Robert Harris

Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics.

The man was insufferable. Lomeli said, ‘My dear Joe,

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

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.

So much for humility, thought Lomeli. So much for the poor of the earth. It could have been the motorcade of a dictator.

An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.

Servus fidelis. A faithful servant. It was on his coat of arms. A prosaic motto for a prosaic man.

The prelates came closer. Lomeli squared his shoulders. He recognised two from his briefing book. On the left was the Brazilian Cardinal Sá, Archbishop of São Salvador de Bahia (aged 60, liberation theologian, a possible Pope, but not this time), and on the right, the elderly Chilean, Cardinal Contreras, Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago (aged 77, arch-conservative, one-time confessor of General Augusto Pinochet). Between them walked a small, dignified figure it took him longer to place: Cardinal Hierra, the Archbishop of Mexico City, of whom Lomeli remembered nothing except his name. He guessed at once that they had been lunching together, doubtless trying to agree on a common candidate. There were nineteen Latin American cardinal-electors, and if they were to vote in a block they
would be formidable. But one had only to observe the body language of the Brazilian and the Chilean, the way they refused even to look at one another, to realise that such a common front was impossible. They’d probably struggled even to agree on which restaurant to meet in.

What an extraordinary variety of races they represented – what a testament to the breadth of the Universal Church that men born so different should be bound together by their faith in God!

‘Be on your guard, my brothers, against developing the vices of all courtiers down the ages – the sins of vanity and intrigue and of malice and gossip.’