‘What was going through his head in those final weeks, I wonder?’ Bellini said, almost to himself.
‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t see him at all for the last month.’
‘Ah, I wish you had! He was strange. Unreachable. Secretive. I believe he sensed his death was approaching and his mind was full of curious ideas. I feel his presence very strongly, don’t you?’
‘I do indeed. I still speak to him. I often sense he is watching us.’
‘I’m quite certain of it. Well, this is where we part. I am on the third floor.’ Bellini studied his key. ‘Room 301. I must be directly above the Holy Father. Perhaps his spirit radiates through the floor? That would explain why I am so restless. Be sure that you sleep well, Jacopo. Who knows where we’ll be this time tomorrow?’
And then, to Lomeli’s surprise, Bellini kissed him lightly on either cheek before turning away and continuing on up the staircase.
Lomeli called after him: ‘Goodnight.’
Without turning round, Bellini raised his hand in response.
After he had gone, Lomeli stood for another minute, staring at the closed door with its barrier of wax and ribbons. He was remembering his conversation with Benítez. Could it really be true that the Holy Father had known the Filipino well enough, and trusted him enough, to criticise his own Secretary of State? Yet the remark had the ring of authenticity. ‘Brilliant but neurotic’: he could almost hear the old man saying it.
Lomeli’s sleep that night was also restless. For the first time in many years he dreamt of his mother – a widow for forty years, who used to complain that he was cold towards her – and when he woke in the early hours, her plaintive voice still seemed to be whining in his ears. But then, after a minute or two, he realised the voice he could hear was real. There was a woman nearby.
A woman?
He rolled on to his side and groped for his watch. It was almost 3 a.m.
The female voice came again: urgent, accusatory, almost hysterical. And then a deep male response: gentle, soothing, placatory.
Lomeli threw off his bedclothes and turned on the light. The unoiled springs of the iron bedstead creaked loudly as he put his feet to the floor. He tiptoed cautiously across the room and put his ear to the wall. The voices had fallen silent. He sensed that on the other side of the plasterboard partition they too were listening. For several minutes he held the same position, until he began to feel foolish. Surely his suspicions were absurd? But then he heard Adeyemi’s unmistakable voice – even the cardinal’s whispers had resonance – followed by the click of a door closing. He moved quickly to his own door and flung it open, just in time to see a flash of the blue uniform of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul disappearing around the corner.
Later, it would be obvious to Lomeli what he should have done next. He should have dressed immediately and knocked on Adeyemi’s door. It might still have been possible, at that early moment, before positions were fixed and when the episode was undeniable, to have a frank conversation about what had just happened. Instead, the dean climbed back into his bed, drew the sheet up to his chin, and contemplated the possibilities.
The best explanation – that is to say, the least damaging from his point of view – was that the nun was troubled, that she had concealed herself after the other sisters had left the building at midnight and had come to Adeyemi to seek guidance. Many of the nuns in the Casa Santa Marta were African, and it was entirely possible she had known the cardinal from his years in Nigeria. Obviously Adeyemi was guilty of a serious indiscretion in admitting her to his room unchaperoned in the middle of the night, but an indiscretion was not necessarily a sin. After that came a range of other explanations, from nearly all of which Lomeli’s imagination recoiled. In a literal sense, he had trained himself not to deal with such thoughts. A passage in Pope John XXIII’s Journal of a Soul had been his guiding text ever since his tormenting days and nights as a young priest:
As for women, and everything to do with them, never a word, never; it was as if there were no women in the world. This absolute silence, even between close friends, about everything to do with women was one of the most profound and lasting lessons of my early years in the priesthood.
This was the core of the hard mental discipline that had enabled Lomeli to remain celibate for more than sixty years. Don’t even think about them! The mere idea of going next door and talking man to man with Adeyemi about a woman was a concept that lay entirely outside the dean’s closed intellectual system. Therefore he resolved to forget about the whole incident. If Adeyemi chose to confide in him, naturally he would listen, in the spirit of a confessor. Otherwise he would act as if it had never happened.
He reached over and switched off the light.
9 The Second Ballot
AT 6.30 A.M., the bell rang for morning Mass.
Lomeli woke with an impending sense of doom somewhere at the back of his mind, as if his anxieties were all coiled together ready to spring out at him the moment he was fully awake. He went into the bathroom and tried to banish them with another scalding shower. But when he stood at the mirror to shave, they were still there, lurking behind him.
He dried himself and put on his robe, knelt at the prie-dieu and recited his rosary, then prayed for Christ’s wisdom and guidance throughout the trials that the day would bring. As he dressed, his fingers shook. He paused and told himself to be calm. There was a set prayer for every garment – cassock, cincture, rochet, mozzetta, zuchetta – and he recited them as he put on each item. ‘Protect me, O Lord, with the girdle of faith,’ he whispered as he knotted the cincture around his waist, ‘and extinguish the fire of lust so that chastity may abide in me, year after year.’ But he did so mechanically, with no more feeling than if he were giving out a telephone number.
Just before he left the room, he caught sight of himself in the mirror wearing his choir dress. The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.
He walked with a group of other cardinals down the stairs to the ground-floor chapel. It was housed in an annexe attached to the main building: an antiseptic modernist design with a vaulted ceiling of white wooden beams and glass, suspended above a cream and gold polished marble floor. The effect was too much like an airport lounge for Lomeli’s taste, yet the Holy Father, amazingly, had preferred it to the Pauline. One entire side consisted of thick plate glass, behind which ran the old Vatican wall, spotlit with potted shrubs at its base. It was impossible to see the sky from this angle, or even to tell whether it was yet dawn.
Two weeks earlier, Tremblay had come to see Lomeli and offered to take charge of celebrating the morning Masses in the Casa Santa Marta, and Lomeli, burdened with the prospect of the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, had been grateful to accept. Now he rather regretted it. He saw that he had given the Canadian the perfect opportunity to remind the Conclave of his skill at performing the liturgy. He sang well. He looked like a cleric in some Hollywood romantic movie: Spencer Tracy came to mind. His gestures were dramatic enough to suggest he was infused with the divine spirit, yet not so theatrical that they seemed false or egocentric. When Lomeli queued to receive Communion and knelt before the cardinal, the sacrilegious thought occurred to him that just this one service might have been worth three or four votes to the Canadian.
Adeyemi was the last to receive the host. He very carefully did not glance at Lomeli or anyone else as he returned to his seat. He seemed entirely self-possessed, grave, remote, aware. By lunchtime he would probably know whether he was likely to be Pope.