John attaches himself two-handed to Gallio’s elbow. They have left Alma in the care of the orphanage, because now that Gallio has John he has less to fear from Valeria. Faced with the choice of taking John to the Circus or kidnapping his own daughter, John is the percentage decision. For the time being Alma is in a safe and caring environment, and one way Gallio can save himself is to be the Speculator who delivers the final disciple. If John is right and Jesus reappears at the Circus, then he’ll deal with that when it happens.
The air temperature dips, unusual for this time of year. John will sense the chill but he can’t see, as Gallio can, other signs that make him anxious. Gallio spots apostles in stained-glass windows, and sculpted disciples in the alcoves of Roman chapels. For the murdered disciples, death is not death. The disciples dominate the Vatican skyline, flanking a triumphant Jesus, mocking their versatile assassins. Simon carries a saw and Thomas a spear and Jude an arrow, their victorious marble whiteness made brighter by the bank of dark cloud descending. John tightens his grip on Gallio’s arm, aching with small-boy excitement.
At the Circus Maximus, increased security means only half the turnstiles are open. Gallio ditches the high-vis jacket because John attracts enough attention as it is, and they join a queue for the bag search. Every bag gets checked. They don’t have any bags. A temporary steward, a woman in a blue suit and white shirt, pats them down. She has no idea how long it will take to get everyone in.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ she guesses. They join another queue, and for anyone with limited vision, Gallio thinks, the outside of the stadium loses detail and becomes a dark mass with an incomplete upper tier of arches, a symbol of Roman ambition defeated by time. After fifteen minutes Gallio stops a second steward who says ‘Fifteen minutes for sure.’ Fifteen minutes later the queue begins to move.
Cassius Gallio and John have tickets for the popular third tier, but nearer the front than the back, on the opposite side of the stadium to where Gallio met Valeria the day before. Not the best seats, but good enough for an unobstructed view of the second coming, which if the Circus ever gets started may bring the world to an end by teatime. Gallio excuses himself and his partially sighted friend along the row, making people stand and suck in their stomachs. At their designated places they make themselves comfortable. John puts his hand on Gallio’s arm, then on his knee. Claudia’s seat, on the other side of Gallio, is empty.
‘Bet you can’t believe your luck,’ Gallio says. ‘A spare ticket out of nowhere.’
‘Bet I can.’
‘Look at this place, it’s packed.’
John can distinguish between light and dark but not much else, so Cassius Gallio describes the changing shapes made by a troupe of willing majorettes. They finish their routine as a perfect square and bow to scattered applause. The band of the Ninth Legion marches in, another prelude to the main event. If Jesus has planted a bomb, Gallio thinks, the casualties will be incomparable to those of any atrocity before or since. He talks John through Carthaginian drummers, a motorcycle display team, and from the upper tiers behind them some anti-Semitic chanting.
A steward at the end of the row points Claudia to her seat, and gives her a cushion to bring to John. A convert, Gallio suspects, who on his daily-guided tours will include a lurid description of Peter’s execution, complete with the number of spectators in attendance and an incontestable date. He will fix Peter’s story on a sharpened point in history, and he’ll ask aloud why this religion among so many rivals survived to the present day. Possibly because the stories told by the disciples are true, he’ll suggest. Jesus did come back from the dead. His disciples were witnesses, and Peter was so convinced by the reality of miracles he died for his beliefs in this very place.
Otherwise, apart from John and a sympathetic steward, few of Rome’s believers could have landed a ticket. The performance is a sell-out, the first full-length programme at the Circus Maximus since the fire, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Peter, the favourite disciple of Jesus. He will be alive then dead, all a man can ever be, with as a bonus attraction the possible second coming of a Messiah, and for true value for money proof of a resurrection.
A blare of copper horns, silencing forty thousand voices. The Circus has a producer called the editor, who controls the running order. Today, the editor has decided, the early part of the entertainment will be understated about pain and death. A singing competition is won by the son of a government official. A theatre company performs an extract from a contemporary play—the plot a timeless mix of coincidence, mistaken identity and a moral dilemma, but with the twist that demigods can intervene to advance the action. At the Circus Maximus the demigods of both sexes are young, oiled and intervene half-naked.
‘We could leave now.’ Claudia leans in close to Gallio, whispers into his ear. John is on his other side. ‘Get him out while we can. Beat the rush.’
‘He’s blind, not deaf. In any case, we’re staying for Jesus.’
‘You mean Peter. You’re getting the two of them mixed up.’
‘For Peter, then.’
But before Peter there’s chariot-racing, early rounds of Greens vs Reds and Blues vs Whites. The Blues crash, but the races never turn brutal until after the editor decides to spill some blood. With every new act and entrance, Gallio is terrified of seeing Alma. He knows about Valeria’s ruthless streak, but he can believe she’s crucifying Peter because she thinks it a reasonable step to take. Peter’s public crucifixion is a deterrent to say look, look again, Jesus isn’t much help to his friends. Targeting Alma doesn’t count as reasonable in any comparable way.
At close to four o’clock a carpet of flares announces the imminent arrival of the show’s star victim. The tunnel of smoke clears and the countdown begins: the beloved disciple of Jesus is in the arena. Peter carries a cross, and like Jesus he falls. No one vaults a barrier to help him, not in the Circus Maximus, with security as tight as it is.
A guard of four soldiers whips Peter into taking up his burden. Peter is the rock but the weight of the cross sways him, a fisherman on deck in a storm. His clothing has soiled in prison to shades of brown, and he is honestly unarmed for the fight. Grey-haired, bent-backed, Peter stumbles but does not fall, not again.
He suffers, but suffering is the price of salvation. For Peter eternity is within reach, where pain will have no meaning: he bears his burden because the soul will decide, not the body. He reaches the centre of the arena, drops the cross flat into a splash of sand. The soldiers offer him a gladiator’s trident to defend himself. Peter turns the weapon away, refuses to entertain.
John will hear the dogs even from the third tier. At opposite ends of the stadium handlers lean back against savage beasts straining at the leash, yowling, snapping, keening. John will supply his own visions to fit the sounds, but at the Circus Maximus he’ll also sense the feeling that’s growing among forty thousand spectators: Peter’s stadium meekness is unsatisfactory.
The bank of clouds is lower, darker. Peter refuses to defend himself and now this: no one wants rain.
Peter kneels in the centre of the arena. He prays. When dogs pull to within inches of his face, lunging at his eyelids, Peter doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t run and he doesn’t fight, which is curious then dull. The Circus crowd respects courage but Peter looks limp and timid, unlikely to provide a decent afternoon’s sport. He is a coward, and for the editor of the Circus Maximus Peter presents significant narrative problems.
An outbreak of booing, sporadic at first but increasing in volume. Slow handclaps. The editor releases a reserve of Christians, bundling them into the arena, about thirty women and children he’d been keeping back for later. He allows the crowd to settle, then gives the order: let loose the dogs.
His initiative is rewarded. These secondary disciples are less accepting of their fate than Peter, and half of them run. The runners survive, because the dogs leap at the faces and throats of the Christians who imitate Peter, those who fall to their knees and pray. Viciou
s, lazy, the dogs sate themselves on the sincere believers, but won’t move for the lesser Christians who, lacking in faith, run to save their lives. Everyone gets what they want.
The Circus today is misfiring. The production should feel like a show of strength, but on a darkening afternoon the prevailing mood is weakness. Horns. The editor has seen enough. Handlers with sticks beat the lethargic dogs and surviving Christians from the arena. In come the sweepers, who scrape bloodied sand into wheelbarrows and replace it with fresh. The renewed blondness of the arena is a promise of blood to come.
The editor needs to make Peter entertaining and the best he can do, with a performer Peter’s age who lacks fighting spirit, is crucifixion. But not a standard crucifixion, which would bore a knowledgeable crowd. The soldiers lay Peter down, and his lack of resistance allows them to arrange his arms and legs along the wood of the cross, which is flat to the ground. They nail him where he lies, and as the blood spurts, the booing fades. This is mildly diverting. A heavy bass drum beats time to the fall of the mallet. The editor wrests back control of the spectacle, though the crowd is familiar with the opening moves of a crucifixion. He will have to add value.
Oh that’s good, though, that’s an inspired variation. The Circus soldiers dig out a slot for the upright. Two of them haul on a rope, another crawls under the rising wood and pushes it up with his back until the cross, with Peter attached, is upright on its end and Peter is crucified upside down. Applause, from every section of the stands.
Excitement shivers through the stadium. A god worthy of esteem will have to react, if he has any pride, in front of forty thousand reasonable spectators who will be obliged to accept his existence. Come on, Jesus. You will never be offered a better opportunity than this. The veins swell in Peter’s inverted neck and head. His eyes, inches from the arena sand, roll into the top of the sockets. He lifts his head, tries to, but can’t reverse the blood pressure, the whites of his eyes filling out.
The stadium waits on god. Peter has an eleven-inch nail through each of his feet, Gallio notices, whereas for Jesus a single nail was enough. For Peter two nails are needed to take the weight. Peter’s knee joints dislocate, and through curling toes Cassius Gallio feels for the underground warning of an earthquake, the tremble of the dead rising to welcome Jesus. For a bomb, an explosion, a terrorist atrocity. The spectacle is Peter crucified upside down, but the tension is the waiting for Jesus to intervene.
A low rumble, and Gallio looks to the heavy black clouds for Jesus descending. John clutches Gallio’s arm. Claudia keeps her eyes on the stands, scans for unusual movement in the tribunes. And again, a low rumbling sound, and Peter’s ankles pop, yes the undertone is louder and it is, Gallio now realizes, the stomping of forty thousand pairs of feet acclaiming the editor’s work.
Peter’s head bangs against the wood of the inverted cross. His neck distends, ridged with obvious ligaments, and Cassius Gallio remembers, too late, that Peter is famous for botched miracles. He is the disciple who could not walk on water. He put his foot on the surface of Lake Galilee and waited a moment before applying some weight and seeing his foot go under.
Peter is dying, and Gallio stares at a disciple’s public death, convinced he has a lesson to learn. He leans forward, and John holding tight is pulled forward with him. The upside-down crucifixion of Peter, Gallio speculates, reveals the mind of Jesus. This is the thought that Gallio allows to develop. Up is down and down is up. Right is left and the last are first. Death is life. Defeat is victory. Nothing in this world is as it seems.
He doesn’t understand. Nor do forty thousand paying spectators in the Circus Maximus. The distractions that follow, with upside-down Peter as the ailing centerpiece, seem trivial by comparison. Chariots race laps round the inverted cross, but the dying body of Peter holds the eye. The editor of the games has misjudged the audience, and his customers start to leave. At first single seats empty, gapping the stands, loners making for the exits. They ignore the gladiators and the talent contests. Then couples, excuse me please, coming through, before entire rows shift and break. Civilized people, educated to know how the world works, are unsettled by a victim who neither fights nor flees. This is unnatural behaviour. Why would anyone behave like this?
Before long Gallio has John on one side and Claudia on the other, but otherwise they’re alone in the stadium, watching Peter die. A crucifixion can take hours, and Cassius Gallio endures the death of Peter as an unforgettable picture, an eleventh grotesque killing to which Jesus doesn’t object. The floodlights click off, leaving a brief silver afterglow. Gallio waits for the end, and even from a distance he recognizes the final moment when Peter’s limbs ease and his head relaxes and his chest ceases to heave. His body falls spent against the cross, and Peter the beloved disciple of Jesus is dead. He is dead.
So now they know. Jesus is not coming back, either in person or as code for a major event. A steward appears, the production is over, but they look beyond his official jacket at Peter’s body ignored in the scuffed centre of the arena. This is a reality check for Cassius Gallio, but for Christians, the no-show of Jesus is a shambles. Peter’s cross abruptly tilts in its slot, skews Peter’s feet sideways, refuses a neat alignment with heaven.
‘Where will we go?’ John says. ‘What will I do?’
Claudia stands up, but Gallio won’t be rushed. With Jesus he distrusts any sense of an ending, and none of the claims made by the disciples have yet been disproved. They never said where Jesus would come back, or specifically when. Gallio is disappointed by Jesus’s absence from the Circus Maximus, of course he is, but he can still think rationally. He turns toward John.
‘You’re the last disciple alive.’
Cassius Gallio touches the side of John’s face, runs his fingers over John’s eyebrow and along his boyish cheekbone. ‘You must be the one, the disciple Jesus loved.’
‘Enough now,’ Claudia says. ‘Nothing they say is true.’
XII
John
“ ”
The Greek island of Patmos smells of thyme and warm sea breezes. John the disciple of Jesus keeps hold of Cassius Gallio in his usual way, gripping him by the elbow, neither of them clear about who’s the guide and who the guided. They pass a mulberry tree where barefoot children laugh, climb a ladder, collect berries into baskets. Mulberry juice stains their arms and legs, and in their game of tag they leave blood-red handprints on exposed brown skin. John doesn’t see what Cassius Gallio, who was never chosen by Jesus, can see any day of the week.
From a distance unkempt old men can look much the same. Up close the differences between Gallio and John become more apparent: Gallio has milky blue eyes and John is blind, while Gallio has a slackness at the sides of his mouth. Arthritis has dried his knees and knuckles, and last night a useful tooth loosened in his head.
Gallio coughs up phlegm, spits to the side of the path. Jesus has not come back, though John hears voices that insist on their daily walk. From the cave past the mulberry tree along the path to the cliff edge, where Cassius Gallio and John the disciple of Jesus wait exposed to the eye of god.
‘Sorry,’ Gallio says. Another morning, another beautiful day on which to break the discouraging news. ‘Not a cloud to be seen in the sky.’
When they first arrived on the island, years ago, they lived more confidently in hope than now. Gallio kept John close because after so much time, such intense speculation, he was jealous of his right to encounter Jesus. Jesus has promised to return in the lifetime of his beloved disciple, and John is the last disciple standing. Therefore he is the beloved.
Cassius Gallio used to watch the clouds on John’s behalf, each as eager as the other for the weather of Jesus to cover the sun. Mostly, on a Greek island, the clouds stay away, or appear as distant lines like text in an unknown language, gradually washed out as dawn turns to day. The early morning Aegean sea, Gallio thinks, is more lovely against the blue Aegean sky than seems strictly necessary.
As a group of three they
had left the Circus Maximus after dark, half a moon slipping onto its back over the lights of the eternal city. John was the beloved disciple, and as the taxi found a thread through the post-stadium streets John said kill me now. Those were the words he used.
‘Please. Now is as good a time as any.’
‘You expected Jesus to appear, didn’t you?’
‘The set-up was perfect,’ John said.
Claudia had to lean round from the front seat, so that unlike in England she could hear every word.
‘The Circus was a piece of theatre like the crucifixion,’ she filled in the gaps left by John, ‘only this time the important people, the rulers of the world, could have witnessed the power of Jesus.’
‘But Jesus couldn’t save Peter,’ Gallio said. ‘Evidently.’
From Claudia’s kitchen to Alma’s orphanage to the Circus Maximus, for Cassius Gallio this has been the longest day. ‘You’re the last disciple, John, and Jesus promised to come back in your lifetime.’
‘So kill me and bring him down. Hurry him up. I’ll join the others and you’ll find Jesus. That’s what you set out to do.’
‘Why rely on us?’ Claudia said. ‘Get your own hands dirty. If you want to die then kill yourself, like James did.’
‘James was bludgeoned to death in the street.’
‘Do it now.’ Claudia taunted him from the front seat. ‘Force Jesus to show himself. Throw yourself out of a moving car.’
Gallio reached across and pushed open the door, because he could appreciate Claudia’s speculative logic. The wind of the city rushed in. The driver braked.
‘It’s not my life to take,’ John said. He reached for the door, missed the handle, grabbed again and pulled it shut. Outside the car, as the driver went back to driving, monuments gathered pace, back to the speed limit and beyond. Life will go on.
Acts of the Assassins Page 27