Acts of the Assassins (3 page)

‘They made that up. The priests want to discredit any talk of resurrection. A man coming back to life is a stupid story, unbelievable, but some people are starting to believe it.’

‘Find the body, Gallio. Please, for the sake of my sanity. And for yourself, for your future. Your time is running out.’

Valeria’s ex-boyfriend is the sergeant in charge of executions. He has strong hands and a capable face made broad by early baldness. Lots of know-how, good with women. His eyes are moist, a little frightened. No one wants an interview with the Speculator.

‘Why didn’t you break his legs?’

The sergeant blinks. He recently lost his girlfriend, he doesn’t want to lose his job. ‘He was dead.’

‘You ignored the procedure. You’ll have heard the gossip that Jesus is alive and out there somewhere, free as you like on his unbroken legs. That’s why we have a procedure.’

‘We speared him, to make sure. He was dead.’

This enquiry is not personal, and Gallio hopes the sergeant appreciates that he’s only doing his job. They are not competing to sleep with Valeria, and none of these problems are of his making. He will, however, find out the truth behind the execution and burial because everything has an explanation.

‘Was he, though? Are you certain he was dead?’

The sergeant is a career soldier. He won’t admit that he acted out of compassion, nor does Cassius Gallio want him to admit to it. He should be desensitized by now, because attending to executions is part of what he must do. The situation is
different for Gallio. He took control of the Jesus execution as a chance to right the wrongs of his misadventure with Lazarus. He doesn’t have the experience to be indifferent, or the necessary distance.

But nobody does, against an enemy like this. Gallio had called up soldiers to guard the tomb, and he acknowledges they were not the finest troops at his disposal. Whereas executions require precision, and a steadfast belief in the rightness of the civilizing project, to stand on duty outside a tomb requires an iron bladder. Gallio had picked the lowest soldiers they had, out of respect for the legion, men on charges for leaving live rounds in the chamber or wearing the wrong hat on parade. The hopeless cases.

Their mission was to guard a corpse, to ensure the dead stayed dead. He thought they might have managed a simple task without fucking up.

Gallio accesses the bank records of his idiot tomb guard detail, but none of them are that stupid. If the soldiers were paid off they’ve hidden the money, and sure enough Valeria finds a stack of used bills taped in a sandwich bag inside a mattress in the garrison block. Dumb enough.

‘Who gave you the money?’

‘What money?’

In the garrison jail no one can hear Cassius Gallio sigh. He upends the sandwich bag onto the floor, kicks through the bricks of paper money.

‘That’s not ours.’

Valeria picks up a solid packet of notes, and jabs the most stupid of them in the throat. The soldier is not forthcoming. She holds his nose and stuffs the money into his mouth until he retches.

He weeps. He blames a local man, named Baruch.

‘He told us his name and offered to pay us. The body had already gone. The tomb was empty. What was the harm?’

‘You should have refused the money.’

‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Swore he was an official of some sort, and the body was already missing. Not our fault, he said. He told us we wouldn’t get into trouble.’

Or if they did, then this man Baruch would straighten it out. They were to say the disciples had stolen the body. The soldier has one hand over his Adam’s apple, and he checks his teeth with his tongue. He sounds aggrieved.

‘He told us the Jerusalem Speculator had approved what he was doing. He’d spoken to you.’

‘Me? He mentioned me by name?’

‘He did. Said you knew each other. We’d be fine.’

‘He was wrong.’

Cassius Gallio lets his face rest, in all its misery. He has a downcast face, when at rest. When he’s feeling nothing, and his face should look neutral, it relaxes into a picture of dejection. His wife has commented on this, after sex.

‘So Baruch paid you to say the disciples stole the body. In this made-up version of events, that you couldn’t even make up yourself, why didn’t you stop them at the time? What lie did he give you to answer that? It’s the obvious question.’

‘They didn’t steal the body.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We would have stopped them. We were awake the whole time.’

‘But Baruch paid you to tell everyone the disciples did it. How would they have done it?’

‘He said to say they were armed.’

‘With what? Dangerous sandals? We’ve been through their hotel. No knives, no guns. Not a single offensive weapon. Not even a blunt object.’

Gallio has the sergeant and his execution squad complete the interrogation. The sergeant is not a bad man, and Cassius Gallio watches through a one-way mirror as he patiently asks the soldiers to take off their clothes. They have no scratching or bruising to suggest they fought for the body of Jesus.

‘You fell asleep, didn’t you?’

The sergeant is gentle with them, because every soldier learns on joining up that sleeping on duty is punishable by death. That’s the tightness of the ship they run. Or rather, falling asleep on watch while active in the field is punishable by death. In camp, the guilty are punished with a beating.

‘We’re in camp!’ the men shout. They come and bang their fists against the mirror, wanting to see who’s behind it, seeing only themselves in reflection and their clenched terrified faces. They know Cassius Gallio is there, and he’s watching. Cassius Gallio knows he’s watching. It’s up to him whether he chooses to intervene.

‘We’re in camp!’ they shout, again and again.

Gallio presses the button for the loudspeaker, and the soldiers hear him as a disembodied voice. ‘This is an occupied territory. We’re in the field.’

By falling asleep on duty they endanger their fellow soldiers. They cast suspicion on their colleagues and superiors, especially their superiors, as if Speculator Cassius Gallio can’t be trusted with a simple execution.

‘We’re in the field, gentlemen. You know the punishment.’

He revisits the crime scene, first at Golgotha and then the tomb. Beyond the police tape the tomb is a high-end Jerusalem unit, a cave sculpted to resemble a room. Inside, Jesus’s burial clothes are folded neatly on a stone shelf, and more than two weeks have passed since Gallio was at another tomb, in Bethany, where Jesus called Lazarus out. Lazarus was bound up in his linen and Gallio with his own eyes had seen Lazarus fall flat on his face. His sisters Mary and Martha had to unwrap Lazarus and help him up, so in Jerusalem Jesus can’t have acted alone. To make good his escape he needed accomplices.

On Gallio’s orders, the stone door of the tomb had been sealed along the edges with household mortar. An extreme precaution, but after Lazarus Gallio was being thorough. Now his exceptional measures made the breaking and entering look twice as miraculous. The bastards had set him up. Calm, he thinks. The escape they engineered is clever, but not impossible. There is always an explanation.

Probably, allowing for the frailty of human nature, the idiot common soldiers had fallen asleep. Why stay awake? The corpse wasn’t going anywhere. While the guard slept, the disciples removed the mortar and rolled back the stone and made off with the body of Jesus. Gallio has no idea why, but he intends to find out.

He increases the reward money. Judas could be bribed, so why not the others? None of the disciples comes forward. Days go by. Instead of a corpse the city throws up collaborator chaff greedy for a share of the reward.

‘He was giving off a kind of brightness. Was he? A white kind. He had a beard. Who else could it be?’

Gallio feels like banging his head against the walls of Jerusalem, outside a one-chair barbershop, outside a launderette.
He realizes how happy he was with his ordinary problems, his wife and a baby he ignores for days on end. Judith accuses him of not loving her, not as a husband should, of neglecting his child, of sleeping with someone at work. He doesn’t
deserve
a home, she says.

He stays longer in the office, as if complications can be solved by working harder, but no line of enquiry works out for him. It feels like a jinxed investigation. There’s the woman in the street who wiped Jesus’s face, but the image they have is grainy, and from above. There’s no match on any of the likely databases.

Gallio issues the blurred picture to his people on the ground, and they move outward from the place where she broke from the crowd. ‘Have you seen this woman?’ Nobody admits that they have. While his agents persevere, Gallio plans a visit to Joseph, owner of a private tomb and a villa on the exclusive heights of Abu Tor. Only Joseph of Arimathea is an acquaintance of the Prefect, who refuses Gallio a warrant.

They do eventually track down the black man, the one on the tapes who carried the crossbeam. He’s an African from Cyrene called Simon, caught trying to leave the country to the north of Jerusalem at the Haifa ferry terminal. This turns out, despite Gallio’s high hopes, not to be the guilty escape it looks like. Simon is a tourist, first visit to Israel, visa in order, threatening to report his treatment as a hate crime. And no criminal record. He appears to be the last type of person a policeman believes in: a genuine bystander. Gallio has no choice but to let him go, watch him board the ferry. Simon turns from the deck and gives them the finger.

Gallio has yet to type up a statement from Judas, as part of the report he seems unable to write. He’d planned to file a full account
after
finding the body, a career saver framed as a success
story for the values of civilization, as demonstrated by the victory of his powers of reasoning over entrenched local ignorance. Now he’s mostly looking for someone to blame.

Pilate will feature in the report. Not even Pilate knows where he stands with the CCU, and the Prefect is responsible for a major anomaly. Once Jesus was dead, Pilate allowed a Jewish councillor to take the body from the cross. The Jewish priests, however amenable, are the enemy. The occupiers are friends with the enemy, but allowing them to interfere with executions is not, repeat not, good procedure. The crucified body goes into an uncovered pit for the overnight dogs. There is a reason for this. It precludes any doubt about the nature of the punishment.

Jesus died, fact. He was definitely dead, or Gallio who was there at the crucifixion would never have authorized the release of the body. Not to Joseph of Arimathea, not to anyone, but Jesus has been sighted alive so many times since his death that Gallio begins to doubt himself.

Briefly, he considers wording a request to reclassify the case as Missing Persons, but can’t imagine how he’d argue for a change of emphasis. To investigate the resurrection of Jesus is in some sense to believe in it, and opening a new line of enquiry admits the possibility that a man nailed to a tree by expert infantrymen would not die. There are limits.

Cassius Gallio spends more nights at his desk, the office emptied, the case rooms locked. He calls Valeria. He hangs up. He calls Valeria and her phone switches to voicemail. He wants to say sorry, and please, but mostly he’s saying he’s there, and he needs her, or someone like her.

She calls back. He doesn’t answer. He needs comfort, and the supernatural will not survive the warmth of Valeria’s body, the reality of the backs of her knees. Whatever else is uncertain
in this city, Gallio is certain he wants to sleep with Valeria, right or wrong.

She calls again. He picks up.

‘That last message didn’t sound like work,’ she says. ‘Got a job for me?’

‘I want to see you.’

‘You see me every day.’

‘I’m in the office now, on my own.’

‘Sorry, Cassius. Not coming.’

‘Please, Val. You wanted us to spend some time together. Val?’

She’s gone, or she’s thinking. All she need say is yes, I will come to the office, I will hold you. Together they’ll forget Jesus for an hour or so, remember what on this planet men and women who like each other are designed to do best.

‘Cassius, you’re in enough trouble. This will make it worse.’

‘How so?’

‘Losing dead prisoners, propositioning junior colleagues. None of it looks good, not from the outside. Trust me on this.’

Cassius Gallio visits Judas instead, and at the safe house Judas is grateful for friendship. Gallio feeds him and provides consoling wines, every sip the evidence that Judas has done no wrong and life on earth is fair. Judas eats and drinks and reddens in the face, he sweats and suffers while aiming to live happily ever after, to prove a point: I am enjoying myself, so there is no vengeful god.

When Judas is drunk, Gallio questions him about the miracles of Jesus.

‘Saw them all.’ His lips are black, and he squints at the level
of wine in the bottle, rotates the base in tiny increments. ‘Makes no difference. Who’s going to believe us?’

Gallio organizes a press conference in which Judas sits in front of coloured microphones and denies witnessing miracles. He does not believe that Jesus has come back from the dead. He overturns his glass of water, then re-rights the glass but it’s empty. The Speculator expenses account buys Judas new clothes to reassure him he’s doing the right thing, and Gallio hopes other potential informers will notice and be impressed.

He bribes Judas onto the best table at Canela. This news will get out, get around. Among the Jerusalem high-achievers, the bankers and the journalists, the rich, the leaders, here is Judas reaping his rewards. He has cooperated with the occupying forces to enable the arrest of a terrorist. Good man. He is clapped on the back, an obvious success, an incentive to any right-minded citizen with information about the corpse of a convicted insurgent.

Come forward and all this can be yours. The restaurant, Gallio wants to say, the gossip. This is how winners have their story told. No one comes forward.

‘Judas?’

The next morning at the safe house Gallio finds Judas slumped in the shower, sitting on the tiles as the water batters the bald spot on the back of his head. The disciples are up early again, declaiming in turns on the Temple steps, honing their version of events in which Jesus comes back from the dead. Judas, on the other hand, is in the black grip of a long night’s wine. Gallio leans in and flips the water to cold. Judas wakes, panics, blows out his cheeks, tries to stand. Gallio holds him down.