‘You fell asleep, didn’t you?’
The sergeant is gentle with them, because every soldier learns on joining up that sleeping on duty is punishable by death. That’s the tightness of the ship they run. Or rather, falling asleep on watch while active in the field is punishable by death. In camp, the guilty are punished with a beating.
‘We’re in camp!’ the men shout. They come and bang their fists against the mirror, wanting to see who’s behind it, seeing only themselves in reflection and their clenched terrified faces. They know Cassius Gallio is there, and he’s watching. Cassius Gallio knows he’s watching. It’s up to him whether he chooses to intervene.
‘We’re in camp!’ they shout, again and again.
Gallio presses the button for the loudspeaker, and the soldiers hear him as a disembodied voice. ‘This is an occupied territory. We’re in the field.’
By falling asleep on duty they endanger their fellow soldiers. They cast suspicion on their colleagues and superiors, especially their superiors, as if Speculator Cassius Gallio can’t be trusted with a simple execution.
‘We’re in the field, gentlemen. You know the punishment.’
He revisits the crime scene, first at Golgotha and then the tomb. Beyond the police tape the tomb is a high-end Jerusalem unit, a cave sculpted to resemble a room. Inside, Jesus’s burial clothes are folded neatly on a stone shelf, and more than two weeks have passed since Gallio was at another tomb, in Bethany, where Jesus called Lazarus out. Lazarus was bound up in his linen and Gallio with his own eyes had seen Lazarus fall flat on his face. His sisters Mary and Martha had to unwrap Lazarus and help him up, so in Jerusalem Jesus can’t have acted alone. To make good his escape he needed accomplices.
On Gallio’s orders, the stone door of the tomb had been sealed along the edges with household mortar. An extreme precaution, but after Lazarus Gallio was nothing if not thorough. Now his exceptional measures made the breaking and entering look twice as miraculous. The bastards had set him up. Calm, he thinks. The escape they engineered is clever, but not impossible. There is always an explanation.
Probably, allowing for the frailty of human nature, the idiot common soldiers had fallen asleep. Why stay awake? The corpse wasn’t going anywhere. While the guard slept, the disciples removed the mortar and rolled back the stone and made off with the body of Jesus. Gallio has no idea why, but he intends to find out.
He increases the reward money. Judas could be bribed, so why not the others? None of the disciples comes forward. Days go by. Instead of a corpse the city throws up collaborator chaff greedy for a share of the reward.
‘He was giving off a kind of brightness. Was he? A white kind. He had a beard. Who else could it be?’
Gallio feels like banging his head against the walls of Jerusalem, outside a one-chair barber-shop, outside a laundrette. He realises how happy he was with his ordinary problems, his wife and a baby he ignores for days on end. Judith accuses him of not loving her, not as a husband should, of neglecting his child, of sleeping with someone at work. He doesn’t deserve a home, she says.
He stays longer in the office, as if complications can be solved by working harder, but no line of enquiry works out for him. It feels like a jinxed investigation. There’s the woman in the street who wiped Jesus’s face, but the image they have is grainy, and from above. There’s no match on any of the likely databases.
Gallio issues the blurred picture to his people on the ground, and they move outward from the place where she broke from the crowd. ‘Have you seen this woman?’ Nobody admits that they have. While his agents persevere, Gallio plans a visit to Joseph, rich enough to own a private tomb as well as a villa on the exclusive heights of Abu Tor. Only Joseph of Arimathea is an acquaintance of the Prefect, who refuses Gallio a warrant.
They do eventually track down the black man, the one on the tapes who carried the cross-beam. He’s an African from Cyrene called Simon, caught trying to leave the country to the north of Jerusalem at the Haifa ferry terminal. This turns out, despite Gallio’s high hopes, not to be the guilty escape it looks like. Simon is a tourist, first visit to Israel, visa in order, threatening to report his treatment as a hate crime. And no criminal record. He appears to be the last type of person a policeman believes in: a genuine bystander. Gallio has no choice but to let him go, watch him board the ferry. Simon turns from the deck and gives them the finger.
Gallio has yet to type up a statement from Judas, as part of the report he seems unable to write. He’d planned to file a full account after finding the body, a career saver framed as a success story for the values of civilisation, as demonstrated by the victory of his powers of reasoning over entrenched local ignorance. Now he’s mostly looking for someone to blame.
Pilate will feature in the report. Not even Pilate knows where he stands with the CCU, and the Prefect is responsible for a major anomaly. Once Jesus was dead, Pilate allowed a Jewish councillor to take the body from the cross. The Jewish priests, however amenable, are the enemy. The occupiers can tolerate the enemy, but allowing them to interfere with executions is not, repeat not, good procedure. The crucified body goes into an uncovered pit for the overnight dogs. There is a reason for this. It precludes any doubt about the nature of the punishment.
Jesus died, fact. He was definitely dead, or Gallio who was there at the crucifixion would never have authorised the release of the body. Not to Joseph of Arimathea, not to anyone, but Jesus has been sighted alive so many times that Gallio begins to doubt himself.
Briefly, he considers wording a request to reclassify the case as Missing Persons, but can’t imagine how he’d argue for a change of emphasis. To investigate the resurrection of Jesus is in some sense to believe in it, and opening a new line of enquiry admits the possibility that a man nailed to a tree by expert infantrymen would not die. There are limits.
Cassius Gallio spends more nights at his desk, the office emptied, the case rooms locked. He calls Valeria. He hangs up. He calls Valeria and her phone switches to voicemail. He wants to say sorry, and please, but mostly he’s saying he’s there, and he needs her, or someone like her.
She calls back. He doesn’t answer. He needs comfort, and the supernatural will not survive the warmth of Valeria’s body, the reality of the backs of her knees. Whatever else is uncertain in this city, Gallio is certain he wants to sleep with Valeria, right or wrong.
She calls again. He picks up.
‘That last message didn’t sound like work,’ she says. ‘Got a job for me?’
‘I want to see you.’
‘You see me every day.’
‘I’m in the office now, on my own.’
‘Sorry, Cassius. Not coming.’
‘Please, Val. You wanted us to spend some time together. Val?’
She’s gone, or she’s thinking. All she need say is yes, I will come to the office, I will hold you. Together they’ll forget Jesus for an hour or so, remember what on this planet men and women who like each other are designed to do best.
‘Cassius, you’re in enough trouble. This will make it worse.’
‘How so?’
‘Losing dead prisoners, propositioning junior colleagues. None of it looks good, not from the outside. Trust me on this.’
Cassius Gallio visits Judas instead, and at the safe house Judas is grateful for friendship. Gallio feeds him and provides consoling wines, every sip the evidence that Judas has done no wrong and life on earth is fair. Judas eats and drinks and reddens in the face, he sweats and suffers while aiming to live happily ever after, to prove a point: I am enjoying myself, so god is not vengeful, or better doesn’t exist.