By the time Gallio reaches the Agios Andreas the basilica is filled to capacity, with three thousand worshippers in the tight rows of chairs. They have come to see Andrew die, as they do every year. The wolfmen and the drunken police and the Greek gods of Patras lash Andrew to an X-shaped cross, the flesh of his wrists and ankles swelling round the liturgical belts that bind him. The heavy rhythmic chanting of Andrew’s killers is part of the carnival entertainment, and will remain so for years to come, the old familiar song as Andrew the disciple of Jesus is lifted up. The spectators join in. They clap their hands to the rhythm of the singing as his cross rises high on wires, up and above the holy screen, halfway to the dome and heaven.
Every death is planned, and Andrew the disciple of Jesus is ecstatic, triumphantly not dying of old age or exhaustion. He has avoided those desperate fates, and is intent on joining the eight who have gone before him. The bindings cut into his wrists, into his ankles on the X of the cross, and Andrew is the ninth atrocity.
Gallio struggles through the standing-room-only at the back, bursts into the central aisle but for Andrew he’s already too late. Civilisation will not save Andrew now, because what’s done is done, from Andrew’s collapsing lungs to the blood in lines between his teeth. Gallio knows about the blood, and the bloodstained teeth, because when Andrew catches sight of him he smiles.
X: MATTHEW burned alive
JESUS IS THE connection. Nine times Jesus, but Cassius Gallio does not accept defeat. He knows the secret of the disciples, their love of death and dying, and two of the three survivors have been sighted alive in Rome. Gallio will save them. Whatever Peter and John have planned, they will not die on Gallio’s watch. Jesus and the disciples have manipulated death to their advantage for long enough.
On his covert journey from Patras to Rome, in the seafront chapels and quayside shrines of southern Europe, Gallio sees memorials to the crucifixion of Jesus. Every crucifix reminds him that the disciples are capable and cunning. Peter survived Baruch in Jerusalem, even though he was captured. He has avoided every assassin as far as Rome, the heart of civilisation.
Which is why, some time after the death of Andrew in Patras, Cassius Gallio finds himself sitting in a Roman bus shelter. He stares at primary colours advertising hair products and free-delivery bathroom suites. Also and always posters for the Circus, here and at every Roman kiosk: the latest films, plays, albums, the next Circus in line. This coming Saturday, in the first major performance since the fire of Rome, the Circus posters promise wild dogs, chariot-racing, and the public execution of Peter the disciple of Jesus.
Gallio groans. Valeria has no idea what she’s doing. The death of Peter is exactly what Jesus wants, and Gallio is determined to stop it happening. He hasn’t shaved since Caistor, barely washed since his meltdown in the Botanical Gardens in Patras. From Patras to Brindisi, to Venice, to Rome. He loses track of time. Andrew died weeks ago, or it could have been longer, and since then Gallio has been jumping ship, travelling in the cash economy, a deserter without papers in ragged clothes with unkempt hair and the look of a criminal Jesus.
Strangers help him along the way, and he distrusts them. People are kind, offering food and shelter, which makes Gallio suspect the Jesus network of encouraging him, urging him towards Rome for purposes not his own. Know your enemy, he thinks, and he learns the sign of the fish, an increasingly familiar shape on his undercover journey from Greece. Two lines curve from a point and intersect to make the tail, a simple but recognisable symbol of the fish for fishermen, for the disciples.
With the aid of fellow travellers, many of them believers in Jesus, Gallio arrives in the eternal city. He has formulated a plan of action that starts with Paul, who is under house arrest in a district called the Fourth Regidor. However, Gallio’s most direct route from the port is blocked by police on the Fabricius bridge. The officers are stopping and searching, security level Red: Severe. Gallio turns back, looks for a safer route, tags on to pedestrian tours and at market stalls pretends to take an interest in SPQR bracelets and letters whittled from Lazio wood. Pick out R O M A and take the letters home. Pick out the name of your favourite saint while keeping an eye on the patrols on the Via Palermo and the Viminal Hill.
Every main thoroughfare is blocked, until Gallio ends up in the bus shelter. He wants a meeting with Paul, but forces beyond his control don’t want him getting through. Interesting, but as a deserter he can’t risk the backstreets and a patrol picking him up. Lost for ideas, he makes the sign of the fish with his finger on the dusty Perspex of the bus shelter. A middle-aged woman with plastic shopping bags asks him if she can help, and Gallio is no longer surprised by the reach of their network.
‘I was hoping to see Paul,’ he says, ‘in the Fourth Regidor. Jesus would rather I didn’t.’
‘Nonsense,’ she says, ‘your information is out of date, that’s all. Paul moves about freely and was last seen outside the city at the Abbey of the Three Fountains. You can take a bus.’
It could be a trap. On the other hand not even Jesus could brief all his followers, every single one, on the off chance they’d meet Cassius Gallio at a Roman bus stop. Gallio is using them; they’re not using him.
He crosses the road and waits for a bus heading in the opposite direction, away from the heightened security in the city centre. For a long time there’s no sign of a bus, just carts full of sand and building materials. Rome is a permanent work-in-progress, chisels on marble, shouting, the bang of hammers getting things done. Gallio sees freestanding columns where life thrived before the fire, he sees roofless temples and doubts if the city will ever fully restore itself.
He doesn’t believe that Peter and John are responsible for the ruins, not all of them, yet Peter is the entertainment at this Saturday’s Circus. Saturday 2–5, says the poster in this and every bus stop, The Greatest Show On Earth. It looks like exactly the kind of extreme result a disciple would welcome.
At last, after about a million years, a bus arrives. The driver knows the Abbey, and tells Gallio to watch out for the Three Fountains bus stop, near the Siemens Italy offices, can’t miss it. The driver is right, and the Siemens headquarters is at a busy out-of-town junction beside a flyover. Gallio walks down the hill, cuts across a park, and picks up signs to the Abbey.
From the entrance, when he arrives, Gallio can see a long garden bisected by a tree-lined path leading to the Abbey itself, which from a distance looks like many of the old church buildings in Rome. A baby cries, his mother one of a handful of believers compelled to see the site where an apostle died. Mum and pushchair are leaving, and at this time of day the café at the lodge is closed.
Just before the main Abbey building, next to a bubbling water source set into the green bricks of a wall, a man and two women are standing in close conversation. Fieldcraft, Gallio thinks, they’re using the running water to counteract listening devices, but fortunately he knows how to join them. He stands nearby and with the toe of his shoe he makes the shape of the fish in the gravel at his feet. They recognise the sign, and welcome him in as a fellow believer.
Yes, they say, Paul is known in this place but he hasn’t been here recently. They’re more interested in Peter — he’s in the underground dungeon at the Mamertine Prison, and they were just saying that apparently he baptises fellow prisoners with the damp from the fetid walls.