Terrorist prevention officers, one man, one woman. Security has tightened globally since the fire in Rome. They examine the name on his passport, check the photo against his face.
‘Sunglasses. Take them off.’
His naked face against the photo. They get a good look at Gallio’s blue eyes. Yes, he thinks, take your time. You know who I am, the idiot who let a corpse escape, but much older and with a face creased like a veteran. Of something, of everything.
‘Business?’
Gallio puts his glasses back on. ‘Holiday.’
They laugh. ‘Love to see that particular brochure.’
So they know he’s here. Cassius Marcellus Gallio has landed in Jerusalem. All these years later and he’s back, following orders, no idea what the Complex Casework Unit want from him. Presumably the Israelis are equally bemused, which explains their charade with the passport. They’re watching. Everyone is watching. Now they know he knows they know.
The officials hand back Cassius Gallio’s passport and wave him through.
Arrivals. He checks the limo namecards, but no one has been sent to meet him. A local driver holds up a sign for Mr Williams, and Gallio could borrow Mr Williams’s car as far as the old city centre. We all look alike to them, he thinks, pale-haired, blue-eyed, with in his case a taint of the cold-hearted north. However hard he has tried to assimilate.
Don’t do anything foolish. Gallio tells himself he’s been out of action a long time, and he’s nervous. He’s not the man he was, and should proceed with caution. As instructed, he buys a magazine — Time in English — Valeria’s sense of irony. Then he follows the signs for a disgraced Speculator without a waiting limo to Exit, to Taxis.
Cassius Gallio wades through the Israel heat, but the first cabbie won’t take him, not at lunchtime: he has tomatoes and a flatbread on paper across his thighs. All Gallio needs to know. Next in line is a dented Mazda seven-seater and from the middle seat, through the Perspex screen, Gallio studies the driver’s right ear. He makes an effort to imagine this man and his ear in the time of Jesus. Israel may have been brighter then, more optimistic, with a freshness to the lie of life after death. He can’t remember, or needs more time to decide.
The driver’s right ear has blackheads and a single unplucked hair.
‘The Old City. In your own time.’
The driver activates the meter and the radio, rap music in Hebrew. He likes the song and turns it up, then heaves the Mazda in front of a delivery truck and swears forcefully, even though everyone in Jerusalem should now be good. That’s what Jesus was supposedly for.
The meet is the Birman restaurant on Dorot Rishonim. Valeria’s choice, and Gallio had checked out the place as best he could without resources, on TripAdvisor. Great food but terrible service, which didn’t surprise him. Secret police love a place with terrible service. No eavesdroppers, and the staff barely notice the customers.
He wonders at the secrecy, and realises that if he disappears no one will know.
On Jaffa Street Gallio taps his rolled-up Time against the screen. He pays, asks for a receipt, and steps out onto a relaid pavement. Car bomb, he thinks, sign of the times. The leaves are back on the trees so the blast happened at least a year ago, but in Jerusalem past and present coexist. Possibly the future too. Cassius reminds himself he doesn’t know everything, so be careful, be so very careful.
He stands still for at least a minute, a rube, a tourist. He takes off his jacket and looks for heads in parked cars, for patterns in the traffic, for pedestrians who never quite manage to move along. He folds the jacket into his suitcase.
Nothing suspicious, or that he wouldn’t expect to see. His wheeled suitcase is loud and innocent on the relaid pavement behind him, handle in one hand, rolled-up magazine swinging in the other. From half a block away he sees Valeria sitting at an outside table.
For years, ever since the tribunal went against him, Gallio has caught glimpses of women who remind him of Valeria. Valeria turns out not to be one of those women. Since the time of their youth her face has grown angular, stronger than he remembers. She is fuller in the waist, and with her sunglasses and sleeveless top she could pass, like Gallio, for a city-break believer.
He drops the Time magazine on an empty table, the signal to abort, and walks straight past.
Cassius Gallio can’t arrive in Jerusalem and make the CCU his first point of contact — he has made a vow to be a better human being. The magazine stunt buys him perhaps an hour, while Valeria secures the B meet.
Within ten minutes Gallio is at the International School, and the gates are open: home time. Through the arched gateway he can see children of all colours running and shouting. One of these is his, and he ought to feel an emotion beyond the worry that his daughter won’t be there, or that he won’t recognise her. Then he sees her, he immediately knows which one she is, her movements less supple than the others. She’s chasing a boy but one of her legs doesn’t straighten. Sadness rises in him, to his throat.
He steps back, an outsider with his suitcase on wheels, a foreign salesman in short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses, a lost obvious bomber. Fuck. He shouldn’t draw attention to himself, or no more than he can help.
Alma has a caliper on one leg, a school rucksack over her shoulder. She’s making her lopsided way to the gate, and Gallio imagines Judith will be picking her up. He panics. He retreats into a shop and watches from the shadow of an awning, half hidden by a stack of orange-crates. In her International School sweatshirt Alma looks like the others but the hitch in her step makes her somehow tough, unstoppable. Gallio might be wrong. He’s her dad but knows nothing about her. He looks for Judith. Doesn’t know much about his wife, either, not any more.
He’s trying to force himself into making a decision, some definitive move either forwards or back, when Alma looks straight at him. He’s convinced she sees the half of him that’s visible, though she won’t recognise him, not after so long. He steps out from behind the crates, but then a silver Range Rover pulls up between them, the only car that dares park directly in front of the school. A man comes round from the driver’s side and offers Alma his hand. She ignores his help and climbs in the back. The man picking her up is Baruch.
‘Who was following you? We checked. There was nobody there. We made sure. Nothing.’
They’re at the B meet — Gallio remembers the procedure — a Lebanese place in the Old City’s Armenian quarter. Valeria is inside, at the back with an unobstructed view of the doorway, and Gallio sits beside her on a bench against the whitewashed wall. No eye contact. They watch the door instead, ready for surprises.
‘Why all the secrecy?’
‘We don’t know who’s watching.’
‘Neither do I,’ Gallio says, ‘apart from your lot and the cops at the airport. Didn’t like the look of the other place. Can’t be too careful.’
Cassius Gallio had prepared for this meeting, had visualised it incessantly since her orders had found him in Germany. But now they’re sitting beside each other he doesn’t remove his sunglasses. From Valeria he gets: authority, curiosity, no perfume. A streak of silver in her hair.
She gets: he doesn’t know what she gets, and wishes he didn’t care.
A yellow drape over the entrance shifts in the late afternoon breeze, and at the other occupied table off-duty recruits rate the local women. They go through a range of criteria, count on their fingers, burst out laughing.