Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard Read Free Book Online Page A

at the time. He won’t repeat his mistake, trusting her, projecting a life they never had, and he checks his heart and is glad he feels nothing. Or very little. He is immune to her so he pulls his hand away, makes the first misjudgement of his comeback.
    ‘Why now? Why me?’
    ‘We want you to identify a body.’
    In camps and barracks beyond the soft reach of civilization, sweating or freezing, Cassius Gallio had tried to forget. The Jesus case was unlike any other he had handled. As was the Lazarus case, only weeks before it, but after the tribunal he had no incentive to unravel these enigmas.
    Jesus stopped being his problem, and Gallio busied himself with the tedious life of common soldiering. Across the Empire, moving with his legion, he helped persuade the benighted and barbarian of the need for elected assemblies and stable leadership.
    He tried not to feel nostalgic for a genuine interest in what he was doing. He followed orders, and acted as if the civilizing process was the inevitable end of history. The world could not go backward, not now. Those who swore by their gods would be persuaded that an imaginary friend was a less reliable leadership option than an educated governing class. A celestial city should not shine more brightly than a city built with planning controls over centuries. There was an order to the universe, andthe first would be first. To suggest otherwise was to encourage false hopes, because observably the last will not be first. Not all of them. On the borders of civilization, wherever Gallio’s legion was posted next, the last were poor and malnourished and oppressed. They were firmly last, and none of the local superstitions had ever changed that fact.
    Yet still at night he lay awake, letting the darkness do its worst. How had the disciples vanished the body of Jesus? From Tripoli to Colchis he collected variations on a theme—mineshafts, quicklime, the furnace. None of the tested methods for disappearing a body applied to Jerusalem, not in this particular case. Gallio had investigated every possibility, and kept returning to a story his stepfather used to tell from the birth of civilization, or soon after.
    Romulus, the founder of Rome, enters an underground room in the Forum. He is old, his pulse weak, his service to the city complete. His senators in their purple-striped togas follow him into the room, which has no windows and only one door. What follows is a classic sealed room mystery: Romulus is never seen again.
    He vanishes.
    ‘So then.’ His stepfather liked to unstrap his sword and rest it across the arm of his chair. ‘Tell me what happened. Work out the crime, and how they made him disappear.’
    In popular legend Romulus had rejoined the gods. A story spread that instead of dying Romulus had ascended to heaven, which explained his missing body. This was not the answer Cassius Gallio’s stepfather wanted. When Gallio first suggested the ascension of Romulus as a solution, his stepfather had unsheathed his sword and whacked him across the thighs.
    Eventually Gallio’s stepfather spelled out the lesson hewanted the boy to learn: a rational explanation is available. Romulus was murdered by the senators. Of course he was. Always suspect those closest to the victim.
    The senators had closed the door and stabbed old Romulus in silence, alerting none of the Forum’s hyper-alert slaves. Then they knelt to dissect the body. Each senator concealed a small section of flesh or bone beneath his toga, and they carried Romulus away from the sealed room in pieces. The cuts of meat they dispersed through the city, flushed into cisterns or tossed to scavenging dogs. No trace of Romulus was ever found.
    True story.
    ‘We thought the Israelis were going to finish off the cult on our behalf. They made a decent start.’
    Valeria walks quickly, wearing trainers with her skirt and sleeveless top, a tourist like any other. She has her familiar fast stride, and Cassius Gallio admires the vigour