“SAWN IN HALF”
In retrospect, the task had been easier at the beginning, with Jesus and his disciples collectively active in Jerusalem. Cassius Gallio had been able to organize a textbook infiltration, an exemplary piece of fieldwork in the Passover season while the city heaved. He’d followed the disciples of Jesus through the holiday crowds and worked out that Judas, as treasurer, was entrusted once every day to make a solo trip to buy supplies.
The next morning, in the covered market, Judas found an unexceptional foreigner (linen trousers, short-sleeved shirt) close against his shoulder. A moment of your time, sir, no need to look around. An investment, a guaranteed return. Not today, not now, but alas if the mission of Jesus were to fail, if his plans for a righteous uprising should end in disappointment.
And the next day again: Judas, friend, it’s hardly my place to judge, but if Jesus has influence with the almighty shouldn’t his project have moved forward more rapidly?
And the next: forty pieces of silver, think it through, no rush, a generous offer to a fringe member of a minor cult.
‘A terrorist cell,’ Judas eventually replied. He would not be undervalued. ‘That’s what you fear we are.’
Terrorists were worth more, and fifty pieces of silver bought a plot of unimproved land not far from the city walls. A little patience, some prudent management, and the land becomes a field. Keep some money aside for livestock. Sell premium lambs to the Temple, Judas his own boss in a seller’s market.
Fifty-three, final offer. Don’t be greedy, Judas, I could ask one of the others. Fifty-five pieces of silver. Absolute tops. You’re breaking me here.
Judas had a head for numbers so he could do the maths. Fifty-five as capital outlay for the field, then he’d borrow against future tenant revenue from grazing. With loans he’d buy a pilgrimage inn that overcharged during festivals, and then he’d borrow again against the capital value of the property. He’d have nothing and he’d have everything. He’d have the big fifty-five, and by these calculations betraying the son of god should work out fine.
Judas walked away, not glancing behind, not looking back.
You’re being ridiculous. Cassius followed him, stayed close on his shoulder.
The devil, Judas said, tapping his handsome head, I can hear demons whispering in my ear.
Thirty now, thirty on completion. Final offer. Think it over.
Cassius Gallio had designed and implemented an impeccable covert operation, for which he never received full credit.
And until they killed Judas nobody died, not even Jesus.
At Ben Gurion airport the flight is delayed, held because of ice at Luton. Bartholomew has slowed their progress. The medical centre had to discharge him, and then on the road to the airport their unmarked car was trumped by the lights and sirens of Paul’s military escort out of Jerusalem. Come on. Cassius Gallio was in a hurry. He touched the crusted row of fresh butterfly stitches pinching the skin above his eyebrow. Motorcycles, a Mercedes and a Mercedes backup, an armoured vehicle, all for Paul and at public expense. Baruch would have been enraged. Even more enraged, wherever he is now.
Their flight is diverted to Heathrow, and when they land the sky is pink with snow about to fall. At Nothing to Declare Cassius Gallio lets Claudia go through first. He hangs back beside Bartholomew and senses they’re being watched, a presence at the edge of his vision. He blames Bartholomew, whose familiar features and clothes attract attention. Gallio hurries him past the one-way mirrors and waits for a disembodied voice to call them back, but they make it through. Probably nobody watching, or watching but not caring.
Luton would have been a better airport from which to start. They now have a three-hour taxi drive to the town of Caistor, on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Baruch is somewhere in England, ahead of them, but despite his head start they can catch him if they make good time around the M25, M1, A46. These roads are like the weather, clear now but threatening to turn for the worse, and the traffic eventually closes in on the A near Historic Lincoln. Gallio resents the jam. Why queue here? What in British Lincolnshire could be so worth seeing?
Except, of course, another sighting of Jesus.
In England a man answering the description was first seen at Glastonbury, then Westminster, now he’s further north at Caistor in Lincolnshire. Here in the outlands they’ve never known anything like it, and early unconfirmed accounts rival the miracles of Jesus. A man who fits Gallio’s Wanted profile has performed incredible exploits, healing the sick and thwarting demons. Voices speak from the clouds and animals talk.
Gallio gazes out of the taxi window. This is such a backwards fringe of the Empire, but if Jesus plans to descend from clouds he’s come to the right place. The car battles against snow, then hail, as if their journey opposes the planet’s direction of travel. When the hail stops, as abruptly as it started, the sky breaks open and lets through a cold cosmic light. It is hard to believe that people live here.
The taxi crawls forward, and Gallio uses this crawl time to start the questioning. In the back seat beside him Bartholomew is as lightweight as when Gallio first picked him up in Jerusalem, years ago, though the coma hasn’t helped. He looks like Jesus after a month in the desert. Claudia sits up front, and she’ll struggle to hear the conversation but Gallio expects she’ll make the effort.
‘I don’t like to be the bringer of bad news,’ Gallio says. Claudia slides her seat back a notch. ‘But did you hear what happened to James in Jerusalem?’
‘He had his head cut off.’
‘The other James, this week, also in Jerusalem. I want to show you something, so you’ll understand why it’s in your interests to cooperate. You don’t want to die like your friends. We wouldn’t wish that on anyone.’
Cassius Gallio lights up his phone. Another disciple down, and because these deaths are real they’re available on YouTube. Gallio scrolls through the Google search results for James Bludgeoned to Death. The YouTube listings include Mexican Immigrant Beaten to Death by US Border Patrol Agents, Baby Beaten to Death by Her Nanny and Gay Rights Activist Beaten to Death.
‘It’s not coming up,’ Gallio says. ‘Don’t know why, but this one’s close enough. You’ll get the idea. And by the way, welcome back to the world. Take a good look at what’s been happening in your absence.’
The footage of Mexican Immigrant Beaten to Death is ill-lit but visible, filmed on a cell phone and available at a click anywhere in the civilized world. The microphone picks up ‘Por favor,’ and ‘Señores, help me.’ At this point, Anastasio Hernandez Rojas is surrounded by US Border Control agents, but he is lying on the ground and not resisting when tasered at least five times. The agents then kick and club him.
The Border Patrol claims self-defense. Methamphetamine was found in the victim’s bloodstream, and the police reaction was a measured response to extreme antisocial behaviour. The exact moment of death, on YouTube, is unclear.
‘Why did James and the other disciples suffer unbearable deaths?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bartholomew says.
‘Want me to play the clip again? There must be a reason.’
Bartholomew can’t say what that reason is.
‘No one came to save James from the riot police. Philip was the same. No one intervened when he was hanging upside down from his legs, and no one stood up to help Thomas or Jude. You were in a coma for weeks. If Jesus is alive, he’s indifferent to your suffering.’
‘But I’m still alive. I’m here.’
‘Thanks to me.’
‘Jesus may have sent you.’
‘Jesus didn’t send me.’
‘Without you knowing. You wouldn’t have to know.’
‘I would know.’
‘Would you?’
The hail is back, vicious fistfuls on the car windows, deafening on the roof. Claudia thumbs a text, her face lit up by the screen. The sky darkens and the car is barely moving so they stop in the services at Thorpe. Cassius Gallio buys everyone a flapjack, including the driver. Bartholomew likes coffee, so Gallio fetches him a cappuccino from the Costa, and Bartholomew makes a big effort to leave intact the heart shape in the chocolate on the milk. That is not a heart, Gallio wants to say, it’s a coffee bean. You are protecting a bean shape that looks like a heart.
Bartholomew says: ‘Ouch. That eye of yours looks like it must have hurt.’
The night before, Gallio had organized the removal of the body of James from the pavement. Then the formal suspension of seven members of Valeria’s riot squad. After that, he’d sat with Claudia in the van. They reviewed on the monitors the last moments on earth of James the Less, the sixth disciple of Jesus to die.
James looked old, Gallio thought, realizing he too must be old. They had grown old together.
‘One more time,’ Gallio said, and Claudia pointed the remote control.
One more time for the very end, a rooftop wind fluttering the Galilean clothes that James and the other disciples chose to wear. James ignores the whistling and jeering from the riot police below, and focuses entirely on his will. He prays, lips moving. He steps forward. Into a pure drop of silence he pronounces the name of Jesus.
He jumps.
‘We need that trace on the phone call.’
‘It’s coming.’ Claudia says. ‘Be patient.’
‘James received a phone call. He listened, but whoever was at the other end of the phone had nothing to say. James ended the call. He left the flat and went up to the roof. He held out his arms like Jesus. He jumped.’
‘Maybe he heard something on the phone we didn’t. Or the silence had a different meaning to him than it does to us.’
Cassius Gallio had reached the roof edge a second after James stepped off, in time to see that the road surface below had done most of the damage. The riot police finished the job, attacking James as if he were deranged and dangerous, a surprise assailant from above that they had to subdue. He’d launched himself unprovoked at officers of the law. They had no choice.
In the van Gallio felt they were missing a piece of the puzzle. James ended the silent phone call, stood up and went to the roof. His immediate reaction suggested an agreed sequence, and explained why he prayed so much—prayer kept him close to the phone and in a heightened spiritual state, ready for the call, in the mood to jump.
Gallio found it hard to rewatch what happened next. The riot police should not have responded in the way they did, even though Cassius Gallio was increasingly convinced the disciples were shielding a secret. They denied it: everything pointed to it. They’d rather die than be disloyal, and if James was prepared to jump then Bartholomew’s initial silence in the taxi to Caistor came as no surprise. Unlike Baruch, however, Gallio didn’t believe in coercion. Six disciples had died horribly, and no new information had surfaced.
Claudia did eventually get a trace on the call, that same night. When the results were phoned through she listened closely then clicked off her phone. ‘Landline,’ she said. ‘Via a switchboard. Internal phone at the King David Hotel. We have a room number.’
‘Paul,’ Gallio said. ‘I’m guessing the room number matches up.’
‘It does. Surprise, and yet not.’
Cassius Gallio whistled. ‘No, you’re right. Paul. I’m more surprised than not.’
The two Speculators made eye contact, but in the van everything was too close and they quickly looked away. Neither of them were convinced that Paul was responsible, even though he had motive. He wanted to be a disciple but they wouldn’t let him join. He also had the experience, a killer from the beginning of his career.
‘In the Israel Museum Paul was genuinely frightened,’ Gallio said. ‘I don’t believe he’s the killer.’
‘But the call came from his suite. Somehow he made this happen, or that’s what it looks like. What do we do?’
‘Paul is all we’ve got,’ Gallio said. ‘We have no option. We pick him up at the hotel, and make Baruch a happy bunny.’
When they arrived at the King David, Baruch volunteered to make the arrest. ‘My reward,’ he said, ‘seeing as I’m the only one who suspected him from the start.’
Baruch wasn’t interested in the how or why. Paul had made the phone call, which was evidently a signal. James had jumped. Paul was involved up to his neck, and he’d devised a way of killing James without even having to speak.
‘So explain how that works.’
‘Don’t know,’ Baruch said. ‘But give me a few days with Paul in custody and I can assure you details will emerge.’
In the breakfast room of the King David Hotel, while Paul was shaking out his napkin and dabbing at the corner of his mouth, Baruch gave him the right to remain silent. Gallio gauged Paul’s reaction, but this wasn’t his first arrest and he calmly rearranged the tableware, made sure the cutlery was aligned at a correct distance from the plate.
‘You’re arresting me on what charge? Making a phone call?’
Paul adjusted his spoon, then volubly and coherently he waived his right to silence. He’d need to hear a legally valid charge. He intended to make an official appeal, which he was entitled to do as a citizen like any other. He demanded a secure escort to Rome, where he’d be happy to defend himself in person at the appeal hearing. He’d expect to retain his personal bodyguard because he was innocent until proven guilty.
‘Why did you telephone James?’ Gallio asked. He didn’t believe Paul was the assassin, who could kill with a phone call, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘We traced the call,’ Claudia said. ‘You made it. James jumped.’
‘No one could prove that connection. I’m sad that James died, and I’ll miss him, but his death has nothing to do with me.’
‘You deny phoning him?’
‘I do not. I had an issue I wanted to discuss. A private matter, of a theological nature.’
‘At the last minute I changed my mind. I decided not to share.’
‘James jumped from the roof of his building after you put through a call. Have you been blackmailing him?’
‘I don’t have to answer. You’re obliged to allow me an appeal in Rome.’
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ Baruch studied Paul’s face, and he was right. Paul was enjoying himself. ‘You end up with exactly what you wanted when we met up yesterday. Protection. Look at you. You don’t give a flying fuck about James. You get what you requested in the museum, as if you’d planned this death for your own benefit.’
Cassius Gallio recognized Baruch’s sense of being used, and it made both of them uneasy. Gallio felt the mysterious hand of Jesus deploying the pieces, devising outcomes that favoured his followers. A death was not a death, any more than this arrest of Paul was a punishment. Jesus had worked out the moves in advance.
‘This isn’t right,’ Baruch said. ‘Something here is wrong.’
Paul laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He beckoned the waiter, but no waiter dared approach, not while Gallio and Baruch were ruining Paul’s breakfast. Paul knew differently, that not everything was as it seemed.
‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘there’s hope for you yet. Something is wrong. Everyone senses it, and from this feeling religion begins. There are features of our existence that feel wrong. Jesus offers an explanation.’
‘This is a set-up,’ Baruch said.
His phone rang. A second later so did Cassius Gallio’s. News from the medical centre; Bartholomew was out of his coma.
‘We’ll both go.’
‘I’ll drive.’
No one forgets Judas, and his betrayal of Jesus is proof the disciples can be weak.
Bartholomew has a weakness for cappuccino. Back from his coma he’s in love with life and surrounded by god’s miracles, including Italian frothed coffee and slot-machine lights at the A46 services near Thorpe.
Cassius Gallio hopes to turn Bartholomew as he once turned Judas, but even on his second Costa he’s yet to be bought. Gallio leans across the laminated table. ‘You don’t remember me, do you? Many years ago we had a chat in the back of a car. I said that one day I’d help you, and seventy pieces of silver is a lot of money. However you choose to look at it.’
‘I’m looking down on it,’ Bartholomew says. ‘What would I do with so much silver?’
‘I’ll buy you some catalogues. You don’t need to be short of ideas, not these days.’
‘Jesus will provide.’
Yet Bartholomew declines to explain how Jesus will arrange a dead-drop or other fieldcraft details, on these mysterious future occasions when Jesus will deign to provide. They’re soon back in the taxi, Bartholomew fascinated by the spaces that divide one town from the next. Strip villages, obese children, and marshes where wheat refuses to grow. Rivers. England is a developing region, the kind of backward territory where gibberish can flourish among the uneducated, but sometimes Gallio just looks, and forgets he’s looking for Jesus.
‘I sense you’re troubled,’ Bartholomew says. ‘What can I do for you?’
Gallio compliments him on his sensitivity, and says that to be honest he’s troubled by the latest forensic reports. ‘I doubt you can help.’
‘That isn’t what I meant. You’re avoiding the question.’
And Gallio continues to do so because this is his taxi, his story. He will ask the questions and sift the answers. He will speculate, because that’s why he was put on god’s good earth. ‘We’ve found evidence of high-strength anesthetic stocked in Joseph of Arimathea’s house during the period of the crucifixion.’
Perhaps Bartholomew can be useful after all. Gallio runs through one of his Jesus survival theories, not the switch but the sedative on the sponge. What does Bartholomew make of that?
‘It’s possible.’
Bartholomew trained as a doctor so he should know. He also wants to be kind, allowing Gallio to speculate, and surprised by Bartholomew’s meek response Gallio sees for the first time how tired he is. As a Speculator he should take advantage.
‘In the sense that anything is possible? Or that the sedative made it easier for whoever took Jesus’s place? A minor disciple. Like Simon, for example, crucified in the place of Jesus but mercifully spared the worst of the pain.’
‘I don’t know. I can’t say whether your theories are true or untrue. They’re not unreasonable.’
‘Tell me how Jesus stays hidden.’
‘He’s not hidden,’ Bartholomew says. ‘He is everywhere.’
‘Yes, but where exactly, right now? Is Jesus here in England? Is he standing in for the disciple who’s been located in Caistor? Tell me and put an end to this. We won’t hurt anyone and you can relax. Seventy-five pieces of silver would set you up, even in this day and age.’
Cassius Gallio offers himself up as a saviour, and as soon as Bartholomew allows reason to prevail then Gallio will have saved him. But Bartholomew stares out the side window, captivated by the forecourt of a BP garage, the first one he’s seen, another everyday miracle. He wipes a hole in the condensation to let in the green and yellow glow of prices and pumps. For the moment the secret entrusted to the disciples is safe with Bartholomew.
‘How well do you know Paul?’
‘Not at all. We’ve never met.’
‘I arrested him in Jerusalem. We think he’s involved in the death of James.’
After the BP garage a superstore, a Real Ale pub, a slow length of road following a vintage Morris Traveller. Bartholomew is easily distracted from explaining how a god can appear on earth. ‘Who do you prefer, Peter’s Jesus or Paul’s Jesus? I think I can predict the answer.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The Jesus according to Peter is a Nazareth carpenter who champions the disadvantaged. Paul thinks Jesus has a direct line to god and can take over the world. Peacefully, as long as everyone believes in him.’
‘I don’t prefer either version. Both can be true.’
‘Paul’s Jesus is winning.’
‘He makes skilful use of the postal service.’
‘Paul is not the person you think he is.’
‘I try to remember Jesus as he was to me.’
Gallio tries another angle, flattery. Bartholomew escaped the carnage of Philip’s martyrium. He was spared a terrible death, meaning he might be the chosen one, as described by Jude. Bartholomew could be the disciple Jesus loves. ‘Couldn’t you? That would explain why you’re alive.’
No disciple with a human heart could fail to warm to this idea, the glory of the disciple beloved above all others.
‘I think that’s Peter,’ Bartholomew says. ‘Jesus called him the rock.’
‘Do you know where Peter is now?’
‘I don’t. I’m sorry.’
Of course he doesn’t. None of them know a thing. The disciples claim encounters with divine omniscience through Jesus, but can’t keep in touch with each other.
‘Really, I’m the least of all the disciples.’
They do love to brag, each disciple more humble than the next.
The traffic congestion eases at a section of dual carriageway, and the taxi eases out past double-trucks carrying hay bales, then makes way for a full-beam fish van hurtling back to Grimsby. Claudia is asleep in the front seat of the taxi, head lolled forward.
‘We can give Peter twenty-four-hour global response protection.’
This is a genuine proposal. If an assassin or team of assassins is targeting the disciples then the CCU has a civilized duty to protect them. At the same time, Valeria could monitor Peter night and day to reduce the chances of a terror attack. Bartholomew, the least of the disciples, closes his eyes.
Cassius Gallio is doing his best: good cop, carrot, the agreeable side of life. So far he has spared Bartholomew the bad cop and the beatings, but both methods carry more weight in the Antonia. Fewer contemporary distractions, but Valeria has sent him to England. She wants him to get ahead of Baruch and restore a sense of control, because Baruch gone rogue threatens the outcome of their mission.
‘You should have fitted him with a tracer.’ Valeria hated not knowing where everyone was, and what they were doing. ‘You had plenty of opportunity in Hierapolis.’
‘We’re supposed to be partners.’
‘But you fell out. You should have seen it coming.’ For the first time since Gallio came back Valeria was flustered, but she too had her career to consider, and the CCU was obsessed with results. Welcome to Jerusalem, Valeria, welcome to the complex case of Jesus.
Gallio wonders what damage Baruch can do in England. Unless, and this is not impossible, the disciple identified in Caistor as Simon is Jesus. Jesus has been hiding away on barbarian shores as a minor disciple, biding his time in an obscure and forgotten territory. Simon in Caistor, England, matches these requirements. Gallio urges the taxi onward, because Baruch mustn’t get there first.
Even with a knife flat-bladed across his forehead Gallio had been optimistic that he was not in a proper fight with Baruch. A proper fight, with Baruch, was to the death, but they seemed to have reached a moment in the Shaare Zedek Medical center where the fighting could reasonably stop. At least, Gallio was hoping they had.
‘You don’t want to die, do you, Gallio? You’re frightened of death. I can smell your little man fear.’
Baruch turned the blade, the cutting edge honed to the idea of slicing off an eyebrow, whole. In fact only Gallio had stopped fighting, and he waited for his life to flash before his eyes. It did not, which was encouraging, though as he’d noticed in other moments of extreme stress, most of them connected to Jesus, time did change shape. Time swelled, slowed, or everything happened at once. Time became unreliable, in the open moments between life and death.
Baruch’s knife stayed flat against Gallio’s forehead for several seconds, or for several years. He forgets.
‘You are pathetic,’ Baruch’s knife-face wavered. ‘You are old and ineffectual.’
Warm, wet, dripping into Gallio’s eye. The bastard, Gallio thought, he cut me. Gallio put his hand to his face and it came away wet and red, and not even a proper fight because he sensed the worst was over. He pressed his fingers hard against the wound, like a clumsy salute. Baruch had cut him, but he dared go no further because behind Cassius Gallio was Valeria, and behind her the CCU, and the legions, all the way back to Rome.
The two men had arrived at the medical centre to find Bartholomew sitting up in bed with a bowl of chicken soup. He was pale, but he managed a smile of welcome. Baruch sat down on the end of the bed, eyes greedy like an ancient prophet, sizing Bartholomew up, no suffering too extreme to imagine. Bartholomew steadied his bowl. He had no idea.
‘Leave him alone,’ Gallio said. Paul’s smug acceptance of his arrest, turning it to his advantage, did not sit well with Baruch. On the journey from the hotel he’d driven like a man possessed, his anger fierce enough to deter every possible accident. Now Gallio wanted to intervene before the anger from the road found a way to settle on Bartholomew. ‘He’s been unconscious since Hierapolis. What can he tell us?’
‘He has information about his attackers. Maybe an identification.’
‘We arrested Paul,’ Gallio said. ‘You wanted Paul. Leave Bartholomew to me.’
‘Why should I? Paul will get his escort, the works. Cushy house arrest in some middle-class district of Rome, and now we can’t touch him. They’re pulling us out of shape, like last time, leaving too many questions unanswered.’
‘Baruch, we’re on the same side. We’re partners.’
Bartholomew sipped at a spoonful of soup, licked his lips, rediscovered entry-level distinctions between alive and dead. Eating was one of them. Baruch stood up and Bartholomew spilled soup on his sheets. Advantages, disadvantages.
‘Who was trailing me in Damascus?’
Gallio took a step back from Baruch’s undivided attention, but at least he was distracted from his prey.
‘You were followed?’
‘You know I was. And who tipped off Paul in Antioch?’
‘Why are you asking me? Ask Bartholomew, he’s more likely to know than I am. But do ask nicely, please.’
‘That’s exactly what I plan to do.’
Bartholomew had moved his bowl to the safety of the bedside table. Baruch sat closer this time, the disciple’s eyes, nose and throat within his reach. ‘Start at Hierapolis,’ he said. ‘This better be good.’
‘Nicely.’
Bartholomew opened his mouth, but at first no words came out. He coughed into his hand and tried again. His voice was weak, feeling a way back into speaking. ‘I remember the beginning of the attack.’ Another cough, more forceful this time. ‘If that’s what you want to know. They were quick. They put a sack on my head. I didn’t see any faces.’
‘How many of them?’
Bartholomew shook his head; the memory simply wasn’t there for him.
‘What about voices?’
‘One voice, I think. Maybe more. It was difficult to hear, because of the sack.’
‘Try to place the voice,’ Gallio said, and compared to Baruch he sounded like a saint. ‘A man or a woman? What language were they speaking?’
Bartholomew smiled thinly, tired now. ‘At the time,’ he said, ‘I thought that’s how the devil would sound.’
‘Like the devil,’ Baruch said. ‘Thank you hugely for your help.’
For a full half minute of silence, Cassius Gallio considered Satan as a suspect. Satan had been accused twice, in Babylon by the wife of the deputy finance minister and now by Bartholomew. Gallio resisted coincidence as an explanation, but could hardly bring in Satan for questioning. Instead he reasoned their latest suspect away: from inside a kidnapper’s sack voices will sound satanic.
‘Another question for you,’ Gallio said. ‘If you feel up to it. Why did James jump from the roof?’
Bartholomew looked confused. ‘Did he do that? I didn’t know.’
‘What do you know?’
‘Leave him alone, Baruch.’
‘Or what?’
Baruch reached around and pulled out his knife, laid the blade across his thigh.
‘He’s doing his best. He’s telling you what he remembers.’
‘He’s lying. Disciples lie. That’s their defining characteristic, to lie about what they’ve lived and seen. They’re keeping a secret, and Bartholomew is going to hand it over.’
‘The knife isn’t the way.’
‘So what is the way? Look at you, with your reasonable questions and your miserable face. I don’t know what the truth is with Paul, but I do know he goaded Jesus into an appearance. He stung the living Jesus by setting up the murder of Stephen on the street in Jerusalem, then Jesus ambushed him on the Damascus road. The two events are connected. Hurting a disciple can incite Jesus to intervene.’
‘That may be a correlation, not a cause.’
‘So let’s find out. Let’s taunt Jesus and see what happens.’
Baruch picked up his knife and Gallio reached for his arm. Baruch was up and on Gallio with the speed and expertise of a killer. He hissed like a snake. He pressed the blade flat against Gallio’s forehead, and cut him. He cut him above the eyebrow. He drew blood.
Then he pushed Gallio away, and with him everything Gallio stood for, the CCU, the legions, civilization. With practiced ease the knife found the sheath in the small of his back. ‘I’ll have answers,’ Baruch said. ‘If not here then from one of the others, and without your help.’ He made for the doorway, as if Jerusalem were full of disciples and he was in a hurry to find them, and to damage them. ‘I’ll deal with the disciples my way. You and your procedures are holding us back.’
Baruch slammed the door on his way out, making the liquids in the IV bags tremble.
‘It’s all right,’ Gallio said. He stood there with his fingers clamped to the cut above his eye. Blood found its way through to his knuckles, across the back of his hand as far as his wrist. ‘I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’m one of the good guys.’
Caistor is on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, away from nearby towns, away from significant transmitters, and the broadband is patchy at best. The town has under three thousand inhabitants, and the spire of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul is a central feature, though in English market towns every building has history, or will have. The fire station on the hill is closed down or not yet operational. It’s difficult to find anyone to ask, because cold and late the market square is roadblocked by squad cars. Blue lights flash in the darkness, sliding across the slick black numbers on the white car roofs. A helicopter hammers above, searchlight strobing the narrow streets.
Cassius Gallio spits into the gutter, and his spit freezes on double yellow lines. A hostage situation. Not what he needs right now, but as likely in Caistor as anywhere else, as the big city, as an isolated farmhouse—wherever the human brain decides that action needs to be taken, that destinies can be changed by force.
In Caistor, hubris requires the presence of emergency police from Hull, who have surrounded a large Georgian house just off the market square. To the side of the driveway are three lock-up garages, the far one subject to a breaking and entering. The two men inside the garage refuse to leave peacefully, hands in the air, as requested by a thirty-watt police loudhailer. The authorities will do the rest. The intruders are foreigners. No one understands a word they say.
Cassius Gallio of the Complex Casework Unit, specializing in sightings of disciples, arrives from over the sea. He has his ID with the embossed eagle. He has the face in its misery, and an overcoat and scarf and leather gloves for the wind that blows in from the Humber. He expects, and receives, a respectful welcome at the crime scene.
The press are in attendance with their lenses and recorders. They film Cassius Gallio shaking hands with the local police commissioner, and shout out for a comment. Gallio grips the commissioner by the elbow and guides him across to the safer side of the police line, nearer the criminals than the press. He shows him two pictures of Jesus from a selection on his phone, a Rubens and a Tissot. The local policeman shakes his head.
‘Similar, but that’s not the man.’
Gallio swipes through the disciple images and stops at Simon. He has a photo of the sculpture he once saw in Brussels, Simon in white marble leaning on a two-handled saw. The commissioner studies the face.
‘That’s him, that’s the hostage.’
‘And the kidnapper?’
‘We don’t have a description. He’s armed. He has a knife.’
Gallio updates Claudia—the disciple Simon is the hostage—and suggests she makes Bartholomew safe. ‘That’s why we brought him, after all. We can’t trust anyone else. Find him a room, somewhere warm. And don’t let him out of your sight.’
A kidnap negotiator offers Gallio his loudhailer. He waves it away. He phones Baruch’s number, and after a lengthy rerouting via Israel and back to England, the phone rings and Baruch answers. Gallio has to shout, because the background noise sounds like a sawmill.
‘What’s going on? Never mind. Stop whatever you’re doing. I’m coming in.’
The uniformed police are impressed. A WPC in a stab vest, crouching and keeping her eye on the corrugated door, accompanies Gallio to the third garage along. Cassius Gallio walks upright, wishing he’d brought a hat, holding the phone to his ear. ‘Open it enough for me to get in.’
Camera flash whitens the winter gloom. Baruch leaves the door as low as possible so the press can’t get pictures, and Gallio drops to a press-up position and slides in underneath. They’ll get front-page shots of a Speculator in action, a special agent’s fearless first contact with the hostage taker.
Cassius Gallio pulls the door closed behind him and stands up inside the garage. Christ. He kills the phone. He doesn’t want to see what he’s seeing but this is what has happened in Caistor. The event can’t be undone. Simon is naked and hanging from chains, head down, the weight of his shoulders slumped on a workbench.
Gallio holds vomit into his mouth with his hand. Christ. Christ alive, this will make Jesus pay attention, surely it will. Every act of evil is an appeal. An atrocity is a provocation, always has been: gods, if you exist and have any shame then show yourselves. When they choose not to show themselves—and according to modern historians this is usually their choice—the horror has failed to shame them. More horror is needed. What about this atrocity, and this? What about this act of evil now? Jesus, what about this here now? Baruch has accepted the challenge.
He has chained each of Simon’s ankles, and hauled him up by a pulley attached to a steel roof beam. Simon’s legs are spread and in the air, his exposed white vertebrae curled into the bench. Baruch has taken an electric chainsaw and split Simon from the groin, starting in the hinge between his legs. How could Jesus not come back at the sight of this? If not now, then when? Come Jesus if you’re coming, come on. Baruch is sawing your disciple Simon in half.
Civilization cannot tolerate acts like this. It sends for the police and civilization is the police. Civilization intervenes, says with divine certainty that this must never happen, though it does happen. Cassius Gallio defies Jesus to explain Simon, and what he thinks the torture of Simon means. None of the recorded parables illuminate a fate such as this in a provincial English garage.
The garage has a brushed concrete floor, and on hooks in the breeze-block wall tools are ordered according to size. The fourteen-inch electric chainsaw is missing from its outline next to the cordless hammer drill. The saw is plugged into an orange flexed extension socket and has been used to slice through Simon as far as his lower stomach. There is a gallon of blood on the concrete floor, as if an engine block’s been emptied of oil.
Cassius Gallio’s mind turns away, saving itself, just as his eyes know never to stare at the sun. He couldn’t chainsaw a man in half, he thinks, but Baruch can. Gallio is a negotiator, a finder of the best way forward. He feels the pressure of conscience, of knowing that Simon shouldn’t have to suffer like this, and conscience feels suddenly like the presence of Jesus. Does it? Cassius Gallio could probably shoot someone with a gun. He’s no saint.
He doesn’t have a gun.
Simon is alive. Gallio sees his fingers twitch.
‘Bastard might as well die.’ Baruch sweats heavily into his white shirt, jacket off, buttons undone even though the garage is cold. He is exhausted, deflated. ‘I couldn’t break him.’
Baruch has moved beyond reasonable decision-making. If anything, reason contributes to the problem because lies are a reasoned attempt to mislead. Pain is necessary to destroy Simon’s ability to reason, and therefore to lie, and Simon has certainly felt pain. He should have told the truth about Jesus by now. Before now. A long time before.
‘He talked, but came out with the same old stuff. Jesus walking on water, and making blind men see. Jesus back from the dead, Jesus to come again.’
‘Baruch, what are you doing? What have you done here?’
Baruch starts crying, sobbing up huge gulps of grief. Gallio risks a glance at Simon. There, again, a flicker of movement right at the end of a fingertip.
‘I wanted to call Jesus out.’ Tears run down Baruch’s face, both cheeks, the corner of his mouth. ‘Paul managed it, so why can’t I? How can Jesus bear to put up with this? He should be here, but he knows I won’t roll over like Paul. I could take him. I know I could, because he’s a coward. If he had anything about him I wouldn’t get away with this.’
And then he has no sobbing left inside him. He wipes his eyes, and anger returns as a reliable emotion, the one he knows and uses best. Anger rises and revives him, and with a new sense of purpose he puts down the saw. One more time he wipes the back of his hand over his eyes. He pulls out his knife.
‘Put down the knife, Baruch.’
Cassius Gallio is unarmed. He feels colossally stupid and arrogant for shutting the door of the garage. Baruch sniffs back the last of his tears then points his knife at Gallio’s throat, like an essential step in his reasoning.
‘I’ve been killing Simon for hours, trying to taunt Jesus out of hiding. I was expecting him to appear to me.’
‘Obviously it doesn’t work like that. Your analysis is flawed.’
‘I know how Jesus works.’
‘Do you? I thought Simon didn’t talk.’
‘Didn’t need to. He betrayed himself in the way he acted. The torture was necessary to find that out, but now I know their secret.’
Gallio is distracted by Simon’s fingers, watching them until they’re no longer closing, however faintly, as a sign that his brain is reaching for grains of life. Simon is breathing, hearing. Something outside himself is understood, and then it is not. His fingers are still. The soul goes out of Simon, and Cassius Gallio waits for a profound insight or thought. None comes.
The seventh disciple is dead, but Jesus stays away. He does not have a human heart.
‘Let me tell you what I did with the bones of James,’ Baruch says. ‘This is important. Not the last James, the one they beat to death. The first James, the disciple my men beheaded in Jerusalem. I was pleased he was dead. Didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I felt we had a point to prove with his body. I wasn’t going to risk a second Jesus, or Lazarus, so James had to stay dead. I boiled his corpse in a horse cauldron. Left it in there for hours, until the meat floated off. Beige in colour, I remember, like boiled pork. I chucked the meat to a dog. Other dogs turned up and fought for the scraps, no manners at all. I emptied the soup of James from the cauldron, watched it soak into the dried earth. The bones I collected into a sack, wrapped it in duct tape, and I personally signed off the package with UPS to Spain. It was the furthest place I could think of. James the disciple of Jesus was dead and he would not be coming back. That’s what I thought: this time when they die they’re dead.’
‘I know. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, trekking miles to touch his bones. They talked about it on the coach to Pamukkale, and this is the secret the disciples want to keep from us. Whatever we do, they’ve planned ahead. Every decision we make works in their favour, if only we could see into the future. We were wrong about Philip and Thomas, they didn’t have to recognize their killer. The disciples don’t fight back because they’re happy to die. That explains why they don’t run, because the future is secure. Death is irrelevant to them. They have an insight into life after death that we should take more seriously.’
Baruch’s eyes are alight with a brightness Gallio fears: shimmering, brittle, sick.
‘Baruch, the British police are outside this garage in numbers. They’re not unreasonable people, and they’ll look after you. Give yourself up.’
‘Simon knew where he was going, and he wanted to get there. He suffered, but without the level of suffering I expected him to show. He had an absolute certainty about what was going to happen next.’
‘Jealous?’
The word slips out before Cassius Gallio can stop himself, a thought so evident that to think it is to say it. Baruch isn’t angry, he’s jealous, this is the most reliable of his emotions. He is the expert on death, but the disciples have information about the afterlife that he does not.
‘I am jealous, yes. I want to know where they go, and why it doesn’t scare them.’
Baruch places his killer’s knife in the looseness of his left hand. He fixes Gallio eye-to-eye and blows into the palm of his right, flexing then clenching his fingers.
‘Tell it to the police,’ Gallio says. ‘Don’t do anything you’ll regret.’
‘I know what I’m doing. Have a little faith.’
He rolls his shoulders, preparing himself. Tosses the knife back into his right hand, grips hard. Baruch stabs himself deep in the windpipe.