“BURNED ALIVE”
Jesus is the connection. Nine times Jesus, but Cassius Gallio does not accept defeat. He knows the secret of the disciples, their love of death and dying, and two of the three survivors have been sighted alive in Rome. Gallio will save them. Whatever Peter and John have planned, they will not die on Gallio’s watch. Jesus and the disciples have manipulated death to their advantage for long enough.
On his covert journey from Patras to Rome, in the seafront chapels and quayside shrines of southern Europe, Gallio sees memorials to the crucifixion of Jesus. Every crucifix reminds him that the disciples are capable and cunning. Peter survived Baruch in Jerusalem, even though he was captured. He has avoided every assassin as far as Rome, the heart of civilization.
Which is why, some time after the death of Andrew in Patras, Cassius Gallio finds himself sitting in a Roman bus shelter. He stares at primary colours advertising hair products and free-delivery bathroom suites. Also and always posters for the Circus, here and at every Roman kiosk: the latest films, plays, albums, the next Circus in line. This coming Saturday, in the first major performance since the fire of Rome, the Circus posters promise wild dogs, chariot-racing, and the public execution of Peter the disciple of Jesus.
Gallio groans. Valeria has no idea what she’s doing. The death of Peter is exactly what Jesus wants, and Gallio is determined to stop it happening. He hasn’t shaved since Caistor, barely washed since his meltdown in the Botanical Gardens in Patras. From Patras to Brindisi, to Venice, to Rome. He loses track of time. Andrew died weeks ago, or it could have been longer, and since then Gallio has been jumping ship, travelling in the cash economy, a deserter without papers in ragged clothes with unkempt hair and the look of a criminal Jesus.
Strangers help him along the way, and yet he distrusts them. People are kind, offering food and shelter, which makes Gallio suspect the Jesus network of encouraging him, urging him toward Rome for purposes not his own. Know your enemy, he thinks, and he learns the sign of the fish, an increasingly familiar shape on his undercover journey from Greece. Two lines curve from a point and intersect to make the tail, a simple but recognizable symbol of the fish for fishermen, for the disciples.
With the aid of fellow travellers, many of them believers in Jesus, Gallio arrives in the eternal city. He has formulated a plan of action that starts with Paul, who is under house arrest in a district called the Fourth Regidor. However, Gallio’s most direct route from the port is blocked by police on the Fabricius bridge. The officers are stopping and searching, security level Code Red: Severe. Gallio turns back, looks for a safer route, tags onto pedestrian tours and pretends to take an interest in SPQR bracelets and letters whittled from Lazio wood. Pick out R O M A and take the letters home. Pick out the name of your favourite saint while keeping an eye on the patrols on the Via Palermo and the Viminal Hill.
Every main thoroughfare is blocked, until Gallio ends up in the bus shelter. He wants a meeting with Paul, but forces beyond his control don’t want him getting through. Interesting, but as a deserter he can’t risk the backstreets and a patrol picking him up. Lost for ideas, he makes the sign of the fish with his finger on the dusty Perspex of the bus shelter. A middle-aged woman with plastic shopping bags asks him if she can help, and Gallio is no longer surprised by the reach of their network.
‘I was hoping to see Paul,’ he says, ‘in the Fourth Regidor. Jesus would rather I didn’t.’
‘Nonsense,’ she says, ‘your information is out of date, that’s all. Paul moves about freely and was last seen outside the city at the Abbey of the Three Fountains. You can take a bus.’
It could be a trap. On the other hand not even Jesus could brief all his followers, every single one, on the off-chance they’d meet Cassius Gallio at a Roman bus stop. Gallio is using them; they’re not using him.
He crosses the road and waits for a bus heading in the opposite direction, away from the heightened security in the city centre. For a long time there’s no sign of a bus, just carts full of sand and building materials. Rome is a permanent work-in-progress, chisels on marble, shouting, the bang of hammers getting things done. Gallio sees free-standing columns where life thrived before the fire, he sees roofless temples and doubts if the city will ever be fully restored.
He doesn’t believe that Peter and John are responsible for the ruins, not all of them, yet Peter is the entertainment at this Saturday’s Circus. Saturday 2–5, says the poster in this and every bus stop, The Greatest Show on Earth. It looks like exactly the kind of extreme result a disciple would welcome.
At last, after about a million years, a bus arrives. The driver knows the abbey, and tells Gallio to watch out for the Three Fountains bus stop, near the Siemens Italy offices, can’t miss it. The driver is right, and the Siemens headquarters is at a busy out-of-town junction beside a flyover. Gallio walks down the hill, cuts across a park, and picks up signs to the abbey.
From the entrance, when he arrives, Gallio can see a long garden bisected by a tree-lined path leading to the abbey itself, which from a distance looks like many of the old church buildings in Rome. A baby cries, his mother one of a handful of believers compelled to see the site where an apostle died. Mum and pushchair are leaving, and at this time of day the café at the lodge is closed.
Just before the main abbey building, next to a bubbling water source set into the green bricks of a wall, a man and two women are standing in close conversation. Fieldcraft, Gallio thinks, they’re using the running water to counteract listening devices, but fortunately he knows how to join them. He stands nearby and with the toe of his shoe he makes the shape of the fish in the gravel at his feet. They recognize the sign, and welcome him in as a fellow believer.
Yes, they say, Paul is known in this place but he hasn’t been here recently. They’re more interested in Peter in the Mamertine Prison—he’s in the underground dungeon, and they were just saying that apparently he baptizes fellow prisoners with the damp from the fetid walls.
‘Amazing. As if the water presented itself there for just that purpose.’
‘Only three left,’ Gallio reminds them, before they get carried away. ‘It’s too late for Peter but thank god for John, and for Matthew. At least in Cairo he’s safe. Have you heard from John? He ought to get out while he can.’
They correct him: sorry, but Matthew is dead. Assassins tracked him to a two-room house in the Entoto suburb of Addis Ababa. They broke down the door. In his study they found a simple chair and table and a roll of blank papyrus imported from Egypt.
‘He died horribly.’
The assassins chopped off Matthew’s hands, and in the yard of the house they wrapped him in his papyrus then soaked the paper in dolphin oil. They poured brimstone over his head, and asphalt, and pitch, then piled up tow and scrubwood beneath him. They invited local dignitaries to come along and watch what happened next. Bring your friends, bring golden images of your gods. See if Matthew the disciple of Jesus will burn.
When everyone was assembled and sitting comfortably, the gods and the men, someone struck a match.
The Christians at the abbey outside Rome take grim pleasure in the details of Matthew’s death, which evidently hasn’t worked as a deterrent. In one sense Matthew is as thoroughly dead as the nine disciples before him, but he is also a light in the darkness. Faith is rewarded by persecution and death, but a brighter day is coming.
‘What is the brighter day?’ Gallio asks. ‘When can it be expected to arrive?’
He realizes his mistake: he ought to know, or as an honest follower believe without facts and details. Jesus is coming back, an article of faith for true believers.
‘Who are you, exactly?’ they ask. ‘What do you want? Can we help you?’
This is their response to every quandary, and to every challenge Gallio has tried to devise: they think they can help him.
‘I need to see Paul,’ Gallio says. ‘Wherever he is now I have important news for him. I was with Andrew when he died.’
Early the next day Cassius Gallio is climbing over rubble in Rome’s shattered back alleys, avoiding the main street patrols that encircle the Fourth Regidor. The Christians at the abbey told him about a safe route through to Paul’s house, and along this or that interrupted vista Gallio sees new buildings squeezed next to old, satellite dishes fading up to ancient domes, a lone seagull gliding.
He falls in behind an early-morning organic rubbish collection. The binmen of Rome tip baskets of food waste into a filthy wagon as it trundles through side streets, and Gallio meets no patrols at this time of day in these places. He rubs his beard, wonders how good is too good to be true. He’d spent the night in the abbey gardens, after the Christians had given him food and a key to the washroom at the café. In the mirror above the sink he’d checked his face for errant nerves, then disapproved of the way he looked. He went back out to find more believers. They loaned him nail scissors and he trimmed his beard.
Paul is under nominal house arrest on the second floor of a two-storey building, in a flat above a kitchen supplies outlet. This is it, the main drag of the Fourth Regidor, and the shops on either side are blackened and boarded up, the cauterized walls patched with fly-posters for the Circus, Sold Out stamped diagonally across the venue and date. For some reason, the fire has left Paul’s building untouched.
At the top of the outdoor stairs a plainclothes officer, a dark-skinned Roman in skinny jeans, sits in a rattan chair with his feet against the railings. He’s playing Tomb Raider on an iPad. Gallio doesn’t know if the police are guarding Paul or protecting him, but either way he can’t back out. The man lifts his eyes, takes in Gallio’s appearance. He nods him through.
In the kitchen a woman is peeling apples into a red plastic tub. She tells Gallio to keep going, as if he looks convincingly in need of spiritual help. In the living room at the end of the hall Paul is writing at a polished wooden desk. His bodyguard faces the door with arms crossed, not a threat but a barrier. Paul glances up, then squares a bundle of papers by blocking them against the leather-inlaid desktop. He looks again at Gallio over the frames of his glasses.
‘Antioch,’ Gallio reminds him. ‘And the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. I’ve changed.’
Paul nods, takes off his glasses and puts them to one side. ‘Don’t like people to see me wearing them. Not the Paul my audience expects.’
The bodyguard is never far away as Paul gestures to a leather three-seater sofa he surely can’t afford. Gallio sits soft, and Paul takes the matching armchair, which is slightly higher. On the glass coffee table between them, a plate of wrapped sweets and a bowl of banknotes. Paul offers Gallio a sweet. Gallio checks the position of the bodyguard.
‘Don’t mind him. He won’t do anything unless you do.’ Gallio takes a sweet, unwraps, sucks. Ah, sugar. ‘You live well.’
‘I haven’t been convicted of a crime, and I’m a citizen. I have the right to appeal against false accusation without harassment. Are you here to harass me?’
‘If you hadn’t appealed you’d be free. After James was beaten to death you wanted us to arrest you for your own safety, but it seems like you weren’t in danger after all.’
Paul sighs, expressing the heavy burden of his knowledge of the world. Against his will he must inform Cassius Gallio, alas, that the world is largely unjust. ‘Now I’m here they can’t decide what I did wrong. I’m under arrest for breaching the Jerusalem peace, apparently, which sounds more convincing than conspiracy to make a dangerous phone call. What is it you want?’
Cassius Gallio remembers Paul as the centre of attention on the conference stage at Antioch. He did so enjoy his following, and Gallio can imagine Paul relishing the entertainment of his trial. They can’t convict a citizen without a triaI, and at his hearing he’ll persuade the judge and jury that belief in Jesus is a rational position to take, that black is white and death is the beginning not the end. He may be expecting applause.
‘You’ve done a fantastic job, Paul. First and foremost I came here to congratulate you. The Jesus believers appreciate your leadership, in which there’s so much to admire.’
Gallio makes a point of admiring the leather furniture in which they sit, the reflective finish of the coffee table, the rock-solid bodyguard. The disciples strive to live like Jesus and are difficult to imitate, problematic as role models. Far easier, now and always, to live like Paul. Not like Peter, in prison offering solace to the damned. Not like John, wherever he is, hunted and poor.
‘You’ve made a name for yourself at the centre of civilization,’ Gallio says, ‘where none of your enemies dare touch you. Academics quote your letters and defer to your theology, even when they don’t agree.’
‘Please,’ Paul says. ‘I can’t take all the credit.’
Paul has a sophistication the disciples lack, which means Gallio isn’t certain what he’s thinking. Paul spreads his hands to mean he accepts Gallio’s flattery, or he doesn’t. ‘A greater power is at work. Now if you tell me what you want, I may be able to help.’
‘I need to set up a meet with John.’
‘You and everyone else. I don’t think you realize what you’re asking.’
‘He’s in Rome, isn’t he?’
Paul steeples his fingers, but the gesture is too studied, buying time. He uses the tips of his fingers as a sight, along which he aims a steady gaze into Gallio’s eyes. ‘You have to understand, John isn’t …’ Paul dissolves his steeple and taps his head. ‘He has suffered. Your people don’t know where John is and neither do I, because since the fire Rome has struggled to cope with the homeless, the raving, the unwashed. In this city one delirious voice praising angels sounds much like any other. The situation is very sad.’
‘Paul, you can trust me. I know your secret, and the secret of the disciples of Jesus.’
‘That’s a lot of secrets.’ Paul looks Gallio over, his ragged clothes and his rough-cut beard. ‘A lot of knowledge for a vagrant, or is it a deserter?’
Cassius Gallio senses that the time is now, and this is the only chance he’ll get. John is the last disciple he can save from death, even if he wants to die.
‘I came here straight from Addis Ababa,’ Gallio says, because he hasn’t forgotten how to lie. ‘My next mission is here in Rome, but with Peter facing public execution the CCU has to be careful about making contact with a high-profile Christian like you. That’s why they sent me to talk to you. No one in Rome remembers who I am.’
Paul’s gaze doesn’t waver. He brings back the steeple, and covers his nose.
‘Valeria sent me to ask about John,’ Gallio says, ‘because we’re reasonable men, Paul, you and I.’
Cassius Gallio has speculated every day in the boats from Patras to Rome, and again last night as he slept beneath the stars at the Abbey of the Three Fountains. If there is an explanation for his second failure as a Speculator, he has decided, this is where the unraveling starts: Paul is Valeria’s puppy, he is her little dog. Always has been.
Yes. All the way back in time to Damascus. Cassius Gallio has rearranged the pieces and now the picture is clearer. After his tribunal and his exile, Valeria had been promoted to the vacant senior Speculator post in Jerusalem. As an ambitious CCU operative she’d have liked the look of Paul, a home-grown killer, and Valeria could plausibly have planned to recruit Paul, luring him away from the Jews. Damascus was the opportunity, away from Jerusalem. Gather the information, assemble the pieces. Yes.
At the public library in Venice Gallio had looked up the area weather reports, and at the relevant time in that particular year a storm had pummeled the mountain ranges north of Israel. Paul with his entourage must have suffered, possibly hit by lightning. An opening. He arrived in Damascus dazed, blinded, and his recuperation provided perfect cover for negotiations behind closed doors, in which Valeria suggested an arrangement from which both stood to benefit. They put their heads together and devised the story of the miracle revelation, a brilliant invention that led to Paul’s acceptance by Jesus sympathizers everywhere.
Baruch had been right—Paul had a secret life. If Gallio had listened to Baruch more closely, and they’d uncovered Paul’s duplicity earlier, they could have undermined the Jesus belief. Now Gallio feels humbled but determined: Baruch was right about Paul, but he didn’t go far enough. Since Andrew, Gallio had seen the truth, and though he’s daunted by his fight against the what-will-be-will-be, he can out-speculate them all. Only Cassius Gallio understands that John must be denied his glorious martyrdom.
‘Paul, you told Valeria where the CCU could find the disciples,’ Gallio says. ‘Our map on the computer with the lights. You fed us information, and without you we wouldn’t have known where to start.’
‘Ingenious.’ Paul picks up a sweet, puts it down again. He looks at his watch, shakes it, holds the face against his ear. He un-straps his watch and places it on the table. ‘Interesting theory, except I haven’t helped the CCU find John. According to you I’ve turned in the others. I know everything about the disciples, then when it comes to John I suddenly know nothing.’
Paul has his own motivation for killing the disciples, over and beyond the leather furniture and free escorted travel to Rome. The disciples of Jesus inconvenience him. They’re his competition, so the quieter the disciples the stronger the voice of Paul, and one day Jesus will be whoever and whatever Paul decides he is in his letters and lectures. Valeria has helped Paul’s reputation to build, encouraging the public disagreements between him and Peter, trying to divide the enemy. She supplied Paul with centurions to feign conversion, and safe passage on his epic pedestrian treks. She once provided armed protection when he was threatened by Jewish militants. Paul is civilization’s man.
‘Yet Valeria can be outwitted, can’t she?’ Gallio says. ‘Whatever you do, with Valeria’s support, belief in Jesus continues to grow. The Christian faith feels as inevitable as that premeditated escape from the tomb, as Jesus at work. You’re a triple agent, Paul. Valeria thinks you’re working for her, to divide and rule the disciples. In fact you’re working for Jesus.’
Paul holds out his hands, his innocent preacher’s hands.
‘Did you come all the way here to tell me that?’
‘You push information in both directions. You told Valeria we could find Jude in Beirut, but you told Andrew where I was in Greece. It was a CCU tracer in the phone, but the information still got through to Andrew.’
Paul stands and goes to the window. He clasps his hands behind his back, appraises the road in which he lives. ‘You took a risk coming here.’
He pulls the curtains closed.
‘Open them. Closing the curtains is a giveaway. They’ll know.’
Paul brushes back the curtains, strokes the edges as if to make sure they hang straight. From the outside he’ll look distracted, one of history’s deep thinkers taking a break from the meaning of life. ‘You don’t have any evidence. This is pure speculation, and there are hundreds of ways people know things, especially these days. Jude had his name in the papers.’
‘You’re not the only person who can change allegiance, Paul. I can’t make you trust me, but you too once converted. You stoned a Jesus believer to death in the street, now you write several letters a day exalting his name. I understand what you’re doing, and I want to help. Peter is the beloved disciple, isn’t he? Jesus is coming back before Peter dies.’
Paul grimaces. ‘And how would you be able to help?’
‘Tell me where to find John. I promise I’ll kill him, because it’s what you all want. I’ll make it grim. Then the stage is set for Peter and Jesus.’
Paul gives Cassius Gallio an address that leads to a bakery off the Via Veneto called La Dolce Vita. The woman behind the counter wipes her hands on her apron between every task, possibly between every thought. The shop is empty.
Gallio has the password, also provided by Paul: Jesus is love. At first he can’t say it, but he makes the effort. ‘Jesus is love,’ he coughs to clear his throat. ‘Sorry. Jesus is love.’
The words turn out to be sayable, but they make his tongue soft and bring tears to his eyes. The woman wipes her hands, thinks hard, approves of what she sees and hears. She pulls up the hinged counter. ‘Bottom of the stairs, turn right. We have a cold store. Knock three times.’
The light switch is a concave button that sinks into the wall and starts a timer as it pulls back out. The timer ticks like a watch on fast-forward. Gallio is halfway down the wooden staircase when the light clicks off. In the dark he retraces his steps. The second time he memorizes another light switch at the foot of the stairs, pushes in the timer and makes it down before the end of the buzz.
He pushes in the second light switch, another timer buzzing in his ear, then turns right toward the cold store. He listens at the door, the timer runs out, the light goes off. He stands in the dark in the silence until he hears movement inside. He knocks three times, as instructed. No response. He raises his hand to knock again. The handle turns, the door opens inward, a bakery store bright with strip lights.
Claudia says: ‘Too late, Cassius. He’s gone.’
She’s pretty, he remembers, and clever and has lovely teeth, and in Caistor he almost believed he loved her. None of that matters now. He’s a deserter who ditched his papers and his CCU-issue phone. The penalty is the same as for sleeping on duty in the field.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’
‘Hush,’ she says, finger to her lips. ‘There’s not much you can say. Valeria doesn’t forget.’
‘You knew I was coming.’
Gallio’s chest feels suddenly empty, and he breathes in sharply to fill the empty space. It doesn’t help, because he sees how this has happened. He was wrong about Paul. Paul is simply a double agent, working for Valeria. The further step where in fact he’s working for Jesus was a false speculation. Gallio has overcomplicated, again.
‘Paul phoned us to say you were on your way. You’re losing your touch, Cassius.’
The storeroom smells of bread and charcoal, of yeast and faintly of open drains. Spilled flour dusts the flagstones, imprinted with random footprints, but the baker upstairs is nervous. Perhaps she knows what has taken place in this room in the past. She thumps her feet against the floor to warn Claudia she has a customer.
‘Still running Valeria’s errands, I see.’ Gallio runs a hand over the steel prep table, looks at his palm for traces of pastry, or dried flakes of blood. ‘I bet you always did, even in Caistor.’
Claudia lets the accusation hang. A denial would be welcome, Gallio thinks, the compliment of a lie to at least pretend she slept with him because she liked him.
‘No hard feelings,’ she says.
‘No feelings at all. We used each other. Suffering from shock, both of us. Probably did us good, aided our recovery.’
‘If you say so. Why did you tell Paul you wanted to kill John?’
‘You’re a Speculator, work it out.’
Gallio is surprised by her question, by the time she’s taking. Despite everything she hesitates, as if held up by the memory of their nights in Caistor. She’s the CCU agent sent by Valeria, but now she’s here she remembers the skin-to-skin.
‘We’re not killers, are we, Cassius?’ she says. ‘We represent order and the future. We’re moving the world along, making it a more reasonable place to live. Aren’t we?’
She is trying to think well of them both, but mostly of herself and her decisions in Caistor and the job she came back to do.
‘I don’t think we used each other,’ Gallio says, taking this chance to let her know. ‘Or not only. That wouldn’t be an accurate description of what happened, in my opinion. And I was there.’
Claudia claps her hands, a cloud of flour dust rising to the strip lights. ‘I don’t know, and I think I probably don’t care. I was sent to fetch you, that’s all. No time to waste. So come along quietly, because you’re back where you started. CCU is the only family you have.’
Ground Zero is an alcove at street level of the ruined Circus Maximus. This is where the great fire of Rome is thought to have started.
‘They made it look like a cooking accident,’ Claudia says. ‘Picked the perfect spot.’
Printouts of the missing and dead flap on temporary fencing like the struggle of a living organism. Cotton flags overlap with cardboard placards: We Love You, Why? but Cassius Gallio is distracted by a photocopy of a teenage girl, Alma’s age, cheek against cheek with a lolling dog. He steadies himself on a bamboo scaffold, and looks up its fretted length into the blueness of the holiday sky. Birds swoop into nests high in the ravaged monument, for them a year like any other, and not the worst season to be alive.
A scab of time has grown here, protecting tourists from the horror, one more stop for the gawping barbarians on their Roman visit of a lifetime. Already the fire is history, though security remains tight. To one side of the Circus main entrance two centurions in feathered helmets buckle their leather skirts. They’re from Eastern Europe for the coach tours, and they share a cigarette before their shift in front of the cameras. The real thing is provided by Securitas employees with scanners beside the turnstiles. Everyone gets checked, even Claudia. She can jump the queue, flash her ID, but she has to walk Gallio through the scanner. On the other side she ignores the hawkers offering private guided tours.
‘Second tier,’ she says, and follows Cassius Gallio up crumbled steps to an archway where he blinks into the brightness of the damaged grandstand. Valeria is waiting midway along a stone terrace, in the shade of a dyed sail usually deployed during performances. Her face is in orange shadow.
Claudia stays at the end of the row, formally out of earshot, sunglasses fixed in place.
Gallio takes the seat next to Valeria and for a while they win at keeping silent, a trusted Speculator tactic. Whoever speaks first will say too much, and is therefore usually the loser. They watch the banked seats in other sections of the stadium, where security teams launch search dogs along the rows. Low-income employees sweep the sand of the arena. If some are undercover agents, and Gallio assumes they are, he can’t tell who is working for Jesus.
‘Remember when we came here on leave?’ Valeria speaks: she loses. ‘Years ago, soon after we met in Jerusalem. We planned to take on the world, you and me.’
Cassius Gallio does remember, though he won’t squander his advantage by saying so. Strange that back then she was younger than him, and that had seemed to matter, but now her age is irrelevant. They had sat in exactly these seats and he had failed to say he loved her while crocodiles chased a Parthian and at some point they watched a crucified lion.
‘The two of us together, Cassius, once you’d left your wife. Now you’ve finally become a deserter, but in a more official sense. Sorry, but that’s the choice you made when you boarded a plane for Patras.’
‘I came back. Here I am in Rome, reporting for duty.’
‘You couldn’t keep out of Claudia’s pants, could you?’
Of course she knows; information is her specialism, because knowledge is power.
‘I have high hopes for Claudia,’ Valeria says, ‘despite her lapse in Caistor, and with luck she’ll survive you unscathed. As I did. You, however, deserted your post and lost your tracer. Unfortunate. We recovered your phone from beneath an altar in the Agios Andreas in Patras, along with your documents. Now we pick you up in Rome, running round and threatening to kill the disciple John. What happened to you, Cassius?’
‘I can explain.’
At the end of the row Claudia is sunning herself, holding up her face to the light.
‘You disobeyed my orders. I wanted you to locate Matthew in north Africa, but you developed a strange fascination with Caistor. Then you disappeared without permission. I brought you back too soon from Germany, I think, and the tribunal was right about you, Cassius. You’re unhinged. You forget which way is up.’
Cassius Gallio is aware of his weathered and beaten clothes, his beard and hair grown long. ‘I’m undercover. I’m an active Speculator.’
‘I hardly recognized you, and you don’t have the right to use that title.’
‘I’ve been on the road, looking for Jesus. That’s what you asked me to do, and if finding him was simple you’d have done so before now. You needed me. You still need me. I know more about these people than anyone else you’ve got.’
After the crucified lion they’d seen a gladiator’s nose sliced off by a short–sword. How the Circus laughed that day. Gallio remembers the sound of forty thousand people in hysterics, and a gladiator scrabbling for his nose. The joke was probably funnier because earlier they’d put out his eyes. Tomorrow is Peter’s turn, and Valeria should know she’s making a mistake.
‘I think Jesus is coming back. The Circus gives him an opportunity to make a spectacular reappearance.’
‘And this intelligence comes from where? You spoke to Jude and Bartholomew and Andrew. None of them offered a specific place or date. Even Simon failed to confess to Baruch, and by all accounts Baruch did not ask nicely.’
‘So why the security?’
‘Not for the second coming, I can assure you, but what the second coming might stand for. An attack of some kind, most likely a bomb. We know from Jude that whichever disciple Jesus loved is at the centre of their big event. When Jesus comes back, whatever that means, it’s going to happen in the beloved disciple’s lifetime. Peter confirmed this information under questioning. It was something Jesus told them, and Peter was his favourite. Now Peter is about to die, so if the attack is going to happen it has to be soon.’
‘And John?’
‘Can’t find him anywhere. Let’s face it, he may already be dead. Rome can be a tough city if you don’t have money. Peter is the last one.’
‘What happened to religious tolerance? Just out of interest. That used to be a priority of ours.’
‘We should have crucified the twelve of them, right at the start. Tolerance makes us look weak, but tomorrow Peter comes to the Circus and everyone will see how intolerant we can be, when we make the effort. No secret assassins, no local mobs. Civilization will take responsibility for killing Peter the disciple of Jesus, as a lesson to anyone who chooses to favour superstition over reason.’
‘You’ve misread the enemy. The disciples aren’t a danger in the way you think. They have a strategy and you’re being played for a longer-term result. The disciples of Jesus want to die.’
‘Nobody wants to die. You’ve been on the road too long.’
‘It was the same with Jesus, and Lazarus before him. This goes back to Jerusalem. Death works in their favour. Andrew admitted it.’
‘He’s a liar. Their belief system is based on lies, a fact you choose to ignore. No one walks on water, or dies and comes back to life. Of course they’re scared of death, otherwise they wouldn’t be human.’
‘It’s not too late to stay Peter’s execution. Out in the territories they’re using the crucifix as a symbol of their support for Jesus, if you can believe that. Listen to me, Valeria. You brought me back as an expert.’
‘No one else wanted the job. No glamour, no glory.’
‘I’m advising you to keep Peter alive. Change the plan and question him further.’
‘Too late. Much too late. Peter deserves his fate, because coming to Rome was a suicidal act.’
‘My point. That’s my point exactly.’
Cassius Gallio wants eye contact but Valeria looks away, and she must be weighing up whether he’s right. She’s a born Speculator, as he is; she can’t help but speculate. Gallio pushes home his advantage. ‘Was Peter an easy arrest? I bet he was.’
The low-income workers sweep at the sand, and they sweep. They level out the arena, then level it again. Valeria lets a silence develop. Cassius Gallio loses.
‘Terror isn’t their strategy. Dying is their strategy.’
‘You’re not making sense. You’re a deserter, which means you gave up on the reasonable approach. The disciples don’t want to die.’
‘Yes, listen. Killing them is counterproductive at every level.’
‘That doesn’t sound very likely. Not at every level. Not in our business.’
‘Which is why we fell into their trap. We assume that dying can’t be positive, but for them it is, and death is the only plan they have. They were never going to stage an attack.’
‘Bad luck. Coincidence, I don’t know. The fire means you have to kill Peter, or now that you want to kill Peter you have your justification. Everything ties in with their plan, or they cleverly make connections after the event. They’re brilliant opportunists.’
‘You’ve seen the list of victims at Ground Zero, the photos taped to the fence. If Jesus or his god is responsible, someone has to pay.’
‘We don’t know they’re responsible, not for the fire.’
‘The odds look good, though. According to you Jesus had himself killed, and then killed the disciples to grow his religion. Why would he bother showing mercy to people he doesn’t even know?’
‘These are his calculations, not mine.’ Gallio thinks he understands what Jesus is doing now, but he can’t see as far as the ultimate why. ‘I don’t know how he works them out.’
‘No one can think that far ahead.’
Valeria waves Gallio’s theory away, pushing out his thoughts to merge with the empty air of the stadium. She has senatorial committees to placate, decisions to implement that are not her own. She isn’t always free to speculate. ‘Soon the twelve disciples of Jesus will be dead, meaning the principal eyewitnesses to his unbelievable miracles will be gone. Without first-hand accounts to back them up, as admissible in a court of law, the events become lies then fiction. No one will believe they ever happened.’
Gallio gestures around, taking in the empty seats for forty thousand witnesses. ‘They’ve set you up perfectly. Major public event. His beloved Peter alive and at the heart of civilization. Aren’t you worried Jesus may have plotted this?’
‘We’ve doubled security. Every operative we have has been briefed and issued with his picture.’
‘Think about it. You’re bringing together a huge audience who’ll be reminded by the taunting of Peter, who looks like Jesus, that Jesus himself is supposed to be dead. This is his method: he makes his exploits unforgettable with witnesses and you’re providing him with forty thousand live YouTube uploads. A beloved disciple to save, a sell-out occasion at which to reappear, a frustrated Messiah who loves a show. Who could fail to be impressed?’
Valeria leans forward in her seat, takes a renewed interest in the arena. A steward bites the corner of a triangular sandwich, head back, pulling in his stomach to avoid falling crumbs. A pair of petrol-headed pigeons swoop in for the clean-up. Then Gallio sees what Valeria wants him to see. His daughter Alma is in the arena of the Circus Maximus. She looks older, too old for the Ave helium balloon she holds in her hand. Her personal guide points out items of architectural interest, while a man in jacket and sunglasses follows them with a finger to his ear.
‘In the arena,’ Gallio says, sitting back. He breathes out with disbelief. ‘You are unforgivable.’
‘She’s a lovely girl, very excited to be in Rome. When you went missing in action I felt it was our duty to provide for your family.’
‘Where’s her mother?’
‘Safe in Jerusalem, but also quite content. We’ve booked Alma in for a series of sessions with the leading physiotherapist in Rome. Comes highly recommended, reckons he can cure that limp she has.
‘You’re threatening me.’
‘What’s the point of our Roman lives if not to help when we can? You’ll have to trust in my good intentions.’
The guide is showing Alma the portcullis gate through which the lions arrive, and he indicates with broad gestures how lions and also hyenas first turn to the left whatever prey is placed before them. Strange, but true.
‘Once upon a time you were a decent Speculator, Cassius, and the CCU remembers that, but on this particular case you lost your bearings. The problem and the solution are much simpler than you want to make them.’
‘So how does Jesus qualify as Complex Casework?’
‘We’re tidying up loose ends. That’s all we have left to do.’
Valeria pats Gallio’s arm, as if comforting a child frightened by a story. Poor thing. None of his fears are real. Gallio watches Alma limp into the tunnel to the underground stables and chariot house, always popular with visitors. He loses sight of her.
‘I hate mass persecutions,’ Valeria says. ‘They’re messy and counterproductive. Better to target twelve leaders than thousands of innocent followers.’
‘What happens to me if I’m as wrong as you say? Another tribunal?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. You’re deniable, Cassius. I told you that from the start. You don’t exist. However, I do have one more job for you, which includes the opportunity to save your skin.’
She reaches into her bag and pulls out two embossed tickets for the next day’s performance. ‘Solid gold,’ she says. ‘Completely sold out.’
‘As Jesus would have wanted.’
‘Enough. There’s no way you’re getting in without a ticket. I’ve doubled security.’
‘I hadn’t looked that far ahead.’
‘No, I thought not. You have a day, one day, in which to capitalize on the knowledge you’ve gained about the disciples of Jesus. Find me John, however you can. Bring him to the Circus tomorrow and we’ll take him off your hands.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘If you run again, I have Alma.’
‘I’ll find you John. I’ll do my best.’
‘That would be good, the last of the twelve. Bring John to the Circus, Cassius, and you can walk away.’