Conclave

by Robert Harris

  Tremblay genuflected to the altar, crossed himself, wished Lomeli a cold goodnight, and walked out of the chapel, leaving the Dean of the College of Cardinals to listen to the dwindling echo of his footsteps on the marble floor.

  *

  For the next few hours, Lomeli lay on his bed, fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling. The only source of light shone from the bathroom. Through the partition wall came the sound of Adeyemi snoring, but this time Lomeli was so preoccupied with his thoughts, he barely heard him. In his hands he held the pass key Sister Agnes had lent him on the morning he’d returned to the Casa Santa Marta after the Mass in St Peter’s, when he’d discovered he had locked himself out of his room. He turned it over and over between his fingers, praying and talking to himself at the same time, so that the two merged into a single monologue.

  O Lord, You have charged me with the care of this most sacred Conclave . . . Is it my duty merely to arrange my colleagues’ deliberations, or do I have a responsibility to intervene and affect the outcome? I am Your servant and I dedicate myself to Your will . . . The Holy Spirit will surely lead us to a worthy pontiff regardless of any actions I may take . . . Guide me, Lord, I beg You, to fulfil Your wishes . . . Servant, you must guide yourself . . .

  Twice he rose from the bed and went to the door, and twice he returned and lay down again. Of course, he knew there would be no flash of insight, no sudden infusion of certainty. He did not expect one. God did not work that way. He had sent him all the signs he needed. It was for him to act upon them. And perhaps he had always suspected what he would have to do in the end, which was why he had never returned the pass key but had kept it in the drawer of the nightstand.

  He got up for a third time and opened the door.

  According to the Apostolic Constitution, no one was to be left in the Casa Santa Marta after midnight apart from the cardinals. The nuns were taken back to their quarters. The security men were either in their parked cars or patrolling the perimeter. In the Palazzo San Carlo, barely fifty metres away, two doctors were on standby. Should an emergency arise, medical or otherwise, the cardinals were supposed to press the fire alarms.

  Satisfied that the corridor was deserted, Lomeli walked quickly towards the landing. Outside the Holy Father’s apartment, the votive candles flickered in their red glasses. He contemplated the door. For a final time he hesitated. Whatever I do, I do for You. You see my heart. You know my intentions are pure. I commend myself to Your protection. He inserted the key into the lock and turned it. The door opened inwards a fraction. The ribbons, affixed by Tremblay with such speed after the Holy Father’s death, tautened, preventing it from opening fully. Lomeli studied the seals. The red wax discs bore the coat of arms of the Apostolic Camera: crossed keys beneath an unfurled parasol. Their function was purely symbolic. They would not survive an instant’s pressure. He pushed the door harder. The wax cracked and broke, the ribbons came free, and the way into the papal apartment was open. He crossed himself, stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him.

  The place smelled stale and airless. He felt around for the light switch. The familiar sitting room looked exactly as it had on the night the Holy Father died. The lemon-coloured curtains, tightly drawn. The scallop-backed blue sofa and two armchairs. The coffee table. The prie-dieu. The desk, with the Pope’s battered black leather briefcase propped beside it.

  He sat at the desk and picked up the briefcase, rested it on his knees and opened it. Inside were an electric razor, a tin of peppermints, a breviary and a paperback copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. It was famously – according to the report issued by the Vatican press office – the last book the Holy Father had been reading before his heart attack. The page he had been studying was marked with a yellowing bus ticket, issued in his home city more than twenty years before:

  Of the dangers of intimacy

  Do not tell others what is on your mind but seek advice from someone who is wise and fears God. Keep company with young people or strangers sparingly. Do not admire the wealthy, and avoid the company of celebrities. It is better to keep company with the poor and simple, the devout and the virtuous . . .

  He closed the book, put everything back in the briefcase and replaced it where he had found it. He tried the central desk drawer. It was unlocked. He pulled it all the way out, placed it on the desk and rummaged through the contents: a spectacles case (empty) and a plastic bottle of lens cleaner, pencils, a box of aspirin, a pocket calculator, rubber bands, a penknife, an old leather wallet containing a ten-euro note, a copy of the latest Annuario Pontificio, the thick red-bound directory listing every major office-holder in the Church . . . He slid open the other three drawers. Apart from signed postcards of the Holy Father that he used to give out to visitors, there was no paper of any kind.

  He sat back and considered this. Although the Pope had refused to live in the traditional papal apartment, he had made use of his predecessors’ office in the Apostolic Palace. He used to walk to it every morning, carrying his briefcase, and invariably he brought work home with him to study in the evening. The burdens of the papacy were never-ending. Lomeli clearly remembered being with him when he was signing letters and documents in this very seat. Either he had given up work entirely in his final days or the desk must have been cleaned out – no doubt by the ever-efficient hand of his private secretary, Monsignor Morales.

  He stood and walked around the room, summoning the will to open the bedroom door.

  The sheets had been stripped from the massive antique bed, the pillows had no covers. But the Pope’s spectacles and alarm clock were still on the nightstand, and when he opened the closet, two white cassocks hung ghost-like from the rail. The sight of these simple garments – the Holy Father had refused to wear the more elaborate papal vestments – seemed to break something inside Lomeli that had been pent up since the funeral. He put his hand to his eyes and bowed his head. His body shook, although no tears came. This dry convulsion lasted barely half a minute, and when it passed, he felt curiously strengthened. He waited until he had recovered his breath, and then turned and contemplated the bed.

  It was formidably ugly, centuries old, with big square posts at all four corners and carved panels at the head and foot. Alone of all the fine furniture to which he was entitled in the papal apartment, the Holy Father had chosen to have this ungainly object shipped to the Casa Santa Marta. Popes had slept in it for generations. To get it through the outer door must have required taking it apart and then reassembling it.

  Carefully, as he had on the night the Pope died, Lomeli lowered himself to his knees, clasped his hands together, closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the edge of the mattress to pray. Suddenly the terrible solitariness of the old man’s life seemed almost too unbearable to contemplate. He reached out his arms in either direction along the wooden frame of the bed, and gripped it.

  How long he remained in this position he could not afterwards say with certainty. It might have been two minutes; it might have been twenty. What he was quite sure of was that at some point during this time, the Holy Father entered his mind and spoke to him. Of course, it could have been a trick of the imagination: the rationalists had an explanation for everything, even for inspiration. All he knew was that before he knelt he was in despair, and afterwards, when he scrambled to his feet and stared at the bed, the dead man had told him what to do.

  *

  His first thought was that there must be a concealed drawer. He got back down on his knees and went round feeling under the frame, but his hands encountered only empty space. He tried lifting the mattress, even though he knew it was a waste of time: the same Holy Father who beat Bellini at chess most evenings would never have done anything so obvious. Finally, when all other options were exhausted, he contemplated the bedposts.

  First he tried the one to the right of the headboard. Its top was a dome of thick dark polished oak. At a casual glance it appeared to be all of a piece with its heavy support. But when he
ran his fingers around the beading, one of the small carved discs felt slightly loose. He switched on the bedside lamp, climbed up on to the mattress, and examined it. Cautiously he pressed it. Nothing seemed to happen. But when he grasped the bedpost so that he could swing his feet back down to the floor, the top came away in his hand.

  Beneath it was an empty cavity with a flat, unvarnished wooden base, in the centre of which, so small as to be barely noticeable, was a tiny wooden knob. He grasped it between thumb and forefinger, pulled, and slowly withdrew a plain wooden case. There was a wonderful exactness to how it fitted. Fully extracted, it was about the size of a shoebox. He shook it. Something rustled within.

  He sat down on the mattress and slid off the cover. Inside, rolled up, were a few dozen documents. He flattened them out. Columns of figures. Bank statements. Money transfers. Apartment addresses. Many of the pages had pencilled notations in the Holy Father’s tiny, angular handwriting. Suddenly his own name jumped out at him: Lomeli. Apartment no.2. Palace of the Holy Office. 445 square metres!! It appeared to be in a list of official apartments occupied by serving and retired members of the Curia, prepared for the Pope by APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. The names of all the cardinal-electors who had apartments were underlined: Bellini (410 square metres), Adeyemi (480 square metres), Tremblay (510 square metres) . . . At the foot of the document, the Pope had added his own name: The Holy Father. Casa Santa Marta. 50 square metres!!

  There was an addendum attached:

  For the eyes of the Pontiff only

  Most Holy Father,

  As far as we can ascertain, the overall surface area of the APSA patrimony totals 347,532 square metres, with a potential value in excess of €2,700,000,000, but a stated book value of €389,600,000. The shortfall in revenue would appear to indicate a paid occupancy rate of only 56%. It appears therefore, as Your Holiness suspected, that much of the income is not being properly stated.

  I have the honour to be,

  Your Holiness’s most devoted and obedient child,

  D. Labriola (Special Commissioner)

  Lomeli turned to the other pages, and here was his name again: to his astonishment, this time when he looked more closely he saw it was a summary of his personal bank records with the Istituto per le Opere di Religione – the Vatican Bank. A list of monthly totals going back more than a decade. The most recent entry, for 30 September, showed he had a closing balance of €38,734.76. He had not even known the figure himself. It was all the money he had in the world.

  He ran his eye over the hundreds of names listed. He felt grubby merely to be reading them, yet he couldn’t stop himself. Bellini had €42,112 on deposit, Adeyemi had €121,865 and Tremblay €519,732 (a figure that earned another set of papal exclamation marks). Some cardinals had tiny balances – Tedesco’s was a mere €2,821, and Benítez seemingly didn’t have an account at all – but others were rich men. The Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, Calogero Scozzazi, who had worked for a time at the IOR in the days of Marcinkus, and who had actually been investigated for money-laundering, was worth €2,643,923. A number of cardinals from Africa and Asia had banked large amounts over the past twelve months. Across one page the Holy Father had scrawled, in shaky pencil, a quotation from St Mark’s Gospel: Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.

  After he had finished reading, Lomeli rolled up the papers tightly, put them back in the box and closed it. He could taste his disgust, like something rotten on his tongue. The Holy Father had secretly used his authority to obtain his colleagues’ private financial records from the IOR! Did he think they were all corrupt? Some of it came as no surprise to him: the scandal of the Curial apartments, for example, had been leaked to the press years ago. And the personal wealth of his brother cardinals he had long suspected – the other-worldly Luciani, who survived as Pope only for a month, was said to have been elected in 1978 because he was the only Italian cardinal who was clean. No, what shook him most, at first reading, was what the collection revealed about the state of mind of the Holy Father.

  He pressed the box back into its compartment and replaced the top of the bedpost. The fearful words of the disciples to Jesus came into his mind: This is a lonely place, and the hour is now late. For a few seconds he clung on to the solid wooden upright. He had asked God for guidance, and God had guided him here, and yet he was afraid of what else he might discover.

  Nevertheless, once he had calmed himself, he went around the bed to the opposite side of the headboard, and checked the beading beneath the carved dome. Here too he discovered a hidden lever. The top of the bedpost came away in his hand and he drew out a second container. Then he went to the foot of the bed and pulled out a third, and then a fourth.

  14

  Simony

  IT MUST HAVE been nearly three in the morning when Lomeli left the papal suite. He opened the door sufficiently to enable him to peer beyond the crimson glow of the candles. He checked the landing. He listened. More than a hundred men, mostly in their seventies, were either sleeping or silently praying. The building was completely still.

  He pulled the door shut behind him. Attempting to reseal it was pointless. The wax was broken, the ribbons trailed. The cardinals would discover it when they woke; it could not be helped. He crossed the landing to the staircase and started to climb. He remembered Bellini telling him that his room was directly above the Holy Father’s, and that the old man’s spirit seemed to rise up through the parquet floor: Lomeli did not doubt it.

  He found number 301 and knocked softly. He had expected to have difficulty making himself heard without waking half the corridor, but to his surprise, almost immediately he heard movement, the door was opened, and there was Bellini, also dressed in his cassock. He regarded Lomeli with the sympathetic recognition of a fellow sufferer. ‘Hello, Jacopo. Can’t sleep, either? Come on in.’

  Lomeli followed him into his suite. It was identical to the one downstairs. The lights in the sitting room were off, but the door to the bedroom was ajar and it was from there that the illumination came. He saw that Bellini had been in the middle of his devotions. His rosary was draped over the prie-dieu; the Divine Office was open on the stand.

  Bellini said, ‘Would you like to pray with me a moment?’

  ‘Very much.’

  The two men got down on their knees. Bellini bowed his head. ‘On this day we remember St Leo the Great. Lord God, You built Your Church on the firm foundation of the Apostle Peter, and You promised that the gates of hell would never overcome it. Supported by the prayers of Pope St Leo, we ask that You will keep the Church faithful to Your truth, and maintain it in enduring peace through our Lord. Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  After a minute or two, Bellini said, ‘Can I get you anything? A glass of water?’

  ‘That would be good, thank you.’

  Lomeli took a seat on the sofa. He felt at once exhausted and agitated – no state in which to make a momentous decision. He heard the sound of a tap running. Bellini called out from the bathroom, ‘I can’t offer you anything to go with it, I’m afraid.’ He came back into the sitting room carrying two tumblers of water and offered one to Lomeli. ‘So what is keeping you awake at this hour?’

  ‘Aldo, you must continue with your candidacy.’

  Bellini groaned and sat down heavily in the armchair. ‘Please, no, not that again! I thought the matter was settled. I don’t want it and I can’t win it.’

  ‘Which of those considerations weighs the more heavily with you – the not wanting it or the not being able to win it?’

  ‘If two-thirds of my colleagues had deemed me worthy of the task, I would have set aside my doubts reluctantly and accepted the will of the Conclave. But they didn’t, so the question doesn’t arise.’ He watched as Lomeli withdrew three sheets of paper from inside his cassock and laid them on the coffee table. ‘What are those?’

  ‘The Keys
of St Peter, if you are willing to pick them up.’

  There was a long pause, and then Bellini said quietly, ‘I think I should ask you to leave.’

  ‘But you won’t, though, Aldo.’ Lomeli took a long drink of water. He hadn’t realised how thirsty he was. Bellini folded his arms and said nothing. Lomeli observed him over the rim of his glass as he drained it. He set it down. ‘Read them.’ He pushed the pages across the table towards Bellini. ‘It’s a report into the activities of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples – more specifically, it’s a report into the activities of its prefect, Cardinal Tremblay.’

  Bellini frowned at the pages and glanced away. Finally, reluctantly, he unfolded his arms and picked them up.

  Lomeli said, ‘It’s an overwhelming prima facie case that he’s guilty of simony – an offence, might I remind you, that’s stipulated in Holy Scripture: “Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the Apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!’”’

  Bellini was still reading. ‘I am aware of what simony is, thank you.’

  ‘But has there ever been a clearer case of an attempt to purchase office or sacrament? Tremblay only obtained all those votes on the first ballot because he bought them – mostly from cardinals in Africa and South America. The names are all there – Cárdenas, Diène, Figarella, Garang, Papouloute, Baptiste, Sinclair, Alatas. He even paid them in cash, to make it harder to trace. And all of it done in the last twelve months, when he must have guessed the Holy Father’s pontificate was coming to an end.’