The Judas Case, page 23
“And what makes you think that?”
“Your cloak. And all that blood. Am I right?”
“You’re a good boy to be so watchful. Your father must be proud of you.”
“I do know a lot,” he said, in a detached, matter-of-fact way. “My father’s friends are always asking me my opinion. But only on the most difficult points. The ones they can’t agree among themselves.”
“And what does your father say?”
“My father’s dead,” he said, again in that matter-of-fact way. “I was going to be a prince of Israel. But he’s dead.”
The boy looked down in silence. He was staring at the blood.
“Yeuda? What are you doing?”
The woman spoke Aramaic with a Galilean peasant’s accent that had a layer of refinement. She wore grey rags and within the shadow of her headscarf there was a streak of hair matted with ash. I had seen her on the stair at the lodging house. The boy looked back at her with a mixture of adoration and anxiety.
“Nothing, Mamma.”
The woman put down the two-handled pitcher that she carried and stood in front of us. Two fingers of her right hand were missing. The first finger of her left hand was a stump.
“Oh. It’s you. You were at the house.” She turned to her son. “He knows that he’s not supposed to trouble people with questions. But he can’t be stopped. Can he?” He laughed shyly, and rushed to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his head in her clothing.
“He’s not being trouble at all. He’s a fine boy.”
The child unwrapped himself from his mother and ran over to the pool’s edge.
“Yeuda! Be careful.” Yeuda looked utterly unconcerned. “His father never taught him to swim,” she said. “We’re fishermen. We live on a lake. And he never taught the boy to swim. Yeuda! Come here!”
He ran to her along the ledge.
“Who’s my best boy? Best boy in the whole world?”
“Yeuda!” he squealed, delighted, and she took him in her arms. Her sorrow lifted for a moment before enclosing her again. She unpicked the boy’s embrace, sat him down at the side of the waters and hitched the sleeves of her cloak.
“Let me help you,” I said. But she turned her head away and lowered the pitcher to the pool herself. Her movement was strong, sure and solid, and she hefted the filled vessel to the pool’s edge with a peasant’s ease. Then she looked down at the boy, who was tugging at the hem of her cloak.
“Yeuda. Enough.” She turned back to me and met my eyes.
“My man was executed by the soldiers,” she said.
Yeuda pulled at the hem of her cloak again, bidding her towards the road.
“Mamma. Come on. We should go to the garden again. To see Papa.”
“Yeuda, no. We can’t do that, child. Not again. Do you understand? We should go back to Satva Mariam. She’ll be wondering where we are.”
For a moment the child looked dejected. Then he smiled.
“Yes. Come on.” And he began to pull her back towards the city. She swayed as she lifted the water pitcher to her shoulder. Then she stopped, and the child clung to her.
“Oh no.” She put down the pitcher. “Mother!” she called out.
At the gate, two watchmen were arguing with an old woman. She was wandering, hands outstretched as if begging. The child’s mother turned back to me.
“Keep him with you, will you, my brother?” Then she rushed towards the gate.
The old woman was asking the men at the gate something, holding out her hand and pulling at their cloaks. A crowd was beginning to gather. Voices called out.
“It’s Satva Mariam,” the boy said after a while. “We should probably go and see if we can help.”
“Mother. Let me help you,” I heard the younger woman say to her, and she turned her away from the crowd. “They do not know,” she said, as she led the old woman towards us. “They know nothing.”
The old woman followed her with vacant docility, oblivious to the crowd. Then she saw me, but her eyes were voids. She reached out and pulled my sleeve, and began to speak in a droning whisper.
“My son,” she said. “Can you find him for me? Tell me where he is. We do not know where he is. Nobody knows what they have done with him.”
Then the old woman’s eyes fastened upon little Yeuda.
“My boy,” she said, and smoothed his hair with her hand in an odd, ungainly way. “My boy,” the old woman repeated. “We should go and find your Papa. Together. You must help me find your Papa. You’re a good boy, Yeuda.”
“Mother Mariam,” the younger woman said gently, “we should go back to the lodgings. You should rest.”
The old woman turned and looked about her, distressed for a moment, her lips and jaw moving, before the certainty of her detachment returned.
“Yes,” she said, “we should go.” She let go of my sleeve and turned in her docile way towards the street. Then she stopped.
It was Shimon-the-Rock, shod and wrapped in a travelling cloak, holding a staff. Yeuda wriggled from my grasp and ran to embrace him.
“Shimon, brother: where are you going?” the younger woman asked.
“Going back to Galilee,” he grunted. “Got a boat to fix. Got fish to catch.” He stopped and looked at her. “There’s no future. Not for any of us here.”
“Shimon-the-Rock,” Yeuda cried out. “You should stay here. We’ll go to the garden again with Mamma.”
“Yeuda,” said his mother, “enough. You mustn’t speak like that.”
Shimon bent down.
“There’s nothing for us here, little one,” he said sadly, and touched the boy’s cheek. There was more movement of people behind us on the street. Iosefos from Arimathea, the two thugs from the previous day Yehonatan and Yakoub, and finally Yehuda-the-Twin appeared. Little Yeuda squealed with delight again and went to the Twin, who held him by the shoulders, and turned him round to face Shimon and the women.
“Now, Shimon, my brother. Where are you going?”
A dispute that must have not long been suspended resumed. Shimon would return to Galilee. No-one showed any sign of wishing to follow him. The two thugs would stay in Jerusalem. Yehuda-the-Twin was undecided, trying to balance between the competing voices. Whatever the women wished to do was of no concern to the men. Little Yeuda wanted to return to the tomb. The argument grew in ferocity and the child disentangled himself from his uncle and returned to the embrace of his mother. Only Iosefos from Arimathea stood apart. At last he spoke to Yehuda-the-Twin.
“Should we not seek guidance in prayer, brother?”
“We decided we will go and pray in the House of the Lord. We will seek guidance as to what we should do, at the end of Pesach.”
“Now,” said Shimon.
In answer, Yehuda-the-Twin strode up the road to the lower city. Shimon followed. I watched the mother, Mariam and the boy go. Yeuda waved at me as they left. Then there was a voice behind me.
“Husband?”
I wish I could say that she came up from the desert like a pillar of smoke and fire. But my wife entered the city astride the vineyard’s second donkey, led by Stephanos with Abi clinging to him. The girl looked terrified by the sights and sounds around her. Zenobia watched the old woman, Mistress Mariam and the child as they departed. Then she dismounted and looked at the blood on my tunic.
“You look as if you’ve been beaten up.”
“I have.”
“Then I’ve arrived not a moment too soon.”
We embraced and when her fingers touched the wound on my head I flinched.
“You see what happens when you go and indulge yourself in this nonsense?”
“This is not nonsense.”
“You stupid, stupid man. You abandoned us, you abandoned our vineyard. You abandoned me, your wife, and I had to come and find you. What have you done here?”
“I have done my duty.”
“Your duty is to your vineyard, husband, and to me.”
“And to the Service.”
“And what happens when you abandon us? I find you looking as if someone has tried to murder you.”
“Congratulations on your deduction. Someone has.”
“I don’t suppose that your Service paid you for that did they? No, of course they did not. You risked your life – for what?”
“Duty. It was my duty. You don’t expect to be paid.”
“Well, I always did, my love. And I made sure they coughed. Every time.”
“A boy has died,” I say to her. “A boy has died and I could not prevent it.”
“Then you should never have taken on that duty if you could not perform it. Don’t insult me like this, you hear? What about your duty to me? And the vines?”
“The vines have nothing to reproach me for.”
“The vines need you. And that wound needs Nico. Where is he?”
As we crossed the square to the Service door I noticed that the Essene and his boy were gone from their place by the messengers’ post. I had time to hope that whatever had happened had been quick, and then we were at the door, to the clucking delight of Zev. Nico was waiting at the inner barrier, just back from his morning consultation with Pilatos.
“A row at the Prefect’s this morning,” he said to me, “Marcus. Philo’s expecting trouble.” Before I could say anything to this Azizus began applying unguents to a streak of cuts and grazes on my left arm. “Good. That’s very good. Very good indeed. You’ll be fit to travel later in the day, old son.”
“Fit to travel?”
“My dear,” he turned to Zenobia, “I think you may wish to consult me too? Don’t you?”
My wife looked utterly reluctant but was eventually persuaded to walk with Nico to the far end of the office, where they spoke together at the gate of the great iron cage. Disturbed by their presence, Micah came to me with a bundle of papers, looking fiercely pleased with himself. He spread out a sheaf of papyri and parchment that were spilling out of the satchel of a High Priest’s personal messenger.
“Just come back from His Sanctity’s office, these. Just the way you asked for them. Someone on his staff must like you.” His expression was pleasure bordering upon awe. “First time I’ve ever seen it happen this fast.”
They were a verbatim record of the interrogation of Yeshua that was carried out following his arrest. They had been annotated by one of the priests who must have been the man who was attempting to prepare the legal case against him. The topmost was a single sheet: a Temple genealogy, certifying Yeshua’s descent from King David. But there was a curiosity to it: unlike the one that Yehuda had described, this genealogy showed the man’s descent from David by Solomon, not Nathan, the more usual means by which someone anxious to acquire legitimacy would embellish their ancestry. This really was evidence of kingly authority for the educated. Most Galileans would be unable even to read the text. A priest’s note at the top right: copied to Prefect’s office. Had they even bothered to compare the details, I wondered? Or just sent it off to His Excellency: proof that suspect claims royal descent. Whatever else our Yehuda had done, that genealogy had been enough, as he had recognised at the very beginning.
I heard raised voices at the Service door, and the sound of Zev fussing over a new arrival – “Come in, master, the Lord Shlomo is waiting for you.” It was Philo, from his audience with the Prefect. He occupied his desk, invited me to sit opposite him and picked a scroll from his satchel.
“This is from Marcus. I already know its contents. Shall I read it to you?”
He broke the seal and read aloud without waiting for an answer.
“Marcus sends me fraternal greetings, reminds me of the obligations of friendship that the Service is under to the Prefect of Judea as representative of the Augustus, and demands that I present you, the Jew Solomon Eliades known as the oenarch, temporarily attached to the Service of the Jerusalem Temple, at the Antonia Tower before the end of the day.”
He dropped the scroll on his desk and leaned back in his chair. His fingers began to mangle his stylus.
“The High Priest and I may be able to find some way to make this right with Marcus and His Excellency. Because I am not going to have him demanding the lives of our people, particularly not of one as eminent as you, when there is something so transparently wrong here. But I cannot allow you to stay in the city a moment longer.”
He stood up, and addressed me in formal Greek.
“Solomon Eliades, temporarily attached to the Service, I hereby relieve you of all duties in the case of Yehuda from Kerioth – and from any other responsibilities that you may have taken on in the Service – from this moment forward. Do you understand?”
I looked straight back at him and said nothing.
“Do you understand?”
“It is a duty,” I said. “I understand that.”
“Then your duty is to me and my orders. You are removed from this case. From this moment. Agreed?”
I sighed and looked up to the great vault of the ceiling above us.
“Agreed,” I said at last.
“Good.”
“Am I still under the Service’s protection?”
He took another scroll from the basket beneath his table, one that I felt I should recognise.
“I asked Micah to bring this to me again. And there’s something I still don’t understand. Something that I’d like your help with.”
“Is this an interrogation?”
“Solomon, this is an attempt to save your life. Don’t you understand?”
“Of course. Of course.”
“Explain this to me. A note on your personal record. No identification. It says that you should under no circumstances be assigned to any work that involves contact with Marcus Ulpianus Varro. And then you’re sent off to that spice trader’s in Pera to run our eastern network.”
He stopped, shuffled the scroll to one side and placed his elbows on the table. Then he leaned forward.
“What is it that I’m not hearing in all this? There’s a lot of noise, but no sense. Will you speak to me out of this confusion?”
Second rule of the man in the field: never lie to your controller or pretend there are things he does not need to know. I sighed and made a decent show of reluctance.
“I will tell you. But you must understand that it was a long time ago. Long before I went to Pera. Marcus and I became enemies. Unfortunately it is all as close as yesterday for him. As I have found out this week.”
“There’s another thing here. Except it’s not here. Look at this.”
My scroll had been cut in two, a section removed and the remaining parts, before and after, joined crudely back together. A part of my life given to the Service had been stolen. I took the scroll from him and held up the top end. It was still there: my name written in my own hand, on the day I joined the Service. When I had returned to Judea from school in Athens, a young man still confounded by the life that he was trying to live, and found that my parents were both dead, my brothers and sisters vanished, our house and our land confiscated by the Herodians. I looked at the damaged section. Someone had removed a hand’s span of material. The scroll had been cut through, sewn together and painted with gum. A repair job that would fool no-one with an eye. I knew perfectly well what the missing material recorded.
“Help me here. Who would have removed that passage?”
“I do not know. But I can tell you that I did not.”
“You’re quite sure? Because I understand from the fetchers that you’re in the habit of searching the box yourself.”
“Was. I was in the habit.”
“Then make sure that you don’t fall back into old ways. Do you understand?”
I handed the scroll back to him.
“Now. For the good of the Service, I want you to tell me about the missing portion. What did it record?”
“It records how Marcus and I became enemies. And I have no idea who has removed it, or why.”
“What happened between you and Marcus?”
“Don’t you know? I thought that it was common gossip the length and breadth of the Service. And the Temple Guard too. They used to teach the mission to recruits. The dangers of working under cover, and what happens when you become too closely involved with the people that you are observing.”
“Go on.”
There was silence between us for many slow heartbeats. Then I breathed out and laid my hands flat upon the desk.
“In the 26th year of the rebuilding of the Temple, I joined the Service. Marcus had just come out from Rome as chief political officer under Prefect Coponius. The Service wanted to be sure that they knew exactly what our good friends were thinking before they even knew it themselves. It was a difficult time. The great rebellion. Thousands of our countrymen hanging from crosses by the roadsides. Tens of thousands. And one of our predecessors as Prefect’s liaison had made rather a mess of things, the way they do.
“Marcus proved impossible to understand. We could not hear his thoughts by any of the usual means. Then someone decided that we needed a pair of ears in his private house. They thought that a domestic slave would be the best means of achieving this. Not a real slave, you understand, but an officer masquerading as a slave. And for some reason the Service chose me. Are you surprised?”
“Yes. I am.”
“I was quite different then, when I was a younger man,” I said. “I was considered handsome and well formed.”
“I meant – why did we not simply bribe his secretary?”
“Someone had a new theory about the gathering of intelligence. I had to become a convincing slave, bought and sold. Impeccably authentic provenance. And Marcus had to choose me himself. He had to be fooled. So, for the sake of the Service, I became a slave. You do understand what that means, don’t you? Our ancestors were slaves in Egypt. And I became the property of a Roman master. A speaking tool. A very sharp tool, but still just a tool. My task was to write and read for Marcus. Everything that passed over his desk passed through my head too, and it stuck there. And of course, he owned me.”
