Rogue's Gallery (3 page)

‘So am I.'

‘You've got the children, haven't you?'

‘I have. Thank God.'

‘Keep them away from your son.'

And he did that, insofar as he needed to. Martin, Inspector Platt told him, had almost certainly moved to Manchester, was not cooperating with the police investigation, and was almost sure to be sacked. Terence did not need to be a mother hen. Martin would have no use for his offspring.

It was now, he realised, that his feelings for the children underwent a change. He had always loved them
as grandparents do – with the addition of a scintilla of grudge that he had been handed them without so much as a ‘by your leave'. Now the love he felt for them had become overwhelming – the love of his life, eclipsing all thought of his own children, all memories of his own wife. They were his, his alone. They were wonderful kids, doing just what he had trained them to do, helping around the house, helping each other, their brains (even Marcus's lately) sharp as scissors, and retaining a remarkable amount of information and comment. They were his offspring, pure and simple, and he blessed a God he had up to now barely believed in for his good fortune.

Holidays were the best times of all. He could be with them all the time, apart from some token hours spent with their school friends. They would play a slimmed down form of cricket in Kirkstall Abbey Park, and when it rained they played Monopoly or whist, and he began teaching Victoria chess.

They were still children, not prodigies. They loved going to shopping centres, or the Victoria Quarter in Leeds. They had children's love of colour and mechanical toys. Out at the White Rose Centre they went mad in shop after shop, though to Terence's eyes they had just the same merchandise in the smaller branches in central Leeds. They each had a sum to spend that depended on their ages. They always consulted with him about what they were going to buy, except when it was sweets, a subject on which they consulted their own preferences. Larry was clutching a bag of liquorice torpedos one day in the White Rose Centre,
when only the three were with him, when suddenly he stopped in his tracks.

‘Daddy! Daddy!'

Something in Terence seemed to stop. A flick of the heart seemed to touch him and run through him, like the touch of a fern or a flower at a crowded wedding. He saw the three children run towards a flashy man, saw him draw to him a ridiculously flashy woman, then saw him as the children drew themselves up, smiling and laughing, and Terence heard his son, retreating hurriedly, say: ‘Sorry, kids. You've got the wrong man.'

Then suddenly a real pain struck – sudden, cruel, incredibly sharp. He staggered down on to his knees, and as he forced open his eyes he saw the three children looking at him. In their eyes he saw love and pity, but he saw also fear – a terror at what could await them, rejected as they were by both parents, and now left alone by the one person they worshipped for his generous, unwise love.

Cardinal Pascona stood a little aside from his fellow electors, observing the scene, conjecturing on the conversations that were animating every little knot of cardinals. The elderly men predominated, of course. The young men were not only in a minority, but they were unlikely to want any of their number to be elected. A long papacy was the last thing anybody wanted at this juncture. So instead of forming up into a clique of their own, they separated and mingled with the older men. They were all, in any case, related in some way or other to earlier popes, and their opinions for that reason tended to be discounted. That was unfair but understandable.

Cardinal Borromei.

That was the name that kept coming towards him, through the sticky and fetid air of the chapel. It was clear to Pascona that opinion was drifting – had already drifted – in that direction. Borromei was related to a previous pope, like the young men, but his promotion to the rank of
cardinal at the age of twenty-three was now so long ago that everybody had discounted it. He had proved his worth to the college by a long life of steady opinions, safe hands on the tiller, and general mediocrity. He was a man to ruffle no feathers, stir up no hornet's nests, raise no high winds.

Ideal.

Or ideal in the view of most of his fellow electors. And promising in other ways too: aged sixty-seven and obese from a fondness for rich and outré foods. That, and a partiality for the finest cognac, marked him out as likely to be present before long in the chapel in mummified form only. Cardinal Pascona stepped down from the chapel stalls and began mingling with the knots of his fellows. The conversations were going as he had expected.

‘The situation in France is becoming worrying,' that old fool da Ponti was saying to a little group of like-minded ciphers. ‘Borromei has been used to a mediation role in Venice. Couldn't be bettered at the present time.' He turned with mischievous intent to Pascona. ‘Wouldn't you agree?' He continued looking at him, and Pascona knew that any dissent would be discounted as the bile of an unsuccessful candidate. Everyone in the conclave assessed Pascona as
papabile
but there was a distinct reluctance to vote for him.

‘Absolutely,' Pascona said with a smile. ‘A perfectly safe pair of hands, and accustomed to bringing peace to warring factions.' He could not restrain himself from adding: ‘Though whether the Bourbons – fairweather friends to us, at their best – deserve the services of the Church's best mediator is another matter. The unkind might suggest that they deserve to stew in a juice of their own making.'

And he moved on, with a peaceful, delightful glide as if, having just dispensed a Christlike wisdom, he was currently walking on air.

The bowls from their light supper were just being cleared away. Pascona nodded in the direction of the robed and cowled figures who silently served them and waited for them to bring the silver goblets with their nightcaps in them. A vile red wine from Sicily in all probability. It was generally agreed among the cardinals that everything was done to make their stay incommunicado from the real world (if Rome and the Vatican was that) as unpleasant as possible. The aim of the Vatican officials was to persuade them to make a decision as quickly as they reasonably could so that a return to normality could be achieved. After all, for those officials, it was only a matter of one old man being succeeded by another old man. Nothing much happened during the last reign, and (unless a surprising choice was made) nothing much would happen in the next one.

Cardinal Pascona took up his goblet. It was indeed a vile wine, quite incredibly sour and thick. Prolonged indigestion or worse could well be the consequences for many of the elderly and infirm electors if they did more than sip at such muck. Confident in his own stomach, the cardinal drank, then went over to another group.

‘It is a sobering thought,' he injected into their small talk that was by now a mere prelude to slumber, ‘that the world is waiting on our decision, but when the choice is announced everyone will say “Who?”'

The cardinals smiled politely, though one or two of the smiles were sour. Not all of them liked to be thought totally
insignificant in the wider scheme of things. Now the cowled figures were going round extinguishing the nests of candles on the walls. They rolled out the down mattresses and put on top of them a pillow and a pile of blankets hardly needed in the close atmosphere of the Sistine. Beside these bundles they put a nightlight. No great comforts for a long night. Cardinals removed their red robes and lay down in their substantial undergarments. Bones creaked as they levered themselves down. Cardinal Pascona took great care not to creak himself. He was still fit and active in every way. That ought to be noticed. He was not going to live for ever, but he had a few years yet in him, and good ones too.

He lay on his back looking up. Nothing could be seen of the ceiling, but in the murky light cast by the few remaining nightlights he could distinguish the contours of the chapel. He had loved the chapel since he had first seen it, fifty years before. It spoke to him. Twenty years before, when he was barely forty, he had become part of a commission to report on the state of the chapel, in particular on the state of Mazzuoli's restorations at the beginning of the century. Pascona had sat on the scaffolding day after day, eventually dressing as a workman, sharing their bread and wine, getting to
know
every inch of the ceiling and the altar wall and the
Last Judgment
fresco. The commission had reported, but nothing had been done. Business as usual at the Vatican!

He altered the position of his bed so that his head was towards the altar. He did not want to think of the
Last Judgment.
Fine, terrifying, but the Christ was not his Christ – too commanding, too much an obvious man of action.
A general, an organiser, that was Michelangelo's Christ. Whereas his was gentler, more of a healer, more forgiving. He would be forgiving, surely?

He lay in the darkness, his eyes fixed on the panels he could not see, recreating the scenes he knew so well, that had been imprinted on his soul some twenty years before. The drunken Noah, a rare scene of comedy, and to the right of that panel his favourite of all the
ignudi
– the naked men holding medallions. A boy-man, infinitely inviting, conscious of his own appeal – delightful, inexhaustible.

But then he let his eye sweep across the darkness of the ceiling and fix on the central panel. The masterpiece among masterpieces in his opinion. The moment of creation. And in particular Adam: beautiful, languid before full awakening, holding hope and promise for all those of Cardinal Pascona's tastes. And so like his own beloved Sandro! The yearning face, the beautiful body – it was as if Sandro had been created for him in the likeness of our first father.

He slept.

He awoke next morning to the sounds of disturbance – shouting, choking, vomiting and groans. He leapt from his bed. The chapel was now fully illuminated and he ran to a little group of cardinals in a circle, gazing down in consternation. In the middle of the circle, writhing on the stone floor, lay the obese figure of Cardinal Borromei. Pascona could only make out one word of his cries.

‘
Aiudo
!'

He immediately took control.

‘Help he must have. Summon a doctor!'

Cardinal da Ponti stepped in with his usual statement of the obvious. ‘You know we cannot allow one in. The best we can do is get him out of the chapel to be treated there.'

‘And that of course is what we must do.'

‘But he should be here. Today might be the day when … And it might be just indigestion.'

Cardinal Pascona paused, momentarily uncertain.

‘Cardinal Borromei is someone who enjoys the pleasures of the table. But there have been few pleasures of the table on offer here in the chapel. Spartan fare every day so far. The wine last night was disgraceful …'

He was about to put aside his indecision and insist that the tormented man be removed and treated outside the chapel when the whole body of cardinals was transfixed by a terrible cry. The flabby body on the floor arched, shuddered, then sank motionless back to the floor.

‘
E morto
?' someone whispered.

Dead was certainly what he seemed to be. Cardinal Pascona knelt by the body, felt his chest, then put his face and ear close to his mouth. He shook his head.

‘Dead,' he said. ‘We must – with the permission of the Cardinal Chamberlain – remove the body. Then we must put out a statement to the waiting crowds. I think it should specify a
colpo di sangue
as the cause of death. A stroke.'

‘But it didn't look—'

Cardinal Pascona put up his hand and turned to Cardinal da Ponti. ‘I specify that because it is easily understood by the least sophisticated member of the crowd. Everyone there will have had some family member – a grandfather, an uncle – who has died of a stroke. It is a question of getting
the message across with the least fuss. If some amendment is needed after the doctors have examined him – so be it. But I do not anticipate any need for it.'

‘But a death in conclave – and
such
a death: a man who, if I might put it so, was the
favourite.
'

Cardinal Pascona was brusque in the face of such tastelessness.

‘But what could be more likely? A large number of elderly men, shut up together in an unhealthy atmosphere, on a diet which – to put it mildly – is not what they are accustomed to. And the candidate in a state of extreme excitement. It has happened before, and it is a wonder that it hasn't happened more often.'

The thought that there had been a precedent excited them all.

‘Oh,
has
it happened?' asked Cardinal Morosi, a new boy of fifty-five.

‘Indeed. The procession from the chapel out to the Great Square at the time of Pope Benedict XIV's inauguration was delayed for two hours by one of the cardinals falling dead. Excitement, of course.'

‘But then the choice had been made,' muttered Cardinal Morosi. Pascona ignored him. He addressed the whole college, summoned from their beds or from the
prima colazione
by that terrible last cry.

‘The need now is to remove, with all appropriate ceremonies and mourning, the deceased brother, and then to continue our deliberations. The whole world awaits our decision. We must not be found wanting at this crisis in our history, and that of the world.'

It struck nobody that for Cardinal Pascona ‘the whole world' meant effectively the western half of Europe. They busied themselves, summoned the waiting monks who were clearing away the breakfast things, and had Cardinal Borromei removed from the chapel. Having someone willing and able to take charge enlivened their torpid and ageing intellects, and they settled down to discussions in groups with zest and vigour. What was a death, after all, to men for whom it was only a beginning?

Yet, oddly, the initiative and address of Cardinal Pascona had an effect on the discussion which was the reverse of what might have been expected. Put bluntly (which it never was in this conclave), it might have been summed up in the phrase ‘Who does he think he is?' The fact that they were all grateful to him for taking charge, were conscious that he had avoided several hours of indecision and in-fighting, did not stop them asking by what right he had taken control, at that moment of crisis, in the affairs of the Church.

‘He takes a great deal too much on himself,' one of them said. And it did his chances no good at all.

For though Pascona was
papabile
, he was not the only one to be so. There had been a minor stir of interest in the early days of the conclave in favour of Cardinal Fosca, Archbishop of Palermo. He was a man who had no enemies, usually spoke sense, and was two or three years on the right side of senility. True, there was one thing against him. This was not the fact that he had something of an obsession about a rag-tag-and-bobtail collection of criminals in his native island. It was the Mafia this, the Mafia that the whole time, as if they were set to take over
the world. That the cardinals shrugged off and suffered. But what was really against him in many cardinals' eyes was his height. He was barely five feet tall (or 1.5 metres, as the newfangled notions from France had it). Just to be seen by the crowd he would have to have several cushions on his throne when he went out on the balcony to bless the masses. It was likely to cause ridicule, and the Church was aware, since Voltaire, of how susceptible it was to wit, irony and proletarian laughter.

But suddenly, it seemed, Fosca was a decidedly desirable candidate.

Pascona watched and listened in the course of the day. Ballot succeeded ballot, with nothing so democratic as a declaration of the result. But the word went around: the vote for Fosca was inching up, that for Pascona slowly ebbing away. The cardinal went around, talking to all and sundry with imperturbable urbanity – amiable to all, forswearing all controversy. He was among the first to collect his frugal evening meal. By then his mood was contemplative. He gazed benignly at the monks serving the
stufato
, then looked down in the direction of the cardinal from Palermo. As he helped himself to the rough bread there was the tiniest of nods from one of the cowled heads.

‘Dear Michelangelo, help one of your greatest admirers and followers,' he prayed that night on his narrow bed. ‘Let the vote go to a follower of yourself, as well as a devout servant of Christ.'

Before he slept his mind went not to the
ignudi
, nor to the awakening Adam in the great central panel, but away from the altar to the expelled Adam as, with Eve, and newly
conscious of sin, he began the journey out of Paradise.

He smiled, as thoughts of Sandro and their forthcoming pleasures when they were united again warmed his ageing body.