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straight away rather than be delayed until the morning (‘We cannot allow ourselves to fall behind the news cycle; it would be a disaster’). He proposed that the official announcement should be released at once and that two film crews from the Vatican Television Centre plus three pool photographers and a newspaper reporter should be allowed into the Piazza Santa Marta to record the transfer of the body from the building to the ambulance. His reasoning was that if they moved quickly, the footage would be broadcast live and the Church would be sure to have maximum exposure. In the great Asian centres of the Catholic faith it was morning; in Latin and North America, evening; only the Europeans and the Africans would be obliged to wake to the news.
    Again, Adeyemi objected. For the sake of the dignity of the office, he argued, they should wait for daylight, and for a hearse and a proper casket that could be taken out draped with the papal flag. Bellini countered sharply: ‘The Holy Father would not have cared a fig about dignity. It was as one of the humble of the earth that he chose to live, and it is as one of the humble poor that he would wish to be seen in death.’
    Lomeli concurred. ‘Remember, this was a man who refused to ride in a limousine. An ambulance is the nearest we can give him now to public transport.’
    Nevertheless, Adeyemi would not change his mind. In the end he had to be outvoted three to one. It was also agreed that the Pope’s body should be embalmed. Lomeli said, ‘But we must ensure it’s done properly.’ 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. ‘And another thing,’ he added. ‘We must make sure no one takes any photographs of the body.’ That indignity, too, had been inflicted upon Pius XII, whose corpse had been shown in news magazines all over the world.
    Tremblay went off to make the arrangements with the media office of the Holy See, and less than thirty minutes later, the ambulance men – their phones confiscated – came and took the Holy Father out of the papal apartment in a white plastic body bag strapped to a wheeled stretcher. They paused with it on the second floor while the four cardinals went down ahead in the elevator so that they could meet it in the hotel lobby and escort it off the premises. The humility of the body in death, the smallness of it, the little rounded foetus shape of the feet and the head, seemed to Lomeli to make a profound statement.
And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre . . .
The children of the Son of Man were all equal at the last, he reflected; all were dependent on God’s mercy for the hope of resurrection.
    The lobby and the lower flight of the staircase were lined byreligious of all ranks. It was their silence that imprinted itself most indelibly on Lomeli’s mind. When the elevator doors opened and the body was wheeled out, the only sound – to his dismay – was the click and whir of phone cameras, interspersed with an occasional sob. Tremblay and Adeyemi walked at the head of the stretcher, Lomeli and Bellini at the rear, with the prelates of the Apostolic Camera in a file behind them. They processed through the doors and into the October chill. The drizzle had ceased. There were even a few stars. They passed between the two Swiss Guards and made towards a crucible of multicoloured light – the flashes of the waiting ambulance and its police escort streaking like blue sunbeams around the rain-slicked piazza, the white strobe effect of the photographers, the engulfing yellow glare thrown up by the