The Confessor ga-3 Read online

  Sister Teresa was not so sure. She was among the handful of people inside the Vatican who knew how much Pietro Lucchesi had not wanted this job. When he had arrived in Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, and the conclave that would choose his successor, the elfin, soft-spoken patriarch of Venice was not considered remotely papabile, a man possessed with the qualities necessary to be pope. Nor did he give even the slightest indication that he was interested. The fifteen years he had spent working in the Roman Curia were the unhappiest of his career, and he had no desire to return to the back-biting village on the Tiber, even as its lord high mayor. Lucchesi had intended to cast his vote for the archbishop of Buenos Aires, whom he had befriended during a tour of Latin America, and return quietly to Venice.

  But inside the conclave, things did not go as intended. As their predecessors had done time and time again over the centuries, Lucchesi and his fellow princes of the church, one hundred thirty in all, entered the Sistine Chapel in solemn procession while singing the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. They gathered beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment, with its humbling depiction of tormented souls rising toward heaven to face the wrath of Christ, and prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide their hand. Then each cardinal stepped forward individually, placed his hand atop the Holy Gospels, and swore an oath binding him to irrevocable silence. When this task was complete, the master of papal liturgical ceremonies commanded, "Extra Omnes"--Everyone out--and the conclave began in earnest.

  The Pole had not been content to leave matters solely in the hands of the Holy Spirit. He had stacked the College of Cardinals with prelates like himself, doctrinaire hardliners determined to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and the power of Rome over all else. Their candidate was an Italian, a consummate creature of the Roman Curia: Cardinal Secretary of State Marco Brindisi.

  The moderates had other ideas. They pleaded for a truly pastoral papacy. They wanted the occupant of the throne of St. Peter to be a gentle and pious man; a man who would be willing to share power with the bishops and limit the influence of the Curia; a man who could reach across the lines of geography and faith to heal those corners of the globe torn by war and poverty. Only a non-European suitable to the moderates. They believed the time had come for a Third World pope.

  The first ballots revealed the conclave to be hopelessly divided, and soon both factions were searching for a way out of the impasse. On the final ballot of the day, a new name surfaced. Pietro Lucchesi, the patriarch of Venice, received five votes. Hearing his name read five times inside the sacred chamber of the Sistine Chapel, Lucchesi closed his eyes and blanched visibly. A moment later, when the ballots were placed into the nero for burning, several cardinals noticed that Lucchesi was praying.

  That evening, Pietro Lucchesi politely refused an invitation to dine with a group of fellow cardinals, adjourning to his room at the Dormitory of St. Martha instead to meditate and pray. He knew how conclaves worked and could see what was coming. Like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, he pleaded with God to lift this burden from his shoulders--to choose someone else.

  But the following morning, Lucchesi's support built, rising steadily toward the two-thirds majority necessary to be elected pope. On the final ballot taken before lunch, he was just ten votes short. Too anxious to take food, he prayed in his room before returning to the Sistine Chapel for the ballot that he knew would make him pope. He watched silently as each cardinal advanced and placed a twice-folded slip of paper into the golden chalice that served as a ballot box, each uttering the same solemn oath: "I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge that my vote is given to the one whom before God I think should be elected."

  The ballots were checked and rechecked before the tally was announced. One hundred fifteen votes had been cast for Lucchesi.

  The camerlengo approached Lucchesi and posed the same question that had been put to hundreds of newly elected popes over two millennia.

  "Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?" After a lengthy silence that produced much tension in the chapel, Pietro Lucchesi responded: "My shoulders are not broad enough to bear the burden you have given me, but with the help of Christ the Savior, I will try. Accepto."

  "By what name do you wish to be called?"

  "Paul the Seventh," Lucchesi replied.

  The cardinals filed forward to embrace the new pontiff and offer obedience and loyalty to him. Lucchesi was then escorted to the scarlet chamber known as the camera lacrimatoria--the crying room--for a few minutes of solitude before being fitted with a white cassock by the Gammarelli brothers, the pontifical tailors. He chose the smallest of the three ready-made cassocks, and even then he seemed like a small boy wearing his father's shirt. As he filed onto the great loggia of St. Peter's to greet Rome and the world, his head was barely visible above the balustrade. A Swiss Guard brought forth a footstool, and a great roar rose from the stunned crowd in the square below. A commentator for Italian television breathlessly declared the new pope "Pietro the Improbable." Cardinal Marco Brindisi, the head of the hard-line Curial cardinals, privately christened him Pope Accidental I.

  The Vaticanisti said the message of the divisive conclave was clear. Pietro Lucchesi was a compromise pope. His mandate was to run the Church in a competent fashion but launch no grand initiatives. The battle for the heart and soul of the Church, said the Vaticanisti, had effectively been postponed for another day.

  But Catholic reactionaries, religious and lay alike, did not take such a benign view of Lucchesi's election. To militants, the new pope bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a tubby Venetian named Roncalli who'd inflicted the doctrinal calamity of the Second Vatican Council. Within hours of the conclave's conclusion, the websites and cyber-confessionals of the hardliners were bristling with warnings and dire predictions about what lay ahead. Lucchesi's sermons and public statements were scoured for evidence of un-orthodoxy. The reactionaries did not like what they discovered. Lucchesi was trouble, they concluded. Lucchesi would have to be kept under watch. Tightly scripted. It would be up to the mandarins of the Curia to make certain Pietro Lucchesi became nothing more than a caretaker pope.

  But Lucchesi believed there were far too many problems confronting the Church for a papacy to be wasted, even the papacy of an unwilling pope. The Church he inherited from the Pole was a Church in crisis. In Western Europe, the epicenter of Catholicism, the situation had grown so dire that a recent synod of bishops declared that Europeans were living as though God did not exist. Fewer babies were being baptized; fewer couples were choosing to be married in the Church; vocations had plummeted to a point where nearly half the parishes in Western Europe would soon have no full-time priest. Lucchesi had to look no further than his own diocese to see the problems the Church faced. Seventy percent of Rome's two and a half million Catholics believed in divorce, birth control, and premarital sex--all officially forbidden by the Church. Fewer than ten percent bothered to attend mass on a regular basis. In France, the so-called "First Daughter" of the Church, the statistics were even worse. In North America, most Catholics didn't even bother to read his encyclicals before flouting them, and only a third attended Mass. Seventy percent of Catholics lived in the Third World, yet most of them rarely saw a priest. In Brazil alone, six hundred thousand people left the Church each year to become evangelical Protestants.

  Lucchesi wanted to stem the bleeding before it was too late. He longed to make his beloved Church more relevant in the lives of its adherents, to make his flock Catholic in more than name only. But there was something else that had preoccupied him, a single question that had run ceaselessly around his head since the moment the conclave elected him pope. Why? Why had the Holy Spirit chosen him to lead the Church? What special gift, what sliver of knowledge, did he possess that made him the right pontiff for this moment in history? Lucchesi believed he knew the answer, and he had set in motion a perilous stratagem that would shake the Roman Catholic Church to its foundations. If his gambit proved successful, it would
revolutionize the Church. If it failed, it might very well destroy it.

  THE SUN SLIPPED behind a bank of cloud, and a breath of cold March wind stirred the pine trees of the gardens. The Pope pulled his cloak tightly around his throat. He drifted past the Ethiopian College, then turned onto a narrow footpath that took him toward the dun-colored wall at the southwest corner of Vatican City. Stopping at the foot of the Vatican Radio tower, he mounted a flight of stone steps and climbed up to the parapet.

  Rome lay before him, stirring in the flat overcast light. His gaze was drawn across the Tiber, toward the soaring synagogue in the heart of the old ghetto. In 1555, Pope Paul IV, a Pope whose name Lucchesi bore, ordered the Jews of Rome into the ghetto and compelled them to wear a yellow star to make them distinguishable from Christians. It was the intention of those who commissioned the synagogue to build it tall enough so that it could be seen from the Vatican. The message was unmistakably clear. We are here too. Indeed, we were here long before you. For Pietro Lucchesi, the synagogue spoke of something else. A treacherous past. A shameful secret. It spoke directly to him, whispering into his ear. It would give him no peace.

  The Pope heard footfalls on the garden pathway, sharp and rhythmic, like an expert carpenter driving nails. He turned and saw a man marching toward the wall. Tall and lean, black hair, black clerical suit, a vertical line drawn with India ink. Father Luigi Donati: the Pope's private secretary. Donati had been at Lucchesi's side for twenty years. In Venice they had called him il doge because of his willingness to wield power ruthlessly and to go straight for the throat when it served his purposes or the needs of his master. The nickname had followed him to the Vatican. Donati did not mind. He followed the tenets of a secular Italian philosopher named Machiavelli, who counseled that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. Every pope needed a son of a bitch, according to Donati; a hard man in black who was willing to take on the Curia with a whip and a chair and bend it to his will. It was a role he played with poorly disguised glee.

  As Donati drew closer to the parapet, the Pope could see by the grim set of his jaw that something was wrong. He turned his gaze toward the river once more and waited. A moment later he could feel the reassuring presence of Donati at his side. As usual, il doge wasted no time on pleasantries or small talk. He leaned close to the Pope's ear and quietly informed him that earlier that morning Professor Benjamin Stern had been discovered murdered in his apartment in Munich. The Pope closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, then reached out and held Father Donati's hand tightly. "How?" he asked. "How did they kill him?"

  When Father Donati told him, the Pope swayed and leaned against the priest's arm for support. "Almighty God in Heaven, please grant us forgiveness for what we have done." Then he looked into the eyes of his trusted secretary. Father Donati's gaze was calm and intelligent and very determined. It gave the Pope the courage to go forward.

  "I'm afraid we've terribly underestimated our enemies, Luigi. They are more formidable than we thought, and their wickedness knows no bounds. They will stop at nothing to protect their dirty secrets."

  "Indeed, Holiness," Donati said gravely. "In fact, we must now operate under the assumption that they might even be willing to murder a pope."

  Murder a pope? It was difficult for Pietro Lucchesi to imagine such a thing, but he knew his trusted secretary was not guilty of exaggeration. The Church was riddled with a cancer. It had been allowed to fester during the long reign of the Pole. Now it had metastasized and was threatening the life of the very organism in which it lived. It needed to be removed. Aggressive measures were required if the patient was to be saved.

  The Pope looked away from Donati, toward the dome of the synagogue rising over the riverbank. "I'm afraid there's no one who can do this deed but me."

  Father Donati placed his hand on the Pope's forearm and squeezed. "Only you can compose the words, Holiness. Leave the rest in my hands."

  Donati turned and walked away, leaving the Pope alone at the parapet. He listened to the sound of his hard man in black pounding along the footpath toward the palace: crack-crack-crack-crack... To Pietro Lucchesi, it sounded like nails in a coffin.

  VENICE

  The night rains had flooded the Campo San Zaccaria. The restorer stood on the steps of the church like a castaway. In the center of the square, an old priest appeared out of the mist, lifting the skirts of his simple black cassock to reveal a pair of knee-length rubber boots. "It's like the Sea of Galilee this morning, Mario," he said, digging a heavy ring of keys from his pocket. "If only Christ had bestowed on us the ability to walk on water. Winters in Venice would be much more tolerable."

  The heavy wooden door opened with a deep groan. The nave was still in darkness. The priest switched on the lights and headed out into the flooded square once more, pausing briefly in the sanctuary to dip his fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross.

  The scaffolding was covered by a shroud. The restorer climbed up to his platform and switched on a fluorescent lamp. The Virgin glowed at him seductively. For much of that winter he had been engaged in a single-minded quest to repair her face. Some nights she came to him in his sleep, stealing into his bedroom, her cheeks in tatters, begging him to heal her.

  He turned on a portable electric heater to burn the chill from the air and poured a cup of black coffee from the Thermos bottle, enough to make him alert but not to make his hand shake. Then he prepared his palette, mixing dry pigment in a tiny puddle of medium. When finally he was ready, he lowered his magnifying visor and began to work.

  For nearly an hour he had the church to himself. Slowly, the rest of the team trickled in one by one. The restorer, hidden behind his shroud, knew each by sound. The lumbering plod of Francesco Tiepolo, chief of the San Zaccaria project; the crisp tap-tap-tap of Adriana Zinetti, renowned cleaner of altars and seducer of men; the conspiratorial shuffle of the ham-fisted Antonio Politi, spreader of malicious lies and gossip.

  The restorer was something of an enigma to the rest of the San Zaccaria team. He insisted on keeping his work platform and the altarpiece shrouded at all times. Francesco Tiepolo had pleaded with him to lower the shroud so the tourists and the notoriously bitchy Venetian upper crust could watch him work. "Venice wants to see what you're doing to the Bellini, Mario. Venice doesn't like surprises." Reluctantly, the restorer had relented, and for two days in January he worked in full view of the tourists and the rest of the Zaccaria team. The brief experiment ended when Monsignor Moretti, San Zaccaria's parish priest, popped into the church for a surprise inspection. When he gazed up at the Bellini and saw half the Virgin's face gone, he fell to his knees in hysterical prayer. The shroud returned, and Francesco Tiepolo never dared to raise the issue of removing it again.

  The rest of the team found great metaphorical significance in the shroud. Why would a man go to such lengths to conceal himself? Why did he insist on setting himself apart from the others? Why did he decline their numerous invitations to lunch, their invitations to dinner and to the Saturday-night drinking sessions at Harry's Bar? He had even refused to attend the cocktail reception at the Accademia thrown by the Friends of San Zaccaria. The Bellini was one of the most important paintings in all Venice, and it was considered scandalous that he refused to spend a few minutes with the fat American donors who had made the restoration possible.

  Even Adriana Zinetti could not penetrate the shroud. This gave rise to rampant speculation that the restorer was a homosexual, which was considered no crime among the free spirits of Team Zaccaria and temporarily increased his sagging popularity among some of the boys. The theory was put to rest one evening when he was met at the church by a stunningly attractive woman. She had wide cheekbones, pale skin, green catlike eyes, and a teardrop chin. It was Adriana Zinetti who noticed the heavy scarring on her left hand. "She's his other project," Adriana speculated gloomily as the pair disappeared into the Venetian night. "Obviously, he prefers his women damaged."

  He called himself Mario
Delvecchio, but his Italian, while fluent, was tinged by a faint but unmistakable accent. He explained this away by saying he had been raised abroad and had lived in Italy only for brief periods. Someone heard he had served his apprenticeship with the legendary Umberto Conti. Someone else heard that Conti had proclaimed his hands the most gifted he had ever seen.

  The envious Antonio Politi was responsible for the next wave of rumors that rippled through Team Zaccaria. Antonio found the leisurely pace of his colleague infuriating. In less time than it had taken the great Mario Delvecchio to retouch the virgin's face, Antonio had cleaned and restored a half-dozen paintings. The fact that they all were of little or no significance only increased his anger. "The master himself painted her in an afternoon," Antonio protested to Tiepolo. "But this man has taken all winter. Always running off to the Accademia to gaze at the Bellinis. Tell him to get on with it! Otherwise, we're going to be here ten years!"

  It was Antonio who unearthed the rather bizarre story about Vienna, which he shared with the rest of Team Zaccaria during a family dinner one snowy evening in February--coincidentally, at Trattoria alia Madonna. About ten years earlier, there had been a major cleaning and restoration project at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. An Italian called Mario was part of that team.