Conclave Read online

  Bellini shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid he was already dead when he was discovered.’

  ‘Who found him? When?’ Lomeli beckoned to Archbishop Woźniak to join them. ‘Janusz, I know this is hard for you, but we’ll need to prepare a detailed statement. Who discovered the Holy Father’s body?’

  ‘I did, Your Eminence.’

  ‘Well, thank God, that’s something.’ Of all the members of the Papal Household, Woźniak was the one who had been closest to the Pope. It was comforting to think that he had been the first on the scene. And also, purely from a public relations point of view, better him than a security guard; better him by far than a nun. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I called the Holy Father’s doctor.’

  ‘And how quickly did he arrive?’

  ‘Immediately, Eminence. He always spent the night in the room next door.’

  ‘But there was nothing to be done?’

  ‘No. We had all the equipment necessary for resuscitation. But it was too late.’

  Lomeli thought it over. ‘You discovered him in bed?’

  ‘Yes. He was quite peaceful, almost as he looks now. I thought he was asleep.’

  ‘This was at what time?’

  ‘Around eleven thirty, Eminence.’

  ‘Eleven thirty?’ That was more than two and a half hours ago.

  Lomeli’s surprise must have shown in his face, because Woźniak said quickly, ‘I would have called you sooner, but Cardinal Tremblay took charge of the situation.’

  Tremblay’s head turned at the mention of his name. It was such a small room. He was only a couple of paces away; he was beside them in an instant. Despite the hour, his appearance was fresh and handsome, his thick silver hair immaculately coiffed, his body trim and carried lightly. He looked like a retired athlete who had made a successful transition to television sports presenter; Lomeli vaguely remembered that he had played ice hockey in his youth. The French Canadian said, in his careful Italian, ‘I’m so sorry, Jacopo, if you feel offended by the delay in informing you – I know His Holiness had no closer colleagues than you and Aldo – but I felt as Camerlengo that my first responsibility was to secure the integrity of the Church. I told Janusz to hold off from calling you so that we could have a brief period of calm to ascertain all the facts.’ He pressed his hands together piously, as if in prayer.

  The man was insufferable. Lomeli said, ‘My dear Joe, my only concerns are for the soul of the Holy Father and the well-being of the Church. Whether I am told a thing at midnight or at two is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. I am sure you acted for the best.’

  ‘It’s simply that when a Pope dies unexpectedly, any mistakes made in the initial shock and confusion can lead to all manner of malicious rumours afterwards. You only have to remember the tragedy of Pope John Paul I – we’ve spent the past forty years trying to convince the world he wasn’t murdered, and all because nobody wanted to admit his body was discovered by a nun. This time, there must be no discrepancies in the official account.’

  From within his cassock he drew a folded sheet of paper and handed it to Lomeli. It was warm to the touch. (Hot off the press, thought Lomeli.) Neatly printed on a word processor, it was headed, in English, ‘Timeline’. Lomeli ran his finger down the columns of type. At 7.30 p.m., the Holy Father had eaten with Woźniak in the cordoned-off space reserved for him in the dining room of the Casa Santa Marta. At 8.30, he had retired to his apartment and had read and meditated on a passage from The Imitation of Christ (Chapter 8, ‘Of the dangers of intimacy’). At 9.30, he had gone to bed. At 11.30, Archbishop Woźniak had checked to see that he was well and had failed to observe any vital functions. At 11.34, Dr Giulio Baldinotti, seconded from the Vatican’s San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, commenced emergency treatment. A combination of cardiac massage and defibrillation was attempted, without result. The Holy Father had been pronounced dead at 12.12 a.m.

  Cardinal Adeyemi came up behind Lomeli and began reading over his shoulder. The Nigerian always smelled strongly of cologne. Lomeli could feel his warm breath on the side of his neck. The power of Adeyemi’s physical presence was too much for him. He gave him the document and turned away, only to have more papers thrust into his hand by Tremblay.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘The Holy Father’s most recent medical records. I had them brought over. This is an angiogram conducted last month. You can see here,’ said Tremblay, holding up an X-ray to the central light, ‘there is evidence of blockage . . .’

  The monochrome image was tendrilled, fibrous – sinister. Lomeli recoiled. What in God’s name was the point of it? The Pope had been in his eighties. There was nothing suspicious about his passing. How long was he supposed to live? It was his soul upon which they should be focused at this moment, not his arteries. He said firmly, ‘Release the data if you must, but not the photograph. It’s too intrusive. It demeans him.’

  Bellini said, ‘I agree.’

  ‘I suppose,’ added Lomeli, ‘you’ll tell us next there will have to be an autopsy?’

  ‘Well, there are bound to be rumours if there isn’t.’

  ‘This is true,’ said Bellini. ‘Once, God explained all mysteries. Now He has been usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age.’

  Adeyemi had finished reading the timeline. He took off his gold-framed glasses and sucked on the stem. ‘What was the Holy Father doing before seven thirty?’

  Woźniak answered. ‘He was celebrating vespers, Eminence, here in the Casa Santa Marta.’

  ‘Then we should say so. It was his last sacramental act, and implies a state of grace, especially as there was no opportunity for the viaticum.’

  ‘A good point,’ said Tremblay. ‘I’ll add it.’

  ‘And going back further – the time before vespers,’ Adeyemi persisted. ‘What was he doing then?’

  ‘Routine meetings, as far as I understand it.’ Tremblay sounded defensive. ‘I don’t have all the facts. I was concentrating on the hours immediately before his death.’

  ‘Who was the last to have a scheduled meeting with him?’

  ‘I believe, in fact, that may have been me,’ said Tremblay. ‘I saw him at four. Is that right, Janusz? Was I the last?’

  ‘You were, Eminence.’

  ‘And how was he when you spoke to him? Did he give any indication he was ill?’

  ‘No, none that I recall.’

  ‘What about later, when he had dinner with you, Archbishop?’

  Woźniak looked at Tremblay, as if seeking his permission before replying. ‘He was tired. Very, very tired. He had no appetite. His voice sounded hoarse. I should have realised—’ He stopped.

  ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with.’ Adeyemi returned the document to Tremblay and put his glasses back on. There was a careful theatricality to his movements. He was always conscious of his dignity. A true prince of the Church. ‘Put in all of the meetings he had that day. It will show how hard he was working, right up to the end. It will prove there was no reason for anyone to suspect he was ill.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Tremblay, ‘isn’t there a danger that if we release his full schedule, it will look as if we were placing a huge burden on a sick man?’

  ‘The papacy is a huge burden. People need to be reminded of that.’

  Tremblay frowned and said nothing. Bellini glanced at the floor. A slight but definite tension had arisen, and it took Lomeli a few moments to realise why. Reminding people of the immense burden of the papacy carried the obvious implication that it was an office best filled by a younger man – and Adeyemi, at just over sixty, was nearly a decade younger than the other two.

  Eventually Lomeli said, ‘May I suggest that we amend the document to include the Holy Father’s attendance at vespers, but otherwise issue it as it stands? And that as a precaution we also prepare a second document listing the Holy Father’s appointments for the entire day, and keep it in reserve in case it becomes necessary?’


  Adeyemi and Tremblay exchanged brief looks, then nodded, and Bellini said drily, ‘Thank God for our Dean. I can see we may have need of his diplomatic skills in the days to come.’

  *

  Later, Lomeli would look back on this as the moment when the contest for the succession began.

  All three cardinals were known to have factions of supporters inside the electoral college: Bellini, the great intellectual hope of the liberals for as long as Lomeli could remember, a former rector of the Gregorian University and former Archbishop of Milan; Tremblay, who as well as serving as Camerlengo was Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, a candidate therefore with links to the Third World, who had the advantage of seeming to be an American without the disadvantage of actually being one; and Adeyemi, who carried within him like a divine spark the revolutionary possibility, endlessly fascinating to the media, that he might one day become ‘the first black Pope’.

  And slowly, as he observed the manoeuvring begin in the Casa Santa Marta, the realisation came upon Lomeli that it would fall to him, as Dean of the College of Cardinals, to manage the election. It was a duty he had never expected to perform. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier, and although he had supposedly been cured, he had always assumed he would die before the Pope. He had only ever thought of himself as a stopgap. He had tried to resign. But now it seemed he would be responsible for the organisation of a Conclave in the most difficult of circumstances.

  He closed his eyes. If it is Your will, O Lord, that I should have to discharge this duty, I pray that You will give me the wisdom to perform it in a manner that will strengthen our Mother the Church . . .

  He would have to be impartial – that first and foremost. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Has anyone telephoned Cardinal Tedesco?’

  ‘No,’ said Tremblay. ‘Tedesco, of all people? Why? Do you think we need to?’

  ‘Well, given his position in the Church, it would be a courtesy—’

  ‘A courtesy?’ cried Bellini. ‘What has he done to deserve courtesy? If any one man can be said to have killed the Holy Father, he did!’

  Lomeli had sympathy for his anguish. Of all the late Pope’s critics, Tedesco had been the most savage, pushing his attacks on the Holy Father and on Bellini to the point, some thought, of schism. There had even been talk of excommunication. Nevertheless, he enjoyed a devoted following among the traditionalists, which was bound to make him a prominent candidate for the succession.

  ‘Still, I should call him,’ said Lomeli. ‘It will be better if he hears the news from us rather than from some reporter. God knows what he might say off the cuff.’

  He lifted the desk telephone from its cradle and pressed zero. An operator, her voice shaky with emotion, asked how she could help him.

  ‘Please put me through to the Patriarch’s Palace in Venice – to Cardinal Tedesco’s private line.’

  He assumed there would be no answer – after all, it was not yet three in the morning – but the phone didn’t even finish its first ring before it was picked up. A gruff voice said, ‘Tedesco.’

  The other cardinals were talking quietly with one another about the timetable for the funeral. Lomeli held up his hand for silence and turned his back so he could concentrate on the call.

  ‘Goffredo? It’s Lomeli. I’m afraid I have terrible news. The Holy Father has just passed away.’ There was a long pause. Lomeli could hear some sort of noise in the background. A footstep? A door? ‘Patriarch? Did you hear what I said?’

  Tedesco’s voice sounded hollow in the cavernousness of his official residence. ‘Thank you, Lomeli. I shall pray for his soul.’

  There was a click. The line went dead. ‘Goffredo?’ Lomeli held the phone at arm’s length and frowned at it.

  Tremblay said, ‘Well?’

  ‘He already knew.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ From inside his cassock Tremblay took out what appeared to be a prayer book bound in black leather, but which turned out to be a mobile phone.

  ‘Of course he knew,’ said Bellini. ‘This place is full of his supporters. He probably knew before we did. If we’re not careful, he will make the official announcement himself, in St Mark’s Square.’

  ‘It sounded as though there was someone with him . . .’

  Tremblay was stroking his screen rapidly with his thumb, scrolling through data. ‘That’s entirely possible. Rumours that the Pope is dead are already trending on social media. We shall have to move quickly. May I make a suggestion?’

  And now came the second disagreement of the night, as Tremblay urged that the transfer of the Pope’s body to the mortuary should take place straight away rather than be delayed until the morning (‘We cannot allow ourselves to fall behind the news cycle; it would be a disaster’). He proposed that the official announcement should be released at once and that two film crews from the Vatican Television Centre plus three pool photographers and a newspaper reporter should be allowed into the Piazza Santa Marta to record the transfer of the body from the building to the ambulance. His reasoning was that if they moved quickly, the footage would be broadcast live and the Church would be sure to have maximum exposure. In the great Asian centres of the Catholic faith it was morning; in Latin and North America, evening; only the Europeans and the Africans would be obliged to wake to the news.

  Again, Adeyemi objected. For the sake of the dignity of the office, he argued, they should wait for daylight, and for a hearse and a proper casket that could be taken out draped with the papal flag. Bellini countered sharply: ‘The Holy Father would not have cared a fig about dignity. It was as one of the humble of the earth that he chose to live, and it is as one of the humble poor that he would wish to be seen in death.’

  Lomeli concurred. ‘Remember, this was a man who refused to ride in a limousine. An ambulance is the nearest we can give him now to public transport.’

  Nevertheless, Adeyemi would not change his mind. In the end he had to be outvoted three to one. It was also agreed that the Pope’s body should be embalmed. Lomeli said, ‘But we must ensure it’s done properly.’ He had never forgotten filing past Pope Paul VI’s body in St Peter’s in 1978: in the August heat, the face had turned greyish-green, the jaw had sagged, and there was a definite whiff of corruption. Yet even that ghoulish embarrassment wasn’t as bad as the occasion twenty years previously, when Pope Pius XII’s body had fermented in its coffin and exploded like a firecracker outside the church of St John Lateran. ‘And another thing,’ he added. ‘We must make sure no one takes any photographs of the body.’ That indignity, too, had been inflicted upon Pius XII, whose corpse had been shown in news magazines all over the world.

  Tremblay went off to make the arrangements with the media office of the Holy See, and less than thirty minutes later, the ambulance men – their phones confiscated – came and took the Holy Father out of the papal apartment in a white plastic body bag strapped to a wheeled stretcher. They paused with it on the second floor while the four cardinals went down ahead in the elevator so that they could meet it in the hotel lobby and escort it off the premises. The humility of the body in death, the smallness of it, the little rounded foetus shape of the feet and the head, seemed to Lomeli to make a profound statement. And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre . . . The children of the Son of Man were all equal at the last, he reflected; all were dependent on God’s mercy for the hope of resurrection.

  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!’