Baruch turns in his seat, sizes up Cassius Gallio as if for a coffin. ‘Does that prospect frighten you?’
‘No, because I don’t know too much.’
‘They didn’t kill Judas. Suicide. Investigated thoroughly, with official stamps on the verdict. You were getting a lot wrong back then, weren’t you, Cassius? I’ve heard the details from Judith, your ex-wife. You were wrong at work and wrong at home. Someone had to repair the damage and it wasn’t going to be you.’
‘It could have been me, except they sent me to outer Moldova.’
‘You’re deluded. Says so in the tribunal report. Stubborn, isolated, unreasonable, prone to fantasy. You could no longer function professionally, not even at procedural tasks like locating a corpse. Or keeping a marriage alive. She’d never take you back now, not after what you did. And poor little Alma with her leg, she’s grateful for a real-life father figure.’
Gallio stamps on the accelerator. Not much happens, the car’s a Toyota Corolla. He backs off, calms down. His family is someone else’s business, and he can hide in the here and now, in the mission that Valeria has given him. He’s driving to Beirut, to find a man who looks like Jesus.
At first, after hearing Valeria’s proposal, Cassius Gallio had said no. Valeria wouldn’t accept his decision, told him he should think it over.
‘No, really no. Jesus is dead. I’m not going to look for him.’
‘Sleep on it. I think you’ll take this on, because what else would you be doing?’
Barracks near Stuttgart, barbarians at the gates, a single bunk, long sleepless nights and a routine designed to use up the time before he dies. At best, Cassius Gallio will look for his socks in the morning. He will look for the cheapest item on the canteen menu, and for an almost entertaining programme on evening TV. Otherwise he’ll look for nothing.
In Jerusalem, with or without his rank as Speculator, Valeria was offering him a goose chase he could drag out for months. Jesus was dead. He was killed years ago, and the trail was cold. If Valeria and the CCU had decided to speculate otherwise, then truly this was a complex case. One they wanted to pursue, and if so then who was Cassius Gallio to object?
‘We’ll give you a desk in the Antonia,’ Valeria said. ‘Security clearance for the files and archives. That’s the most we can offer. We’re going on a hunch as it is.’
The next day Cassius Gallio sat at his allocated computer on an upper floor of the Antonia Fortress, swinging in a swivel chair pinched from Human Resources. It felt good to be back, and the open-plan Antonia operations room was in a familiar state of distress. Desks pushed together, files everywhere, computer screens glowing the colour of bad rice. Someone had polished their football boots and left them in a corner, stuffed with newspaper, on a plastic bag from Hamashbir.
For the first hour or so Gallio watched the junior intelligence officers of an occupying army, who kept themselves busy by sifting standard police reports for incidents of obscure significance. Stolen official cars, ABH against a minor civil servant, graffiti at the TV station. Usually these crimes were not significant, not even obscurely so. The youngsters in the office avoided Gallio because he was attached to the CCU. Also because his sole and slightly shameful responsibility was to hunt a man who was dead. For the second hour he mulled over his mission, steepled his fingers to his chin, swivelled his chair this way and that.
The story was baffling, from beginning to end, but Gallio was in no special hurry to return to barracks. He decided on an approach: not optimistic but conscientious. Either he would solve the Jesus mystery or he would not, and when he eventually set to work he started with the events the disciples claimed to have seen: Jesus, so they said, had risen into a cloud above the Mount of Olives. Gallio found this hard to believe. He’d kept the disciples under 24/7 surveillance, yet they claimed to have seen this ascension with their own eyes, the same eyes that once witnessed Jesus walking on water.
People passed by Gallio’s desk. He looked busy, wrote himself a memo: Miracles/hallucinations. Galilee connection? Check lake for cadmium/mercury trace. Industrial pollution/poisoning? Would explain a lot.
He found a report Valeria had commissioned in the previous month. Over the relevant period, no heavy industry had been operational near Lake Galilee, no processes at work to leak toxins into the water supply.
Cassius Gallio binned his memo and started again from the only fact they knew for certain: a man was dead. Between then and now Gallio had seen hundreds of pictures of Jesus on the cross, because he was interested and provincial museums and churches were full of them. Paintings, carvings, sculptures. No other death in history had been so exhaustively recorded. Jesus was dead.
At the same time, and Gallio finally confronted the truth of this, he had never stopped experimenting with the idea that Jesus had survived. Jesus only appeared to be dead on the cross, and had entered some kind of trance. Gallio’s soldiers (what happened to that sergeant?) neglected to break the bones in Jesus’s legs, meaning that severe physical trauma was confined to feet and hands, giving him a shot at survival.
Gallio called up files from the archive and stacked them beside his desk. He went through the dossiers one by one, relived the familiar story. From the newer material he learned that Valeria had investigated lung capacity. Jesus had form as a public speaker, and for three years he projected his voice to large crowds in open-air spaces without amplification. If orators developed abnormal lung efficiency, then Jesus’s oversized lungs might have delayed asphyxiation, a common cause of death when chest muscles and lungs were hyper-expanded by crucifixion. Even then, considering his other injuries, Gallio didn’t see how Jesus could have survived for more than a few weeks afterwards. A month at the outside, with expert medical attention.
There was always another file to open. Gallio respected the assignment, such as it was. He treated Jesus as a missing person and pulled relevant information from Valeria’s Complex Casework networks. He reviewed every theory. The rational approach was to keep an open mind until the evidence convinced one way or another, and the Speculator protocols came back to Gallio like riding a bike. He contacted Israeli banks and had them search for an account in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. He was meticulous, accessing the benefits register to see if any likely Jesus was claiming, and if so how he collected his money. Neither initiative generated a result.
Cassius Gallio swung on his chair, this way, that way. He chewed the end of his propelling pencil. Why not? If you’ve lost something, as his stepfather liked to say, look again in the obvious place. He spent a morning checking police and hospital records for unidentified bodies. He respected the assignment but he was a realist. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross he might have died since, and the alleged resurrection hadn’t put a stop to violent assaults in Jerusalem, nor vagrants dying alone. The worst of life continued, here and now as everywhere and always, and the official records contained a separate category for unclaimed corpses.
Some of the dead bodies, not many, had mutilated fingers where prints had been removed by sanding or slicing. Gang crimes, scores settled and souls lost. Not one of the unclaimed corpses had extremity damage compatible with crucifixion. And even if a likely candidate did emerge, Gallio didn’t have a DNA profile to confirm the match with Jesus.
The burial clothes, those left behind at the tomb, had long gone missing. There were no body fluids to sequence or physical remains to analyse. The cross, pretty much any remnant of it, would provide bloodspots for a DNA sample, but no one could locate the cross. Valeria had tracked down fragments across the ancient world, but the provenance was never certain. And in any case, so many hands had touched these suspect relics that the DNA became unusable. The contemporary evidence was lost.