Baruch slams the trapdoor shut.
‘Make yourself comfortable. No charge.’
For the first time Lazarus gets a clear view of the assassin sent to kill him. He is dark, heavy, an offence against Lydia’s careful version of heaven.
Lazarus recoils and trips over a cushion. He has a soft landing. He looks desperately for a weapon, grabs a rounded flask of perfume and holds it ready. ‘What have you done with Lydia?’
‘She hasn’t been here since Saturday. Remember Saturday? You came back from the dead.’
Baruch feints one way but moves the other, easily deflects the bottle that Lazarus throws at him. He catches Lazarus by the arm and tumbles him into the cushions, jamming his elbow into his side. He reaches round Lazarus’s neck, and grips him by the jaw. He could break him like a chicken.
‘If I wanted to kill you you’d be dead, several times over. The Sanhedrin priests have changed their plan. I’ve been ordered to leave you be.’
Lazarus tastes the salt sweat from Baruch’s palm. He can feel the creak of his bones about to break.
‘They’re aiming for Jesus instead. He shouldn’t have upset the tables of the moneychangers. By doing that, he saved your life.’
Baruch pats Lazarus twice on the cheek, then releases him. ‘I should say he saved your life again. Twice in a week. Some friend.’
Lazarus rubs blood back into his arms. ‘If you’re not going to kill me, what do you want?’
‘Very little. Hardly anything. Just one thing. It’s about last week, and where you went. I want to know if there’s anyone waiting.’
In the tomb Baruch had been nervous, uncertain. Now that he’s had time to think, he is terrified. He has always sincerely believed that when his victims died they were dead.
‘Remember I could have killed you. So tell me. Are they waiting? It’s not as though I make the decisions. I just do the killing.’
Lazarus says: ‘I’m looking for Jesus. Do you know where he is?’
‘Maybe they’ll forgive me. In the Sicarii our training starts at seven years old. I never had any choice.’
‘Help me find Jesus. I know you can do that.’
Baruch looks up sharply. ‘Are you after the money?’
‘What money?’
‘The priests have set money aside, as a reward for whoever brings him in. Someone will claim it sooner or later.’
‘But not you?
‘I’m a killer. That’s what I do. I’m not an informer.’
‘So you do know where he is?’
‘I know where he was last seen. Tell me what I can expect on the other side.’
Lazarus stares into the assassin’s frightened, unblinking eyes. In return for news about Jesus, he gives Baruch what he wants.
Cassius needs five or six men, no more, but he is out of the habit of asking permission.
‘You were wrong about Jesus,’ the governor says. He is a balding, middle-aged administrator. Every inconvenience is a direct assault on the authorised idleness he’d been promised. ‘You reported in writing both to me and to Rome that Jesus couldn’t gather a following in Jerusalem. You captured Lazarus but you let him escape.’
The governor is not impressed. He has cancelled all leave, and Cassius will not be allocated even one soldier to develop his hunches about Lazarus. Passover is a volatile festival. It reminds the Judaeans that they’re expecting a messiah and the end of the world, but there will be no end of the world, not with Romans in charge.
‘Why have we lost sight of Jesus? What do your spies think they’re doing?’
The spies have been keeping Cassius informed about the movements of Lazarus. After his escape from the fortress Lazarus had been seen leaving Isaiah’s house, and then later he was spotted in the Lower City. The spies will not, however, lay a hand on him. They know where he’s been.
‘I can pick up Lazarus, but I need those legionnaires.’
‘Why didn’t you flog him? The soldiers stay here in barracks. Jesus is the one we want.’
Cassius goes to the marketplace below the west wall, where Yanav is continuing his brisk business in genuine Lazarus relics.
‘Where is he?’
‘Which one?’
‘Either. Both.’
‘Maybe in the same place,’ Yanav says. ‘Lazarus is searching, like everyone else.’
‘And where exactly is he looking? Take an educated guess.’
‘If I were him, I’d start where Jesus was last seen. Bethany. Anywhere else is speculation.‘
Cassius thinks: what would Lazarus do? He’d be smart, and travel at dusk, to attract the least attention. Cassius decides to get ahead of him. He crosses the Kidron stream, alone, and settles down behind a shrivelled fig tree. He is hidden from the road and he waits. Birds return to their nests, and night falls heavily on the last of the day, squeezing out a final grey layer of light.
Lazarus turns the corner. He walks briskly, like someone who knows he’s being watched.
Cassius follows him, up the gravelled tracks through the uneven groves of the Mount of Olives. Silver leaves twitch green and grey in the twilight. Lazarus can make this journey in his sleep, but as the night blackens, dark as the inside of a sack, Cassius becomes confused. He trips over a tree root and skins his hands. He scrambles upright, but the incline is against him and he bangs his knee. It feels as if the whole world is against him.
He can’t keep up, nor see where he’s going. He sits down, and breathes deeply, because regular breathing is good for logical thought.
‘Yaaaah!’
Shouting aloud also helps. He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, then pushes the skin of his forehead towards his hairline. He lets go and becomes himself again. Organise, he thinks. Fetch a horse, wait for some moonlight to ride by.
He turns back towards the city — saving people is harder than he’d expected, but he isn’t giving up. If Lazarus can be persuaded to cooperate, then nobody will have to die.
3
At first, Martha doesn’t recognise him. The last time she saw her brother he was tied to a rope being dragged away by Romans. She spent hours grieving him a second time, and then Jesus returned from Jerusalem. He calmed her, and almost convinced her that everything could turn out well.
His beard has grown. She mistakes him for Jesus, but then the moon comes out and there he is, Lazarus her brother, alive yet again.
Before his death, Martha hadn’t cried in thirty years. Now she cries every day. Tears come as she rushes towards him, as she pulls at him and holds him close. She slaps her wet cheek against his neck, his shoulder, then holds him at arm’s length to check his face.
‘What about the Romans? Where are they?’
‘Where they always are. What are you doing outside?’
The house, the Home of Lazarus Martha and Mary, is pale in the moonlight. Beside the bay tree in the courtyard a fire is snapping, and Martha had been sweeping embers back towards the flames. Lazarus wants a closer look, and with his first step he kicks a chip of crockery across the yard.
‘We’re burning everything,’ Martha says. ‘Every object you ever touched. The priests ruled the house was unclean, defiled by contact with the dead. One of the younger ones made me collect the kindling.’
‘I heard Jesus was here. After I was taken by the Romans.’
‘He said it didn’t matter, that we’d soon forget. They’re only possessions.’
Lazarus sees the remains of his razor near the base of the fire, the copper blade twisted and blackened.
‘The rugs,’ Martha says. ‘Gone. The blankets we carried from Galilee.’
Martha has saved what she can for everyday use. Otherwise their life is in ashes: clothes, bedding, the bolt of silk that Mary and Martha were keeping for weddings never destined to happen. ‘Jesus is probably right. You can’t take it with you.’