Claudia says: ‘Too late, Cassius. He’s gone.’
She’s pretty, he remembers, and clever and has lovely teeth, and in Caistor he almost believed he loved her. None of that matters now. He’s a deserter who ditched his papers and his CCU-issue phone. The penalty is the same as for sleeping on duty in the field.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’
‘Hush,’ she says, finger to her lips. ‘There’s not much you can say. Valeria doesn’t forget.’
‘You knew I was coming.’
Gallio’s chest feels suddenly empty, and he breathes in sharply to fill the empty space. It doesn’t help, because he sees how this has happened. He was wrong about Paul. Paul is simply a double agent, working for Valeria. The further step where in fact he’s working for Jesus was a false speculation. Gallio has over-complicated, again.
‘Paul phoned us to say you were on your way. You’re losing your touch, Cassius.’
The storeroom smells of bread and charcoal, of yeast and faintly of open drains. Spilled flour dusts the flagstones, imprinted with random footprints, but the baker upstairs is nervous. Perhaps she knows what has taken place in this room in the past. She thumps her feet against the floor to warn Claudia she has a customer.
‘Still running Valeria’s errands, I see.’ Gallio runs a hand over the steel prep table, looks at his palm for traces of pastry, or dried flakes of blood. ‘I bet you always did, even in Caistor.’
Claudia lets the accusation hang. A denial would be welcome, Gallio thinks, the compliment of a lie to at least pretend she slept with him because she liked him.
‘No hard feelings,’ she says.
‘No feelings at all. We used each other. Suffering from shock, both of us. Probably did us good, aided our recovery.’
‘If you say so. Why did you tell Paul you wanted to kill John?’
‘You’re a Speculator, work it out.’
Gallio is surprised by her question, by the time she’s allowing to pass. Despite everything she hesitates, as if held up by the memory of their nights in Caistor. She’s the CCU agent sent by Valeria, but now she’s here she remembers the skin-to-skin.
‘We’re not killers, are we, Cassius?’ she says. ‘We represent order and the future. We’re moving the world along, making it a more reasonable place to live. Aren’t we?’
She is trying to think well of them both, but mostly of herself and her decisions in Caistor and the job she came back to do.
‘I don’t think we used each other,’ Gallio says, taking this chance to let her know. ‘Or not only. That wouldn’t be an accurate description of what happened, in my opinion. And I was there.’
Claudia claps her hands, a cloud of flour dust rising to the striplights. ‘I don’t know, and I think I probably don’t care. I was sent to fetch you, that’s all. No time to waste. So come along quietly, because you’re back where you started. CCU is the only family you have.’
Ground Zero is an alcove at street level of the ruined Circus Maximus. This is where the great fire of Rome is thought to have started.
‘They made it look like a cooking accident,’ Claudia says. ‘Picked the perfect spot.’
Printouts of the missing and dead flap on temporary fencing like the struggle of a living organism. Cotton flags overlap with cardboard placards: We Love You, Why? but Cassius Gallio is distracted by a photocopy of a teenage girl, Alma’s age, cheek against cheek with a lolling dog. He steadies himself on a bamboo scaffold, and looks up its fretted length into the blueness of the holiday sky. Birds swoop into nests high in the ravaged monument, for them a year like any other, and not the worst season to be alive.
A scab of time has grown here, protecting tourists from the horror, one more stop for the gawping barbarians on their Roman visit of a lifetime. Already the fire is history, though security remains tight. To one side of the Circus main entrance two centurions in feathered helmets buckle their leather skirts. They’re from Eastern Europe for the coach tours, and they share a cigarette before their shift in front of the cameras. The real thing is provided by Securitas employees with scanners beside the turnstiles. Everyone gets checked, even Claudia. She can jump the queue, flash her ID, but she has to walk Gallio through the scanner. On the other side she ignores the hawkers offering private guided tours.
‘Second tier,’ she says, and follows Cassius Gallio up crumbled steps to an archway where he blinks into the brightness of the damaged grandstand. Valeria is waiting midway along a stone terrace, in the shade of a dyed sail usually deployed during performances. Her face is in orange shadow.
Claudia stays at the end of the row, formally out of earshot, sunglasses fixed in place.
Gallio takes the seat next to Valeria and for a while they win at keeping silent, a trusted Speculator tactic. Whoever speaks first will say too much, and is therefore usually the loser. They watch the banked seats in other sections of the stadium, where security teams launch search dogs along the rows. Low-income employees sweep the sand of the arena. If some are undercover agents, and Gallio assumes they are, he can’t tell which ones are working for Jesus.
‘Remember when we came here on leave?’ Valeria speaks: she loses. ‘Years ago, soon after we met in Jerusalem. We planned to take on the world, you and me.’
Cassius Gallio does remember, though he won’t squander his advantage by saying so. Strange that back then she was younger than him, and that had seemed to matter, but now her age is irrelevant. They had sat in exactly these seats and he had failed to say he loved her while crocodiles chased a Parthian and at some point they watched a crucified lion.
‘The two of us together, Cassius, once you’d left your wife. Now you’ve finally become a deserter, but in a more official sense. Sorry, but that’s the choice you made when you boarded a plane for Patras.’
‘I came back. Here I am in Rome, reporting for duty.’
‘You couldn’t keep out of Claudia’s pants, could you?’
Of course she knows; information is her specialism, because knowledge is power.
‘I have high hopes for Claudia,’ Valeria says, ‘despite her lapse in Caistor, and with luck she’ll survive you unscathed. As I did. You, however, deserted your post and lost your tracer. Unfortunate. We recovered your phone from beneath an altar in the Agios Andreas in Patras, along with your documents. Now we pick you up in Rome, running round and threatening to kill the disciple John. What happened to you, Cassius?’
‘I can explain.’
At the end of the row Claudia is sunning herself, holding up her face to the light.
‘You disobeyed my orders. I wanted you to locate Matthew in north Africa, but you developed a strange fascination with Caistor. Then you disappeared without permission. I brought you back too soon from Germany, I think, because the tribunal was right about you. You’re unhinged. You forget which way is up.’
Cassius Gallio is aware of his weathered and beaten clothes, his beard and hair grown long. ‘I’m undercover. I’m an active Speculator.’
‘I hardly recognised you, and you don’t have the right to use that title.’
‘I’ve been on the road, looking for Jesus. That’s what you asked me to do, and if finding him was simple you’d have done so before now. You needed me. You still need me. I know more about these people than anyone else you’ve got.’
After the crucified lion they’d seen a gladiator’s nose sliced off by a short-sword. How the Circus laughed that day. Gallio remembers the sound of forty thousand people in hysterics, and a gladiator scrabbling for his nose. The joke was probably funnier because earlier they’d put out his eyes. Tomorrow is Peter’s turn, and Valeria should know she’s making a mistake.
‘I think Jesus is coming back. The Circus gives him an opportunity to make a spectacular reappearance.’