‘Architect. Good time to be an architect, after the fire. The place won’t be rebuilt in a day.’
Claudia doesn’t want to talk about her husband, so Gallio asks about the fire. ‘How bad was it?’
For years, in the ditches of the Empire, Cassius Gallio imagined Rome as the eternal, shining city. Pillars gleamed white, and high-browed senators applied the law with justice. Rome was the past and future, a model of organization that made outlying superstitions look feeble. If nothing else, he never stopped believing in Rome.
Claudia tells him the fire made tens of thousands homeless. The city housing authority had set up a tent city with running water on the Campus Martius, but the crowded conditions bred wild speculation about who’d started the fire.
‘Human nature to speculate,’ Gallio says.
‘Right. But not many people are experts.’
A grease fire, the amateurs agreed. For as long as anyone could remember, carts selling street food had traded from beneath the wooden arches of the Circus Maximus. Fry up some veal brains or dough balls, fat catches fire, immigrant chef panics, chucks on a bucket of water.
‘People wanted someone to blame,’ Claudia says. ‘Persecute the short-order cooks to teach them some health and safety. And if it wasn’t them it was probably the Jesus followers, who had a motive.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Jesus is a carpenter. Paul is a tentmaker. Plenty of work in Rome for their sort now.’
Claudia must have realized that Gallio has guessed she’s not a lowly analyst. She’s a Speculator. But he doubts she knows he prays. What Cassius Gallio does is this: he closes his eyes and lets his hands go loose, as James does, and he makes a conscious effort to visualize Claudia. In the darkness behind his eyes he builds a clear picture of her pretty, clever face. There she is, inside his head, her corrected teeth, her tight upper lip, her distinctive nose. Then he pours himself into her brown imagined eyes (the eyes in the image he’s made) and takes up the space inside her imagined head (inside his head), from where he looks back out to a clear mental picture of himself.
Gallio is amazed, sometimes, by what the human brain can do. His mental effort is a kind of prayer, a way of projecting an ideal Claudia who thinks about him as much as he must think about her, to construct that image in the first place. His intense imagining feels like a mind game powerful enough to deserve results, but he doesn’t know if his system works. The prayers may never have reached her.
‘This mission could get you noticed,’ Cassius says, though that isn’t what’s on his mind. Apart from the prayer thing, which can be intense, he could tell her he feels calmer when she’s around. ‘We find Jesus and it’s medals for both of us.’
On the central monitor James kneels, sits on his heels, rests his hands loose on his thighs. On a side monitor the streetcam shows riot officers leaning in a doorway. They burst out laughing, and for one of them the laugh becomes a cough. He’s wearing too much equipment, and when he doubles over his baton and webbing make him stumble.
‘Who would win in a fight,’ Claudia takes another pretzel, fingers in the bag. ‘Achilles or Samson?’
Gallio has spent hundreds of nights alone and has previously considered this question. ‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
He scratches his ear. ‘On Samson’s haircut.’
‘Wrong. Depends who discovers the secret weakness of the other.’
‘You mean who discovers it first.’
‘Correct. Which means the hero with the stronger god, who can identify weakness and is powerful enough to get the message across quickly and clearly.’
‘Or whichever man is luckier.’
Gallio wonders if she can hear his heart.
‘Cassius?’
‘Yes.’
They’re sitting close together on the bench seat—his feet on a toolbox, hers on a backup monitor—and Gallio worries about his breathing. He doesn’t breathe properly, not like her husband breathes. Claudia will register the fact that he’s not a normal breather, or that he’s doing it wrong. He hasn’t felt like this for a very long time.
‘The night at the tomb.’
‘Don’t want to talk about that.’
‘When you were demoted. What did they charge you with?’
‘Failing to prevent the theft of a body.’
Claudia pulls her legs underneath herself and turns toward him. She wants more. Despite the narrow bench she’s making the van intimate by acting out an idea of comfort, suggesting Cassius Gallio can comfortably tell her the truth. Not some tired tribunal truth, but the truth.
‘You think I’m trying to use you in some way,’ Claudia says.
He wasn’t thinking that, but now he does.
‘You can check me for a wire, if you want. I’m clean. I’m interested in what happened back then, and what that means for now.’
Finally, in the privacy of a surveillance van (with the latest recording equipment, the hidden cameras) Cassius Gallio will tell a sympathetic colleague (her photos of her children, her sharing of the pretzels) whatever secrets he failed to confess in the past. Claudia is good at this, very good.
‘After the shock of Lazarus I was keen for Jesus to stay dead. That’s why I put guards on the tomb, but the tribunal didn’t believe me. They couldn’t understand why I ordered a watch over a dead man, and they preferred a more rational explanation. They decided I was involved in the escape. I either drugged the soldiers, or hypnotized them, I fabricated an errand so they were absent at the critical moment and then made them the scapegoats. The accusation was ludicrous, or I wouldn’t be alive today.’
‘So what happened to Jesus? You must have some idea.’
‘I don’t know. We never found the body.’
‘Valeria told me you used to be the best. You were the Speculator with the brightest future.’
‘I was young, and believed in reason and the burden of proof. I had a lot to learn.’
‘I know that feeling.’
She touches his arm, and Gallio pushes a button to change a view from the streetcam. ‘Go to sleep.’ He stands, crouched into the van, looks for a place to sit on the floor. ‘Overnight shifts start now. I’ll wake you in four hours.’
Claudia stretches out on the bench seat, arms behind her head. After a while Gallio thinks she’s asleep.
‘I love my daughters,’ she says and shifts onto her side, cheek on hands. ‘In case you were wondering. I love them more than anything or anyone I can think of.’
The next morning they feel claustrophobic, as if neither has slept off the closeness of the night before. In his morning break, Cassius Gallio collects the paper cups and the empty pretzel packet, decides to stretch his legs. He takes an innocent stroll, not far, to a rubbish bin and then round the corner to the International School. If the world is about to end, as James keeps promising his callers, Gallio would like to see his daughter one more time.
He loiters in the gateway of the school, and predicts the immediate future. If he hangs around long enough they’ll call the police, so he changes the future by pushing the button on the intercom.
‘I’d like to speak to one of your students, Alma Marcella Gallio.’
If the world has until lunchtime, that’s what Gallio chooses to do.
‘She’s in school. In school hours. Are you her parent?’
‘I have a message for Alma from Baruch.’ The ruse works, as Gallio gambled it would. He hears the hesitation at Baruch’s name. They’ll see what they can do, and Gallio’s absent father’s heart gives an unexpected flutter. He’ll ask about Alma’s leg. How’s the leg? Maybe not. He’ll skip the small talk, tell her that whether the world ends at lunchtime or not a happy life is possible if she’s prepared to renounce ambition. Don’t waste the time that remains, he’ll tell her, don’t chase empty shadows.
The gate swings open, and Alma limps forward followed by a teacher, who will not be leaving a schoolgirl unattended with a strange man at the school gate
s. Good. This is exactly the kind of sheltered environment Gallio wants his alimony to pay for.
‘Thanks for coming out.’
She doesn’t recognize him. Why should she? The family was broken up by Jesus when Alma was a baby, and Gallio doesn’t know the stories her mother tells to explain how and why that happened. Instead of a genuine emotion, he feels he ought to feel more than he does.
‘You had a message?’
The teacher wants to be somewhere else, but she can’t shake off her habit of encouragement, even with grown men.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gallio says. ‘Yes, I do.’
He is aware of staring, of seeing a new human being who is neither himself nor her mother, and of not being able to get his message across. One day I’ll die, he’d like to say, though obviously that’s not the place to start. What he means is Alma should spend his military pension on a sunny villa in a civilized territory where people are safe and well. Take love where you find it, he wants to tell her, because if not for that what can life be for? Succeed where I have failed.
Alma smiles and the miserable look doesn’t run in the family. She wants to put him at his ease, whoever he may be, but he’s not a competent dad full of wise advice. The teacher looks at her watch.
‘Don’t worry,’ Gallio manages.
‘Why not?’
A reasonable question, and if he answered he’d sound like a dad: because in the long or short time that remains to us there will be good moments as well as bad. Gallio doesn’t know if this is true, but it seems the end of the world makes him hope for the best. He says: ‘The message. I’ve forgotten to give you the message.’
The teacher has to prompt him. ‘It’s from Baruch. We need to be getting back into lessons.’
Alma’s face changes. The miserable look does run in the family after all. ‘Is he angry? Again?’
‘He’s not angry. He’ll be a few minutes late.’
‘But it’s not his day,’ she says. ‘He hasn’t fetched me for weeks.’
‘Well that’s what he said.’
Gallio is saved by his phone. As it rings he makes a show of fumbling it out of his pocket, and then he’s walking away, pointing at the phone and at his ear to explain what he’s doing. He waves and answers at the same time, making his escape, a solid lump of emotion in his chest. He doesn’t know what the emotion is, but to feel it coming is feeling enough, and he regrets calling his daughter out of school. He doesn’t know what he was thinking.
The call is from Claudia: ‘For once. You have your phone turned on and you answered it.’
‘What happened? Is James on the move?’
‘Not James. Paul. We forgot he’s a trained operative. He picked up on Baruch and identified him from the old days. He sent his bodyguard over for a chat. Paul wants our protection.’
They schedule a meeting for 15:45 in the Israel Museum. Claudia stays in the van, eyes on James, while Cassius Gallio dresses up. Unlike the disciples, Paul likes to mix with men in suits, and in the designated room—Feasts and Miracles—Gallio greets Paul with a handshake. The file says he was once a tentmaker, but not recently, and Gallio holds Paul’s soft preacher’s hand for longer than he should.
‘You already know Baruch,’ Gallio says. ‘What can we do for you?’
‘Not here,’ Paul says.
He’s a professional. Never talk in a room where the opposition arranged the meet. Paul turns and sets a discreet browsing pace from Dawn of Civilization through to Land of Canaan. Despite the air conditioning Israel is heavy with history, and remnants of the old days always break through into now. Brand-new building, ancient objects.
Whether Paul turns left or right, walks straight on or doubles back, the bodyguard stands close enough to make a difference, and Paul is complicated in ways that Gallio admires. He doesn’t have the simplicity of the disciples, and has been surprised by Jesus, blinded by him. Paul has experienced the hurt that Jesus can cause, and he and Gallio have this knowledge in common. Paul surely has his reasons for employing a bodyguard.
‘First of all,’ Paul says. ‘I had nothing to do with the murders of Jude, Thomas or Philip. I have solid alibis and witnesses.’
He chooses to talk while walking, into Illuminating the Script and out through Costume and Jeweler. Baruch sometimes gets ahead of him, walks backward, fails to blink his Old Testament eyes. Baruch’s mind is stuck on a single thought, and out it comes in The Cycle of the Jewish Year. ‘I remember when you were Saul. You killed Stephen in the street.’
‘I changed my name, like Peter did. Simon to Peter. Saul to Paul. Saul is long dead.’
‘You kill him too?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘Nothing changes, then.’
Gallio registers the intensity between Baruch and Paul, neither man prepared to compromise on his version of the past. He searches for common ground. ‘No one else needs to die,’ he says. ‘The situation is bad enough already.’
‘Seven disciples left.’ Baruch wants only to provoke. ‘The others gone under.’
‘Which is why we need to talk,’ Paul says.
‘Barbarous deaths,’ Baruch says, ‘in outlandish places. Not pleasant at all.’
‘I need protecting from these assassins.’
‘You have a bodyguard.’
‘One man is not enough.’
‘You have your god.’
‘Philip had god on his side,’ Paul says. ‘I’m sure of that. He also had a skewer through the back of his legs.’
Paul decides they’ve walked enough, and in Modern Art he takes a rest on a leather bench facing Salvador Dali’s Immaculate Conception. He is as inattentive to surrealism as to seventeenth-century bridal caskets, and acts in all these galleries as if he is the dominant attraction. Gallio sits down next to him. He places a foot on his knee and holds his bony ankle. Straightens out his sock. He’s about to speak but again Baruch is quicker.
‘You’re one of us,’ Baruch says. He does not sit down, or betray an interest in abstract art. ‘When they killed Stephen you held the coats of the murderers. You can look after yourself.’
‘I’ve been forgiven my past,’ Paul says. ‘Though obviously not by you.’
‘We do not forgive defectors, nor do we forget them.’
‘No fighting, please,’ Gallio says. He revolves his black shoe and thinks it could do with a polish. ‘Not in a public gallery of the Israel Museum. We can protect you, Paul, but you have to give us something in return. Politics. You’ll understand the politics. Where can we find Peter?’
‘I don’t know. We’re not in regular contact.’
‘Maybe you should be, if you want us to offer you protection.’
‘Honestly, I know everything and everyone, but I haven’t heard from Peter in a long time. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘Liar,’ Baruch says. ‘Always was, always will be. The Jerusalem security services pick out the finest liars at a very young age.’
Paul’s secretary scuttles in from Oceanic Art with a pile of letters on a silver tray. Paul waves them away, then calls the man back, looks more closely at the letter on top (address, back of envelope, front) then drops it and waves the man away again. ‘Peter may have died, of course. The disciples of Jesus are not immune from natural causes.’
‘Or unnatural ones.’ Gallio pulls his ankle higher up his thigh, doubtful that natural death is an event the disciples are likely to experience. ‘But you’re not in the same danger, are you, Paul? You should be happy. You’re not a disciple so you’re probably safe.’
‘I met Jesus like they did.’
‘But you didn’t, did you? Not properly in Galilee. The disciples were chosen when Jesus was alive, and they worked and travelled as a group. You’re a latecomer, not in the same category, so you’ll probably be fine.’
Paul slaps Gallio on the knee, indulging him, acknowledging Gallio’s boldness in teasing the mighty Paul of Tarsus. Except his hand stops on Gallio’s knee,
grips, and Gallio understands that the Saul from a darker lifetime hasn’t been entirely banished. Paul does not take kindly to suggestions he’s second best, especially when the lesser disciples can barely explain the Trinity.
‘What’s your deal with Peter?’ Baruch approaches a painting of geometric shapes, looks at it without looking, hands on his hips, jacket wings pushed out behind him. Gallio sees the hilt of his knife, and then it’s hidden again as Baruch turns back to Paul.
‘Who’s second in command to Jesus? You or Peter?’
‘We don’t have a deal.’ Paul looks pained, because Baruch is seriously unenlightened. ‘We once reached a loose agreement.’
‘You convert the Gentiles, Peter sticks to the Jews. That’s what they told me in Damascus. But Peter is the beloved disciple, isn’t he? He’s witless, but Jesus loves him.’
‘He’s a fisherman,’ Gallio says. ‘Not that bright. He can tell a story but couldn’t unpack it in a keynote speech.’
Gallio decides to refine Baruch’s attack, though he’s probing the same weakness, Paul’s obvious pride. Good cop, he remembers. The nice guy used to be one of his roles. ‘Why deny your differences? Jesus appeared to you on the road to Damascus because the disciples needed help. The Galileans couldn’t communicate his message, not on their own, they didn’t have the brains. They heard the stories and saw his miracles but never knew what they meant. That’s what you do so well, interpret the stories and bring meaning to Jesus. Personally I like meaning, and I appreciate nuance because I’m an educated man, Paul, as are you.’
‘Whereas Peter,’ Baruch says, double-teaming, ‘knows how to thread the bait for flatfish. An underrated skill, I feel. The hook goes in at the eye then down the gut and out through the anus.’
‘The disciples aren’t a big help, are they? Can’t write a decent letter between them.’
‘It’s not that.’ Paul stands up and walks away from what he’s about to say, looking for an exit, but his doubt keeps pace with him and he says it anyway. ‘Twelve was the wrong number from the start.’
He exits to Impressionism and bustles through Orientalism. Everyone follows him—the bodyguard, Gallio, Baruch. Paul stops at a Meromi sculpture, then an Aboriginal dream painting, but none of the art on display can distract him. ‘Jesus had too many original disciples. No one can have that many friends around him, or advisers. He lost track, and the result was Judas.’
Acts of the Assassins Page 16