The Gospel Of Judas

by Simon Mawer

  He washed approximately and went to bed. Exhaustion edged around his thoughts, eroding their coherence, dragging them down into the idiocy of dream and nightmare, a nightmare in which Madeleine tried to tell him things that he didn’t understand, Madeleine and Judas, the one faithful, the other betraying. But which was which?

  He woke early and showered. The smell of freesias was still heavy in the air, a smell which now seemed almost sickly, like the scent that his mother had worn, something old-fashioned and redolent of a past that could never be captured, never conquered. Eating breakfast he tried to turn his thoughts to the lecture he would deliver that morning. Banal, ordinary thoughts to dispel the demons. But Judas whispered in his ear, his voice quiet and measured as it sounded across the centuries of faith and doubt:

  … he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption …

  And other thoughts crowded in. Madeleine and freesias. Madeleine in that loft under the sloping ceiling, padding on bare feet into the bathroom to wash the evidence of their love-making from her body. Her matter-of-factness, her acceptance of what he was and what he wasn’t. He drank coffee and ate some cheese that he had found in the fridge and tried to place her within the chaos of his mind. Madeleine naked beside him, her flesh soft and warm, a negation of faith and vocation, a fragile grasp on humanity.

  Who is worthy to open the scroll? he thought.

  It was only after he had eaten that he found the note lying on his desk. He unfolded the paper with trepidation, without knowing what to expect, without even recognising her handwriting: with a flash of inconsequence he realised that he had never seen anything in her hand.

  Dear Leo, he read, I think you had better telephone me.

  But it was not signed Madeleine, nor even Maddy, nor, as he supposed it might have been, merely initialled M. It was signed Jack.

  A terrible stillness. The words again, their careful grammatical accuracy, their diplomat’s caution, hiding everything and betraying nothing: Dear Leo, I think you had better telephone me.

  But he didn’t. The telephone lay there on the floor, but he didn’t pick the receiver up. He made his way down the stairs to the entrance of the palazzo. There were many things to face: a lecture theatre of students with varying degrees of interest, a woman with whom he might or might not be in love, a future in which he might or might not be apostate, a husband who knew everything. His world was, perhaps, on the edge of dissolution. He would face the various fracturing parts in his own time.

  The porter was in his cubicle. His face hung in the dusty pane of the window like a piece of dirty material: an expression of concern and suspicion was scrawled across the fabric. ‘Signor Neoman.’ That was how he managed the name, emphasising the novelty of it, accentuating the raw newness. Neo-man. What did the man want? Something about the electricity? Something about the water, or the cleaning of the stairs? What could it be?

  ‘Signor Neoman, there’s been an incident.’ Incident is the word he used. Incidente. There are shades of meaning. Accident; incident. Leo paused beside the sign that announced to a waiting world that the Casadei Palace was open to the public during the hours of 10.00–13.00 and 16.00–17.30, but not on Monday. The man came out of his cubicle. Perhaps it was the first time Leo had seen him outside his box. He was surprised to find that he was small, reaching no higher than Leo’s chest. Leo barely even knew his name. Mimmo, he was known as Mimmo. ‘The police were here,’ the man said. ‘The day before yesterday. In the afternoon. The signora …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She fell. That’s what they think.’

  ‘Fell?’ Tripped on the stairs. Fell over a chair while she was in his flat putting the freesias in the vase. Sprained her ankle. Broke something? Her wrist, perhaps. Perhaps she tripped and in trying to save herself she put out her hand and broke her wrist. But why, in heaven’s name, the police? The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

  The porter laid a confidential hand on Leo’s arm. He was a lugubrious character. In the time that Leo had known him – no more than a few weeks – he had never demonstrated a glimmer of emotion: but now he contrived a glistening of the eyes. Now he even squeezed Leo’s arm, as though to show some kind of solidarity ‘She came to put flowers in your flat. I said buongiorno to her and she smiled at me and said buongiorno back and she had a bunch of flowers in her hand. She looked like she always does. Happy, you know what I mean? And she fell.’

  ‘What do you mean, fell?’

  The man looked anguished, as though it were his fault, as though he were somehow to blame, as though it was all owing to his carelessness, his dereliction of duty. ‘From the roof. Signor Neoman, the signora is dead.’

  Panic. Panic manifested in the flesh, the panic of the agoraphobic, the panic of someone who cannot bear the void of the open street, who stands on the edge of the pavement and fancies himself on the edge of a cliff with emptiness below and a clear sensation that the whole world is tilting in order to thrust him over the gulf. Fear like an ache in the bones, deep and hollow, the kind of pain you know you are going to have to live with for months and years.

  He ran out into the street, distractedly, as though looking for something. It was a day of scirocco, the south wind that comes from the Sahara Desert laden with heat and damp and sand. There was a high blanket of cloud, a cloying warm blanket above the tilted roofs of the city. The alleyway behind the Palazzo Casadei was a narrow canyon between the old, crumbling cliffs. One of the outer reaches of the ghetto. Round the corner from the small grocery store – Minimarket, it announced hopefully – there was nothing, no shops, no bar, no trattoria. There were only drainpipes and mute back doors and the uneven ribbon of black paving stones like the scales of a snake’s back. A cul-de-sac led off the alley into the body of the Palazzo Casadei. There was a barricade across the entrance, a barrier of galvanised steel with a battered notice in baby blue saying POLIZIA. He pulled the thing aside. There were bins at the far end and a rusted fire-escape ladder that led upwards to nowhere. On the ground he found a smear of sand and some dark substance in the fissures between the stones. Someone had placed a small bunch of flowers against the wall.

  He walked. Rome lay exhausted beneath the cloud, like a corpse beneath a shroud. It was a place where everything imaginable happened and presumably would happen again, a place where nothing was remarkable. Madeleine was not remarkable, Leo was not remarkable, their poor, stunted relationship was not remarkable, death was not remarkable. He walked without direction. He walked unsteadily over blocks of basalt, down between the ochre and umber walls of the Campo Marzio, the Field of Mars where bits of the ancient city show through the mediaeval like bones poking though the flesh of a corpse.

  Panic is a pagan thing born of the great god Pan, that mysterious deity who stands in the shadows behind the cold light of Olympian reason. Leo felt pure, pagan panic: a shortage of breath, a sensation of tightness in the chest, as though his sternum was gripped in a vice, a feeling of enclosure and exposure at one and the same time; a feeling that he must be somewhere else other than here. He walked. For an hour or more – whatever happened to the restless group of students awaiting his lecture? – he just walked. And then he fetched up near a post office where there was a line of telephone booths. He had the number on a piece of paper in his wallet.

  Over the phone Jack’s voice seemed perfectly calm. ‘I was wondering when you’d get back,’ he said. ‘Where were you? Maddy said something about London.’ She might have been still there, just there, standing right beside him at the phone.

  ‘That’s right,’ Leo said. ‘London. Jack, what happened?’ People walked past the booth, an anonymous street crowd. Tourists, kids, a gypsy woman with a baby at her breast.

  ‘I thought of you,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘Of course I did, considering where it happened. Your flat, I mean. I’m sorry, I’m maybe not quite as articulate as I should be. But I thought of you and I didn’t really know how
to get in contact.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’ Why should it be quite all right? Why should Jack be half apologising, and Leo refusing the need for apology, as though some kind of solecism had been committed?

  ‘I don’t know if the magistrate will want to see you …’

  ‘Jack, what happened?’ Leo repeated. ‘In God’s name what happened?’

  ‘In God’s name, is it?’ There was the faint breath of a laugh on the other end of the line. ‘I wonder if that’s quite accurate.’

  ‘Just tell me what happened.’

  There was a pause. ‘I suppose you’d better come round.’

  Jack was entirely calm, that was what was so terrifying. He was as calm as if he was in the midst of some diplomatic negotiation, with the police, with the embassy, with the magistrate’s office, with some officially constituted body for the management of corpses. The phone would ring and he would pick it up with a faint frown and stare at the floor as he spoke, and issue instructions in measured tones as though making important but passionless decisions, the kind of thing one might do when buying a house, or taking a new job, or negotiating a new trade agreement. ‘I can’t come for the moment,’ he said to one of the callers. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as possible, but I can’t at the moment.’

  Leo looked round the familiar room. Madeleine watched him from a silver frame on top of the piano. She seemed to smile, almost as though she had this all planned. On the floor beneath the piano was a copy of an English newspaper. He saw the small headline down at the foot of the page: DIPLOMAT’S WIFE IN ROOF PLUNGE. He felt renewed panic, a sense of the pure randomness of things.

  There was a pause and the phone rang again and quite suddenly Jack was talking in a different pitch, with a softer, gentler tone. ‘Mummy’s hurt herself,’ he said in this counterfeit child’s voice. ‘Yes, I’ll be coming to see you soon. Meanwhile you look after Boot for me. Will you do that, Katz? Yes, everything’s quite all right. You two just be good, and soon I’ll be there.’ He replaced the receiver with infinite care.

  ‘What happened?’ Leo asked. ‘Can’t you tell me what happened?’

  ‘She’s dead. That’s what happened.’

  ‘But how?’

  There was someone in the kitchen, a dutiful and earnest woman whom Leo vaguely recognised. She came out now and asked Jack if he wanted anything and he said no, thanked her courteously and denied that he wanted anything at all, even a cup of tea. ‘I wish they’d stop fussing,’ he said to Leo when the woman had retreated. ‘I know they mean well, but I wish they’d stop fussing. This is the FCO pulling out the stops, you see. Rallying round, they call it, as though … as though what? The flag, I suppose. Rallying round the flag. The fucking Gatling’s jammed and the square’s broken and they’re all rallying round.’ He looked away, towards the piano with the pictures of the family, towards the window, beyond which lay the rest of the world. Towards the bluebottle that hammered its head against the pane with a desperate insistence. ‘Did you know she had a key?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Key?’

  ‘To your flat.’

  Leo found himself measuring his answers, wondering where they might lead. He couldn’t read the shifts and allusions of this situation, the matter-of-factness of it all, the undercurrent of familiarity. ‘From when you helped me move in, I suppose.’

  Jack nodded. ‘They found the flat locked, you see. The police got the porter to open it. And they found the key on the table. Of course they call it an accident for the moment. That’s what the magistrate said. Incidentally, she’ll want to interview you.’

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘The magistrate, Leo. The magistrate.’ Jack’s tone was of studied patience, the kind of tone he might have used with a stupid child.

  ‘And you don’t think it was an accident?’

  He smiled the smile of a diplomat who knows he has scored a point in the negotiations. ‘My dear Leo,’ he said quietly. ‘I know it wasn’t.’

  ‘You know?’

  Jack looked at him. Leo wondered, what goes on behind the face, behind the eyes? What goes on in the grey jelly that lies behind that fine forehead? In the confessional one never saw the face. There was nothing more than a dim shadow laying bare its soul without ever revealing its features. Gender you knew. And social class. And sometimes, but not always, you could guess at intelligence and education. But you never saw the face with its look of panic, its mask of shame. ‘I’m surprised she never told you,’ Jack said, ‘seeing how close you were. I would have thought she would have confided in her great friend, her father-confessor …’

  ‘Confided what?’

  ‘This wasn’t the first time that Maddy tried to take her own life. Didn’t you know about that? Didn’t you? Hadn’t she told her confessor?’ He laughed faintly. His expression was drawn in grey and white, a composition of disaster and despair, but his tone was of amiable patronage, a tone born of Winchester and Cambridge, of years of effortless superiority. ‘Maddy wasn’t the kind of person who needed the comforts of a priest. She was ill, Leo. What she needed was a doctor, a psychiatrist, but of course she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. So she found you instead. And she never told you.’

  Leo tried to say something, but Jack trampled easily over his words. There was a relentless quality to his manner, as though he was standing there in the alley and looking up the ochre side of the building and watching the woman balanced for a moment on the parapet way up there, five storeys up there, high up against the sky, just watching and waiting for her to make the small step into the void. ‘Maddy was the survivor of half a dozen previous suicide attempts, Leo. Mostly pills. Once she cut her wrists – wrist, singular, to be precise: she only managed one. And there was another incident that involved booze and one of my ties round her neck. You can make what you wish of that one. But mostly it was pills. She said to me, “You think I’m just messing around, don’t you? You think I’m just seeking attention. But one day I’ll do it properly.” That’s what she said. And now she has.’

  There was a silence. Jack looked steadily at Leo and the smile had gone from his face, like snow from a bleak winter landscape. Was there accusation in that look? Did Jack Brewer hold Leo Newman, the innocent Leo Newman, the naïve Leo Newman, to blame?

  ‘She was ill, Leo. How stupid can you priests be? I’ve never really believed in priests as confessors, do you know that? It has always seemed to me like giving a child a hand grenade to play with. She was ill, a depressive or whatever you want to call it. She lived part of her life on the edge of despair and part of it in some idiotic state of excitement, like a five-year-old child at a party. Just like an overexcited child being sick at a party. Except she was an adult and so she didn’t throw up all over the carpet. She just fucked other men instead.’ He paused, as though for effect, as though to let his words strike home. ‘Didn’t she tell you that either? Didn’t she confess it in all its squalid detail? Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps it had all gone beyond guilty secrets in the confessional. Perhaps she fucked her pet priest as well.’

  Leo got to his feet. The ground seemed to shift a fraction. For a moment he had to concentrate on keeping his balance. ‘You’re distressed, Jack,’ he said. ‘You’re overwrought and you don’t know what you’re saying. Maddy and I were friends, you know that. Close friends.’ Why was it so easy to lie, not to lie directly, but to lie by implication? Why did the words come so easily to hand? He paused for a moment as though to let his assertion find its mark. And then he turned and made his way to the front door, leaving Jack alone in the sitting room. A face looked out of the kitchen to see what was going on, then darted back out of sight. He opened the door. Shame coursed through his body like a chill tide, guilt and shame in equal measure, the one seeping into the other, both denied the means of atonement, for atonement is at-one-ment and the one was gone, extinguished in a moment’s plunge. She fucked other men. He went out on to the landing and closed the door behind him. She padded across his mind, he
r buttocks moving clumsily as she walked. She turned towards him and her dark, untidy delta of hair pointed to things he could not comprehend. He even spoke her name as he walked down the stairs, as though she herself might answer him and explain. ‘Madeleine,’ he whispered. ‘Madeleine.’

  That evening he went round to the narrow alley behind the palazzo to look again. The flowers were still there, ragged and bruised now, a sorry litter of yellow and red. He looked upwards, up the cliff of burnt ochre, up the receding lines of perspective towards the distant parapet. What happens on the way down, he wondered? Mere seconds. A decision taken and just as soon brought to its conclusion. Consummation of a kind. What happens during that momentary plunge? What do you think? Of whom do you think? He saw the kick of her legs. Her skirt billowing. A sudden glimpse of white thigh. And then the blow. Something soft and heavy. Things breaking inside.

  12

  The magistrate examined Leo’s identity card, glanced at the photograph, considered his profession – sacerdote – thoughtfully. ‘Prete,’ she said. Her tone was carefully edged with contempt.

  ‘Priest,’ Leo agreed.

  ‘And your relationship with the Englishwoman?’

  ‘A friend.’

  The office was high up in the ministry building with a view over plane trees and the dark flow of the river. The magistrate herself was brisk and smart, impatient to resolve one case and move on to the next. Manila folders were piled on her desk. In one corner of the room, hedged about with box files, a man sat behind some kind of word processor. There was the patter of a keyboard.

  ‘Where were you when she died?’

  ‘I was out of the country. In England.’

  ‘You can prove this?’

  ‘Prove it?’

  ‘Can you demonstrate when you left the country?’

  And suddenly, quite suddenly – for only a moment before the idea had been beyond consideration – Leo understood that he was suspect. ‘Of course I can prove it.’