VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis died at 7:35 a.m. local time on Easter Monday. Suddenly even Vatican waiters had turned conspiratorial.
In a double-vaulted dining room just east of the Apostolic Palace, one leaned over a dessert menu to offer up a furtive trade: his list of the top papal candidates in exchange for this reporter’s. “I know things,” he said. “I know Cardinal Wako”—the John Paul II-appointed Gabriel Cardinal Zubeir Wako, archbishop emeritus of Khartoum, Sudan—“always orders a half-portion of lasagna.” And depositing a slip of paper and a ballpoint pen on the table below him, he gave a meaningful nod, and walked away.
Without a ruler since Francis died, sleepy Vatican City has in a matter of days been reconfigured top to bottom. Now it is a humming maze of narrow, newly one-way streets, of checkpoints, barricades, drone-jamming guns, mounted police, military police, more than 60,000 mourners snaking in through this nearly half-kilometer-square sliver of a nation-state, of whispers, of rumors, of bets.