To Kill the Pope (41 page)

“I would imagine that even Catholic fundamentalists could be paranoid,” Saint-Ange answered. “It doesn't take many people to engage in a conspiracy, and paranoia, even in the case of individuals, is a terrible danger that cannot be foreseen. Look at the killing of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo that led to the Great War, the assassination of Kennedy, and so on throughout the history of this century . . .”

“Speaking of foresight,” the pope remarked, “what about the warning from de Marenches in Paris prior to the assassination attempt? It might be quite relevant in light of what the American has discovered about French Catholics who do not like me. Perhaps de Marenches had some clue or insight about paranoid
Catholics. As I recall, I accepted your advice not to heed his warning because it was too vague in simply saying, as you had told me, that I faced danger from France—and therefore we took no special precautions. We didn't even inform our own
corpo di vigilanza
plainclothesmen. I think that you argued that there was a risk of the warning being leaked to the press in some way and precautions, if we took them, might suggest that the French pope doesn't trust his compatriots. De Marenches did not identify more precisely the provenance of the danger, like a name or something, did he? You did read that warning message, right?”

“Yes, I read the message, and, no, he went into no detail,” the monsignor answered smoothly. He was always prepared to lie to Gregory XVII for what he considered his boss's own good.

“And one more thing,” the pope said. “You did tell me some time ago that the American was aware of the warning, but he didn't quite know what to make of it. Is it possible that he may now link the warning to what he found out in France?”

“It is possible and
that
would be a problem, Holy Father,” Sainte-Ange replied. “This is why I told you at the outset, Holy Father, that some of the material collected by Savage could be damaging to us.”

*  *  *

From his own office, the monsignor made a quick telephone call to Paris over his secure line.

“I believe that a family reunion is really overdue,” he said to the person who answered. “Would dinner tomorrow be convenient? I'll arrive on a late afternoon flight from Rome and I'll plan on spending the night with my sister. I won't be missed too much here on a Sunday.”

*  *  *

De Marenches' warning was very much on Tim Savage's mind when he left Sainte-Ange late that Saturday morning. He had been thinking about it ever since his conversation with Archbishop Leduc at the Cisterian abbey, remembering what the old Jesuit had told him in Rome months earlier and what he had read in the newspaper clips Angela had located for him. Leduc having, in effect, confirmed the conspiracy he had spawned, the unheeded warning from the French secret service chief clearly
was a big piece of the whole puzzle, perhaps a vital one, but Tim could not quite fit it into the picture. There had to be more to this affair than what he had learned in his travels, but it kept eluding him. There still was a missing link.

Why, for example, had Sainte-Ange not mentioned the warning when Tim was being entrusted with the mission of investigating the shooting on St. Peter's Square? It had been by sheer happenstance that he had learned of it at all, curiously coinciding with the advice from his friend, the Rome CIA Station Chief, that he should familiarize himself with the figure of de Marenches. He also continued to wonder about the private secretary's attitude toward him as he expressed doubts about Tim's discoveries and conclusions. Why did he forbid a written report? It was worse than the CIA's obsessive “Eyes Only” stuff. Moreover, Tim was intrigued by Sainte-Ange's brusque rejection of his suggestion that he be allowed to make a presentation personally to Gregory XVII.

Increasingly disturbed, Tim called Angela in the afternoon, ostensibly to thank her for arranging the meeting with the monsignor. He then asked whether it would be possible for her to join him for dinner that evening. Angela hesitated only briefly and they agreed to meet at a small, hole-in-the-wall fish restaurant on a street off Borgo Pio, a five-minute walk from the Vatican through Sant'Anna Gate.

“It looks like this is our farewell,” Angela told Tim as they sat down at the tiny table in a corner of the noisy restaurant. It was a favorite spot this year for Rome's
jeunesse dorée
whose cars and scooters were parked outside, forming a wall around the entrance. The menu was inscribed with white and colored chalk on a big blackboard standing on the bar counter, and diners shouted their orders to the three or four waiters fighting their way back and forth through the throng. It was an excellent spot not to be noticed. Angela wore a plain, gray dress, almost a nun's habit, under a raincoat. Her face was pale. Tim was reminded of a Botticelli painting, not an unusual reaction among those who knew Angela.

“Why a farewell?” Tim asked, surprised.

“Monsignor Sainte-Ange told me that you have completed your assignment and that there would be no further need for communication between you and me,” Angela said.

“Well, assignment is one thing and communication between us is something else,” Tim said. He was extremely annoyed with the monsignor, and now not only over their morning conversation. “You don't mean that he actually forbade you to see me? So we wouldn't have a friendship outside of work?”

“He didn't say it in so many words,” Angela replied, “but that is what he had in mind. He likes to control everything and everybody, and I imagine I'm in violation of his instructions by seeing you tonight. After all, I do belong to his Papal Household staff. Still, I couldn't simply hang up on you—forever. So this
is
a farewell . . . I believe, however, that his main reason for ending our contact is to make all traces of your mission vanish.”

“Would you risk violating his instructions to meet again, if we wished to meet?” he asked her gently.

Angela looked down in silence at her plate, toying with her fork and her
scampi.
Then she raised her head to meet Tim's eyes.

“Why don't we take things a day at a time, as they happen,” she said, delicately placing her hand on his. “We don't have to make final decisions tonight. I certainly do not . . . Do you feel like talking about the rest of your stay in France, after we parted in Paris? When I saw him after your visit this morning I had the impression that for some reason the Monsignor seemed disappointed with your work . . . Should he be? It all seems so mysterious.”

“It is,” Tim answered. “In fact, it gets curiouser and curiouser, if I may quote from
Alice in Wonderland.
It was normal to encounter resistance, even hostility, when I was investigating in the field. That's what you expect. But I found the Monsignor to be nearly as hostile and incredibly suspicious of what I was reporting to him. He treated me as if I were trying to sell him a bill of goods. If he was disappointed, I have no idea what he had expected of me. To validate some pet theory of his, or what? I have no agenda of my own.”

Tim then gave Angela a fairly full account of his investigations in France, including his meeting with the imam in Toulouse and the conversations with the abbé at the Pius V Fraternity's seminary and with Archbishop Leduc at the abbey. He told her about his shoot-out with Kurtski, going back briefly to their Vietnam past, as well as about the archbishop's explanation for the attack on him in Fanjeaux.

“So my conclusion is that Leduc was the man who conceived and engineered the attempt on the pope's life,” Tim told her. “This is the conclusion I presented this morning to the Monsignor—although I chose to omit quite a few things, like Kurtski's attack on me and my actual encounter with Leduc. I had the weird feeling that I shouldn't tell him all I know and all I did. But I would've told the pope if I had been permitted to see him, which Sainte-Ange vetoed. Very strange! You know, I now feel caught between two hostile sides: Leduc there and Sainte-Ange here.”

“The Monsignor obviously wishes to be in full command of this operation,” Angela remarked. “If he isn't happy with the outcome, which, for whatever reason, seems to be the case, he prefers to obliterate your investigation altogether. This is why, I think, he didn't want anything from you on paper.”

“That's fine with me,” Tim said, “except that, as I warned Sainte-Ange, the Holy Father remains in great danger. By the way, Angela, do you remember this business of warnings from de Marenches of the French secret service? You sent me some clippings, and then I asked you to find out if Sainte-Ange knew more about it—and he said he didn't, right?”

“Yes, of course, I remember,” she answered. “And you know, when I returned from Paris the Monsignor asked me whether I had seen you. He also asked, rather casually, whether you had referred in anyway to de Marenches.”

“Yeah, it gets curiouser by the minute,” Tim mused. “But, all things considered, I cannot understand why Sainte-Ange wanted an investigation in the first place, and then why he recruited me for it.”

“Oh, that's very simple,” Angela said. “My very educated guess is that it was the pope who had demanded an investigation after the Italians had given up on it, and Saint-Ange had to obey. He likes to tie up loose ends, especially concerning his survival. It was never the Monsignor's idea: he believes in letting sleeping dogs lie. The pope did develop some doubts after you were recruited, but dropped them in the end . . .”

“How do you know?”

“When you work there for a while, as I have, you learn to listen and remember. It is, after all, a tight little place. I've seen this sort
of thing, involving the Holy Father and the Monsignor, happen before. They always work it out.”

*  *  *

Monsignor Sainte-Ange, wearing a plain gray flannel suit by Adolfo, was met at the bottom of the Air France plane's ramp in midfield at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris by a polite young man who led him to a waiting car. Forty-five minutes later, the monsignor entered a luxurious apartment in a building off Avenue Foch in the fashionable sixteenth
arrondissement.
He had left the Apostolic Palace shortly before noon, prior to Gregory XVII's regular Sunday appearance in his window, having informed the pope that he had a family emergency in Paris involving his older sister and would return the next day. The pope wished Sainte-Ange a safe trip and blessed him. Sainte-Ange also left routine instructions with the assistant private secretary, a Brazilian monsignor.

His cousin, Georges de Sainte-Ange, the head of SDECE, the French CIA-like secret service, was awaiting him in the living room. He had played golf in the morning, probably the last decent-weather Sunday of the year, and was still in his sports clothes.

“Greetings, dear cousin Georges,” the monsignor said. “I hate to spoil your weekend, but we have a bit of a problem on our hands.”

“So I gather,” Georges responded. “I've already heard from the abbey early last week. And a furious call it was! I'm curious as to what you can add to it. And may I offer you a glass of champagne? Is Veuve Clicquot okay?”

The private secretary looked puzzled.

“But I cannot see the connection between what I came to discuss with you and that call from the abbey,” he said. “Tell me about the call and I'll fill you in on what I learned yesterday morning in my own office.”

“It was about that fellow Savage, the American Jesuit,” Georges de Sainte-Ange said. “This reminds me, dear cousin, that you never informed me that you had him working for you.”

“I meant to do it once I heard his report,” the monsignor explained. “I'm really sorry. But what about Savage?”

“Well, to put it briefly, our friend was very upset that my people screwed up, which they did, and failed to liquidate the American.”

“What, in God's name, are you talking about?” the monsignor exploded.

“Actually, there was no operational reason for you to be aware of it beforehand, particularly since I had no idea that Savage worked for you,” Georges told him. “But Archbishop Leduc had discovered very recently that Savage had learned plenty about the plan to assassinate your pope, including the rather disconcerting fact that he, personally, and his Fraternity had arranged to hire the Turkish gunman. Savage told Leduc when they met the other day that he had come up with it in the course of his investigation. This had led Leduc, with impeccable logic, to the conclusion that it wouldn't be wise to let the American go home to Rome and babble about it in front of Gregory XVII. That's why he had ordered him killed in Fanjeaux. You, of course, knew the background, but Leduc was afraid that the pope would want to hear Savage's report himself It was fortunate that you were able to to keep that part of de Marenches' warning—about Leduc—from Gregory XVII the first time around. The archbishop, however, could not take chances that Savage would break the news to the pope five years after the fact—and after the death of de Marenches and his colonel. So, he wanted Savage dead, you see.”

“That is extraordinary,” the monsignor commented, feeling completely off balance for the first time in his career. “Savage never said a word to me about any attempt to kill him. In fact, the son of a whore didn't even mention that he had actually spoken with Leduc . . . But how did your people figure in the plan to murder Savage?”

“I'm afraid that I forgot to let you know, way back, that my Service provides security for Leduc and the Fraternity,” his cousin said. “It's one of those complicated French political situations I wouldn't have wanted to bother you with, anyway. You know, the rightist premier under a socialist president, a rightist religious movement, my minister and that sort of thing . . . The guards at the abbey, at the residence of Leduc's deputy, a bishop named Laval, and at the Fraternity's seminary in Mirepoix are SDECE personnel who report directly—and only—to me. So are the drivers and support elements. We have a special office for it in Carcassonne . . . So when Leduc and Laval decided to have Savage eliminated, the
archbishop asked me to orchestrate it. Leduc's personal security chief, one of my guys, already had on the payroll an American mercenary who once worked for the CIA in Vietnam and whom I had found, and he was to do the killing. My people were to organize the logistics, but it all went wrong and, instead, Savage killed the other American. So, naturally, Leduc went ballistic . . .”