“Not a soul.”

“In that case, our friends at the Jesuit Curia are about to get the surprise of their lives.” He seemed to relish the thought. “Come with me to the balcony. It’s not something you should miss.”

He went into the Sala Regia and, followed by much of the conclave, set off along the Hall of Blessings toward the front of the basilica. Unlike his master, Pietro Lucchesi, he did not need to be shown the way. In the antechamber behind the balcony, he solemnly made the sign of the cross as the doors were opened. The roar of the multitude in the square was deafening. He smiled at Gabriel one final time as the senior cardinal deacon declared, “Habemus papam!” We have a pope! Then he stepped into a corona of blinding white light and was gone.

ALONE WITH THE CARDINALS, GABRIEL felt suddenly out of place. The man once known as Luigi Donati belonged to them now, not him. Unescorted, he made his way back to the Sistine Chapel. Then he headed downstairs to the Bronze Doors of the Apostolic Palace.

Outside, St. Peter’s Square was ablaze with candles and mobile phones. It looked as though a galaxy of stars had fallen to earth. Gabriel tried Chiara’s number, but there was not a cellular connection to be had. He picked his way through Bernini’s Colonnade. The crowd was delirious. Donati’s election was an earthquake.

Gabriel finally emerged from the Colonnade into the Piazza Papa Pio XII. To reach the Jesuit Curia, he had to somehow make his way to the other side. He soon gave up. A sea of humanity stretched from Donati’s feet to the banks of the Tiber. There was nowhere for Gabriel to go.

He realized suddenly that Chiara and the children were calling his name. It took a moment to find them. Elated, the children were pointing toward the basilica, as though their father were unaware of the fact that his friend was standing on the balcony. Chiara’s arms were wrapped around Veronica Marchese, who was weeping uncontrollably.

Gabriel tried to reach them, but it was no good. The crowd was impenetrable. Turning, he saw a man in white floating above a key-shaped carpet of golden light. It was a masterwork, he thought. His Holiness, oil on canvas, artist unknown …

PART FOUR

HABEMUS PAPAM

61

CANNAREGIO, VENICE

IT WAS CHIARA WHO SECRETLY informed the prime minister that her husband would not be at his desk at King Saul Boulevard on Monday morning. While purportedly on holiday, he had prevented a massive bombing in Cologne, dealt a severe blow to the ambitions of the European far right, and watched his close friend become the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He needed a few days to recuperate.

He spent the first three largely confined to the apartment overlooking the Rio della Misericordia, for God in his infinite wisdom had inflicted upon Venice a deluge of biblical magnitude. When combined with gale-force winds and an unusually high tide in the lagoon, the results were disastrous. All six of the city’s historic sestieri suffered catastrophic flooding, including San Marco, where the crypt of the basilica flooded for only the sixth time in twelve centuries. In Cannaregio the water rose a historic six and a half feet in a span of just three hours. Particularly hard hit was the small island to which the city’s Jews were confined in 1516 by the order of Venice’s ruling council. The museum in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo was inundated, as was the ground floor of the Casa Israelitica di Riposo. Waves lapped against the bas-relief Holocaust memorial, leaving the carabinieri no choice but to abandon their bulletproof kiosk.

Like nearly everyone else in the city, the Allon family huddled behind barricades and sandbags and made the best of it. Raphael and Irene looked upon their watery internment as a great adventure; Gabriel, as a blessing. For three waterlogged days, they read books aloud, played board games, undertook art projects, and watched every DVD in the apartment’s modest library, most twice. It was a glimpse of their future. In retirement, Gabriel would be an expatriate again, a Diaspora Jew. He would work when it suited him and devote every spare minute to his children. The clock would slow, his many wounds would heal. This is where his story would end, in the sinking city of churches and paintings at the northern end of the Adriatic.

He checked in with Uzi Navot early each morning and late each afternoon. And, of course, he followed the news from Rome, where Donati wasted little time upsetting the curial applecart. For a start, there was his decision to reside not in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace but in an unadorned suite in the Casa Santa Marta. His first Angelus, delivered to an audience of some two hundred thousand pilgrims crammed into St. Peter’s Square, left little doubt he intended to guide the Church in a new direction.

But who was this man who now occupied the throne of St. Peter? And what were the circumstances of his shocking and historic election? The author of the Vanity Fair article hopscotched from network to network, describing the magnetic archbishop she had christened “Luscious Luigi.” Several profiles explored his Jesuit roots and the period during which he served as a missionary in war-torn El Salvador. It was widely assumed, though never proven, that as a young priest he had been a supporter of the controversial doctrine known as liberation theology. This did not endear him to certain segments of the American political right. Indeed, one conservative referred to him as Pope Che Guevara. Another wondered whether the flooding in Venice, where he had worked for several years, might be a sign of God’s displeasure in the conclave’s choice.

Bound by their vows of secrecy, the cardinal-electors refused to discuss what had transpired inside the Sistine Chapel. Even Alessandro Ricci, the dogged investigative reporter from La Repubblica, appeared unable to penetrate the conclave’s armor. Instead, he published a lengthy article on the links between the European far right and the Order of St. Helena, the reactionary Catholic fraternity about which he had written a best-selling book. Three of the figures implicated in the false-flag bombings in Germany—Jonas Wolf, Andreas Estermann, and Axel Brünner—were alleged to be secret members of the Order. So, too, were Austrian chancellor Jörg Kaufmann and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Saviano.

Kaufmann immediately denied the report. He was forced to issue a clarification when La Repubblica published a photograph from his wedding, which was officiated by the Order’s superior general, Bishop Hans Richter. For his part, Saviano brazenly dismissed the story as “fake news” and called upon Italian prosecutors to file charges of treason against its author. Informed that no such offense had been committed, he issued a tweet calling on his thuggish soccer-hooligan supporters to teach Ricci a lesson he would not soon forget. After receiving hundreds of death threats, the journalist fled his apartment in Trastevere and went into hiding.

Bishop Richter, secluded at the Order’s medieval priory in Canton Zug, refused to comment on the story. Nor did he issue a statement when lawyers in New York filed a class action suit in federal court, accusing the Order of extorting money and valuables from desperate Jews during the late 1930s in exchange for promises of false baptismal certificates and protection from the Nazis. The lead plaintiff in the case was Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman. In a sparsely attended news conference in Vienna, she unveiled a painting—a river landscape by the Dutch Old Master Jan van Goyen—that her father had turned over to the Order in 1938. The canvas, which had been removed from its stretcher, had been returned to her by the noted Holocaust investigator Eli Lavon, whose schedule did not permit him to attend the press briefing.