As the months and years of his exile passed, Cassius Gallio would lie awake at night denying the resurrection. Life after death meant the end of the world as he knew it, but if Jesus were a fraud and never actually died then his later appearances weren’t the end of the world.
Gallio would put his head beneath his army-issue blanket and concentrate on his breathing. In, out. Feel the biological processes of being alive, oxygen in his lungs, blood in his veins and his brain. Make the bad supernatural thoughts go away.
He regretted not staying at the burial site, in person, for all three days. But at the time he’d made his point and he was the winner: Jesus was dead. The Lazarus story became instantly irrelevant, and Gallio worried that Valeria would despise him for watching a corpse so closely. He didn’t want to appear tentative about life after death, and by killing Jesus he had solved that problem. Whatever the story with Lazarus, Jesus now was dead.
In any case, he couldn’t have known the disciples were planning a breakout on the Sunday. How long should he have stayed? A week, a month, until the end of time? Gallio would still be there now, and no one would understand why, not even the army psychiatrists.
Cassius Gallio saw his first statue of a disciple on a transit through Belgium: a lifesize piece in white marble, Simon leaning casually on a two-handled saw outside the Church of our Lady in Bruges. On the same trip he was surprised by a painted Jude in a roadside shrine near Avignon.
The cult was growing, and Cassius sometimes felt nostalgic for Jerusalem and his one big idea. He’d wanted to control the Jesus movement by setting up Lazarus as a client Messiah. Together he and Lazarus, taking the place of Jesus, would have preached a god of compromise amenable to the values of civilisation. Pay taxes, respect the rule of law, be reasonable.
His plan hadn’t worked, which left the disciples with their unreasonable lies that encouraged the poor and feckless. Cassius Gallio was occasionally angry, but the military life inhibited sustained feeling. Thankfully. His legion was posted East, where he supervised building works and assembled collections of coins. For months on end he’d forget to wonder what the story of Jesus could mean, obsessed with blisters and his next appointment with the booze. He consciously refused to look for Jesus, closing his eyes at the neck of a bottle and once in the arms of a shopgirl. And soon after that, Gallio didn’t look for Jesus in the waiting room of a sexual health clinic. He didn’t look for him and he wasn’t there.
While a doctor swabbed him and asked how much he drank, Gallio did think briefly about Jesus and how to get his life back on track. He wasn’t without virtue: he refused to pay for sex and every month his wages were deducted at source and half sent to his wife and child in Jerusalem. Not that he had much choice. He was a grunt in a modern army from the civilised world, and obligations were expected to be honoured.
If he was ever homesick, and he thinks he sometimes was, it wasn’t a sickness for Judith and Alma or for any of the homes he could remember. He longed for a kind of unnamed absence, with a tearfulness he found unsettling. Sentiment, self-pity: he wiped his eyes and dismissed these useless emotions that brought him no relief. He was not the person he’d wanted to be. The world was not decipherable as promised, with a reason for everything if only he could see what it was.
An unamused nurse burned off his genital warts, smoke rebounding from the ceiling. Gallio remembered Valeria, but whatever his problem Valeria wasn’t the solution, and antibiotics with beer and loneliness felt like a punishment that had finally arrived. Only he didn’t believe in cosmic justice, so he preferred not to think at all.
‘How can you tell this isn’t Jesus?’
‘I just know.’
The dismembered head belongs to a disciple, though Cassius Gallio can’t say for sure which one. He has been a long time away, and the eleven survivors always looked similar to him: they look like Jesus. Ten. Judas gone, now this one too. Ten survivors left, and anyway Jesus is dead. Why had Valeria asked if the dead man in the stable was Jesus?
Observation, reason. The dark horseshit in the stable contains pieces of yellow straw. No, beyond that. The shit is lightly cracked, days old.
‘How could it be Jesus when Jesus is dead?’
‘You tell me. I asked the Israelis to wait for our experts, meaning you. As the representative of a global power I made an official recommendation to a tiny local security service. Hopeless. They couldn’t follow a simple instruction.’
‘Who couldn’t?’
‘Baruch. Not an easy man, but on their side he deals with everything Jesus. Always has.’
Gallio knows who Baruch is. He tried to kill Lazarus after the incomprehensible events at Bethany, when Lazarus appeared to come back to life. He killed the son of the widow of Nain, a teenage boy who Jesus also allegedly resurrected. A military patrol found the boy in a wood outside his pathetic little village, his throat cut from ear to ear. That’s Baruch, who picked Cassius Gallio’s daughter up from school. The involvement of Baruch feels like further punishment, but Gallio doesn’t know for what.
‘I think this head belongs to a James.’
Gallio squats down and looks closely at the half a dead face he can see. Memories flood back, and he warms to the idea of becoming an expert, of knowing what few other people can know. ‘I’m fairly sure. Who was the other one they captured?’
‘They say it was Peter. Unconfirmed. He escaped.’
James and Peter, but Valeria has let herself speculate that one of the captives was Jesus. This is the more interesting information that Gallio now has in his possession. If the CCU are prepared to reconsider, and conclude that Jesus may be alive, it would explain their decision to reopen the case.
Some kind of commotion starts outside, which gives Cassius Gallio an excuse to stop speculating and stoop under the tape and out into the fresher air. The sun is hot and the flies loud. A woman in a POLICE anti-stab jacket is photographing faces through the fence. Beside her, pointing out anyone she misses, is an unshaven man in a dark suit. He turns round, open-neck white shirt, sees Cassius Gallio and taps the photographer’s shoulder. Gallio watches the zoom lengthen as she takes her shot. Baruch, hands on hips like the man in charge, laughs at his funny joke.
Baruch is Gallio’s age, a little older, but he moves better. He shoots his cuffs and dances over, soft leather shoes avoiding small rocks and the obvious piles of horse dung.
‘Cassius Gallio! You should have phoned from the airport! We’d have sent a car.’
They’re about the same height. Baruch offers his hand at a slight downward angle. To take it, Gallio would have to expose his palm like a white belly, like a dog rolling over. He offers his hand at the same angle, palm facing down. Their fingers barely touch.
‘Yet somehow you knew I was here.’
‘Boys,’ Valeria says. She swishes the riding crop at a couple of flies.
‘Congratulations on killing an unarmed disciple,’ Gallio says. ‘Keeping yourself busy, I see.’
‘Not guilty. I’m helping to clean up the mess, and making sure the press stay away. Let the press in on something like this and it’s pictures, words and before you know it they’ve written the opera and everyone’s crying. Completely misrepresent the facts.’
‘Try me with the facts.’
Baruch smiles. ‘My men were over-enthusiastic, which is a fault I can tolerate. And no need to look so miserable — ten more where this one came from. The disciples of Jesus come to Jerusalem at their own risk. The founder of their cult is a convicted terrorist, so what kind of welcome do they expect?’
Baruch bends under the police tape and Gallio follows him into the stable. Police work develops muscular thighs.