Acts of the Assassins (8 page)

They end up driving north out of Jerusalem in a family class Toyota Corolla. Gallio respects the speed limit and keeps his distance from the vehicle in front. He slows for camels, for carts pulled by donkeys. Mirror, signal, maneuver.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Baruch says, one foot on the dash. He can’t even smoke, because those days are gone. ‘You know, Cassius,
happy as I am to be working with you again, I’m surprised Valeria called you back.’

Baruch blows his nose, disposes of the tissue out of the open window. Checks the palms of his hands. ‘I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t only your soldiers who were under suspicion. I mean if I’m looking for a reasonable explanation for how the body left the tomb, after all this time. If Jesus is alive, someone patched him up and let him out. You were the man in charge.’

‘I was cleared at the tribunal.’

‘Of that particular act. Not of much else. The sentencing document is a classic, and I like the paragraph that declares you unstable and incompetent. I believe those are the words they used.’ Cassius Gallio keeps his eyes on the road. ‘Incompetent. Strong stuff.’

‘But not guilty of receiving illegitimate payments to allow the removal of the body. The tribunal had no evidence of that, no witnesses.’

‘They fired you once, they could do it again. That must worry you. Dereliction of Duty. Professional Negligence. And one other, I think, yes, I remember now, suspended Gross Misconduct for sexual harassment of a junior colleague. I looked up the charge sheet.’

‘It wasn’t harassment. Nothing happened.’

Baruch is joshing, and he is not. Gallio can’t blame him, because anyone who wanted to steal the body would think first of corrupting the senior officer. That would be a logical approach to take, so the question needs to be asked.

‘All we know for sure is the body was gone,’ Gallio says. ‘Why are you picking my daughter up from school?’

Baruch flips his foot off the dash, and as the city thins he gazes at the street-side storefronts. Driving out the slow way,
dentists and driving schools give way to car dealerships and furniture outlets.

‘Where’d you hide the money, Cassius?’

‘How’s my wife? Been seeing her long?’

‘Intelligent man like you. Offshore, I guess. Your family—I mean the wife and child you abandoned—they could use some extra income.’

‘I never intended to abandon them. First, I don’t have money because no one bribed me. Second, if I’d let the disciples steal the body I’d know too much. I could undermine their resurrection story at any time, and they’d shut me up like they shut up Judas.’

Baruch turns in his seat, sizes up Cassius Gallio as if for a coffin. ‘Does that prospect frighten you?’

‘No, because I don’t know too much.’

‘They didn’t kill Judas. Suicide. Investigated thoroughly, with official stamps on the verdict. You were getting a lot wrong back then, weren’t you, Cassius? I’ve heard the details from Judith, your ex-wife. You were wrong at work and wrong at home. Someone had to repair the damage and it wasn’t going to be you.’

‘It could have been me, except they sent me to fucking Moldova.’

‘You’re deluded. Says so in the tribunal report. Stubborn, isolated, unreasonable, prone to fantasy. You could no longer function professionally, not even at procedural tasks like locating a corpse. Or keeping a marriage alive. She’d never take you back now, not after what you did. And poor little Alma with her leg, she’s grateful for a real-life father figure.’

Gallio stamps on the accelerator. Not much happens, the car’s a Toyota Corolla. He backs off, calms down. His family is
someone else’s business, and he can hide in the here and now, in the mission that Valeria has given him. He’s driving to Beirut, to find a man who looks like Jesus.

At first, after hearing Valeria’s proposal, Cassius Gallio had said no. Valeria didn’t accept his decision, told him he should think it over.

‘No, really no. Jesus is dead. I’m not going to look for him.’

‘Sleep on it. I think you’ll take this on, because what else would you be doing?’

Barracks near Stuttgart, barbarians at the gates, a single bunk, long sleepless nights and a routine designed to use up the time before he dies. At best, Cassius Gallio will look for his socks in the morning. He will look for the cheapest item on the canteen menu, and for an almost entertaining program on evening TV. Otherwise he’ll look for nothing.

In Jerusalem, with or without his rank as Speculator, Valeria was offering him a goose chase he could drag out for months. Jesus was dead. He was killed years ago, and the trail was cold. If Valeria and the CCU had decided to speculate otherwise, then truly this was a complex case. One they wanted to pursue, and if so then who was Cassius Gallio to object?

‘We’ll give you a desk in the Antonia,’ Valeria said. ‘Security clearance for the files and archives. That’s the most we can offer. We’re going on a hunch as it is.’

The next day Cassius Gallio sat at his allocated computer on an upper floor of the Antonia Fortress, swinging in a swivel chair pinched from Human Resources. It felt good to be back, and the open-plan Antonia operations room was in a familiar state of distress. Desks pushed together, files everywhere, computer
screens glowing the colour of bad rice. Someone had polished their football boots and left them in a corner, stuffed with newspaper, on a plastic bag from Hamashbir.

For the first hour or so Gallio watched the junior intelligence officers of an occupying army, who kept themselves busy by sifting standard police reports for incidents of obscure significance. Stolen official cars, ABH against a minor civil servant, graffiti at the TV station. Usually these crimes were not significant, not even obscurely so. The youngsters in the office avoided Gallio because he was attached to the CCU. Also because his sole and slightly shameful responsibility was to hunt a man who was dead. For the second hour he mulled over his mission, steepled his fingers to his chin, swivelled his chair this way and that.

The story was baffling, from beginning to end, but Gallio was in no special hurry to return to barracks. He decided on an approach: not optimistic but conscientious. Either he would solve the Jesus mystery or he would not, and when he eventually set to work he started with the events the disciples claimed to have seen: Jesus, so they said, had risen into a cloud above the Mount of Olives. Gallio found this hard to believe. He’d kept the disciples under surveillance, yet they claimed to have seen this ascension with their own eyes, the same eyes that once witnessed Jesus walking on water.

People passed by Gallio’s desk. He looked busy, wrote himself a memo:
Miracles/hallucinations. Galilee connection? Check lake for cadmium/mercury trace. Industrial pollution/poisoning? Would explain a lot
.

He found a report Valeria had commissioned in the previous month. On the relevant dates there had been no heavy industry operational near Lake Galilee, no processes at work to leak toxins into the water supply.

Cassius Gallio binned his memo and started again from the only fact they knew for certain: someone was dead. Between then and now Gallio had seen hundreds of pictures of Jesus on the cross, because he was interested and provincial museums and churches were full of them. Paintings, carvings, sculptures. No other death in history had been so exhaustively recorded. Jesus was dead.

At the same time, and Gallio finally confronted the truth of this, he had never stopped experimenting with the idea that Jesus had survived. Jesus only appeared to be dead on the cross, and had entered some kind of trance. Gallio’s soldiers (what happened to that sergeant?) neglected to break the bones in Jesus’s legs, meaning that severe physical trauma was confined to feet and hands, giving him a shot at survival.

Gallio called up files from the archive and stacked them beside his desk. He went through the dossiers one by one, relived the familiar story. From the newer material he learned that Valeria had investigated lung capacity. Jesus had form as a public speaker, and for three years he projected his voice to large crowds in open-air spaces without amplification. If orators developed abnormal lung efficiency, then Jesus’s oversized lungs might have delayed asphyxiation, a common cause of death when chest muscles and lungs were hyper-expanded. Even then, considering his other injuries, Gallio didn’t see how Jesus could have survived for more than a few weeks afterward. A month at the outside, with expert medical attention.

There was always another file to open. Gallio respected the assignment, such as it was. He treated Jesus as a missing person and pulled relevant information from Valeria’s Complex Casework networks. He reviewed every theory. The rational approach was to keep an open mind until the evidence convinced one way
or another, and the Speculator protocols came back to Gallio like riding a bike. He contacted Israeli banks and had them search for an account in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. He was meticulous, accessing the benefits register to see if any likely Jesus was claiming, and if so how he collected his money. Neither initiative generated a result.

Cassius Gallio swung on his chair, this way, that way. He chewed the end of his propelling pencil. Why not? If you’ve lost something, as his stepfather liked to say, look again in the obvious place. He spent a morning checking police and hospital records for unidentified bodies. He respected the assignment but he was a realist. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross he might have died since, and the alleged resurrection hadn’t put a stop to violent assaults in Jerusalem, nor vagrants dying alone. The worst of life continued, here and now as everywhere and always, and the official records contained a separate category for unclaimed corpses.

Some of the dead bodies, not many, had mutilated fingers where prints had been removed by sanding or slicing. Gang crimes, scores settled and souls lost. Not one of the unclaimed corpses had extremity damage compatible with crucifixion. And even if a likely candidate did emerge, Gallio didn’t have a DNA profile to confirm the match with Jesus.

The burial clothes, those left behind at the tomb, had long gone missing. There were no body fluids to sequence or physical remains to analyze. The cross, pretty much any remnant of it, would provide blood spots for a DNA sample, but no one could locate the cross. Valeria had tracked down fragments across the ancient world, but the provenance was never certain. And in any case, so many hands had touched these suspect relics that the DNA was unusable. The contemporary evidence was lost.

Gallio looked again in an obvious place: the family. Valeria had labelled a dossier ‘Nazareth,’ and repeated searches of the house where Jesus grew up were routinely logged in the weeks after his body vanished. Gallio now sees from photocopies that he signed the original warrants himself, back in the day, but Valeria had raided the house more recently. Empty, mother gone, father long dead, neighbours adamant that Joseph and Mary had seemed a normal couple who kept themselves to themselves. Yes, they remembered Jesus. Always had time for everyone.

None of these enquiries revealed a hidden twin who could have died in his place. Valeria made sure her people asked, checking back through school yearbooks and birth certificates. No secret twin or brother of about the same age. Only Jesus, from Nazareth, and his circle of Galilean friends.

His friends. The original twelve disciples, with the violent exceptions of Judas and James, were alive. No reported deaths from natural causes, as yet, but not one of the disciples was resident in Israel. The beheading of James was unlikely to tempt them home.

Gallio thought some more about the disciples, and how they looked so similar. He dug out the tape of the crucifixion and watched it again, and again. He stayed in the office after everyone had left, and gradually he remembered how to speculate. Cassius Gallio felt meaningful for the first time in years, and reacquainted himself with his youthful desire for glory, like a lost friend he was surprised to recognize.

Then he suppressed his ambition as best he could. There was no glorious return to Rome in this, consuls rising to acclaim him. The CCU did not call for its finest minds to track down a missing Jewish mystic who was anyway probably dead. Valeria
had assigned the case to a washed-up ex-Speculator. Cassius Gallio knew that, but this was also his second chance. He knew that too.

Find Jesus and take him alive. Parade him in a cage before a glut of academicians who will explain his escape from the tomb. Either that or prove once and for all that Jesus is dead. The most ridiculous illusion in history will unravel, for the entertainment of the rational classes.

Cassius Gallio watched the tapes, remembered his vocation, and a possible solution began to emerge.

‘There’s more to life than Jesus.’

Baruch is a restless passenger. The road climbs through the glitter of sunlit olive trees and he fiddles with his phone, with the buttons of his suit, with the radio. He can’t find a decent station, too much news not enough music. ‘I have plenty to be doing in Damascus.’

‘Like what?’

‘Hunches. Seeing a man about a dog.’

Cassius Gallio sets the satnav for Damascus, but there’s only one road over the mountains, a ribbon of tarmac through the summit passes. Before long they leave the horse-drawn traffic behind, and near the highest point on the road Gallio pulls into a lay-by, comfort break. Though not straight away. Before getting out of the car they wait, as a precaution. No other vehicles but the Toyota Corolla out on the ancient highway.

‘Safe,’ Baruch says, and they both climb out of the car.

Up in the mountains a wind blows through, and a rush of clouds hustles across the peaks, blocking and unblocking the sun. The hills and the road go dark then light, and in the dry bush to
the side of the Damascus road, on rusting poles, triangular signs warn of landmines.

Baruch ignores them, steps through some flowering thorns toward a solitary scrub oak. He survives, pisses, shakes, zips. He strolls back and survives again. Either he’s lucky or he has access to privileged information.

At the car Cassius Gallio leans with his hands on the bonnet, straight-armed, stretching his calf muscles. Baruch sits on the front wing and lights a cigarette, inhales.