“ ”
The Greek island of Patmos smells of thyme and warm sea breezes. John the disciple of Jesus keeps hold of Cassius Gallio in his usual way, gripping him by the elbow, neither of them clear about who’s the guide and who the guided. They pass a mulberry tree where barefoot children laugh, climb a ladder, collect berries into baskets. Mulberry juice stains their arms and legs, and in their game of tag they leave blood-red handprints on exposed brown skin. John doesn’t see what Cassius Gallio, who was never chosen by Jesus, can see any day of the week.
From a distance unkempt old men can look much the same. Up close the differences between Gallio and John become more apparent: Gallio has milky blue eyes and John is blind, while Gallio has a slackness at the sides of his mouth. Arthritis has dried his knees and knuckles, and last night a useful tooth loosened in his head.
Gallio coughs up phlegm, spits to the side of the path. Jesus has not come back, though John hears voices that insist on their daily walk. From the cave past the mulberry tree along the path to the cliff edge, where Cassius Gallio and John the disciple of Jesus wait exposed to the eye of god.
‘Sorry,’ Gallio says. Another morning, another beautiful day on which to break the discouraging news. ‘Not a cloud to be seen in the sky.’
When they first arrived on the island, years ago, they lived more confidently in hope than now. Gallio kept John close because after so much time, such intense speculation, he was jealous of his right to encounter Jesus. Jesus has promised to return in the lifetime of his beloved disciple, and John is the last disciple standing. Therefore he is the beloved.
Cassius Gallio used to watch the clouds on John’s behalf, each as eager as the other for the weather of Jesus to cover the sun. Mostly, on a Greek island, the clouds stay away, or appear as distant lines like text in an unknown language, gradually washed out as dawn turns to day. The early morning Aegean sea, Gallio thinks, is more lovely against the blue Aegean sky than seems strictly necessary.
As a group of three they had left the Circus Maximus after dark, half a moon slipping onto its back over the lights of the eternal city. John was the beloved disciple, and as the taxi found a thread through the post-stadium streets John said kill me now. Those were the words he used.
‘Please. Now is as good a time as any.’
‘You expected Jesus to appear, didn’t you?’
‘The set-up was perfect,’ John said.
Claudia had to lean round from the front seat, so that unlike in England she could hear every word.
‘The Circus was a piece of theatre like the crucifixion,’ she filled in the gaps left by John, ‘only this time the important people, the rulers of the world, could have witnessed the power of Jesus.’
‘But Jesus couldn’t save Peter,’ Gallio said. ‘Evidently.’
From Claudia’s kitchen to Alma’s orphanage to the Circus Maximus, for Cassius Gallio this has been the longest day. ‘You’re the last disciple, John, and Jesus promised to come back in your lifetime.’
‘So kill me and bring him down. Hurry him up. I’ll join the others and you’ll find Jesus. That’s what you set out to do.’
‘Why rely on us?’ Claudia said. ‘Get your own hands dirty. If you want to die then kill yourself, like James did.’
‘James was bludgeoned to death in the street.’
‘Do it now.’ Claudia taunted him from the front seat. ‘Force Jesus to show himself. Throw yourself out of a moving car.’
Gallio reached across and pushed open the door, because he could appreciate Claudia’s speculative logic. The wind of the city rushed in. The driver braked.
‘It’s not my life to take,’ John said. He reached for the door, missed the handle, grabbed again and pulled it shut. Outside the car, as the driver went back to driving, monuments gathered pace, back to the speed limit and beyond. Life will go on.
‘Out of the question,’ John said. ‘I might be wrong about the time and place. Jesus makes the decisions, knows when and where.’
‘Not to mention how,’ Claudia said. ‘Falling out of a Roman taxi can’t contend with crucifixion.’
‘Or skinned alive,’ Gallio said. ‘Or sawn in two.’
‘Jesus needs someone else to provide the requisite horror, doesn’t he? None of you act alone. To push your religion forward you need some of us, those who aren’t disciples, to be assassins.’
Cassius Gallio had once heard Lazarus make the same complaint about his best friend Jesus. He could never do anything by himself.
‘Jesus used me to stage his execution,’ Gallio said, not as an accusation but as a statement of the sad facts of the matter. ‘I took responsibility for killing him. I lived with the guilt of executing a man whose record never warranted a charge of terrorism. Then it turns out he may not have died. Jesus hasn’t been fair on me, and neither have you, his disciples. Including you, John. You collude in the various deceptions.’
‘But today is John’s lucky day,’ Claudia said. ‘We can give him what he wants. John, we’re taking you to your killer.’
‘Fate will do the rest,’ Gallio said, giving up on his training, on every pledge he’d made to civilization. He could do no more. He would deliver John alive, which would go some way to atoning for his desertion, even though it meant Valeria came out ahead. Valeria was always the winner, but Cassius Gallio was fatalistic about that too.
‘I appreciate your kindness,’ John said. ‘I’m grateful to you both.’
The tour-boats started as dots on the horizon, the dots became ships, and from the ships came landing-boats heavy with pilgrims in search of John the beloved disciple. Cassius Gallio assured these earnest believers that they were misinformed. John the former disciple of Jesus was last seen in Ephesus. He had been assassinated like the others, yes, equally horribly—boiled in a vat of pagan cooking oil, according to widespread reports.
‘We found a man not far from here who lives in a cave. He says his name is John.’
Gallio insisted the John on the island of Patmos was another John. This John believed in Jesus, true, but he was not the beloved disciple. Not after all this time. And John is a common name. Some of the pilgrims were heartened, made their excuses and left. Others believed what they wanted to believe, and competed to show their devotion.
‘We too are disciples of Jesus,’ they said. ‘But we are the least of all the disciples.’
The pilgrims shared food and soap and images of Jude impaled by arrows against a verdant pastoral background. Gallio couldn’t begin to explain in how many ways their version of Jude’s death was wrong. They had woodcuts of Simon sawn in half crossways with a manual bow saw, and Bartholomew on a beach carrying his skin in his hands. They believed whatever pleased them, and as disciples the next generation of Christians, and the next, were impostors. No one could replace the original twelve, individually selected by Jesus. The Patmos visitors were aware of this, Gallio thought, because they were unrelenting in their pursuit of John. He could stand in for Jesus. He could pick out a new set of special disciples, who would be only too willing to serve.
In his failure to do this, John of Patmos was a disappointment. He sat in his cave and he waited. He waited some more and he continues to wait, until the pilgrims and more recently the professors can’t be sure it’s him. Is the disciple John here? Is Jesus here? The questioners want the glory of being certain, but to this day Cassius Gallio refuses to compromise. He concedes that both John and Jesus may once have visited Patmos, but neither is here right now.
‘And Satan?’
Gallio despairs, almost, but despair is unproductive so occasionally he’ll throw out a story, disinformation in the tradition of Jesus. A myth hides the man himself from sight, Jesus knows this, and Gallio will freely admit that here on Patmos he once saw, with his own eyes, the disciple John collect an armful of hay from a field. John knelt down in front of the hay and prayed, and the hay was transformed into the purest gold. Yes John did exactly that, here on the island of Patmos. John melted the gold down and minted an armful of golden coins.
‘Then what? What did John do with the money?’
The researchers and academics are desperate to make connections, to speculate, to move on to what a story means and why it matters.
‘He gathered the gold coins together,’ Gallio said, ‘every last one of them, and he hurled them into the sea.’
The taxi drove against the headlamps of construction lorries carrying sand and gravel for the never-ending renovation of the city. Beyond the tourist highways, where no one would think to look, the final lit windows in the glass Siemens building darkened one by one. It was getting late.
The gateway to the Abbey of the Three Fountains was quiet, apart from traffic noise from the flyover, and the daytime trickle of visitors was a memory. In a sweep of full beam the taxi U-turned toward the city, leaving Gallio committed to John and Claudia. He acted as if he belonged, but was grateful for the night’s half moon that silvered the tree-lined avenue to the abbey building. He wouldn’t want to die in total darkness. Lamps at ankle level illuminated the path leading to the raised terrace in front of the arched abbey doorway. At the top of the steps, he could see Valeria waiting.
‘A pathway,’ Gallio said, ‘I’ll guide you along it. At the end of the path we have some steps. Keep hold of my elbow. Don’t be afraid.’
‘Is it the assassin?’
Along with Valeria, up on the abbey terrace, Cassius Gallio could make out two more figures, dark in the shadow of thick stone walls.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All of them are here.’
The disciples have disciples with disciples who over the years become implacable. Cassius Gallio can’t deter them from building their monasteries, from ringing their ecumenical bells. When John hears the faithful called to prayer he hides in his cave, a hollow in the rocks beside the path. The cave has room enough for two but Gallio prefers to wait outside: Jesus will descend from the clouds, according to Jude, and Gallio would like to be the first to know.
As luck would have it, a contour in the rock beside the cave entrance is a perfect fit for the shape of Gallio’s back. That’s where he sits, shaped into the island stone and warmed by daily sunshine. Sometimes, especially if he falls asleep, believers will leave him money or handwritten messages: Please, God, let me find myself in Jesus.
Cassius Gallio is not John’s keeper; that would not be a reasonable position for him to take. More accurately he remains constantly alert to ways in which a beloved disciple could die. Accident, illness, violence. Gallio watches John closely around traffic and water. Strangers have his attention—any of them could be Satan, or a killer from Rome, or both—and Gallio sleeps less well when John catches a cold. He can’t be certain that Jesus will appear, but if Jesus does appear, in the final instant of his beloved disciple’s lifetime, then he’ll find that Cassius Gallio is at hand.
He lives every day as if the world might come to an end, as does John, which is not as exciting as it sounds. Eat, watch for clouds, sit outside the cave. Sleep. Avoid evil, because on Patmos with the monasteries and churches that’s the dominant mood. Despite a memorable episode of food poisoning, and a nasty chest infection, John is healthy and strangers are kind and Gallio wakes to endless sunny days by the sea.
John complains that life isn’t fair. His brother James—his brother!—was beheaded and went first to sit at the right hand of Jesus in heaven. They killed James an age ago in Jerusalem, so the right hand is taken. As is the left hand. Thomas is on the left hand, or possibly Jude, and the two seats outside those are filled by Philip and Bartholomew, and the next places along by Andrew and Matthew and Peter. One disciple after another fast-tracked to paradise, with John left a vacant chair at the distant end of the table.
‘Next to Judas?’
‘Even Judas got there before me.’
John feels abandoned. Of the original twelve disciples, only John is absent from the kingdom.
On the terrace of the Abbey of the Three Fountains, Paul stepped out of the shadows and John embraced him. The short bald man and the blind disciple, solid in each other’s arms, even though by Valeria’s accounting they weren’t supposed to be fond of each other.
‘In your own time,’ Gallio said. ‘Let’s get this done.’
He was impatient, wary of any delay because in the open he felt exposed, out in the light: fat-winged flies bashed into the low-level glass of the lamps. Left, right, above, below. Gallio scrutinized the grounds of the abbey. If Valeria had called in backup then her hired assassins were behind the hedges, or moving tree to tree. He watched for black to detach from blackness, as evil would, from the dark of the barn or the lodge, shadows with knives, clubs, a pump-action shotgun.
Nothing moved, nobody took aim from the darkness. Or not that he could see.
Paul’s bodyguard, the third person to arrive ahead of them on the terrace, was armed. The curved blade of his sword was dulled with blacking, a professional touch, Gallio thought, and proof that Paul trusted no one.
‘Break it up, gents.’ Valeria had seen enough hugging, or shared some of Gallio’s operational anxiety. ‘We’re busy people, with problems to solve. No time like the present.’
In the uplight she looked years younger, the Valeria Gallio had once almost loved in Jerusalem. No jacket, no bag, no weapons. Paul and John broke apart but held each other at arm’s length, like friends before a long separation. Or afterward, reunited.
‘I missed you,’ Paul said. ‘Now I have to go.’
Claudia coughed, held out the padded envelope containing Paul’s fee. ‘I brought your money. You can count it if you like.’
‘Which one is the assassin?’ John asked. He pulled away from Paul and raised his chin.
Part of growing old is the forgetting. The days grow longer then shorten then lengthen again. On Patmos Cassius Gallio loses track of how the starlings come and go, flocking as they depart, flocking as they arrive with a sound like circling bells. The sun goes down and the sun comes up. Light reflects from the sea onto the underwing of a seagull. A black cat jumps from a seaside trellis, lands safely on all four feet.
The Jesus church continues to grow, travelling along the trade routes on the words of dead disciples, promising that Jesus will have dominion over the earth. It looks like he may. For every one of the original disciples there are twelve more, and those twelve breed another twelve, blowing across the region like seeds. The Jesus believers are many but mostly harmless, allowing the first to remain first, leaving the rich and powerful unchallenged.
Some of the stories that reach Patmos are ludicrous. Cassius Gallio hears about memorials to Peter in Rome, of all places, a basilica over his tomb and a piazza that can welcome eighty thousand believers to prayer.
‘Is there singing?’ John asks, and the Vatican has a choir of twenty tenors and basses and thirty boy choristers and yes John we can confirm that there is singing, along with domes by Michelangelo and stonework by Bernini, sunlight through arches onto pillars.
‘Sculptures?’
‘In bronze, in marble, in purple alabaster.’
John laughs. This is not what Jesus had in mind, or not that he ever said.
‘They pay their taxes,’ Gallio reminds him. ‘At least some of them do.’
‘I’ll take John now,’ Valeria said. ‘Thank you Cassius, for finding him and bringing him here. I’m grateful for all you’ve done, and I’ll keep my promise. You can go, leave us, disappear.’
Valeria was offering Gallio the extinction he had longed for in Caistor, and for most of the time in Patras. Cassius Gallio could disappear and his name with him, a Speculator who never existed.
‘Unless you give me a reason to change my mind the CCU will leave you in peace. Your work is done. For the avoidance of doubt, should anyone ask, I see no one here at the abbey but us.’ She gestured round the terrace, at Claudia and Paul and Paul’s bodyguard. ‘Just the three of us, you and me and John.’
‘The last surviving disciple of Jesus,’ Gallio said. ‘It took us a while, but we got there in the end. Every disciple located, and all dead apart from John. You don’t worry it was too easy?’
‘The full set, exactly. When no disciples are left alive, Jesus can’t come back. Or none of his sympathizers can tell that particular story, not in good faith, about Jesus returning at the latest in the lifetime of his beloved disciple. His prophecy collapses, and with it the dangerous idea that he’s a mystical genius. With John we have the twelve. We’re done.’
‘Here I am.’ John opened his hands toward her, lifted up his arms. ‘You win. We’ve been hopeless at protecting ourselves.’
‘I’d have to agree,’ Valeria said.
‘Be careful, you’re falling into their trap.’
Despite Gallio’s efforts in Caistor and in Patras, he found he couldn’t walk away from the story of Jesus. He saw the same patterns repeating themselves, but this time Valeria was at the centre, overconfident as he had been in Jerusalem. Gallio had once outwitted Jesus, because a corpse does not escape a sealed tomb. Valeria was satisfied that eleven disciples of Jesus had not chosen to die—and if they didn’t think this through Jesus would trick them again.
‘I know you were responsible for killing the other disciples,’ Gallio said. He wasn’t expecting Valeria to confess, but she would listen to his reasoning. She was a Speculator too, and Gallio was worthy of her attention if he could unfold the how and the why.
‘Personally?’
‘You have your people,’ Gallio said. ‘Operatives like me, like Claudia. We don’t see them and they don’t see us. You’ll deny them, because that’s the agreement, but you made it to regional chief of CCU because you respect how complex a case can get.’
‘I didn’t kill the disciple Simon in England. How did I kill Simon? I didn’t kill Andrew in Patras or James when he jumped from that roof.’
‘Simon in Caistor was an unexpected bonus, courtesy of Baruch, and in Jerusalem with James the riot police followed your orders. They have comms equipment, like the rest of us. They radioed for guidance, then used their batons because that’s what you told them to do.’
‘How did I get James off the roof?’
‘Paul made the phone call,’ Gallio said. ‘When James picked up, Paul kept quiet. That was a signal.
‘James wanted to die, as did the others. Paul helped James by letting him know when the time was right, a dark evening when you were jacked into the HQ radio. Paul started the process with the phone call, then you finished the job.’
‘I enjoy your agile mind,’ Valeria said. ‘If it wasn’t for Jesus you could have been one of the greats. Explain to me how I killed Andrew.’
‘You had your people in the Patras mob, easy to disguise during Carnival. In their costumes and masks they incited the locals and ramped up the aggression. They were the ones who had the cross ready, and the bindings. The mastermind assassin was never Paul, nor was it Jesus, or Satan. It was you, Valeria, though you were helped by Paul from the start. You sent us after Paul in Antioch to give yourself time to kill Thomas in Babylon, then you tipped off Paul and let him run from his hotel before we could make his life awkward. He’s a paid informer and he told you where to find the disciples. My role was to make it look like we found them by ourselves.’
On the terrace of the abbey, John was a picture of serenity, rejoicing that finally his time had come. Paul, however, was showing the strain. He didn’t know where to stand; it was as if he wanted to avoid Gallio as the truth came out. He moved into the shadows, banged the back of his head against the stones of the abbey. He slapped his hand over his eyes, ran the palm flat down his face. He mumbled to himself, the same sounds over and over, and this was not the composed style of prayer favoured by James on the monitors. Paul clenched his fists and squeezed his old eyes shut. He released his jaw and uncricked his neck, reminding Gallio of Baruch whose soul was never at rest.
‘You’ll find no evidence of civilized involvement in these deaths,’ Valeria said. ‘With the single exception of Peter, who was punished for organizing the fire of Rome, an unforgivable act of terror. As for the other disciples, they were randomly murdered by whichever excitable locals they upset most. Infidels can be vicious. That’s how history will remember this.’
‘You’re probably right. Until Peter you kept it clean. We achieved the result we wanted while maintaining our reputation for tolerance. You constructed and followed a brilliant piece of reasoning, which I respect. But you’re also wrong.’
Paul was louder with his repetitive prayer, moaning the words over and over oh lord oh lord. John joined him and held his hand, as encouragement. Claudia held the envelope with the money, but this was never a story about the money.
‘Paul has given me valuable assistance,’ Valeria said. ‘I admit that. We understand each other, and recently we both saw that the disciples had outstayed their welcome. They and their storytelling had to be removed to make way for ideas less damaging to the stability of modern life. We’ll replace superstition with community values. The resurrection becomes a symbolic idea rather than an absurd and exceptional fact.’
Valeria sounded so reasonable. Cassius Gallio pressed a fist to a twitch beside his eye. So reasonable yet mistaken. No one understood the cunning of Jesus but him. ‘Paul isn’t betraying the disciples,’ he said, ‘he’s helping them out. If Paul wants them dead he’s on their side. Believe me on this.’
‘You’re unbelievable,’ Valeria said. ‘Claudia, tell him his speculation doesn’t make sense.’
‘I think it does,’ Claudia said, ‘at least until the point about dying. Valeria, you killed the disciples with the help of Paul. But they didn’t want to die, because that would mean they were manipulating the CCU. Which makes the disciples smarter than us.’
‘Remember the tomb in Jerusalem,’ Gallio said. He needed to convince them both. ‘Valeria, you were there when Jesus supposedly died, and whatever took place on the Friday and the Sunday we never successfully explained. These are clever people. Jesus picked disciples sharp enough to keep up with his scams and hoaxes.’
‘Paul is my asset,’ Valeria said. ‘We have everything under control. He’s my agent, and has been for years.’
‘Which puts him beyond reproach,’ Gallio said. ‘He has the perfect cover. Valeria, open your eyes and see what’s in front of you. He doesn’t work for us; he works for them. Paul is a triple agent. He’s the father, the son and the holy ghost.’
‘I think my time has come.’ John’s voice wavered as he stepped forward, unsure who was tasked with the actual killing. ‘None of us can wait forever.’
John spends hours at a time in his cave, hidden from heavenly sight, and over the years Cassius Gallio has occasionally failed to chivvy him outside.
‘Another glorious day,’ he’d say, which was unlikely to cheer John up. ‘Your loss, but at some stage you’ll have to forgive him for keeping you alive.’
‘How long before you forgave him for what he did to you?’
‘Fair point. He’s not an easy man to forgive.’
Inside the cave John writes by candlelight, except he doesn’t physically write because he’s blind. John dictates and Gallio writes down the seven miracles of Jesus that John remembers best. John remembers the last supper and resting his head against the shoulder of Jesus, and he sees now that Jesus was pitying him for the suffering to come. The memory offers insufficient comfort—Jesus knew in advance but still he left John behind, to live and breathe in a cave on Patmos while his mind is back in Israel. He exists in both places at once, opening gaps in time that let through unsettling thoughts.
‘Write them,’ he says, and Gallio records the thoughts of John, however extreme or apparently senseless. First he thinks in stories, then in images of natural disasters and harpists and carnivorous birds. He spews out numbers, threes and sevens and twelves, and the voice in his head wants to multiply his findings by a thousand. Gallio writes down every word, from the miracles through to the final reckoning, not to please John but to inform the millions who will come after.
They both seize on the insolence of this idea, understanding that every sentence of John’s Gospel and John’s Revelation is a snipe at Jesus. The beloved disciple is leaving a testimony for others to read, after he is gone. With every paragraph John scorns the notion that he’ll live to see the end of the world. Writing is his act of revenge, his doubt in the prophecy that Jesus will return in the lifetime of one of his disciples.
‘Credit where it’s due,’ Gallio says. ‘Jesus isn’t all bad.’
Whenever John annoys him, Gallio defends the record of Jesus, in particular his treatment of John. In Galilee John was among the first disciples called, and in Jerusalem Jesus trusted him to lay the table for the last meal the disciples ate together. From first to last, unlike some of the others, John was given specific tasks to achieve. He was selected with Peter to run and discover the empty tomb. He was chosen even among the chosen.
Gallio doesn’t know why he bothers, because there are nights in the cave when he considers blocking John’s airways. He watches the disciple while he sleeps, and at almost any time Gallio could lean heavily on John’s face and he could press down and keep on pressing and force Jesus to make himself known. To return or not to return. Either way would end John’s misery at being left behind, and at last Cassius Gallio would know.
Except he’s an ex-Speculator, formerly attached to the Complex Casework Unit. He’s a guardian of enlightened values and a champion of reasonable thinking. Cassius Gallio isn’t a killer, so in Patmos John wakes up come the morning. The two men go for their walk, look for clouds and leave Jesus to choose his moment. Or not, as the case may be.
On the surface, without question, Paul was a Jesus believer. But behind that facade of letters and prayers, Valeria was confident of Paul’s allegiance to her and the CCU. Gallio was now suggesting that in actual fact Paul worked, more secretly again, for real for Jesus. Valeria had chosen not to be worried by the spread of churches and congregations, or by how Paul had connected, under her protection in the name of Jesus, Ephesians with Galatians with Corinthians and Romans.
‘He encourages Jesus believers to love peace and pay their taxes,’ Valeria said. ‘Exactly as we agreed.’
Gallio could sense Valeria’s exasperation, her inability to accept that a fatal mistake had been made. As a young woman she had misread Gallio in Jerusalem, when he wouldn’t leave his wife, but since then she’d pretty much known what she was doing. Being wrong was a feeling she’d forgotten how to recognize.
‘The number of believers doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘as long as they don’t pose a threat to Rome.’
‘So you never believed in a Christian terror threat, or Jesus triggering the end of the world?’
‘I couldn’t rule out those risks, not until now. Paul is ours, but we needed to rationalize all twelve disciples to be sure they didn’t have a plan of their own in motion.’
‘Maybe, but who is actually winning here?’
Valeria turned to Paul. ‘Tell Cassius about Damascus, when I recruited you. You’ve been against Jesus from the start.’
Paul ignored her, his lips drawn thin, his head rocking forward and back. He found a rhythm like a monk in active contemplation of the invisible, but he was trying too hard as if the invisible ought to be easier to see.
‘He was caught by a storm in the mountains,’ Valeria said. If Paul refused to take responsibility for his past she would tell the story herself. ‘He was badly shaken, but he recovered and the real change in him was the secret deal he made with me. Once we reached an agreement he was brilliant. He invented the bolt of lightning and the appearance of Jesus. The miracle revelation on the road to Damascus was mostly his idea.’
‘You were so impatient,’ Paul said, but as if Valeria was worth only a fraction of his attention. The rest of his mind was elsewhere, and not at ease, but Valeria was easily dismissed. ‘You didn’t listen to me. In Damascus you were so sceptical you’d have disbelieved in anything.’
Valeria grabbed the envelope from Claudia and pulled out a brick of banknotes, shook them in the air. ‘Tell John, tell everyone—this payment is for information that led to the death of Peter.’
‘He has gone ahead,’ John said. ‘In glory.’
Paul recited a prayer out loud and John filled the gaps with Amens, until the prayer between them became a chant.
‘He has gone ahead.’
‘In glory.’
‘To share the table of Jesus. Amen.’
‘This isn’t right.’ Claudia looked from Paul to John and back again. The line was deep in her forehead. ‘They’re not supposed to be friends with each other.’
Paul shivered violently where he stood, then lay down on the stones of the terrace. He tried to make himself comfortable, clamped his fingers between his thighs. He lay curled up on his side, face drained of colour and teeth clenched, his brain unable to control his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’
The bodyguard balanced his blacked sword against the wall and on one knee he attended to Paul, his hand reaching out for Paul’s shoulder but not quite touching. Gallio saw for the first time the love the bodyguard had for Paul, that he had always loved him.
‘You’re saying Paul played us.’ Claudia wanted to believe in the infallibility of the CCU, but she had a Speculator’s open mind and the terrible truth was making itself felt. Her faith had not been rewarded. ‘Shit. Paul was playing us while we thought we were playing him.’
‘All the time,’ Gallio said, ‘since the beginning. The most effective way to spread news of Jesus was to hitch a ride with the dominant secular power, accelerating the Jesus story in every direction. That’s right, isn’t it, Paul? You were always aiming at two billion Christian believers worldwide, a number that never stops growing. Look at him. You never turned him, Valeria. Most of those people found Jesus thanks to Paul.’
Gallio had an urge to kick the traitor where he lay. The bodyguard stood and moved between them, one eye on Valeria, who took this opportunity to pick up the sword. She examined the blacking on the blade while the bodyguard lifted Paul to his knees, made sure with his muscular hands that Paul could kneel unaided.
‘Enough speculation,’ Valeria said. ‘Everyone step away from John.’
‘You’re not thinking straight,’ Gallio said. ‘Watch them, Val, be careful. They’re experts in deception.’
‘John,’ Valeria said. ‘Move away from the others. Now, please.’
Paul was making a visible effort to hold himself together, humbled at the end on his knees, a short bald man shimmering with fear. He was letting Jesus down but he was only human, and he couldn’t help himself. Gallio instinctively glanced skyward, but saw stars and half the moon, not a cloud in god’s heaven.
‘I have stepped away,’ John said. For the second time that evening he lifted up his hands, offering himself to Valeria as the last of the disciples of Jesus.
‘Listen, Valeria, think.’ Gallio watched the bodyguard. ‘Did you want Paul in Rome? Are you sure you were in control of that? He led us to the minor disciples before Peter. He kept us away from Peter until the end, meaning the most famous disciple was available for a grandstand death for which we’re clearly responsible. And which via a huge audience will reach the greatest number of people.’
‘I have not been deceived,’ Valeria said, but the words ate at her pride, opened up the possibility of their untruthfulness in the act of being spoken. ‘John is the last of the twelve.’
‘You think you’re being reasonable, and you are,’ Gallio said. ‘That’s your weakness. Everything we do is what Jesus wants.’
Jesus had plotted every cause and effect, guiding the disciples and their assassins to this moment in the abbey and beyond. The abbey, the museum, the free admission, the knowledge that visitors would come here not just now but for countless lifetimes into the future.
‘Every dead disciple becomes a martyr,’ Gallio said, ‘and brings Jesus new converts. Together we can turn this round, but only by not doing what Jesus wants. We should do nothing, or nothing he’d expect. Doing nothing at all, especially right now, is our safest course of action.’
‘None of us can refuse his work,’ Paul said, his voice squeezed by the tightness of his breathing. His body was at war with itself, or with his brain. ‘If Jesus is the son of god.’
On his knees he took half a shuffle toward Valeria. He swayed where he knelt, wanting her attention, but unable to force his body any closer. Cassius Gallio recognized the wildness of defeat in Valeria’s eyes, another Speculator outwitted by Jesus. She knew. Suddenly she knew she was losing everything. Thanks to Jesus she could see her career shrivel in the white heat of Gallio’s revelation: I have been wrong. The brilliance of Jesus blistered her sense of herself and burst holes in her faith that reason would prevail. Only she couldn’t be destroyed like this, not Valeria, not a regional director of the CCU.
Sword in hand, Valeria would seize back control as Cassius Gallio had once sworn he’d restore sanity by finding the body of Jesus in Jerusalem. Wrong and wrong again.
Gallio lunged at Paul, to save him from the death he so fervently desired. Paul’s bodyguard had orders for exactly this situation, the only specific instruction he’d ever received, and the day had finally come.
He blocked Gallio, making sure he couldn’t reach either Paul or Valeria, then expertly used Gallio’s momentum to turn and hold him arm-locked with his wrist at breaking point. Gallio tried to shout out, but the bodyguard’s free hand pressed hard over his mouth. Cassius Gallio was powerless to intervene.
On Patmos, the martyrdom of Paul joins the pantheon of legendary deaths suffered by the eleven murdered disciples. In the stories that reach the island Paul dies extravagantly, as an equal with the apostles of Jesus. The pilgrims bring pictures, and Paul’s assassin is a muscular brute in white marble, or a black angel with ragged wings. Cassius Gallio spends years politely considering the visual evidence, the postcards of paintings and sculptures, but he sees little these days that can’t be faked.
According to legend, Paul was beheaded at a site close to Rome but outside the city itself, and with each bounce of his severed head a fountain sprang to life. At the Abbey of the Three Fountains the three water sources are about ten paces apart on a downslope. To achieve the velocity for this length of carry, Paul’s head must have been cleaved off with appreciable force, in anger.
At her tribunal Valeria presented a different version of events. Paul’s untimely death was the fault of Cassius Gallio, a rogue Speculator who assassinated an embedded CCU agent in an ignorant rage. Check the archives, she said, Gallio had a history of mental instability, and a fixated belief that a minor Israeli insurgent was capable of returning from the dead. She conceded that her error of judgement was to have brought Gallio back, but she couldn’t have predicted the long-term damage to his powers of reason caused by earlier setbacks in Jerusalem. The tribunal disagreed, and noted that the archives also suggested the two of them had once been romantically linked.
‘That’s not true.’
The members of the tribunal decided, on reflection, that it was their duty and no longer hers to judge the truth. Paul had measurably advanced the interests of Jesus, whatever secret plans she might have devised for him. Valeria was found guilty of neglecting due diligence in her recruitment of Paul as an undercover agent. The arrogance of her method suggested she was either a traitor or a fool, and Valeria was nobody’s fool. In sentencing, the tribunal was deliberately generous, giving Valeria a brief window in which to exercise her free will as a high-ranking guardian of secular behaviour. She bled to death in the bath after cutting the veins in her wrists.
Claudia avoided the fallout. She was young, and could prove she’d disobeyed Valeria’s illegal orders to assassinate Cassius Gallio. There was, after all, some justice in the world. In Rome Claudia worked hard, kept her life simple and was promoted through the reorganized Complex Casework Unit. Now she speculates about threats to civilization wherever they may arise, though discounting the island of Patmos. The intelligence community knows of twelve disciples of Jesus, and extensive records exist for twelve spectacular deaths. Paul makes up the twelve, taking the place of John, and Claudia underlines the numbers in official ledgers. Twelve disciples, twelve dead bodies. Done and dusted, nothing more to see here, move along now please. Every time Claudia hides John from sight she recognizes a quiet act of love, of Caistor remembered.
Claudia sometimes sees Alma in the Roman markets, growing older, laughing with her mother as she barters for kugels and Mandelbrot, the two of them enjoying the benefits of life in a progressive world city. Alma’s leg was strengthened by extensive physiotherapy—at least that’s the most obvious cause—and she joined the regular army soon after her mother agreed to settle in Rome.
On Patmos, John meditates and falls into trances and remembers and generally wrestles with a fate he struggles to understand. His anger gives him strength, whereas Cassius Gallio mostly aches. His knees, his hips, his old man’s body subsiding. If nothing else, Gallio can write, and he writes for as long as John hears voices. John hears a word that sounds like millstones, and on another day a word like trumpets; he has bright visions of structures of glass that shine like gold, or of angels in the midst of heaven. Yes, Gallio tells him, he can see the angels. He can make out their vapour trails over the white island of Patmos, every sunny day during the summer months.
Cassius Gallio refuses to be the first to go. He can’t risk missing Jesus, but with every year he is physically weaker. Sometimes he mishears John’s stories, as if they’re true, or forgets that after so much time most of what remains is story. Any life, he finally thinks, can be told as a sequence of miracles, even his own. How extraordinary that the crucifixion of Jesus should have been allocated to a young Speculator whose zealous guarding of the tomb made the escape of Jesus more memorable. Or what a coincidence that of all people Valeria was in a position to remember his plight and call him back from exile. Cassius Gallio has lived these and many other miraculous accidents, if he chooses to remember them, until the cause and effect of his life starts to deceive like a plot, a life mapped out.
It is true that occasionally Cassius Gallio is comforted by what John is able to believe, a vision of eternity where everything is now, and now is everything. At the same time he’s proud never to have called on Jesus for help. He resists the divinity of Jesus as an explanation for the path of his life, and if Jesus would like to correct him then he’d better move soon. Time feels short, and one day on their walk to the cliff Cassius Gallio falls. He falls down, as if at imaginary feet.
John lifts him up, but Gallio is too old and frail to be righted. John makes space in the cave, and lays down his friend on woven mats, warms him with woolen blankets. Gallio will not close his eyes, he will not. He speculates to the end, and beyond the end, and beyond, until John takes pity and reaches out. Cassius Gallio takes hold of John’s hand and presses it to his feeble chest. At last, comforted, he closes his eyes. In the darkness he grips the hand that Jesus faithfully held, once upon a time.