Acts of the Assassins (6 page)

Yet still at night he lay awake, letting the darkness do its worst. How had the disciples vanished the body of Jesus? From Tripoli to Colchis he collected variations on a theme—mineshafts, quicklime, the furnace. None of the tested methods for disappearing a body applied to Jerusalem, not in this particular case. Gallio had investigated every possibility, and kept returning to a story his stepfather used to tell from the birth of civilization, or soon after.

Romulus, the founder of Rome, enters an underground room in the Forum. He is old, his pulse weak, his service to the city complete. His senators in their purple-striped togas follow him into the room, which has no windows and only one door. What follows is a classic sealed room mystery: Romulus is never seen again.

He vanishes.

‘So then.’ His stepfather liked to unstrap his sword and rest it across the arm of his chair. ‘Tell me what happened. Work out the crime, and how they made him disappear.’

In popular legend Romulus had rejoined the gods. A story spread that instead of dying Romulus had ascended to heaven, which explained his missing body. This was not the answer Cassius Gallio’s stepfather wanted. When Gallio first suggested the ascension of Romulus as a solution, his stepfather had unsheathed his sword and whacked him across the thighs.

Eventually Gallio’s stepfather spelled out the lesson he
wanted the boy to learn: a rational explanation is available. Romulus was murdered by the senators. Of course he was. Always suspect those closest to the victim.

The senators had closed the door and stabbed old Romulus in silence, alerting none of the Forum’s hyper-alert slaves. Then they knelt to dissect the body. Each senator concealed a small section of flesh or bone beneath his toga, and they carried Romulus away from the sealed room in pieces. The cuts of meat they dispersed through the city, flushed into cisterns or tossed to scavenging dogs. No trace of Romulus was ever found.

True story.

‘We thought the Israelis were going to finish off the cult on our behalf. They made a decent start.’

Valeria walks quickly, wearing trainers with her skirt and sleeveless top, a tourist like any other. She has her familiar fast stride, and Cassius Gallio admires the vigour that comes from a lifetime of civil service health insurance and not making mistakes.

She stops and points out a street where the locals stoned a Jesus follower to death, a short while after Gallio’s disgrace. An Israeli agent called Saul set up the hit to showcase his talents, but the street has reverted to what it was and always will be: shopfronts filled with toiletries and battery-powered fans. Gallio checks they’re not being followed. Jerusalem puts him on edge.

‘Ruthless, ambitious, highly capable. We liked the look of him. Saul was the kind of driven local agent who didn’t need our help.’

Valeria walks on. Gallio lets her go, watches her hips sway
left and right, her buttocks, then catches up. ‘Saul targeted Peter in Damascus,’ she says. ‘A trained international agent against a lake fisherman in a major world city. Should have been a mismatch.’

‘Peter turned him. Saul became one of them.’

‘Well done. I’m glad not everything passed you by, but the truth is we didn’t have a back-up plan. We kept to our civilized policy of not intervening in religious affairs. Saul was converted, but even then we expected the Jesus cult to fold.’

‘But it didn’t. It hasn’t.’

‘It hasn’t followed the usual pattern of Judaean self-hatred and implosion, no. Every year the number of Jesus believers increases, and across a wider geographical spread. We underestimated them.’

‘You don’t say.’

The disciples of Jesus had negated a crucifixion and rigged a burial. They could break in and out of a sealed and guarded tomb, leaving no trace, and managed to hide a body in a city under martial law. Simple upcountry peasants? Cassius Gallio didn’t think so.

‘They could organize a fire,’ he says.

‘Possibly. What’s certain is the disciples have a history. Whatever they’ve become will depend on what happened in the past. We need people who were there at the beginning and who appreciate the specific difficulties.’

They walk into a cavalry exercise ground, separated from the housing scheme behind it by a high link fence. On the far side of the fence, the public side, about fifteen to twenty gawpers—including children, an Asian family—cling to each other and cry out. Yellow crime-scene tape flutters across the door of a stable, the centre stall in a block of five.

Gallio is first to duck under the tape. Old habits.

Inside, a free-standing aluminum spotlamp heats up the base note of rotting straw and horseshit. Two objects on the ground. The first looks like a hessian sack, but closer up the lump is beige clothing silted with blood. Gallio holds his hand across his nose. Get closer, right up close, because closeness comes with the job, and a nub of tendon glistens in the half-light, where the head should be. Blackflies rise from the severed neck, settle on the top of the spine.

Above the lamp, Gallio notices, looking away and up, and further up, anywhere but down, afternoon sunshine pierces the knotholes in the roof slats, light coming through in pinpoint beams. He looks back down. The second object is the head. Valeria finds a riding crop on a nail in the wall. She asks Gallio for a handkerchief. She takes his handkerchief and uses it to handle the whip, which she unhooks and pokes at the severed head. It lies stubbornly on one side on a patch of straw. She levers the head upright, it pauses, seems for a moment to be the head of Jesus (long brown hair, beard) then topples back onto a blood-caked ear.

‘You were there. You saw the twelve of them together. Is this Jesus?’

In Benghazi, staring at a pathway of moonlight across the water of the bay, Gallio had allowed the killers of Romulus a change of clothing and rolls of plastic bags. He could speculate about their actions but couldn’t unmake the world he knew: with minor improvements their murderous scheme looked plausible. The senators would need odorless floor-cleaning materials, concealable in a toga. He gave them some water, or sand. A brush, a mop.

Gallio spent night after night picturing eleven Galileans in a sealed tomb lit by flickering lamp-flames. Busy, each and every one of them, as they carved away flesh from the bones of Jesus. The disciples sawed through ligaments and tendons, then broke the skeleton, bone by bone. The tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, private property, and he could have stored cleavers and a hacksaw in advance, along with other useful supplies: fresh clothing, rolls of plastic bags, cleaning materials (water, sand, brush, mop). On an earlier visit Joseph could have left a commercial pestle and mortar. The disciples, most of them with a background in manual labour, silently grind the skull of Jesus into powder, non-stop in shifts for seventy-two hours. Three days and the labour of eleven men to annihilate a human body.

These were the same men who hanged Judas and made it look like suicide. The disciples could have made Jesus disappear, and Gallio knows there are people who can do such things to others they once fully loved. He reads the newspapers. He keeps up to date with human atrocity.

Logistically, eleven adults (one with basic medical training) could have dismantled the body of Jesus in three days. The disciples were absent from the crucifixion, but not because they were scared of being arrested. While the authorities were distracted by the death of Jesus the disciples hid inside the tomb. When Jesus was carried in they were already concealed inside, waiting with their knives and buckets, their plastic aprons and gloves.

The tomb was sealed, which would have muffled any noise, and the soldiers on watch heard nothing. To be fair, they weren’t making an effort to listen, even though Gallio had ordered them to guard the dead man as if alive. He used those exact words and
signed the order himself, and at the military tribunal his signature was used against him. ‘Unhinged,’ they said, because dead men don’t need a guard. ‘Not in his right mind,’ because tombs remain closed without a seal.

Night after night, as the months and years of his exile passed, Cassius Gallio would lie awake denying the resurrection. Life after death meant the end of the world as he knew it, but if Jesus were a fraud and never actually died then his later appearances weren’t the end of the world.

Gallio would put his head beneath his army-issue blanket and concentrate on his breathing. In, out. Feel the biological processes of being alive, oxygen in his lungs, blood in his veins and his brain. Make the bad supernatural thoughts go away.

He regretted not staying at the burial site, in person, for all three days. But at the time he’d made his point and he was the winner: Jesus was dead. The Lazarus story became instantly irrelevant, and Gallio worried that Valeria would despise him for watching a corpse so closely. He didn’t want to appear tentative about life after death, and by killing Jesus he had solved that problem. Whatever the story with Lazarus, Jesus now was dead.

In any case, he couldn’t have known the disciples were planning a breakout on the Sunday. How long should he have stayed? A week, a month, until the end of time? Gallio would still be there now, and no one would understand why, not even the army psychiatrists.

Cassius Gallio saw his first statue of a disciple on a transit through Belgium: a life-size piece in white marble, Simon leaning casually on a two-handled saw outside the Church of our Lady in Bruges. On the same trip he was surprised by a painted Jude in a roadside shrine near Avignon.

The cult was growing, and Cassius sometimes felt nostalgic for Jerusalem and his one big idea. He’d wanted to control the Jesus movement by setting up Lazarus as a client Messiah. Together he and Lazarus, taking the place of Jesus, would have preached a god of compromise amenable to the values of civilization. Pay taxes, respect the rule of law, be reasonable.

His plan hadn’t worked, which left the disciples with their unreasonable lies that encouraged the poor and feckless. Cassius Gallio was occasionally angry, but the military life inhibited sustained feeling. Thankfully. His legion was posted east, where he supervised building works and assembled collections of coins. For months on end he’d forget to wonder what the story of Jesus could mean, obsessed with blisters and his next appointment with the booze. He consciously refused to look for Jesus, in the bottle and once in the arms of a shop girl. And soon after that, Gallio didn’t look for Jesus in the waiting room of a sexual health clinic. He didn’t look for him and he wasn’t there.

While a doctor swabbed him and asked how much he drank, Gallio did think briefly about Jesus and how to get his life back on track. He wasn’t without virtue: he refused to pay for sex and every month his wages were deducted at source and half sent to his wife and child in Jerusalem. Not that he had much choice. He was a grunt in the civilized army from the civilized world, and obligations were expected to be honored.

If he was ever homesick, and he thinks he sometimes was, it wasn’t a sickness for Judith and Alma or for any of the homes he could remember. He longed for a kind of unnamed absence, with a tearfulness he found unsettling. Sentiment, self-pity: he wiped his eyes and dismissed these useless emotions that brought him no relief. He was not the person he’d wanted to be. The world
was not decipherable as promised, with a reason for everything if only he could see what it was.

An unamused nurse burned off his genital warts, smoke rebounding from the ceiling. Gallio remembered Valeria, but whatever his problem Valeria wasn’t the solution, and antibiotics with beer and loneliness felt like a punishment that had finally arrived. Only he didn’t believe in cosmic justice, so he preferred not to think at all.

‘How can you tell it isn’t Jesus?’

‘I just know.’

The dismembered head belongs to a disciple, though Cassius Gallio can’t say for sure which one. He has been a long time away, and the eleven survivors always looked similar to him: they look like Jesus. Ten. Judas gone, now this one too. Ten survivors left, and anyway Jesus is dead. Why had Valeria asked if the dead man in the stable was Jesus?

Observation, reason. The dark horseshit in the stable contains pieces of yellow straw. No, beyond that. The shit is lightly cracked, days old.

‘How could it be Jesus when Jesus is dead?’

‘You tell me. I asked the Israelis to wait for our experts, meaning you. As the representative of a global power I made an official recommendation to a tiny security service. Hopeless. They couldn’t follow a simple instruction.’

‘Who couldn’t?’

‘Baruch. Not an easy man, but on their side he deals with everything Jesus. Always has.’

Gallio knows who Baruch is. He tried to kill Lazarus after the incomprehensible events at Bethany, when Lazarus appeared to come back to life. He killed the son of the widow of Nain, a teenage boy who Jesus also allegedly resurrected. A military
patrol found the boy in a wood outside his pathetic little village, his throat cut from ear to ear. That’s Baruch, who picked Cassius Gallio’s daughter up from school. The involvement of Baruch feels like further punishment, but Gallio doesn’t know for what.

‘I think this head belongs to a James.’

Gallio squats down and looks closely at the half a dead face he can see. Memories flood back, and he warms to the idea of becoming an expert, of knowing what few other people can know. ‘I’m fairly sure. Who was the other one they captured?’

‘They say it was Peter. Unconfirmed. He escaped.’

James and Peter, but Valeria has let herself speculate that one of the captives was Jesus. This is the more interesting information that Gallio now has in his possession. If the CCU are prepared to reconsider, and conclude that Jesus may be alive, it would explain their decision to reopen the case.

Some kind of commotion starts up outside, which gives Cassius Gallio an excuse to stop speculating and stoop under the tape and out into the fresher air. The sun is hot and the flies loud. A woman in a POLICE anti-stab jacket is photographing faces through the fence. Beside her, pointing out anyone she misses, is an unshaven man in a dark suit. He turns round, open-neck white shirt, sees Cassius Gallio and taps the photographer’s shoulder. Gallio watches the zoom lengthen as she takes her shot. Baruch, hands on hips like the man in charge, laughs at his funny joke.