefore saw the logic in Gregory XVII's desire to
understand
the mystery of death as well as to
accept
it and that, consequently, he
needed
to know the truth. As Sainte-Ange had pointed out, he needed it to stay alive.

Urgent thoughts raced through Tim's mind as he left St. Peter's Square, passed the famous Vatican bookstore and the Holy See's pretentious modern
Sala Stampa
press office, and entered Via della Conciliazione. The broad avenue led, west-east, to the Vatican from the Tiber and Castel Sant'Angelo, where a head of the Jesuit order was imprisoned by Pope Clement XIV over 200 years ago. The street was a triumphal gift to Rome from Benito Mussolini, and had required the razing of hundreds of ancient houses. Tim walked slowly toward his office, meditating every step of the way, wondering how he was going to carry out his instructions. It would not be in his nature to admit failure, particularly on a mission for this particular pope.

Gregory XVII had the reputation of being a very exacting man. As the first foreign pope in almost half a millennium, he also was the
tenth
French pontiff in history. It once made France the “First Daughter of the Church,” but now an often disobedient one, and the second-largest purveyor of Roman popes after the Italians. Gregory XVII was the first French pope in 607 years, following in this Gallic tradition Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who had taken the name of Gregory XI and reigned for a year from 1370 to 1371. The
immediate previous two popes were also Frenchmen, Urban V and Innocent VI. The first French pope was Urban II, né Oddone di Lagery, who ruled for eleven years, between 1088 and 1099, and was famous for proclaiming the First Crusade in 1095, a papal precedent many French would come to curse before very long. Gregory XVII took this name because Gregory the Great, who straddled the sixth and seventh centuries, was his role model. He also wished to honor the previous French Gregory, the eleventh, and his predecessor of this name, Gregory XVI, a pleasant Italian who occupied St. Peter's throne from 1831 to 1846, just before Europe's “Spring of the Peoples.” The present pope certainly would not choose to be identified with Gregory IX, the thirteenth-century Bolognese lawyer who endorsed legislation authorizing secular powers to burn convicted heretics at the stake and who instituted the Great Inquisition in 1231. It was another papal precedent that would martyr much of France. Eight centuries later, it was history Gregory XVII could not afford to ignore.

*  *  *

Tim Savage himself had experienced memories and mysteries of death that he could not erase from his mind.

Displayed in the place of honor at his office was the neatly folded Stars and Stripes that had been ceremoniously handed to Tim's mother by an Air Force general after his father had been killed in a fiery crash of his B-25 bomber during World War Two. Tim was two years old at the time, and he already understood death. His father's bomber had been shot down by the Germans over Monte Cassino, the site of the hilltop Benedictine monastery where the Nazis long resisted the Allied advance across Italy. It was one of the most stubborn battles of the war, and the monastery was leveled along with its famous medieval libraries. After he had come to live in Rome, Tim made a pilgrimage to Monte Cassino every year, leaving flowers over ruins that still lay there. He had no idea where exactly his father's body reposed.

Then, very much later, there was the Arab youth, his throat slashed, in a narrow Cairo alley. Tim was twenty-six at the time. And, still later, when he was thirty-two, there was the haunting face of the dead peasant woman, a tiny cross on a chain around her neck, outside her burning hut in that little village in Vietnam.
And there had been others whose deaths had been part of his life.

But now that he was a middle-aged Jesuit in Rome, neither feeling nor looking the age that follows youth, Tim remembered that past though he was no longer condemned to live and relive it. His quiet sense of humor had returned. His intelligence was as intense as his penchant toward independent thought, not an uncommon Jesuit trait. He was calm and relaxed most of the time. Courtly and friendly, Tim was likable in the eyes of both men and women. He was, of course, aware of his attraction to women, and, on occasions, he was strongly tempted to reciprocate—even all the way. Prior to his vows of chastity, Tim had enjoyed a reasonably active sex life, in college and then overseas, but it was one-night stands or brief affairs. No romantic involvements or commitments. Anyway that was the past, he kept reminding himself.

*  *  *

On this day, walking to his office from the Apostolic Palace, he was oblivious to his surroundings, overwhelmed as he was by his conversation with Monsignor Sainte-Ange. Via della Conciliazione overflowed with motorized and foot bound humanity, but Tim neither noticed nor heard in his concentration on what lay ahead in his new role. What with all the May religious feasts, uncounted thousands of pilgrims and tourists from every corner of the globe converged every day on the Vatican, like invading armies of yore, to stare at the window of the papal apartment high in the Apostolic Palace on the west side of the piazza where Gregory XVII appeared at noon every Sunday he was in Rome to bless the multitude, and to line up at the massive doors of St. Peter's Basilica, waiting to enter or just to gape. The square itself was little changed since Gianlorenzo Bernini had reshaped it—with the Baroque colonnade and the
Scala Regia
—in the second half of the seventeenth century under the patronage of Pope Alexander VII.

Tour buses with Italian, German, Austrian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and other license plates that had brought the faithful and the curious to the holy sites lined both sides of Conciliazione, belching black clouds of diesel exhausts. The engines were kept running to assure that the returning sweat-drenched visitors would find their vehicles perfectly air-conditioned and
super-cool. Little yellow taxis, private cars, and the motorcycles and
motorinos
responsible for the permanent high-decibel hum that is Rome's identifying sound streamed down the via toward the square, creating a perpetual traffic jam.

Pilgrims and tourists battled their way along the narrow sidewalks, conversing and shouting in every language of the Tower of Babel, stopping at the shops along the avenue to ogle and buy cheap, plastic, tacky Holy See memorabilia—Our Ladies (of Everywhere), Jesus Christ (on or off the Cross), crosses, rosaries, and framed color photographs of a bemused-looking French pope. They sat down, if they could secure a chair and a table, at the outdoor cafés for an
espresso, cappuccino,
a cold soft drink, a beer, or an ice-cream cone. In Tim's learned opinion, the hole-in-the-wall shop in the traditional Columbus Hotel, the pilgrims' favorite nest, made the best pistachio ice cream in the world.