by Daniel Silva
“Hurry, Luigi. You mustn’t keep them waiting.”
Donati glanced at the 116 men waiting at the altar.
“Not them, Luigi. The people in the square.”
“What will I say to them? My God, I don’t even have a name.” Donati threw his arms around Gabriel’s neck and clung to him as though he were drowning. “Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I never meant for this to happen.”
Donati drew away and squared his shoulders. Suddenly composed, he marched the length of the chapel and stopped directly in front of Cardinal Francona.
“I believe you have something you wish to ask me, Eminence.”
Francona posed the question in Latin. “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?” Do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?
“I accept,” answered Donati without hesitation.
“Quo nomine vis vocari?” By what name do you wish to be called?
Donati stared at Michelangelo’s ceiling, as if searching for inspiration. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t a clue.”
Laughter filled the Sistine Chapel. It was a good beginning.
60
SISTINE CHAPEL
IT WAS FITTING THAT DONATI’S first official act as pope was to affix his signature to a document that would reside permanently in the silence of the Vatican Secret Archives. Hastily prepared by Monsignor Montini, it formally recorded Donati’s new name and his acceptance of the position of supreme pontiff. He signed the document at the table where the Scrutineers and Revisers had tabulated the votes. Eighty had gone to Donati on the first ballot, a shocking result. Not since the days of election by acclamation had a pope been elected so swiftly and by such an overwhelming margin.
Donati next withdrew to the Room of Tears, where a representative of the Gammarelli family, papal tailors since 1798, waited with three white linen cassocks and a selection of rochets, mozettas, stoles, and red silk slippers. Pietro Lucchesi had famously chosen the smallest of the three cassocks. Donati required the largest. He dispensed with the rochet, mozetta, and stole, and chose to wear his old silver-plated pectoral cross rather than the heavy gold cross offered to him. Nor did he select a pair of red slippers. His Italian loafers, which he had shined himself for his appearance before the cardinals at the Casa Santa Marta, were good enough.
Gabriel was not permitted to witness Donati’s ritual rerobing. He remained in the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals waited to greet the man to whom they had just handed the keys to the kingdom. The mood was electric but uncertain. The room’s acoustics allowed Gabriel to eavesdrop on a few of the conversations. It was obvious that many of the cardinals had cast so-called complimentary votes for Donati, not realizing that an overwhelming majority of their colleagues intended to do the same. The general consensus was that the Holy Spirit, not Bishop Richter and the Order of St. Helena, had intervened.
Not everyone in the room was pleased by the outcome, especially Cardinals Albanese and Tardini. Only thirty-six had voted for another candidate, which meant a significant number of the forty-two conspirators had supported Donati’s candidacy, perhaps with the misplaced hope he might overlook their financial transgressions and allow them to remain in their current jobs. Gabriel reckoned the College of Cardinals would soon see a rash of quiet resignations and reassignments. Long-overdue change was coming to the Catholic Church. No one knew how to operate the levers of Vatican power better than Luigi Donati. More important, he knew where the bodies were buried and where the dirty laundry was hidden. The Roman Curia, guardian of the status quo, had finally met its match.
At last, Donati emerged from the Room of Tears in his snow-white garment, a zucchetto upon his head. He was aglow, as though caught by his own private spotlight. So remarkable was the change in his appearance that even Gabriel scarcely recognized him. He was no longer Luigi Donati, he thought. He was the successor of St. Peter, Christ’s representative on earth.
He was His Holiness.
In a few minutes he would be the most famous and recognizable man in the world. But first there was a last ritual, as old as the Church itself. One by one, in order of precedence, the cardinals filed forward to offer their congratulations and pledge their obedience, a reminder that the pope was not only a spiritual leader of a billion Catholics but one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchs as well. He chose to receive the cardinals while standing rather than seated on his throne. Most of the exchanges were warm, even boisterous. Several were frigid and tense. Tardini, defiant to the end, wagged his finger at the new pope, who wagged his finger in return. Domenico Albanese fell to his knees and begged for absolution. Donati told him to rise and then waved him away with the stain of a pontiff’s murder still on his soul. There was a monastery in Albanese’s future, thought Gabriel. Somewhere cold and isolated, with bad food. Poland, perhaps. Or better yet, Kansas.
There was one last precedent to be broken that evening. It came at 7:34 p.m., when Donati summoned Gabriel with a joyous wave of his long arm. The new pope seized him by the shoulders. Gabriel had never felt smaller.
“Congratulations, Holiness.”
“Condolences, you mean.” His confident smile made it clear he was already becoming comfortable in the role. “You’ve just seen something only a handful of people have ever witnessed.”
“I’m not sure I’ll remember much of it.”
“Nor will I.” He lowered his voice. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“Not a soul.”
“In that case, our friends at the Jesuit Curia are about to get the surprise of their lives.” He seemed to relish the thought. “Come with me to the balcony. It’s not something you should miss.”
He went into the Sala Regia and, followed by much of the conclave, set off along the Hall of Blessings toward the front of the basilica. Unlike his master, Pietro Lucchesi, he did not need to be shown the way. In the antechamber behind the balcony, he solemnly made the sign of the cross as the doors were opened. The roar of the multitude in the square was deafening. He smiled at Gabriel one final time as the senior cardinal deacon declared, “Habemus papam!” We have a pope! Then he stepped into a corona of blinding white light and was gone.
ALONE WITH THE CARDINALS, GABRIEL felt suddenly out of place. The man once known as Luigi Donati belonged to them now, not him. Unescorted, he made his way back to the Sistine Chapel. Then he headed downstairs to the Bronze Doors of the Apostolic Palace.
Outside, St. Peter’s Square was ablaze with candles and mobile phones. It looked as though a galaxy of stars had fallen to earth. Gabriel tried Chiara’s number, but there was not a cellular connection to be had. He picked his way through Bernini’s Colonnade. The crowd was delirious. Donati’s election was an earthquake.
Gabriel finally emerged from the Colonnade into the Piazza Papa Pio XII. To reach the Jesuit Curia, he had to somehow make his way to the other side. He soon gave up. A sea of humanity stretched from Donati’s feet to the banks of the Tiber. There was nowhere for Gabriel to go.
He realized suddenly that Chiara and the children were calling his name. It took a moment to find them. Elated, the children were pointing toward the basilica, as though their father were unaware of the fact that his friend was standing on the balcony. Chiara’s arms were wrapped around Veronica Marchese, who was weeping uncontrollably.
Gabriel tried to reach them, but it was no good. The crowd was impenetrable. Turning, he saw a man in white floating above a key-shaped carpet of golden light. It was a masterwork, he thought. His Holiness, oil on canvas, artist unknown …
PART FOUR
HABEMUS PAPAM
61
CANNAREGIO, VENICE
IT WAS CHIARA WHO SECRETLY informed the prime minister that her husband would not be at his desk at King Saul Boulevard on Monday morning. While purportedly on holiday, he had prevented a massive bombing in Cologne, dealt a severe blow to the ambitions of the European far right, and watched his close friend become the supreme pontiff
of the Roman Catholic Church. He needed a few days to recuperate.
He spent the first three largely confined to the apartment overlooking the Rio della Misericordia, for God in his infinite wisdom had inflicted upon Venice a deluge of biblical magnitude. When combined with gale-force winds and an unusually high tide in the lagoon, the results were disastrous. All six of the city’s historic sestieri suffered catastrophic flooding, including San Marco, where the crypt of the basilica flooded for only the sixth time in twelve centuries. In Cannaregio the water rose a historic six and a half feet in a span of just three hours. Particularly hard hit was the small island to which the city’s Jews were confined in 1516 by the order of Venice’s ruling council. The museum in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo was inundated, as was the ground floor of the Casa Israelitica di Riposo. Waves lapped against the bas-relief Holocaust memorial, leaving the carabinieri no choice but to abandon their bulletproof kiosk.
Like nearly everyone else in the city, the Allon family huddled behind barricades and sandbags and made the best of it. Raphael and Irene looked upon their watery internment as a great adventure; Gabriel, as a blessing. For three waterlogged days, they read books aloud, played board games, undertook art projects, and watched every DVD in the apartment’s modest library, most twice. It was a glimpse of their future. In retirement, Gabriel would be an expatriate again, a Diaspora Jew. He would work when it suited him and devote every spare minute to his children. The clock would slow, his many wounds would heal. This is where his story would end, in the sinking city of churches and paintings at the northern end of the Adriatic.
He checked in with Uzi Navot early each morning and late each afternoon. And, of course, he followed the news from Rome, where Donati wasted little time upsetting the curial applecart. For a start, there was his decision to reside not in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace but in an unadorned suite in the Casa Santa Marta. His first Angelus, delivered to an audience of some two hundred thousand pilgrims crammed into St. Peter’s Square, left little doubt he intended to guide the Church in a new direction.
But who was this man who now occupied the throne of St. Peter? And what were the circumstances of his shocking and historic election? The author of the Vanity Fair article hopscotched from network to network, describing the magnetic archbishop she had christened “Luscious Luigi.” Several profiles explored his Jesuit roots and the period during which he served as a missionary in war-torn El Salvador. It was widely assumed, though never proven, that as a young priest he had been a supporter of the controversial doctrine known as liberation theology. This did not endear him to certain segments of the American political right. Indeed, one conservative referred to him as Pope Che Guevara. Another wondered whether the flooding in Venice, where he had worked for several years, might be a sign of God’s displeasure in the conclave’s choice.
Bound by their vows of secrecy, the cardinal-electors refused to discuss what had transpired inside the Sistine Chapel. Even Alessandro Ricci, the dogged investigative reporter from La Repubblica, appeared unable to penetrate the conclave’s armor. Instead, he published a lengthy article on the links between the European far right and the Order of St. Helena, the reactionary Catholic fraternity about which he had written a best-selling book. Three of the figures implicated in the false-flag bombings in Germany—Jonas Wolf, Andreas Estermann, and Axel Brünner—were alleged to be secret members of the Order. So, too, were Austrian chancellor Jörg Kaufmann and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Saviano.
Kaufmann immediately denied the report. He was forced to issue a clarification when La Repubblica published a photograph from his wedding, which was officiated by the Order’s superior general, Bishop Hans Richter. For his part, Saviano brazenly dismissed the story as “fake news” and called upon Italian prosecutors to file charges of treason against its author. Informed that no such offense had been committed, he issued a tweet calling on his thuggish soccer-hooligan supporters to teach Ricci a lesson he would not soon forget. After receiving hundreds of death threats, the journalist fled his apartment in Trastevere and went into hiding.
Bishop Richter, secluded at the Order’s medieval priory in Canton Zug, refused to comment on the story. Nor did he issue a statement when lawyers in New York filed a class action suit in federal court, accusing the Order of extorting money and valuables from desperate Jews during the late 1930s in exchange for promises of false baptismal certificates and protection from the Nazis. The lead plaintiff in the case was Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman. In a sparsely attended news conference in Vienna, she unveiled a painting—a river landscape by the Dutch Old Master Jan van Goyen—that her father had turned over to the Order in 1938. The canvas, which had been removed from its stretcher, had been returned to her by the noted Holocaust investigator Eli Lavon, whose schedule did not permit him to attend the press briefing.
The exact circumstances of the painting’s recovery were not made public, which gave rise to much unfounded speculation in the Austrian press. A website that regularly trafficked in false or misleading stories went so far as to accuse Lavon of being an Israeli agent. The story happened to be accurate, thus proving Rabbi Jacob Zolli’s contention that the unimaginable can happen. Normally, Gabriel would not have bothered with a response. But given the current climate of anti-Semitism in Europe—and the ever-present threat of violence hanging over Austria’s tiny Jewish minority—he thought it best to issue a denial through the Israeli Embassy in Vienna.
He was less inclined, however, to repudiate a British tabloid report regarding his presence in the Sistine Chapel on the night of the historic conclave, if only to annoy the Russians and the Iranians, who were rightly paranoid about his capabilities and reach. But when the story jumped from publication to publication like a contagion, he reluctantly instructed the prime minister’s irascible spokeswoman to dismiss it as “preposterous on its face.” The statement was a classic example of a nondenial denial. And with good reason. Numerous Vatican insiders, including the new supreme pontiff and the 116 cardinals who elected him, knew the story to be true.
So, too, did Gabriel’s children. For three blissful days, as the rains fell upon Venice without relent, he had them entirely to himself. Board games, art projects, old movies on DVD. Occasionally, when the combination of shadows and light was favorable, he lifted the flap of an envelope emblazoned with the armorial of His Holiness Pope Paul VII and removed the three sheets of rich stationery. The salutation was informal. First name only. There were no preliminaries or pleasantries.
While researching in the Vatican Secret Archives, I came upon a most remarkable book …
FINALLY, ON THE MORNING OF the fourth day, the clouds parted and the sun shone over the whole of the city. After breakfast, Gabriel and Chiara dressed the children in oilskin coats and Wellington boots and together they waded over to the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo to assist with the cleanup. Nothing had been spared, especially the museum’s beautiful bookstore, which lost most of its inventory. The kitchen and common room of the Casa Israelitica di Riposo were in ruins, and both the Portuguese and Spanish synagogues suffered severe damage. Once again, thought Gabriel as he surveyed the destruction, calamity had befallen the Jews of Venice.
They worked until one and then took their lunch in a tiny restaurant hidden away on the Calle Masena. From there it was a short walk to the first of two apartments that Chiara, without bothering to inform Gabriel, had arranged for them to see that day. It was large and airy and, perhaps most important, dry as a bone. The kitchen was newly renovated, as were the three bathrooms. The price was high, but not unreasonable. Gabriel was confident he would be able to shoulder the additional financial burden without having to sell knockoff Gucci handbags to the tourists in San Marco.
“What do you think?” asked Chiara.
“Nice,” said Gabriel noncommittally.
“But?”
“Why don’t you show me the other apartment?”
It was located near the San Toma vap
oretto stop on the Grand Canal, a fully refurbished piano nobile with a private roof terrace and a high-ceilinged, light-filled room that Gabriel could claim as his studio. There he would toil night and day on lucrative private commissions in order to pay for it all. He consoled himself with the knowledge that there were far worse ways for a man to spend the autumn of his years.
“If we sell Narkiss Street,” said Chiara.
“We’re not going to sell it.”
“I know it’s a stretch, Gabriel. But if we’re going to live in Venice, wouldn’t you prefer to live here?”
“Who wouldn’t? But someone has to pay for it.”
“Someone will.”
“You?”
She smiled.
“I want to see his books.”
“Where do you think we were going next?”
Francesco Tiepolo’s office was on the Calle Larga XXII Marzo in San Marco. On the wall behind his desk were several framed photographs of his friend Pietro Lucchesi. In one was a youthful version of Lucchesi’s successor.
“I suppose you had something to do with it.”
“What’s that?”
“The election of the first pope from outside the College of Cardinals since the thirteenth century.”
“Fourteenth,” said Gabriel. “And rest assured, it was the Holy Spirit who chose the new pope, not me.”
“You’ve been spending too much time in Catholic churches, my friend.”
“It’s an occupational hazard.”
Tiepolo’s books were hardly immaculate, but they were in far better shape than Gabriel had feared. The firm had little debt, and the monthly overhead was low. Mainly, it consisted of the rent for the San Marco office and a warehouse on the mainland. At present, the firm had more work than it could handle, and several projects were in the pipeline. Two were scheduled to commence after the date of Gabriel’s retirement, which meant Chiara would be able to hit the ground running. Tiepolo insisted they keep the firm’s name and pay him a fifty percent share of the annual profit. Gabriel agreed to keep the name—he did not want his many enemies to know where he was living—but he balked at Tiepolo’s demand for half of the company’s profits, offering him twenty-five percent instead.