Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

Claudia tells him the fire made tens of thousands homeless. The city housing authority had set up a tent city with running water on the Campus Martius, but the crowded conditions bred wild speculation about who’d started the fire.

‘Human nature to speculate,’ Gallio says.

‘Right. But some have more of a gift than others.’

A grease fire, the amateurs agreed. For as long as anyone could remember, carts selling street food had traded from beneath the wooden arches of the Circus Maximus. Fry up some veal brains or dough balls, fat catches fire, immigrant chef panics, chucks on a bucket of water.

‘People wanted someone to blame,’ Claudia says. ‘Persecute the short-order cooks to teach them some health and safety. And if it wasn’t them it was probably the Jesus followers, who had a motive.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Jesus is a carpenter. Paul is a tentmaker. Plenty of work in Rome for their sort now.’

Claudia must have realised that Gallio has guessed she’s not a lowly analyst. She’s a Speculator. But he doubts she knows he prays. What Cassius Gallio does is this: he closes his eyes and lets his hands go loose, as James does, and he makes a conscious effort to visualise Claudia’s face. In the darkness behind his eyes he builds a clear picture of her pretty, clever features. There she is, inside his head, her corrected teeth, her tight upper lip, her distinctive nose. Then he pours himself into her brown imagined eyes (the eyes in the image he’s made) and takes up the space inside her imagined head (inside his head), from where he looks back out to a clear mental picture of himself.

Gallio is amazed, sometimes, by what the human brain can do. His mental effort is a kind of prayer, a way of projecting an ideal Claudia who thinks about him as much as he must think about her, to construct that image in the first place. His intense imagining feels like a mind game powerful enough to deserve results, but he doesn’t know if his system works. The prayers may never have reached her.

‘This mission could get you noticed,’ Cassius says, though that isn’t what’s on his mind. Apart from the prayer thing, which can be intense, he could tell her he feels calmer when she’s around. ‘We find Jesus and it’s medals for both of us.’

On the central monitor James kneels, sits on his heels, rests his hands loose on his thighs. On a side monitor the streetcam shows riot officers leaning in a doorway. They burst out laughing, and for one of them the laugh becomes a cough. He’s wearing too much equipment, and when he doubles over his baton and webbing make him stumble.

‘Who would win in a fight,’ Claudia takes another pretzel, fingers in the bag. ‘Achilles or Samson?’

Gallio has spent hundreds of nights alone and has previously considered this question. ‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

He scratches his ear. ‘On Samson’s haircut.’

‘Wrong. Depends who discovers the secret weakness of the other.’

‘You mean who discovers it first.’

‘Correct. Which means the hero with the stronger god, who can identify weakness and is powerful enough to get the message across quickly and clearly.’

‘Or whichever man is luckier.’

Gallio wonders if she can hear his heart.

‘Cassius?’

‘Yes.’

They’re sitting close together on the bench-seat — his feet on a toolbox, hers on a backup monitor — and Gallio worries about his breathing. He doesn’t breathe properly, not like her husband breathes. Claudia will register the fact that he’s not a normal breather, or that he’s doing it wrong. He hasn’t felt like this for a very long time.

‘The night at the tomb.’

‘Don’t want to talk about that.’

‘When you were demoted. What did they charge you with?’

‘Failing to prevent the theft of a body.’

Claudia pulls her legs underneath herself and turns towards him. She wants more. Despite the narrow bench she’s making the van intimate by acting out an idea of comfort, suggesting Cassius Gallio can comfortably tell her the truth. Not some tired tribunal truth, but the truth.

‘You think I’m trying to use you in some way,’ Claudia says.

He wasn’t thinking that, but now he does.

‘You can check me for a wire, if you want. I’m clean. I’m interested in what happened back then, and what that means for now.’

Finally, in the privacy of a surveillance van (with the latest recording equipment, the hidden cameras) Cassius Gallio will tell a sympathetic colleague (her photos of her children, her sharing of the pretzels) whatever secrets he failed to confess in the past. Claudia is good at this, very good.

‘After the shock of Lazarus I was keen for Jesus to stay dead. That’s why I put guards on the tomb, but the tribunal didn’t believe me. They couldn’t understand why I ordered a watch over a dead man, and they preferred a more rational explanation. They decided I was involved in the escape. I either drugged the soldiers, or hypnotised them, I fabricated an errand so they were absent at the critical moment and then made them the scapegoats. The accusation was ludicrous, or I wouldn’t be alive today.’

‘So what happened to Jesus? You must have some idea.’

‘I don’t know. We never found the body.’

‘Valeria told me you used to be the best. You were the Speculator with the brightest future.’

‘I was young, and believed in reason and the burden of proof. I had a lot to learn.’

‘I know that feeling.’

She touches his arm, and Gallio pushes a button to change a view from the streetcam. ‘Go to sleep.’ He stands, crouched into the van, looks for a place to sit on the floor. ‘Overnight shifts start now. I’ll wake you in four hours.’

Claudia stretches out on the bench-seat, arms behind her head. After a while Gallio thinks she’s asleep.

‘I love my children,’ she says and shifts onto her side, cheek on hands. ‘In case you were wondering. I love them more than anything or anyone I can think of.’

The next morning they feel claustrophobic, as if neither has slept off the closeness of the night before. In his morning break, Cassius Gallio collects the paper cups and the empty pretzel packet, decides to stretch his legs. He takes an innocent stroll, not far, to a rubbish bin and then round the corner to the International School. If the world is about to end, as James keeps promising his callers, Gallio would like to see his daughter one more time.

He loiters in the gateway of the school, and predicts the immediate future. If he hangs around long enough they’ll call the police, so he changes the future by pushing the button on the intercom.

‘I’d like to speak to one of your students, Alma Marcella Gallio.’

If the world has until lunchtime, that’s what Cassius Gallio chooses to do.

‘She’s in school. In school hours. Are you her parent?’

‘I have a message for Alma from Baruch.’ The ruse works, as Gallio gambled it would. He hears the hesitation at Baruch’s name. They’ll see what they can do, and Gallio’s absent father’s heart gives an unexpected flutter. He’ll ask about Alma’s leg. How’s the leg? Maybe not. He’ll skip the small talk, tell her that whether or not the world ends at lunchtime a happy life is possible if she’s prepared to renounce ambition. Don’t waste the time that remains, he’ll tell her, don’t chase empty shadows.

The gate swings open, and Alma limps forward followed by a teacher, who will not be leaving a schoolgirl unattended with a strange man at the school gates. Good. This is exactly the kind of sheltered environment Gallio wants his alimony to pay for.

‘Thanks for coming out.’

She doesn’t recognise him. Why should she? The family was broken up by Jesus when Alma was a baby, and Gallio doesn’t know the stories her mother tells to explain how and why that happened. Instead of a genuine emotion, he feels he ought to feel more than he does.