‘Could you have missed him?’ Gallio has given Valeria responsibility for the surveillance teams, and anyone can make mistakes. ‘Could you have confused him with one of his followers?’
‘I don’t think so, we don’t know.’ Valeria covers for her operatives, who are working double shifts. ‘They all look similar. It’s possible.’
CCTV is inconclusive. The disciples are in and out. From above, with fisheye angles and in corridor light, the men are interchangeable. Except the dead one among them would be limping. He would limp, if he could walk, but probably he couldn’t even walk. He’s not alive, he’s crippled and he’s dead.
Gallio confines Judas to a safe house in the Upper City, a flat in a modern block beside the museum where the street fills daily with a useful confusion of human traffic. Gallio tells Valeria to give Judas what he wants, within reason, and Judas stays indoors and comfort-eats. He likes his bottles of wine, but when Gallio asks Valeria what she makes of him she shrugs, flicks open her notebook like a blank ID. In the centre of the page is a pencilled square, heavily shaded at the edges and empty in the centre. She pushes the notebook close to Gallio’s face.
‘I need more than that.’ Gallio bats her hand away. They touch, for a split second. ‘Has he tried to contact anyone? How frightened is he?’
‘That’s all I’ve got. I’ve thought it through.’
Fair enough — the silent treatment because he won’t sleep with her. Not now, Gallio wants to say, let’s get this sorted and maybe then. You know I want to, only this is a difficult time, and she should remember he’s married. Until now his marriage hasn’t deterred her. She kept coming all the same, split up publicly with her boyfriend, a uniformed sergeant. I’m married, Gallio had said, but she sensed his weakness. She knows he doesn’t believe that faithfulness matters, because like her he’s ambitious, and what matters most is a promotion one day to chief of section Complex Casework Unit, Europe. As a minimum career requirement.
Their shared vision of the future can make ‘now’ feel a limited experience, and Jerusalem an insignificant posting. They earn a hardship allowance for serving in the field, but in these peaceful days the garrison feels more like a complacent army in camp. They can get frustrated, spies in a country where there’s nothing to spy on. They have been bored. Then Lazarus. Lazarus changed everything. Now this.
‘Thanks for your help,’ Gallio says.
‘You’re welcome.’
Gallio submits a request to the Prefect of the Province of Judaea, in writing, to bring in a disciple from the leadership group. He doesn’t care which one, probably Peter. The way Cassius Gallio sees it he can play Peter off against Judas: the two former colleagues in separate rooms, neither of them sure what the other may confess. Then in the same room, to wonder how much pain the other can bear. Not that the interviews need descend into violence. The anticipation of pain is often enough.
Pilate refuses Gallio’s request, also in writing. He’s covering his back. Pilate has seen no evidence to incriminate the disciples, and this is the Middle East. The zealots in the mountains are unpredictable, and in this particular region a riot could start a war. Cassius Gallio should avoid inflaming the situation, and an arrest would be a negative at this time.
Gallio barely goes home. He sleeps at his desk, arms as a pillow, woken by 3 a.m. phone calls when his wife needs help with the baby. He tells her not now, he has a lot on his plate. She shouts down the phone, says if she’d known he’d be like this with his work then she’d have married one of her own.
‘Like who?’
‘Someone simple. A Jerusalem man without big ideas.’
‘I don’t do big ideas.’
‘You do about yourself.’
In his office in the early hours, now that he’s awake, Gallio wipes the sleep from his eyes and explores the angles: before, during, after, determined to work out how they did it. He reviews the coverage. Play, rewind, play. Pause. Break it down. Look for deviations from best practice. He finds so many they make him wince. He can’t understand why this man Jesus was treated differently from everyone else.
The cameras pick Jesus up in the street outside Herod’s Palace, and there’s footage from there until the waste ground of Golgotha outside the city gates, where the execution takes place. The street-views on tape are cut from fourteen separate cameras, and the screen geeks have spliced the shots into a single sequence. From the beginning Jesus is not in good shape, weakened by flaying. He carries the cross-beam himself and often he falls. His mother breaks from the crowd to help him, a lapse in security. She should never have made it through the cordon.
Soon after that the uniformed escort forces a spectator, a youngish black man, to help with the cross-beam. Gallio freezes the face, but recognition software can’t find a match. A little later a second unidentified individual, this time a woman, comes out of the crowd to wipe Jesus’s face. No match, no criminal record or previous arrests. The first part of this death/resurrection scam is clean, Jesus and his disciples passing every test of criminal hygiene. Gallio uncovers no loose ends, no careless recruitment of accomplices with a history.
Jesus falls again. The third time he falls some more women, as a group, hold up the procession with their local weeping and wailing. They are suspects, and every face needs identifying before being cleared. Then Jesus falls again. Falling could be a signal, but this time nothing special happens, no one else arrives to help him, to deliver a message or receive instructions. The execution is back on track, though behind schedule due to the many delays. By the time the procession reaches Golgotha the soldiers have regained control. Beside the cross they strip the prisoner, following orders. Cassius Gallio’s orders.
Gallio studies the images, even though he was there. On the cross Jesus is naked, to ensure he can’t conceal some secret device to help him counterfeit death. If Gallio has learned anything in Jerusalem, it’s that Jesus can’t be trusted. He’d pretended to bring Lazarus back to life, and staged various medical illusions that he passed off as real. Gallio was wary of whatever he’d come up with next, and had vowed to be ready.
Naked, however, nailed to a cross, Jesus has been decisively outwitted. He dies. Gallio watches him die. Over and over again. Civilisation is the winner.
The body needs to be down before sunset, out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath, but this next part of the tape makes Gallio’s chest seize. The endgame is a lesson in bad practice. Either side of Jesus the two prisoners have their legs broken, the standard procedure to accelerate death. Jesus does not.
Why not? No one can say. The Prefect gave permission for a Judaean high priest and councillor, identified as Joseph of Arimathea, to take down the body. Why would he do that? No one knows, but there are regulations, and the regulations have been flouted. The camera tracks Joseph, a known Jesus sympathiser, as he carries the body of Jesus to his tomb. His own tomb, private property. The body of Jesus disappears inside and the image blurs and whites out. Show over. The security geeks cut to a drug deal in a bus shelter, then a cat asleep on a bin.
The cameras see everything; understand nothing.
Rewind. Stop. Play, Pause. Gallio stills the moment of death, watches Jesus die frame by frame in slo-mo, and Jesus has one of those faces. When the face is moving, it is him, recognisably a cult leader with a fanatical following. On pause, however, the stilled image never accurately captures the living individual Gallio would recognise. Forget the face and trust the body, bruised and defeated and bleeding — that part of it, the violence and the killing, is real from whichever angle Gallio chooses to look.