Conclave

2 Casa Santa Marta

THE STORY OF the Conclave began a little under three weeks later.

The Holy Father had died on the day after the feast of St Luke the Evangelist: that is to say on the nineteenth day of October. The remainder of October and the first part of November had been taken up by his funeral and by the almost daily congregations of the College of Cardinals, who had poured into Rome from all across the world to elect his successor. These were private meetings, during which the future of the Church had been discussed. To Lomeli’s relief, although the usual split between the progressives and the traditionalists had surfaced occasionally, they had passed off without controversy.

Now, on the feast day of St Herculanus the Martyr – Sunday 7 November – he stood on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, flanked by the Secretary of the College of Cardinals, Monsignor Raymond O’Malley, and the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, Archbishop Wilhelm Mandorff. The cardinal-electors would be locked into the Vatican that very night. The balloting would begin the following day.

It was shortly after lunchtime and the three prelates were standing just inside the marble and wrought-iron screen that separated the main part of the Sistine Chapel from the vestibule. Together they surveyed the scene. The temporary wooden floor was almost finished. A beige carpet was being nailed down. Television lights were going up, chairs carried in, desks screwed together. Nowhere could one look and not see movement. The teeming activity of Michelangelo’s ceiling – all that semi-naked pink-grey flesh stretching and gesturing and bending and carrying – now seemed to Lomeli to have found its clumsy earthly counterpart. At the far end of the Sistine, in the gigantic fresco of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, humanity floated in an azure sky around the Throne of Heaven to an echoing accompaniment of hammering, electric drills and buzz-saws.

‘Well, Eminence,’ said the Secretary of the College, O’Malley, in his Irish accent. ‘I’d say this is a pretty fair vision of hell.’

‘Don’t be blasphemous, Ray,’ replied Lomeli. ‘Hell arrives tomorrow, when we bring in the cardinals.’

Archbishop Mandorff laughed slightly too loudly. ‘Excellent, Eminence! That is good!’

Lomeli turned to O’Malley. ‘He thinks I’m joking.’

O’Malley, who carried a clipboard, was in his late forties: tall, already running to fat, with the bluff red face of a man who had spent his life outdoors – riding to hounds, perhaps – even though he had never done any such thing; it was his Kildare ancestry and a taste for whiskey that had given him his complexion. The Rhinelander Mandorff was older, at sixty, also tall, with a head as smooth and domed and hairless as an egg; he had made his reputation at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt with a treatise on the origins and theological foundations of clerical celibacy.

On either side of the chapel, facing across the long aisle, two dozen plain bare wooden tables had been pushed together to form four rows. Only the table nearest the screen had so far been dressed with cloth, ready for Lomeli’s inspection. He stepped into the chapel and ran his hand over the double layers of fabric: a soft crimson felt that reached all the way to the floor, and a thicker, smoother material – beige, to match the carpet – that covered the desktop and its edge, and provided a surface firm enough to write on. It had been set with a Bible, a prayer book, a name card, pens and pencils, a small ballot paper and a long sheet listing the names of all 117 cardinals eligible to vote.

Lomeli picked up the name card: XALXO, SAVERIO. Who was he? He felt a twinge of panic. In the days since the Pope’s funeral, he had tried to meet every cardinal and memorise a few personal details. But there were so many new faces – the late Pope had awarded more than sixty red hats, fifteen in the last year alone – that the task had proved beyond him.

‘How on earth does one pronounce this? Salso, is it?’

‘Khal-koh, Eminence,’ said Mandorff. ‘He’s Indian.’

‘Khal-koh. I’m obliged to you, Willi. Thank you.’

Lomeli sat and tested the chair. He was glad to see there was a cushion. And plenty of room to stretch one’s legs. He tilted back. Yes, it was comfortable enough. Given the amount of time they were likely to spend locked up in here, it needed to be. He had read the Italian press over breakfast. It was the last time he would see a newspaper until the election was over. The Vatican-watchers were unanimous in predicting a long and divisive Conclave. He prayed it would not be so, and that the Holy Spirit would enter the Sistine early and guide them to a name. But if it failed to materialise – and certainly there had been no sign of it during any of the fourteen congregations – then they could be stuck here for days.

He glanced along the length of the Sistine. It was strange how being seated just a metre above the mosaic floor altered the perspective of the place. In the cavity beneath their feet, the security experts had installed jamming devices to prevent electronic eavesdropping. However, a rival firm of consultants had insisted that such precautions were insufficient. They had claimed that laser beams aimed at the windows set high in the upper gallery could detect vibrations in the glass caused by any words spoken, and that these could be transcribed back into speech. They had recommended that every window should be boarded up. Lomeli had vetoed the proposal. The lack of daylight and the claustrophobia would have been intolerable.

He politely waved away Mandorff’s offer of help, pushed himself up from the chair and ventured further into the chapel. The freshly laid carpet smelled sweet, like barley in a threshing room. The workmen stood aside to let him pass; the Secretary of the College and the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations followed him. He could still hardly believe it was happening, that he was in charge. It was like a dream.

‘You know,’ he said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of an electric drill, ‘when I was a boy in ’58 – when I was still at the seminary in Genoa, in fact – and then again in ’63, before I was even ordained, I used to love looking at the pictures of those Conclaves. They had artists’ impressions in all the newspapers. I remember how the cardinals used to sit in canopied thrones around the walls during the voting. And when the election was over, one by one they’d pull a lever to collapse their canopies, apart from the cardinal who’d been chosen. Can you imagine that? Old Cardinal Roncalli, who never dreamed of even becoming a cardinal, let alone Pope? And Montini, who was so hated by the old guard there was actually a shouting match in the Sistine Chapel during the voting? Imagine them sitting here in their thrones, and the men who had only a few minutes before been their equals queuing up to bow before them!’

He was aware of O’Malley and Mandorff listening politely. He reproached himself. He was talking like an old man. Nevertheless, the memories moved him. The thrones had been abandoned in 1965 after the Second Vatican Council, like so much else of the Church’s old traditions. These days the College of Cardinals was felt to be too large and too multinational for such Renaissance flummery. Still, there was a part of Lomeli that rather hankered after Renaissance flummery, and privately he thought the late Pope had occasionally gone too far in his endless harping on about simplicity and humility. An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.

He stepped over the electric cables and stood beneath The Last Judgement with his hands on his hips. He contemplated the mess. Shavings, sawdust, crates, cartons, strips of underlay. Particles of timber and fabric swirling in the shafts of light. Hammering. Sawing. Drilling. He felt suddenly appalled.

Chaos. Unholy chaos. Like a building site. And in the Sistine Chapel!

This time he had to shout over the racket. ‘I assume we are going to finish in time?’

‘They’ll work through the night if they have to,’ O’Malley said. ‘It will be fine, Eminence, it always is.’ He shrugged. ‘Italy, you know.’

‘Ah yes, Italy! Indeed.’ Lomeli stepped down from the altar. To the left was a door, and beyond it the small sacristy known as the Room of Tears. This was where the new Pope would go immediately after his election to be robed. It was a curious little chamber, with a low vaulted ceiling and plain whitewashed walls, almost like a dungeon, crammed with furniture – a table, three chairs, a couch, and the throne that would be carried out for the new pontiff to sit on and receive the obeisance of the cardinal-electors. In the centre was a metal clothes rail on which hung three white papal cassocks wrapped in cellophane – small, medium and large – along with three rochets and three mozzettas. A dozen boxes contained various sizes of papal shoes. Lomeli took out a pair. They were stuffed with tissue paper. He turned them over in his hands. They were slip-ons, made of plain red Morocco leather. He raised them to his nose and sniffed. ‘One prepares for every eventuality, but one never knows. For example, Pope John the Twenty-third was too large to fit into the biggest cassock, so they had to button up the front and split the seam at the back – they say he stepped into it arms-first, like a surgeon into his gown, and then the papal tailor sewed him into it.’ He replaced the shoes in the box and crossed himself. ‘May God bless whoever is called to wear them.’

The three men left the sacristy and strolled back the way they had come, along the carpeted aisle, through the marble screen and down the wooden ramp into the vestibule. Incongruous in one corner, positioned side by side, stood two squat grey metal stoves. Both were about waist-high, one round and one square, each with a copper chimney. The two chimneys had been soldered together to form a single flue. Lomeli eyed it dubiously. It looked very rickety. It rose almost twenty metres, supported by a scaffolding tower, and disappeared through a hole cut in the window. In the round stove they were supposed to burn the voting papers after each ballot, to ensure its secrecy; in the square stove, they released smoke canisters – black to indicate an inconclusive ballot, white when they had a new Pope. The entire apparatus was archaic, absurd, and oddly wonderful.

‘The system has been tested?’ asked Lomeli.

O’Malley spoke patiently. ‘Yes, Eminence. Several times.’

‘Of course you would have done that.’ He patted the Irishman’s arm. ‘I’m sorry to fuss.’

They went out across the marbled expanse of the Sala Regia, down the staircase and out into the cobbled car park of the Cortile del Maresciallo. Large wheeled refuse bins overflowed with rubbish. Lomeli said, ‘They’ll be gone by tomorrow, I trust?’

‘Yes, Eminence.’

The trio passed under an archway and into the next courtyard, and the next, and the next – a labyrinth of secret cloisters, with the Sistine always on their left. Lomeli never failed to be disappointed by the dull dun brickwork of the chapel’s exterior. Why had every ounce of human genius been poured into that exquisite interior – almost too much genius, in his opinion: it gave one a kind of aesthetic indigestion – and yet seemingly no thought at all had been given to the outside? It looked like a warehouse, or a factory. Or perhaps that was the point. The treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in God’s mystery-

His thoughts were interrupted by O’Malley, who was walking at his side. ‘By the way, Eminence, Archbishop Woźniak wants to have a word.’

‘Well I don’t think that’s possible, do you? The cardinals will begin arriving in an hour.’

‘I told him that, but he seemed rather agitated.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me.’

‘But really, this is too ridiculous!’ He appealed to Mandorff for support. ‘The Casa Santa Marta will be sealed off at six. He should have come to me before now. I can’t possibly spare the time.’

‘It’s thoughtless, to say the least.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ said O’Malley.

They walked on, past the saluting Swiss Guards in their sentry boxes and out into the road. They had barely gone a dozen paces before Lomeli’s self-reproaches set in. He had spoken too harshly. It was vain of him. It was uncharitable. He was becoming puffed up with his own importance. He would do well to remember that in a few days the Conclave would be over and then no one would be interested in him either. No longer would anyone have to pretend to listen to his stories about canopies and fat Popes. Then he would know what it felt like to be Woźniak, who had lost not only his beloved Holy Father but his position, his home and his prospects, all at the same instant. Forgive me, God.

‘Actually, that’s ungenerous of me,’ he said. ‘The poor fellow will be worrying about his future. Tell him I’ll be at the Casa Santa Marta, meeting the cardinals as they arrive, and I’ll try to spare him a few minutes afterwards.’

‘Yes, Eminence,’ said O’Malley, and made a note on his clipboard.

Before the Casa Santa Marta had been built, more than twenty years earlier, the cardinal-electors were housed for the duration of a Conclave in the Apostolic Palace. The powerful Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Siri, a veteran of four Conclaves and the man who had ordained Lomeli a priest in the 1960s, used to complain that it was like being buried alive. Beds were jammed into fifteenth-century offices and reception rooms, with curtains slung between them to provide a rudimentary privacy. Washing facilities for each cardinal consisted of a jug and a basin; sanitation was a commode. It was John Paul II who had decided that such quaint squalor was no longer tolerable on the eve of the twenty-first century and who had ordered the Casa to be built in the south-western corner of the Vatican City at a cost to the Holy See of twenty million dollars.

It reminded Lomeli of a Soviet apartment building: a grey stone rectangle lying on its side, six storeys high. It was arranged over two blocks, each fourteen windows wide, connected by a short central mid-section. In the aerial photographs published in the press that morning it resembled an elongated H, with its northern elevation, Block A, fronting on to the Piazza Santa Marta, and the southern, Block B, overlooking the Vatican wall to the city of Rome. The Casa contained 128 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, and was run by the blue-habited nuns of the Company of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. In the intervals between papal elections – that is, for the great majority of the time – it was used as a hotel for visiting prelates, and as a semi-permanent hostel for some of the priests working in the bureaucracy of the Curia. The last of these residents had been cleared out of their rooms early in the morning and transferred half a kilometre outside the Vatican to the Domus Romana Sacerdotalis in Via della Traspontina. By the time Cardinal Lomeli entered the building after his visit to the Sistine Chapel, the Casa had taken on a ghostly, abandoned air. He passed through the scanner that had been set up just inside the lobby and collected his key from the sister at the reception desk.

Rooms had been allocated the previous week by lot. Lomeli had drawn one on the second floor of Block A. To reach it he had to pass the late Pope’s suite. It had been sealed since the morning after his death, in accordance with the laws of the Holy See, and to Lomeli, whose guilty recreation was detective fiction, it looked disturbingly like one of the crime scenes he had often read about. Red ribbon ran back and forth in a cat’s cradle between the door and its frame, fixed in place by blobs of wax bearing the coat of arms of the Cardinal Camerlengo. In the doorway was a large vase of fresh white lilies; they exuded a sickly scent. On the tables either side of them, two dozen votive candles in red glass holders flickered in the wintry gloom. The landing, which had once been so busy as the effective seat of government of the Church, was deserted. Lomeli knelt and took out his rosary. He tried to pray, but his mind kept drifting back to his final conversation with the Holy Father.

You knew my difficulties, he said to the closed door, yet you refused my resignation. Very well. I understand. You must have had your reasons. Now at least help to provide me with the strength and wisdom to find a way through this trial.

Behind him he heard the elevator stop and the doors open, but when he glanced over his shoulder, no one was there. The doors closed and the car continued upwards. He put away his beads and struggled to his feet.

His room was halfway along the corridor, on the right. He unlocked the door and opened it on to darkness. He felt around the wall for a switch and turned on the lamp. He was dismayed to discover he had no sitting room, merely a bedroom, with plain white walls, a polished parquet floor and an iron bedstead. But then he thought it was for the best. In the Palace of the Holy Office he had an apartment of four hundred square metres, with plenty of room for a grand piano. It would do him good to be reminded of a simpler life.

He opened the window and tried the shutter, forgetting it had been sealed, like all the others in the building. Every television and radio had been removed. The cardinals were to be entirely sequestered from the world for as long as the election lasted, so that no person and no news could influence their meditation. He wondered what view he would have had if he had been able to open the shutters. St Peter’s or the city? He had already lost his bearings.

He checked the closet and saw with satisfaction that his efficient chaplain, Father Zanetti, had already brought over his suitcase from his apartment and had even unpacked it for him. His choir dress was hanging up. His red biretta was on the top shelf, his underwear in the drawers. He counted up the number of socks and smiled. Enough for a week. Zanetti was a pessimist. In the tiny bathroom his toothbrush, razor and shaving brush had been laid out, along with a packet of sleeping pills. On the desk were his breviary and Bible, a bound copy of Universi Dominici Gregis, the rules for electing a new Pope, and a much thicker file, prepared by O’Malley, containing the details of every cardinal who was eligible to vote, along with their photograph. Beside it was a leather folder in which was the draft of the homily he would have to deliver the next day when he celebrated the televised Mass in St Peter’s Basilica. The mere sight of it was enough to give him stomach cramps, and he had to move quickly to the bathroom. Afterwards he sat on the edge of the bed with his head bowed.

He tried to tell himself that his feelings of inadequacy were simply proof of a proper humility. He was the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia. Before that he had been the Cardinal-Priest of San Marcello al Corso in Rome. Before that, the titular Archbishop of Aquileia. In all of these positions, however nominal, he had played an active part: had preached sermons and celebrated Mass and heard confessions. But one could be the grandest prince of the Universal Church and still lack the most basic skills of the commonest country priest. If only he had experienced life in an ordinary parish, just for a year or two! Instead, ever since his ordination, his path of service – first as a professor of canon law, then as a diplomat, and finally, briefly, as Secretary of State – had seemed only to lead him away from God rather than towards Him. The higher he had climbed, the further heaven had receded. And now it fell to him, of all unworthy creatures, to guide his fellow cardinals in choosing the man who should hold the Keys of St Peter.

Servus fidelis. A faithful servant. It was on his coat of arms. A prosaic motto for a prosaic man.

A manager. . .

After a while he went into the bathroom and poured himself a glass of water.

Very well then, he thought. Manage.

The doors of the Casa Santa Marta were scheduled to close at six. No one would be admitted after that. ‘Come early, Your Eminences,’ Lomeli had advised the cardinals at their last congregation, ‘and please remember that no communications with the outside world will be permitted after you’ve checked in. All mobile telephones and computers must be surrendered at the front desk. You will have to pass through a scanner to make sure you have not been forgetful. It would speed up registration considerably if you simply left them behind.’

At five to three, wearing a winter coat over his black cassock, he stood outside the entrance, flanked by his officials. Once again, Monsignor O’Malley, the Secretary of the College, and Archbishop Mandorff, the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, were with him, along with Mandorff’s four assistants: two masters of ceremonies, one a monsignor and the other a priest, and two friars of the Order of St Augustine who were attached to the Papal Sacristy. He was also permitted the services of his chaplain, young Father Zanetti. These, and two doctors, on standby in case of medical emergencies, were the sum total of those who would supervise the election of the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.

It was getting cold. Invisible but close in the darkening November sky a helicopter hovered a couple of hundred metres above the ground. The drone of its rotors seemed to come in waves, rising and falling as either it or the wind changed direction. Lomeli scanned the clouds, trying to work out where it was. No doubt it would belong to some television network, dispatched to take aerial pictures of the cardinals arriving at the exterior gates; either that, or it was part of the security forces. He had been briefed about security by the Italian Minister of the Interior, a fresh-faced economist from a well-known Catholic family, who had never worked outside politics and whose hands had shaken as he read through his notes. The threat of terrorism was considered serious and imminent, the Minister had said. Surface-to-air missiles and snipers would be stationed on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the Vatican. Five thousand uniformed police and army personnel would openly patrol the neighbouring streets in a show of strength, while hundreds of plain-clothes officers mingled with the crowds. At the end of the meeting the Minister had asked Lomeli to bless him.

Occasionally above the noise of the helicopter floated the distant sounds of protest: thousands of voices chanting in unison, punctuated by klaxons and drumbeats and whistles. Lomeli tried to distinguish what it was they were complaining about. It was impossible. Supporters of gay marriage and opponents of civil union, pro-divorce advocates and Families for Catholic Unity, women demanding to be ordained as priests and women demanding abortions and contraception, Muslims and anti-Muslims, immigrants and anti-immigrants. . . they merged into a single undifferentiated cacophony of rage. Police sirens cried out somewhere, first one and then another and then a third, as if they were courting one another from opposite ends of the city.

We are an Ark, he thought, surrounded by a rising flood of discord.

Across the piazza, in the nearest corner of the basilica, the melodious clock chimed the four quarter-hours in quick succession; then the great bell of St Peter’s tolled three. The anxious security men in their short black coats strutted and turned and fretted like crows.

A few minutes later, the first of the cardinals appeared. They were wearing their everyday long black cassocks with red piping, with wide red silk sashes tied at their waists and red skullcaps on their heads. They climbed the slope from the direction of the Palace of the Holy Office. A member of the Swiss Guard in his plumed helmet walked with them, carrying a halberd. It might have been a scene from the sixteenth century, except for the noise of their wheeled suitcases, clattering over the cobbles.

The prelates came closer. Lomeli squared his shoulders. He recognised two from his briefing book. On the left was the Brazilian Cardinal Sá, Archbishop of São Salvador de Bahia (aged 60, liberation theologian, a possible Pope, but not this time), and on the right, the elderly Chilean, Cardinal Contreras, Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago (aged 77, arch-conservative, one-time confessor of General Augusto Pinochet). Between them walked a small, dignified figure it took him longer to place: Cardinal Hierra, the Archbishop of Mexico City, of whom Lomeli remembered nothing except his name. He guessed at once that they had been lunching together, doubtless trying to agree on a common candidate. There were nineteen Latin American cardinal-electors, and if they were to vote in a block they would be formidable. But one had only to observe the body language of the Brazilian and the Chilean, the way they refused even to look at one another, to realise that such a common front was impossible. They’d probably struggled even to agree on which restaurant to meet in.

‘My brothers,’ he said, opening his arms, ‘welcome.’ Immediately, the Mexican archbishop began complaining in a mixture of Spanish and Italian about his journey across Rome – he showed his arm: the dark fabric was covered in spit – and about their treatment at the entrance to the Vatican, which had scarcely been better. They had been obliged to present their passports, submit to a body search, open their luggage for inspection: ‘Are we common criminals, Dean, or what is this?’

Lomeli took the archbishop’s gesticulating hand in both of his and clasped it. ‘Your Eminence, I hope at least you have had a good lunch – it may be your last for some time – and I am sorry if you felt your treatment was demeaning. But we must do our best to keep this Conclave safe, and I fear a certain inconvenience is the price we shall all have to pay. Father Zanetti will show you to reception.’

And with that, and without letting go of his hand, he gently steered Hierra towards the entrance of the Casa Santa Marta, then released him. Watching them walk away, O’Malley marked their names on his list, then turned to Lomeli and raised his eyebrows, at which Lomeli returned him a look of such reproof that the monsignor’s capillaried cheeks turned even redder. He liked the Irishman’s sense of humour. But he would not have his cardinals mocked.

In the meantime, another trio had started making its way up the hill. Americans, thought Lomeli, they always stick together: they had even given daily press conferences together until he put a stop to it. He guessed they would have shared a taxi over from the American clergy house, the Villa Stritch. He recognised the Archbishop of Boston, Willard Fitzgerald (aged 68, preoccupied with pastoral duties, still clearing up the mess of the abuse scandal, good with the media); Mario Santos SJ, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston (aged 70, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, cautious reformer), and Paul Krasinski (aged 79, Archbishop Emeritus of Chicago, Prefect Emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura, traditionalist, strong supporter of the Legionaries of Christ). Like the Latin Americans, the North Americans wielded nineteen votes, and it was widely assumed that Tremblay, as Archbishop Emeritus of Quebec, would pick up most of them. But he wouldn’t get Krasinski’s vote – the Chicagoan had already endorsed Tedesco, and in language calculatedly insulting to the dead Pope: ‘We need a Holy Father who can restore the Church to her proper path after a long period when she has been lost.’ He walked with the aid of two sticks and waved one of them at Lomeli. The Swiss Guard carried his big leather suitcase.

‘Good afternoon, Dean.’ He was gleeful to be back in Rome. ‘I bet you never expected to see me again!’

He was the oldest member of the Conclave: another month and he would have reached eighty, the statutory age limit for voting. He also had Parkinson’s disease, and there had been doubt until the very last minute whether he would be pronounced fit enough to travel. Well, thought Lomeli grimly, he had made it, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

‘On the contrary, Your Eminence, we wouldn’t have dared hold a Conclave without you.’

Krasinski squinted at the Casa Santa Marta. ‘So then! Where have you put me?’

‘I’ve arranged for you to have a suite on the ground floor.’

‘A suite! That’s decent of you, Dean. I thought the rooms were distributed by lot?’

Lomeli leaned in. ‘I fixed the ballot,’ he whispered.

‘Ha!’ Krasinski struck one of his sticks against the cobbles. ‘I wouldn’t put it past you Italians to fix the others too!’

He hobbled away. His companions hung back, embarrassed, as if they had been obliged to bring to a family wedding an elderly relative for whose behaviour they could not vouch. Santos shrugged. ‘Same old Paul, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind him. We’ve been teasing one another for years.’

And in an odd way Lomeli did feel almost nostalgic for the old brute. They were survivors together. This would be their third papal election. Only a handful of others could say the same. Most of those arriving had never participated in a Conclave before; and if the College chose a young enough man, most would never take part in one again. It was history they were making, and as the afternoon went on and they came up the slope with their suitcases, sometimes singly but mostly in groups of three or four, Lomeli was moved by how many of them were awed by the occasion, even those who tried to put on a show of nonchalance.

What an extraordinary variety of races they represented – what a testament to the breadth of the Universal Church that men born so different should be bound together by their faith in God! From the Eastern ministries, Maronite and Coptic, came the patriarchs of Lebanon, Antioch and Alexandria; from India, the major archbishops of Trivandrum and Ernakulam-Angamaly, and also the Archbishop of Ranchi, Saverio Xalxo, whose name Lomeli took pleasure in pronouncing correctly: ‘Cardinal Khal-koh, welcome to the Conclave. . .’

From the Far East came no fewer than thirteen Asian archbishops – Jakarta and Cebu, Bangkok and Manila, Seoul and Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City and Hong Kong. . . And from Africa another thirteen – Maputo, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, Khartoum, Addis Ababa. . . Lomeli was sure that the Africans would vote as a solid block for Cardinal Adeyemi. Halfway through the afternoon, he noticed the Nigerian strolling across the piazza in the direction of the Palace of the Holy Office. He returned a few minutes later with a group of African cardinals. Presumably he had met them at the gate. As they walked, he pointed out this building and that, in the manner of a proprietor. He brought them over to Lomeli for their official welcome, and Lomeli was struck by how much they deferred to Adeyemi, even the elderly grey-headed eminences like Zucula of Mozambique and the Kenyan, Mwangale, who had been around a lot longer.

But to win, Adeyemni would need to pick up support from beyond Africa and the Third World, and that would be his difficulty. He might win votes in Africa by attacking, as he often did, ‘the Satan of global capitalism’ and ‘the abomination of homosexuality’, but he would lose them in America and Europe. And it was still the cardinals of Europe – fifty-six in all – who dominated the Conclave. These were the men Lomeli knew best. Some, like Ugo De Luca, the Archbishop of Genoa, with whom he had studied at the diocesan seminary, had been his friends for half a century. Others he had been meeting at conferences for more than thirty years.

Arm in arm up the hill came the two great liberal theologians of Western Europe, once outcasts but lately awarded their red hats in a show of defiance by the Holy Father: the Belgian, Cardinal Vandroogenbroek (aged 68, ex-Professor of Theology at Louvain University, advocate of Curial appointments for women, no-hoper), and the German, Cardinal Löwenstein (aged 77, Archbishop Emeritus of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, investigated for heresy by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1997). The Patriarch of Lisbon, Rui Brandão D’Cruz, arrived smoking a cigar, and lingered on the doorstep of the Casa Santa Marta, reluctant to put it out. The Archbishop of Prague, Jan Jandaček, made his way across the piazza still limping as a result of his torture at the hands of the Czech secret police when he was working underground as a young priest in the 1960s. There was the Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, Calogero Scozzazi, investigated three times for money-laundering but never prosecuted, and the Archbishop of Riga, Gatis Brotzkus, whose family had converted to Catholicism after the war and whose Jewish mother had been murdered by the Nazis. There was the Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Courtemarche, Archbishop of Bordeaux, once excommunicated as a follower of the heretic Marcel-François Lefebvre, and who had been secretly taped claiming that the Holocaust had never occurred. There was the Spanish Archbishop of Toledo, Modesto Villanueva – at fifty-four the youngest member of the Conclave – an organiser of Catholic Youth, who maintained that the way to God was through the beauty of culture. . .

And finally – and broadly speaking it was finally – there came that separate and most rarefied species of cardinal, the two dozen members of the Curia, who lived permanently in Rome and who ran the big departments of the Church. They formed in effect their own chapter inside the College, the Order of Cardinal-Deacons. Many, like Lomeli, had grace-and-favour apartments within the walls of the Vatican. Most were Italian. For them it was an easy matter to stroll across the Piazza Santa Marta carrying their suitcases. As a result, they had lingered over their lunches and were among the last to arrive. And although Lomeli greeted them just as warmly as he did the others – they were his neighbours, after all – he couldn’t help noticing that they lacked the precious gift of awe he had detected in those who had travelled from across the world. Good men though they were, they were somehow knowing; they were blasé. Lomeli had recognised this spiritual disfigurement in himself. He had prayed for the strength to fight it. The late Pope used to rail against it to their faces: ‘Be on your guard, my brothers, against developing the vices of all courtiers down the ages – the sins of vanity and intrigue and of malice and gossip.’ When Bellini had confided on the day of the Holy Father’s death that the Pope had lost his faith in the Church – a revelation so shocking to Lomeli that he had tried ever since to banish it from his mind – it was surely these bureaucrats he had meant.

Yet it was the Pope who had appointed them all. Nobody had made him pick them. For example, there was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Simo Guttuso. The liberals had had such high hopes for the genial Archbishop of Florence. ‘A second Pope John XXIII,’ they had called him. But far from granting more autonomy to the bishops, which he had proclaimed as his great cause before he entered the Curia, once installed Guttuso had slowly revealed himself to be every bit as authoritarian as his predecessors, merely lazier. He had become very stout, like a figure from the Renaissance, and walked with difficulty the short distance from his huge apartment in the Palazzo San Carlo to the Casa Santa Marta, which was almost next door. His personal chaplain struggled behind him with his three suitcases.

Lomeli, eyeing the suitcases, said, ‘My dear Simo, are you trying to smuggle in your personal chef?’

‘Well, Dean, one never knows quite when one will be able to go home, does one?’ Guttuso grasped Lomeli’s hand in his two fat damp paws and added hoarsely, ‘Or even, for that matter, if one will be going home.’ The phrase hung in the air for several seconds, and Lomeli thought: dear God, he actually believes he might be elected; but then Guttuso winked. ‘Ah, Lomeli! Your face! Don’t worry, I’m joking. I am one man who is aware of his limitations. Unlike certain of our colleagues. . .’ He kissed Lomeli on either cheek and waddled past him. Lomeli watched him pause in the doorway to recover his breath and then disappear into the Casa Santa Marta.

He guessed it had been lucky for Guttuso that the Holy Father had died when he did. Another few months and Lomeli was sure he would have been asked to resign. ‘I want a Church that is poor,’ the Pope had complained more than once in Lomeli’s hearing. ‘I want a Church that is closer to the people. Guttuso has a good soul but he has forgotten where he came from.’ He had quoted Matthew: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ Lomeli reckoned the Holy Father had had it in mind to remove almost half the senior men he had appointed. Bill Rudgard, for example, who arrived soon after Guttuso: he might come from New York and look like a Wall Street banker, but he had failed entirely to gain control over the financial management of his department, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (‘Between you, me and the bedpost, I should never have given the job to an American. They are so innocent: they have no idea how bribery works. Did you know that the going rate for a beatification is said to be three quarters of a million euros? The only miracle is that anyone pays it. . .’).

As for the next man to enter the Casa Santa Marta, Cardinal Tutino, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, he would surely have gone in the New Year. He had been exposed in the press for spending half a million euros knocking two apartments together to create a place big enough to house the three nuns and the chaplain he felt necessary to serve him. Tutino had been given such a mauling in the media, he looked like the survivor of a physical attack. Someone had leaked his private emails. He was obsessed with finding out who. He moved furtively. He glanced over his shoulder. He found it hard to meet Lomeli’s eyes. After only the most cursory of greetings, he slipped into the Casa, ostentatiously carrying his belongings in a cheap plastic holdall.

By five o’clock it was becoming dark. As the sun dipped, the air chilled. Lomeli asked how many of the cardinals had yet to arrive. O’Malley consulted his list. ‘Fourteen, Your Eminence.’

‘So a hundred and three of our sheep are safely in the pen before nightfall. Rocco,’ he said, turning to his priest, ‘would you be so kind as to bring me my scarf?’

The helicopter had moved away, but the last of the demonstrators could still be heard. There was a steady, rhythmic beating of drums.

He said, ‘I wonder where Cardinal Tedesco has got to?’

O’Malley said, ‘Perhaps he isn’t coming.’

‘That would be too much to hope! Ah, forgive me. That was uncharitable.’ He could hardly admonish the Secretary of the College for lacking respect if he didn’t show it himself. He must remember to confess his sin.

Father Zanetti returned with his scarf just as Cardinal Tremblay appeared, walking alone from the direction of the Apostolic Palace. Slung over his shoulder was his choir dress in a dry-cleaner’s cellophane wrapper. In his right hand he swung a Nike sports bag. It was the image he had projected ever since the Holy Father’s funeral: a Pope for the modern age – unpretentious, informal, accessible – even though not one hair of that magnificent silvery helmet beneath his red zucchetto was ever out of place. Lomeli had expected the Canadian’s candidacy to fade after the first couple of days. But Tremblay knew how to keep his name before the media. As Camerlengo, he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Church until a new pontiff was elected. There was not much to do. Nevertheless, he called daily meetings of the cardinals in the Synod Hall and held press conferences afterwards, and soon articles began appearing, quoting ‘Vatican sources’, saying how much his skilful management had impressed his colleagues. And he had another, more tangible means of ingratiating himself. It was to him, as Prefect of the Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples, that the cardinals from the developing world, especially the poorer countries, came for funds, not just for their missionary work but for their living expenses in Rome during the time between the Pope’s funeral and the Conclave. It was hard not to be impressed. If a man had that strong a sense of destiny, perhaps he had indeed been chosen? Perhaps he had been given a sign, invisible to the rest of them? It was certainly invisible to Lomeli.

‘Joe, welcome.’

‘Jacopo,’ said Tremblay amiably, and lifted his arms with a smile of apology, to show that he couldn’t shake hands.

If he wins, Lomeli promised himself as soon as the Canadian had passed, I shall be gone from Rome the very next day.

He knotted his black woollen scarf around his neck and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. He stamped his feet against the cobbles.

Zanetti said, ‘We could wait indoors, Your Eminence.’

‘No, I’d prefer to get some fresh air while I still can.’

Cardinal Bellini didn’t appear until half past five. Lomeli noticed his tall, thin figure moving through the shadows around the edge of the piazza. He was pulling a suitcase with one hand. In the other he carried a thick black briefcase so crammed with books and papers it would not properly close. His head was bowed in meditation. By general agreement, Bellini had emerged as the favourite to succeed to the throne of St Peter. Lomeli wondered what thoughts must be passing through his mind at the prospect. He was far too lofty for gossip or intrigue. The Pope’s strictures about the Curia had not applied to him. He had worked so hard as Secretary of State that his officials had been obliged to provide him with a second shift of assist-ants to come on duty at six every evening and stay with him until the early hours. More than any other member of the College he had the physical and mental capacity to be Pope. And he was a man of prayer. Lomeli had made up his mind to vote for him, although he had been careful not to say so, and Bellini had been too fastidious to ask him. The ex-Secretary was so wrapped up in his thoughts he seemed likely to walk straight past the welcoming party. But at the last minute he remembered where he was, glanced up and wished them all good evening. His face looked more than usually pale and drawn. ‘Am I the last?’

‘Not quite. How are you, Aldo?’

‘Oh, fairly dreadful!’ He managed a thin-lipped smile and drew Lomeli aside. ‘Well, you’ve read today’s newspapers – how else would you expect me to be? I’ve twice meditated on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius just to try to keep my feet on the ground.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen the press, and if you want my advice, you’d be wise to ignore all these self-appointed “experts”. Leave it to God, my friend. If it’s His will, it will happen; if not, not.’

‘But I’m not merely God’s passive instrument, Jacopo. I have some say in the matter. He gave us free will.’ He lowered his voice so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘It’s not that I want it, you understand? No sane man could possibly want the papacy.’

‘Some of our colleagues seem to.’

‘Well then they’re fools, or worse. We both saw what it did to the Holy Father. It’s a Calvary.’

‘Nevertheless, you should prepare yourself. The way things are going, it may well fall to you.’

‘But what if I don’t want it? What if I know in my heart I’m not worthy?’

‘Nonsense. You’re more worthy than any of us.’

‘I am not.’

‘Then tell your supporters not to vote for you. Pass the chalice to someone else.’

A tortured look passed across Bellini’s face. ‘And let it go to him?’ He nodded down the hill to where a squat, bulky, almost square figure was marching up the slope towards them, his shape rendered all the more comical by the tall, plumed Swiss Guards flanking him. ‘He has no doubts. He’s perfectly ready to undo all the progress we’ve made these past sixty years. How am I to live with myself if I don’t try to stop him?’ And without waiting for a reply, he hurried into the Casa Santa Marta, leaving Lomeli to face the Patriarch of Venice.

Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco was the least clerical-looking cleric Lomeli had ever seen. If you showed his picture to someone who didn’t know him, they would say he was a retired butcher, perhaps, or a bus driver. He came from a peasant family in Basilicata, right down in the south, the youngest of twelve children – the kind of huge family that used to be so common in Italy but had almost vanished since the end of the Second World War. His nose had been broken in his youth and was bulbous and slightly bent. His hair was too long and roughly parted. He had shaved carelessly. In the fading light he reminded Lomeli of a figure from another century: Gioachino Rossini, perhaps. But the rustic image was an act. He had two degrees in theology, spoke five languages fluently, and had been a protégé of Ratzinger’s at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he had been known as the Panzer Cardinal’s enforcer. Tedesco had kept well clear of Rome ever since the Pope’s funeral, pleading a severe cold. Of course nobody believed him. He scarcely needed any more publicity, and his absence added to his mystique.

‘Apologies, Dean. My train was delayed in Venice.’

‘Are you well?’

‘Oh, not too bad – but is one ever really well at our age?’

‘We’ve missed you, Goffredo.’

‘No doubt.’ He laughed. ‘Alas, it couldn’t be helped. But my friends have kept me well informed. I’ll see you later, Dean. No, no, my dear fellow,’ he said to the Swiss Guard, ‘give me that,’ and so, a man of the people to the last, he insisted on carrying his own bag inside.