His first thought was that there must be a concealed drawer. He got back down on his knees and went round feeling under the frame, but his hands encountered only empty space. He tried lifting the mattress, even though he knew it was a waste of time: the same Holy Father who beat Bellini at chess most evenings would never have done anything so obvious. Finally, when all other options were exhausted, he contemplated the bedposts.
First he tried the one to the right of the headboard. Its top was a dome of thick dark polished oak. At a casual glance it appeared to be all of a piece with its heavy support. But when he ran his fingers around the beading, one of the small carved discs felt slightly loose. He switched on the bedside lamp, climbed up on to the mattress, and examined it. 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. Fully extracted, it was about the size of a shoebox. He shook it. Something rustled within.
He sat down on the mattress and slid off the cover. Inside, rolled up, were a few dozen documents. He flattened them out. Columns of figures. Bank statements. Money transfers. Apartment addresses. Many of the pages had pencilled notations in the Holy Father’s tiny, angular handwriting. Suddenly his own name jumped out at him: Lomeli. Apartment no.2. Palace of the Holy Office. 445 square metres!! It appeared to be in a list of official apartments occupied by serving and retired members of the Curia, prepared for the Pope by APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. The names of all the cardinal-electors who had apartments were underlined: Bellini (410 square metres), Adeyemi (480 square metres), Tremblay (510 square metres)… At the foot of the document, the Pope had added his own name: The Holy Father. Casa Santa Marta. 50 square metres!!
There was an addendum attached:
For the eyes of the Pontiff only
Most Holy Father,
As far as we can ascertain, the overall surface area of the APSA patrimony totals 347,532 square metres, with a potential value in excess of €2,700,000,000, but a stated book value of €389,600,000. The shortfall in revenue would appear to indicate a paid occupancy rate of only 56%. It appears therefore, as Your Holiness suspected, that much of the income is not being properly stated.
I have the honour to be,
Your Holiness’s most devoted and obedient child,
D. Labriola (Special Commissioner)
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.
He ran his eye over the hundreds of names listed. He felt grubby merely to be reading them, yet he couldn’t stop himself. Bellini had €42,112 on deposit, Adeyemi had €121,865 and Tremblay €519,732 (a figure that earned another set of papal exclamation marks). Some cardinals had tiny balances – Tedesco’s was a mere €2,821, and Benítez seemingly didn’t have an account at all – but others were rich men. The Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, Calogero Scozzazi, who had worked for a time at the IOR in the days of Marcinkus, and who had actually been investigated for money-laundering, was worth €2,643,923. 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 Gospeclass="underline" 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 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.
14 Simony
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?’