“This is a dangerous mission,” Plotius declared. “Never mind getting there, but on the way back we shall be carrying a lot more money. Enough to make it really worth killing for.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that going there we are only taking sacrificial money, but going back we shall be taking the money that our Elders use to grease the palms of the Roman authorities to give rights of Roman or Italian citizenship to the rich of Judaea. They come through too!”
Uri was dumbfounded.
It was not the Romans who distributed citizenship rights to the inhabitants of the provinces; members of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem and their families were legally excluded from the circle of potential Roman citizens. In principle, a subject of Judaea or Galilee could never become a Roman or Italian citizen, and that went for Syrians and Egyptians as well.
Yet there was a way nonetheless — and how else but with money!
How else but with money. That was the expression his father had used when he was obliged to enter the silk business.
Only half of their mission was exalted, then, and the smaller half at that, it appeared.
But how did the joiner know all this?
Uri gulped his wine and stayed quiet. It did not enter his mind to ask if they really were taking the sacrificial money as Plotius says, where it could actually be.
The joiner had a good profession: he could work anywhere at all in Rome outside the Jewish quarter, and because houses often burned down, there was always work and it paid decently as well. It was this prospect of a bright future with which his father had tried to persuade him to become a roofer, it being easier than joinery; it involved no more than placing tiles or slates onto and alongside each other. Plotius must have picked up several languages in the course of his work, as his employers might belong to any nation, so he must have heard all kinds of things along the way. He might be on good terms with individual Roman Elders, including bankers, having worked for them; these days huge houses were being built just to be rented out.
“Do all the others know about this?” Uri asked.
“I suspect they do,” said Plotius. “We get a small commission; after all, we earn it. We’ll be nicely paid off.”
Uri said nothing, just sipped his wine.
Plotius broke out in laughter.
“It’s not what you would call nice,” he admitted, “but if a delegation is carrying money over there, why let it go back empty-handed? On top of which we also have a safe-conduct.”
“Who gives us the money, then?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Plotius. “One day someone will come from the prefect with a fair-sized sack that jingles. We won’t be hard to spot, even in that colossal mass of people. We are an important delegation.”
“Why from the prefect?”
“Because he has been getting a taste too.”
Uri pondered: so that’s how it went.
“Have you done similar work before?” he quizzed.
“No, but I’ve heard that’s the way it’s done.”
“So does the person in question also hand over a list of who is to be granted citizenship in Rome?”
“I very much doubt something like that gets put down in writing. They’ll tell the names to someone with a good memory, and he’ll register them; there won’t be many names to learn — twenty or thirty at most.”
“I’ve got a good memory,” Uri said with pride. “If I read something once, then I have it down perfectly, word for word.”
“You’re exactly the sort I would expect that from,” said Plotius.
Uri picked up a note of sarcasm in his tone and felt a trifle ashamed of himself. Boasting again. Fat good it was his father warning him.
He appreciated Plotius’s candor. Maybe the Lord had arranged this delay in Syracusa so that Uri would finally learn something about his companions.
He would have liked to ask a few other things about the whole setup but he did not dare. Plotius guessed what he was thinking.
“The carriers to Rome do not usually give the names of anyone except those who have actually paid,” he said. “It’s not possible to squeeze in anyone who has not paid. That sort of thing comes to light sooner or later, and the consequences would be serious. There’s a tariff for everything; you can’t gain citizenship free of charge. Just think how lucky we are; we acquired Roman citizenship because it was tossed our way when we were kind enough to be born.”
Uri nodded in agreement. He really had been lucky; he had to thank his grandfather, who perished in the effort to free himself for his grandson, whom he never saw, to become a Roman with full rights of citizenship.
“So Judaean Jews who are full Roman citizens and therefore no longer taxed can move to Italia without hindrance,” he deduced wisely.
“That’s not the point,” said Plotius. “They still have to pay all the Jewish taxes, and they cannot leave the province that they have been living in up till now without special permission, but they do escape the control of the Sanhedrin and fall under Roman jurisdiction. The Jewish authority has no powers over them; it cannot even arrest them but has to turn to the prefect responsible for the matter, who is a long way away. The Roman municipal administration sends the prefect the official list of new Roman and Italian citizens if they happened to live in Judaea; from that moment they cannot be touched by Jewish courts. That is what the real point is, because that is a legal security that does not otherwise exist in Judaea. That is priceless.”
Uri was astounded.
“There was a time once in Jerusalem,” Plotius continued, “when I was arraigned, and not to get hauled up before the Sanhedrin I had to prove that I was a Roman citizen. I told them, and they were so scared they backed right off, did not dare lay a finger on me, though they kept me under close observation and I was unable to leave the city. So I wrote to the prefect in Caesarea, and they got an answer two and a half weeks later that I genuinely was a Roman citizen. Letters between Caesarea and Rome get a response in a fortnight because of the state diplomatic bag. As a result the Jews were forced to leave me alone.”
“What were you accused of?”
“I don’t recall,” said Plotius.
Uri had the sense to let it go at that.
Then Plotius said something else to which Uri did not pay any attention at the time, adding with a smile, “The mail in Rome is slower than the Jewish. News gets from Jerusalem to Antioch in a day and a half at most, because it is passed on by beacons on hilltops; it might take only a day, but one is best advised to avoid Samaria, because those scum light interfering flares to make it impossible to read messages.”
It felt good to idle about in the dark at the back of the tavern; Uri could dimly see colorful figures moving past on the sunlit street, many carrying the same sort of sportulas as they did in Rome, which indicated that here there were likewise patrons and clients, just fewer of them; they were the spitting image of the sportulas in Rome. Evidently Rome dictated the fashions — something that filled Uri with pride. There, inside, he looked at Plotius’s cheerful, mocking, deeply lined face over a thick, unkempt, black beard. He could see that nearby face well, and because he could make it out well, to him it felt familiar. If he did not know he was a Jew and Plotius were to shave his face, anyone might easily take it to be the profile of a Roman noble, complete with dignified aquiline nose in the middle. His baldness was utterly Roman in character. It would be worth having him sit as a model for a bust of a Latin patrician; more than likely there had been patrician blood flowing in the veins of his slave grandfather or great-grandfather.
The wine loosened Uri’s reticence, and he asked Plotius about his trade.
Plotius recounted that he earned his living as a joiner. It did not pay badly; indeed, after a commission in Jerusalem a few years ago he had been hired to build villas for the rich in the Roman style, and he accepted because he had learned all the house-building tricks of the trade back at home, in Rome. In recent times massive new villas had been going up in the center of Jerusalem; they were so big and splendid that they vied with the best in Rome, and not a few of them were graced by his own handiwork; he would show Uri later. Well-off Jews were willing to pay to be able to display their wealth in the city center, above all in the fashionable upper city, rather than on the outskirts. Homo novus, the lot of them, he added contemptuously. He had spent years building villas in Jerusalem, being passed on by personal recommendation from one satisfied customer to the next, and they did pay handsomely, whereas he hardly spent anything because the cost of living in Jerusalem was incredibly low, as compared with Rome.