Acts of the Assassins

by Richard Beard

  ‘Jesus remembers you from Jerusalem,’ Andrew says. ‘And from that fantastic day with Lazarus. You’ve seen and shared so much with us. You could tell people what you know, what you’ve witnessed with your own eyes. You’d be welcome to join us.’

  Cassius Gallio could give himself up, especially his ambition and pride. He could discard his former self, and this knowledge shines like light—to become a believer he need only be weak. That’s why Jesus has so many followers. But surrender feels like possession, like being inhabited by a person who isn’t him. The meek shall not inherit the earth, not while Valeria is regional director of the CCU, and anyway Gallio isn’t confident of what he’s witnessed or how much he knows. He doesn’t have the facts.

  ‘Approach Jesus with humility,’ Andrew says. ‘Not as a Speculator, hunting him down, but opening yourself up to him.’

  ‘Speculators have open minds. That’s one of the requirements, written into the job description.’

  ‘Not your mind, your heart. That’s how we the disciples came to Jesus. We felt something was wrong, and we believed Jesus could put the wrongness right. After you find him with an open heart the rest is easy. Then he’s always there.’

  A ray of sunshine beams through a window high in the dome, whitens a rectangle of marbled floor. ‘Think how much you have to give.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Gallio says. ‘I’ve resigned from the case, and I’m looking for no one. You should leave me in peace.’

  Cassius Gallio rejects Andrew’s idea of Jesus and tears brim in his eyes. He hates that. He has several thousand euros in his pocket, and he’s in a Greek ferry port where he can buy travel tickets without question for cash. He should be looking forward to a quiet and comfortable retirement, but the disciples of Jesus want more than his ruined career. Not once, but now twice. Still they refuse to let him be.

  ‘Are you scared of dying?’ Andrew asks.

  ‘Yes, like everyone else. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. That’s the difference between us.’

  Gallio believes him. Andrew projects the same certainty Gallio had envied in Jude and Bartholomew—Jesus died and came back to life, which to a sincere believer constitutes proof that something or somewhere exists on the far side of death. Andrew can die horribly, and at the same time he can succeed. This is the story retold in mosaic on the walls of the basilica, and Gallio remembers the ruined martyrium where Philip hung from his thighs. It was a beautiful spot, high above the blue pools of Pamukkale, impeccably picturesque. The story had been plotted in advance, because Jesus is always a step ahead.

  ‘Persecutions have started in Rome,’ Andrew says. ‘They’re blaming Peter for starting the fire.’

  ‘I didn’t know, I threw away my phone.’

  ‘You need to be careful. Nice beard, but you’re beginning to look like one of us.’

  In the Agios Andreas Gallio’s eyes sweep across images and icons but he blocks them into manageable shapes. Andrew is talking but Gallio isn’t listening. His heart is calloused, and Andrew says the dead in Jesus are not dead, Gallio hearing the words but not understanding. He refuses to be tempted into weakness. He’d rather kill himself, confronting death with courage, knowing that death is the end. Cassius Gallio sees no virtue in dying for the selfish reward of a perfect life in heaven.

  When he finds his voice he is cruel. ‘Your brother Peter shouldn’t have gone to Rome, which isn’t the wisest place to be, for a disciple of Jesus. He makes himself easy to blame.’

  Gallio’s statement becomes a question, a default process for a Speculator. ‘CCU know Peter is in the city. Is he coordinating some kind of attack?’

  ‘We have high hopes for Rome,’ Andrew says, ‘if everything goes to plan. Is Peter imprisoned in the Mamertine dungeon? Or not yet? He’s going to be a great comfort to the other prisoners, even though the jailers will make him suffer. My own fate is kinder. I’m a lesser man than my brother, the least of the disciples, but I expect to arrive earlier into the kingdom.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to die?’

  ‘Thanks to you, Cassius Gallio, yes. I’m grateful to you for bringing me to Patras.’

  Cassius Gallio adapts his strategy, takes control of his destiny. He refuses to make himself vulnerable on a boat, where they could trap him with no place to run. Either the disciples or the CCU, whoever catches up with him first. Out in the country he’d be equally exposed, so he needs to stay hidden in the city.

  He decides that paranoia is preferable to being burst asunder or skinned alive. Everyone wants their share of him, and in the centre of Patras Gallio searches out unforgiving faces, hard-skinned palms that can handle ropes and stones. He catches a drunken Greek god looking his way, and is spooked when a boy bangs a drum. He does not want to die.

  ‘You’ll be back,’ Andrew had said, calling out to him over the rows of seats, walking fast to keep up as Gallio headed for the door. But Andrew was wrong. Gallio wasn’t going to join them, not now. He’d slept with Claudia in Caistor, to make Jesus pay attention. Look Jesus, with a married woman I don’t love. A married woman with two baby girls, and I don’t love any of them. No response. Andrew wouldn’t let him go, followed him through the doors and out of the basilica into the sunlight. Gallio stumbled through solid heat, collided with a topless man in britches and a wolf-mask. He spun, lost his balance, righted himself. He ran, pursued by the howls of the wolfman.

  In the streets of Patras Andrew had been busy, presumably on his way to the basilica. He’d made an exhibition of himself, preaching against the sins of Carnival and taking public exception to the Bourbilia, a popular rite where women danced lasciviously for men. Andrew had dared question the supremacy of Bacchus, he’d criticized the local football team and the morals of the mayor’s son. Since the last time Gallio walked these streets, Andrew had been asking for trouble, and as an endangered disciple he ought to shut his mouth. He has offended everyone, making all of Patras a potential assassin.

  Cassius Gallio needs cover, and the Botanical Gardens contain copses of mature broadleaf trees. He weaves through the tree trunks, finding the centre where up above a canopy of leaves greenly deflects the sunlight. Mustn’t be visible from the air. A noise slides from his mouth, a whine of animal fear, and Gallio lies down and covers himself in leaf mold and litter. He crawls into the soil, hiding from the eye of god. He plants himself, and is still.

  He’ll wait this out. With one eye open he spies on joggers running off the edge of the path to save their knees. He spies on mothers with pushchairs. Cassius Gallio is buried alive, and he pisses where he lies. A madman, a timeless vagrant without papers, he shall ripen in the warm until he rots.

  His visible world is cigarette butts, a used plastic water bottle and a pair of torn Patras cinema tickets. However hard he tries, he finds it impossible to do nothing. He dehydrates, and as his brain dries out he hears voices, ghost versions of Jesus. James and Bartholomew, Jude and Thomas, Philip and James and Simon. They say: ‘I am the least of all the disciples.’

  Time passes. Cassius Gallio doesn’t know how long. He may have slept but however many centuries he missed, when he wakes the problem of Jesus remains unsolved. He blinks. He raises his face from the forest floor, and bark flakes from his cheek. He spits a seed off his tongue.

  A revelation is making itself known. One of the voices has something to say, and Gallio tries to isolate what is important from what is not. Eight disciples dead, he thinks, but their message continues to spread. Gallio bites the inside of his cheek, tastes blood and soil. Whoever is responsible for killing the disciples, for whatever reason, is not fully informed. Killing them is counterproductive, because every martyrdom is a fresh story that nourishes the original lie: life after death. He remembers the icon of Andrew in the basilica, and realizes the disciples continue their work when they’re gone.

  He pushes himself up onto his elbows. He’s a Speculator, and should question everything. That’s why Valeria hired him, and at last Gallio sees a truth emerging
: they have had everything the wrong way round. In Caistor Simon could have escaped from Baruch, if an escape had suited Jesus. James in Jerusalem had jumped from the roof, with no more encouragement than a silent phone call. Jude could have arranged professional security in Beirut, and Thomas had chosen to live in Babylon, a city of famous jeopardy.

  Now Andrew has followed Gallio to Patras, where every year on this day the Carnival celebrates the death of Andrew the disciple of Jesus. The disciples want to die, which means this story is not like other stories. Gallio sits up, brushes leaf scraps from his hair and shoulders. Lazarus went first, then Jesus at the crucifixion, until these subsequent killings look like entries in a competition: Which disciple of Jesus can die most horrifically, to prove he has no fear? The assassins, whoever they are, say yes you may want to die but not like this, surely, you must surely be frightened by this? Or this, Bartholomew, no one chooses to be skinned alive.

  Finally, Cassius Gallio begins to understand. The disciples don’t feel pain, not like he feels pain, because their eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord. They believe in a better place, so why linger here? Beheaded, shot with arrows, stoned, speared, hung upside down clubbed, sawn in half, skinned alive—to the disciples death is a happy ending. Heaven is real, and they love their enemies who send them there.

  Jesus is a ruthless opponent and he calls death, time and again, down upon the disciples he claimed to love. His will is done. Jesus coordinates every move his disciples make, as one after the other they die hideously and happily.

  Cassius Gallio rises up from the forest, the truth revealed to him. Jesus wants his disciples to die, and knowing their secret Gallio has to act, as Baruch did, with Simon. Except Baruch took the wrong type of action. The answer is not to make the disciples suffer, hoping to taunt Jesus into an appearance, but to refuse the idea of a Jesus in control of whatever happens next. Andrew will not die in Patras. The future is not shaped in advance, but can be changed by willed human action. This is a core principle of civilization, as Gallio has been taught to defend it.

  By the time Gallio reaches the Agios Andreas the basilica is filled to capacity, with three thousand worshippers in the tight rows of chairs. They have come to see Andrew die, as they do every year. The wolfmen and the drunken police and the Greek gods of Patras lash Andrew to an X-shaped cross, the flesh of his wrists and ankles swelling round the liturgical belts that bind him. The heavy rhythmic chanting of Andrew’s killers is part of the Carnival entertainment, and will remain so for years to come, the old familiar song as Andrew the disciple of Jesus is lifted up. The spectators join in. They clap their hands to the rhythm of the singing as his cross rises high on wires, up and above the holy screen, halfway to the dome and heaven.

  Every death is planned, and Andrew the disciple of Jesus is ecstatic, triumphantly not dying of old age or exhaustion. He has avoided those desperate fates, and is intent on joining the eight who have gone before. The bindings cut into his wrists, into his ankles on the X of the cross, and Andrew is the ninth atrocity.

  Gallio struggles through the standing-room-only at the back, bursts into the central aisle but for Andrew he’s already too late. Civilization will not save Andrew now, because what’s done is done, from Andrew’s collapsing lungs to the blood in lines between his teeth. Gallio knows about the blood, and the bloodstained teeth, because when Andrew catches sight of him he smiles.

  X

  Matthew

  “BURNED ALIVE”

  Jesus is the connection. Nine times Jesus, but Cassius Gallio does not accept defeat. He knows the secret of the disciples, their love of death and dying, and two of the three survivors have been sighted alive in Rome. Gallio will save them. Whatever Peter and John have planned, they will not die on Gallio’s watch. Jesus and the disciples have manipulated death to their advantage for long enough.

  On his covert journey from Patras to Rome, in the seafront chapels and quayside shrines of southern Europe, Gallio sees memorials to the crucifixion of Jesus. Every crucifix reminds him that the disciples are capable and cunning. Peter survived Baruch in Jerusalem, even though he was captured. He has avoided every assassin as far as Rome, the heart of civilization.

  Which is why, some time after the death of Andrew in Patras, Cassius Gallio finds himself sitting in a Roman bus shelter. He stares at primary colours advertising hair products and free-delivery bathroom suites. Also and always posters for the Circus, here and at every Roman kiosk: the latest films, plays, albums, the next Circus in line. This coming Saturday, in the first major performance since the fire of Rome, the Circus posters promise wild dogs, chariot-racing, and the public execution of Peter the disciple of Jesus.

  Gallio groans. Valeria has no idea what she’s doing. The death of Peter is exactly what Jesus wants, and Gallio is determined to stop it happening. He hasn’t shaved since Caistor, barely washed since his meltdown in the Botanical Gardens in Patras. From Patras to Brindisi, to Venice, to Rome. He loses track of time. Andrew died weeks ago, or it could have been longer, and since then Gallio has been jumping ship, travelling in the cash economy, a deserter without papers in ragged clothes with unkempt hair and the look of a criminal Jesus.

  Strangers help him along the way, and yet he distrusts them. People are kind, offering food and shelter, which makes Gallio suspect the Jesus network of encouraging him, urging him toward Rome for purposes not his own. Know your enemy, he thinks, and he learns the sign of the fish, an increasingly familiar shape on his undercover journey from Greece. Two lines curve from a point and intersect to make the tail, a simple but recognizable symbol of the fish for fishermen, for the disciples.

  With the aid of fellow travellers, many of them believers in Jesus, Gallio arrives in the eternal city. He has formulated a plan of action that starts with Paul, who is under house arrest in a district called the Fourth Regidor. However, Gallio’s most direct route from the port is blocked by police on the Fabricius bridge. The officers are stopping and searching, security level Code Red: Severe. Gallio turns back, looks for a safer route, tags onto pedestrian tours and pretends to take an interest in SPQR bracelets and letters whittled from Lazio wood. Pick out R O M A and take the letters home. Pick out the name of your favourite saint while keeping an eye on the patrols on the Via Palermo and the Viminal Hill.

  Every main thoroughfare is blocked, until Gallio ends up in the bus shelter. He wants a meeting with Paul, but forces beyond his control don’t want him getting through. Interesting, but as a deserter he can’t risk the backstreets and a patrol picking him up. Lost for ideas, he makes the sign of the fish with his finger on the dusty Perspex of the bus shelter. A middle-aged woman with plastic shopping bags asks him if she can help, and Gallio is no longer surprised by the reach of their network.

  ‘I was hoping to see Paul,’ he says, ‘in the Fourth Regidor. Jesus would rather I didn’t.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she says, ‘your information is out of date, that’s all. Paul moves about freely and was last seen outside the city at the Abbey of the Three Fountains. You can take a bus.’

  It could be a trap. On the other hand not even Jesus could brief all his followers, every single one, on the off-chance they’d meet Cassius Gallio at a Roman bus stop. Gallio is using them; they’re not using him.

  He crosses the road and waits for a bus heading in the opposite direction, away from the heightened security in the city centre. For a long time there’s no sign of a bus, just carts full of sand and building materials. Rome is a permanent work-in-progress, chisels on marble, shouting, the bang of hammers getting things done. Gallio sees free-standing columns where life thrived before the fire, he sees roofless temples and doubts if the city will ever be fully restored.

  He doesn’t believe that Peter and John are responsible for the ruins, not all of them, yet Peter is the entertainment at this Saturday’s Circus. Saturday 2–5, says the poster in this and every bus stop, The Greatest Show on Earth. It looks like exactly the kind of extreme result a disciple
would welcome.

  At last, after about a million years, a bus arrives. The driver knows the abbey, and tells Gallio to watch out for the Three Fountains bus stop, near the Siemens Italy offices, can’t miss it. The driver is right, and the Siemens headquarters is at a busy out-of-town junction beside a flyover. Gallio walks down the hill, cuts across a park, and picks up signs to the abbey.

  From the entrance, when he arrives, Gallio can see a long garden bisected by a tree-lined path leading to the abbey itself, which from a distance looks like many of the old church buildings in Rome. A baby cries, his mother one of a handful of believers compelled to see the site where an apostle died. Mum and pushchair are leaving, and at this time of day the café at the lodge is closed.

  Just before the main abbey building, next to a bubbling water source set into the green bricks of a wall, a man and two women are standing in close conversation. Fieldcraft, Gallio thinks, they’re using the running water to counteract listening devices, but fortunately he knows how to join them. He stands nearby and with the toe of his shoe he makes the shape of the fish in the gravel at his feet. They recognize the sign, and welcome him in as a fellow believer.

  Yes, they say, Paul is known in this place but he hasn’t been here recently. They’re more interested in Peter in the Mamertine Prison—he’s in the underground dungeon, and they were just saying that apparently he baptizes fellow prisoners with the damp from the fetid walls.

  ‘Amazing. As if the water presented itself there for just that purpose.’

  ‘Only three left,’ Gallio reminds them, before they get carried away. ‘It’s too late for Peter but thank god for John, and for Matthew. At least in Cairo he’s safe. Have you heard from John? He ought to get out while he can.’