Acts of the Assassins Read online

  Their shared vision of the future can make ‘now’ feel a limited experience, and Jerusalem an insignificant posting. They earn a hardship allowance for serving in the field, but in these peaceful days the garrison feels more like a complacent army in camp. They can get frustrated, spies in a country where there’s nothing to spy on. They have been bored. Then Lazarus. Lazarus changed everything. Now this.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ Gallio says.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Gallio submits a request to the Prefect of the Province of Judaea, in writing, to bring in a disciple from the leadership group. He doesn’t care which one, probably Peter. The way Cassius Gallio sees it he can play Peter off against Judas: the two former colleagues in separate rooms, neither of them sure what the other may confess. Then in the same room, to wonder how much pain the other can bear. Not that the interviews need descend into violence. The anticipation of pain is often enough.

  Pilate refuses Gallio’s request, also in writing. He’s covering his back. Pilate has seen no evidence to incriminate the disciples, and this is the Middle East. The zealots in the mountains are unpredictable, and in this particular region a riot could start a war. Cassius Gallio should avoid inflaming the situation, and an arrest would be a negative at this time.

  Gallio barely goes home. He sleeps at his desk, arms as a pillow, woken by a.m. phone calls when his wife needs help with the baby. He tells her not now, he has a lot on his plate. She shouts down the phone, says if she’d known he’d be like this with his work then she’d have married one of her own.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Someone simple. A Jerusalem man without big ideas.’

  ‘I don’t do big ideas.’

  ‘You do about yourself.’

  In his office in the early hours of the morning, now that he’s awake, Gallio wipes the sleep from his eyes and explores the angles: before, during, after, determined to work out how they did it. He reviews the coverage. Play, rewind, play. Pause. Break it down. Look for deviations from best practice. He finds so many they make him wince. He can’t understand why this man Jesus was treated differently from everyone else.

  The cameras pick Jesus up in the street outside Herod’s Palace, and there’s footage from there until the waste ground of Golgotha outside the city gates, where the execution takes place. The street-views on tape are cut from fourteen separate cameras, and the screen geeks have spliced the shots into a single sequence. From the beginning Jesus is not in good shape, weakened by flaying. He carries the crossbeam himself and often he falls. His mother breaks from the crowd to help him, a lapse in security. She should never have made it through the cordon.

  Soon after that the uniformed escort forces a spectator, a youngish black man, to help with the crossbeam. Gallio freezes the face, but recognition software can’t find a match. A little later a second unidentified individual, this time a woman, comes out of the crowd to wipe Jesus’s face. No match, no criminal record or previous arrests. The first part of this death/resurrection scam is clean, Jesus and his disciples passing every test of criminal hygiene. Gallio uncovers no loose ends, no careless recruitment of accomplices with a history.

  Jesus falls again. The third time he falls some more women, as a group, hold up the procession with their local weeping and wailing. They are suspects, and every face needs identifying before being cleared. Then Jesus falls again. Falling could be a signal, but this time nothing special happens, no one else arrives to help him, to deliver a message or receive instructions. The execution is back on track, though behind schedule due to the many delays. By the time the procession reaches Golgotha the soldiers have regained control. Beside the cross they strip the prisoner, following orders. Cassius Gallio’s orders.

  Gallio studies the images, even though he was there. On the cross Jesus is naked, to ensure he can’t conceal some secret device to help him counterfeit death. If Gallio has learned anything in Jerusalem, it’s that Jesus can’t be trusted. He’d pretended to bring Lazarus back to life, and staged various medical illusions that he passed off as real. Gallio was wary of whatever he’d come up with next, and had vowed to be ready.

  Naked, however, nailed to a cross, Jesus has been decisively outwitted. He dies. Gallio watches him die. Over and over again. Civilization is the winner.

  The body needs to be down before sunset, out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath, but this next part of the tape makes Gallio’s chest seize. The endgame is a lesson in bad practice. Either side of Jesus the two prisoners have their legs broken, as is standard procedure, to accelerate death. Jesus does not.

  Why not? No one can tell him. The Prefect gave permission for a Judaean high priest and councillor, identified as Joseph of Arimathea, to take down the body. Why would he do that? No one can say, but there are regulations, and the regulations have been flouted. The camera tracks Joseph, a known Jesus sympathizer, as he carries the body of Jesus to his tomb. His own tomb, private property. The body of Jesus disappears inside and the image blurs and whites out. Show over. The security geeks cut to a drug deal in a bus shelter, then a cat asleep on a bin.

  The cameras see everything; understand nothing.

  Rewind. Stop. Play, pause. Gallio stills the moment of death, watches Jesus die frame by frame in slo-mo, and Jesus has one of those faces. When the face is moving, it is him, recognizably a cult leader with a fanatical following. On pause, however, the stilled image never accurately captures the living individual Gallio would recognize. Forget the face and trust the body, bruised and defeated and bleeding—that part of it, the violence and the killing, is real from whichever angle Gallio chooses to look.

  ‘Nothing? A total empty zero-shaped hole of nothing?’

  Pilate slams his hand against the arm of his chair, against a marble pillar, and a third time against a window frame. He finds the hard edges of what is otherwise an office of soft furnishings, a big man running to fat since his posting to Jerusalem as Prefect. In the good old days, when he was a soldier, he had fewer crimson cushions in his life.

  He paces. He points his rigid finger. ‘All you had to do was guard a fucking corpse. You’re a young man but you’re also my regional Speculator, a member of the supposedly elite military police. What is going on here?’

  ‘On the day of the execution there were irregularities.’

  ‘Not good enough. This nonsense about resurrection has to stop. Now. Yesterday. The day before yesterday.’

  Gallio feels a powerful urge to smack Pilate down. He’s a Speculator, with authority to think more creatively than a senior administrator, stuck with his present tense chores. But after Lazarus, Cassius Gallio isn’t so sure of himself, of what he can do or when he’s right.

  ‘The area searches are ongoing,’ he says, calming himself with the facts. ‘We have Judas in a safe house and the disciples under observation. I’m looking for the man who helped Jesus carry his crossbeam in the street. Also an unidentified woman who wiped his face when he fell. Messages may have been passed, we don’t know.’

  ‘Spare me the details. Get out there and put an end to it.’

  ‘Can I bring in Peter?’

  ‘No.’

  Gallio is leaving when Pilate calls him back.

  ‘The money, Gallio. I’ve heard whispers.’

  Cassius Gallio doesn’t know what Pilate is talking about, but Pilate has more to say.

  ‘Don’t let this story about money be true.’

  ‘I have affidavits from the on-duty soldiers saying they received no unsanctioned payments.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For allowing unauthorized persons to remove a body from a tomb under guard.’

  ‘So no chance they might be lying? And suspicion doesn’t just fall on the grunts, does it?’

  Pilate turns his fleshy head like a flightless bird. His nearer eye is sharp and alive, but the distant more dangerous eye is doing the looking. ‘The Jerusalem high priests, including the Sanhedrin council, are suggesting we took money for re
laxing our watch on the tomb. How else could a body go missing?’

  ‘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, ou
tside 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.