‘Nothing? A total empty zero-shaped hole of nothing?’
Pilate slams his hand against the arm of his chair, against a marble pillar, and a third time against a window frame. He finds the hard edges of what is otherwise an office of soft furnishings, a big man running to fat since his posting to Jerusalem as Prefect. In the good old days, when he was a soldier, he had fewer crimson cushions in his life.
He paces. He points his rigid finger. ‘All you had to do was guard a fucking corpse. You’re a young man but you’re also my regional Speculator, a member of the supposedly elite military police. What is going on here?’
‘On the day of the execution there were irregularities.’
‘Not good enough. This nonsense about resurrection has to stop. Now. Yesterday. The day before yesterday.’
Gallio feels a powerful urge to smack Pilate down. He’s a Speculator, with authority to think more creatively than a senior administrator, stuck with his everyday chores. But after Lazarus, Cassius Gallio isn’t so sure of himself, of what he can do or when he’s right.
‘The area searches are ongoing,’ he says, calming himself with the facts. ‘We have Judas in a safe house and the disciples under observation. I’m looking for the man who helped Jesus carry his cross-beam in the street. Also an unidentified woman who wiped his face when he fell. Messages may have been passed, we don’t know.’
‘Spare me the details. Get out there and put an end to it.’
‘Can I bring in Peter?’
‘No.’
Gallio is leaving when Pilate calls him back.
‘The money, Gallio. I’ve heard whispers.’
Cassius Gallio doesn’t know what Pilate is talking about, but Pilate hasn’t finished.
‘Don’t let this story about money be true.’
‘I have affidavits from the on-duty soldiers saying they received no unsanctioned payments.’
‘For what?’
‘For allowing unauthorised persons to remove a body from a tomb under guard.’
‘So no chance they might be lying? And suspicion doesn’t just fall on the grunts, does it?’
Pilate turns his fleshy head like a flightless bird. His nearer eye is sharp and alive, but the distant more dangerous eye is doing the looking. ‘The Jerusalem high priests, including the Sanhedrin council, are suggesting we took money for relaxing our watch on the tomb. How else could a body go missing?’
‘They made that up. The priests want to discredit any talk of resurrection. A man coming back to life is a stupid story, unbelievable, but some people are starting to believe it.’
‘Find the body, Gallio. Please, for the sake of my sanity. And for yourself, for your future. Your time is running out.’
Valeria’s ex-boyfriend is the sergeant in charge of executions. He has strong hands and a capable face made broad by early baldness. Lots of know-how, good with women. His eyes are moist, a little frightened. No one wants an interview with the Speculator.
‘Why didn’t you break his legs?’
The sergeant blinks. He recently lost his girlfriend, he doesn’t want to lose his job. ‘He was dead.’
‘You ignored the procedure. You’ll have heard the chatter that Jesus is alive and out there somewhere, free as you like on his unbroken legs. That’s why we have a procedure.’
‘We speared him, to make sure. He was dead.’
This enquiry is not personal, and Gallio hopes the sergeant appreciates that he’s only doing his job. They are not competing to sleep with Valeria, and none of these problems are of his making. He will, however, find out the truth behind the execution and burial because every mystery has an explanation.
‘Was he, though? Are you certain he was dead?’
The sergeant is a career soldier. He won’t admit that he acted out of compassion, nor does Cassius Gallio want him to admit to it. He should be desensitised, because attending to executions is part of the job he must do. The situation is different for Gallio. He took control of the Jesus execution as a chance to right the wrongs of his misadventure with Lazarus. He doesn’t have the experience to be indifferent, or the necessary distance.
But nobody does, against an enemy like this. Gallio had called up soldiers to guard the tomb, and he acknowledges they were not the finest troops at his disposal. Whereas executions require precision, and a steadfast belief in the rightness of the civilising project, to stand on duty outside a tomb requires an iron bladder. Gallio had picked the lowest soldiers they had, out of respect for the legion, men on charges for leaving live rounds in the chamber or wearing the wrong hat on parade. The hopeless cases.
Their mission was to guard a corpse, to ensure the dead stayed dead. He thought they might have managed such a simple task without fucking up.
Gallio accesses the bank records of his idiot tomb guard detail, but none of them are that stupid. If the soldiers were paid off they’ve hidden the money, and sure enough Valeria finds a stack of used bills taped in a sandwich bag inside a mattress in the garrison block. Dumb enough.
‘Who gave you the money?’
‘What money?’
In the garrison jail no one can hear Cassius Gallio sigh. He upends the sandwich bag onto the floor, kicks through the bricks of paper money.
‘That’s not ours.’
Valeria picks up a solid packet of notes, and jabs the most stupid of them in the throat. The soldier is not forthcoming. She holds his nose and stuffs the money into his mouth until he retches.
He weeps. He blames a local man, named Baruch.
‘He told us his name and offered to pay us. The body had already gone. The tomb was empty. What was the harm?’
‘You could have refused the money.’
‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Swore he was an official of some sort, and the body was already missing. Not our fault, he said. He told us we wouldn’t get into trouble.’
Or if they did, then this man Baruch would straighten it out. They were to say the disciples had stolen the body. The soldier has one hand over his Adam’s apple, and he checks his teeth with his tongue. He sounds aggrieved.
‘He told us the Jerusalem Speculator had approved what he was doing. He’d spoken to you.’
‘Me? He mentioned me by name?’
‘He did. Said you knew each other. We’d be fine.’
‘He was wrong.’
Cassius Gallio lets his face rest, in all its misery. He has a downcast face, when at rest. When he’s feeling nothing, and his face should look neutral, it relaxes into a picture of dejection. His wife has commented on this, after sex.
‘So Baruch paid you to say the disciples stole the body. In this made-up version of events, that you couldn’t even make up yourself, why didn’t you stop them at the time? What lie did he give you to answer that? It’s the obvious question.’
‘They didn’t steal the body.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We would have stopped them. We were awake the whole time.’
‘But Baruch paid you to tell everyone the disciples are thieves. How would they have done it?’
‘He said to say they were armed.’
‘With what? Dangerous sandals? We’ve been through their hotel. No knives, no guns. Not a single offensive weapon. Not even a blunt object.’
Gallio has the sergeant complete the interrogation. The sergeant is not a bad man, and Cassius Gallio watches through a one-way mirror as he patiently asks the soldiers to take off their clothes. They have no scratching or bruising to suggest they fought for the body of Jesus.