Conclave (25 page)

He pressed the box back into its compartment and replaced the top of the bedpost. The fearful words of the disciples to Jesus came into his mind:
This is a lonely place, and the hour is now late.
For a few seconds he clung on to the solid wooden upright. He had asked God for guidance, and God had guided him here, and yet he was afraid of what else he might discover.

Nevertheless, once he had calmed himself, he went around the bed to the opposite side of the headboard, and checked the beading beneath the carved dome. Here too he discovered a hidden lever. The top of the bedpost came away in his hand and he drew out a second container. Then he went to the foot of the bed and pulled out a third, and then a fourth.

IT MUST HAVE
been nearly three in the morning when Lomeli left the papal suite. He opened the door sufficiently to enable him to peer beyond the crimson glow of the candles. He checked the landing. He listened. More than a hundred men, mostly in their seventies, were either sleeping or silently praying. The building was completely still.

He pulled the door shut behind him. Attempting to reseal it was pointless. The wax was broken, the ribbons trailed. The cardinals would discover it when they woke; it could not be helped. He crossed the landing to the staircase and started to climb. He remembered Bellini telling him that his room was directly above the Holy Father’s, and that the old man’s spirit seemed to rise up through the parquet floor: Lomeli did not doubt it.

He found number 301 and knocked softly. He had expected to have difficulty making himself heard without waking half the corridor, but to his surprise, almost immediately he heard movement, the door was opened, and there was Bellini, also dressed in his cassock. He regarded Lomeli with the sympathetic recognition of a fellow sufferer. ‘Hello, Jacopo. Can’t sleep, either? Come on in.’

Lomeli followed him into his suite. It was identical to the one downstairs. The lights in the sitting room were off, but the door to the bedroom was ajar and it was from there that the illumination came. He saw that Bellini had been in the middle of his devotions. His rosary was draped over the prie-dieu; the Divine Office was open on the stand.

Bellini said, ‘Would you like to pray with me a moment?’

‘Very much.’

The two men got down on their knees. Bellini bowed his head. ‘On this day we remember St Leo the Great. Lord God, You built Your Church on the firm foundation of the Apostle Peter, and You promised that the gates of hell would never overcome it. Supported by the prayers of Pope St Leo, we ask that You will keep the Church faithful to Your truth, and maintain it in enduring peace through our Lord. Amen.’

‘Amen.’

After a minute or two, Bellini said, ‘Can I get you anything? A glass of water?’

‘That would be good, thank you.’

Lomeli took a seat on the sofa. He felt at once exhausted and agitated – no state in which to make a momentous decision. He heard the sound of a tap running. Bellini called out from the bathroom, ‘I can’t offer you anything to go with it, I’m afraid.’ He came back into the sitting room carrying two tumblers of water and offered one to Lomeli. ‘So what is keeping you awake at this hour?’

‘Aldo, you must continue with your candidacy.’

Bellini groaned and sat down heavily in the armchair. ‘Please, no, not that again! I thought the matter was settled. I don’t want it and I can’t win it.’

‘Which of those considerations weighs the more heavily with you – the not wanting it or the not being able to win it?’

‘If two-thirds of my colleagues had deemed me worthy of the task, I would have set aside my doubts reluctantly and accepted the will of the Conclave. But they didn’t, so the question doesn’t arise.’ He watched as Lomeli withdrew three sheets of paper from inside his cassock and laid them on the coffee table. ‘What are those?’

‘The Keys of St Peter, if you are willing to pick them up.’

There was a long pause, and then Bellini said quietly, ‘I think I should ask you to leave.’

‘But you won’t, though, Aldo.’ Lomeli took a long drink of water. He hadn’t realised how thirsty he was. Bellini folded his arms and said nothing. Lomeli observed him over the rim of his glass as he drained it. He set it down. ‘Read them.’ He pushed the pages across the table towards Bellini. ‘It’s a report into the activities of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples – more specifically, it’s a report into the activities of its prefect, Cardinal Tremblay.’

Bellini frowned at the pages and glanced away. Finally, reluctantly, he unfolded his arms and picked them up.

Lomeli said, ‘It’s an overwhelming prima facie case that he’s guilty of simony – an offence, might I remind you, that’s stipulated in Holy Scripture: “Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the Apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!’”’

Bellini was still reading. ‘I am aware of what simony is, thank you.’

‘But has there ever been a clearer case of an attempt to purchase office or sacrament? Tremblay only obtained all those votes on the first ballot because he bought them – mostly from cardinals in Africa and South America. The names are all there – Cárdenas, Diène, Figarella, Garang, Papouloute, Baptiste, Sinclair, Alatas. He even paid them in cash, to make it harder to trace. And all of it done in the last twelve months, when he must have guessed the Holy Father’s pontificate was coming to an end.’

Bellini finished his reading and stared into the middle distance. Lomeli could see his powerful mind assimilating the information, testing the strength of the evidence. Eventually he said, ‘How do you know they didn’t use the money for completely legitimate purposes?’

‘Because I’ve seen their bank statements.’

‘Good God!’

‘The issue at this point isn’t the cardinals. I wouldn’t even accuse them of being corrupt, necessarily – perhaps they do intend to pass this money on to their churches but haven’t got round to it yet. Besides, their ballots have been burnt, so how could we ever prove who they voted for? What
is
absolutely clear, though, is that Tremblay ignored the official procedures and handed out tens of thousands of euros in a manner that was clearly designed to further his candidacy. And the automatic penalty for simony, I need hardly remind you, is excommunication.’

‘He’ll deny it.’

‘He can deny it all he likes: if this report becomes widely known, it will create the scandal to end all scandals. For one thing, surely it establishes that Woźniak was telling the truth when he said that the Holy Father, in his last official act, ordered Tremblay to resign.’

Bellini made no reply. He replaced the pages on the table. With his long fingers he squared them off meticulously, until they were perfectly aligned. ‘May I ask where you obtained all this information?’

‘From the Holy Father’s apartment.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

Bellini looked up at him, appalled. ‘You broke the seals?’

‘What choice did I have? You witnessed the scene at lunchtime. I had cause to suspect Tremblay had deliberately destroyed Adeyemi’s chances of the papacy by bringing that poor woman from Africa to embarrass him. He denied it, of course, so I needed to see if I could find proof. In all conscience I could not stand back and see such a man elected Pope without at least making some enquiries.’

‘And did he? Bring her here to embarrass Adeyemi?’

Lomeli hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He certainly asked for her transfer to Rome. But he said he did it at the request of the Holy Father. Maybe that part is true – the Holy Father does seem to have mounted some kind of espionage operation against his own colleagues. I found all manner of private emails and telephone transcripts hidden in his room.’

‘My God, Jacopo!’ Bellini groaned as if he were in physical pain. He threw back his head and gazed at the ceiling. ‘What a devil’s business this is!’

‘It is, I agree. But better we clear it up now, while the Conclave is still in session and we can discuss our affairs in secret, than we only discover the truth after we’ve elected a new Pope.’

‘And how are we to “clear it up” this late in our proceedings?’

‘For a start, we must make our brothers aware of the Tremblay report.’

‘How?’

‘We must show it to them.’

Bellini regarded him with renewed horror. ‘Are you serious? A document based on private bank records, stolen from the Holy Father’s apartment? It will smack of desperation! It could backfire on us.’

‘I’m not suggesting that you should do it, Aldo – absolutely not. You must keep well clear of it. Leave it to me, or perhaps to me and Sabbadin. I’m willing to take the consequences.’

‘That’s noble of you, and I’m grateful, of course. But the damage wouldn’t end with you. Word inevitably would leak out. Think of what it would do to the Church. I couldn’t possibly countenance becoming Pope in such circumstances.’

Lomeli could hardly credit what he was hearing. ‘What circumstances?’

‘The circumstances of a dirty trick – a break-in, a stolen document, the smearing of a brother cardinal. I would be the Richard Nixon of Popes! My pontificate would be tainted from the start, even assuming I could win the election, which I strongly doubt. You do appreciate that the person who stands to gain the most from this is Tedesco? The whole basis of his candidacy is that the Holy Father led the Church to disaster by his ill-thought-out attempts at reform. For him and his supporters, the revelation that the Holy Father was reading their bank accounts and commissioning reports accusing the Curia of institutional corruption would simply prove their point.’

‘I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.’

‘Oh don’t be naïve, Jacopo – you of all people! I have been fighting these battles for longer than you have, and the truth of the matter is that we can only serve God through the Church of His Son, Jesus Christ, and the Curia
is
the heart and brain of the Church, however imperfect it may be.’

Lomeli was suddenly conscious of a fearsome headache
beginning to form, positioned precisely behind his right eye – it was always brought on by exhaustion and nervous strain. On past form, if he was not careful, he would have to take to his bed for a day or two. Perhaps he should? There was a provision in the Apostolic Constitution for sick cardinals to cast their votes from their rooms in the Casa Santa Marta. Their ballot papers were to be collected by three nominated cardinals known as
infirmarii
, who were required to transfer their votes in a locked box to the Sistine Chapel. He was sorely tempted by the idea of lying in bed with the covers over his head and leaving it to others to sort out the mess. But immediately he asked God to forgive his weakness.

Bellini spoke quietly. ‘His pontificate was a war, Jacopo. People have no idea. It started on the first day, when he refused to wear the full regalia of his office and insisted on living here rather than in the Apostolic Palace, and it went on every day thereafter. Do you remember how he marched into that introductory meeting with the prefects of all the congregations in the Sala Bologna and demanded full financial transparency – proper books kept, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for every tiny bit of building work, receipts? Receipts! In the Administration of the Patrimony they didn’t even know what a receipt was! Then he brought in accountants and management consultants to comb through every file, and set them up in their own offices downstairs on the first floor of the Casa Santa Marta. And he wondered why the Curia hated it – and not just the old guard, either!

‘So then the leaks started, and every time he looked in a newspaper or at the television, there was some new embarrassment about how much his friends like Tutino were skimming off funds for the poor to have their apartments renovated or fly first class. And all the while in the background there was Tedesco and his gang sniping
away at him, practically accusing him of heresy whenever he said anything that sounded too much like common sense about gays or divorced couples or promoting more women. Hence the cruel paradox of his papacy: the more the outside world loved him, the more isolated he became inside the Holy See. By the end, he hardly trusted anybody. I’m not even sure he trusted me.’

‘Or me.’

‘No, I’d say he trusted you as well as he did anyone, otherwise he would have accepted your resignation when you offered it. But there’s no point in us fooling ourselves, Jacopo. He was frail and he was sick, and it was affecting his judgement.’ Bellini leaned forward and tapped the report. ‘If we use this, we will not be doing his memory a service. My advice is to put it back, or destroy it.’ He pushed it across the table to Lomeli.

‘And have Tremblay as Pope?’

‘We’ve had worse.’

Lomeli studied him for a moment, then got to his feet. The pain behind his eye was almost blinding. ‘You grieve me, Aldo. You do. Five times I cast my ballot for you, in the true belief that you were the right man to lead the Church. But now I see that the Conclave, in its wisdom, was correct, and I was wrong. You lack the courage required to be Pope. I’ll leave you alone.’

Three hours later, with the reverberations of the 6.30 bell still echoing around the building, Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, wearing full choir dress, let himself out of his room and moved quickly along the corridor, past the apartment of the Holy Father, with its unmistakable signs of forced entry, down the staircase and into the lobby.

None of the other cardinals had yet emerged. Beyond the plate-glass door, a security guard was checking the identity of the nuns who were arriving to prepare breakfast. It was not yet sufficiently light to distinguish their faces. In the pre-dawn gloom they were a line of moving shadows, such as one might see anywhere in the world at that hour – the poor of the earth beginning their day’s labour.

Lomeli walked quickly around the reception desk and into the office of Sister Agnes.