Conclave

11 The Fourth Ballot

ROUGHLY AN HOUR later, and only twenty minutes before the minibuses were due to leave for the Sistine for the start of the fourth ballot, Lomeli went in search of Adeyemi. He checked in all parts of the lobby first, and then in the chapel. Half a dozen cardinals were on their knees with their backs to him. He hurried up to the altar to get a look at their faces. None was the Nigerian’s. He left, took the elevator to the second floor and strode quickly down the corridor to the room next to his.

He knocked loudly. ‘Joshua? Joshua? It’s Lomeli!’ He knocked again. He was about to give up, but then he heard footsteps and the door was opened.

Adeyemi, still in full choir dress, was drying his face with a towel. He said, ‘I shall be ready in a moment, Dean.’

He left the door open and disappeared into the bathroom; after a brief hesitation, Lomeli stepped over the threshold and closed the door after him. The shuttered room smelled strongly of the cardinal’s aftershave. On the desk was a framed black-and-white picture of Adeyemi as a young seminarian, standing outside a Catholic mission with a proud-looking older woman wearing a hat – his mother, presumably, or perhaps an aunt. The bed was rumpled, as if the cardinal had been lying on it. There was the sound of a lavatory flushing, and Adeyemi emerged, buttoning the lower part of his cassock. He acted as if he was surprised that Lomeli was in the room rather than the corridor. ‘Shouldn’t we be leaving?’

‘In a moment.’

‘That sounds ominous.’ Adeyemi bent to look in the mirror. He planted his zuchetta firmly on his head and adjusted it so that it was straight. ‘If this is about the incident downstairs, I have no desire to talk about it.’ He flicked invisible dust from the shoulders of his mozzetta. He jutted out his chin. He adjusted his pectoral cross. Lomeli maintained his silence, watching him. Finally Adeyemi said quietly, ‘I am the victim of a disgraceful plot to ruin my reputation, Jacopo. Someone brought that woman here and staged this entire melodrama solely to prevent my election as Pope. How did she come to be in the Casa Santa Marta in the first place? She’d never left Nigeria before.’

‘With respect, Joshua, the issue of how she came to be here is secondary to the issue of your relationship with her.’

Adeyemi threw up his arms in exasperation. ‘But I have no relationship with her! I hadn’t set eyes on her for thirty years – not until last night, when she turned up outside my room! I didn’t even recognise her. Surely you can see what’s happening here?’

‘The circumstances are curious, I grant you, but let’s put that aside for now. It’s the condition of your soul that concerns me more.’

‘My soul?’ Adeyemi spun on the ball of his foot. He brought his face up very close to Lomeli’s. His breath was sweet-smelling. ‘My soul is full of love for God and His Church. I sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit this morning – you must have felt it too – and I am ready to take on this burden. Does a single lapse thirty years ago disqualify me? Or does it make me stronger? Allow me to quote your own homily from yesterday: “Let God grant us a Pope who sins, and asks forgiveness, and carries on.” ’

‘And have you asked forgiveness? Have you confessed your sin?’

‘Yes! Yes, I confessed my sin at the time, and my bishop moved me to a different parish, and I never lapsed again. Such relationships were not uncommon in those days. Celibacy has always been culturally alien in Africa – you know that.’

‘And the child?’

‘The child?’ Adeyemi flinched, faltered. ‘The child was brought up in a Christian household, and to this day he has no idea who his father is – if indeed it is me. That is the child.’

He recovered his equilibrium sufficiently to glare at Lomeli, and for one moment longer the edifice remained in place – defiant, wounded, magnificent: he would have made a tremendous figurehead for the Church, Lomeli thought. Then something seemed to give way and he sat down abruptly on the edge of his bed and clasped his hands on the top of his head. He reminded Lomeli of a photograph he had once seen of a prisoner poised on the edge of a pit waiting his turn to be shot.

What an appalling mess it all was! Lomeli could not recall a more exquisitely painful hour in his life than the one he had just spent listening to the confession of Sister Shanumi. By her account, she had not even been a novitiate when the thing began but a mere postulant, a child, whereas Adeyemi had been the community’s priest. If it had not been statutory rape, it had not been far off it. What sin therefore did she have to confess? Where was her guilt? And yet carrying the burden of it had been the ruin of her life. Worst of all for Lomeli had been the moment when she had produced the photograph, folded up to the size of a postage stamp. It showed a boy of six or seven in a sleeveless Aertex shirt, grinning at the camera: a good Catholic school photograph, with a crucifix on the wall behind him. The creases where she had folded and refolded it over the past quarter-century had cracked the glossy surface so deeply it looked as if he were staring out from behind a latticework of bars.

The Church had arranged the adoption. After the birth she had wanted nothing from Adeyemi except some sort of acknowledgement of what had happened, but he had been transferred to a parish in Lagos and her letters had all been returned unopened. Seeing him in the Casa Santa Marta, she had not been able to help herself. That was why she had visited him in his room. He had told her they must forget about the whole thing. And when he had refused in the dining room even to look at her, and when one of the other sisters had whispered that he was about to be elected Pope, she had been unable to control herself any longer. She was guilty of so many sins, she insisted, she barely knew where to begin – lust, anger, pride, deceit.

She had sunk to her knees and made the Act of Contrition: ‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because I have offended You, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life. Amen.’

Lomeli had raised her to her feet and absolved her. ‘It is not you who has sinned, my child, it is the Church.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.’

‘For His mercy endures forever.’

After a while, Adeyemi said in a low voice, ‘We were both very young.’

‘No, Your Eminence, she was young; you were thirty.’

‘You want to destroy my reputation so that you can be Pope!’

‘Don’t be absurd. Even the thought of it is unworthy of you.’

Adeyemi’s shoulders had begun to shake with sobs. Lomeli sat down on the bed next to him. ‘Compose yourself, Joshua,’ he said kindly. ‘The only reason I know any of this is because I heard the poor woman’s confession, and she won’t ever speak of it in public, I’m sure, if only to protect the boy. As for me, I’m bound by the vows of the confessional never to repeat what I’ve heard.’

Adeyemi gave him a sideways look. His eyes were glistening. Even now, he could not quite accept his dream was over. ‘Are you saying I still have a hope?’

‘No, none whatever.’ Lomeli was appalled. He managed to control himself and went on in a more reasonable tone, ‘After such a public scene, I’m afraid there are bound to be rumours. You know what the Curia is like.’

‘Yes, but rumours are not the same as facts.’

‘In this case they are. You know as well as I do that if there is one thing that terrifies our colleagues above all others, it is the thought of yet more sexual scandals.’

‘So that is it? I can never be Pope?’

‘Your Eminence, you cannot be anything.’

Adeyemi seemed unable to raise his gaze from the floor. ‘What shall I do, Jacopo?’

‘You are a good man. You will find some way to atone. God will know if you are truly penitent, and He will decide what is to happen to you.’

‘And the Conclave?’

‘Leave them to me.’

They sat without speaking. Lomeli could not bear to imagine his agony. God forgive me for what I have had to do. Eventually Adeyemi said, ‘Would you pray with me for a moment?’

‘Of course.’

And so the two men got down on their knees under the electric light in the sealed room that was sweet with the scent of aftershave – got down easily in Adeyemi’s case, stiffly in Lomeli’s – and prayed together side by side.

Lomeli would have liked to have walked to the Sistine again – to have inhaled some cool fresh air and turned his face to the mild November sun. But it was too late for that. By the time he reached the lobby, the cardinals were already boarding the minibuses, and Nakitanda was waiting for him by the reception desk.

‘Well?’

‘He will have to resign all his offices.’

Nakitanda’s head dropped in dismay. ‘Oh no!’

‘Not immediately – I hope we may avoid a humiliation – but certainly in a year or so. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you tell the others. I have spoken to both parties and I am bound by vows. I cannot say any more.’

On the minibus he sat at the very back with his eyes closed, his biretta on the seat next to him to discourage company. Every part of this business sickened him, but one aspect in particular had started to niggle away in his mind. It was the first thing Adeyemi had brought up: the timing. According to Sister Shanumi, her work in Nigeria for the past twenty years had been at the Iwaro Oko community in Ondo province, helping women suffering from HIV/AIDs.

‘Were you happy there?’

‘Very much so, Your Eminence.’

‘Your work must have been somewhat different from what you have to do here, I would imagine?’

‘Oh yes. There I was a nurse. Here I am a maid.’

‘So what made you want to come to Rome?’

‘I never wanted to come to Rome!’

Quite how she had ended up in the Casa Santa Marta was still a mystery to her. One day in September she had been called in to see the sister in charge of their community and informed that an email had been received from the office of the Superioress General in Paris, requesting her immediate transfer to the order’s mission in Rome. There had been great excitement among the other sisters at such an honour. Some even believed that the Holy Father himself must be responsible for the invitation.

‘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.’