Compared to resurrection, Gallio reminded himself, no other version of this particular story was ridiculous. In that sense, every possibility was a possibility.
The new picture was higher definition than the freeze-frame Gallio had extracted at the time: oil paints brought out the paleness of the woman’s skin and a strand of reddish-brown hair escaping a headscarf. The image captured the moment she leaned in towards Jesus, but with improved technology a name was pulled from a mortgage record, an Old City householder named Veronica. The file had her address on the Suq Khan el-Zeit.
Gallio signed himself out of the Antonia, and went for a wander. A convenience store, a hairdresser, and then, after a stretch of residential, he found it. He checked the numbers on either side and he was in the right place: the residential address from the file had been converted into St Veronica’s Gift Shop. The shop was open. Gallio pushed through a bead curtain and as the beads settled he browsed through stacks of tea towels imprinted with the face of Jesus. The likeness wasn’t quite right; it wasn’t how Gallio had Jesus in his mind — close, but not the man himself. Or the image was an idea of Jesus but not Cassius Gallio’s idea.
A girl behind the counter, school-leaver by age and attitude. Sullen, pretty, and she looked Gallio over as if wondering whether they’d ever had sex. Bad sex.
‘I’m looking for Veronica.’
The girl’s tongue pulled bubble-gum back behind her teeth. She chewed once, twice, raised a drawn-on eyebrow.
‘I’m asking if a woman named Veronica lives here?’
A man bustled through from the back. He could be the girl’s father, a broken blood vessel in his cheek, his belt missing a loop of his trousers. He registered Gallio’s miserable face, decided he was probably harmless.
‘Last week someone else was asking, same as you,’ he said. ‘All we know is she’s gone.’
‘Leave anything behind?’
‘No, just like the last time I was asked. She sold her possessions and made a donation to the School for the Blind. Then she sold me the empty house. Couldn’t see its potential. Her loss. She gave the money from the house to the Daughters of Charity.’
‘No forwarding address?’
‘None. Last I heard she went abroad somewhere. France? One of those places.’
Gallio reached for the beads in the doorway, then turned back. ‘The other person asking after Veronica. What did he look like?’
‘Could have been a woman.’ This from the girl, who popped a bubble as a follow-up.
‘Your father came in because of my voice.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘Forget it,’ Gallio said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
The Swiss passports provided by Valeria keep Gallio and Baruch out of trouble. Cassius Gallio is travelling as a pharmaceutical salesman from Basle. He had wondered, briefly, why Valeria needed him undercover.
‘Jesus disguised himself as a gardener, and an angel,’ Valeria had reminded him. ‘He went undercover as a carpenter. To catch him out we can learn those lessons.’
With Jesus, the trickery is habitual. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get. He turned the death of Lazarus to his advantage, and then his own crucifixion. Jesus is not a problem that can be approached head-on. Jesus has skills, fieldcraft, and at a purely professional level is a worthy opponent for a disgraced Speculator with a point to prove.
Cassius Gallio tells lies to cross the border into Syria and the lies don’t matter, are part of how once he’d decided to live. His only regret is being out of practice. The good news is that they reach the Al Kadam station in south Damascus without incident, where Baruch is scheduled to leave him. No trains are running, so Baruch walks away into the bombed suburbs without looking back. Not many cars on the roads, but a yellow Cherokee is in the Toyota’s mirror when Gallio pulls away.
His stepfather the Roman general, who knew what he wanted in life, had expected Cassius Gallio to join the uniformed army. He’d planned to ease Gallio along, using his experience and connections to nudge his stepson ahead of contemporaries and competitors. He wasn’t a great believer in colleagues, or friends. Not in the army. Gallio’s main refuge from his stepfather’s ambition was the chess club, and one evening after he’d checkmated a civil servant their casual conversation shaded into recruitment. We don’t call it spying, the man said, because that’s not exactly what it is. We’re looking for bright people like yourself to police civilisation, and to shape everyone’s future for the best.
A successful Speculator, as Gallio would soon learn in training, must be rational, deceptive if necessary, then ruthless. Powerful, invisible, but never a killer beyond the rule of law, or at least not without an agreed objective. No one should be certain he existed. And remember, his instructors said, knowledge is power. Knowledge is always power.
His stepfather was furious but Cassius Gallio escaped overseas, and on his first posting to Jerusalem he was greedy to learn as much as possible as quickly as he could. Initially this meant the language and the women, the easiest available territories. He met Judith, who was direct and uncomplicated. Gallio had grown up in a villa with his stepfather’s third wife, and was cynical about communication between the sexes. It was therefore a relief to spend time with a woman and not expect immediately to understand her.
Or Cassius Gallio had been lonely, and Judith in Jerusalem was kind. He’d been aiming to conquer, in a small way, but at the same time he’d needed comfort, and to be comfortable. He can’t remember. They’d met a long time ago, but the early marriage became convincingly part of his cover, his legend. His photo ID said military attaché, with full immunity, but his more effective disguise was Judith. Spies and secret police shouldn’t marry, everyone knows that. They should keep the hours and the secrets and the dangers to themselves, which is such obvious common sense that a single diplomat immediately rouses suspicion. Meaning that all serious spies are married, but ideally not for love.
The trouble, as with the Jesus fiasco, was that Gallio never knew enough. He didn’t know that Valeria was on her way, young and culturally compatible and willing. He couldn’t see the future, only his lonely past, and if he had his time again he’d allow the past no more influence than it deserved. As now, in Damascus, where he’s ignoring his earlier failures and taking his second chance.
The dead-drop is the Travelex exchange in the lobby of the Damascus Sheraton. Gallio picks up an envelope of dollars, and exchanges half with the concierge for a room key. Then checks into his room where in the wardrobe he finds a grey Strellson suit, as favoured by Swiss sales reps. On the hanger beside it a purple shirt and tie set completes the look, and on the floor of the wardrobe a white cardboard box, stamped with the same pharmaceutical company name as his business cards.
He lies down on the double bed, closes his eyes and sleeps. He wakes up and showers, the water as hot as he can bear. He turns off the shower and sits on the floor of the wet room and breathes. In, out, as deeply and slowly as he can. Occasionally, according to no discernible pattern (but there is one, there must be one, and the pattern can be represented by a mathematical formula) a solitary drip from the shower lands on top of his head. Cassius Gallio and Jesus have unfinished business, but if Gallio solves this case then he can become, for the first time, the man he wanted to be.