Conclave

by Robert Harris

  He was staring too openly, he realised. He ought to mingle with the others. But he didn’t much want to talk to anyone. He wandered around the lobby, holding his cup and saucer like a shield in front of him, smiling and bowing slightly to those cardinals who approached him, but all the time keeping moving. Just around the corner, next to the door to the chapel, he spotted Benítez at the centre of a group of cardinals. They were listening intently to what he was saying. He wondered what the Filipino was telling them. Benítez glanced over their shoulders and noticed Lomeli looking in his direction. He excused himself, and came over.

  ‘Good evening, Your Eminence.’

  ‘And good evening to you.’ Lomeli put his hand on Benítez’s shoulder and gazed at him with concern. ‘How is your health bearing up?’

  ‘My health is excellent, thank you.’

  He seemed to tense slightly at the question, and Lomeli remembered that he had only been told in confidence of his offer to resign on medical grounds. He said, ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t intended to be intrusive. I meant have you recovered from your journey?’

  ‘Entirely, thank you. I slept very well.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. It’s a privilege to have you with us.’ He patted the Filipino’s shoulder and swiftly withdrew his hand. He sipped his coffee. ‘And I noticed in the Sistine that you found someone to vote for.’

  ‘Indeed I did, Dean.’ Benítez smiled shyly. ‘I voted for you.’

  Lomeli rattled his cup against its saucer in surprise. ‘Oh, good heavens!’

  ‘Forgive me. Am I not supposed to say?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. I’m honoured. But really I’m not a serious candidate.’

  ‘With respect, Your Eminence, isn’t that for your colleagues to decide?’

  ‘Of course it is. But I fear that if you knew me better, you would appreciate that I’m in no way worthy to be Pope.’

  ‘Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy. Isn’t that the point you were making in your homily? That without doubt there can be no faith? It resonated with my own experience. The scenes I witnessed in Africa especially would make any man sceptical of God’s mercy.’

  ‘My dear Vincent – may I call you Vincent? – I beg you, in the next ballot, give your vote to one of our brothers who has a realistic chance of winning. Bellini would be my choice.’

  Benítez shook his head. ‘Bellini seems to me – what was the phrase the Holy Father once used to me to describe him? – “brilliant but neurotic”. I’m sorry, Dean. I shall vote for you.’

  ‘Even if I plead with you not to? You received a vote yourself this afternoon, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did. It was absurd!’

  ‘Then imagine how you would feel if I insisted on voting for you, and by some miracle you won.’

  ‘It would be a disaster for the Church.’

  ‘Yes, well that is how it would be if I became Pope. Will you at least think about what I’m asking?’

  Benítez promised that he would.

  *

  After his conversation with Benítez, Lomeli was sufficiently troubled to try to seek out the main contenders. He found Tedesco alone in the lobby, lying back in one of the crimson armchairs, his plump and dimpled hands folded across his capacious stomach, his feet up on a coffee table. They were surprisingly dainty for a man of his girth, shod in scuffed and shapeless orthopaedic shoes. Lomeli said, ‘I just wanted to tell you that I’m doing all in my power to withdraw my name from the second ballot.’

  Tedesco regarded him through half-open eyes. ‘And why would you do that?’

  ‘Because I don’t wish to compromise my neutrality as dean.’

  ‘You rather did that this morning, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry if you took it that way.’

  ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. As far as I’m concerned, I hope you continue as a candidate. I want to see the issues aired: I thought Scavizzi answered you well enough in his meditation. Besides . . .’ he wiggled his little feet happily and closed his eyes, ‘you’re splitting the liberal vote!’

  Lomeli studied him for a moment. One had to smile. He was as cunning as a peasant selling a pig at market. Forty votes, that was all the Patriarch of Venice needed: forty votes, and he would have the blocking third he needed to prevent the election of a detested ‘progressive’. He would drag the Conclave out for days if he had to. All the more urgency, then, for Lomeli to extricate himself from the embarrassing position in which he was now placed.

  ‘I wish you a good night’s sleep, Patriarch.’

  ‘Goodnight, Dean.’

  Before the evening was over, he had managed to speak in turn to each of the other three leading candidates, and to each he repeated his pledge to withdraw. ‘Mention it to anyone who brings up my name, I implore you. Tell them to come and see me if they doubt my sincerity. All I wish is to serve the Conclave and to help it arrive at the right decision. I can’t do that if I’m seen as a contender myself.’

  Tremblay frowned and rubbed his chin. ‘Forgive me, Dean, but if we do that, won’t we simply make you look like a paragon of modesty? If one was being Machiavellian about it, one could almost say it was a clever move to swing votes.’

  It was such an insulting response, Lomeli was tempted to raise the issue of the so-called withdrawn report into the Camerlengo’s activities. But what was the point? He would only deny it. Instead he said politely, ‘Well that is the situation, Your Eminence, and I shall leave you to handle it as you see fit.’

  Next he talked to Adeyemi, who was statesmanlike. ‘I consider that a principled position, Dean, exactly as I would have expected from you. I shall tell my supporters to spread the word.’

  ‘And you certainly have plenty of supporters, I think.’ Adeyemi looked at him blankly. Lomeli smiled. ‘Forgive me: I couldn’t help overhearing the meeting in your room earlier this evening. We’re next-door neighbours. The walls are very thin.’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ Adeyemi’s expression cleared. ‘There was a certain exuberance after the first ballot. Perhaps it wasn’t very seemly. It won’t happen again.’

  Lomeli intercepted Bellini just as he was about to go upstairs to bed and told him what he had told the others. He added, ‘I feel very wretched that my meagre tally may have come at your expense.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m relieved. There seems to be a general feeling that the chalice is slipping away from me. If that is the case – and I pray that it is – I can only hope that it passes to you.’ Bellini threaded his arm through Lomeli’s, and together the two old friends began to climb the stairs.

  Lomeli said, ‘You are the only one of us with the holiness and the intellect to be Pope.’

  ‘No, that’s kind of you, but I fret too much, and we cannot have a Pope who frets. You will have to be careful, though, Jacopo. I’m serious: if my position weakens further, much of my support will probably switch to you.’

  ‘No, no, no, that would be a disaster!’

  ‘Think about it. Our fellow countrymen are desperate to have an Italian Pope, but at the same time most of them can’t abide the thought of Tedesco. If I fade, that leaves you as the only viable candidate for them to rally behind.’

  Lomeli stopped, mid-step. ‘What an appalling thought! That must not be allowed to happen!’ When they resumed climbing he said, ‘Perhaps Adeyemi will turn out to be the answer. He certainly has the wind behind him.’

  ‘Adeyemi? A man who has more or less said that all homosexuals should be sent to prison in this world and to hell in the next? He is not the answer to anything!’

  They reached the second floor. The candles flickering outside the Holy Father’s apartment cast a red glow across the landing. The two most senior cardinals in the electoral college stood for a moment contemplating the sealed door.

  ‘What was going through his head in those final weeks, I wonder?’ Bellini said, almost to himself.

  ‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t see him at all for the last month.’

/>   ‘Ah, I wish you had! He was strange. Unreachable. Secretive. I believe he sensed his death was approaching and his mind was full of curious ideas. I feel his presence very strongly, don’t you?’

  ‘I do indeed. I still speak to him. I often sense he is watching us.’

  ‘I’m quite certain of it. Well, this is where we part. I am on the third floor.’ Bellini studied his key. ‘Room 301. I must be directly above the Holy Father. Perhaps his spirit radiates through the floor? That would explain why I am so restless. Be sure that you sleep well, Jacopo. Who knows where we’ll be this time tomorrow?’

  And then, to Lomeli’s surprise, Bellini kissed him lightly on either cheek before turning away and continuing on up the staircase.

  Lomeli called after him: ‘Goodnight.’

  Without turning round, Bellini raised his hand in response.

  After he had gone, Lomeli stood for another minute, staring at the closed door with its barrier of wax and ribbons. He was remembering his conversation with Benítez. Could it really be true that the Holy Father had known the Filipino well enough, and trusted him enough, to criticise his own Secretary of State? Yet the remark had the ring of authenticity. ‘Brilliant but neurotic’: he could almost hear the old man saying it.

  *

  Lomeli’s sleep that night was also restless. For the first time in many years he dreamt of his mother – a widow for forty years, who used to complain that he was cold towards her – and when he woke in the early hours, her plaintive voice still seemed to be whining in his ears. But then, after a minute or two, he realised the voice he could hear was real. There was a woman nearby.

  A woman?

  He rolled on to his side and groped for his watch. It was almost 3 a.m.

  The female voice came again: urgent, accusatory, almost hysterical. And then a deep male response: gentle, soothing, placatory.

  Lomeli threw off his bedclothes and turned on the light. The unoiled springs of the iron bedstead creaked loudly as he put his feet to the floor. He tiptoed cautiously across the room and put his ear to the wall. The voices had fallen silent. He sensed that on the other side of the plasterboard partition they too were listening. For several minutes he held the same position, until he began to feel foolish. Surely his suspicions were absurd? But then he heard Adeyemi’s unmistakable voice – even the cardinal’s whispers had resonance – followed by the click of a door closing. He moved quickly to his own door and flung it open, just in time to see a flash of the blue uniform of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul disappearing around the corner.

  *

  Later, it would be obvious to Lomeli what he should have done next. He should have dressed immediately and knocked on Adeyemi’s door. It might still have been possible, at that early moment, before positions were fixed and when the episode was undeniable, to have a frank conversation about what had just happened. Instead, the dean climbed back into his bed, drew the sheet up to his chin, and contemplated the possibilities.

  The best explanation – that is to say, the least damaging from his point of view – was that the nun was troubled, that she had concealed herself after the other sisters had left the building at midnight and had come to Adeyemi to seek guidance. Many of the nuns in the Casa Santa Marta were African, and it was entirely possible she had known the cardinal from his years in Nigeria. Obviously Adeyemi was guilty of a serious indiscretion in admitting her to his room unchaperoned in the middle of the night, but an indiscretion was not necessarily a sin. After that came a range of other explanations, from nearly all of which Lomeli’s imagination recoiled. In a literal sense, he had trained himself not to deal with such thoughts. A passage in Pope John XXIII’s Journal of a Soul had been his guiding text ever since his tormenting days and nights as a young priest:

  As for women, and everything to do with them, never a word, never; it was as if there were no women in the world. This absolute silence, even between close friends, about everything to do with women was one of the most profound and lasting lessons of my early years in the priesthood.

  This was the core of the hard mental discipline that had enabled Lomeli to remain celibate for more than sixty years. Don’t even think about them! The mere idea of going next door and talking man to man with Adeyemi about a woman was a concept that lay entirely outside the dean’s closed intellectual system. Therefore he resolved to forget about the whole incident. If Adeyemi chose to confide in him, naturally he would listen, in the spirit of a confessor. Otherwise he would act as if it had never happened.

  He reached over and switched off the light.

  9

  The Second Ballot

  AT 6.30 A.M., the bell rang for morning Mass.

  Lomeli woke with an impending sense of doom somewhere at the back of his mind, as if his anxieties were all coiled together ready to spring out at him the moment he was fully awake. He went into the bathroom and tried to banish them with another scalding shower. But when he stood at the mirror to shave, they were still there, lurking behind him.

  He dried himself and put on his robe, knelt at the prie-dieu and recited his rosary, then prayed for Christ’s wisdom and guidance throughout the trials that the day would bring. As he dressed, his fingers shook. He paused and told himself to be calm. There was a set prayer for every garment – cassock, cincture, rochet, mozzetta, zuchetta – and he recited them as he put on each item. ‘Protect me, O Lord, with the girdle of faith,’ he whispered as he knotted the cincture around his waist, ‘and extinguish the fire of lust so that chastity may abide in me, year after year.’ But he did so mechanically, with no more feeling than if he were giving out a telephone number.

  Just before he left the room, he caught sight of himself in the mirror wearing his choir dress. The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.

  He walked with a group of other cardinals down the stairs to the ground-floor chapel. It was housed in an annexe attached to the main building: an antiseptic modernist design with a vaulted ceiling of white wooden beams and glass, suspended above a cream and gold polished marble floor. The effect was too much like an airport lounge for Lomeli’s taste, yet the Holy Father, amazingly, had preferred it to the Pauline. One entire side consisted of thick plate glass, behind which ran the old Vatican wall, spotlit with potted shrubs at its base. It was impossible to see the sky from this angle, or even to tell whether it was yet dawn.

  Two weeks earlier, Tremblay had come to see Lomeli and offered to take charge of celebrating the morning Masses in the Casa Santa Marta, and Lomeli, burdened with the prospect of the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, had been grateful to accept. Now he rather regretted it. He saw that he had given the Canadian the perfect opportunity to remind the Conclave of his skill at performing the liturgy. He sang well. He looked like a cleric in some Hollywood romantic movie: Spencer Tracy came to mind. His gestures were dramatic enough to suggest he was infused with the divine spirit, yet not so theatrical that they seemed false or egocentric. When Lomeli queued to receive Communion and knelt before the cardinal, the sacrilegious thought occurred to him that just this one service might have been worth three or four votes to the Canadian.

  Adeyemi was the last to receive the host. He very carefully did not glance at Lomeli or anyone else as he returned to his seat. He seemed entirely self-possessed, grave, remote, aware. By lunchtime he would probably know whether he was likely to be Pope.

  After the blessing, a few of the cardinals remained behind to pray, but most headed straight to the dining hall for breakfast. Adeyemi joined his usual table of African cardinals. Lomeli took a place between the archbishops of Hong Kong and Cebu. They tried to make polite conversation, but the silences soon became longer and more frequent, and when the others went up to collect their food from the buffet, Lomeli stayed where he was.

  He watched the nuns as they moved between the tables serving coffee. To his shame, he realised he had never bothered to take any notice of them until now. Their
average age, he guessed, was around fifty. They were of all races, but without exception short of stature, as if Sister Agnes had been determined not to recruit anyone taller than herself. Most wore spectacles. Everything about them – their blue habits and headdresses, their modest demeanour, their downcast eyes, their silence – might have been designed to efface them from notice, let alone prevent them becoming objects of desire. He presumed they were under orders not to speak: when one nun poured coffee for Adeyemi, he did not even turn to look at her. Yet the late Holy Father used to make a point of eating with a group of these sisters at least once a week – another manifestation of his humility that made the Curia mutter with disapproval.

  Just before nine o’clock, Lomeli pushed away his untouched plate, rose and announced to the table that it was time to return to the Sistine Chapel. His move began a general exodus towards the lobby. O’Malley was already in position by the reception desk, clipboard in hand.

  ‘Good morning, Your Eminence.’

  ‘Good morning, Ray.’

  ‘Did Your Eminence sleep well?’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you. If it isn’t raining, I think I’ll walk.’

  He waited while one of the Swiss Guards unlocked the door, and then stepped out into the daylight. The air was cool and damp. After the heat of the Casa Santa Marta, the slight breeze on his face was a tonic. A line of minibuses with their engines running coiled around the edge of the piazza, each watched by an individual plain-clothes security man. Lomeli’s departure on foot provoked a flurry of whispering into sleeves, and as he set off in the direction of the Vatican Gardens, he was aware of being followed by a bodyguard of his own.

  Normally this part of the Vatican would have been busy with officials from the Curia arriving for work or moving between appointments; cars with their ‘SCV’ licence plates would be thrumming over the cobbles. But the area had been cleared for the duration of the Conclave. Even the Palazzo San Carlo, where the foolish Cardinal Tutino had created his vast apartment, looked abandoned. It was as if some terrible calamity had befallen the Church, wiping out all the religious and leaving no one alive except security men, swarming over the deserted city like black dung beetles. In the gardens they stood grouped behind the trees and scrutinised Lomeli as he passed. One patrolled the path with an Alsatian on a short leash, checking the flower beds for bombs.