Bellini spoke quietly. ‘His pontificate was a war, Jacopo. People have no idea. It started on the first day, when he refused to wear the full regalia of his office and insisted on living here rather than in the Apostolic Palace, and it went on every day thereafter. Do you remember how he marched into that introductory meeting with the prefects of all the congregations in the Sala Bologna and demanded full financial transparency – proper books kept, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for every tiny bit of building work, receipts? Receipts! In the Administration of the Patrimony they didn’t even know what a receipt was! Then he brought in accountants and management consultants to comb through every file, and set them up in their own offices downstairs on the first floor of the Casa Santa Marta. And he wondered why the Curia hated it – and not just the old guard, either!
‘So then the leaks started, and every time he looked in a newspaper or at the television, there was some new embarrassment about how much his friends like Tutino were skimming off funds for the poor to have their apartments renovated or fly first class. And all the while in the background there was Tedesco and his gang sniping away at him, practically accusing him of heresy whenever he said anything that sounded too much like common sense about gays or divorced couples or promoting more women. 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. But there’s no point in us fooling ourselves, Jacopo. He was frail and he was sick, and it was affecting his judgement.’ Bellini leaned forward and tapped the report. ‘If we use this, we will not be doing his memory a service. My advice is to put it back, or destroy it.’ He pushed it across the table to Lomeli.
‘And have Tremblay as Pope?’
‘We’ve had worse.’
Lomeli studied him for a moment, then got to his feet. The pain behind his eye was almost blinding. ‘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.’
Three hours later, with the reverberations of the 6.30 bell still echoing around the building, Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, wearing full choir dress, let himself out of his room and moved quickly along the corridor, past the apartment of the Holy Father, with its unmistakable signs of forced entry, down the staircase and into the lobby.
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.
Lomeli walked quickly around the reception desk and into the office of Sister Agnes.
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. He raised his hands helplessly. ‘I am trying to make some copies of a document.’
‘If you give it to me, Your Eminence, I’ll do it for you.’
He hesitated. The top sheet was headed: Report prepared for the Holy Father into the alleged offence of simony committed by Cardinal Joseph Tremblay. Executive Summary. Strictly confidential. It was dated 19 October, the day of the Holy Father’s death. Finally, he decided he had no choice and handed it to her. She glanced at it without comment. ‘How many copies does Your Eminence require?’
‘One hundred and eighteen.’
Her eyes widened slightly.
‘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.’ She found him a pen and pulled out a chair so that he could sit at the desk. Tactfully, she turned away and opened a cupboard to take out a new packet of paper.
He went through the document line by line, carefully inking out the names of the eight cardinals to whom Tremblay had given cash. Cash! he thought, tightening his mouth. 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? It was a fine calculation as to whose reputation would be the more damaged, Tremblay’s or the Church’s. He gave the amended report to Sister Agnes, and watched as she began to make one hundred and eighteen copies of each page. 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.
He muttered, ‘God forgive me.’
Sister Agnes glanced at him. She must have known by now what she was printing: she could hardly have avoided seeing it. ‘If your heart is pure, Your Eminence,’ she said, ‘He will forgive you.’
‘Bless you, Sister, for your generosity. I believe my heart is pure. But how can any of us say for sure why we act as we do? In my experience, the basest sins are often committed for the highest motives.’