Conclave (4 page)

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.

‘How on earth does one pronounce this? Salso, is it?’

‘Khal-koh, Eminence,’ said Mandorff. ‘He’s Indian.’

‘Khal-koh. I’m obliged to you, Willi. Thank you.’

Lomeli sat and tested the chair. He was glad to see there was a cushion. And plenty of room to stretch one’s legs. He tilted back. Yes, it was comfortable enough. Given the amount of time they were likely to spend locked up in here, it needed to be. He had read the Italian press over breakfast. It was the last time he would see a newspaper until the election was over. The Vatican-watchers were unanimous in predicting a long and divisive Conclave. He prayed it would not be so, and that the Holy Spirit would enter the Sistine early and guide them to a name. But if it failed to materialise – and certainly there had been no sign of it during any of the fourteen congregations – then they could be stuck here for days.

He glanced along the length of the Sistine. It was strange how being seated just a metre above the mosaic floor altered the perspective of the place. In the cavity beneath their feet, the security experts had installed jamming devices to prevent electronic eavesdropping. However, a rival firm of consultants had insisted that such precautions were insufficient. They had claimed that laser beams aimed at the windows set high in the upper gallery could detect vibrations in the glass caused by any words spoken, and that these could be transcribed back into speech. They had recommended that every window should be boarded up. Lomeli had vetoed the proposal. The lack of daylight and the claustrophobia would have been intolerable.

He politely waved away Mandorff’s offer of help, pushed himself up from the chair and ventured further into the chapel. The freshly laid carpet smelled sweet, like barley in a threshing room. The workmen stood aside to let him pass; the Secretary of the College and the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations followed him. He could still hardly believe it was happening, that he was in charge. It was like a dream.

‘You know,’ he said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of an electric drill, ‘when I was a boy in ’58 – when I was still at the seminary in Genoa, in fact – and then again in ’63, before I was even ordained, I used to love looking at the pictures of those Conclaves. They had artists’ impressions in all the newspapers. I remember how the cardinals used to sit in canopied thrones around the walls during the voting. And when the election was over, one by one they’d pull a lever to collapse their canopies, apart from the cardinal who’d been chosen. Can you imagine that? Old Cardinal Roncalli, who never dreamed of even becoming a cardinal, let alone Pope? And Montini, who was so hated by the old guard there was
actually a shouting match in the Sistine Chapel during the voting? Imagine them sitting here in their thrones, and the men who had only a few minutes before been their equals queuing up to bow before them!’

He was aware of O’Malley and Mandorff listening politely. He reproached himself. He was talking like an old man. Nevertheless, the memories moved him. The thrones had been abandoned in 1965 after the Second Vatican Council, like so much else of the Church’s old traditions. These days the College of Cardinals was felt to be too large and too multinational for such Renaissance flummery. Still, there was a part of Lomeli that rather hankered after Renaissance flummery, and privately he thought the late Pope had occasionally gone too far in his endless harping on about simplicity and humility. An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.

He stepped over the electric cables and stood beneath
The Last Judgement
with his hands on his hips. He contemplated the mess. Shavings, sawdust, crates, cartons, strips of underlay. Particles of timber and fabric swirling in the shafts of light. Hammering. Sawing. Drilling. He felt suddenly appalled.

Chaos. Unholy chaos. Like a building site. And in the Sistine Chapel!

This time he had to shout over the racket. ‘I assume we
are
going to finish in time?’

‘They’ll work through the night if they have to,’ O’Malley said. ‘It will be fine, Eminence, it always is.’ He shrugged. ‘Italy, you know.’

‘Ah yes, Italy! Indeed.’ Lomeli stepped down from the altar. To the left was a door, and beyond it the small sacristy known as the Room of Tears. This was where the new Pope would go immediately after his election to be robed. It was a curious little chamber,
with a low vaulted ceiling and plain whitewashed walls, almost like a dungeon, crammed with furniture – a table, three chairs, a couch, and the throne that would be carried out for the new pontiff to sit on and receive the obeisance of the cardinal-electors. In the centre was a metal clothes rail on which hung three white papal cassocks wrapped in cellophane – small, medium and large – along with three rochets and three mozzettas. A dozen boxes contained various sizes of papal shoes. Lomeli took out a pair. They were stuffed with tissue paper. He turned them over in his hands. They were slip-ons, made of plain red Morocco leather. He raised them to his nose and sniffed. ‘One prepares for every eventuality, but one never knows. For example, Pope John the Twenty-third was too large to fit into the biggest cassock, so they had to button up the front and split the seam at the back – they say he stepped into it arms-first, like a surgeon into his gown, and then the papal tailor sewed him into it.’ He replaced the shoes in the box and crossed himself. ‘May God bless whoever is called to wear them.’

The three men left the sacristy and strolled back the way they had come, along the carpeted aisle, through the marble screen and down the wooden ramp into the vestibule. Incongruous in one corner, positioned side by side, stood two squat grey metal stoves. Both were about waist-high, one round and one square, each with a copper chimney. The two chimneys had been soldered together to form a single flue. Lomeli eyed it dubiously. It looked very rickety. It rose almost twenty metres, supported by a scaffolding tower, and disappeared through a hole cut in the window. In the round stove they were supposed to burn the voting papers after each ballot, to ensure its secrecy; in the square stove, they released smoke canisters – black to indicate an inconclusive ballot, white when they had a new Pope. The entire apparatus was archaic, absurd, and oddly wonderful.

‘The system has been tested?’ asked Lomeli.

O’Malley spoke patiently. ‘Yes, Eminence. Several times.’

‘Of course you would have done that.’ He patted the Irishman’s arm. ‘I’m sorry to fuss.’

They went out across the marbled expanse of the Sala Regia, down the staircase and out into the cobbled car park of the Cortile del Maresciallo. Large wheeled refuse bins overflowed with rubbish. Lomeli said, ‘They’ll be gone by tomorrow, I trust?’

‘Yes, Eminence.’

The trio passed under an archway and into the next courtyard, and the next, and the next – a labyrinth of secret cloisters, with the Sistine always on their left. Lomeli never failed to be disappointed by the dull dun brickwork of the chapel’s exterior. Why had every ounce of human genius been poured into that exquisite interior – almost too much genius, in his opinion: it gave one a kind of aesthetic indigestion – and yet seemingly no thought at all had been given to the outside? It looked like a warehouse, or a factory. Or perhaps that was the point.
The treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in God’s mystery—

His thoughts were interrupted by O’Malley, who was walking at his side. ‘By the way, Eminence, Archbishop Woźniak wants to have a word.’

‘Well I don’t think that’s possible, do you? The cardinals will begin arriving in an hour.’

‘I told him that, but he seemed rather agitated.’

‘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.