Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

‘Yet Valeria can be outwitted, can’t she?’ Gallio says. ‘Whatever you do, with Valeria’s support, belief in Jesus continues to grow. The Christian faith feels as inevitable as that premeditated escape from the tomb, as Jesus at work. You’re a triple agent, Paul. Valeria thinks you’re working for her, to divide and rule the disciples. In fact you’re working for Jesus.’

Paul holds out his hands, his innocent preacher’s hands.

‘Did you come all the way here to tell me that?’

‘You push information in both directions. You told Valeria we could find Jude in Beirut, but you told Andrew where I was in Greece. It was a CCU tracer in the phone, but the information still got through to Andrew.’

Paul stands and goes to the window. He clasps his hands behind his back, appraises the road in which he lives. ‘You took a risk coming here.’

He pulls the curtains closed.

‘Open them. Closing the curtains is a giveaway. They’ll know.’

Paul brushes back the curtains, strokes the edges as if to make sure they hang straight. From the outside he’ll look distracted, one of history’s deep thinkers taking a break from the meaning of life. ‘You don’t have any evidence. This is pure speculation, and there are hundreds of ways people know things, especially these days. Jude had his name in the papers.’

‘You’re not the only person who can change allegiance, Paul. I can’t make you trust me, but you too once converted. You stoned a Jesus believer to death in the street, now you write several letters a day exalting his name. I understand what you’re doing, and I want to help. Peter is the beloved disciple, isn’t he? Jesus is coming back before Peter dies.’

Paul grimaces. ‘And how would you be able to help?’

‘Tell me where to find John. I promise I’ll kill him, because it’s what you all want. I’ll make it grim. Then the stage is set for Peter and Jesus.’

Paul gives Cassius Gallio an address that leads to a bakery off the Via Veneto called La Dolce Vita. The woman behind the counter wipes her hands on her apron between every task, possibly between every thought. The shop is empty.

Gallio has the password, also provided by Paul: Jesus is love . At first he can’t say it, but he makes the effort. ‘Jesus is love,’ he coughs to clear his throat. ‘Sorry. Jesus is love.’

The words turn out to be sayable, but they make his tongue soft and bring tears to his eyes. The woman wipes her hands, thinks hard, approves of what she sees and hears. She pulls up the hinged counter. ‘Bottom of the stairs, turn right. We have a cold store. Knock three times.’

The light switch is a concave button that sinks into the wall and starts a timer as it pulls back out. The timer ticks like a watch on fast-forward. Gallio is halfway down the wooden staircase when the light clicks off. In the dark he retraces his steps. The second time he memorises another light switch at the foot of the stairs, pushes in the timer and makes it down before the end of the buzz.

He pushes in the second light switch, another timer buzzing in his ear, then turns right towards the cold store. He listens at the door, the timer runs out, the light goes off. He stands in the dark in the silence until he hears movement inside. He knocks three times, as instructed. No response. He raises his hand to knock again. The handle turns, the door opens inward, a bakery store bright with striplights.

Claudia says: ‘Too late, Cassius. He’s gone.’

She’s pretty, he remembers, and clever and has lovely teeth, and in Caistor he almost believed he loved her. None of that matters now. He’s a deserter who ditched his papers and his CCU-issue phone. The penalty is the same as for sleeping on duty in the field.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’

‘Hush,’ she says, finger to her lips. ‘There’s not much you can say. Valeria doesn’t forget.’

‘You knew I was coming.’

Gallio’s chest feels suddenly empty, and he breathes in sharply to fill the empty space. It doesn’t help, because he sees how this has happened. He was wrong about Paul. Paul is simply a double agent, working for Valeria. The further step where in fact he’s working for Jesus was a false speculation. Gallio has over-complicated, again.

‘Paul phoned us to say you were on your way. You’re losing your touch, Cassius.’

The storeroom smells of bread and charcoal, of yeast and faintly of open drains. Spilled flour dusts the flagstones, imprinted with random footprints, but the baker upstairs is nervous. Perhaps she knows what has taken place in this room in the past. She thumps her feet against the floor to warn Claudia she has a customer.

‘Still running Valeria’s errands, I see.’ Gallio runs a hand over the steel prep table, looks at his palm for traces of pastry, or dried flakes of blood. ‘I bet you always did, even in Caistor.’

Claudia lets the accusation hang. A denial would be welcome, Gallio thinks, the compliment of a lie to at least pretend she slept with him because she liked him.

‘No hard feelings,’ she says.

‘No feelings at all. We used each other. Suffering from shock, both of us. Probably did us good, aided our recovery.’

‘If you say so. Why did you tell Paul you wanted to kill John?’

‘You’re a Speculator, work it out.’

Gallio is surprised by her question, by the time she’s allowing to pass. Despite everything she hesitates, as if held up by the memory of their nights in Caistor. She’s the CCU agent sent by Valeria, but now she’s here she remembers the skin-to-skin.

‘We’re not killers, are we, Cassius?’ she says. ‘We represent order and the future. We’re moving the world along, making it a more reasonable place to live. Aren’t we?’

She is trying to think well of them both, but mostly of herself and her decisions in Caistor and the job she came back to do.

‘I don’t think we used each other,’ Gallio says, taking this chance to let her know. ‘Or not only. That wouldn’t be an accurate description of what happened, in my opinion. And I was there.’

Claudia claps her hands, a cloud of flour dust rising to the striplights. ‘I don’t know, and I think I probably don’t care. I was sent to fetch you, that’s all. No time to waste. So come along quietly, because you’re back where you started. CCU is the only family you have.’

Ground Zero is an alcove at street level of the ruined Circus Maximus. This is where the great fire of Rome is thought to have started.

‘They made it look like a cooking accident,’ Claudia says. ‘Picked the perfect spot.’

Printouts of the missing and dead flap on temporary fencing like the struggle of a living organism. Cotton flags overlap with cardboard placards: We Love You, Why? but Cassius Gallio is distracted by a photocopy of a teenage girl, Alma’s age, cheek against cheek with a lolling dog. He steadies himself on a bamboo scaffold, and looks up its fretted length into the blueness of the holiday sky. Birds swoop into nests high in the ravaged monument, for them a year like any other, and not the worst season to be alive.

A scab of time has grown here, protecting tourists from the horror, one more stop for the gawping barbarians on their Roman visit of a lifetime. Already the fire is history, though security remains tight. To one side of the Circus main entrance two centurions in feathered helmets buckle their leather skirts. They’re from Eastern Europe for the coach tours, and they share a cigarette before their shift in front of the cameras. The real thing is provided by Securitas employees with scanners beside the turnstiles. Everyone gets checked, even Claudia. She can jump the queue, flash her ID, but she has to walk Gallio through the scanner. On the other side she ignores the hawkers offering private guided tours.