Acts of the Assassins

by Richard Beard

  When the music stops, hours later, some time after midnight, Claudia insists she has no regrets. She’s glad it happened. But please, she says, let’s not do this again.

  By now there’s no visible police presence in Caistor. The town is a Co-Op, a Spar, and a timeless sense that nothing significant either good or bad will take place here ever again. The people of Caistor carry on doing what they’ve always done, overpaying for the lottery and looking for love. It is complacent to live like this, but life at least is bearable.

  Gallio and Claudia have questioned Bartholomew endlessly, without great success.

  ‘What’s your opinion of Paul?’

  ‘I like Paul.’

  ‘You said that as if there’s a but.’

  ‘Paul always wants to explain. Sometimes Jesus just is.’

  Valeria runs out of patience and orders them by phone and email and text to give up on Bartholomew. Once, twice, three times. She wants Cassius Gallio in Cairo, because even her researchers struggle to remember Bartholomew’s name—as a disciple he must be unimportant. Gallio suggests Bartholomew is about to crack, while after-images of Claudia from the night before mean he couldn’t care less.

  ‘Leave Bartholomew alone,’ Valeria says, ‘before I have to send someone to fetch you.’

  Claudia tells Gallio their time is up. The reality they have to face is that no one can live in Caistor indefinitely. She invites Bartholomew to join their daily meeting in the Tea Cosy Café, and over a disappointing cappuccino she convinces him he’s done everything he can in Caistor. The hour has come, she says, for him to turn his thoughts to more benighted corners of the earth.

  ‘We’ll pay your fare,’ Claudia says, and Gallio wishes she wasn’t in such a hurry. He assumes that for her the twin room in the White Hart pub has been an interlude, a brief fantasy, and now she wants home with her children. She’s young, she’ll recover.

  ‘Wherever you feel called to go,’ she tells Bartholomew, ‘as thanks from Rome for your help.’

  Caistor has no travel agent, which gives Cassius Gallio fresh hope of a new delay, but Claudia discovers Internet terminals at the Heritage Centre. Claudia is keener than he realized, past the café inside the entrance, the three of them loud on the stripped floorboards, up the stairs beyond the library to the computers on the second floor.

  Claudia sits Bartholomew in front of a computer screen and shows him pictures of Greece, gorgeous and blue. Greece needs love and medicine and social justice. She leans across him and searches for a flight, departing Humberside Airport, and the earliest available is a last-minute package leaving later in the week to the northern Peloponnese, west of Athens. Not an established tourist destination but the new-build hotel has sea views. Looks promising. Fly into a city called Patras.

  Bartholomew holds up his hands, shakes his head. Not Greece. He’s less interested in gorgeous and blue and more in overrun by idolatry. Claudia clicks to Ibiza, but Bartholomew points further along the alphabet to Iran. Iran. Claudia will struggle to find Tehran four-star specials with pool and buzzing nightlife.

  But Bartholomew insists, so Claudia puts together a route leaving the next day that involves three transfers to the airport at Bashkale in Armenia, which is the closest she can get him to the border. She downloads for Bartholomew an Armenian visa for an Israeli citizen available on the Internet for immediate travel. The final stage, the short trip into Iran itself, he’ll have to arrange by himself. She fills out his booking details.

  ‘How many bags?’

  No bags. One-way.

  The next afternoon they share Bartholomew’s taxi for the short ride to the airport, leaving plenty of time before his first leg to Amsterdam (Schiphol, inevitably). Gallio buys him a cappuccino at the café in the airport, and there’s a smiley face in the chocolate on the milk.

  ‘About the cross, and Golgotha,’ Bartholomew says. He has milk froth on his moustache, and Gallio hopes for a last-minute confession, a decisive offering before Departures. Instead Bartholomew asks a question. ‘At the very end, when Jesus died, was there light?’

  Hopeless. The disciples give nothing away, but they’re happy to take from others. ‘You had to be there.’

  Gallio immediately regrets his unkindness. Bartholomew missed the crucifixion because he was scared, or preparing an escape for Jesus, but at Humberside Airport Gallio has no further use for him. A bit of kindness won’t hurt either of them.

  ‘Yes, now you mention it. I’m trying to remember. I think there was light.’

  Bartholomew is joyful like a child. He wants the same story at every bedtime, even when in daylight there are more convincing versions available. He ignores the implications of an anesthetic-infused sponge, even after Gallio has brought it to his attention. Jesus looked dead but in fact was sedated, which connects into a new plausible story: Joseph’s tomb was prestocked with medicines and dressings. Even so, given his injuries, Jesus needed three days to gain strength before his accomplices could move him.

  A gate number appears on the flight information screens.

  ‘Better make a move,’ Bartholomew says, hands flat on the table, but Gallio can feel the levelling of those Galilee brown eyes, saying talk to me one last time, while you still can. You may never see me again, and I am a disciple of Jesus. ‘You’ll not stop looking for him. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘The investigation is ongoing, and for the time being the Wanted bulletin remains valid. I’ll be looking for Jesus while that continues to be my job.’

  ‘I feel I’ve neglected you. Somehow I got very busy, even in Caistor, but we should have spent more time together. I sense I could help.’

  ‘Where’s Jesus?’

  ‘Everywhere.’ Bartholomew drains the last of his coffee, a regular dark-skinned guy with a beard wearing pale Middle Eastern robes. ‘When you find him you’ll know, but maybe he’s not the one who’s hiding.’

  Since identifying the body of James, weeks ago in Jerusalem, Cassius Gallio has worn the disguise of a Swiss pharma rep, a religious tourist, an academic, and most recently in Caistor a normal human being muddling through while giving his time to the Church. None of these pretend people are him. If the quest were the other way round, and Jesus were to look for Cassius Gallio, he wouldn’t know where to start.

  ‘Maybe I should stay,’ Bartholomew says. ‘Point you in the right direction. I’d like to help you feel his love.’

  Bartholomew’s flight is called. Boarding. Claudia suddenly remembers he hasn’t checked in but she rushes his e-ticket details to a self-service terminal. His destiny is not to stay in England, and when confronted by automated check-in Claudia is the answer to his prayers.

  ‘Open yourself up to him,’ Bartholomew says, as Gallio ushers him in the direction of the gate. ‘He knows who you are.’

  ‘Me? By name?’

  Cassius Gallio stops on the concourse, and Bartholomew does too. A flight crew has to dodge to avoid them.

  ‘You were there at the crucifixion. He never forgets a face.’

  ‘You should go through,’ Claudia says, but Cassius Gallio gives Bartholomew a last opportunity to tell the truth.

  ‘Nobody comes back from the dead, my friend. That’s common knowledge. Tell me what really happened.’

  Bartholomew does not take this opportunity at Departures to change his mind. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ he says, ‘that you find what you’re looking for.’

  ‘You need to go through Security,’ Claudia says. ‘Go now.’

  ‘Jesus did not come back from the dead,’ Gallio says. ‘I hope you can live with yourself.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Worry about the fire that’s coming, when Jesus returns and has dominion over the earth.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t?’

  ‘He is coming, along with the cleansing fire.’

  ‘Go,’ Claudia says. ‘And good luck.’

  He embraces them both, whether they like it or not, but Cassius Gallio has one final question. He whispers
into Bartholomew’s ear. ‘Who is the disciple Jesus loved?’

  But Bartholomew has already gone, showing his boarding card, joining the queue for the scanners, and he never answers the question. Gallio watches him through Security, though he can’t think of anyone less likely to set off the alarms. Bartholomew has no hand luggage. He has no pockets.

  Back at the White Hart Gallio and Claudia rut like animals. Cassius Gallio sometimes opens his eyes on her, or changes positions for the benefit of Jesus, should he condescend to be watching. See? See what you’re making us do? If god exists we have no privacy. There is no time on our own, up to our secret devices.

  Gallio finishes. He starts again. After the second bout he comes back from the bathroom and Claudia is on the phone. To Valeria, Gallio thinks. He doesn’t know why he can tell, but he can.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  Claudia disconnects her call, checks the screen for Call Ended.

  ‘I have a family. Any objections?’

  Her cover, her legend. Every ambitious spy is married, and lonely, because the secret of the secret police is that they search for connections they never find. They face a lifetime of detection to discover that life has no detectable meaning.

  Gallio speculates a scenario in which Valeria suggests to Claudia the idea that she should sleep with him. He takes Claudia’s phone from the unused second bed and puts it screen-up on the windowsill. They rut like animals. Coming back from the bathroom, Gallio sees she’s asleep. He checks her call log. Deleted.

  When Claudia wakes beside him Gallio holds her, skin to skin, treasuring the touch of her while he can. He moves his lips close to the softness of her ear. ‘We could move here,’ he says, ‘leave our problems behind.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  She twists to look at the other bed, then at the windowsill.

  ‘You don’t need your phone.’

  Gallio feels how much she longs to reach for it, to confirm her existence in the world outside this room at the White Hart free house in Lincolnshire. Through the wall, from Bartholomew’s former room, they can hear chat TV, bursts of studio laughter. There’s nothing to keep them in Caistor. Even their made-up reason has left.

  ‘You could bring your girls over. We’ll enrol them at the grammar school. They say it’s one of the best in the country.’

  ‘Want me to check its rating?’

  ‘Leave the phone. I’m serious. We could build a new life here. Just the two of us, and your two girls.’

  The dilemma of Jesus is a complex case best left to Valeria, while Claudia and Cassius Gallio stay out of harm’s way, cultivating a mild version of heaven in provincial England. They don’t need much: a service pension and retirement villa, occasional sunny spells as they love each other to death in a territory that’s safe and sound. Caistor will be eternal life, or feel like it.

  Claudia’s phone vibrates on the windowsill. They look at the white light from the lit-up screen, doubled in reflection on the window. The phone stops vibrating—voicemail, or the caller hung up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gallio says. He touches her stomach, her hip, pulls her into him. ‘We shouldn’t have done this.’

  Easy to say. Most words are easy to say. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

  The phone vibrates again, moving across the gloss paint of the sill with each new shudder. It stops. It starts again, and unless the caller gives up soon the phone will reach the edge and fall. Claudia gives Gallio his hands back and gets out of bed. She answers the phone, turns away until the far side of her face and her underarm reflect in the black of the window. She snibs her hair behind her ear. Her buttocks contract.

  ‘Totally,’ she says.

  She disconnects, tosses the phone on the bed, looks for a towel. Can’t find one, pulls on her pants instead. Then jeans from her suitcase. She clicks on the bedside lamp, and Gallio shields his eyes.

  ‘Bartholomew is dead.’

  ‘That can’t be true.’

  ‘In Bashkale, not long after his plane landed.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He was skinned alive.’

  IX

  Andrew

  “X CRUCIFIXION”

  Cassius Gallio sits naked, head in hands, in the upstairs room of a pub in an English market town. The stress of chasing after Jesus has cut lines through his cheeks. He has grey in his days-old stubble, like cobwebs in foliage, and a diagonal pillow scar above the wound near his eyebrow. Knife-fighting in his sleep. He scratches his chin. Apart from the blue eyes he could pass, from a distance, as an apprentice disciple of Jesus.

  Claudia is filling her suitcase. Like disciples, spies have limited belongings, and Gallio watches Claudia roll her anonymous tops, bag her sensible shoes.

  ‘Stay in Caistor with me,’ he says. ‘Live happily ever after.’

  ‘Bartholomew is dead. Skinned alive.’

  ‘That’s in the past already. It’ll be forgotten today or tomorrow, what difference does it make? Doesn’t change anything, and the world keeps turning.’

  Claudia looks frightened, and older. Married. ‘We’ve been ordered to report to Valeria, in Rome. The case has moved forward. She increased the security code to Severe, as a response to Bartholomew’s killing. Code Red, unlimited budget.’

  Skinned alive. Sawn in half, bludgeoned to death, hung upside down, stoned, shot by arrows, beheaded, hanged and now this. How random was a skinning, an eighth violent murder of a disciple? Each was more dead than the last, like a demonstration that no loving god could protect them.

  Gallio imagines the inner Bartholomew, and without his skin his delicate body is tubes and fibres and feathered blood vessels that branch and branch again into nothing. His anatomy is full of gaps, with empty space between vein and muscle, between muscle and bone. His vital organs are barely acquainted.

  ‘We should have kept him with us,’ Claudia says. ‘At the end he almost stayed.’

  ‘Why does Valeria want us in Rome? What about Cairo?’

  ‘She said Rome. Those are her orders.’

  Rome, after all this time. When they were cleaning Simon’s body out of the garage Gallio had thought it was over. He had failed, again, and Baruch was a sad dead example to anyone sincerely attempting to understand Jesus. For a short while Gallio had preferred the delusion of life in Caistor, where the planet could tilt and the raffle would still be called. The absence of significance in provincial England had seduced him.

  ‘She suspects the disciples Peter and John of being in Rome,’ Claudia says. ‘Trying to trace both of them, so far unsuccessfully. This isn’t finished.’

  Gallio puts his hand on her shoulder. She zips her suitcase. He wants to slow her down, to establish that the value of now is equal to then and next. Caistor, in the present, can compete with the lure of future glory or the flight from past mistakes—even with Rome. Claudia should give him a sign that she takes this present moment seriously, as he does.

  ‘Stop, Claudia. Stand up and look at me.’

  He wraps her in his arms and holds her, her eyelashes on his neck, blinking, brushing his skin, so her eyes must be open. She’s waiting this out, arms at her sides. Her elbow moves and Gallio suspects, behind his back, that Claudia is checking her watch. Time to let her go. He lets go. She picks up her book from the bedside table, gathers brushes and pots from the bathroom. Gallio follows her like a lost dog.

  ‘You don’t have to jump as soon as Valeria whistles. She’s chasing shadows.’

  ‘I have to follow orders. We both do. That’s how the CCU works.’

  ‘We could just not go. Exercise our free will.’

  ‘You mean disobey a clear instruction. We’ve pushed her as far as I dare. Stay and that’s desertion, for which the penalty is death, but it’s up to you.’

  ‘We’re in the back of beyond. What’s she going to do? Simon is dead, forgotten, and nothing else of importance will happen here. I feel the safety of this place in my bones.’

  ‘What
about Bartholomew? In the wider world disciples are being slaughtered and civilization is threatened. This isn’t all about us.’

  Claudia turns side-on to move past him without touching, checks one last time she’s left nothing behind, looks under the bed and reaches for a pair of knickers. She stuffs them into the pocket of her case. She’s ready.

  ‘The summons to Rome feels like a set-up,’ Gallio says.

  ‘You’re not dressed.’

  ‘No, listen. Valeria suspects Jesus of starting the fire in Rome. Now maybe of planning something worse, but the CCU is neurotic about terror threats, always has been. I’m not above suspicion, all things considered, not when contact with terrorists is a convictable offence. I’ve had contact with Jesus followers, right back to the beginning in Jerusalem. I’ve been actively searching Jesus out, which looks bad. I sent drugs to Jude’s hospital. Should have told you that. Then we let Bartholomew wander off unattended.’

  ‘The CCU brought you back from Germany to do a job. Valeria wouldn’t abandon you now.’

  ‘I’m not convinced she’s that interested in Jesus. Sooner or later she’s going to take her revenge.’

  ‘You exaggerate. Why would she want revenge?’

  ‘History. Something that happened between us. Please, Claudia, sit down and think it over. At least try to imagine living happily ever after in Caistor.’

  Gallio tries to hold her again, but she’s always moving and is made of elbows.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Claudia says. ‘She knows my house, my family. You have no idea what she’s like. Now put some clothes on. Valeria wants us in Rome and we’ve stalled here as long as we can. She isn’t joking about sending someone to fetch us. We don’t want that, believe me.’

  ‘Valeria can make mistakes. She doesn’t believe Rome can ever be outwitted, or go backward. She thinks all she needs is a reasonable plan of action and with logic and strategy she’ll control the future.’

  ‘Why is that so wrong? Reason will prevail. Don’t waver, Cassius.’

  ‘The future is under control only as far ahead as she can see. Which isn’t very far, in the scheme of things.’