Acts of the Assassins (25 page)

‘No?’

‘Baruch was a confused individual.’

‘He was deranged, but I liked him.’

‘He started taking the afterlife seriously. We made a mistake letting him get ahead of us but he’s done us a favour. Simon’s killer isn’t Jesus and it isn’t Paul, who’s under observation and house arrest in Rome. It looks like no single assassin is responsible. Baruch killed Simon. We know he didn’t kill the others. The riot police killed James. The murders are random.’

‘In which case there’s no point searching for Jesus. He’s not a controlling genius with a secret plan, and he doesn’t have conclusive answers.’

Claudia reaches across the table and places her hand on Gallio’s hand, her movement a textbook copy of Valeria in the restaurant when he first arrived back in Jerusalem. Claudia’s wedding band is hard against Gallio’s knuckle, but he doesn’t mind. He leaves his hand where it is, under hers, never making the same mistake twice.

‘You look miserable.’

‘I live in a randomly brutish universe.’

‘We’ve done our job. Nothing more we could do.’

‘I wonder. Where do you think Baruch is now?’

‘In a bag in cold storage at John W. Varlow and Son.’

‘He changed his mind about death being of the end. Baruch couldn’t stand the idea that Simon knew more about death than he did. He came to believe that the disciples had made a decisive discovery, that changed everything.’

‘So now Baruch is chasing dead disciples in the afterlife?’ Claudia withdraws her hand. She can allow Gallio a day or two of vulnerability, considering the bloodbath he witnessed, but he shouldn’t fall apart. ‘This isn’t easy for me, either. I didn’t sign up to strap a man’s hips back together before he’d fit into a body bag. If you’re not thinking straight give the reason a name. Shock. Symptoms are confusion and energy deficit. First week of Speculator training.’

Cassius Gallio adds sugar to his tea and stirs, even though the tea is cold. One day he might even get around to drinking it.

‘Where’s Bartholomew?’

‘At the church. Where he usually is.’

‘Not a committed mourner, Bartholomew. You probably noticed. Hardly overcome with grief, is he?’

‘Let’s go back. We should pack.’

They have a twin room upstairs at the White Hart. Bartholomew has the next room along, a double. Claudia booked them in on the evening they arrived, when the pub’s other two rooms were taken by married ramblers and an agricultural products salesman. All three left Caistor first thing the next morning, after a blue-lit night disturbed by mayhem and murder. Two days later Gallio and Claudia are still in the twin. Gallio blames confusion and energy deficit. Claudia cites Valeria’s budget, and worries that Gallio might be scared of the dark. Between them
they can easily justify the twin beds, and they confirm that this is a strictly professional arrangement by showing the utmost respect for each other’s privacy.

Gallio flops onto his single bed, lies on his back. Stomach, side. Back. He kicks off his shoes in the middle of the afternoon, pulls a pillow over his face.

‘We’re supposed to be packing. Cairo, remember? Matthew is doing whatever he does in Cairo. He’s at risk.’

‘I have this picture stuck in my head,’ Gallio says.

‘What?’

Gallio lifts up the pillow. ‘Baruch before he killed himself. The determined look in his eyes.’

On the table separating the beds is a novel Claudia pretends to read before sleeping. Gallio picks up the book, reads the premise on the back. Young Americans adrift in Spain, deft, very very funny. He wonders how she can relate to that, when here in England a disciple of Jesus was sawn in half.

‘I’m going to shower,’ she says.

‘Again?’

‘Then we should make a move. We can’t stay here forever.’

She locks herself in the bathroom, though Gallio would like her to lie down next to him on his narrow single bed. He’d like that very much, though he wouldn’t know how to ask. He has spent a long time living with men, making sure to avoid sex except for that one misjudgement in Hamburg. He went back to the shoe shop the next afternoon, to apologize and to offer the girl money. She refused, said she liked him. He never saw her again.

Of course he’s shaken up, and he understands his reaction. He has seen death and he wants sex, suddenly alert to the only clock that matters, death then sex then death then sex then
death sex death, one thing after another. He needs to fuck Claudia. He wants, needs, whatever, to push her head down into the sheets and to be in her. Not just now. He wanted it already last night and the night before and every night but he stayed where he was in his bed. He’s suffering from an instinctive reaction, an equalling out, and he recognizes his impulse for what it is. Sex as a compensation, a consolation. Sex as the opposite of death.

He is, all the same, slightly ashamed of himself for wanting Claudia so fiercely. It reminds him that before he was civilized he was not. His people long ago and seemingly forever lived in forests in Germany, until they were massacred in battle by an army with superior technology. Civilization had arrived. Gallio’s stepfather, the general in charge, had offered to adopt the orphaned children of slaughtered enemy chieftains. He was full of human decency, after the battle was won.

But however young those children, the slate was never wiped entirely clean. Cassius Gallio can dream of matted blonde hair and double-edged hatchets. In his past, somewhere in the history that made him, a blue-eyed shaman pierces a chain through his tongue, and for years on end he drags a clutter of human skulls behind him. In days gone by, a long time ago, this must have seemed important. The shaman and the papery skulls and the firelight chant to Odin for victory in the upcoming battle.

They lost.

As an adult, a modern civilized man, Gallio almost believes that reason will prevail. Sometimes, though, the instinctive equations reassert themselves, and no rational argument will deny them. We should pray for victory in the battle. Sex is the opposite of death.

Claudia sits at the end of her bed wrapped in a hotel bath towel. A smaller towel is around her hair like a turban.

‘You haven’t moved.’

His eyes settle on her damp neck like fingers, then move across her reddened ears and along her jawline to her chin. This is so inconvenient for him, if he wants to be good.

‘I need to wash my hands.’

‘Again?’

Cassius Gallio goes to the bathroom and washes his hands. He comes back out, and in the last half hour between them they have used three of the four guest-room towels provided, thus hastening the end of the world. Gallio can’t bring himself to care, not after the last few days. He lies on his side, watches Claudia inspect her toenails.

‘One more day,’ she says, ‘then we move on.’

She bumps herself up the bed and sits back against the headboard, picks up her book and puts on her reading glasses. Reads for a bit, looks across at him over the frames. ‘I was thinking. If you ever come to Rome there are places I’d like to show you.’

‘I know Rome pretty well.’

‘Take your mind off the disciples.’ Claudia has given up on packing. If Gallio isn’t leaving today, neither is she. ‘The city changes. Changes all the time.’

‘But also stays the same.’

Gallio could fuck her now. Reach for her, exploit his instinct that life wins out over death. He’ll have to deceive her a little, pretend he likes her more than he does, that he’s always liked her, suggest that sex between them is therefore inevitable, and it is right and good. His feelings for her have a past and a future, that’s the message to convey, even though he’s not sure what those feelings are.

He wonders if he ever loved his wife, or Valeria. If he did he loved them and he lost them, but he was young, and the earlier love is lost the less serious it is, like chickenpox. He moved on and he was lucky because losing love later, as a grown-up, can scar the victim for life. People can actually die.

He’d be a fool to fall in love now. Wanting Claudia is probably connected with Valeria, and with his younger self. He wishes he didn’t think so much.

Still, Gallio could fuck her now. He swings off the bed and waits until he’s sure his feet are making solid contact with the floor. Then he stands up. He locks his hands behind his neck and pushes his head back against them.

‘To work!’ he says. He flings out his arms. The disciples of Jesus have no monopoly on virtue.

They’re in Caistor the next day, and still they haven’t packed. Cassius Gallio has a pain in his left shoulder from the single bed, and at some point in his sleep he pulled out the stitches above his eye. He checks in the bathroom mirror, tugs out the one remaining stitch, and disinfects the seeping wound with aftershave. He is not entirely indifferent to the future.

Claudia spends time on the phone to Valeria, excusing the delay, proposing fresh explanations for Baruch’s excessive behaviour. Stress disorder, exhausted in the line of duty. Also, they need another day or so because two Jewish corpses on the same night in Caistor, one of them a disciple of Jesus, is not routine police work. There are loose ends.

‘Yes, yes,’ Claudia promises, ‘as soon as we can. We can’t leave any sooner than that.’

Valeria phones back. What the hell are they playing at, really?

We’re not playing, Claudia thinks, we’re being sensitive to each other’s needs at a difficult time. Not what Valeria will want to hear. ‘We’re questioning Bartholomew. He lacks the physical strength for another journey.’

She could go on, and does. Bartholomew is frail from his coma, and without careful handling could suffer a relapse—a lie Claudia tells beautifully, because most of the time they can’t even find him. Bartholomew is out, he’s about, doing the work that disciples do.

Meanwhile, his protectors discover that in the slowness of Caistor a Speculator can avoid the headache of Jesus and global terrorism and Valeria’s complex casework. The displaced Romans enjoy bright English afternoons, savoring this time between horrors when children can walk home from the grammar school. In the market square a parish councillor raffles tickets for Caistor in Bloom. Under striped tarpaulins, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the market has tables of vegetables, meat, pet food, and Cassius Gallio honestly can’t see that the world is going to end, not soon, not here in provincial England. Simon the disciple of Jesus may as well not have been sawn in half here. Life continues as if he never existed.

At the church on Sunday Bartholomew speaks from the pulpit, unaffected by Simon’s death. He is confident that what will be will be, which seems to include his return to health and a renewed commitment to Jesus. Cassius Gallio slides into a pew near the back, and feels a twinge of metaphysical envy: to feel a sense of destiny would be a blessed relief. He thinks about his frailties and his failures and corrects himself—but only if that destiny were favourable.

He listens to Bartholomew advising the older churchgoers not to be scared of dying. Then Bartholomew reassures the
middle-aged who are frightened of the death of the old, and, in smaller numbers, he consoles the young frightened by the fear of the middle-aged. Bartholomew the preacher promises to honor the strongest and most urgent human wish: that we should never die. In exchange, the parishioners of Caistor bake cakes and sort jumble at the town hall on a Thursday. Simon is dead, yet their belief in Jesus and eternal life remains alive.

Caistor already has a stipendiary vicar, a bearded graduate of Sunday schools, who repeats stories he knows from Simon. Bartholomew stands aside with clasped hands and hears about the miracles of Jesus, the sayings of Jesus, the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. James, Jude, Thomas, Philip, James, now Simon himself. All eyewitnesses, all dead, but the stories live on. The parishioners of Caistor sing ‘Thine is the Glory.’

In the high-ceilinged Church of St. Peter and St. Paul the hymn resonates with longing fulfilled, and in a moment of weakness Cassius Gallio wants everything they believe to be true. Jesus promises justice and love and eternal life. That would be a lovely and perfect solution to injustice and hate and death, thank you, but from experience he has his doubts.

After the preaching and the singing, Bartholomew visits the misfortunate of Caistor. Gallio watches and learns, loyal to his vocation as a Speculator, as does Claudia. They tell Valeria this is what they’re doing, and this is what they do. Bartholomew picks up where Simon left off. He performs his small repertoire of country doctor tricks, easing the ailments of the rural poor. Cassius Gallio hands him bandages and presses him for a medical opinion on Jesus.

‘Up on the cross the point of a spear went into his side. That’s right, isn’t it? If Jesus bled from the wound then at that stage of the execution his heart must still have been beating, correct?’

Bartholomew is dressing an ulcer on the leg of an immigrant farm laborer. ‘Could have been. I’d need more information to confirm a diagnosis.’

‘So clinically he was still alive?’

Bartholomew shines a penlight into the milky eyes of an ancient woman who as a child was blessed by a retired naval chaplain who’d opened a gate for Queen Victoria. Everyone tells him a story.

‘At that point yes. Probably.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate your honesty. Where were you during the crucifixion? Where did the disciples go?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Bartholomew says, ‘I’m busy.’

The people of Lincolnshire keep on coming, and Gallio feigns an interest. With Claudia’s help he hands out hot meals and financial advice to people who believe in Jesus instead of understanding the macroeconomic pressures of a global civilization. He makes crutches for the lame, and forces himself to be patient with children, because if Bartholomew trusts him he’s more likely to confide his secrets. Gallio shows him the photos of Jesus on his phone—he’s a late starter, but he’s committed to finding Jesus. ‘Is that him?’

Bartholomew should know—Jesus sad but tough, with a crown of thorns, by Antonello da Messina.

‘Yes, that’s him.’

Jesus muscular but wary, again with thorns, by Peter Paul Rubens. ‘What about this one?’