Richard Beard - Acts of the Assassins

Gallio does counter-insurgency. But the theft of a body he’s supposed to be guarding ruins his career. Bizarre rumours of the walking dead are swirling, there is panic in the air, and it’s his job to straighten out the conspiracy. He blows the case.

Years later, the file is reopened when a second body appears. Gallio is called back by headquarters and ordered to track down everyone involved the first time round. The only problem is they keep dying, in ever more grotesque and violent ways. How can Gallio stay ahead of the game when the game keeps changing?

Acts of the Assassins is about one man’s struggle to confront forces beyond his understanding. And about how lonely a turbulent world can be.

Richard Beard is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: X20, Damascus, The Cartoonist, Dry Bones , and Lazarus is Dead , and three works of non-fiction: Muddied Oafs, How To Beat the Australians and Becoming Drusilla . He is Director of the National Academy of Writing in London.

FIRST, FIND THE body.

Male, early thirties, bearded. Distinguishing features: extensive trauma injury, severe to hands and feet. Decomposition consistent with springtime conditions in an arid territory. So follow the smell of a four-day-old death, the black fruit stench of human decay. The corpse is out there somewhere.

Find it. Then the occupying army, representing human progress, will investigate. These people have forensics, a rational system of criminal justice, and will ensure that those guilty of stealing a body from a burial site are tried and punished. Whoever they may be.

Cassius Marcellus Gallio, counter-insurgency, switches on the recording equipment and speaks out loud the precise date, the exact time, the full names of those present. This is how it usually begins. Then he switches the machine off, watches the green recording light fade and die. In this city he has the title of Speculator. He expects to get results.

‘What I’m wondering, what I really want you to tell me, off the book, if you can, is how much you knew in advance.’

Cassius Gallio will be polite for as long as possible. The interview room often does the rest — a single metal table and a folding metal chair. No one wants to wind up in the fortress, in the Antonia. Outside, down in the streets, a turncoat can convince himself that his loyalties are divided. In the Antonia they are not. Inside the fortress the time has passed for ‘and’, for ‘both’. The choice now is either/or, the occupiers or the occupied, reason or superstition.

‘If you can remember, if the information is alive in your brain, and not too much trouble to share.’

Despite the hard chair and the bare room, the Judas is not in a talkative mood. Cassius Gallio flips open his notebook and draws a circle. An imperfect circle, so he has another go. Same intended shape, different imperfections. Nothing is going right for him today.

‘I’m withholding half your fee.’

‘I did what we agreed.’

Valeria, Gallio’s colleague, sits on the front edge of the table with one foot on the floor. She picks her fingernails with the corner of a laminated guide explaining emergency procedures in the event of fire. Her nails are clean. She taps the stiff edge of the card on her knee. Tap tap tap. On her knee, the back of which would fit perfectly the inside of Cassius Gallio’s elbow.

Gallio concentrates. Not today, he thinks, of all days. He doesn’t have time for the inconvenience of Valeria’s knee.

‘Judas?’

The man flinches at the sound of his name. He gnaws at the inside of his cheek, bites at the skin of his fingertips. Let him, let the traitor eat away at himself. At the barred window Gallio looks down on the early Jerusalem streets: a normal Monday morning, visibly untouched by miracles. A boy runs down an alley, a tray of loaves on his head. He dodges a rasping scooter, which hits the main drag and accelerates away through traffic. Life goes on.

‘Where’s the body?’

Cassius Gallio had reacted to yesterday’s rumour, of course he had. He came in late on a Sunday to follow up the lead, a sighting on the Emmaus road to the north of the city. Not the body but the man himself, apparently alive, a dead man walking. Gallio had sent Valeria to make enquiries, but it turned out to be nothing, peasant gossip about an executed convict and his seven-mile hike for lunch.

If they were regular police, Gallio had thought at the time, he’d have charged someone for wasting police resources. But Speculators were not regular police. He needed that body.

First thing Monday morning he ordered a city-wide search. He prepared his people for the worst — the shrunken lips, the livid meat — but the certainties of a dead body would put an end to any mystery. All through the day uniformed troops moved house to house, going in hard on the Lower City. Cellars, attics, any darkness that could conceal a folded adult corpse. Freezers. Gallio makes sure his people look inside the freezers, chest and wardrobe. The body could be whole, could be dissected. Check bathtubs for acid corrosion, and treat plastic sheeting as suspicious. Pick through building sites, anywhere with recently poured concrete.

The forces of order know what to do. Sadly, this is neither the first nor last time they’ll search for a missing body.

Gallio sends five-man cordons to walk the mountain scrub. No sign yet of a shallow grave. Valeria supervises the dive team at the reservoir and the Bethesda pool, where she clears out the cripples who’ve come for a cure. She finds no trace of weighted human remains dumped into the water. Gallio opens a series of local tombs, an inspired hunch as a hiding place. The body he wants isn’t there.

Until further notice every cart and truck leaving Jerusalem will be security-checked at the city gates. Think. Gallio orders raids on apothecaries suspected of trading in human body parts, eyes and spleens for the more costly curses and spells. Nothing. Think again. If anyone wants to move the body then spices or perfume would mask the smell. Gallio turns over shipments of nard and aloe, and at this troubled time Passover in Jerusalem smells like heaven.

And of burned meat from the Temple sacrifices, and a haze of two-stroke. Maybe a night downstairs in the Antonia will put Judas back in touch with reality.

‘A local source tells me the way you betrayed him was foretold.’

Gallio perches on the steel table-edge, next to Valeria. He licks the end of his biro, to remind Judas he’s expecting solid information worth noting down. Then he draws an irregular triangle like a head above one of the imperfect circles from yesterday. Saliva doesn’t help, smears the ink.

‘Judas?’

He’s not listening. Valeria slices him across the cheek with her laminated card. In an occupied territory the army are the cops, and the army cops have their own secret service, the Speculators. They don’t like their time being wasted. Valeria shapes for another hit, but making Judas flinch is enough.

‘His other followers knew what was going to happen, Judas.’ Gallio will have to spell it out to him. ‘The missing body was written in the prophecies. Ergo. You Judas also knew in advance what would happen.’

Instructions in the Event of Fire has opened a cut on the man’s cheekbone, and blood seeps through. Gallio rolls his eyes. Earlier than he’d have liked he leans back and flips a switch on the intercom. He says: ‘Chicken, now.’ In the starkness of the interview room his words sound like a code, as if he’s lost the habit of saying anything straight. Saying it twice may help. ‘Chicken, as soon as you can.’