‘Remember the tomb in Jerusalem,’ Gallio said. He needed to convince them both. ‘Valeria, you were there when Jesus supposedly died, and whatever took place on the Friday and the Sunday we never successfully explained. These are clever people. Jesus picked disciples sharp enough to keep up with his scams and hoaxes.’
‘Paul is my asset,’ Valeria said. ‘We have everything under control. He’s my agent, and has been for years.’
‘Which puts him beyond reproach,’ Gallio said. ‘He has the perfect cover. Valeria, open your eyes and see what’s in front of you. He doesn’t work for us; he works for them. Paul is a triple agent. He’s the father, the son and the holy ghost.’
‘I think my time has come.’ John’s voice wavered as he stepped forward, unsure who was tasked with the actual killing. ‘None of us can wait forever.’
John spends hours at a time in his cave, hidden from heavenly sight, and over the years Cassius Gallio has occasionally failed to chivvy him outside.
‘Another glorious day,’ he’d say, which was unlikely to cheer John up. ‘Your loss, but at some stage you’ll have to forgive him for keeping you alive.’
‘How long before you forgave him for what he did to you?’
‘Fair point. He’s not an easy man to forgive.’
Inside the cave John writes by candlelight, except he doesn’t physically write because he’s blind. John dictates and Gallio writes down the seven miracles of Jesus that John remembers best. John remembers the last supper and resting his head against the shoulder of Jesus, and he sees now that Jesus was pitying him for the suffering to come. The memory offers insufficient comfort—Jesus knew in advance but still he left John behind, to live and breathe in a cave on Patmos while his mind is back in Israel. He exists in both places at once, opening gaps in time that let through unsettling thoughts.
‘Write them,’ he says, and Gallio records the thoughts of John, however extreme or apparently senseless. First he thinks in stories, then in images of natural disasters and harpists and carnivorous birds. He spews out numbers, threes and sevens and twelves, and the voice in his head wants to multiply his findings by a thousand. Gallio writes down every word, from the miracles through to the final reckoning, not to please John but to inform the millions who will come after.
They both seize on the insolence of this idea, understanding that every sentence of John’s Gospel and John’s Revelation is a snipe at Jesus. The beloved disciple is leaving a testimony for others to read, after he is gone. With every paragraph John scorns the notion that he’ll live to see the end of the world. Writing is his act of revenge, his doubt in the prophecy that Jesus will return in the lifetime of one of his disciples.
‘Credit where it’s due,’ Gallio says. ‘Jesus isn’t all bad.’
Whenever John annoys him, Gallio defends the record of Jesus, in particular his treatment of John. In Galilee John was among the first disciples called, and in Jerusalem Jesus trusted him to lay the table for the last meal the disciples ate together. From first to last, unlike some of the others, John was given specific tasks to achieve. He was selected with Peter to run and discover the empty tomb. He was chosen even among the chosen.
Gallio doesn’t know why he bothers, because there are nights in the cave when he considers blocking John’s airways. He watches the disciple while he sleeps, and at almost any time Gallio could lean heavily on John’s face and he could press down and keep on pressing and force Jesus to make himself known. To return or not to return. Either way would end John’s misery at being left behind, and at last Cassius Gallio would know.
Except he’s an ex-Speculator, formerly attached to the Complex Casework Unit. He’s a guardian of enlightened values and a champion of reasonable thinking. Cassius Gallio isn’t a killer, so in Patmos John wakes up come the morning. The two men go for their walk, look for clouds and leave Jesus to choose his moment. Or not, as the case may be.
On the surface, without question, Paul was a Jesus believer. But behind that facade of letters and prayers, Valeria was confident of Paul’s allegiance to her and the CCU. Gallio was now suggesting that in actual fact Paul worked, more secretly again, for real for Jesus. Valeria had chosen not to be worried by the spread of churches and congregations, or by how Paul had connected, under her protection in the name of Jesus, Ephesians with Galatians with Corinthians and Romans.
‘He encourages Jesus believers to love peace and pay their taxes,’ Valeria said. ‘Exactly as we agreed.’
Gallio could sense Valeria’s exasperation, her inability to accept that a fatal mistake had been made. As a young woman she had misread Gallio in Jerusalem, when he wouldn’t leave his wife, but since then she’d pretty much known what she was doing. Being wrong was a feeling she’d forgotten how to recognize.
‘The number of believers doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘as long as they don’t pose a threat to Rome.’
‘So you never believed in a Christian terror threat, or Jesus triggering the end of the world?’
‘I couldn’t rule out those risks, not until now. Paul is ours, but we needed to rationalize all twelve disciples to be sure they didn’t have a plan of their own in motion.’
‘Maybe, but who is actually winning here?’
Valeria turned to Paul. ‘Tell Cassius about Damascus, when I recruited you. You’ve been against Jesus from the start.’
Paul ignored her, his lips drawn thin, his head rocking forward and back. He found a rhythm like a monk in active contemplation of the invisible, but he was trying too hard as if the invisible ought to be easier to see.
‘He was caught by a storm in the mountains,’ Valeria said. If Paul refused to take responsibility for his past she would tell the story herself. ‘He was badly shaken, but he recovered and the real change in him was the secret deal he made with me. Once we reached an agreement he was brilliant. He invented the bolt of lightning and the appearance of Jesus. The miracle revelation on the road to Damascus was mostly his idea.’
‘You were so impatient,’ Paul said, but as if Valeria was worth only a fraction of his attention. The rest of his mind was elsewhere, and not at ease, but Valeria was easily dismissed. ‘You didn’t listen to me. In Damascus you were so sceptical you’d have disbelieved in anything.’
Valeria grabbed the envelope from Claudia and pulled out a brick of banknotes, shook them in the air. ‘Tell John, tell everyone—this payment is for information that led to the death of Peter.’
‘He has gone ahead,’ John said. ‘In glory.’
Paul recited a prayer out loud and John filled the gaps with Amens, until the prayer between them became a chant.
‘He has gone ahead.’
‘In glory.’
‘To share the table of Jesus. Amen.’
‘This isn’t right.’ Claudia looked from Paul to John and back again. The line was deep in her forehead. ‘They’re not supposed to be friends with each other.’
Paul shivered violently where he stood, then lay down on the stones of the terrace. He tried to make himself comfortable, clamped his fingers between his thighs. He lay curled up on his side, face drained of colour and teeth clenched, his brain unable to control his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’
The bodyguard balanced his blacked sword against the wall and on one knee he attended to Paul, his hand reaching out for Paul’s shoulder but not quite touching. Gallio saw for the first time the love the bodyguard had for Paul, that he had always loved him.
‘You’re saying Paul played us.’ Claudia wanted to believe in the infallibility of the CCU, but she had a Speculator’s open mind and the terrible truth was making itself felt. Her faith had not been rewarded. ‘Shit. Paul was playing us while we thought we were playing him.’
‘All the time,’ Gallio said, ‘since the beginning. The most effective way to spread news of Jesus was to hitch a ride with the dominant secular power, accelerating the Jesus story in every direction. That’s right, isn’t it, Paul? You were
always aiming at two billion Christian believers worldwide, a number that never stops growing. Look at him. You never turned him, Valeria. Most of those people found Jesus thanks to Paul.’
Gallio had an urge to kick the traitor where he lay. The bodyguard stood and moved between them, one eye on Valeria, who took this opportunity to pick up the sword. She examined the blacking on the blade while the bodyguard lifted Paul to his knees, made sure with his muscular hands that Paul could kneel unaided.
‘Enough speculation,’ Valeria said. ‘Everyone step away from John.’
‘You’re not thinking straight,’ Gallio said. ‘Watch them, Val, be careful. They’re experts in deception.’
‘John,’ Valeria said. ‘Move away from the others. Now, please.’
Paul was making a visible effort to hold himself together, humbled at the end on his knees, a short bald man shimmering with fear. He was letting Jesus down but he was only human, and he couldn’t help himself. Gallio instinctively glanced skyward, but saw stars and half the moon, not a cloud in god’s heaven.
‘I have stepped away,’ John said. For the second time that evening he lifted up his hands, offering himself to Valeria as the last of the disciples of Jesus.
‘Listen, Valeria, think.’ Gallio watched the bodyguard. ‘Did you want Paul in Rome? Are you sure you were in control of that? He led us to the minor disciples before Peter. He kept us away from Peter until the end, meaning the most famous disciple was available for a grandstand death for which we’re clearly responsible. And which via a huge audience will reach the greatest number of people.’
‘I have not been deceived,’ Valeria said, but the words ate at her pride, opened up the possibility of their untruthfulness in the act of being spoken. ‘John is the last of the twelve.’
‘You think you’re being reasonable, and you are,’ Gallio said. ‘That’s your weakness. Everything we do is what Jesus wants.’
Jesus had plotted every cause and effect, guiding the disciples and their assassins to this moment in the abbey and beyond. The abbey, the museum, the free admission, the knowledge that visitors would come here not just now but for countless lifetimes into the future.
‘Every dead disciple becomes a martyr,’ Gallio said, ‘and brings Jesus new converts. Together we can turn this round, but only by not doing what Jesus wants. We should do nothing, or nothing he’d expect. Doing nothing at all, especially right now, is our safest course of action.’
‘None of us can refuse his work,’ Paul said, his voice squeezed by the tightness of his breathing. His body was at war with itself, or with his brain. ‘If Jesus is the son of god.’
On his knees he took half a shuffle toward Valeria. He swayed where he knelt, wanting her attention, but unable to force his body any closer. Cassius Gallio recognized the wildness of defeat in Valeria’s eyes, another Speculator outwitted by Jesus. She knew. Suddenly she knew she was losing everything. Thanks to Jesus she could see her career shrivel in the white heat of Gallio’s revelation: I have been wrong. The brilliance of Jesus blistered her sense of herself and burst holes in her faith that reason would prevail. Only she couldn’t be destroyed like this, not Valeria, not a regional director of the CCU.
Sword in hand, Valeria would seize back control as Cassius Gallio had once sworn he’d restore sanity by finding the body of Jesus in Jerusalem. Wrong and wrong again.
Gallio lunged at Paul, to save him from the death he so fervently desired. Paul’s bodyguard had orders for exactly this situation, the only specific instruction he’d ever received, and the day had finally come.
He blocked Gallio, making sure he couldn’t reach either Paul or Valeria, then expertly used Gallio’s momentum to turn and hold him arm-locked with his wrist at breaking point. Gallio tried to shout out, but the bodyguard’s free hand pressed hard over his mouth. Cassius Gallio was powerless to intervene.
On Patmos, the martyrdom of Paul joins the pantheon of legendary deaths suffered by the eleven murdered disciples. In the stories that reach the island Paul dies extravagantly, as an equal with the apostles of Jesus. The pilgrims bring pictures, and Paul’s assassin is a muscular brute in white marble, or a black angel with ragged wings. Cassius Gallio spends years politely considering the visual evidence, the postcards of paintings and sculptures, but he sees little these days that can’t be faked.
According to legend, Paul was beheaded at a site close to Rome but outside the city itself, and with each bounce of his severed head a fountain sprang to life. At the Abbey of the Three Fountains the three water sources are about ten paces apart on a downslope. To achieve the velocity for this length of carry, Paul’s head must have been cleaved off with appreciable force, in anger.
At her tribunal Valeria presented a different version of events. Paul’s untimely death was the fault of Cassius Gallio, a rogue Speculator who assassinated an embedded CCU agent in an ignorant rage. Check the archives, she said, Gallio had a history of mental instability, and a fixated belief that a minor Israeli insurgent was capable of returning from the dead. She conceded that her error of judgement was to have brought Gallio back, but she couldn’t have predicted the long-term damage to his powers of reason caused by earlier setbacks in Jerusalem. The tribunal disagreed, and noted that the archives also suggested the two of them had once been romantically linked.
‘That’s not true.’
The members of the tribunal decided, on reflection, that it was their duty and no longer hers to judge the truth. Paul had measurably advanced the interests of Jesus, whatever secret plans she might have devised for him. Valeria was found guilty of neglecting due diligence in her recruitment of Paul as an undercover agent. The arrogance of her method suggested she was either a traitor or a fool, and Valeria was nobody’s fool. In sentencing, the tribunal was deliberately generous, giving Valeria a brief window in which to exercise her free will as a high-ranking guardian of secular behaviour. She bled to death in the bath after cutting the veins in her wrists.
Claudia avoided the fallout. She was young, and could prove she’d disobeyed Valeria’s illegal orders to assassinate Cassius Gallio. There was, after all, some justice in the world. In Rome Claudia worked hard, kept her life simple and was promoted through the reorganized Complex Casework Unit. Now she speculates about threats to civilization wherever they may arise, though discounting the island of Patmos. The intelligence community knows of twelve disciples of Jesus, and extensive records exist for twelve spectacular deaths. Paul makes up the twelve, taking the place of John, and Claudia underlines the numbers in official ledgers. Twelve disciples, twelve dead bodies. Done and dusted, nothing more to see here, move along now please. Every time Claudia hides John from sight she recognizes a quiet act of love, of Caistor remembered.
Claudia sometimes sees Alma in the Roman markets, growing older, laughing with her mother as she barters for kugels and Mandelbrot, the two of them enjoying the benefits of life in a progressive world city. Alma’s leg was strengthened by extensive physiotherapy—at least that’s the most obvious cause—and she joined the regular army soon after her mother agreed to settle in Rome.
On Patmos, John meditates and falls into trances and remembers and generally wrestles with a fate he struggles to understand. His anger gives him strength, whereas Cassius Gallio mostly aches. His knees, his hips, his old man’s body subsiding. If nothing else, Gallio can write, and he writes for as long as John hears voices. John hears a word that sounds like millstones, and on another day a word like trumpets; he has bright visions of structures of glass that shine like gold, or of angels in the midst of heaven. Yes, Gallio tells him, he can see the angels. He can make out their vapour trails over the white island of Patmos, every sunny day during the summer months.
Cassius Gallio refuses to be the first to go. He can’t risk missing Jesus, but with every year he is physically weaker. Sometimes he mishears John’s stories, as if they’re true, or forgets that after so much time most of what remains is story. Any life, he finally thinks, can be told a
s a sequence of miracles, even his own. How extraordinary that the crucifixion of Jesus should have been allocated to a young Speculator whose zealous guarding of the tomb made the escape of Jesus more memorable. Or what a coincidence that of all people Valeria was in a position to remember his plight and call him back from exile. Cassius Gallio has lived these and many other miraculous accidents, if he chooses to remember them, until the cause and effect of his life starts to deceive like a plot, a life mapped out.
It is true that occasionally Cassius Gallio is comforted by what John is able to believe, a vision of eternity where everything is now, and now is everything. At the same time he’s proud never to have called on Jesus for help. He resists the divinity of Jesus as an explanation for the path of his life, and if Jesus would like to correct him then he’d better move soon. Time feels short, and one day on their walk to the cliff Cassius Gallio falls. He falls down, as if at imaginary feet.
John lifts him up, but Gallio is too old and frail to be righted. John makes space in the cave, and lays down his friend on woven mats, warms him with woolen blankets. Gallio will not close his eyes, he will not. He speculates to the end, and beyond the end, and beyond, until John takes pity and reaches out. Cassius Gallio takes hold of John’s hand and presses it to his feeble chest. At last, comforted, he closes his eyes. In the darkness he grips the hand that Jesus faithfully held, once upon a time.
About the Author
RICHARD BEARD is the author of six novels, including X20, Damascus (a New York Times Notable Book), The Cartoonist, Dry Bones, and Lazarus Is Dead, and three works of nonfiction. He has been short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award and long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He lives in London.
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