Gallio looked again in an obvious place: the family. Valeria had labelled a dossier ‘Nazareth,’ and repeated searches of the house where Jesus grew up were routinely logged in the weeks after his body vanished. Gallio now sees from photocopies that he signed the original warrants himself, back in the day, but Valeria had raided the house more recently. Empty, mother gone, father long dead, neighbours adamant that Joseph and Mary had seemed a normal couple who kept themselves to themselves. Yes, they remembered Jesus. Always had time for everyone.
None of these enquiries revealed a hidden twin who could have died in his place. Valeria made sure her people asked, checking back through school yearbooks and birth certificates. No secret twin or brother of about the same age. Only Jesus, from Nazareth, and his circle of Galilean friends.
His friends. The original twelve disciples, with the violent exceptions of Judas and James, were alive. No reported deaths from natural causes, as yet, but not one of the disciples was resident in Israel. The beheading of James was unlikely to tempt them home.
Gallio thought some more about the disciples, and how they looked so similar. He dug out the tape of the crucifixion and watched it again, and again. He stayed in the office after everyone had left, and gradually he remembered how to speculate. Cassius Gallio felt meaningful for the first time in years, and reacquainted himself with his youthful desire for glory, like a lost friend he was surprised to recognize.
Then he suppressed his ambition as best he could. There was no glorious return to Rome in this, consuls rising to acclaim him. The CCU did not call for its finest minds to track down a missing Jewish mystic who was anyway probably dead. Valeria had assigned the case to a washed-up ex-Speculator. Cassius Gallio knew that, but this was also his second chance. He knew that too.
Find Jesus and take him alive. Parade him in a cage before a glut of academicians who will explain his escape from the tomb. Either that or prove once and for all that Jesus is dead. The most ridiculous illusion in history will unravel, for the entertainment of the rational classes.
Cassius Gallio watched the tapes, remembered his vocation, and a possible solution began to emerge.
‘There’s more to life than Jesus.’
Baruch is a restless passenger. The road climbs through the glitter of sunlit olive trees and he fiddles with his phone, with the buttons of his suit, with the radio. He can’t find a decent station, too much news not enough music. ‘I have plenty to be doing in Damascus.’
‘Like what?’
‘Hunches. Seeing a man about a dog.’
Cassius Gallio sets the satnav for Damascus, but there’s only one road over the mountains, a ribbon of tarmac through the summit passes. Before long they leave the horse-drawn traffic behind, and near the highest point on the road Gallio pulls into a lay-by, comfort break. Though not straight away. Before getting out of the car they wait, as a precaution. No other vehicles but the Toyota Corolla out on the ancient highway.
‘Safe,’ Baruch says, and they both climb out of the car.
Up in the mountains a wind blows through, and a rush of clouds hustles across the peaks, blocking and unblocking the sun. The hills and the road go dark then light, and in the dry bush to the side of the Damascus road, on rusting poles, triangular signs warn of landmines.
Baruch ignores them, steps through some flowering thorns toward a solitary scrub oak. He survives, pisses, shakes, zips. He strolls back and survives again. Either he’s lucky or he has access to privileged information.
At the car Cassius Gallio leans with his hands on the bonnet, straight-armed, stretching his calf muscles. Baruch sits on the front wing and lights a cigarette, inhales.
‘I tell her I don’t smoke.’ He sighs out the smoke, a long relief, at last. ‘Figure she’s heard worse lies in her time.’
Gallio swigs from a water bottle, watches a pair of eagles glide high in the blue above the summits. Like a bird of prey, Gallio can rise above Baruch’s goading. He can be patient. Baruch points up at the eagles with his cigarette hand. ‘Vultures. A rich and varied life.’ He takes another drag. ‘The misfortunes of others will provide.’
‘Eagles.’
‘Whatever. She’s a lovely woman. No side to her.’
‘Shut up, Baruch.’ Gallio points the water bottle at him, and Baruch points back. Bottle versus cigarette, water against fire, but in this form neither much good as a weapon. ‘Shut up or we’ll have to fight.’
‘She is, though. You must be interested.’
‘OK, tell me about Judith. How is she?’
Gallio drinks the water, Baruch smokes the cigarette.
‘To be honest, she bores me. She doesn’t bother me. That’s why I like her.’
Gallio raises his face to the sunshine, breathes. Baruch flicks his cigarette into the bush, then stands and sweeps his arm over the rocky hills. ‘Here, or somewhere near here, Jesus intercepted Paul.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘That was after the ascension.’ Baruch puts his hands on his hips, looking, thinking. ‘Of all the appearances, Paul was the last person to see Jesus alive.’
The wind dies, leaving in its place a complicated silence. Gallio stretches and makes the moves to show he’s starting the car, very soon now, as soon as his brain can find a story that’s more reasonable than a dead Jesus appearing to Paul on the road to Damascus.
‘I’d take my chances with Jesus if I met him.’ Baruch cracks his knuckles, and Gallio checks but Baruch isn’t joking. His face is set. ‘Don’t believe in hell. And if I decide to go easy on him don’t believe in heaven either.’
Baruch is not sorry for the enemies of Israel he has killed. Perhaps he regrets the son of the widow of Nain, a little, who may have had valuable information about the afterlife. And also he was only a child.
‘Paul is an ongoing investigation of ours,’ he adds. He walks back to the car. ‘No organization likes their best employees to defect.’
‘Not many witnesses.’ Cassius Gallio slaps Damascus road dust from his hands. ‘Not in a place like this. Anything could have happened here.’
‘Not anything. Neither of us believe that.’
‘Time to make a move.’
They used a substitute. Another man died on the cross in the place of Jesus. Cassius Gallio analyzed the record that remained, and each time Jesus fell on the way to Golgotha strangers broke from the crowd. It was chaos, the soldiers pushing back, not knowing which way to turn. As soon as they restored order there came another fall, another interruption, three times in all.
The disciples needed three attempts at manufacturing the incident—the heat, the pain, the mayhem—to exchange a stranger who looked not dissimilar to Jesus. The substitute, his features disguised by blood and bruising, then died on the cross while the real Jesus slipped away through the crowds, hidden and supported by his disciples. At that point in the proceedings his injuries were skin deep, and he could later reappear uninjured.
This switch theory called for meticulous planning, and a follower (probably from Galilee, for the looks) willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Such a gesture wasn’t unthinkable, because belief in eternal life could inspire drastic errors of judgement, and on the day of the crucifixion there were twelve men in Jerusalem who were known to look similar to Jesus.
Back to the office, to the files. One of the few fresh pieces of information was an updated image of the young woman who had left the crowd to wipe Jesus’s face. Now this was interesting. Cassius Gallio could speculate that ‘wiping his face’ was a cover, a misinterpretation. She was preparing his face, or checking his wounds so that the substitute Jesus could look as similar as possible when they enacted the exchange the next time he fell.
Compared to resurrection, Gallio reminded himself, no other version of this particular story was ridiculous. In that sense, every possibility was a possibility.
The new picture was higher definition than the freeze-frame Gallio had extracted at the time: oil paints brought out the paleness of her
skin and a strand of reddish-brown hair escaping a headscarf. The image captured the moment the woman leaned in toward Jesus, but with improved technology she could be identified from mortgage records as an Old City householder named Veronica. The file had her address on the Suq Khan el-Zeit.
As Gallio counted down the numbers he noted that the street was residential with occasional independent retail. A convenience store, a hairdresser, and then he found it. He checked the numbers on either side and he was in the right place: the residential address from the file had been converted into St. Veronica’s Gift Shop. The shop was open. Gallio pushed through a bead curtain and as the beads settled he browsed through stacks of tea towels imprinted with the face of Jesus. The likeness wasn’t quite right; it wasn’t how Gallio had Jesus in his mind—close, but not the man himself. Or the image was an idea of Jesus but not Cassius Gallio’s idea.
A girl behind the counter, school-leaver by age and attitude. Sullen, pretty, and she looked Gallio over as if wondering whether they’d ever had sex. Bad sex.
‘I’m looking for Veronica.’
The girl’s tongue pulled bubblegum back behind her teeth. She chewed once, raised a drawn-on eyebrow.
‘I’m asking if a woman named Veronica lives here?’
A man bustled through from the back. He could be the girl’s father, a broken blood vessel in his cheek, his belt missing a loop of his trousers. He registered Gallio’s miserable face, decided he was probably harmless.
‘Last week someone else was asking, same as you,’ he said. ‘All we know is she’s gone.’
‘Leave anything behind?’
‘No, just like the last time I was asked. She sold her possessions and made a donation to the School for the Blind. Then she sold me the empty house. Couldn’t its potential. Her loss. She gave the money from the house to the Daughters of Charity.’
‘No forwarding address?’
‘None. Last I heard she went abroad somewhere. France? One of those places.’
Gallio reached for the beads in the doorway, then turned back. ‘The other person asking after Veronica. What did he look like?’
‘Could have been a woman.’ This from the girl, who popped a bubble as a follow-up.
‘Your father came in because of my voice.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘Forget it,’ Gallio said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
The Swiss passports provided by Valeria keep Gallio and Baruch out of trouble. Cassius Gallio is travelling as a pharmaceutical salesman from Basle. He had wondered, briefly, why Valeria needed him undercover.
‘Jesus disguised himself as a gardener, and an angel,’ Valeria had reminded him. ‘He went undercover as a carpenter. To catch him out we can learn those lessons.’
With Jesus, the trickery is without end. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get. He turned the death of Lazarus to his advantage, and then his own crucifixion. Jesus is not a problem that can be approached head-on. Jesus has skills, fieldcraft, and at a purely professional level is a worthy opponent for a disgraced Speculator with a point to prove.
Cassius Gallio tells lies to cross the border into Syria and the lies don’t matter, are part of how once he’d decided to live. His only regret is being out of practice. The good news is that they reach the Al Kadam station in south Damascus without incident, where Baruch is scheduled to leave him. No trains are running, so Baruch walks away into the bombed suburbs without looking back. Not many cars on the roads, but a yellow Cherokee is in the Toyota’s mirror when Gallio pulls away.
His stepfather the Roman general, who knew what he wanted in life, had expected Cassius Gallio to join the uniformed army. He’d planned to ease Gallio along, using his experience and connections to nudge his stepson ahead of contemporaries and competitors. He wasn’t a great believer in colleagues, or friends. Not in the army. Gallio’s main refuge from his stepfather’s ambition was the chess club, and one evening after he’d checkmated a civil servant their casual conversation shaded into recruitment. We don’t call it spying, the man said, because that’s not exactly what it is. We’re looking for bright people like yourself to police civilization, and to shape everyone’s future for the best.
A successful Speculator, as Gallio would soon learn in training, must be rational, deceptive if necessary, then ruthless. Powerful, invisible, but never a killer beyond the rule of law, or at least not without a transparent objective. No one should be certain he existed. And remember, his instructors said, knowledge is power. Knowledge is always power.
His stepfather was furious but Cassius Gallio escaped overseas, and on his first posting to Jerusalem he was greedy to learn as much as possible as quickly as he could. Initially this meant the language and the women, the easiest available territories. He met Judith, who was direct and uncomplicated. Gallio had lived in a villa with his stepfather’s third wife, and was cynical about communication between the sexes. It was therefore a relief to spend time with a woman and not expect immediately to understand her.
Or Cassius Gallio was lonely, and Judith in Jerusalem was kind. He’d been aiming to conquer, in a small way, but at the same time he’d needed comfort, and to be comfortable. He can’t remember. They’d met a long time ago, but the early marriage became convincingly part of his cover, his legend. His photo ID said military attaché, with full immunity, but his more effective disguise was Judith. Spies and secret police shouldn’t marry, everyone knows that. They should keep the hours and the secrets and the dangers to themselves, which is such obvious common sense that a single diplomat immediately rouses suspicion. Meaning that all serious spies are married, but ideally not for love.
The trouble, as with the Jesus fiasco, was that Gallio never knew enough. He didn’t know that Valeria was on her way, young and culturally compatible and willing. He couldn’t see the future, only his lonely past, and if he had his time again he’d allow the past no more influence than it deserved. That’s what he’s doing now, in Damascus. He’s ignoring his earlier failures and taking his second chance.
The dead-drop is the Travelex exchange in the lobby of the Damascus Sheraton. Gallio picks up an envelope of dollars, and exchanges half with the concierge for a room key. Then checks into his room where in the wardrobe he finds a grey Strellson suit, as favoured by Swiss sales reps. On the hanger beside it a purple shirt and tie set completes the look, and on the floor of the wardrobe a white cardboard box, stamped with the same pharmaceutical company name as his business cards.
He lies down on the double bed, closes his eyes and sleeps. He wakes up and showers, the water as hot as he can bear. He turns off the shower and sits on the floor of the wet room and breathes. In, out, as deeply and slowly as he can. Occasionally, according to no discernible pattern (but there is one, there must be one, and the pattern can be represented as a mathematical formula) a solitary drip from the shower lands on top of his head. Cassius Gallio and Jesus have unfinished business, but if Gallio solves this case then he can become, for the first time, the man he’d wanted to be.
When he drives away from the hotel there’s no sign of the yellow Cherokee, and at the Lebanese border, a salesman from Basle in a grey lightweight suit, Gallio passes without incident between allied Arab states. He stops for petrol between the border and Beirut city, but before moving off he pulls the cardboard box onto his lap and opens it up. A truck appears in the distance, takes a long time to arrive, then rushes past. The Toyota rocks on its suspension.
Gallio rummages through the box for antibiotics. He knows the samples are in there somewhere. He flips out a blister pack of doxycycline, thumbs himself a capsule, swallows it without water. Reads the list of side effects, thumbs out another, throws his head back and swallows that one too for luck. Even with a double dose in his system Gallio won’t be a hundred per cent safe, but nobody ever is.
He brought bags of pistachios into the office at the Antonia, then forg
ot them in a desk drawer as he went through the logged post-death appearances of Jesus. For about a month after Jesus vanished he was everywhere and nowhere at once. He was seen by Peter, by the disciples together (behind locked doors, avoiding surveillance), by more than five hundred followers, by James, and then again by the disciples.
During each appearance Jesus walked, spoke, ate. He had to conclude that Jesus wasn’t severely handicapped, despite his extreme ordeal. More reasonably, if his death could be faked then so could his injuries. But Cassius had witnessed at close quarters the wounds of Jesus when he was nailed to the cross. He could pull up comprehensive pictorial evidence to confirm the event. Someone had been severely injured and had died, even if it wasn’t Jesus, meaning the switch theory looked increasingly plausible. Though not yet convincing enough to present with confidence to Valeria.
Cassius Gallio pursued the logic of his speculation. If Jesus had arranged a switch, then Joseph of Arimathea was implicated. In the absence of the disciples (who, minus Judas, were hiding the real Jesus somewhere in the city) Joseph had taken responsibility for hauling the body off the cross before sunset, hiding the evidence in his private tomb before standard post-mortem checks could be made.
Joseph had a security file, like every high priest in Jerusalem: his address, his voting patterns, and a record of his sympathy for the Jesus cult. To fill in the gaps Gallio tried out his new phone, CCU issue, and googled Joseph of Arimathea. No network coverage, not behind the historic walls of the Antonia, so Gallio made do with his desktop. The Internet turned out to be as vague as the dossier: Joseph was originally from Arimathea, but may have fled to Europe, a thin-lipped man with a chin-end wispy beard. According to the pictures, he had a taste for ornate headscarves.
Gallio concluded that if he wanted unique off-the-record information, of the type that would unlock secrets, he’d have to put in the legwork.
Acts of the Assassins Page 7