Outside Joseph’s former villa, on the wealthy upslope of Abu Tor, the roadside shrubs were overgrown and a landscape services van was parked in front of a chained sign saying Gate in Constant Use. Next door to Joseph’s address, a gardener was trimming the base of the boundary wall. Gallio waved his arms until the man turned off the machine, flipped ear defenders off one ear.
‘Is this your van?’
‘Not blocking anyone. No one’s lived there for years. Who are you?’
‘Estate agent. Lost the keys. Might have interested a buyer.’
‘Well, try and sell it.’ The gardener snapped his defenders back into place, which made him shout even louder. ‘It’s an eyesore!’
Gallio knew from experience that the secret of life—anywhere, at any time—is to act like you belong. He squeezed past the van, stepped over the rusted chain and brushed through the weeds in the gravel driveway. The windows at the front of the large house were boarded up, but those round the side were intact. A shop-bought kennel and a green plastic water butt. Gallio stood on a metal dustbin and tried the top of what looked from the outside like a toilet window. Secured.
He jumped down, steadied himself, pushed with one finger at the back door. Locked.
Gallio looked more closely. The locks had been changed and replaced with imitation Yales. He ran his finger over fake brass. Leave now, said the voice of reason. Take a breath, step back and call Valeria. Get a warrant. Respect the procedure, as a lesson learned from the botched execution. But a warrant would take forever.
Cassius Gallio was a Speculator, even if Valeria refused him the title. He’d excelled in training, where he’d picked up a range of skills they told him he’d never forget. He glanced over his shoulder. No one was watching. He was inside the house within thirty seconds.
The back hallway looked a mess. The plasterwork was patchy and a ray of sunlight picked out a wall scorched by a pallet fire. Squatters. The air inside the house had settled, colder than outside, stale. Some scrabbling noises, mice making themselves scarce, possibly a bird trapped in the roof.
No one home, and hadn’t been for years. Cassius Gallio called out, a courtesy to the unknown. No reply. To the right of the hallway was the kitchen, cupboards stripped, floor tiles cracked in several places. Gallio went past the kitchen and opened the next door on the left. In this room the mirror above the fireplace was smashed. Gallio felt behind the frame, then up into the chimney. He sifted through ashes in the grate, but he was aeons behind the curve. Every room was the same: empty and open drawers, rotting skirting boards, mice briefly interrupted from generations of digesting the evidence.
Gallio left the way he came in, securing the door behind him. He was about to walk away when he considered the metal dustbin beneath the window. He’d intended to put it back in its place, but instead he lifted the corrugated lid, peered inside. At the top was a pretzel bag that dated from earlier that year. He checked both ways—still no one watching—then upturned the bin. The contents slumped in a heavy mess across the paving stones. A rusted tuna can with an ancient sell-by date—more or less what he was hoping to see. Older than the tin can was a grey layer of biodegraded sludge, and in the sludge some shards of glass.
He took out his handkerchief, last used by Valeria to avoid fingerprints on the crop in the stable. Gallio retrieved two pieces of glass and knotted them inside the handkerchief. All was not lost.
‘I’m not going to trouble the lab,’ Valeria said. ‘Not yet.’
‘These could be significant pieces of evidence.’
‘Which you acquired without a warrant. You haven’t formally launched your operation and already you’re breaking rules. First things first, you know that.’
First, Valeria suggested Cassius Gallio should work out as precisely as possible the nature of the man he wanted to find. What would Jesus look like now? Gallio had read second-hand accounts of the time the disciple Thomas put his fingers in Jesus’s wounds. So Jesus wasn’t injured, in the sense of being handicapped, but the records suggested he was visibly scarred.
Gallio added this conclusion to a provisional Missing Persons description, but regretted not having paid closer attention at the time. The CCU had coached him to be observant, and in the line of duty he’d witnessed the arrest and death of Jesus. He was therefore surprised that he had no stable image of Jesus fixed in his memory. Jesus would be older now, but Gallio struggled even on basic descriptors like height, the shade of his hair, the colour of his eyes. Identification 101.
He hadn’t considered Jesus worth memorizing, not back then, when as a rookie Speculator he’d been more intent on recruiting Judas. Gallio had made no special effort to settle the physical Jesus in his mind. The secondary sources of information, which could have supplemented his memory, were unreliable.
Valeria stopped by his desk to tell him to hurry up.
‘Nearly there. One final detail.’
Gallio had to decide on an image of Jesus for his official Missing Persons bulletin, and although Valeria had commissioned various artists’ impressions the results were variable. In the pictures Jesus ranged from angelic rabbi (fair, slender) to swarthy warrior (determined, muscular), by way of the occasional portrayal as an unearthly cosmic light. They’d never find him if they searched for cosmic light.
The disciples. Cassius Gallio had the disciples on his mind. By all accounts the disciples strove every day to be as much like Jesus as possible. They had dark hair and were bearded. They wore clothes of a beige or cream colour, and sandals. Their eyes were brown. This was the Galilee model of a disciple, with variations. Peter was broader in the shoulder, while John sometimes shaved, but every disciple had the basic likeness to Jesus, which was unsurprising. All ten surviving disciples were from the same region of Israel. Four of them were brothers, some were cousins, and each could pass for any of the others. The head of James, as Valeria had demonstrated, could be mistaken for the head of Jesus.
Gallio decided to settle for a physical approximation. Jesus would look something like his disciples, so he attached an image for distribution based on the severed head of James. At least the picture was recent. He then summarized his findings about Jesus into a Missing Persons template, and saved it to the central computerized register. The protocol gave him two options before going live: Jesus could be Missing, or he could be Wanted. Gallio clicked Missing, then Done.
At various stages in the city’s history there have been pleasant parts of Beirut, especially close to the seafront. That’s where Cassius Gallio parks the Toyota. Then he hails a cab for the other Beirut, the southern suburbs, where there’s no sea view and parking is at the owner’s risk.
He walks the last couple of blocks, white cardboard box of pharmaceutical supplies wedged under his arm. The scarred low-rise buildings smell of river weed, and women in veils burn rubbish beside the unmade road.
Men stand around and watch. A dog the colour of cement takes Gallio seriously and a motorbike chugs by, low on its axle through the potholes, metal milk churns rattling in the place of panniers. As a friend of the poor, if he were genuine, Jesus could hide in a place like this.
For some time, however, Gallio has known he’s on the trail of Jude. He found Jude’s name in the Lebanon Daily Star, where the classified ads are full of messages of thanks. Thank you Jude, for your Intercession. That is, unless Jude was the disciple who’d changed places with Jesus for the crucifixion, and this disciple in Beirut is secretly Jesus. It would fit. Jude is a minor disciple, less likely to have been missed in the aftermath.
From early responses to the Missing Persons bulletin, and Jude’s name in the newspaper, Gallio has tracked this alleged disciple to a community hospital in the centre of one of Beirut’s southern city camps. Beirut shelters refugees from conflicts dating back to Assyrian wars and Canaanite rebellions, but no one gives up hope of a better life even now. Taped to the door of Jude’s hospital is a sign in black marker pen: No Guns Beyond This Point.
Inside the entranc
e, sitting behind a table, is a squat man in camouflage trousers and a Christian Surfers T-shirt. Jags of scar tissue interrupt the growth of his two-day stubble, and on his side of the X-ray scanner there’s a black steel crossbow. He picks it up in a good-natured way.
‘Bolt can go through a horse. Your ID, please.’
He nods at the Swiss identity card, hands it back. ‘Are you ill?’
Gallio holds up the box. ‘Drugs. I’m here to help.’
Security in a Beirut hospital comes with dreadful teeth. ‘Ha! We prayed for medicines. We must be expecting you. Come on in.’
Gallio walks around the metal detector. The man holds up his hand.
‘Through the gate, please.’
Gallio beeps once, backs out, takes off his belt and tries again.
‘Arms out, we can’t be too careful.’
He frisks Gallio, armpit to hip, takes his phone and wallet from the Strellson jacket. Waistband. Inner leg. ‘You’ll get your stuff back when you leave.’
Gallio feels nervy without his phone, suddenly back in a more vulnerable era when backup was in the hands of the gods. A small boy slides out from a corridor. He’s carrying a bow fashioned from a car aerial, and aims a homemade arrow at Gallio’s eye. The man cuffs the boy across the head.
‘Don’t frighten people you don’t know.’
The lift doesn’t work. The boy covers them across every angle of the stairwell as they climb and turn, bow poised, arrow in the slot. The hospital seems deserted.
‘Contagious,’ the doorkeeper says. ‘Everyone else had to leave. Jude keeps the infected patients on the top floor because the air is better.’
On the understanding that knowledge is power, Speculators value small talk for the information it can yield. As they climb the stairs Cassius Gallio gets the man to talk about how Jude cured him, and also his son. Like the patients at the top of the hospital, father and son had the plague.
‘Which is what, exactly?’
‘Some long medical name. We all call it the plague.’
Out of gratitude to Jude the man takes care of security, and besides, jobs in Beirut are scarce.
‘Why does Jude need protection?’
The man hauls himself up by the stair rail. He may be cured but he’s not in good shape. ‘You wouldn’t believe the nutters in this city. Some of them think we’ve enough gods as it is. Others think we have too many. A god strong enough to heal the sick looks to some people like a bad omen.’
The citizens of Beirut have a historical instinct for the damage religion can do. Gallio understands that, because he too has suffered. ‘I thought the worst was over? I heard Beirut was getting safer.’
‘It is.’ The man holds up his crossbow, balancing it on his meaty trigger finger. ‘No guns in this sector of the camp. Not even in the hospital. Believe me, that counts as progress.’
He turns, flips the crossbow upright, and fires at the Push panel on a door about thirty yards away. The bolt punches two-thirds of the way through the door. Gallio and the boy admire his work. The man has sent the bolt from A to B, a straight cause and effect between him and his target, the reassurance of connecting what he intended to happen with what then visibly happens. Bullseye. It’s practically all anyone wants.
On the top floor they push through another set of doors into a ward. High ceilings, a double row of beds. For a heart-stopping moment Gallio sees Jesus—the long hair, the beard. The fluorescent light, possibly, quivering on washed-out linen. The eyes, the pitiful brown eyes.
After sending out the Missing Persons bulletin, Gallio had waited to see what would happen, which was pretty much the essence of police work as he remembered it. The waiting, and the hope that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Some bright Antonia IT spark had written code for a drop-down tab that displayed a map of the known world. As soon as a station or associate bureau responded to the bulletin, a small star would light up in that place on the map. One sighting was all Gallio needed to justify his existence, and to make his first progress report to Valeria. A star, a light, a reason to begin.
Within minutes, a star lit up in southern Turkey. The city of Hierapolis. Gallio paged Valeria. Another light in Ephesus, then a star above Athens, and another in central France. Lights started blinking across the screen, in Beirut, north into Russia. A star appeared above Whithorn in southwest Scotland, over Cyprus, across into Turkmenistan.
Gallio could barely keep up.
‘What’s going on?’ Valeria leaned over his shoulder, her head close to his. ‘How can he be in all of these places at once?’
Gallio rolled the cursor over each light in turn but the text box never guaranteed the identification. Not a hundred per cent certain. These were sightings that fitted the description on the bulletin, but none positively confirmed a location and lock for Jesus.
‘The disciples, it must be.’ Cassius Gallio pushed his chair back from the screen. ‘They look like Jesus, act in his name. Wherever they go the disciples are mistaken for Jesus.’
‘Or Jesus is mistaken for them.’ Valeria took over the mouse, rolled over each of the lights one more time. She stopped, read the text that appeared over each star, moved on. ‘He can pose as a disciple just as his disciples pretend to be him. Clever way to hide.’
‘It would be, if that’s how he’s hiding.’
‘Call Baruch.’
Valeria chaired the meeting in a disused case room. Apart from the reopened Jesus puzzle, Israel was quiet, and the room was currently the military police storeroom for military mops and buckets. Valeria sat Gallio down and invited him to talk them through his switch theory. She let Baruch guffaw and draw a penis in the dust of a storaged whiteboard.
‘One of the disciples stood in for Jesus on the day of the crucifixion,’ Gallio said. ‘It wasn’t Jesus who died. That explains how he could reappear after the crucifixion.’
‘We’d have noticed at the time.’
‘Would we? If there were ten disciples instead of eleven, who really would have noticed? That’s why he had Judas killed. Judas would have worked it out, eventually, because he knew the disciples up close. Nobody else can tell them apart, except their families who were safely out of the way in Galilee. The disciple who changed places with Jesus would have been one of the lesser ones. Collateral damage.’
‘I always forget their names,’ Baruch said. ‘I mean apart from Peter and a couple of the others.’ Suddenly this seemed relevant, as if the junior disciples were deliberately forgettable.
With the point of his index finger Baruch dotted semen spurting from the penis. Made one of the dots into the eye of a circled happy face. Then he pulled up a chair and sat on it backward. ‘Simon, Philip, one of those. No idea what they’re for, if not for this.’
‘Jude,’ Gallio said. ‘None of the minor disciples would be missed, would they?’
‘So how do you suggest we act on this?’ Valeria was always looking forward, to a future where the confusions of the past could be straightened out, definitively.
‘We confront them,’ Baruch said. ‘We might get lucky. Track down Simon and he turns out to be Jesus. Hit the jackpot.’
Valeria checked the screen on her laptop. ‘According to this, the sighting in England may be Simon. The back of beyond is a long way to go on the off-chance that Simon is actually Jesus.’
‘So you’re saying no to England?’
‘We don’t have the budget. Times have changed.’ Valeria decided she might as well tell them the truth. ‘This isn’t a high-priority mission, not these days, or not yet. We can start somewhere nearer.’
Gallio hadn’t been gone so long he’d forgotten the bad weather of budgets and cost analyses. Work within the possible, one of the mottoes of the Speculator cadre. ‘Let’s start in Beirut,’ Gallio suggested. ‘Put some pressure on them close to home.’
‘If it’s Jesus, how will you know?’
‘We’ll know,’ Baruch said. ‘We saw him when he was alive.’
Cassius Gallio wasn’t
so confident. Would he recognize Jesus? Jesus might be the gentle son of god spreading the wealth and healing the sick. Or he could be an intolerant fucker, good with a knife. Gallio would be happier with a scientific method for confirming the identification.
‘We should send the glass from Joseph’s bin to forensics. I brought it in as potential evidence. We might get some DNA we could match against the disciples, or against Jesus.’
‘After all this time? Don’t worry, I have your pieces of glass. I’ll keep them safe.’
Valeria looked from Gallio to Baruch, then back at Gallio. At this stage they were all she had. ‘Beirut it is. You both knew Jesus and I’d trust your positive identification. Start with Jude in Beirut.’
A city that within budgetary restraints they could reach in a hire car from Jerusalem. And even that wasn’t so simple. The special needs of the region meant that traffic from Israel into Lebanon had to pass through the demilitarized zone with document inspections at every checkpoint. Valeria didn’t want diplomatic hotlines demanding why exactly her CCU agents were moving across these particular borders.
‘Damascus,’ Baruch said. ‘Let’s go via Damascus. Cassius can pursue your fool’s errand in Beirut and I’ll deal with the living. Let’s find out what in Damascus they remember about the conversion of Paul.’
In the Beirut hospital ward the smell hits, but thankfully Gallio’s collar is loose and he can pull his purple shirt and tie up over his nose. Jude the disciple of Jesus, patron saint of hopeless causes, steps toward him. He distrusts nobody! Cassius Gallio looks at Jude’s hands, no scarring, and up close Jude’s face is heavily lined and nothing like the face of Jesus, or Jesus in Jerusalem as Gallio remembers him. Jude eyes the cardboard box held in the crook of Gallio’s elbow.
‘Welcome. Come and see the work that Jesus has been able to do.’
Gallio lets his collar drop and bears the smell, glad he swallowed a double dose of antibiotics. In the beds along the ward Jude’s patients wring their sweating hands, or lunge sideways to vomit into plastic bowls. Some are seized with cramps, others have drops of blood beading in their ears.
Acts of the Assassins Page 8
