The lobby and the lower flight of the staircase were lined by religious of all ranks. It was their silence that imprinted itself most indelibly on Lomeli’s mind. When the elevator doors opened and the body was wheeled out, the only sound – to his dismay – was the click and whir of phone cameras, interspersed with an occasional sob. Tremblay and Adeyemi walked at the head of the stretcher, Lomeli and Bellini at the rear, with the prelates of the Apostolic Camera in a file behind them. They processed through the doors and into the October chill. The drizzle had ceased. There were even a few stars. They passed between the two Swiss Guards and made towards a crucible of multicoloured light – the flashes of the waiting ambulance and its police escort streaking like blue sunbeams around the rain-slicked piazza, the white strobe effect of the photographers, the engulfing yellow glare thrown up by the lamps of the TV crews, and behind all these, rising out of the shadows, the gigantic illuminated glow of St Peter’s.
As they reached the ambulance, Lomeli tried to picture the Universal Church at that moment – some one and a quarter billion souls: the ragged crowds gathered around the television sets in the slums of Manila and São Paulo, the swarms of commuters in Tokyo and Shanghai hypnotised by their mobile phones, the sports fans in the bars of Boston and New York whose games were being interrupted…
Go forth and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit…
The body slid head-first into the back of the ambulance. The rear door slammed. The four cardinals stood at solemn attention as the cortège pulled away – two motorcycles, then a police car, then the ambulance, then another police car, and finally more motorcycles. It swept around the piazza for a moment and disappeared. The instant it was out of sight, the sirens were switched on.
So much for humility, thought Lomeli. So much for the poor of the earth. It could have been the motorcade of a dictator.
The wails of the cortège dwindled into the night.
Behind their rope line, the reporters and photographers started calling out to the cardinals, like tourists at a zoo trying to persuade the animals to come closer: ‘Your Eminence! Your Eminence! Over here!’
‘One of us should say something,’ announced Tremblay, and without waiting for a response, he set off across the piazza. The lights seemed to impart to his silhouette a fiery halo. Adeyemi managed to restrain himself for a few more seconds, and then went in pursuit.
Bellini said, under his breath and with great contempt, ‘What a circus!’
‘Shouldn’t you join them?’ suggested Lomeli.
‘God, no! I shan’t pander to the mob. I think I would prefer to go to the chapel and pray.’ He smiled sadly and rattled something in his hand, and Lomeli saw that he was holding the travelling chess set. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Join me. Let us say a Mass for our friend together.’ As they walked back into the Casa Santa Marta, he took Lomeli’s arm. ‘The Holy Father told me of your difficulties with prayer,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps I can help. You know that he had doubts himself, by the end?’
‘The Pope had doubts about God?’
‘Not about God! Never about God!’ And then Bellini said something Lomeli would never forget. ‘What he had lost faith in was the Church.’
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.