Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

Claudia makes some dots on her empty page, joins a few of them at random. Gallio sketches a cartoon Roman nose. She leans over to look at his drawing. He moves across the bed making room for her, and she shifts across the space and sits beside him, puts her hand on his knee. That’s new. Cassius Gallio should offer a gift in return. ‘Thanks for staying in Caistor. Was worried you’d leave me to it.’

‘Operational reasons. Bartholomew will trip up sooner or later.’

‘Or he might potter about until the end of time. Be honest. I only half believed Jesus survived the cross, either by my switch theory or through carefully administered pain relief. He probably died.’

‘We may never know.’

‘There’s no devious plot here, the product of a brilliant mind.’

‘You mean no god.’

‘I suppose I do.’

They hear the murmur of Bartholomew’s voice in the neighbouring room. Prayers, always the praying, but like his fellow disciples he’s trapped. Basic psychology. If Jesus is dead, and therefore an ordinary human being, Bartholomew left home for no good reason. To justify the arc of his life Bartholomew has to keep Jesus alive, and the more logically anyone protests the more forcefully he and the disciples resist. Jesus is alive, they say, and this fact explains their unemployment, their unfashionable taste in clothes, their hard exile from Galilee. Jesus is the son of god, so no devotion is excessive.

Bartholomew mumbles on. Gallio could pop next door and kill him. Bartholomew, disciple of Jesus, smothered with a pillow. Baruch, if he’s looking down, would be disappointed: a pillow over the airway can’t compete with a chainsaw, so Jesus will remain unmoved. Gallio doesn’t bother. He guesses Bartholomew won’t fight and he won’t run, a stupid combination invented by the followers of Jesus.

‘Let’s talk about something else.’

Which can work, for a while. Talk about something other than god for the next two thousand years. Try. Gallio tests Claudia on the labours of Hercules, and she can remember seven or eight, and as they’re doing this they make each other laugh. Gallio turns more towards her. He doesn’t love her. Maybe her husband back in Rome loves her, and surely she is loved by her children. She turns more towards him, and smiles often enough that he’s impressed by her perfect teeth. He can touch her, if he wants, on her hip. He will start at the hip, on the iliac crest. There. Bartholomew continues to pray. His god does not warn Gallio off.

So there’s the sex. But also Gallio can imagine the framed photograph he’ll place on his desk. The two of them smile against a pure white background, in the studio of a parallel universe.

‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’

Lies are good; lies make it worse. Is this how he started with Valeria? He can’t remember. Claudia touches his cheek, and her fingers on his skin could mean anything, though he never stopped his version of praying, projecting his desires inside her mind, imagining her projecting desire back out at him. He expended effort in making that connection, and brainwaves of such purpose can’t simply dissipate. Besides, they’re a long way from home. No one will ever know. They are lonely, and life is preferable to death.

At the White Hart in Caistor Live Music Night starts now, and the 4/4 beat of classic rock thumps through the floor. Hits from the ages drown out Bartholomew’s prayers, fill up another evening in Caistor of not looking for Jesus, as does Gallio’s hand on Claudia’s hip, and from her hip into the dramatic indent of her waist. This is one of the loveliest available shapes, Cassius Gallio thinks, in an empty random universe.

Try not to lie, be kind to people, live for ever. Gallio concedes that Bartholomew has tempting ideas, but he resists temptation.

When the music stops, hours later, some time after midnight, Claudia insists she has no regrets. She’s glad it happened. But please, she says, let’s not do this again.

By now there’s no visible police presence in Caistor. The town is a Co-Op, a Spar, and a timeless sense that nothing significant either good or bad will take place here ever again. The people of Caistor carry on doing what they’ve always done, overpaying for the lottery and looking for love. It is complacent to live like this, but life at least is bearable.

Gallio and Claudia have questioned Bartholomew endlessly, without great success.

‘What’s your opinion of Paul?’

‘I like Paul.’

‘You said that as if there’s a but.’

‘Paul always wants to explain . Sometimes Jesus just is.’

Valeria runs out of patience and orders them by phone and email and text to give up on Bartholomew. Once, twice, three times. She wants Cassius Gallio in Cairo, because even her researchers struggle to remember Bartholomew’s name — as a disciple he must be unimportant. Gallio suggests Bartholomew is about to crack, while after-images of Claudia from the night before mean he couldn’t care less.

‘Leave Bartholomew alone,’ Valeria says, ‘before I have to send someone to fetch you.’

Claudia tells Gallio their time is up. The reality they have to face is that no one can live in Caistor indefinitely. She invites Bartholomew to join their daily meeting at the Tea Cosy Café, and over a disappointing cappuccino she convinces him he’s done everything he can in Caistor. The hour has come, she says, for him to turn his thoughts to more benighted corners of the earth.

‘We’ll pay your fare,’ Claudia says, and Gallio wishes she wasn’t in such a hurry. He assumes that for her the twin room in the White Hart pub has been an interlude, a brief fantasy, and now she wants home with her children. She’s young, she’ll recover.

‘Wherever you feel called to go,’ she tells Bartholomew, ‘as thanks from Rome for your help.’

Caistor has no travel agent, which gives Cassius Gallio fresh hope of a new delay, but Claudia discovers internet terminals at the Heritage Centre. Claudia is keener to leave than he realised, past the café inside the entrance, the three of them loud on the stripped floorboards, up the stairs beyond the library to the computers on the second floor.

Claudia sits Bartholomew in front of a computer screen and shows him pictures of Greece, gorgeous and blue. Greece needs love and medicine and social justice. She leans across him and searches for a flight, departing Humberside Airport, and the earliest available is a last-minute package leaving later in the week to the northern Peloponnese, west of Athens. Not an established tourist destination but the new-build hotel has sea views. Looks promising. Fly into a city called Patras.

Bartholomew holds up his hands, shakes his head. Not Greece. He’s less interested in gorgeous and blue and more in overrun by idolatry. Claudia clicks to Ibiza, but Bartholomew points further along the alphabet to Iran. Iran. Claudia will struggle to find Tehran four-star specials with pool and vibrant nightlife.

But Bartholomew insists, so Claudia puts together a route leaving the next day that involves three transfers to the airport at Bashkale in Armenia, which is the closest she can get him to the border. She downloads for Bartholomew an Armenian visa for an Israeli citizen available on the internet for immediate travel. The final stage, the short trip into Iran itself, he’ll have to arrange by himself. She fills out his booking details.

‘How many bags?’

No bags. One-way.

The next afternoon they share Bartholomew’s taxi for the short ride to the airport, leaving plenty of time before his first leg to Amsterdam (Schiphol, inevitably). Gallio buys him a cappuccino at the café in the airport, and there’s a smiley face in the chocolate on the milk.