Conclave

by Robert Harris

  Bellini finished his reading and stared into the middle distance. Lomeli could see his powerful mind assimilating the information, testing the strength of the evidence. Eventually he said, ‘How do you know they didn’t use the money for completely legitimate purposes?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen their bank statements.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘The issue at this point isn’t the cardinals. I wouldn’t even accuse them of being corrupt, necessarily – perhaps they do intend to pass this money on to their churches but haven’t got round to it yet. Besides, their ballots have been burnt, so how could we ever prove who they voted for? What is absolutely clear, though, is that Tremblay ignored the official procedures and handed out tens of thousands of euros in a manner that was clearly designed to further his candidacy. And the automatic penalty for simony, I need hardly remind you, is excommunication.’

  ‘He’ll deny it.’

  ‘He can deny it all he likes: if this report becomes widely known, it will create the scandal to end all scandals. For one thing, surely it establishes that Woźniak was telling the truth when he said that the Holy Father, in his last official act, ordered Tremblay to resign.’

  Bellini made no reply. He replaced the pages on the table. With his long fingers he squared them off meticulously, until they were perfectly aligned. ‘May I ask where you obtained all this information?’

  ‘From the Holy Father’s apartment.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  Bellini looked up at him, appalled. ‘You broke the seals?’

  ‘What choice did I have? You witnessed the scene at lunchtime. I had cause to suspect Tremblay had deliberately destroyed Adeyemi’s chances of the papacy by bringing that poor woman from Africa to embarrass him. He denied it, of course, so I needed to see if I could find proof. In all conscience I could not stand back and see such a man elected Pope without at least making some enquiries.’

  ‘And did he? Bring her here to embarrass Adeyemi?’

  Lomeli hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He certainly asked for her transfer to Rome. But he said he did it at the request of the Holy Father. Maybe that part is true – the Holy Father does seem to have mounted some kind of espionage operation against his own colleagues. I found all manner of private emails and telephone transcripts hidden in his room.’

  ‘My God, Jacopo!’ Bellini groaned as if he were in physical pain. He threw back his head and gazed at the ceiling. ‘What a devil’s business this is!’

  ‘It is, I agree. But better we clear it up now, while the Conclave is still in session and we can discuss our affairs in secret, than we only discover the truth after we’ve elected a new Pope.’

  ‘And how are we to “clear it up” this late in our proceedings?’

  ‘For a start, we must make our brothers aware of the Tremblay report.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We must show it to them.’

  Bellini regarded him with renewed horror. ‘Are you serious? A document based on private bank records, stolen from the Holy Father’s apartment? It will smack of desperation! It could backfire on us.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that you should do it, Aldo – absolutely not. You must keep well clear of it. Leave it to me, or perhaps to me and Sabbadin. I’m willing to take the consequences.’

  ‘That’s noble of you, and I’m grateful, of course. But the damage wouldn’t end with you. Word inevitably would leak out. Think of what it would do to the Church. I couldn’t possibly countenance becoming Pope in such circumstances.’

  Lomeli could hardly credit what he was hearing. ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘The circumstances of a dirty trick – a break-in, a stolen document, the smearing of a brother cardinal. I would be the Richard Nixon of Popes! My pontificate would be tainted from the start, even assuming I could win the election, which I strongly doubt. You do appreciate that the person who stands to gain the most from this is Tedesco? The whole basis of his candidacy is that the Holy Father led the Church to disaster by his ill-thought-out attempts at reform. For him and his supporters, the revelation that the Holy Father was reading their bank accounts and commissioning reports accusing the Curia of institutional corruption would simply prove their point.’

  ‘I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.’

  ‘Oh don’t be naïve, Jacopo – you of all people! I have been fighting these battles for longer than you have, and the truth of the matter is that we can only serve God through the Church of His Son, Jesus Christ, and the Curia is the heart and brain of the Church, however imperfect it may be.’

  Lomeli was suddenly conscious of a fearsome headache beginning to form, positioned precisely behind his right eye – it was always brought on by exhaustion and nervous strain. On past form, if he was not careful, he would have to take to his bed for a day or two. Perhaps he should? There was a provision in the Apostolic Constitution for sick cardinals to cast their votes from their rooms in the Casa Santa Marta. Their ballot papers were to be collected by three nominated cardinals known as infirmarii, who were required to transfer their votes in a locked box to the Sistine Chapel. He was sorely tempted by the idea of lying in bed with the covers over his head and leaving it to others to sort out the mess. But immediately he asked God to forgive his weakness.

  Bellini spoke quietly. ‘His pontificate was a war, Jacopo. People have no idea. It started on the first day, when he refused to wear the full regalia of his office and insisted on living here rather than in the Apostolic Palace, and it went on every day thereafter. Do you remember how he marched into that introductory meeting with the prefects of all the congregations in the Sala Bologna and demanded full financial transparency – proper books kept, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for every tiny bit of building work, receipts? Receipts! In the Administration of the Patrimony they didn’t even know what a receipt was! Then he brought in accountants and management consultants to comb through every file, and set them up in their own offices downstairs on the first floor of the Casa Santa Marta. And he wondered why the Curia hated it – and not just the old guard, either!

  ‘So then the leaks started, and every time he looked in a newspaper or at the television, there was some new embarrassment about how much his friends like Tutino were skimming off funds for the poor to have their apartments renovated or fly first class. And all the while in the background there was Tedesco and his gang sniping away at him, practically accusing him of heresy whenever he said anything that sounded too much like common sense about gays or divorced couples or promoting more women. Hence the cruel paradox of his papacy: the more the outside world loved him, the more isolated he became inside the Holy See. By the end, he hardly trusted anybody. I’m not even sure he trusted me.’

  ‘Or me.’

  ‘No, I’d say he trusted you as well as he did anyone, otherwise he would have accepted your resignation when you offered it. But there’s no point in us fooling ourselves, Jacopo. He was frail and he was sick, and it was affecting his judgement.’ Bellini leaned forward and tapped the report. ‘If we use this, we will not be doing his memory a service. My advice is to put it back, or destroy it.’ He pushed it across the table to Lomeli.

  ‘And have Tremblay as Pope?’

  ‘We’ve had worse.’

  Lomeli studied him for a moment, then got to his feet. The pain behind his eye was almost blinding. ‘You grieve me, Aldo. You do. Five times I cast my ballot for you, in the true belief that you were the right man to lead the Church. But now I see that the Conclave, in its wisdom, was correct, and I was wrong. You lack the courage required to be Pope. I’ll leave you alone.’

  *

  Three hours later, with the reverberations of the 6.30 bell still echoing around the building, Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, wearing full choir dress, let himself out of his room and moved quickly along the corridor, past the apartment of the Holy Father, with its unmistakable signs of forced entry, down the staircase and into
the lobby.

  None of the other cardinals had yet emerged. Beyond the plate-glass door, a security guard was checking the identity of the nuns who were arriving to prepare breakfast. It was not yet sufficiently light to distinguish their faces. In the pre-dawn gloom they were a line of moving shadows, such as one might see anywhere in the world at that hour – the poor of the earth beginning their day’s labour.

  Lomeli walked quickly around the reception desk and into the office of Sister Agnes.

  It was many years since the Dean of the College of Cardinals had used a photocopier. Indeed, now that he looked at one, he was not sure he ever had. He studied the array of settings, then began pressing buttons at random. A small screen lit up and displayed a message. He bent to read it: Error.

  He heard a sound behind him. Sister Agnes was standing in the doorway. Her unwavering gaze intimidated him. He wondered how long she had been watching his fumbling efforts. He raised his hands helplessly. ‘I am trying to make some copies of a document.’

  ‘If you give it to me, Your Eminence, I’ll do it for you.’

  He hesitated. The top sheet was headed: Report prepared for the Holy Father into the alleged offence of simony committed by Cardinal Joseph Tremblay. Executive Summary. Strictly confidential. It was dated 19 October, the day of the Holy Father’s death. Finally, he decided he had no choice and handed it to her. She glanced at it without comment. ‘How many copies does Your Eminence require?’

  ‘One hundred and eighteen.’

  Her eyes widened slightly.

  ‘And one other thing, Sister – if I may. I would like to preserve the original document untouched, yet at the same time I wish to obscure certain words in the copies. Is there a way of doing that?’

  ‘Yes, Your Eminence. I believe that should be possible.’ There was a trace of amusement in her voice. She lifted the lid of the machine. After she had made a copy of each page, she gave them to him. ‘You can add your changes to this version, and then this will be the one we copy. The machine is excellent. There will be very little deterioration in quality.’ She found him a pen and pulled out a chair so that he could sit at the desk. Tactfully, she turned away and opened a cupboard to take out a new packet of paper.

  He went through the document line by line, carefully inking out the names of the eight cardinals to whom Tremblay had given cash. Cash! he thought, tightening his mouth. He remembered how the late Holy Father always used to say that cash was the apple in their Garden of Eden, the original temptation that had led to so much sin. Cash sluiced through the Holy See in a constant stream that swelled to a river at Christmas and Easter, when bishops and monsignors and friars could be seen trooping through the Vatican carrying envelopes and attaché cases and tin boxes stuffed with notes and coins from the faithful. A papal audience could raise 100,000 euros in donations, the money pressed discreetly into the hands of the Holy Father’s attendants by his visitors as they took their leave while the Pope pretended not to notice. The money was supposed to be taken straight to the cardinals’ vault in the Vatican Bank. The Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples in particular, obliged to send money to its missions in the Third World, where bribery was rife and banks unreliable, liked to deal in large sums of cash.

  When he reached the end of the report, Lomeli went back to the beginning, to make sure he had removed every name. The redactions made it look even more sinister, like some classified file released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, the thing would reach the press eventually. Sooner or later, everything did. Had not Jesus Christ Himself prophesied, according to Luke’s Gospel, that nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light? It was a fine calculation as to whose reputation would be the more damaged, Tremblay’s or the Church’s. He gave the amended report to Sister Agnes, and watched as she began to make one hundred and eighteen copies of each page. The blue light of the machine moving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, seemed to Lomeli to have the rhythm of a scythe.

  He muttered, ‘God forgive me.’

  Sister Agnes glanced at him. She must have known by now what she was printing: she could hardly have avoided seeing it. ‘If your heart is pure, Your Eminence,’ she said, ‘He will forgive you.’

  ‘Bless you, Sister, for your generosity. I believe my heart is pure. But how can any of us say for sure why we act as we do? In my experience, the basest sins are often committed for the highest motives.’

  It took twenty minutes to print the copies and another twenty to collate the pages and staple them together. They worked alongside one another in silence. At one point a nun came in to use the computer, but Sister Agnes told her sharply to leave. When they were done, Lomeli asked if there were enough envelopes in the Casa Santa Marta to enable each report to be individually sealed and delivered.

  ‘I’ll go and find out, Your Eminence. Please sit down. You look exhausted.’

  While she was gone, he sat at the desk with his head bowed. He could hear the cardinals making their way across the lobby to the chapel for morning Mass. He grasped his pectoral cross. Forgive me, Lord, if today I try to serve You in a different way . . . A few minutes later, Sister Agnes returned carrying two boxes of A4 Manila envelopes.

  They started inserting the reports into the envelopes. She said, ‘What do you want us to do with them, Eminence? Shall we deliver them to each room?’

  ‘I want to be sure every cardinal has a chance to read it before we leave to vote – I fear we don’t have the time. Perhaps we could distribute them in the dining room?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Accordingly, when the envelopes had been filled and sealed, they divided the pile in two and went into the dining room, where the nuns were setting the tables for breakfast. Lomeli worked on one side of the room, placing the envelopes on the chairs, and Sister Agnes on the other. From the chapel, where Tremblay was celebrating the Mass, came the sound of plainsong. Lomeli could feel his heart pounding; the pain behind his eyes throbbed in unison with each beat. Nevertheless, he pressed on until he and Sister Agnes met in the centre of the hall and the last of the reports was gone.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to her. He was touched by the sternness of her kindness and held out his hand, expecting her to grasp it. But to his surprise, she knelt and kissed his ring. Then she rose and smoothed her skirts, and walked away without uttering a word.

  After that, there was nothing for Lomeli to do except take a seat at the nearest table and wait.

  *

  Garbled accounts of what happened next were to emerge within hours of the end of the Conclave, for although there was a strict injunction of secrecy on every cardinal, many could not resist talking to their closest associates when they returned to the outside world, and these confidantes, mostly priests and monsignors, gossiped in their turn, so that very quickly a version of the story appeared.

  Broadly speaking, there were two categories of eyewitness. Those who were among the first to leave the chapel and enter the dining room were struck by the spectacle of Lomeli sitting alone and impassive at one of the central tables, his forearms resting on the tablecloth, his gaze fixed ahead, unseeing. The other thing they recalled was the shocked quiet that fell as the cardinals discovered the envelopes and started reading.

  In contrast, those who arrived a few minutes later – the ones who had chosen to pray in their rooms rather than attend the morning Mass, or who had lingered in the chapel after receiving Communion – they remembered most clearly the hubbub in the dining room and the cluster of cardinals who by that time had gathered around Lomeli demanding explanations.

  Truth, in other words, was a matter of perspective.

  In addition to all these, there was another, smaller group, whose rooms were on the second floor, or who had descended via the two staircases from upper storeys, and who had noticed that the seals on the papal apartment were broken. Accordingly, a new set of rumours started circulating, as a
counterpoint to the first, that there had been some kind of burglary during the night.

  Throughout it all, Lomeli never moved from his seat. To all the cardinals who came up to him – Sá, Brotzkus, Yatsenko and the rest – he repeated the same mantra. Yes, he was responsible for the circulation of the document. Yes, he had broken the seals. No, he had not taken leave of his senses. It had been brought to his notice that an excommunicable offence might have been committed, and then covered up. He had felt it his duty to investigate, even if that had meant entering the Holy Father’s rooms in search of evidence. He had tried to handle the matter responsibly. His brother electors now had the information in front of them. Theirs was the sacred duty. They must decide what weight to attach to it. He had merely obeyed his conscience.

  He was surprised both by his own sense of inner strength and by the way this conviction seemed to radiate out from him, so that even those cardinals who approached him to express their dismay often ended up going away nodding in approbation. Others took a harsher view. Sabbadin bent as he was passing on his way to the buffet table and hissed in his ear, ‘Why have you thrown away a valuable weapon? We could have used this to control Tremblay after his election. All you have succeeded in doing is strengthening Tedesco!’

  And Archbishop Fitzgerald of Boston, Massachusetts, who was one of Tremblay’s most prominent supporters, actually strode over to the table and flung the report towards Lomeli. ‘This is contrary to all natural justice. You have given our brother cardinal no opportunity to lay out his defence. You have acted as judge, jury and executioner. I am appalled at such an unchristian act.’ Several cardinals, listening at the neighbouring tables, murmured agreement. One called out, ‘Well said!’ and another, ‘Amen to that!’

  Lomeli remained impassive.

  At one point Benítez fetched him some bread and fruit and beckoned to one of the nuns to pour him coffee. He took the seat beside him. ‘You must eat, Dean, or you will make yourself ill.’