And then there was Benítez, of whom Lomeli had lost track since the previous night. One could at least be certain that he would not be voting for himself. The choir dress that had been found for him was too long. His rochet hung almost to the ground and he nearly tripped over it as he reached the altar. When he had finished voting and turned to go back to his seat, he gave Lomeli a wry glance. Lomeli nodded and smiled encouragement in return. The Filipino had an attractive quality, he thought, not easy to define: an inner grace. Now that he was becoming better known, he might go far.
The voting went on for more than an hour. When it began, there had been a few whispered conversations. But by the time the scrutineers had cast their own ballots, and the last man to vote – Bill Rudgard, the Junior Cardinal-Deacon – had returned to his seat, the silence seemed to have become endless and absolute, like the infinity of space. God has entered the room, thought Lomeli. We are sequestered under lock and key at the point where time and eternity meet.
Cardinal Lukša lifted the urn and displayed it to the Conclave, as if he were about to bless the sacrament. He shook it several times to mix up the ballots. Then he offered it to Cardinal Newby, who, without unfolding the voting papers, extracted them one by one, counting them out loud, and transferred them to a second urn standing on the altar.
At the end, the Englishman announced, in his thickly accented Italian, ‘One hundred and eighteen votes have been cast.’
He and Cardinal Mercurio went into the Room of Tears, the sacristy to the left of the altar where the three different sizes of papal vestments were hanging, and emerged almost at once carrying between them a small table, which they set up in front of the altar. Cardinal Lukša covered it with a white cloth and placed the urn containing the votes in the centre. Newby and Mercurio returned to the sacristy and fetched three chairs. Newby unclipped the microphone from its stand and carried it over to the table.
‘My brothers,’ he said, ‘we shall proceed to count the first ballot.’
And now, at last, emerging from its trance, the Conclave stirred. In the folder in front of them, every elector had been issued with a list, arranged alphabetically, of the cardinals eligible to vote. Lomeli was glad to see it had been reprinted overnight to include Benítez. He picked up his pen.
Lukša extracted the first ballot paper from the urn, unfolded it, and made a note of the name. He passed it to Mercurio, who studied it in turn and also recorded it. Then Mercurio handed it to Newby, who used a silver needle to pierce the vote through the word ‘elect’ and thread it on to a length of red silk cord. He leaned into the microphone. He had the easy, confident voice of a public-school-and-Oxford man. ‘The first vote is cast for Cardinal Tedesco.’
Each time a vote was announced, Lomeli put a tick against the candidate’s name. At first it was impossible to get a sense of who was ahead. Thirty-four cardinals – more than a quarter of the Conclave – received at least one vote: it was said afterwards to be a record. Men voted for themselves, or for a friend, or a fellow countryman. Quite early on, Lomeli heard his own name read out, and awarded himself a tick on his list. He was touched that someone should have considered him worthy of the supreme honour; he wondered who it was. But when it happened several times more, he began to feel alarmed. In such a crowded field, anything more than half a dozen votes would be enough, at least in theory, to put one in contention.
He kept his head down, concentrating on his tally. Even so, he was aware of cardinals occasionally staring at him across the aisle. The race was slow and close, the distribution of support bizarrely random, so that one of the front-runners might get two or three votes in a row, and then receive none of the succeeding twenty. Still, after about eighty or so ballots had been read out, it was clear which cardinals had the potential strength to emerge as Pope, and as predicted they were Tedesco, Bellini, Tremblay and Adeyemi. When a hundred votes had been counted, there was still nothing between them. But then at the end, something strange happened. Bellini’s vote stalled, and the final few names read out must have felt like hammer blows to him: Tedesco, Lomeli, Adeyemi, Adeyemi, Tremblay, and last of all – amazingly – Benítez.
As the scrutineers conferred and checked the totals, whispered conversations broke out all around the chapel. Lomeli ran his pen down his list, adding up the votes. He scribbled the figures beside each name:
Tedesco 22
Adeyemi 19
Bellini 18
Tremblay 16
Lomeli 5
Others 38
The size of his own vote dismayed him. Assuming he had drawn away support from Bellini, he might well have cost him first place, and with it the sense of inevitability that might have carried him to victory. Indeed, the more he studied the figures, the more disappointing for Bellini they looked. Hadn’t Sabbadin, his campaign manager, predicted at dinner that he was certain to be in the lead after the first ballot, with up to twenty-five votes, and that Tedesco would receive no more than fifteen? Yet Bellini had come in third, behind Adeyemi – no one had envisaged that – and even Tremblay was only two votes behind him. One thing was certain, Lomeli concluded: no candidate was anywhere near the seventy-nine votes it would take to win the election.
He was only half listening as Newby read out the official results: they merely confirmed what he had already worked out for himself. Instead he was flicking through the Apostolic Constitution to paragraph seventy-four. No modern Conclave had lasted beyond three days, but that didn’t mean it might not happen. Under the rules they were obliged to keep on balloting until they found a candidate who could command a two-thirds majority, if necessary for as many as thirty ballots, extending over twelve days. Only at the end of that time would they be permitted to use a different system, whereby a simple majority would be sufficient to elect a new Pope.
Twelve days – an appalling prospect!
Newby had finished giving the results. He held up the red silk cord on which all the ballot papers were threaded. He knotted the two ends together and looked towards the dean.
Lomeli rose from his place and took the microphone. From the altar step he could see Tedesco studying the voting figures, Bellini staring into nothing, Adeyemi and Tremblay talking quietly to the men sitting next to them.
‘My brother cardinals, that concludes the first ballot. No candidate having achieved the necessary majority, we shall now adjourn for the evening and resume voting in the morning. Will you please remain in your places until the officials are allowed back into the chapel. And may I remind Your Eminences that you are forbidden to take any written record of the voting out of the Sistine. Your notes will be collected from you, and burnt along with the ballot papers. There will be buses outside to take you back to the Casa Santa Marta. I would ask you humbly not to discuss this afternoon’s vote in the hearing of the drivers. Thank you for your patience. I now invite the Junior Cardinal-Deacon to ask for us to be released.’
Rudgard stood and walked to the back of the chapel. They could hear him knocking on the doors and calling for them to be opened – ‘Aprite le porte! Aprite le porte!’ – like a prisoner summoning his guard. A few moments later he returned accompanied by Archbishop Mandorff, Monsignor O’Malley and the other masters of ceremonies. The priests were carrying paper sacks and went up and down the rows of desks collecting the voting tallies. Some of the cardinals were reluctant to hand them over, and had to be persuaded to put them in the sacks. Others hung on to them for a last few seconds. No doubt they were trying to memorise the figures, Lomeli thought. Or perhaps they were simply savouring the only record there would ever be of the day they received a vote to be Pope.