Conclave

by Robert Harris

Cautiously he pressed it. Nothing seemed to happen. But when he grasped the bedpost so that he could swing his feet back down to the floor, the top came away in his hand. Beneath it was an empty cavity with a flat, unvarnished wooden base, in the centre of which, so small as to be barely noticeable, was a tiny wooden knob. He grasped it between thumb and forefinger, pulled, and slowly withdrew a plain wooden case. There was a wonderful exactness to how it fitted.

Lomeli turned to the other pages, and here was his name again: to his astonishment, this time when he looked more closely he saw it was a summary of his personal bank records with the Istituto per le Opere di Religione—the Vatican Bank. A list of monthly totals going back more than a decade. The most recent entry, for 30 September, showed he had a closing balance of €38,734.76. He had not even known the figure himself. It was all the money he had in the world.

A number of cardinals from Africa and Asia had banked large amounts over the past twelve months. Across one page the Holy Father had scrawled, in shaky pencil, a quotation from St. Mark’s Gospel: Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers. After he had finished reading, Lomeli rolled up the papers tightly, put them back in the box and closed it. He could taste his disgust, like something rotten on his tongue. The Holy Father had secretly used his authority to obtain his colleagues’ private financial records from the IOR! Did he think they were all corrupt? Some of it came as no surprise to him: the scandal of the Curial apartments, for example, had been leaked to the press years ago. And the personal wealth of his brother cardinals he had long suspected—the other-worldly Luciani, who survived as Pope only for a month, was said to have been elected in 1978 because he was the only Italian cardinal who was clean. No, what shook him most, at first reading, was what the collection revealed about the state of mind of the Holy Father.

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.

Bellini said, “Would you like to pray with me a moment?” “Very much.”

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!” ’ ”

“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.”

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 G...

this ties back to the speech about the church being a body

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.

“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.”

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.

It was many years since the Dean of the College of Cardinals had used a photocopier. Indeed, now that he looked at one, he was not sure he ever had. He studied the array of settings, then began pressing buttons at random. A small screen lit up and displayed a message. He bent to read it: Error. He heard a sound behind him. Sister Agnes was standing in the doorway. Her unwavering gaze intimidated him. He wondered how long she had been watching his fumbling efforts.

“And one other thing, Sister—if I may. I would like to preserve the original document untouched, yet at the same time I wish to obscure certain words in the copies. Is there a way of doing that?” “Yes, Your Eminence. I believe that should be possible.” There was a trace of amusement in her voice. She lifted the lid of the machine. After she had made a copy of each page, she gave them to him. “You can add your changes to this version, and then this will be the one we copy. The machine is excellent. There will be very little deterioration in quality.”

He remembered how the late Holy Father always used to say that cash was the apple in their Garden of Eden, the original temptation that had led to so much sin. Cash sluiced through the Holy See in a constant stream that swelled to a river at Christmas and Easter, when bishops and monsignors and friars could be seen trooping through the Vatican carrying envelopes and attaché cases and tin boxes stuffed with notes and coins from the faithful. A papal audience could raise 100,000 euros in donations, the money pressed discreetly into the hands of the Holy Father’s attendants by his visitors as they took their leave while the Pope pretended not to notice. The money was supposed to be taken straight to the cardinals’ vault in the Vatican Bank. The Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples in particular, obliged to send money to its missions in the Third World, where bribery was rife and banks unreliable, liked to deal in large sums of cash. When he reached the end of the report, Lomeli went back to the beginning, to make sure he had removed every name. The redactions made it look even more sinister, like some classified file released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, the thing would reach the press eventually. Sooner or later, everything did. Had not Jesus Christ Himself prophesied, according to Luke’s Gospel, that nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light?

The blue light of the machine moving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, seemed to Lomeli to have the rhythm of a scythe.