To Kill the Pope Read Online Free PDF

clementina and began to peel it.
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    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.
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    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.

Chapter Two
    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 majestyof 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