‘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.