Acts of the Assassins

by Richard Beard

  Cassius Gallio of the Complex Casework Unit, specializing in sightings of disciples, arrives from over the sea. He has his ID with the embossed eagle. He has the face in its misery, and an overcoat and scarf and leather gloves for the wind that blows in from the Humber. He expects, and receives, a respectful welcome at the crime scene.

  The press are in attendance with their lenses and recorders. They film Cassius Gallio shaking hands with the local police commissioner, and shout out for a comment. Gallio grips the commissioner by the elbow and guides him across to the safer side of the police line, nearer the criminals than the press. He shows him two pictures of Jesus from a selection on his phone, a Rubens and a Tissot. The local policeman shakes his head.

  ‘Similar, but that’s not the man.’

  Gallio swipes through the disciple images and stops at Simon. He has a photo of the sculpture he once saw in Brussels, Simon in white marble leaning on a two-handled saw. The commissioner studies the face.

  ‘That’s him, that’s the hostage.’

  ‘And the kidnapper?’

  ‘We don’t have a description. He’s armed. He has a knife.’

  Gallio updates Claudia—the disciple Simon is the hostage—and suggests she makes Bartholomew safe. ‘That’s why we brought him, after all. We can’t trust anyone else. Find him a room, somewhere warm. And don’t let him out of your sight.’

  A kidnap negotiator offers Gallio his loudhailer. He waves it away. He phones Baruch’s number, and after a lengthy rerouting via Israel and back to England, the phone rings and Baruch answers. Gallio has to shout, because the background noise sounds like a sawmill.

  ‘What’s going on? Never mind. Stop whatever you’re doing. I’m coming in.’

  The uniformed police are impressed. A WPC in a stab vest, crouching and keeping her eye on the corrugated door, accompanies Gallio to the third garage along. Cassius Gallio walks upright, wishing he’d brought a hat, holding the phone to his ear. ‘Open it enough for me to get in.’

  Camera flash whitens the winter gloom. Baruch leaves the door as low as possible so the press can’t get pictures, and Gallio drops to a press-up position and slides in underneath. They’ll get front-page shots of a Speculator in action, a special agent’s fearless first contact with the hostage taker.

  Cassius Gallio pulls the door closed behind him and stands up inside the garage. Christ. He kills the phone. He doesn’t want to see what he’s seeing but this is what has happened in Caistor. The event can’t be undone. Simon is naked and hanging from chains, head down, the weight of his shoulders slumped on a workbench.

  Gallio holds vomit into his mouth with his hand. Christ. Christ alive, this will make Jesus pay attention, surely it will. Every act of evil is an appeal. An atrocity is a provocation, always has been: gods, if you exist and have any shame then show yourselves. When they choose not to show themselves—and according to modern historians this is usually their choice—the horror has failed to shame them. More horror is needed. What about this atrocity, and this? What about this act of evil now? Jesus, what about this here now? Baruch has accepted the challenge.

  He has chained each of Simon’s ankles, and hauled him up by a pulley attached to a steel roof beam. Simon’s legs are spread and in the air, his exposed white vertebrae curled into the bench. Baruch has taken an electric chainsaw and split Simon from the groin, starting in the hinge between his legs. How could Jesus not come back at the sight of this? If not now, then when? Come Jesus if you’re coming, come on. Baruch is sawing your disciple Simon in half.

  Civilization cannot tolerate acts like this. It sends for the police and civilization is the police. Civilization intervenes, says with divine certainty that this must never happen, though it does happen. Cassius Gallio defies Jesus to explain Simon, and what he thinks the torture of Simon means. None of the recorded parables illuminate a fate such as this in a provincial English garage.

  The garage has a brushed concrete floor, and on hooks in the breeze-block wall tools are ordered according to size. The fourteen-inch electric chainsaw is missing from its outline next to the cordless hammer drill. The saw is plugged into an orange flexed extension socket and has been used to slice through Simon as far as his lower stomach. There is a gallon of blood on the concrete floor, as if an engine block’s been emptied of oil.

  Cassius Gallio’s mind turns away, saving itself, just as his eyes know never to stare at the sun. He couldn’t chainsaw a man in half, he thinks, but Baruch can. Gallio is a negotiator, a finder of the best way forward. He feels the pressure of conscience, of knowing that Simon shouldn’t have to suffer like this, and conscience feels suddenly like the presence of Jesus. Does it? Cassius Gallio could probably shoot someone with a gun. He’s no saint.

  He doesn’t have a gun.

  Simon is alive. Gallio sees his fingers twitch.

  ‘Bastard might as well die.’ Baruch sweats heavily into his white shirt, jacket off, buttons undone even though the garage is cold. He is exhausted, deflated. ‘I couldn’t break him.’

  Baruch has moved beyond reasonable decision-making. If anything, reason contributes to the problem because lies are a reasoned attempt to mislead. Pain is necessary to destroy Simon’s ability to reason, and therefore to lie, and Simon has certainly felt pain. He should have told the truth about Jesus by now. Before now. A long time before.

  ‘He talked, but came out with the same old stuff. Jesus walking on water, and making blind men see. Jesus back from the dead, Jesus to come again.’

  ‘Baruch, what are you doing? What have you done here?’

  Baruch starts crying, sobbing up huge gulps of grief. Gallio risks a glance at Simon. There, again, a flicker of movement right at the end of a fingertip.

  ‘I wanted to call Jesus out.’ Tears run down Baruch’s face, both cheeks, the corner of his mouth. ‘Paul managed it, so why can’t I? How can Jesus bear to put up with this? He should be here, but he knows I won’t roll over like Paul. I could take him. I know I could, because he’s a coward. If he had anything about him I wouldn’t get away with this.’

  And then he has no sobbing left inside him. He wipes his eyes, and anger returns as a reliable emotion, the one he knows and uses best. Anger rises and revives him, and with a new sense of purpose he puts down the saw. One more time he wipes the back of his hand over his eyes. He pulls out his knife.

  ‘Put down the knife, Baruch.’

  Cassius Gallio is unarmed. He feels colossally stupid and arrogant for shutting the door of the garage. Baruch sniffs back the last of his tears then points his knife at Gallio’s throat, like an essential step in his reasoning.

  ‘I’ve been killing Simon for hours, trying to taunt Jesus out of hiding. I was expecting him to appear to me.’

  ‘Obviously it doesn’t work like that. Your analysis is flawed.’

  ‘I know how Jesus works.’

  ‘Do you? I thought Simon didn’t talk.’

  ‘Didn’t need to. He betrayed himself in the way he acted. The torture was necessary to find that out, but now I know their secret.’

  Gallio is distracted by Simon’s fingers, watching them until they’re no longer closing, however faintly, as a sign that his brain is reaching for grains of life. Simon is breathing, hearing. Something outside himself is understood, and then it is not. His fingers are still. The soul goes out of Simon, and Cassius Gallio waits for a profound insight or thought. None comes.

  The seventh disciple is dead, but Jesus stays away. He does not have a human heart.

  ‘Let me tell you what I did with the bones of James,’ Baruch says. ‘This is important. Not the last James, the one they beat to death. The first James, the disciple my men beheaded in Jerusalem. I was pleased he was dead. Didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I felt we had a point to prove with his body. I wasn’t going to risk a second Jesus, or Lazarus, so James had to stay dead. I boiled his corpse in a horse cauldron. Left it in there for hours, until the meat floated off. Beige in colour, I remember, like
boiled pork. I chucked the meat to a dog. Other dogs turned up and fought for the scraps, no manners at all. I emptied the soup of James from the cauldron, watched it soak into the dried earth. The bones I collected into a sack, wrapped it in duct tape, and I personally signed off the package with UPS to Spain. It was the furthest place I could think of. James the disciple of Jesus was dead and he would not be coming back. That’s what I thought: this time when they die they’re dead.’

  ‘James gets visitors.’

  ‘I know. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, trekking miles to touch his bones. They talked about it on the coach to Pamukkale, and this is the secret the disciples want to keep from us. Whatever we do, they’ve planned ahead. Every decision we make works in their favour, if only we could see into the future. We were wrong about Philip and Thomas, they didn’t have to recognize their killer. The disciples don’t fight back because they’re happy to die. That explains why they don’t run, because the future is secure. Death is irrelevant to them. They have an insight into life after death that we should take more seriously.’

  Baruch’s eyes are alight with a brightness Gallio fears: shimmering, brittle, sick.

  ‘Baruch, the British police are outside this garage in numbers. They’re not unreasonable people, and they’ll look after you. Give yourself up.’

  ‘Simon knew where he was going, and he wanted to get there. He suffered, but without the level of suffering I expected him to show. He had an absolute certainty about what was going to happen next.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  The word slips out before Cassius Gallio can stop himself, a thought so evident that to think it is to say it. Baruch isn’t angry, he’s jealous, this is the most reliable of his emotions. He is the expert on death, but the disciples have information about the afterlife that he does not.

  ‘I am jealous, yes. I want to know where they go, and why it doesn’t scare them.’

  Baruch places his killer’s knife in the looseness of his left hand. He fixes Gallio eye-to-eye and blows into the palm of his right, flexing then clenching his fingers.

  ‘Tell it to the police,’ Gallio says. ‘Don’t do anything you’ll regret.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing. Have a little faith.’

  He rolls his shoulders, preparing himself. Tosses the knife back into his right hand, grips hard. Baruch stabs himself deep in the windpipe.

  VIII

  Bartholomew

  “SKINNED ALIVE”

  Shit. This kind of mess won’t clean up itself.

  The next morning Gallio keeps Claudia involved, and that line in her forehead will not be softening any time soon. Her coping mechanisms involve pointing and tutting and snapping at Caistor locals who are too quick, too slow, too clumsy. Is it really so difficult, her body language asks, to get a pair of bodies bagged for airfreight to Israel?

  The heavy lifting they leave to John W. Varlow and his son, undertakers from Chapel Street, while Gallio feeds a diversionary story to the press about foreign gangs and ancient grudges and the chronic use of Humberside Airport by international drug mules. He mentions Albania. The ladies and gentlemen of the press suck their teeth. Naturally, Albania. He provides a prime-time story they recognize, along with its familiar ending. The kidnapper killed the hostage then turned his weapon on himself. That will be all, thank you.

  For the people of Caistor, from that night onward, the horror is safe in the past. The murder of Simon was a freak event, however grisly, but no one need think too deeply about what has happened here, not far from the market square. The case of the sawn-in-half disciple becomes a curiosity for out-of-towners, and a leaflet is available in the Heritage Centre.

  Gallio has a report to write for Valeria, to close off the episode, but for him the incident lives on. He supervises the police as they decontaminate the crime scene, and reassures the commissioner that no other disciples of Jesus are expected in the region. The police commissioner glances at an upstairs window, above the long blue sign for White Hart Free House and Accommodation. Bartholomew is occasionally seen in silhouette, and he’s always conspicuous at the post office.

  ‘Except him,’ Claudia says. ‘But he’s harmless. He’s helping us with our enquiries, and we’ll take him with us when we go.’

  They stay in Caistor. Speculators aren’t machines, despite their best efforts, and temporarily, while the double killing seems random and senseless, Gallio loses the urge to look for Jesus. He misses Baruch. He didn’t think he would, but he does. Baruch has been a part of his life as far back as Lazarus, and Gallio grieves for another story lost that connects the past to the present.

  Keep it together, he tells himself, but his ambitions feel undermined by so much death and so little Jesus. He remembers Thomas on the morgue trolley in Babylon, Philip swinging from his thighs in Hierapolis, and now in Caistor Simon with legs splayed sawn almost in half. These murders are unforgettable, deliberately so, but what kind of death does Jesus need to see before objecting? What has to happen before he intervenes and makes his presence felt?

  If Jesus is alive, and as powerful as Bartholomew believes, then he is everywhere and the answer to every question. He may even care. But if he doesn’t intercede he might as well not exist—the Jesus who abandons his followers to the saw and the rope and the stone is not worth seeking out.

  Gallio asks the younger John Varlow, in a break from bagging up the corpses, to recommend a tea shop in Caistor. In fact there’s only one, the Tea Cosy Café over the model railway shop, with a view of the market square. This is where every morning Gallio and Claudia debrief, comparing notes where Bartholomew can’t overhear. There is often not much to say, so they watch the time go by.

  ‘Stop looking at your phone,’ Gallio says. ‘Life is also here.’

  They take the table in the window, though if life is here in Caistor life is once again slow. Claudia holds out her phone, screen facing Gallio. A text from Valeria, not the first. ‘Read it. She says good things about you.’

  Gallio sees the length of the message, sighs, pushes his cup and saucer to one side and holds the phone in both hands. Valeria is full of praise. She commends Cassius Gallio for containing what sounds like an appalling situation. Baruch was a loose cannon (she always thought so) but now they can push on against Jesus free from Baruch’s obsession with Paul. Valeria advises Gallio, frankly, to keep his phone turned on. They’re not living in the Dark Ages. Next, she has new intelligence that the disciple Matthew is in Cairo.

  ‘According to our sources he’s writing a book,’ Claudia says. ‘Valeria reckons he’s their archivist. If so, he may have privileged information about a terror attack.

  ‘And he may not.’ Gallio hands back the phone. ‘She wants me to fly to Cairo.’

  ‘I know. Caistor, Cairo. International man of action.’

  ‘I can’t do this any more.’

  Claudia looks up from her phone, sees he’s serious and makes a show of powering the phone off. She has to study the edges and the top to remember how to do it, the line has to appear in her forehead, then she places the dead phone face down on the table and slides it to one side. She leans forward over her hands. ‘You can’t give up now. We’re making progress. It can’t get worse than Simon.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Baruch was a confused individual.’

  ‘He was deranged, but I liked him.’

  ‘He started taking the afterlife seriously. We made a mistake letting him get ahead of us but he’s done us a favour. Simon’s killer isn’t Jesus and it isn’t Paul, who’s under observation and house arrest in Rome. It looks like no single assassin is responsible. Baruch killed Simon. We know he didn’t kill the others. The riot police killed James. The murders are random.’

  ‘In which case there’s no point searching for Jesus. He’s not a controlling genius with a secret plan, and he doesn’t have conclusive answers.’

  Claudia reaches across the table and places her hand on Gallio’s hand, her movement a textbook copy of Va
leria in the restaurant when he first arrived back in Jerusalem. Claudia’s wedding band is hard against Gallio’s knuckle, but he doesn’t mind. He leaves his hand where it is, under hers, never making the same mistake twice.

  ‘You look miserable.’

  ‘I live in a randomly brutish universe.’

  ‘We’ve done our job. Nothing more we could do.’

  ‘I wonder. Where do you think Baruch is now?’

  ‘In a bag in cold storage at John W. Varlow and Son.’

  ‘He changed his mind about death being of the end. Baruch couldn’t stand the idea that Simon knew more about death than he did. He came to believe that the disciples had made a decisive discovery, that changed everything.’

  ‘So now Baruch is chasing dead disciples in the afterlife?’ Claudia withdraws her hand. She can allow Gallio a day or two of vulnerability, considering the bloodbath he witnessed, but he shouldn’t fall apart. ‘This isn’t easy for me, either. I didn’t sign up to strap a man’s hips back together before he’d fit into a body bag. If you’re not thinking straight give the reason a name. Shock. Symptoms are confusion and energy deficit. First week of Speculator training.’

  Cassius Gallio adds sugar to his tea and stirs, even though the tea is cold. One day he might even get around to drinking it.

  ‘Where’s Bartholomew?’

  ‘At the church. Where he usually is.’

  ‘Not a committed mourner, Bartholomew. You probably noticed. Hardly overcome with grief, is he?’

  ‘Let’s go back. We should pack.’

  They have a twin room upstairs at the White Hart. Bartholomew has the next room along, a double. Claudia booked them in on the evening they arrived, when the pub’s other two rooms were taken by married ramblers and an agricultural products salesman. All three left Caistor first thing the next morning, after a blue-lit night disturbed by mayhem and murder. Two days later Gallio and Claudia are still in the twin. Gallio blames confusion and energy deficit. Claudia cites Valeria’s budget, and worries that Gallio might be scared of the dark. Between them they can easily justify the twin beds, and they confirm that this is a strictly professional arrangement by showing the utmost respect for each other’s privacy.