Conclave (20 page)

Lomeli had raised her to her feet and absolved her. ‘It is not you who has sinned, my child, it is the Church.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.’

‘For His mercy endures forever.’

After a while, Adeyemi said in a low voice, ‘We were both very young.’

‘No, Your Eminence,
she
was young; you were thirty.’

‘You want to destroy my reputation so that you can be Pope!’

‘Don’t be absurd. Even the thought of it is unworthy of you.’

Adeyemi’s shoulders had begun to shake with sobs. Lomeli sat down on the bed next to him. ‘Compose yourself, Joshua,’ he said kindly. ‘The only reason I know any of this is because I heard the poor woman’s confession, and she won’t ever speak of it in public, I’m sure, if only to protect the boy. As for me, I’m bound by the vows of the confessional never to repeat what I’ve heard.’

Adeyemi gave him a sideways look. His eyes were glistening. Even now, he could not quite accept his dream was over. ‘Are you saying I still have a hope?’

‘No, none whatever.’ Lomeli was appalled. He managed to control himself and went on in a more reasonable tone, ‘After such a public scene, I’m afraid there are bound to be rumours. You know what the Curia is like.’

‘Yes, but rumours are not the same as facts.’

‘In this case they are. You know as well as I do that if there is one thing that terrifies our colleagues above all others, it is the thought of yet more sexual scandals.’

‘So that is it? I can never be Pope?’

‘Your Eminence, you cannot be
anything
.’

Adeyemi seemed unable to raise his gaze from the floor. ‘What shall I do, Jacopo?’

‘You are a good man. You will find some way to atone. God will know if you are truly penitent, and He will decide what is to happen to you.’

‘And the Conclave?’

‘Leave them to me.’

They sat without speaking. Lomeli could not bear to imagine his agony.
God forgive me for what I have had to do.
Eventually Adeyemi said, ‘Would you pray with me for a moment?’

‘Of course.’

And so the two men got down on their knees under the electric light in the sealed room that was sweet with the scent of aftershave – got down easily in Adeyemi’s case, stiffly in Lomeli’s – and prayed together side by side.

Lomeli would have liked to have walked to the Sistine again – to have inhaled some cool fresh air and turned his face to the mild November sun. But it was too late for that. By the time he reached the lobby, the cardinals were already boarding the minibuses, and Nakitanda was waiting for him by the reception desk.

‘Well?’

‘He will have to resign all his offices.’

Nakitanda’s head dropped in dismay. ‘Oh no!’

‘Not immediately – I hope we may avoid a humiliation – but certainly in a year or so. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you tell the others. I have spoken to both parties and I am bound by vows. I cannot say any more.’

On the minibus he sat at the very back with his eyes closed,
his biretta on the seat next to him to discourage company. Every part of this business sickened him, but one aspect in particular had started to niggle away in his mind. It was the first thing Adeyemi had brought up: the timing. According to Sister Shanumi, her work in Nigeria for the past twenty years had been at the Iwaro Oko community in Ondo province, helping women suffering from HIV/AIDs.

‘Were you happy there?’

‘Very much so, Your Eminence.’

‘Your work must have been somewhat different from what you have to do here, I would imagine?’

‘Oh yes. There I was a nurse. Here I am a maid.’

‘So what made you want to come to Rome?’

‘I never wanted to come to Rome!’

Quite how she had ended up in the Casa Santa Marta was still a mystery to her. One day in September she had been called in to see the sister in charge of their community and informed that an email had been received from the office of the Superioress General in Paris, requesting her immediate transfer to the order’s mission in Rome. There had been great excitement among the other sisters at such an honour. Some even believed that the Holy Father himself must be responsible for the invitation.

‘How extraordinary. Had you ever met the Pope?’

‘Of course not, Your Eminence!’ It was the only time she laughed – at the absurdity of the idea. ‘I saw him once, when he made his tour of Africa, but I was just one of millions. For me, he was a white dot in the distance.’

‘So at what point were you asked to come to Rome?’

‘Six weeks ago, Eminence. I was given three weeks to prepare myself, and then I caught the plane.’

‘And when you got here, did you have a chance to speak to the Holy Father?’

‘No, Eminence.’ She crossed herself. ‘He died the day after I arrived. May his soul be at peace.’

‘I don’t understand why you agreed to come. Why would you leave your home in Africa and travel all this way?’

Her answer pierced him almost more than anything else she said: ‘Because I thought it might be Cardinal Adeyemi who had sent for me.’

One had to hand it to Adeyemi. The Nigerian cardinal comported himself with the same dignity and gravity he had shown at the end of the third ballot. No one watching him as he entered the Sistine Chapel could have guessed from his appearance that his manifest sense of destiny had been in any way disrupted, let alone that he was ruined. He ignored the men around him and sat at his desk calmly reading the Bible while the roll call was taken. When his name was read out he responded firmly: ‘Present.’

At 2.45 p.m., the doors were locked and Lomeli for the fourth time led the prayers. Yet again he wrote Bellini’s name on his ballot paper and stepped up to the altar to tip it into the urn.

‘I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God I think should be elected.’

He settled back into his seat to wait.

The first thirty cardinals who voted were the most senior members of the Conclave – the patriarchs, the cardinal-bishops, the cardinal-priests of longest standing. Scrutinising their impassive faces as they rose from their desks one after another at the front of
the chapel, it was impossible for Lomeli to guess what was going through their minds. Suddenly he was seized by an anxiety that perhaps he hadn’t done enough. What if they had no idea of the gravity of Adeyemi’s sin and were voting for him in ignorance? But after a quarter of an hour, the cardinals seated around Adeyemi in the central section of the Sistine began to file up to vote. To a man, on their way back from casting their ballots, they averted their eyes from the Nigerian. They were like members of a jury filing into a courtroom to deliver their verdict, unable to look at the accused they were about to condemn. Observing them, Lomeli began to feel a little calmer. When it came to Adeyemi’s turn to vote, he walked with a solemn tread to the urn and recited the oath with the same absolute assurance as before. He passed Lomeli without a glance.

At 3.51 p.m., the voting was concluded and the scrutineers took over. One hundred and eighteen ballots having been certified as cast, they set up their table and the ritual of the count began.

‘The first ballot cast is for Cardinal Lomeli . . .’

Oh no, God,
he prayed,
not again; let this pass from me.
It had been Adeyemi’s taunt that he was motivated by personal ambition. It wasn’t true – he was certain of it. But now as he marked down the results he couldn’t help noticing his own tally beginning to tick back up again, not to a dangerous level, but still to a point that was a little too high for comfort. He leaned forward slightly and peered down the row of desks to where Adeyemi was sitting. Unlike the men around him, he was not even bothering to write down the votes but was simply staring at the opposite wall. Once Newby had read out the last ballot, Lomeli added up the totals:

He placed the list of results on the desk and studied it, his elbows on the table propping up his head, his knuckles pressed to his temples. Adeyemi had lost more than half his support since they paused for lunch – a staggering haemorrhage: thirty-two votes – of which Tremblay had picked up eleven, Bellini eight, himself six, Tedesco four and Benítez three. Clearly Nakitanda had spread the word, and enough cardinals had either witnessed the scene in the dining hall or heard about it afterwards for them to have taken serious fright.

As the Conclave absorbed this new reality, there was a general outbreak of conversation all around the Sistine. Lomeli could tell from their faces what they were saying. To think that if they hadn’t broken for lunch, Adeyemi might by now be Pope! Instead of which, the dream of the African pontiff was dead and Tedesco was back in the lead – a mere four votes off the forty he needed to deny anyone else a two-thirds majority . . .
The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to all . . .
And Tremblay – assuming the Third World vote started to swing his way, might he be poised to become the new front-runner? (Poor Bellini, they whispered, glancing over at his passionless expression – when would his long-drawn-out humiliation be over?) As for Lomeli, presumably his vote reflected the fact that when things started to look uncertain, there was always a yearning for a steady hand. And finally there was Benítez – five votes for a man nobody even knew two days ago: that was little short of miraculous . . .

Lomeli put his head down and continued to study the figures,
oblivious to the number of cardinals who had begun staring at him, until Bellini leaned around the back of the Patriarch of Lebanon and gave him a gentle poke in the ribs. He looked up in alarm. There was some laughter from the other side of the aisle. What an old fool he was becoming!

He rose and went up to the altar. ‘My brothers, no candidate having secured a two-thirds majority, we shall now proceed immediately to a fifth ballot.’

IN MODERN TIMES
, they usually had a Pope by the fifth ballot. The late Holy Father, for example, had got it on the fifth, and Lomeli could picture him now, resolutely refusing to sit on the papal throne but insisting on standing up to embrace the cardinals as they queued to congratulate him. Ratzinger had won it one ballot earlier, when they voted for the fourth time; Lomeli remembered him, too – his shy smile as his tally reached two-thirds and the Conclave burst into applause. John Paul I had also been a fourth-ballot victor. In fact, apart from Wojtyła, the fifth-ballot rule held true at least as far back as 1963, when Montini had defeated Lercaro and had famously remarked to his more charismatic rival, ‘That’s how life is, Your Eminence – you should be sitting here.’

An election completed in five ballots was what Lomeli had secretly prayed for – a nice, easy, conventional number, suggestive of an election that had been neither schism nor coronation but a meditative process of discerning God’s will. It would not be so this year. He did not like the feel of it.

Studying for his doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran
University, he had read Canetti’s
Crowds and Power
. From it he had learnt to separate the various categories of crowd – the panicking crowd, the stagnant crowd, the crowd in revolt, and so forth. It was a useful skill for a cleric. Applying this secular analysis, a papal Conclave could be seen as the most sophisticated crowd on earth, moved this way or that by the collective impulse of the Holy Spirit. Some Conclaves were timid and disinclined to change, such as that which elected Ratzinger; others were bold, like the one that eventually chose Wojtyła. What worried Lomeli about this particular Conclave was that it was beginning to show signs of becoming what Canetti might call a disintegrating crowd. It was troubled, unstable, fragile – capable of suddenly heading off in any direction.

That growing sense of purpose and excitement with which they had ended the morning session had evaporated. Now, as the cardinals filed up to vote, and the small area of sky visible through the high windows darkened, the silence in the Sistine became bleak and tomblike. The tolling of the bell of St Peter’s for five o’clock might have been the death knell at a funeral. We are lost sheep, Lomeli thought, and a great storm is approaching. But who will be our shepherd? He still thought the best choice was Bellini, and voted for him yet again, but without any expectation that he could win. His tallies in the four ballots so far had been eighteen, nineteen, ten and eighteen respectively: clearly something was preventing him breaking out beyond his core group of supporters. Perhaps it was because he had been Secretary of State, and was too closely associated with the late Holy Father, whose policies had both antagonised the traditionalists and disappointed the liberals.

He found his gaze returning repeatedly to Tremblay. The Canadian, who was nervously fingering his pectoral cross as the voting proceeded, managed somehow to combine a bland personality with
passionate ambition – a paradox that was not uncommon in Lomeli’s experience. But maybe blandness was what was needed to maintain the unity of the Church. And was ambition necessarily such a sin? Wojtyła had been ambitious. My God, how confident he had been, right from the start! On the night of his election, when he had stepped on to the balcony to address the tens of thousands in St Peter’s Square, he had practically shouldered the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations out of the way in his eagerness to speak to the world. If it comes to a choice between Tremblay and Tedesco, Lomeli thought, I shall have to vote for Tremblay – secret report or no. He could only pray it would not happen.

The sky was entirely black by the time the last ballot was cast and the scrutineers began to count the votes. The result was another shock: