‘I doubt he’d have lasted the journey. He’s not in the best of health. I extracted some solid information, more than we’d hoped for.’
‘Paul,’ Baruch said. ‘Paul’s the man.’
‘Thomas.’ Cassius Gallio hated to see his speculations go to waste. From Jude’s suggestion he’d projected a specific and important role for Thomas in the creation of the Jesus legend. They should follow the path as indicated. ‘Thomas. It has to be Thomas. We should pay a visit to Babylon.’
Valeria held up her hands. ‘We can’t go after both, not at the same time.’ She stood up and surveyed the map with its scattered pinheads, then studied the headshots on the walls.
‘If the switch theory is correct,’ Gallio said, ‘one of those disciples out there is Jesus.’
‘Paul was the last person to see him alive,’ Baruch said. ‘That has to count for something.’
Valeria sat down and clasped her hands together on the tabletop, a sign of decisiveness not yet matched by a decision. ‘We need to make some progress, see if it’s worth allocating staff to the casework. Not everyone takes Jesus seriously, but you two saw him in action and that’s why we need you involved. You know better than anyone that the weekend of his crucifixion leaves important questions unresolved. So we have to decide: Thomas or Paul. I’m the boss. My decision.’
Gallio and Baruch spoke over each other but Valeria held up her hands for silence. ‘Look. We’ve been asked, discreetly through diplomatic channels, to move Thomas on from Babylon. He’s upsetting the wrong type of people, and he’s an incident waiting to happen.’
‘Thomas is a peasant a long way from home,’ Baruch said.
Valeria closed her eyes until he stopped. She waited. Opened her eyes on the silence.
‘On the other hand, Paul draws crowds wherever he goes. He gets invited to speak at conventions. Last week Athens, this week Antioch. It’s Paul. That’s my decision. Talk to Paul, but a word of warning. Remember he’s not a disciple. He may be more dangerous than that.’
Valeria and Cassius Gallio sat opposite each other in the Antonia canteen, Gallio toying with a tubbed salad he didn’t really want. Valeria had her green tea, the square tag hanging outside the takeaway cup.
‘Why did you listen to Baruch?’
Gallio had asked Valeria for a quiet word, just the two of them, alone. She agreed, but this time didn’t propose the American Colony Hotel. ‘You brought me back to lead this investigation, and I gave you sound reasons for going after Thomas.’
‘Don’t take it personally,’ Valeria said. ‘I have to keep Baruch sweet, as if we’re equal partners. Politics.’
Gallio remembered hearing this evasion somewhere before. ‘My call was Thomas. You went with Baruch.’
‘Stop being childish. This isn’t about you. In case you missed it we had a fire in Rome that lasted six days and shut down ten out of fourteen districts. Thousands were killed or made homeless. Jesus may have been involved, and I haven’t sent you to find him on a whim. I hired lexicographers to study transcripts of his speeches, and those of his followers. The word “fire” comes up big and bold in every wordmap.’
Gallio had seen the printouts, and it was true the Jesus followers were obsessed with fire. The unquenchable fire, the hell of fire, the eternal fire; cast, thrown, fallen into fire; tested and refined and scorched by fire; fire in tongues and pillars and lakes. The fury of fire and revealed by fire. Fire will be coming down.
‘If we discover they’re connected to the fire of Rome,’ Valeria said, ‘they will be punished.’
Cassius Gallio should have been pleased. Valeria had changed her mind about the disciples, and about Jesus. Their talent for deception was at last being taken seriously, and he almost sensed an apology — as he alone had insisted at the time, the disciples weren’t as blunt as they seemed. Gallio felt a momentary nerve spasm in his jaw, but quelled it by biting his cheek. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Listen. Thomas may be about as useful as Jude, another earnest man in sandals who’s self-righteous about the poor.’
‘There’s no reason all twelve of them should know everything. A sub-group of disciples may have made the switch or stolen the body, and only a favoured few are in on the details, like where Jesus is hiding. That would be standard procedure in a terrorist cell.’
‘Jude is surviving Beirut, so Thomas can be left to his own devices for a while longer in Babylon. At the very least we eliminate Paul from our enquiries, and if on reflection Paul denies meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus then we make progress. We can ignore an awkward sighting. Look, let’s not fall out over this. I’ve been impressed by your work so far.’
Valeria pulled the teabag from her cup, let it swing like a pendulum, then dropped it into Gallio’s salad. It leaked tea across his lettuce, which they both knew he wasn’t eating. Not now, anyway.
‘I think it’s personal,’ Gallio said, ‘because you once thought we had a future together.’
‘We did. Here we are. I don’t want to revisit that.’
‘A future with a different past.’
‘No such thing.’
‘I told you from the beginning I’d never leave my family.’
‘And I hope you enjoyed your reward. You didn’t go to heaven, and you’re not going to heaven. You went to Moldova, and all points east.’
‘We can’t turn back the clock.’
‘It’s ancient history, forget it. Your problem was you didn’t know how to change your mind. That’s a weakness, Cassius. They called you on it at the tribunal.’
‘No one stood up for me, or believed the disciples were highly trained. Remember the tomb. These people plan in advance, and their following keeps growing, so their long-term strategy is working. That’s why we need to question Thomas right now.’
‘You lost a corpse, Cassius.’ Valeria zipped her bag and stood up, looked down her nose at him. ‘I expect you and Baruch to work together, which means having a chat with Paul. Co-operate, and you’ll be fine. You two have more in common than you think.’
She could say the words but that didn’t make them true. Gallio didn’t reply. She was wrong and her error didn’t deserve a response, as wrong as that.
‘You don’t believe Jesus is alive, do you?’ he said. ‘You’re pretending.’
‘I’m doing the job that Complex Casework has asked me to do.’
Gallio had spent his first viaticum pay cheque on a shipment of medicines for Beirut. Jude could save himself, and his patients shouldn’t have to suffer because their hospital was run by a man who believed in Jesus.
Valeria put the bag over her shoulder, checked her watch. ‘You lost a corpse and you should have left your wife. You lost her anyway. Your judgement is fallible, Cassius. That’s why it’s Paul, not Thomas.’
At the Babylon crime scene Gallio keeps his ID open for his own benefit, to remind himself he knows what he’s doing. The plastic wallet hangs limp in his hand. Thomas was murdered at a construction site, on a concrete slab foundation about ten metres by ten, with two plastic utility pipes raised at one corner.
‘Speared,’ the police chief says, not looking so dapper since the passing of midnight, since the detailed examination of the body in the morgue, since this journey into the Babylon badlands. The dawn is not a sight he usually sees. ‘You’ve been over the body with the coroner. Thomas was stoned first, then finished off with a length of iron foundation rod. Through the heart.’
The sun breaks over a building. Gallio folds away his ID, puts on his sunglasses, and the Polaroid lenses turn blood on concrete into rust. He hunkers down on his heels. Must have picked up some tinnitus from the air travel, or the hum of fridges in the morgue, sound in his ears at a frequency his brain can’t decipher.