Conclave (27 page)

A woman’s voice! It was scarcely credible! The cardinals turned in shock to stare at the tiny, resolute figure of Sister Agnes advancing between the tables. The silence that fell was probably as much appalled at her presumption as curious at what she might say.

‘Eminences,’ she began, ‘although we Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul are supposed to be invisible, God has nonetheless given us eyes and ears, and I am responsible for the welfare of my sisters. I wish to say that I know what prompted the Dean of the College to enter the Holy Father’s rooms last night, because he spoke to me beforehand. He was concerned that the sister from my order who made that regrettable scene yesterday – for which I apologise – might have been brought to Rome with the deliberate intention of embarrassing a member of this Conclave. His suspicions were correct. I was able to tell him that she was indeed here at the specific request of one of your number: Cardinal Tremblay. I believe it was that discovery, rather than any malicious intent, that guided his actions. Thank you.’

She genuflected to the cardinals, then turned, and with her head held very erect, walked out of the dining room and across the lobby. Tremblay gaped after her in horror. He held out his hands in an
appeal for understanding. ‘My brothers, it is true I made the request, but only because the Holy Father asked me to. I had no knowledge of who she was, I swear to you!’

For several seconds no one spoke. Then Adeyemi rose. Slowly he brought up his arm to point at Tremblay. In his deep, well-modulated voice, which sounded to his listeners, that morning more than ever, like the wrath of God made manifest, he intoned the single word, ‘Judas!’

THE CONCLAVE WAS
unstoppable. Like some sacred machine, it ground on into its third day, regardless of all profane distractions. At 9.30 a.m., in accordance with the Apostolic Constitution, the cardinals once again began filing out to the minibuses. They knew the routine by now. As quickly as old age and infirmity permitted, they took their seats. Soon the buses were pulling away, one every couple of minutes, heading west across the Piazza Santa Marta towards the Sistine Chapel.

Lomeli stood outside the hotel, biretta in hand, bare-headed beneath the grey sky. The cardinals’ mood was subdued – stunned, even – and he half expected Tremblay to plead ill-health and withdraw from the election altogether, but no: he emerged from the lobby on the arm of Archbishop Fitzgerald and climbed up on to his bus, outwardly quite calm, although his face, which he turned to the window as they pulled away, was a dead white mask of misery.

Bellini, who was standing beside Lomeli, said drily, ‘We seem to be running out of favourites.’

‘Indeed. One wonders who will be next.’

Bellini glanced at him. ‘I should have thought that was obvious: you.’

Lomeli put his hand to his forehead. Beneath his fingertips he could feel a vein throbbing. ‘I meant what I said just now in the dining room: I believe it would be best for us all if I stepped aside as dean, and you took over the supervision of the election.’

‘No, thank you, Dean. Besides, you must have noticed that the mood of the meeting was with you by the end. You are steering this Conclave – exactly where I do not know, but you are certainly steering it, and that firm hand of yours will have its admirers.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Last night I warned you that exposing Tremblay would backfire on whoever did it, but it turns out I was wrong – again! Now I predict it will become a contest between you and Tedesco.’

‘Then let us hope you’re wrong – again.’

Bellini gave one of his chillier smiles. ‘After forty years, we may have an Italian Pope at last. That will please our compatriots.’ He gripped Lomeli’s arm. ‘Seriously, my friend, I shall pray for you.’

‘Please do. Just as long as you don’t vote for me.’

‘Oh, I shall do that as well.’

O’Malley put away his clipboard. ‘We’re ready to leave, Your Eminences.’

Bellini went first. Lomeli put on his biretta and adjusted it, took one last look at the sky, then climbed up on to the bus behind the billowing red skirts of the Patriarch of Alexandria. He settled himself into one of the pair of vacant seats just behind the driver. O’Malley joined him. The doors closed, the bus vibrated over the cobbles.

As they passed between St Peter’s Basilica and the Palace of Justice, O’Malley leaned in and said very quietly, so that no one could
overhear him, ‘I assume, Your Eminence, given the latest developments, the Conclave is extremely unlikely to reach a decision today?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I was in the lobby throughout.’

Lomeli grunted to himself. If O’Malley knew, then sooner or later everyone would. He said, ‘Well, naturally, given the arithmetic, you’ll appreciate that deadlock is almost inevitable. We shall have to devote tomorrow to meditation and resume voting on . . .’ He paused. Shuttling back and forth between the Casa Santa Marta and the Sistine, rarely seeing daylight, he was losing track of time.

‘Friday, Your Eminence.’

‘Friday, thank you. Four ballots on Friday, another four on Saturday, and then a further meditation on Sunday, assuming we’re no further forward. We’ll need to make arrangements for laundry, fresh clothes and so forth.’

‘That is all in hand.’

They halted to allow the buses ahead of them to offload their passengers. Lomeli stared at the blank wall of the Apostolic Palace, then turned to O’Malley and whispered, ‘Tell me, what are they saying in the media?’

‘They are predicting a decision either this morning or this afternoon, with Cardinal Adeyemi still considered the favourite.’ O’Malley brought his lips even closer to Lomeli’s ear. ‘Between us, Your Eminence, if there isn’t white smoke today, I fear we may start to lose control of things.’

‘In what sense?’

‘In the sense that we are not sure what the press office can say to the media to stop them speculating that the Church is in crisis. How else will they fill the airtime? And there are security issues as well. There are said to be four million pilgrims in Rome awaiting the new Pope.’

Lomeli glanced up at the driver’s mirror. A pair of dark eyes were watching him. Perhaps the fellow could lip-read? Anything was possible. He took off his biretta and used it to shield his mouth as he turned to whisper to O’Malley. ‘We have sworn an oath of secrecy, Ray, so I rely on your discretion, but I think you should let the press office know, very subtly, that the Conclave is likely to be longer than any in recent history. Instruct them to prepare the media accordingly.’

‘And what reasons shall I give them?’

‘Not the real ones, that’s for sure! Tell them that we have an abundance of strong candidates and that choosing between them is proving difficult. Say that we are deliberately taking our time, and praying hard to divine God’s will, and that it may take us some days yet to settle on our new shepherd. You might also point out that God is not to be rushed simply to suit the convenience of CNN.’

He smoothed down his hair and replaced his biretta. O’Malley was writing in his notebook. When he had finished, he whispered, ‘One other thing, Your Eminence. It’s very trivial. I needn’t bother you with it, if you’d prefer not to know.’

‘Go on.’

‘I did a little more research into Cardinal Benítez. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I see.’ Lomeli closed his eyes as if he was hearing confession. ‘You’d better tell me.’

‘Well, you remember I informed you that he had a private meeting with the Holy Father in January this year, following his request to resign as archbishop on health grounds? His resignation letter is in his file at the Congregation for Bishops, along with a note from the Holy Father’s private office to say that his request to retire was withdrawn. There is nothing else. However, when I entered
Cardinal Benítez’s name into our data search engine, I discovered that shortly afterwards, he was issued with a return airline ticket to Geneva, paid for by the Pope’s own account. This is in a separate registry.’

‘Is it of any significance?’

‘Well, as a Philippine national, he was required to submit a visa application. The purpose of travel was given as “medical treatment”, and when I looked up his address in Switzerland for the duration of his stay, I discovered it was a private hospital.’

Lomeli opened his eyes at that. ‘Why not one of the Vatican’s medical facilities? What was he being treated for?’

‘I don’t know, Your Eminence – presumably it was in connection with the injuries he sustained in the bombing in Baghdad. Anyway, whatever it was, it can’t have been serious. The tickets were cancelled. He never went.’

For the next half-hour, Lomeli gave no further thought to the Archbishop of Baghdad. When he disembarked from the bus, he made a point of letting O’Malley and the others go on ahead, and then walked alone up the long staircase and across the Sala Regia towards the Sistine Chapel. He needed an interval of solitude to clear that space in his mind that was the necessary precondition to the admittance of God. The scandals and stresses of the past forty-eight hours, his awareness of the watching millions beyond the walls who were impatient for their decision – all these he tried to banish by reciting in his head the prayer of St Ambrose:

He greeted Archbishop Mandorff and his assistants in the vestibule, where they were waiting for him beside the stoves, then walked with them into the Sistine. Inside the chapel, not a word was being spoken. The only sounds, magnified by the vast echo, were the occasional cough and the shifting of the cardinals in their seats. It sounded like an art gallery, or a museum. Most were praying.

Lomeli whispered to Mandorff, ‘Thank you. I expect we shall see you again at lunchtime.’ After the doors had been locked, he sat in his place with his head bowed and let the silence go on. He sensed a collective desire for meditation to restore a mood of the sacred. But he could not rid himself of the thought of all those pilgrims, and the commentators babbling their inanities into the cameras. After five minutes, he rose and walked up to the microphone.

‘My most holy brothers, I will now take the roll call in alphabetical order. Please answer “Present” when I read out your name. Cardinal Adeyemi?’

‘Present.’

‘Cardinal Alatas?’

‘Present.’

Alatas, an Indonesian, was sitting halfway down the aisle, on the right-hand side. He was one of those who had taken money from Tremblay. Lomeli wondered who he would cast his vote for now.

‘Cardinal Baptiste?’ He was two places further along from Alatas. Another of Tremblay’s beneficiaries, from St Lucia, in the Caribbean.
They were so poor, those missions. His voice was thick, as if he had been weeping.

‘Present.’

On Lomeli went. Bellini . . . Benítez . . . Brandão D’Cruz . . . Brotzkus . . . Cárdenas . . . Contreras . . . Courtemarche . . . He knew them all so much better now, their foibles and their weaknesses. A line of Kant’s came into his mind:
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made . . .
The Church was built of crooked timber – how could it not be? But by the grace of God it fitted together. It had endured two thousand years; if necessary it would last another two weeks without a Pope. He felt suffused by a deep and mysterious love for his colleagues and their frailties.

‘Cardinal Yatsenko?’

‘Present.’

‘Cardinal Zucula?’

‘Present, Dean.’

‘Thank you, my brothers. We are all assembled. Let us pray.’

For the sixth time, the Conclave stood.

‘O Father, so that we may guide and watch over Your Church, give to us, Your servants, the blessings of intelligence, truth and peace, so that we may strive to know Your will, and serve You with total dedication. For Christ our Lord . . .’

‘Amen.’

‘Scrutineers, will you take your places, please?’

He looked at his watch. It was three minutes to ten.

While Archbishop Lukša of Vilnius, Archbishop Newby of Westminster, and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal
Mercurio, took their places at the altar, Lomeli studied his ballot paper. In the upper half were printed the words
Eligo in Summum Pontificem – ‘
I elect as Supreme Pontiff’; in the lower half, nothing. He tapped his pen against it. Now that the moment had arrived, he was not sure what name to write. His confidence in Bellini had been shaken badly, but when he came to consider the other possibilities, none of them seemed much better. He looked up and down the Sistine Chapel and begged God to give him a sign. He closed his eyes and prayed, but nothing happened. Conscious that the others were waiting for him to begin the balloting, he shielded his paper and wrote, reluctantly, BELLINI.

He folded the ballot in half, stood, held it aloft, stepped on to the carpeted aisle and approached the altar. He spoke in a firm voice.

‘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 placed the paper on the chalice and tipped it into the urn. He heard it strike the silver base. As he returned to his seat, he felt an acute sense of disappointment. For the sixth time God had asked him the same question, and for the sixth time he felt he had returned the same wrong answer.

He had no recollection at all of the remainder of the voting process. Exhausted by the events of the night, he fell asleep almost as soon as he sat down, only waking an hour later when something fluttered on to the desk in front of him. His chin was resting on his chest. He opened his eyes to find a folded note:
And behold there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. Matthew 8:24.
He looked around to see Bellini leaning
forward, looking at him. He was embarrassed to have shown such weakness in public, but no one else seemed to be paying him any attention. The cardinals opposite were either reading or staring into space. In front of the altar, the scrutineers were setting up their table. The balloting must have ended. He picked up his pen and scribbled beneath the quotation:
I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. Psalm 3
. Then he
tossed the note back. Bellini read it and nodded judiciously, as if Lomeli was one of his old students at the Gregorian who had returned a correct answer.