Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

‘I don’t trust Jesus. He’s playing us.’

At last, the angle of Claudia’s head suggests she feels for Gallio, maybe pity, but better than no emotion at all. ‘Are you staying,’ she says, ‘or coming with me? Make up your mind.’

Cassius Gallio needs more time to speculate. He is convinced that he’s of no use to Jesus’s master plan, whatever it is, in Caistor. He therefore wins a victory by staying in England. Rome, on the other hand, is not Gallio’s choice, and to change the world in Rome Jesus will be needing all the help he can get. Gallio will not be duped into helping, not again.

‘You do what you feel is right,’ Claudia says, ‘but I won’t go down in flames because you want to waste your life in Caistor. Phone Valeria. She’ll tell you straight — Rome. That’s why they issue us phones.’

‘To keep us in line.’

‘I can’t cover for you. What should I tell her?’

Claudia genuinely intends to leave. Gallio rushes on his trousers, a T-shirt, follows her down the stairs and into the public bar, which barely makes sense in the pre-dawn light, out of its usual time. Beer mats and carpets and chairs upturned on tables, waiting to come to life.

‘Claudia.’

She’s outside. Gallio pleads on the pavement in his bare feet, slaps his arms for warmth. ‘We don’t have the complete picture,’ he says, and the words leave his mouth as steam. ‘Tell Valeria I’m on my way, but I’m researching the bigger picture.’

A minicab pulls up, and while the engine runs Claudia holds out her hand. After everything they’ve done she wants to shake on the end of the deal. It is finished. He refuses, and she says fuck off then and climbs into the back of the cab, pulling in her case behind her. In his bare feet, cold, alone, Gallio holds up a flat Roman palm to say goodbye, watches the car cross the square and away past the Georgian house. The truth is he has no concept of the bigger picture. It feels too big. He should have settled for the smaller picture, himself in the back of a minicab with Claudia. Wearing his shoes.

Upstairs at the White Hart he packs his small bag, waits for daylight, decides against a final English breakfast. He walks down the hill to the Heritage Centre, where he sits on a wall until it opens. Not much to see, a dog, some vans, litter in the wind. He bangs the heels of his shoes against the bricks. Caistor is a perfect place to lose himself, he is sure of this, and to be lost to Jesus. He’ll click onto a property site and find himself a one-bedroom flat. Job first, then flat. With his experience he should be able to pick up something in security, at the industrial estate or a superstore on a bus route.

And then working and sleeping and hiding away in provincial England will eat up his time. He can not look, not love, not live, be as good as he likes. Rome burned once without him and Rome can burn again, will always have burned whether he’s in the city or not.

Finally the Heritage Centre opens its doors. At a computer screen he logs in, and out of habit he uses his Speculator ID to access the restricted Missing Persons pages. He clicks through to the locator map, and at first he thinks there’s a glitch, or that he opened the wrong program. Eight of the disciples are dead, he knows this for a fact. Gallio had expected a maximum of four lights for the surviving disciples — Andrew, Matthew and, in or near Rome, John and Peter. But the map is signalling multiple sightings, many more lights than twelve, double that number in locations across the screen. A light comes on at Ephesus in Turkey even as Gallio watches. The disciples seem to have divided, and divided again, and from limited beginnings can now be everywhere at once.

The nearest sighting to Caistor is a light on the south-east coast of Scotland. The drop-down box, unconfirmed, names the disciple as Andrew, last seen in a town called Whithorn. Gallio magnifies Scotland’s North Sea Coast, activating a refinement that plots Andrew’s movements from the page history. In the last few days Andrew has been moving steadily southwards. Gallio sits back and considers the light, thinks about Andrew coming closer. He’s heading in the general direction of Caistor.

Cassius Gallio blinks twice and the third time he keeps his eyes clenched shut, mouth stretched tight, showcasing the wreck of his face. He grimaces and dips his chin into his collarbone. He can resist them. He can run away from Jesus, like in the old days in Germany.

The light representing Andrew moves a measure south, reaching the border with England. Gallio wants this over. He rocks forward and links through to the travel websites accessed by Claudia the day before. The northern Peloponnese, to the west of Athens. Not the most popular of Greek holiday destinations, but a world away from Lincolnshire and from Andrew, and in Patras Jesus has no obvious use for him. Cassius Gallio puts the holiday package on his credit card, taxes included, flying from Humberside Airport later that day.

Patras is a medium to large southern European city, rich with history but made present by urban planning and pre-stressed concrete. The season is Carnival. Through the window of the airport shuttle bus, on a city-centre route to his designated hotel, Cassius Gallio sees pirates blowing saxophones and Socrates on a Jamaican steel drum. Nothing is sacred, everything is allowed, and in Patras at this time of year at this time of night Bacchus the god of revels is god.

His bus brakes at traffic lights and Gallio reads a wall of fly-posts for the Black Pussy club, first sixty-nine ladies in for free. He doubts Jesus would linger here, but if Jesus is watching, if he’s interested, he’ll see that Cassius Gallio has disengaged. He has given up looking for good.

Gallio makes an arbitrary decision to get off the bus at a stop near the Roman Odeon. The heat of the Greek night rises from the pedestrian asphalt, a welcome change of temperature from Caistor, and in among the sailors and angels, hearing the timeless music, Gallio enjoys being no one. He does not represent Complex Casework. He attempts none of the difficult answers.

He retreats, blots himself into the corner of a streetside bar. In the warmth and the flamelight, Cassius Gallio convinces himself that the disciples are of as little concern to him as they are to the revellers of Patras. Also he is indifferent to Claudia, reunited in Rome with her family. The point is, he reminds himself, nothing matters. There is no god, no love, no plan. He raises his arm to the waiter for another drink. One more, and then he’ll justify Patras to Valeria. He turns on his phone, off since the plane, to show his positive intent.

For this second failure of his they’ll probably skip the tribunal. Gallio has bungled his search for Jesus as completely as he did the crucifixion. He over-complicates, he thinks, or complications happen around him. Should have killed Lazarus while he had the chance. Should have closed down Jesus in Jerusalem before he went to trial.

He drinks half his Mythos beer then texts Valeria his resignation. Hereby , he texts — not a word recognised by autocorrect — Hereby I end my connection with the Jesus case . He could thank Valeria for giving him a second opportunity to fail, but settles for best wishes and a reminder of his full family name, Cassius Marcellus Gallio . Repeat any name often enough and it sounds absurd.

He sips his beer, adds an X , and sends the text. Then he sends another with a single word: Sorry . He sits and drinks and waits for a reply that doesn’t come. The penalty for desertion is death. He does not want to die.

He sits and drinks, but alcohol hadn’t helped in Moldova. He sits. He sends back a double ouzo from a man alone at the bar. He doesn’t want to care and he doesn’t want to die. Or to kill. For his sanity as well as his safety he needs to engineer a disappearance. In training a Speculator learns procedures for most patterns of human behaviour, including the urge to vanish off the face of the earth, and it occurs to Gallio that Jesus and CCU Speculators have similar skills. Though Gallio can think of more discreet ways to disappear than starting with a faked crucifixion. Show-off.