I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (23 page)

trick. The legs kicked, the neatly plucked eyebrows drew
down (one grave, one acute), the plum-coloured lips
twitched and pursed, the perspiring palms opened and
closed. Have nothing to do with this innocent man ... Have
nothing to do with this innocent man ... Have nothinn~ ... I
stayed till she woke, charmingly dishevelled (flushed and
hyperventilating, one mango-sized breast free of the nightgown - if I hadn't been in such a Godawful hurry ...) and
called reedily for her maid.

You want to get to the man, go through the woman.
Eden seemed like ages ago (grainy Super-8 footage in ropy
colour) but I hadn't forgotten its lessons. Complacency's
never been my vice, and it certainly wasn't that morning in
Judea, but I felt, you know, optimistic.

But. Well.

Actually things got off to a good start, what with Pilate's
irritation at having to come out of the practorium into the
courtyard to meet the priests (Passover's dictates for clean and
unclean objects, food and places) exacerbated by narked
Caiaphas's response to the governor's question about what
the prisoner was accused of. 'If he weren't a malefactor, we
wouldn't have brought him to you, would we?' I watched
the furrows appearing in Pilate's brow and practically rubbed
my hands with glee. I think if they'd stayed outdoors I might
have been in with a shout. But God was interfering.
Goddammit God was interfering. I could see it in the governor's occasional slight head-shakes (as if trying to clear a
ringing from his ears) and fidgeting hands. The sun hammered the stones in the yard, and when Pilate looked up,
briefly, the sky struck him like a cacophony.

Are you the King of the Jews?

You say it.

Not to mention junior's elliptical style. If he'd just said
`you bet your skirt I am, Punchy', the procurate could have
dismissed him as just another Hebe nutter, but the tone was
all wrong for that, suggesting at best fearlessness, at worst
contempt. Don't be insulted, I'm going. He doesn't mean to be
insolent. Don't do anything hasty, man. Meanwhile the
Sanhedrin's bigwigs are chunnering and gabbling like a gang
of speeding turkeys, and the sunlight's playing havoc with its
boomerangs and spears. Tell them it's nothing to do with you.
Tell them to crucify him themselves ifhe's getting on their nerves so
much.

Which would be illegal, as both Caiaphas and Pilate knew
well enough.

`It's too fucking hot out here,' to no one in particular.
Then to the prisoner: `You. Come inside with me.'

It was time to call in reinforcements. I picked the creme de
la creme from the fallen angelic host and gathered them over
Jerusalem. It's going to get ugly, I told them. I'm pretty sure
He's going to make use of the mob. I want you in there.
Right in there, understand? I want you whispering so close
you can taste their earwax - got it? At least three of you to
every member of the crowd. Is that understood? Let's go.

I did some work with Pilate in the praetorium. Really
some of my best, warped though it was by the irony of its
application. On any other day Sonny's clipped ripostes and
sheer non sequiturs would have exhausted his patience and
had him signing the crucifixion chit with his mind elsewhere. As it was, he spent most of his time in the judgement
hall vacillating between curious fraternity with this wastrel
and a strangely detached conviction that his own destruction
would follow if he failed to execute him. His hands and face grew hot. The lamps weren't lit (what need amid the nmote-
filled and Godspeaking shafts of light?) but his breathing was
troubled by the stink of burning oil. Tonight he would get
Claudia to mix hint a draught. Thoughts rose and burst,
emptily, like painless blisters. He had an overwhelming desire
(courtesy of ►no►) to understand the riddles..11), kinndon► is not
of this world: if ►ny kingdom were of this world, then would my servants -fight . . . But the language - kingdoms, servants,
fighting - kept yanking him back to his own world, one in
which he was Pontius Pilate, Roman Procurator of Judea,
with a city swelled for the feast, a gossip-fattened crowd
outside the palace and a phalanx of ecclesiastical thoughtpolice all but breaking down his door. And still I worked,
amazing hint and the hall's guards with his own tolerance.
His face found hitherto unseen alignments, a grammar of
expression his own mother wouldn't have recognized, featuring improbable segues from anger to bliss, from
peremptoriness to a patience that amounted almost to bonhomie. I find in him no fault at all. The words dropped like
gentian petals. A sweating centurion exchanged a risky
glance with a standard bearer. Are ►ve dreaming, Marcus?

No we weren't. I was horribly tired, I don't mind telling
you, and in more than my usual amount of excruciating
pain. All the back-and-forthing was killing me. I know this
is a rhetorical question, but have you any idea how difficult
it is to tempt a human being away from his fate? You see the
conceptual clash, yes? It was a strain for Pilate, too, you
could see. He scratched his neck a lot. Started up violently -
then sat down again after three or four paces. The very
stones of the praetoriunm were warm with incredulity, as if
blushing.

To this end I was horn, and for this cause I came into the ►vorld,
that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice. I remember thinking, Yes, it's all very well
standing there with your slumped shoulders and risen veins
talking about bearing witness to the truth, but what you've
just said could have come quite as easily from me, mate, and
no word of a lie would it be. Some of which sentiment
plainly rubbed off on our beleaguered guv, who, getting
quickly to his feet, spat out `What is truth?', before turning
on his sandaled heel and storming back out to the priests.

You know, it's quite exhausting just talking about this.
Come aside with me a moment. Trust me.

Paedophilia's what I call a flexible gain investment. It yields
profit in umpteen different ways. Most obviously there's the
immediate suffering of the children, followed by the shame,
the guilt, the self-disgust, the not being believed, the hatred.
Not least the now loudly ticking clock of their own desire,
all those dream-rich hours and days before the early damage
gestates and they start fiddling with youngsters themselves.
Then there are the perpetrators. Again the shame, again
the self-loathing, again the useless guilt. Useless to God, I
mean. Guilt's only useful to God as prologue to penitence
and a change of ways. But based on guilt no paedophile's
ever going to change his ways. The desire for nippers is too
strong. Guilt's simply no match for it. It goes: desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratification-
guilt and so on. It's a mechanism, interrupted if they get
caught by the cops and banged up by a judge, but otherwise
unstoppable except via hard psychic and professional graft
which neither the perp nor his world is remotely interested
in investing in. Then there's the suffering of the parents (in
cases where it's not actually the parents wots dunnit, I
mean). The horror of being afraid of their own sullied child.
The shame of having suspected and done nothing. The shame of having known and done nothing. But best of all,
by far the best of all, is the opportunity it gives the selfrighteous mob.

Look closely the next time a paedophile comes via the
media to the attention of his peers, look closely at the faces
of the outraged mob. That's where you'll find me. Those
pixelated tabloid stills of good mules and dads transformed
by righteousness into grimacing beasts, bellowing for blood,
teaching their children to hate first and ask questions later (or
better still never), buoyed and inflated by the gobbled-up lie
that they're doing God's work. This is paedophilia's quality
yield: the indignant niob bloodthirsty with decency,
obscenely relieved of the burden of thought and the yoke of
argument. EVIL PERVERTS SHOULD BE TORTURED THEMSELVES.
The bald leaders make me fizz with pride. You'll have
noticed, no doubt, how mum and dad's first genuine expressions of grief and shock are telly-seduced and nlob-lionized
into studied outrage and the calculated stammers of disbelief.
You'll have noticed, I dare say, a dearly purchased and bitter
confidence, now that their loss has excused them their own
ethical failings and moral mediocrity. They've suffered the
tragedy of poor Tommy and are thus absolved of further
responsibilities. It is required of them now only that they exist
as mascots for the mob. Please do look at the hangin's-too-
good-for-'eel crowds in the tabloids - do look and tell me, if
you can, that there's any greater evil than the transformation of
individuals into the lurching, self-congratulatory mob?

God taught me that. Yes, God Himself taught me the
value of the niob a couple of thousand years ago in
Jerusalem.

The boys told me afterwards they could barely believe what
happened. What happened was nothing less than the mass scrambling of their myriad promptings in the ears of the
crowd. (It wasn't that big a crowd, by the way. Maybe a
couple of hundred. Certainly no more than that. Still, the
idea that there were fucking thousands ofJews of their own free
will screaming for Jimmeny's blood has come in awfully
handy down the centuries, so I shouldn't complain I suppose. Ill wind and all that.) What happened was that they
told the crowd one thing; God made sure the crowd heard
another. I mean `release Barabbas' doesn't sound anything
like `release Jesus', does it? Nor does `crucify him' sound
much like `let him go'. Not the sort of thing you'd accidentally mishear. At the time I thought the lads just weren't
pulling their weight. Pilate's psyche was still wobbling like a
blancmange, preoccupied - flabbergasted, as a matter of
fact - by its own reluctance to do what it would normally do
and seek the path of least political resistance. The sensation
was both seductive and nauseating - and somewhere
between the two he ordered the prisoner scourged.

I didn't like it. Not the scourging per se, obviously, but the
line of physical contact having been crossed. Wife batterers
around the world will tell you: the primary effect of hitting
your wife for the first time (assuming she doesn't leave you
immediately or cut your cock off while you're asleep) is that
it makes it much easier to hit her - harder - a second time.
Then a third, then a fourth, and so on, until hitting's
nowhere near enough and you've got to start getting creative. Although he didn't wield the whip himself, Pilate had
now got his hands dirty with action; more importantly, he
had seen that he could draw the man's blood, and that it was
red, just like any other man's. It lowered the stakes. That
wasn't good for me. If he could scourge him as a man, he
could crucify him as one - although it was after all somewhat
diverting to see Arthur having such a terrible time of it, I admit. Then the message from Proc ula arrived, via a redrobed flunkey with a face in which all the dark little features
seemed to huddle in the middle as if in fear of being shot.
Have mothing to do with that just man. I've suffered many thin s
this day in a dream because of Irim.

Well, it was a bit late for having nothing to do with him,
since he was hanging from the post in bloody ribbons,
thorn-crowned, dripping with sweat and glazed with the
spit of pilate's soldiery. But not too late, perhaps (that's ritht,
go on.~ to avoid nailing him to a cross on Calvary. Assuming
my boys had by now swayed the crowd, I put it into the
procurate's seasick head (why did the floor keep pitching
like that%) that he should take the prisoner out with him, let
the morons see what a harmless and indeed pitiable spectacle the so-called `King of the Jews' made against the
backdrop of Imperial pomp and order; get him off in other
words, on the sympathy ticket. I didn't know, I repeat, that
God had already been at it among them. Neither, obviously,
did Caiaphas, who'd sent cronies into the throng to buy
shouts with coin. All redundant. God had released the force
of the brain-dead righteous collective. They didn't know
why it seemed imperative to crucify the fellow - only that in
some way he was Them and they were Us. It could have
been the terraces of Old Trafford or the swaying Anfield
Kop. I could see my angelic brethren among them like fragments of a smashed rainbow. Lack of results was plainly not
due to lack of effort; they blazed and swarmed and whispered - and achieved precisely nothing. And this is where
my earlier boasting about the importance of the right remark
at the right moment comes back to haunt me, because
Caiaphas leaned in close for the delivery of the one that
clinched it: `Caesar's subjects are united in their condemnation of this blasphemer and instigator against Rome. I'm sure the Emperor wouldn't like to hear that his governor in
Judea suffers such an individual to live and spread his lies.
Rome, after all, gets to hear of everything sooner or later.!

Pilate closed and opened his eyes very slowly and wearily.
Not as slowly or as wearily as Jesus, mind you, who was
already having trouble staying on his feet.

'This round to you then,' I said, slipping alongside him.
`Still, that business with the nails isn't going to be a picnic, is
it?'