conclave

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Very faintly through the broken windows came the sound of sirens, and then a helicopter.

Benítez alone remained seated. With the cardinals at his back and on either side looking down at him, applauding him, he appeared, at his moment of triumph, even smaller and more out of place than before – a tiny figure, head still bowed in prayer, his face obscured by a tumbling lock of black hair just as it had been the first time Lomeli saw him with his rosary in Sister Agnes’s office.

Thus he was at once terrified that he had brought God’s judgement down upon his own head and yet simultaneously elated to be given proof of His existence.

He must have spent at least ten minutes praying to St Peter, sunk so deep in thought that he never heard the cardinals being ushered across the Sala Regia and down the staircase to the minibuses. Nor did he hear the door open and O’Malley come up behind him. A wonderful feeling of peace and certainty had stolen upon him. He knew what he should do.

At that instant he found himself eye to eye with Michelangelo’s depiction of the damned being turfed out of their barque and dragged down to hell. Dear Lord, forgive my sin. But he could not stop now.

‘And what about the Conclave, Eminence?’ O’Malley said. ‘Does it simply continue as before?’

Lomeli did not know what to reply.

He did not wish to be Pope – of that much he was certain. He prayed with all his heart to be spared that Calvary. My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. And should his prayer go unheeded and the cup be offered? In that event he was resolved to refuse it, just as poor Luciani had tried to do at the end of the first Conclave of ’78. Refusal to take one’s place upon the cross was regarded as a grievous sin of selfishness and cowardice, which was why Luciani had yielded in the end to the pleading of his colleagues. But Lomeli was determined to stand firm.

‘But under what provision of the constitution is this permitted?’

‘Under what provision is it forbidden?’

On the far side of the room, Lomeli saw Benítez tentatively raise his hand.

‘Your Eminence, I wish to say something.’

If he had been told four days ago that on the eighth ballot he would vote for a man whom he had never met, whom he was not then even aware was a cardinal, and who even now was largely a mystery to him, he would have dismissed the notion as a fantasy. But he did it even so. In a firm hand, in capital letters, he wrote: BENÍTEZ, and when he looked at it again, it felt strangely right, so that when he stood and flourished his folded ballot paper for all to see, he was able to make his oath with a clean heart.

To his amazement, he realised the prospect did not terrify him. There had come into his head, unbidden, the words of our Saviour Jesus Christ: Do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given you in that hour.

If God had granted one the gift of self-knowledge, then surely one had an obligation to use it? The loneliness, the isolation, the agony of the papacy he was willing to endure. What was unconscionable was to have a Pope who was insufficiently holy. That would be the sin.

And lastly he prayed for himself, that he might be forgiven for breaking his oath, and that in his hopelessness he might yet be sent a sign telling him what he should do to save the Conclave.

Lomeli’s bureaucratic mind was nothing if not logical.

He was aware that the cardinals had started clapping again, in approval of the name. He knelt before the new Holy Father. Smiling in alarm, Benítez raised himself out of his seat, leaned across the desk and tugged at Lomeli’s mozzetta, indicating that he should get back on his feet. ‘It should be you in this place,’ he whispered. ‘I voted for you in every ballot and I shall need your advice. I would like you to continue as Dean of the College.’

Lomeli grasped Benítez’s hand as he hauled himself up. He whispered in return, ‘And my first piece of advice, Your Holiness, would be to make no promises of office just yet.’

There was a communal sense of relief. Even Tedesco grudgingly acknowledged it. The Holy Spirit had done its work. They had picked the right man.

He was not so solipsistic as to believe that a bomb had gone off merely because he had written his own name on a piece of paper. But he was not so prosaic that he did not believe in the interconnectedness of things.

It seemed to promise both a return to tradition and yet a departure from it – exactly the sort of ambiguity the Curia relished. And it fitted the dignified, childlike, graceful, softly spoken Benítez to perfection.

He passed Rudgard, who was on his way back to his seat, and tried to give him an encouraging smile, but the American looked away. Nor did any of the seated cardinals meet his eye. At first he thought it was hostility, then he realised it was the first manifestation of a new and terrifying deference: they were beginning to think he might be Pope.

As he walked towards the dining room, he saw Bellini standing alone. He took him by the arm and whispered, ‘I have decided to announce what has happened. Am I doing the right thing?’

‘I don’t know. You must judge. But I’ll support you whatever happens.’

He was like the man in Christ’s sermon: out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks – regardless of whether that heart’s abundance be good or bad, wise or foolish.

It seemed to me more of a sin to correct His handiwork than to leave my body as it was. So I cancelled my appointment and returned to Baghdad.’