Conclave

by Robert Harris

  ‘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:

  Tedesco 36

  Adeyemi 25

  Tremblay 23

  Bellini 18

  Lomeli 11

  Benítez 5

  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.’

  12

  The 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:

  Tremblay 40

  Tedesco 38

  Bellini 15

  Lomeli 12

  Adeyemi 9

  Benítez 4

  As his colleagues turned to look at him, Tremblay bowed his head and placed his hands together in prayer. For once this ostentatious show of piety did not irritate Lomeli. Instead, he briefly closed his eyes and gave thanks. Thank you, O Lord, for this indication of Your will, and if Cardinal Tremblay is to be our choice, I pray that You may grant him the wisdom and strength to fulfil his mission. Amen.

  It was with some relief that he stood and faced the Conclave. ‘My brothers, that concludes the fifth ballot. No candidate having achieved the necessary majority, we shall resume voting tomorrow morning. The masters of ceremonies will collect your papers. Please do not take any written notes out of the Sistine, and be careful not to discuss our deliberations until you are back inside the Casa Santa Marta. Would the Junior Cardinal-Deacon please ask for the doors to be unlocked?’

  *

  At 6.22 p.m., black smoke once again began to pour from the Sistine chimney, picked out by the searchlight mounted on the side of St Peter’s Basilica. The pundits hired by the television channels professed themselves surprised by the Conclave’s failure to agree. Most had predicted that the new Pope would have been elected by now, and the US networks were on standby to interrupt their lunchtime schedules to show the scenes in St Peter’s Square as the victor appeared on the balcony. For the first time the experts started to express doubts about the strength of Bellini’s support. If he was going to win, he ought to have done so by now. A new collective wisdom began to rise out of the debris of the old: that the Conclave was on the verge of making history. In the United Kingdom – that godless isle of apostasy, where the whole affair was being treated as a horse race – the Ladbrokes betting agency made Cardinal Adeyemi the new favourite. Tomorrow, it was commonly said, might at last see the election of the first black Pope.

  *

  As usual, Lomeli was the last cardinal to leave the chapel. He stayed behind to watch Monsignor O’Malley burn the ballots, and then together they made their way across the Sala Regia. A security man trailed them down the staircase towards the courtyard. Lomeli assumed that O’Malley, as the Secretary of the College, must know the results of the afternoon ballots, if only because it was his task to collect the cardinals’ notes in order to destroy them – and O’Malley was not the kind of man to avert his eyes from a secret. He must be aware therefore of the collapse of Adeyemi’s candidacy and of the unexpected ascendancy of Tremblay’s. But he was too discreet to raise the subject directly. Instead he said quietly, ‘Is there anything you would like me to do before tomorrow morning, Your Eminence?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I was wondering if perhaps you wanted me to go back to Monsignor Morales and see if I could discover any more about this withdrawn report into Cardinal Tremblay.’

  Lomeli glanced over his shoulder at the security man. ‘I don’t know what would be the point of it, Ray. If he wouldn’t say anything before the Conclave started, he’s hardly likely to do so now, particularly if he suspects Cardinal Tremblay might be about to be elected Pope. And that, of course, is exactly what he would suspect if you raised the matter for a second time.’

  They emerged into the evening. The last of the minibuses had gone. Somewhere nearby a helicopter was hovering again. Lomeli beckoned at the security guard and gestured to the deserted courtyard. ‘I seem to have been left behind. Would you mind?’

  ‘Of course, Your Eminence.’ The man whispered into his sleeve.

  Lomeli turned back to O’Malley. He felt weary and alone and was seized by an unaccustomed desire to unburden himself. ‘Sometimes one can know too much, my dear Monsignor O’Malley. I mean, who among us doesn’t have some secret of which he is ashamed? This ghastly business of shutting our eyes to sexual abuse, for example – I was in the foreign service, so was spared direct involvement myself, thank God, but I doubt I would have acted any more firmly. How many of our colleagues failed to take the complaints of the victims seriously, but simply moved the priests responsible to a different parish? It wasn’t that those who turned a blind eye were evil; it was simply that they didn’t understand the scale of the wickedness they were dealing with, and preferred a quiet life. Now we know differently.’

  He was silent for a moment, thinking of Sister Shanumi and her worn little photograph of her child. ‘Or how many have had friendships that became too intimate, and led on to sin and heartbreak? Or poor silly Tutino and his wretched apartment – without a family, one can so easily become obsessed with matters of status and protocol to give one a sense of fulfilment. So tell me: am I supposed to go around like some witchfinder general, searching for my colleagues’ lapses of more than thirty years ago?’

  O’Malley said, ‘I agree, Your Eminence. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” However, I thought in the case of Cardinal Tremblay you were worried about something more recent – a meeting between the Holy Father and the cardinal that took place last month?’

  ‘I was. But I’m beginning to discover that the Holy Father – may he be joined for evermore to the Fellowship of Holy Pontiffs . . .’

  ‘Amen,’ said O’Malley, and the two prelates crossed themselves.

  ‘I am beginning to discover,’ continued Lomeli in a quieter voice, ‘that the Holy Father may not have been entirely himself in the last few weeks of his life. Indeed, from what Cardinal Bellini has said to me, I gather he had almost become – I speak to you in absolute confidence – slightly paranoid, or at any rate very secretive.’

  ‘As witnessed by his decision to create a cardinal in pectore?’

  ‘Indeed. Why in heaven’s name did he do that? Let me say at once that I hold Cardinal Benítez in high esteem, as clearly do several of our brothers – he is a true man of God – but was it really necessary for him to be elevated in secret, and in such haste?’

  ‘Especially as he had only just tried to resign as archbishop on the grounds of poor health.’

  ‘And yet he seems perfectly fit in mind and body to me, and last night when I asked after his health, he seemed surprised by the question.’ Lomeli realised he was whispering. He laughed. ‘Listen to me – I sound like a typical old maid of the Curia, gossiping in darkened corners about appointments!’

  A minibus drove into the courtyard and pulled up opposite Lomeli. The driver opened the doors. There were no other passengers inside. A blast of hot air-condit
ioned air fanned their faces.

  Lomeli turned to O’Malley. ‘Do you want a lift to the Casa Santa Marta?’

  ‘No, thank you, Your Eminence. I need to go back to the Sistine and put out fresh ballot papers, and make sure everything is ready for tomorrow.’

  ‘Well then, goodnight, Ray.’

  ‘Goodnight, Your Eminence.’ O’Malley offered his hand to help Lomeli up on to the coach, and for once Lomeli felt so tired he took it. The Irishman added, ‘Of course, I could undertake a little further investigation, if you would like me to.’

  Lomeli paused on the top step. ‘Into what?’

  ‘Cardinal Benítez.’

  Lomeli thought it over. ‘Thank you, but no. I don’t think so. I’ve heard enough secrets for one day. Let God’s will be done – and preferably quickly.’

  *

  When he reached the Casa Santa Marta, Lomeli went straight to the elevator. It was just before seven o’clock. He held the door open long enough to allow the archbishops of Stuttgart and Prague, Löwenstein and Jandaček, to join him. The Czech was leaning on his stick, grey-faced with fatigue. As the door closed and the car began to rise, Löwenstein said, ‘Well, Dean, do you think we will finish this by tomorrow night?’

  ‘Perhaps, Your Eminence. It’s not in my hands.’

  Löwenstein raised his eyebrows and glanced briefly at Jandaček. ‘If it drags on much longer, I wonder what the actuarial odds are that one of us will die before we find a new Pope.’

  ‘You might mention that to a few of our colleagues.’ Lomeli smiled and gave him a slight bow. ‘It may concentrate minds. Excuse me – this is my floor.’