If Jesus is alive, and as powerful as Bartholomew believes, then he is everywhere and the answer to every question. He may even care. But if he doesn’t intercede he might as well not exist — the Jesus who abandons his followers to the saw and the rope and the stone is not worth seeking out.
Gallio asks the younger John Varlow, in a break from bagging-up the corpses, to recommend a tea-shop. In fact Caistor has only one, the Tea Cosy Café over the model railway shop, with a view of the market square. This is where every morning Gallio and Claudia debrief, comparing notes where Bartholomew can’t overhear. There is often not much to say, so they watch the time go by.
‘Stop looking at your phone,’ Gallio says. ‘Life is also here.’
They take the table in the window, though if life is here in Caistor life is once again slow. Claudia holds out her phone, screen facing Gallio. A text from Valeria, not the first. ‘Read it. She says good things about you.’
Gallio sees the length of the message, sighs, pushes his cup and saucer to one side and holds the phone in both hands. Valeria is full of praise. She commends Cassius Gallio for containing what sounds like an appalling situation. Baruch was a loose cannon (she always thought so) but now they can push on against Jesus free from Baruch’s obsession with Paul. Valeria advises Gallio, frankly, to keep his phone turned on. They’re not living in the Dark Ages. Next, she has new intelligence that the disciple Matthew is in Cairo.
‘According to our sources Matthew is writing a book,’ Claudia says. ‘Valeria reckons he’s their archivist. If so, he may have privileged information about a terror attack.
‘And he may not.’ Gallio hands back the phone. ‘She wants me to fly to Cairo.’
‘I know. Caistor, Cairo. International man of action.’
‘I can’t do this any more.’
Claudia looks up from her phone, sees he’s serious and makes a show of powering the phone off. She has to study the edges and the top to remember how to do it, the line has to appear in her forehead, then she places the dead phone face down on the table and slides it to one side. She leans forward over her hands. ‘You can’t give up now. We’re making progress. It can’t get worse than Simon.’
‘No?’
‘Baruch was a conflicted individual.’
‘He was deranged, but I liked him.’
‘He started taking the afterlife seriously. We made a mistake letting him get ahead of us but he’s done us a favour. Simon’s killer isn’t Jesus and it isn’t Paul, who’s under observation and house arrest in Rome. It looks like no single assassin is responsible. Baruch killed Simon. We know he didn’t kill the others. The riot police killed James. The murders are random.’
‘In which case there’s no point searching for Jesus. He’s not a controlling genius with a secret plan, and he doesn’t have conclusive answers.’
Claudia reaches across the table and places her hand on Gallio’s hand, her movement a textbook copy of Valeria in the restaurant when he first arrived back in Jerusalem. Claudia’s wedding band is hard against Gallio’s knuckle, but he doesn’t mind. He leaves his hand where it is, under hers, never making the same mistake twice.
‘You look miserable.’
‘I live in a randomly brutal universe.’
‘We’ve done our job. Nothing more we could do.’
‘I wonder. Where do you think Baruch is now?’
‘In a bag in cold storage at John W. Varlow and Son.’
‘He changed his mind about death being the end. Baruch couldn’t stand the idea that Simon knew more about death than he did. He came to believe that the disciples had made a decisive discovery, one that changed everything.’
‘So now Baruch is chasing dead disciples in the afterlife?’ Claudia withdraws her hand. She can allow Gallio a day or two of vulnerability, considering the bloodbath he witnessed, but he shouldn’t fall apart. ‘This isn’t easy for me, either. I didn’t sign up to strap a man’s hips back together before he’d fit into a body bag. If you’re not thinking straight give the reason a name. Shock. Symptoms are confusion and energy deficit. First week of Speculator training.’
Cassius Gallio adds sugar to his tea and stirs, even though the tea is cold. One day he might even get around to drinking it.
‘Where’s Bartholomew?’
‘At the church. Where he usually is.’
‘Not a committed mourner, Bartholomew. You probably noticed. Hardly overcome with grief, is he?’
‘Let’s go back. We should pack.’
They have a twin room upstairs at the White Hart. Bartholomew has the next room along, a double. Claudia booked them in on the evening they arrived, when the pub’s other two rooms were taken by married ramblers and an agricultural products salesman. All three left Caistor first thing the next morning, after a blue-lit night disturbed by mayhem and murder. Two days later Gallio and Claudia are still in the twin. Gallio blames confusion and energy deficit. Claudia cites Valeria’s budget, and worries that Gallio might be scared of the dark. Between them they can easily justify the twin beds, and they confirm that this is a strictly professional arrangement by showing the utmost respect for each other’s privacy.
Gallio flops onto his single bed, lies on his back. Stomach, side. Back. He kicks off his shoes in the middle of the afternoon, pulls a pillow over his face.
‘We’re supposed to be packing. Cairo, remember? Matthew is doing whatever he does in Cairo. He’s at risk.’
‘I have this picture stuck in my head,’ Gallio says.
‘What?’
Gallio lifts up the pillow. ‘Baruch before he killed himself. The determined look in his eyes.’
On the table separating the beds is a novel Claudia pretends to read before sleeping. Gallio picks up the book, reads the premise on the back. Young Americans adrift in Spain, deft, very very funny. He wonders how she can relate to that, when here in England a disciple of Jesus was sawn in half.
‘I’m going to shower,’ she says.
‘Again?’
‘Then we should make a move. We can’t stay here for ever.’
She locks herself in the bathroom, though Gallio would like her to lie down next to him on his narrow single bed. He’d like that very much, though he wouldn’t know how to ask. He has spent a long time living with men, making sure to avoid sex except for that one misjudgement in Hamburg. He went back to the shoe shop the next afternoon, to apologise and to offer the girl money. She refused, said she liked him. He never saw her again.
Of course he’s shaken up, and he understands his reaction. He has seen death and he wants sex, suddenly alert to the only clock that matters, death then sex then death then sex then death sex death, one thing after another. He needs to fuck Claudia. He wants, needs, whatever, to push her head down into the sheets and to be in her. Not just now. He wanted it already last night and the night before and every night but he stayed where he was in his bed. He’s suffering from an instinctive reaction, an equalling out, and he recognises his impulse for what it is. Sex as a compensation, a consolation. Sex as the opposite of death.
He is, all the same, slightly ashamed of himself for wanting Claudia so fiercely. It reminds him that before he was civilised he was not. His people long ago and seemingly for ever lived in forests in Germany, until they were massacred in battle by an army with superior technology. Civilisation had arrived. Gallio’s stepfather, the general in charge, had offered to adopt the orphaned children of slaughtered enemy chieftains. He was full of human decency, after the battle was won.
But however young those children, the slate was never wiped entirely clean. Cassius Gallio can dream of matted blonde hair and double-edged hatchets. In his past, somewhere in the history that made him, a blue-eyed shaman pierces a chain through his tongue, and for years on end he drags a clutter of human skulls behind him. In days gone by, a long time ago, this must have seemed important. The shaman and the papery skulls and the firelight chant to Odin for victory in the upcoming battle.