He embraces them both, whether they like it or not, but Cassius Gallio has one final question. He whispers into Bartholomew’s ear. ‘Who is the disciple Jesus loved?’
But Bartholomew has already gone, showing his boarding card, joining the queue for the scanners, and he never answers the question. Gallio watches him through Security, though he can’t think of anyone less likely to set off the alarms. Bartholomew has no hand luggage. He has no pockets.
Back at the White Hart Gallio and Claudia rut like animals. Cassius Gallio sometimes opens his eyes on her, or changes positions for the benefit of Jesus, should he condescend to be watching. See? See what you’re making us do? If god exists we have no privacy. There is no time on our own, up to our secret devices.
Gallio finishes. He starts again. After the second bout he comes back from the bathroom and Claudia is on the phone. To Valeria, Gallio thinks. He doesn’t know why he can tell, but he can.
‘Who are you talking to?’
Claudia disconnects her call, checks the screen for Call ended.
‘I have a family. Any objections?’
Her cover, her legend. Every ambitious spy is married, and lonely, because the secret of the secret police is that they search for connections they never find. They endure a lifetime of detection to discover that life has no detectable meaning.
Gallio speculates a scenario in which Valeria suggests to Claudia the idea that she should sleep with him. He takes Claudia’s phone from the unused second bed and puts it screen-up on the windowsill. They rut like animals. Coming back from the bathroom, Gallio sees she’s asleep. He checks her call log. Deleted.
When Claudia wakes beside him Gallio holds her, skin to skin, treasuring the touch of her while he can. He moves his lips close to the softness of her ear. ‘We could move here,’ he says, ‘leave our problems behind.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
She twists to look at the other bed, then at the windowsill.
‘You don’t need your phone.’
Gallio feels how much she longs to reach for it, to confirm her existence in the world outside this room at the White Hart freehouse in Lincolnshire. Through the wall, from Bartholomew’s former room, they can hear chat TV, bursts of studio laughter. There’s nothing to keep them in Caistor. Even their made-up reason has left.
‘You could bring your girls over. We’ll enrol them at the grammar school. They say it’s one of the best in the country.’
‘Want me to check its rating?’
‘Leave the phone. I’m serious. We could build a new life here. Just the two of us, and your two children.’
The dilemma of Jesus is a complex case best left to Valeria, while Claudia and Cassius Gallio stay out of harm’s way, cultivating a mild version of heaven in provincial England. They don’t need much: a service pension and retirement villa, occasional sunny spells as they love each other to death in a territory that’s safe and sound. Caistor will be eternal life, or feel like it.
Claudia’s phone vibrates on the windowsill. They look at the white light from the lit-up screen, doubled in reflection on the window. The phone stops vibrating — voicemail, or the caller hung up.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gallio says. He touches her stomach, her hip, pulls her into him. ‘We shouldn’t have done this.’
Easy to say. Most words are easy to say. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.
The phone vibrates again, moving across the gloss paint of the sill with each new shudder. It stops. It starts again, and unless the caller gives up soon the phone will reach the edge and fall. Claudia gives Gallio his hands back and gets out of bed. She answers the phone, turns away until the far side of her face and her underarm reflect in the black of the window. She snibs her hair behind her ear. Her buttocks contract.
‘Totally,’ she says.
She disconnects, tosses the phone on the bed, looks for a towel. Can’t find one, pulls on her pants instead. Then jeans from her suitcase. She clicks on the bedside lamp, and Gallio shields his eyes.
‘Bartholomew is dead.’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘In Bashkale, not long after his plane landed.’
‘Jesus.’
‘He was skinned alive.’
IX: ANDREW X crucifixion
CASSIUS GALLIO SITS naked, head in hands, in the upstairs room of a pub in an English market town. The stress of chasing after Jesus has cut lines through his cheeks. He has grey in his days-old stubble, like cobwebs in foliage, and a diagonal pillow scar above the wound near his eyebrow. Knife-fighting in his sleep. He scratches his chin. Apart from the blue eyes he could pass, from a distance, as an apprentice disciple of Jesus.
Claudia is filling her suitcase. Like disciples, spies have limited belongings, and Gallio watches Claudia roll her anonymous tops, bag her sensible shoes.
‘Stay in Caistor with me,’ he says. ‘Live happily ever after.’
‘Bartholomew is dead. Skinned alive.’
‘That’s in the past already. It’ll be forgotten today or tomorrow, what difference does it make? Doesn’t change anything, and the world keeps turning.’
Claudia looks frightened, and older. Married. ‘We’ve been ordered to report to Valeria, in Rome. The case has moved forward. She increased the security code to Severe, as a response to Bartholomew’s killing. Code Red, unlimited budget.’
Skinned alive. Sawn in half, bludgeoned to death, hung upside down, stoned, shot by arrows, beheaded, hanged and now this. How random was a skinning, an eighth violent murder of a disciple? Each was more dead than the last, like a demonstration that no loving god could protect them.
Gallio imagines the inner Bartholomew, and without his skin his delicate body is tubes and fibres and feathered blood vessels that branch and branch again into nothing. His anatomy is full of gaps, with empty space between vein and muscle, between muscle and bone. His vital organs are barely acquainted.
‘We should have kept him with us,’ Claudia says. ‘At the end he almost stayed.’
‘Why does Valeria want us in Rome? What about Cairo?’
‘She said Rome. Those are her orders.’
Rome, after all this time. When they were cleaning Simon’s body out of the garage Gallio had thought it was over. He had failed, again, and Baruch was a sad dead example to anyone sincerely attempting to understand Jesus. For a short while Gallio had preferred the delusion of life in Caistor, where the planet could tilt and the raffle would still be called. The absence of significance in provincial England had seduced him.
‘She suspects the disciples Peter and John of being in Rome,’ Claudia says. ‘Trying to trace both of them, so far unsuccessfully. This isn’t finished.’
Gallio puts his hand on her shoulder. She zips her suitcase. He wants to slow her down, to establish that the value of now is equal to then and next. Caistor, in the present, can compete with the lure of future glory or the flight from past mistakes — even with Rome. Claudia should give him a sign that she takes this present moment seriously, as he does.
‘Stop, Claudia. Stand up and look at me.’
He wraps her in his arms and holds her, her eyelashes on his neck, blinking, brushing his skin, meaning her eyes must be open. She’s waiting this out, arms at her sides. Her elbow moves and Gallio suspects, behind his back, that Claudia is checking her watch. Time to let her go. He lets go. She picks up her book from the bedside table, gathers brushes and pots from the bathroom. Gallio follows her like a lost dog.
‘You don’t have to jump as soon as Valeria whistles. She’s chasing shadows.’
‘I have to follow orders. We both do. That’s how the CCU works.’