Acts of the Assassins

by Richard Beard

  ‘Out of the question,’ John said. ‘I might be wrong about the time and place. Jesus makes the decisions, knows when and where.’

  ‘Not to mention how,’ Claudia said. ‘Falling out of a Roman taxi can’t contend with crucifixion.’

  ‘Or skinned alive,’ Gallio said. ‘Or sawn in two.’

  ‘Jesus needs someone else to provide the requisite horror, doesn’t he? None of you act alone. To push your religion forward you need some of us, those who aren’t disciples, to be assassins.’

  Cassius Gallio had once heard Lazarus make the same complaint about his best friend Jesus. He could never do anything by himself.

  ‘Jesus used me to stage his execution,’ Gallio said, not as an accusation but as a statement of the sad facts of the matter. ‘I took responsibility for killing him. I lived with the guilt of executing a man whose record never warranted a charge of terrorism. Then it turns out he may not have died. Jesus hasn’t been fair on me, and neither have you, his disciples. Including you, John. You collude in the various deceptions.’

  ‘But today is John’s lucky day,’ Claudia said. ‘We can give him what he wants. John, we’re taking you to your killer.’

  ‘Fate will do the rest,’ Gallio said, giving up on his training, on every pledge he’d made to civilization. He could do no more. He would deliver John alive, which would go some way to atoning for his desertion, even though it meant Valeria came out ahead. Valeria was always the winner, but Cassius Gallio was fatalistic about that too.

  ‘I appreciate your kindness,’ John said. ‘I’m grateful to you both.’

  The tour-boats started as dots on the horizon, the dots became ships, and from the ships came landing-boats heavy with pilgrims in search of John the beloved disciple. Cassius Gallio assured these earnest believers that they were misinformed. John the former disciple of Jesus was last seen in Ephesus. He had been assassinated like the others, yes, equally horribly—boiled in a vat of pagan cooking oil, according to widespread reports.

  ‘We found a man not far from here who lives in a cave. He says his name is John.’

  Gallio insisted the John on the island of Patmos was another John. This John believed in Jesus, true, but he was not the beloved disciple. Not after all this time. And John is a common name. Some of the pilgrims were heartened, made their excuses and left. Others believed what they wanted to believe, and competed to show their devotion.

  ‘We too are disciples of Jesus,’ they said. ‘But we are the least of all the disciples.’

  The pilgrims shared food and soap and images of Jude impaled by arrows against a verdant pastoral background. Gallio couldn’t begin to explain in how many ways their version of Jude’s death was wrong. They had woodcuts of Simon sawn in half crossways with a manual bow saw, and Bartholomew on a beach carrying his skin in his hands. They believed whatever pleased them, and as disciples the next generation of Christians, and the next, were impostors. No one could replace the original twelve, individually selected by Jesus. The Patmos visitors were aware of this, Gallio thought, because they were unrelenting in their pursuit of John. He could stand in for Jesus. He could pick out a new set of special disciples, who would be only too willing to serve.

  In his failure to do this, John of Patmos was a disappointment. He sat in his cave and he waited. He waited some more and he continues to wait, until the pilgrims and more recently the professors can’t be sure it’s him. Is the disciple John here? Is Jesus here? The questioners want the glory of being certain, but to this day Cassius Gallio refuses to compromise. He concedes that both John and Jesus may once have visited Patmos, but neither is here right now.

  ‘And Satan?’

  Gallio despairs, almost, but despair is unproductive so occasionally he’ll throw out a story, disinformation in the tradition of Jesus. A myth hides the man himself from sight, Jesus knows this, and Gallio will freely admit that here on Patmos he once saw, with his own eyes, the disciple John collect an armful of hay from a field. John knelt down in front of the hay and prayed, and the hay was transformed into the purest gold. Yes John did exactly that, here on the island of Patmos. John melted the gold down and minted an armful of golden coins.

  ‘Then what? What did John do with the money?’

  The researchers and academics are desperate to make connections, to speculate, to move on to what a story means and why it matters.

  ‘He gathered the gold coins together,’ Gallio said, ‘every last one of them, and he hurled them into the sea.’

  The taxi drove against the headlamps of construction lorries carrying sand and gravel for the never-ending renovation of the city. Beyond the tourist highways, where no one would think to look, the final lit windows in the glass Siemens building darkened one by one. It was getting late.

  The gateway to the Abbey of the Three Fountains was quiet, apart from traffic noise from the flyover, and the daytime trickle of visitors was a memory. In a sweep of full beam the taxi U-turned toward the city, leaving Gallio committed to John and Claudia. He acted as if he belonged, but was grateful for the night’s half moon that silvered the tree-lined avenue to the abbey building. He wouldn’t want to die in total darkness. Lamps at ankle level illuminated the path leading to the raised terrace in front of the arched abbey doorway. At the top of the steps, he could see Valeria waiting.

  ‘A pathway,’ Gallio said, ‘I’ll guide you along it. At the end of the path we have some steps. Keep hold of my elbow. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Is it the assassin?’

  Along with Valeria, up on the abbey terrace, Cassius Gallio could make out two more figures, dark in the shadow of thick stone walls.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All of them are here.’

  The disciples have disciples with disciples who over the years become implacable. Cassius Gallio can’t deter them from building their monasteries, from ringing their ecumenical bells. When John hears the faithful called to prayer he hides in his cave, a hollow in the rocks beside the path. The cave has room enough for two but Gallio prefers to wait outside: Jesus will descend from the clouds, according to Jude, and Gallio would like to be the first to know.

  As luck would have it, a contour in the rock beside the cave entrance is a perfect fit for the shape of Gallio’s back. That’s where he sits, shaped into the island stone and warmed by daily sunshine. Sometimes, especially if he falls asleep, believers will leave him money or handwritten messages: Please, God, let me find myself in Jesus.

  Cassius Gallio is not John’s keeper; that would not be a reasonable position for him to take. More accurately he remains constantly alert to ways in which a beloved disciple could die. Accident, illness, violence. Gallio watches John closely around traffic and water. Strangers have his attention—any of them could be Satan, or a killer from Rome, or both—and Gallio sleeps less well when John catches a cold. He can’t be certain that Jesus will appear, but if Jesus does appear, in the final instant of his beloved disciple’s lifetime, then he’ll find that Cassius Gallio is at hand.

  He lives every day as if the world might come to an end, as does John, which is not as exciting as it sounds. Eat, watch for clouds, sit outside the cave. Sleep. Avoid evil, because on Patmos with the monasteries and churches that’s the dominant mood. Despite a memorable episode of food poisoning, and a nasty chest infection, John is healthy and strangers are kind and Gallio wakes to endless sunny days by the sea.

  John complains that life isn’t fair. His brother James—his brother!—was beheaded and went first to sit at the right hand of Jesus in heaven. They killed James an age ago in Jerusalem, so the right hand is taken. As is the left hand. Thomas is on the left hand, or possibly Jude, and the two seats outside those are filled by Philip and Bartholomew, and the next places along by Andrew and Matthew and Peter. One disciple after another fast-tracked to paradise, with John left a vacant chair at the distant end of the table.

  ‘Next to Judas?’

  ‘Even Judas got there before me.’

  John feels
abandoned. Of the original twelve disciples, only John is absent from the kingdom.

  On the terrace of the Abbey of the Three Fountains, Paul stepped out of the shadows and John embraced him. The short bald man and the blind disciple, solid in each other’s arms, even though by Valeria’s accounting they weren’t supposed to be fond of each other.

  ‘In your own time,’ Gallio said. ‘Let’s get this done.’

  He was impatient, wary of any delay because in the open he felt exposed, out in the light: fat-winged flies bashed into the low-level glass of the lamps. Left, right, above, below. Gallio scrutinized the grounds of the abbey. If Valeria had called in backup then her hired assassins were behind the hedges, or moving tree to tree. He watched for black to detach from blackness, as evil would, from the dark of the barn or the lodge, shadows with knives, clubs, a pump-action shotgun.

  Nothing moved, nobody took aim from the darkness. Or not that he could see.

  Paul’s bodyguard, the third person to arrive ahead of them on the terrace, was armed. The curved blade of his sword was dulled with blacking, a professional touch, Gallio thought, and proof that Paul trusted no one.

  ‘Break it up, gents.’ Valeria had seen enough hugging, or shared some of Gallio’s operational anxiety. ‘We’re busy people, with problems to solve. No time like the present.’

  In the uplight she looked years younger, the Valeria Gallio had once almost loved in Jerusalem. No jacket, no bag, no weapons. Paul and John broke apart but held each other at arm’s length, like friends before a long separation. Or afterward, reunited.

  ‘I missed you,’ Paul said. ‘Now I have to go.’

  Claudia coughed, held out the padded envelope containing Paul’s fee. ‘I brought your money. You can count it if you like.’

  ‘Which one is the assassin?’ John asked. He pulled away from Paul and raised his chin.

  Part of growing old is the forgetting. The days grow longer then shorten then lengthen again. On Patmos Cassius Gallio loses track of how the starlings come and go, flocking as they depart, flocking as they arrive with a sound like circling bells. The sun goes down and the sun comes up. Light reflects from the sea onto the underwing of a seagull. A black cat jumps from a seaside trellis, lands safely on all four feet.

  The Jesus church continues to grow, travelling along the trade routes on the words of dead disciples, promising that Jesus will have dominion over the earth. It looks like he may. For every one of the original disciples there are twelve more, and those twelve breed another twelve, blowing across the region like seeds. The Jesus believers are many but mostly harmless, allowing the first to remain first, leaving the rich and powerful unchallenged.

  Some of the stories that reach Patmos are ludicrous. Cassius Gallio hears about memorials to Peter in Rome, of all places, a basilica over his tomb and a piazza that can welcome eighty thousand believers to prayer.

  ‘Is there singing?’ John asks, and the Vatican has a choir of twenty tenors and basses and thirty boy choristers and yes John we can confirm that there is singing, along with domes by Michelangelo and stonework by Bernini, sunlight through arches onto pillars.

  ‘Sculptures?’

  ‘In bronze, in marble, in purple alabaster.’

  John laughs. This is not what Jesus had in mind, or not that he ever said.

  ‘They pay their taxes,’ Gallio reminds him. ‘At least some of them do.’

  ‘I’ll take John now,’ Valeria said. ‘Thank you Cassius, for finding him and bringing him here. I’m grateful for all you’ve done, and I’ll keep my promise. You can go, leave us, disappear.’

  Valeria was offering Gallio the extinction he had longed for in Caistor, and for most of the time in Patras. Cassius Gallio could disappear and his name with him, a Speculator who never existed.

  ‘Unless you give me a reason to change my mind the CCU will leave you in peace. Your work is done. For the avoidance of doubt, should anyone ask, I see no one here at the abbey but us.’ She gestured round the terrace, at Claudia and Paul and Paul’s bodyguard. ‘Just the three of us, you and me and John.’

  ‘The last surviving disciple of Jesus,’ Gallio said. ‘It took us a while, but we got there in the end. Every disciple located, and all dead apart from John. You don’t worry it was too easy?’

  ‘The full set, exactly. When no disciples are left alive, Jesus can’t come back. Or none of his sympathizers can tell that particular story, not in good faith, about Jesus returning at the latest in the lifetime of his beloved disciple. His prophecy collapses, and with it the dangerous idea that he’s a mystical genius. With John we have the twelve. We’re done.’

  ‘Here I am.’ John opened his hands toward her, lifted up his arms. ‘You win. We’ve been hopeless at protecting ourselves.’

  ‘I’d have to agree,’ Valeria said.

  ‘Be careful, you’re falling into their trap.’

  Despite Gallio’s efforts in Caistor and in Patras, he found he couldn’t walk away from the story of Jesus. He saw the same patterns repeating themselves, but this time Valeria was at the centre, overconfident as he had been in Jerusalem. Gallio had once outwitted Jesus, because a corpse does not escape a sealed tomb. Valeria was satisfied that eleven disciples of Jesus had not chosen to die—and if they didn’t think this through Jesus would trick them again.

  ‘I know you were responsible for killing the other disciples,’ Gallio said. He wasn’t expecting Valeria to confess, but she would listen to his reasoning. She was a Speculator too, and Gallio was worthy of her attention if he could unfold the how and the why.

  ‘Personally?’

  ‘You have your people,’ Gallio said. ‘Operatives like me, like Claudia. We don’t see them and they don’t see us. You’ll deny them, because that’s the agreement, but you made it to regional chief of CCU because you respect how complex a case can get.’

  ‘I didn’t kill the disciple Simon in England. How did I kill Simon? I didn’t kill Andrew in Patras or James when he jumped from that roof.’

  ‘Simon in Caistor was an unexpected bonus, courtesy of Baruch, and in Jerusalem with James the riot police followed your orders. They have comms equipment, like the rest of us. They radioed for guidance, then used their batons because that’s what you told them to do.’

  ‘How did I get James off the roof?’

  ‘Paul made the phone call,’ Gallio said. ‘When James picked up, Paul kept quiet. That was a signal.

  ‘James wanted to die, as did the others. Paul helped James by letting him know when the time was right, a dark evening when you were jacked into the HQ radio. Paul started the process with the phone call, then you finished the job.’

  ‘I enjoy your agile mind,’ Valeria said. ‘If it wasn’t for Jesus you could have been one of the greats. Explain to me how I killed Andrew.’

  ‘You had your people in the Patras mob, easy to disguise during Carnival. In their costumes and masks they incited the locals and ramped up the aggression. They were the ones who had the cross ready, and the bindings. The mastermind assassin was never Paul, nor was it Jesus, or Satan. It was you, Valeria, though you were helped by Paul from the start. You sent us after Paul in Antioch to give yourself time to kill Thomas in Babylon, then you tipped off Paul and let him run from his hotel before we could make his life awkward. He’s a paid informer and he told you where to find the disciples. My role was to make it look like we found them by ourselves.’

  On the terrace of the abbey, John was a picture of serenity, rejoicing that finally his time had come. Paul, however, was showing the strain. He didn’t know where to stand; it was as if he wanted to avoid Gallio as the truth came out. He moved into the shadows, banged the back of his head against the stones of the abbey. He slapped his hand over his eyes, ran the palm flat down his face. He mumbled to himself, the same sounds over and over, and this was not the composed style of prayer favoured by James on the monitors. Paul clenched his fists and squeezed his old eyes shut. He released his jaw and uncricked his neck, remind
ing Gallio of Baruch whose soul was never at rest.

  ‘You’ll find no evidence of civilized involvement in these deaths,’ Valeria said. ‘With the single exception of Peter, who was punished for organizing the fire of Rome, an unforgivable act of terror. As for the other disciples, they were randomly murdered by whichever excitable locals they upset most. Infidels can be vicious. That’s how history will remember this.’

  ‘You’re probably right. Until Peter you kept it clean. We achieved the result we wanted while maintaining our reputation for tolerance. You constructed and followed a brilliant piece of reasoning, which I respect. But you’re also wrong.’

  Paul was louder with his repetitive prayer, moaning the words over and over oh lord oh lord. John joined him and held his hand, as encouragement. Claudia held the envelope with the money, but this was never a story about the money.

  ‘Paul has given me valuable assistance,’ Valeria said. ‘I admit that. We understand each other, and recently we both saw that the disciples had outstayed their welcome. They and their storytelling had to be removed to make way for ideas less damaging to the stability of modern life. We’ll replace superstition with community values. The resurrection becomes a symbolic idea rather than an absurd and exceptional fact.’

  Valeria sounded so reasonable. Cassius Gallio pressed a fist to a twitch beside his eye. So reasonable yet mistaken. No one understood the cunning of Jesus but him. ‘Paul isn’t betraying the disciples,’ he said, ‘he’s helping them out. If Paul wants them dead he’s on their side. Believe me on this.’

  ‘You’re unbelievable,’ Valeria said. ‘Claudia, tell him his speculation doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I think it does,’ Claudia said, ‘at least until the point about dying. Valeria, you killed the disciples with the help of Paul. But they didn’t want to die, because that would mean they were manipulating the CCU. Which makes the disciples smarter than us.’