THE CONNING TOWER
I left Magdalene’s house and stepped outside into the raw street.
In that prurient night, Passover haunted the city like a flock of angry birds. Whatever the capricious nature of man toward man that was embedded in the split and struggling heart of Jesus of Nazareth, this was also in the Passover. The night when angels become vultures. It folded its wings around the city. A baby cried from an unlit room as I made my way. I shuddered to hear it. I was pleased that the next night would be the last time that we would have to endure this cruel feast. I was relieved to be apart from the others, but I knew that I would have to return to them. I felt like a ghost between the chill houses.
“Judas!” It seemed that my name was forever being called out from the darkness. I whipped about, finding myself surrounded by a pack of Roman soldiers, their black hair glistening in the torchlight borne by the man who led them. He stepped forward and I recognized him as Malchus, the slave-spy of Pontius Pilate. “We have come unarmed, Judas,” he said. “Put away your knife.” Malchus’ red hair blazed.
“So, all of Pilate’s premonitions have come to be. Look at us; we are like mirrors, you and I. We must have shared a body once.”
“The knife, Judas, sheath it. I assure you, you see that our men have come without helmets or weapons. Pilate wishes for a reunion with you, and I think that you should oblige.” Malchus swept his torch flames to illuminate his mob.
We went by a strange path through Jerusalem that took us through the Phrygian quarter. Fireworks exploded above us, raining lurid sparks. “It is the solstice, for the cult of Attis,” Malchus explained with contempt. “The eunuch god! Look at this insanity.” His lips curled into a snarl of repulsion. A date stall had been made into a temporary stage and was surrounded by naked men and women who crushed toward it. A tall eunuch cavorted above them. He held a hollow boar’s head high in the full moonlight, and blackening blood poured from the stitches at its mouth and snout. The blood flushed down on the crowd, who cried out in pleasure, smearing the gore on their breasts and brows. “Attis baptizes with blood,” said Malchus as another crude rocket detonated over the plaza. “Tomorrow, they will nail a mutilated effigy of their good shepherd to a pine tree. They will cut him down and seal him in a tomb. Priests will secretly remove the effigy, but at the end of the festival the disciples of Attis will return to the tomb, open it, and find the eunuch god vanished, resurrected and gone beyond. And spring will begin for the young Turks. They will gorge themselves on scented jellies and make for the hillsides to fuck each other. It is all a charade, but Pilate asks me to keep an eye on it. What good is a eunuch god? But what is a religion without genital mutilation, eh, Judas?”
“You seem to enjoy it, in your own way.”
“Things are more intriguing since we are no longer stationed on the coast. Although, ironically, Pilate’s promotion inland meant trading the mansion for a ship.”
We found Pilate in the conning tower of the USS Eldritch.
High in the tower, Pilate lowered his rusting binoculars from watching the chaos outside and turned from the window to face me. He smiled and extended his hand to me. “Depressing, isn’t it?” he said. As I made to shake his hand, Pilate took my wrists and turned my palms up, examining the broken glass scars there from when I escaped from the walled gardens of his mansion as a boy. “I see that you still bear the stigma of working for me.”
The green lights of the instrument panels glowed about us as Pilate poured wine from a crystal decanter. A map of the city was projected upon a glass screen, and small clusters of light moved across it, showing the movements of different factions within Jerusalem. “We are enforcing the no-fly zone,” Pilate announced wearily, “and are building more checkpoints around the city. The solstice is like a tinderbox, Judas. Jerusalem is a city of a thousand provocations. Do you know the only thing that I can do to keep a semblance of order here?”
“What?”
“I must shrug my shoulders. That is all I do, day and night. Malchus, you may leave us alone now. Go back to your studies.”
“Sir.” Malchus closed the heavy bomb door behind him.
“It strikes me, Judas, that power is indifference to suffering. You can drink, Judas; it’s not poison or blood.” Pilate laughed.
“So, I am not your prisoner?” I asked.
“I told you, I shrug my shoulders. I don’t care that you betrayed my care of you, when I found you washed up and half-dead on my beach, over common gossip. And I am indifferent to your friend, Jesus of Nazareth.” Pilate put his arm around my shoulders, and with his other hand, he gently moved my wine glass toward my lips. I drank as he went on. “But Jerusalem, whatever Jerusalem means, is not indifferent to him, even if he is content to arouse, obfuscate, confuse, and foment their little minds. It strikes me, also, that your friend is beginning to experience the indifference of tangible power. I hear that he discourages rich and poor in equal measure, that he is ambivalent and aloof, that he gives and takes offense arbitrarily. We have clear eyes and sensitive ears. And further, I suspect . . .” Pilate fell silent and put his finger to his pursed lips, as though he had finally discovered a way to articulate a problem that had long vexed him, and now, he wanted to chew and savor his inspiration.
“You suspect?”
“Judas, I suspect that this man seems not to be of his own mind, because you are behind everything that he does.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Pilate laughed again and poured us more wine, his brown eyes sparkling. “Oh, I’m not worried about a little dissent, here and there. This city feeds on dissent. What worries me is the extraordinary manner in which he is uniting people, not with him, but against him. I’ve never seen it like this. He assumes such immodest aristocracy for himself, not just over the whores of the city, but also over the entire world, that I fear a homicidal revolt against him. If I could hold him in the public balance against even the most venal criminal in Jerusalem, I can tell you that the crowd would be for the criminal, not Jesus.”
I shrugged once more. I felt like a child without a ready answer to a worried father. But, finally, I asked him: “Why do you care so much about that to bring me here?”
“Judas, the point is that I don’t care what happens to him. I care what happens to you. I have no children. When we found you as a boy in your wrecked skiff, I took you in as my drowned little fox. You were my page, but had you stayed, I wanted to make you my son. I know that Malchus attacked you and that he slandered you with lies that might have had you crucified. He was jealous, since he knew he would only ever be a slave in my retinue. His back is so deeply cut with welts and stripes from the lashing he received, he will never forget it. You were different, Judas, but we never had time.” Pilate looked into my eyes, and I saw the tears in his. “I chanced upon an orphan, and he was taken from me by doubt. My fear is that a mob will come for your friend Jesus, and you and all of his allies will be murdered with him.”
“What do you propose?”
“Let me take him in. Let me weigh him in public balance for the people.”
“He already thinks that I will betray him.”
“Then, you have nothing to lose. We can make it look as though you were not involved. If I can have him, then I might save the others. What do you say, Judas? One life for a dozen, or a thousand, is that so terrible?”
“I feel sick. I want no reward for this.”
“None.” Pilate agreed. He crossed the room to a water cooler and opened its chrome faucet. The water ran through his fingers and splashed the floor as he washed his hands. He filled a glass and handed it to me. “For your nausea, and our covenant.”
I was not, as others would later ascribe in retrospect, a zealot or a political assassin. I was not a disillusioned revolutionary patriot, riven with conflict. These passions are superimposed upon me when men cannot accept that it is enough to act from experimental malice alone or to be a psychopath, however philosophical, driven by abstract desires, survival instincts, and a brutal sense of the world. Perhaps it did matter that I had been betrayed by Malchus and denied my rightful life with a new father in Pilate—another sentimental explanation. Cannot the killer be merely cruel? Must the inhumane be humanized and the beast rationalized? No, brother. The revolution will not be televised with a script by Gore Vidal wearing an embroidered bathrobe from a Mediterranean aerie, or broadcast to a soundtrack of blueeyed soul on Clear Channel. It will not be mass-produced in airport lounge editions or turned into a major motion picture. It will not be captured in the deteriorating paint job of Leonardo da Vinci, and my model will not be a small, misshapen black man with his elbow on the one-sided table. But as the moment of final betrayal drew near, had I been something other than apolitical, had I been more sentimental, then I might have anticipated the appalling threat that Jesus was about to pose to me.
