Acts of the Assassins Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD BEARD

  FICTION

  X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking

  Damascus

  The Cartoonist

  Dry Bones

  Lazarus Is Dead

  NONFICTION

  Muddied Oafs: The Last Days of Rugger

  Manly Pursuits (or How to Beat the Australians)

  Becoming Drusilla

  THE APOSTLE KILLER

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Beard

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Harvill Secker

  First Melville House Printing: September 2016

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.​com facebook.​com/​mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-580-3

  Design by Marina Drukman

  v3.1

  With the Lord one day

  Is as a thousand years,

  And a thousand years

  As one day.

  (2 Peter 3:8)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  I. Judas “burst asunder”

  II. James “beheaded”

  III. Jude “shot with arrows”

  IV. Thomas “stoned and speared”

  V. Philip “inverted hanging”

  VI. James “bludgeoned to death”

  VII. Simon “sawn in half”

  VIII. Bartholomew “skinned alive”

  IX. Andrew “X crucifixion”

  X. Matthew “burned alive”

  XI. Peter “crucified upside down”

  XII. John “ ”

  About the Author

  I

  Judas

  “BURST ASUNDER”

  First, find the body.

  Male, early thirties, bearded. Distinguishing features: extensive trauma injury, severe to hands and feet. Decomposition consistent with springtime conditions in an arid territory. So follow the smell of a four-day-old death, the black fruit stench of human decay. The corpse is out there somewhere.

  Find it. Then the occupying army, representing human progress, will investigate. These people have forensics, a rational system of criminal justice, and will ensure that those guilty of stealing a body from a burial site are tried and punished. Whoever they may be.

  Cassius Marcellus Gallio, counterinsurgency, switches on the recording equipment and speaks out loud the precise date, the exact time, the full names of those present. This is how it usually begins. Then he switches the machine off, watches the green recording light fade and die. In this city he has the title of Speculator. He expects to get results.

  ‘What I’m wondering, what I really want you to tell me, off the book, if you can, is how much you knew in advance.’ Cassius Gallio will be polite for as long as possible. The interview room often does the rest—a single metal table and a folding metal chair. No one wants to wind up in the fortress, in the Antonia. Outside, down in the streets, a turncoat can convince himself that his loyalties are divided. In the Antonia they are not. Inside the fortress the time has passed for ‘and,’ for ‘both.’ The choice now is either/or, the occupiers or the occupied, reason or superstition.

  ‘If you can remember, if the information is alive in your brain, and not too much trouble to share.’

  Despite the hard chair and the bare room, the Judas is not in a talkative mood. Cassius Gallio flips open his notebook and draws a circle. An imperfect circle, so he has another go. Same intended shape, different imperfections. Nothing is going right for him today.

  ‘I’m withholding half your fee.’

  ‘I did what we agreed.’

  Valeria, Gallio’s colleague, sits on the front edge of the table with one foot on the floor. She picks her fingernails with the corner of a laminated guide explaining emergency procedures in the event of fire. Her nails are clean. She taps the stiff edge of the card on her knee. Tap tap. On her knee, the back of which would fit perfectly the inside of Cassius Gallio’s elbow.

  Gallio concentrates. Not today, he thinks, of all days. He doesn’t have time for the inconvenience of Valeria’s knee.

  ‘Judas?’

  The man flinches at the sound of his name. He gnaws at the inside of his cheek, bites at the skin of his fingertips. Let him, let the traitor eat away at himself. At the barred window Gallio looks down on the early Jerusalem streets: a normal Monday morning, visibly untouched by miracles. A boy runs down an alley, a tray of loaves on his head. He dodges a rasping scooter, which hits the main drag and accelerates away through traffic. Life goes on.

  ‘Where’s the body?’

  Cassius Gallio had reacted to yesterday’s rumour, of course he had. He came in late on a Sunday to follow up the lead, a sighting on the Emmaus road to the north of the city. Not the body but the man himself, apparently alive, a dead man walking. Gallio had sent Valeria to make enquiries, but it turned out to be nothing, peasant gossip about an executed convict and his seven-mile hike for lunch.

  If they were regular police, Gallio thought, he would have charged someone for wasting regular police time. Speculators were not regular police. He needed that body.

  First thing Monday morning he ordered a citywide search. He prepared his people for the worst—the shrunken lips, the livid meat—but the certainties of a dead body would put an end to any mystery. All through the day uniformed troops moved house to house, going in hard on the Lower City. Cellars, attics, any darkness that could conceal a folded adult corpse. Freezers. Gallio makes sure his people look inside the freezers, chest and wardrobe. The body could be whole, could be dissected. Check bathtubs for acid corrosion, and treat plastic sheeting as suspicious. Pick through building sites, anywhere with recently poured concrete.

  The forces of order know what to do. Sadly, this is neither the first nor last time they’ll search for a missing body.

  Gallio sends five-man cordons to walk the mountain scrub. No sign yet of a shallow grave. Valeria supervises the dive team at the reservoir and the Bethesda pool, where she clears out the cripples who’ve come for a cure. She finds no trace of weighted human remains dumped into the water. Gallio opens a series of tombs, an inspired hunch as a hiding place. The body isn’t there.

  Until further notice every cart and truck leaving Jerusalem will be security-checked at the city gates. Still no result. Think. Gallio orders raids on apothecaries suspected of trading in human body parts, eyes and spleens for the more costly curses and spells. Nothing. Think again. If anyone wants to move the body then spices or perfume would mask the smell. Gallio turns over shipments of nard and aloe, and at this troubled time Passover in Jerusalem smells like heaven.

  And of burned meat from the Temple sacrifices, and a haze of two-stroke. Maybe a night downstairs in the Antonia will put Judas back in touch with reality.

  ‘A local source tells me the way you betrayed him was foretold.’

  Gallio perches on the steel table-edge, next to Valeria. He licks the end of his biro, to remind Judas he’s expecting solid information worth noting down. Then he draws an irregular triangle like a head above one of the imperfect circles from yesterday. Saliva doesn’t help, smears the ink.

  ‘Judas?’

  He’s not listening. Valeria slices him across the cheek with her laminated card. In an occupied territory the army are the cops, and the army cops have their own secret service, the Speculators. They don’t like their time being wasted. Valeria shapes for another hit, but making Judas flinch is enough.

  ‘His othe
r followers knew what was going to happen, Judas.’ Gallio will have to spell it out to him. ‘The missing body was written in the prophecies. Ergo, you, Judas, also knew what would happen.’

  Instructions in the Event of Fire has opened a cut below his eye, and blood seeps through. Gallio rolls his eyes. Earlier than he’d have liked he leans back and flips a switch on the intercom. He says: ‘Chicken, now.’ In the starkness of the interview room his words sound like a code, as if he’s lost the habit of saying anything straight. Saying it twice may help. ‘Chicken, as soon as you can.’

  Judas has spent a night downstairs in the Antonia. He’s dirty and hungry. But also, Gallio concedes, the chicken does have a double meaning. Good cop. Judas is the asset, and the asset’s cover is blown. His eleven former companions, his ex-friends, despise him. He’ll appreciate every kindness.

  ‘Judas!’ Val stabs the stiff end of the card into his shoulder. Bad cop, an act but she’s a natural. ‘He knew what was going to happen and he planned every move, didn’t he? You might have warned us, said a little something in advance.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Judas says.

  They wait. A rotisserie chicken in a white and silver bag, an underpaid local recruit: he carries the bag past the security barriers, into the lift, out of the lift, through the manned gate to the reinforced door of the interview room. Keypad, authorised personnel only. Gallio goes to open the door, takes the bag that smells of grease and freedom. He says thanks, in good cop character, swings the door shut, hands the hot roast chicken to Judas.

  Cassius Gallio has a heart of gold, but Judas peers cautiously inside. A cloud of chicken steam billows to the ceiling. The chicken is not a trap, Judas, or a trick. Everything is as it seems.

  Judas pulls out the browned carcass, snaps it open and bites out the liver. Hungry. As he chews, the meat gives him strength. He breaks off a drumstick and points, jelly glistening on the hanging skin.

  ‘I kept you out of it. They trusted me.’

  Judas is an innocent, Judas is a baby. Obviously they didn’t trust him, or he’d know how they’d subverted a public execution. If he had their trust he could explain why the disciples, his former friends, were spreading misinformation about the dead man being alive. Judas had yet to volunteer a satisfactory answer as to why they were doing that.

  ‘They played you.’ Valeria keeps her amber eyes fixed on Judas, skims the laminated card onto the table, where it slides across the metal and drops to the floor. ‘Played us too. You’re nervous, Judas. Why is that? What reason do you have for being so nervous?’

  Valeria is a people person, who enjoys the intimate questions. Who are you? What are you afraid of? Will you ever leave your wife?

  ‘Your leader is dead, Judas,’ she says. ‘We watched him die, and it wasn’t pleasant, but he can’t hurt you now. The others, however, have worked you out. They recognized the signal you gave to trigger the arrest.’

  ‘We should have thought up something more subtle,’ Gallio adds. ‘Sorry, our mistake.’

  ‘They’ll be wondering where you are,’ Valeria builds the fear. ‘You’re seriously outnumbered.’

  ‘Eleven against one.’

  ‘Honestly,’ Judas says. He holds the chicken carcass in both hands. ‘We never discussed stealing the body. From the start of this you promised to protect me. It was the first thing you said.’

  He rips at the chicken breast with his teeth, chews and swallows, bites, chews, all body, no brain. He reduces life to the basic function of taking on fuel, hoping to block out the last few days, and the feeling that life and death have stopped following the basic expectations.

  ‘Judas. Look at me.’

  On the edge of the table, next to Valeria, Gallio is as close to his former inside man as can be. He leans forward and brings his blue eyes to bear. Sweat beads on the bridge of Judas’s nose. ‘Put down the bird, Judas.’

  Gallio lays his wrists on the man’s shoulders, his metal watchband hard against Judas’s collarbone, and he leans, making Judas heavier, a burden on his shoulders weighing him down. ‘Stop chewing, Judas. Good. Good boy. Mouth closed. Now look at me, Judas, look into my eyes. We want the truth about what happened this weekend, and don’t be frightened. We’re the good guys. We won’t let them fuck you up.’

  Gallio himself takes plainclothes shifts at the hotel. He sits at the bar with his laptop and types out notes for a provisional report. Low priority, no cause for alarm. What they have here is an unusual but annoying theft. That is what this is. What it can’t possibly be, and what he refuses to contemplate, is died, risen, coming again.

  Unfortunately, being unreasonable is not against the law. The disciples can’t be arrested for their delusions, but they need to know they’re in trouble and under constant surveillance. Gallio wears the same jacket every day, so they’ll notice him, has his shoes shined in the lobby when they come down to breakfast because he wants them to know he’s watching. He makes a show of staring, hardly blinking, at eleven out-of-towners with plenty of hair and delicate fingers. They do not dress well, favouring lighter colours in the range between beige and cream. Cult uniformity, which is why Judas had to single out their leader: they all look alike.

  The disciples are agitated, glance left and right, know that Jerusalem is full of spies. ‘Agitated,’ Gallio adds to his notebook, next to the intricate lines of a diamond formation. He blocks out the letters, especially the capital A: years of training for this. He is supposed to make connections, work out how conspiracies against the civilized world fit together, but in this case he simply doesn’t know.

  Over the following days he chases leads with increasing desperation. In one tip-off the dead man is supposed to have appeared to his mother, alive and disguised as a gardener. Gallio rounds up the city’s registered gardeners. They vow to make a formal complaint to the Prefect, which is fine, but none of them remembers speaking to a distressed middle-aged lady on the day in question at or near the crime scene.

  So Gallio brings in the mother, because close family members are always suspects. Instead of a lawyer she insists on coming accompanied by one of the disciples, John. John recommends she exercise her right to remain silent.

  ‘Have you seen your son since the day of the execution?’

  She exercises her right, but John is ready to fill the silence. He’s a young man with barely enough beard to look the part, and thick glasses he pushes up his nose to punctuate the nonsense he likes to spout. According to John a man died, was in a tomb for three days, and then on the Sunday he came back to life and walked away. A god is involved.

  ‘That figures.’

  ‘He came back from the dead,’ John says. ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  But Cassius Gallio doesn’t have the evidence to prove John wrong. He lets them go, and in the fortress Gallio bans all discussion of resurrection as a potential line of enquiry. As an occupying force they have arguably imported some questionable laws, but there’s nothing debatable about laws of nature. The Complex Casework Unit will expect a rational explanation. Anything else is going to sound, coming from Cassius Gallio, like an excuse. A terrible excuse, especially from him, after the embarrassment of what happened with Lazarus.

  He still doesn’t understand how they did that. Lazarus died from multiple diseases. Cassius Gallio himself witnessed the wreck of the man in his final hours, and then the burial, but four days later Lazarus was alive again and dazed by sunshine in front of his tomb. Gallio couldn’t explain the mechanics, the trick, and since failing to come up with answers he’d been put on a caution. Complex Casework is taking an interest. He can’t afford to fail again.

  The Jewish leadership also lack patience for the gimmicks of Jesus. Without providing evidence they spin the disciples as thieves who’d steal a body from a tomb. Maybe so, but the disciples give nothing away, supply no reasonable cause for arrest.

  Gallio follows them, and on the steps of the Temple they tout an organized line, devoting themselves to a falsehood about an executed c
riminal who is alive, healthy and a surprise visitor at their city-centre hotel. Delusion, Gallio reminds himself, is not an arrestable offence. Their dead leader appears behind closed doors, they say, of course he does, but comings and goings are easy to check: no one fitting the description of Jesus enters or leaves the hotel within the specified time frames.

  ‘Could you have missed him?’ Gallio has made Valeria responsible for the surveillance teams, and anyone can make mistakes. ‘Could you have confused him with one of his followers?’

  ‘I don’t think so, we don’t know.’ Valeria covers for her operatives, who are working double shifts. ‘They all look similar. It’s possible.’

  CCTV is inconclusive. The disciples are in and out. From above, with fisheye angles and in corridor light, the men are interchangeable. Except the dead one among them would be limping. He would limp, if he could walk, but probably he couldn’t even walk. He’s not alive, he’s crippled and he’s dead.

  Gallio confines Judas to a safe house in the Upper City, a flat in a modern block beside the museum where the street fills daily with a useful confusion of human traffic. Gallio tells Valeria to give Judas what he wants, within reason, and he stays indoors and comfort-eats. He likes his bottles of wine, but when Gallio asks Valeria what she makes of him she shrugs, flicks open her notebook like a blank ID. In the centre of the page is a penciled square, heavily shaded at the edges and empty in the centre. She pushes the notebook close to Gallio’s face.

  ‘I need more than that.’ Gallio bats her hand away. They touch, for a split second. ‘Has he tried to contact anyone? How frightened is he?’

  ‘That’s all I’ve got. I’ve thought it through.’

  Fair enough—the silent treatment because he won’t sleep with her. Not now, Gallio wants to say, let’s get this sorted and maybe then. You know I want to, only this is a difficult time, and she should remember he’s married. Until now his marriage hasn’t deterred her. She kept coming all the same, split up publicly with her boyfriend, a uniformed sergeant. I’m married, Gallio had said, but she sensed his weakness. She knows he doesn’t believe that faithfulness matters, because like her he’s ambitious, and what matters most is a promotion one day to chief of section Complex Casework Unit, Europe. As a minimum career requirement.