‘You went to your daughter’s school. That wasn’t the plan.’
Of course she knew. Cassius Gallio is the junior now, the exile who should expect to be monitored.
‘I haven’t agreed to any plan.’
Gallio remembers this place, and the only change is a TV in a corner, half way up the wall. The TV is off, or broken. He wants a beer, an Amstel, and probably a chaser if Valeria can claim expenses. His hands feel unsteady. He puts them under the table and orders a mineral water, gas. The bubbles may convince him there’s more to the drink than the water.
‘You look older,’ she says. Her blonde eyes, turned on him for the first time, have a hard edge. A hard centre, too. He wonders why she’s putting on a stern face, auditioning for the role of an older woman. Then he realises she is an older woman. She doesn’t need to audition, because ageing has chosen them both.
‘Thanks. Moldova, Germany. The ranks.’
‘Must have made a big mistake.’
Cassius Gallio leans forward over his water, weight on his elbows, aware of Valeria at his shoulder. He does a thing he does. He taps the pad of each finger precisely against its opposite, pad after pad in sequence, thumb through to pinkie and back, proving his brain has absolute control over his ageing but sober body. He goes through the sequence several times. Finger to finger, back again. Never misses. ‘So the judges of the tribunal decided. In their wisdom.’
They pinned him on two indictments: misplacing the corpse of an executed criminal and failing to protect a key witness, even from himself. They recorded Judas as a suicide, and Gallio didn’t cover himself in glory by suggesting an alternative: the disciples had murdered Judas to avenge his betrayal of Jesus. Either way, the death of Judas was Cassius Gallio’s fault, but he’d been confident of support from Valeria. As a Speculator, even a junior one, she should have insisted on approaching the evidence objectively. Judas was a civic hero who’d outwitted a leading terrorist. He had plenty of money, nothing to fear from the authorities, and he didn’t leave a note.
The tribunal duly asked Valeria for her thoughts, and also a character reference for Gallio. She surrendered her notebook, empty apart from random shapes which didn’t help him at all. As for his character she declined to comment, given their personal history.
Now, so many years later, Valeria is not Cassius Gallio’s enemy. He won’t have enemies, not at his age. She’s a former colleague he knows not to trust. She sent him an El Al ticket, economy class from Munich, and he used it because he misses the man he was. He imagines she needs him. Her need makes her vulnerable.
Gallio takes off his sunglasses, some kind of defeat, and rubs at the side of his naked eye with a thumb.
‘Why am I here?’
‘I looked you up. The Jerusalem militia recently captured two of the original Jesus followers, which surprised us. We didn’t think the disciples would dare come back, but these ones were found in the Lower City. We had the situation under control, and for a while the Israelis kept the two men safe in a lockup.’
‘Don’t tell me. The disciples of Jesus escaped. They were rescued by angels, and have a story to prove it.’
‘You can help us.’
On the day Cassius Gallio had seen the body of Judas split apart, he’d texted Valeria. Later that evening, before they came to arrest him, he’d left a second message pleading with her to intercede on his behalf. He loved her, he said, and regretted not expressing himself earlier and more clearly. She should tell the tribunal that Judas wasn’t the problem; Jesus was the mystery they needed to solve. When they found the body none of the other unknowns would seem so daunting.
Gallio sent the same message twice, to be sure it arrived and because he hadn’t known who else to ask. He felt out-manoeuvred by the Jesus faction, by Jesus as a personal opponent, so he’d persuaded himself he was special to Valeria beyond the call of duty. Between them they’d see that justice was done.
She hadn’t replied, and after a year or two Gallio stopped feeling bitter. Valeria was an ambitious professional who valued her career. For her disloyalty, along with his shattered life, he shifted the blame onto Jesus.
Cassius Gallio applies pressure to the twitch near his eye. He is gentle with himself, pushes in with his thumb and then the heel of his hand. The nerve stops fluttering, it starts again. He gives it a tap. A harder double-tap.
‘Cassius?’
‘Here.’
‘You know these people. You were closer to them than anyone else. We have a job for you.’
‘You got married.’
‘That’s not why I called you in.’
‘Someone important. Rome, obviously, for the right calibre of husband. Now you’re the woman in charge.’
‘You’re well informed, but out of date. I’m divorced. I run the Complex Casework Unit, Middle East region. It’s not the biggest job out there.’
‘Nor the smallest.’
‘We’re reopening the Jesus case.’
Cassius Gallio fiddles with his sunglasses, uses a stem to spread icemelt into curves on the table. ‘Hence the secrecy.’ He makes alphabet shapes no one can read, not even himself. ‘A bit embarrassing, investigating a dead man.’
‘We don’t know who was responsible for the fire in Rome. It was big. Thousands dead, damage still being repaired, and the CCU are ruling nothing out, not even provincial cults with a grievance. The Jesus belief has grown and we killed their original leader.’
Valeria puts her hand on his, and Gallio doesn’t know if she’s forgiving him or asking for forgiveness. The case should never have been closed, not with so many questions left unanswered. Cassius Gallio had been right, but being right was overrated. Being smart was safer.
Gallio registers the veins in Valeria’s hands, and a grey liver spot. The years they’ve spent ignoring Jesus have aged them both, but she should have backed him at the time. He won’t repeat his mistake, trusting her, projecting a life they never had, and he checks his heart and is glad he feels nothing. Or very little. He is immune to her so he pulls his hand away, makes the first misjudgement of his comeback.
‘Why now? Why me?’
‘We want you to identify a body.’
In camps and barracks beyond the soft reach of civilisation, sweating or freezing, Cassius Gallio had tried to forget. The Jesus case was unlike any other he had handled. As was the Lazarus case, only weeks before it, but after the tribunal he had no incentive to unravel these enigmas.
Jesus stopped being his problem, and Gallio busied himself with the tedious life of common soldiering. Across the Empire, moving with his legion, he helped persuade the benighted and barbarian of their need for elected assemblies.
He tried not to feel nostalgic for a genuine interest in what he was doing. He followed orders, and acted as if the civilising process was the inevitable end of history. The world could not go backwards, not now. Those who swore by their gods would be persuaded that an imaginary friend was a less reliable leadership option than an educated governing class. A celestial city should not shine more brightly than a city built with planning controls over centuries. There was an order to the universe, and the first would be first. To suggest otherwise was to encourage false hopes, because observably the last will not be first. Not all of them. On the borders of civilisation, wherever Gallio’s legion was posted next, the last were poor and malnourished and oppressed. They were firmly last, and none of the local superstitions had ever changed that fact.
Yet still at night he lay awake, letting the darkness do its worst. How had the disciples vanished the body of Jesus? From Tripoli to Colchis he collected variations on a theme — mineshafts, quicklime, the furnace. None of the tested methods for disappearing a body applied to Jerusalem, not in this particular case. Gallio had investigated every possibility, and kept returning to a story his stepfather used to tell from the birth of civilisation, or soon after.