The Implacable Hunter (11 page)

He showed no emotion. I continued: ‘You will take these points of view for what they are worth, which isn’t much. You will force your passion to serve the work in hand. I will have no fine frenzies, no smitings hip-and-thigh. You will handle the Sanhedrin with the utmost discretion: you must seem to obey them in everything, while at the same time you enforce the will of Rome. This, in itself, is a game at which older and wiser men than you have failed
miserably
. They will want blood. But you will kill only where killing will so some good; that is to say, with extreme
discrimination
. You will take plenty of prisoners, though, but try and get them young and strong; we want men for the mines, the roads and the circuses. A sturdy fisherman generally makes a good net-and-trident man, if you catch him young, and there is a shortage of retiarii in Rome…. But there is plenty of time for your instructions in detail.’

His jaw dropped. ‘Plenty of time? When am I to go, then?’

‘In a week, let us say.’

‘And what is my rank or official position?’

‘You haven’t got one. This appointment is a special civil one. Your present ambiguous position of Tax Examiner gives you latitude enough.’

‘Do I go in armour on this occasion?’

‘No. Better dress as usual in some rich but plain manner, with a judicative touch about it. But if I were you I’d wear helmet and body armour and a good sword on the road. The passes are dangerous. But you will ride with an escort this time – one of the younger officers and ten soldiers – and an Unofficial Observer.’

‘What is that?’

‘Someone who will bring me a dispassionate, unbiased
report
of the affair, apart from your own official statement. I think I shall send Afranius. He has nothing better to do, and his eye is clearer than most. Besides, he likes you.’

‘I like Afranius,’ said Paulus, pursing his lips and
nodding
gravely; he was the cool administrator, now, in counsel with his peers. ‘Yes, Afranius is not a fool, and I think he is an honest man.’

‘I am sure Afranius would be flattered,’ I said. ‘Now there is one other thing I particularly desire you to do, Paulus. It is in the nature of a secret inquiry, or, perhaps, a confidential errand.’

‘You know you can trust me, Diomed.’

‘I know I can. It is confidential and secret because I cannot yet make it official. I can give you only some broken threads to follow, some smeared tracks, and by these you will try and find me a certain man, and bring him back alive.’

‘Name him and I will find him,’ said Paulus.

‘This is no part of your official duty, Paulus.’

‘That is all the better – name the man!’

‘Jesus of Nazareth, so-called King of the Jews,’ I said.

H
E
paused, then laughed. ‘What with the good wine and the good news, Diomed, the blood must be a little thick in my head, and my ears are playing me tricks. Do you know, I could almost swear I heard you say “Jesus of Nazareth”!’

‘That is what I said.’

‘But you said “a man”.’

‘Quite right.’

‘Oh, I think I understand. You were speaking figuratively. You meant, the man who has inherited this Jesus’s mantle, so to speak?’

‘You don’t. I wasn’t. I didn’t. I meant exactly what I said. I want you to bring back Jesus of Nazareth.’

‘But he is dead!’

‘Then bring me his corpse,’ I said, smiling.

‘Diomed,’ said Paulus, tapping his words out steadily and carefully, as goldsmiths do with gold-dust when they shake
it out of a horn spoon on to a balance, ‘if you speak to me again as to a wanton child who must be kept quiet with mockery and riddles, upon my honour I leave your house, and we are no longer friends! I’ll gather taxes, I’ll sell hides, I’ll finance ventures, I’ll ride with the caravans – you go too far, you presume too much!’ He leapt up, his hands clenched and his face set, struck to the heart with a sense of pathos.

‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘I was not playing with you. Even if I had been, you should have kept still.’ Sudden exaltation is a tricky thing; a young man is no more fit to hold his balance on a freshly-realised hope than a fledgling is to fly. A breath may send him spinning, a thought may turn him.’

‘Pardon,’ said Paulus, sitting again.

‘Granted. Jesus Christ is dead, you say, is he not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your evidence, please.’

‘Evidence? Firstly, he was tried and sentenced in a Roman court. Secondly, the sentence of death was carried out. Thirdly, he was pronounced dead, and was buried.’

‘Pronounced dead. By whom?’

‘He was sentenced to die on the cross.’

‘Let that pass for the moment. Buried. Where?’

‘I understand that his friends obtained permission to bury him in a private tomb, like a person of quality.’

‘Correct. Then where is his body?’

‘In the tomb, no doubt.’

‘Well, it is not. What do you make of that?’

Paulus said: ‘Nothing much. His followers being
blasphemers
and fanatics, no doubt they wanted to make some kind of holy place, or shrine, of the spot where their “king” was to lie. The Egyptians worship dung-beetles and filthy ibises and desert dogs; the Indians pray to cows and monkeys; then why should the Nazarenes not say their prayers to a carrion carpenter? They carried away their
Christ’s carcass to nuzzle his rotten bones in peace and quiet in some hole in a hill.’

‘Plausible,’ I said, ‘only it appears they did nothing of the sort. Some angels came and carried Jesus up to heaven like Elijah.’

‘You don’t believe that?’ cried Paulus.

‘Of course I don’t. Angels do not bother to pack your clothes for you when they carry you away, as they seem to have done in the case of Jesus Christ. They remembered to include a quantity of linen bandages and some ointments, too – for which, I trust, we shall have no further use in the other world.’

‘Then who stole the corpse of Jesus?’

‘Nobody. Considering the matter, in idle moments, I have arrived at a half-formed conclusion that there never was any corpse of Jesus to steal.’

‘You mean, it was laid in some other burying-place?’

‘No. I am considering the matter solely as a police officer now. The religious aspect of the matter does not concern me. If Jesus Christ is dead, so be it – leave him to the gods – Hades holds court beyond my jurisdiction. It is my
conjecture
that he is alive.’

‘Your evidence, please?’ said Paulus.

‘What kind of evidence would you like? General grounds for a particular belief, as in metaphysics? Or eye-witnesses’ statements that tend to establish the point, as in law?’

He thought a moment, and said: ‘From you, Diomed, your general grounds for belief. Diomed’s considered
conjecture
carries more weight with me than a judge’s
summing
up. How many times have you demonstrated to me the fallibility of the eye-witness?’

‘Yes,’ I said, pleased with his sincere vehemence, ‘multiply the witnesses, and you divide the truth. I have, for example, questioned witnesses who swore most solemnly – having nothing to gain and possibly something to lose by so swearing – that
they, and hundreds of others, saw Jesus Christ being carried into the sky over Jerusalem, in the arms of two or three angels. He was lying like a man asleep, and his mangled hands hung down. Some of them had drops of his blood on their head-dresses to prove it – neat, star-shaped splashes that couldn’t have fallen from higher than a man’s nose; and any clodhopper who has been sprinkled with blood from a stricken bird will tell you that such drops must make a narrow, pear-shaped splash, never a round one. But still they swore; and when one witness said: “It seemed to me his hands were folded”, half a dozen others were ready to tear him to pieces. There is a point worth remembering, incidentally – their sect is not half formed, and they are already letting the image of their Christ come between
themselves
and what he preached.’

‘This I know,’ said Paulus. ‘But you were coming to
your
evidence, not theirs. You have an eye in your mind which is worth a cart-load of the jelly they keep in their skulls.’

‘That was only a case in point. Let us come to the subject of Jesus himself. What are the known facts about this person? There are very few. His birth was registered at Bethlehem. His parents came from Nazareth, a small town. One of Jesus’s brothers, or stepbrothers, is still conducting the old carpenter’s shop where our Nazarene grew up, I hear. Many people know the family. Joseph, the putative father of Jesus, is still alive – or was, when last I heard of him – a sour old man, crippled in the joints, and with a face like the claw of a crab, as I am told. Those who knew his family best hate Jesus the most, not for personal reasons, but because it simply does not make sense that the boy who used to sweep up the shavings and carry bags of sawdust to the meat-smoker should be a Redeemer, a Prophet. As you know, every Jewish wife hopes to give birth to the Messiah, and all good Jews pray for his coming – but they are not at
all likely to believe in him if he happens to be born to a
next-door
neighbour.

‘If our little Jesus had risen high in the rabbinate through the orthodox channels, no doubt the townspeople would be proud of him. But his immediate origins are too familiarly low. They don’t like that. What is more, it appears that Jesus was an infant prodigy. That is an awkward thing for a boy to be, in a town like Nazareth. A woman may scold her boy, screaming: “Come out of the dirt, ruffian! Does Joseph’s little Jesus play with mud?” But in her heart she hates Mary for having borne the unfortunate brat, and hopes that he will come to a bad end. And rest assured that the other boys don’t like Jesus; he is a target for their spitefullest tricks and dirtiest jokes. Joseph’s other sons detest him. Even Joseph would show his distaste for him, if he dared. Referring to him, he always says to his wife: “
Your
son”, with a kind of querulous irony.’

Paulus said: ‘No doubt. The woman had a shady
reputation
. She was already with child when she married this fatuous stool-maker.’

‘So I have heard. If so, she wasn’t the first girl that made a fool of herself, and she won’t be the last. If she had been the whore the Jews say she was, and had not wanted to be with child, why, any midwife could have rid her of it at three months with a pinch of rye-grain smut and a peeled twig. But even if she was that same whore – what, then? Why does your common harlot sometimes choose to bear a child, which can be nothing but a clog and
embarrassment
to her? To have a brat to beg with? No. They are to be rented by the day or week. Then why? Because it is the high doom of the womb that it shall fructify, and so there comes a moment when the prostitute tenderly opens herself, and the father of her child is a hazy composite of a thousand faces – a dream, my friend, a dream! – and so it happens that even the son of a whore may be begotten upon a virgin
by a god. But wait! The same is true of the pure girl
betrayed
. Let her have a dozen children, the child of her secret grief and trouble is the one that is most entirely her own. Oh, moderate your moralities, my boy! As you live you will learn that many men born in wedlock are the fruit of fantasy, of spiritual adultery; or why do mothers love to call their children by strange names? Many a gritty charcoal-burner has been Apollo, if he only knew it, one night when there was no moon; and little does more than one plucked, pious matron know that she has conceived in the form of some cat-eyed slut her husband caught a whiff of when she brushed him in the street.’

Paulus said: ‘We will assume that in fact, however, this Jesus was the child of some stranger.’

‘Excuse me. Why should we assume that Jesus’s father was a stranger to his mother? Let us say, some person
unknown
. Why did Joseph marry her? Because he was a middle-aged widower and she was pretty? There is no shortage of presentable virgins among the Jews; girls with dowries, too. It may be surmised that the girl was of some respectable family whom she might disgrace, who paid Joseph well to marry her and take her away. We don’t know, and it is not material. We know that as soon as he was old enough, Jesus ran away. He simply disappeared, and there is no record of his movements. Why should there be? A carpenter’s son in a growing family leaves home. He appears to have joined the crowd that followed a prophet called John, who baptized his people in the Mithraic style and preached the coming of the Messiah as foretold by Isaiah. Herod put a stop to John, and the record goes blank. Actually, between the birth of Jesus and his appearance as a dissenting rabbi, there is an almost complete lacuna of about thirty years.

‘Then – pssst! – out of the desert comes Jesus, the voice of God, the very seed of God, the only begotten son of God,
God
, at the head of a rag-tag and bobtail of disciples and a riff-raff mob of worshippers weeping with ecstasy! And he is hailed as that Messiah who was to be born of a virgin and redeem the world. Some call him King.’

‘King!’ said Paulus.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was absolutely without fear, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he could find words to say this in a manner to excite popular enthusiasm. And, my boy, if you are a swineherd and have these gifts alone, you will carry yourself like a king by your own virtue – you will inspire faith, the people will look to you for guidance, and they will follow you. And at this point, you had better watch your back.’

Paulus protested: ‘He knew what he wanted to say, he said what he wanted to say! What
did
he say?’

‘Very little, and there was the genius of it. He made eloquent the tiny vocabulary of incoherence. The poor love great words, but not to pray with when they are in earnest. The poor like to worship a fine fat god, but it irritates them a little to see his priests get too gross when they are hungry. He sweated their god down to the sinew in the flesh while he filled the sky with him in the vapour. The poor are humble, but they don’t like to be made ashamed; they feel awkward in the presence of a god who says to the
copper-miner
: “You have a green face”, or to the iron-smelter: “You have black hands”. He said: “Spin them fast enough and all colours are white. Rinse your hands and come just as you are.”’

‘A faith for a rabble,’ said Paulus, contemptuously.

‘Absolutely. And so it caught on. But let me continue …’ I suppose I sighed; Paulus was no company, just now, for a man in a mellow, discursive mood. I was willing to discuss the nature and character of Jesus, as one of those strange men whom love of God destroys. I think I understand why some Jewish chroniclers sometimes imagine God coming out
of nowhere and spinning the dead dust into a singing trumpet. Jesus was one of those to whom the trumpet sang in the emptiness of the desert. It sucked him in, spun him to its still heart, twirled him out, and sent him staggering away drunk with revelation down the crooked roads of the world, to spread the news that God was here and he was a part of him. It happens to all kinds of men everywhere. ‘I am God, and so are you, fellow dust-mote!’ they cry. ‘Ride with me to the place where the light sleeps when the lamp dies and the music goes when the harp is broken!’

Fevered imagination? Not so. Your Jesus sees his god’s countenance and reads his purposes as clearly as your Paulus sees a column of tax figures and reads their
ineluctable
sum total. If anything, the god-poisoned visionary is even deficient in imagination. To him, the men of the world are the dreamers. Only the Noumenon, the invisible,
intangible
Essence is the fact. For example, it takes a most unimaginative man to stand up and speak to a gathered audience, and expect them to go away satisfied with a
hundred
plain words of unsupported statement. But the divine authority is in this man if he can send that audience away satisfied, as Jesus did, no matter what he says.

I went on: ‘This Jesus said little because he believed that he was speaking literally with the voice of God, and giving voice to ultimate truths that needed no elaboration. He was a man of learning, competent to split hairs with the
rabbinical
analysts and interpreters, but he reduced his
vocabulary
to a couple of hundred words. He wrote nothing,
because
he felt that there was neither time nor need to write. His sedentary life was over, and he was a man in a hurry, on the road, always on the road – he was God’s own courier, the Messiah – the liberation of the world was at hand!

‘And his message delivered, he had to die like the Messiah in order that the Prophecy might be fulfilled. For if you believe in your Isaiah, you will bend your present to suit his
future. It was necessary for Jesus to be betrayed, dragged through the streets, mocked, spat upon, humiliated, flogged, and hanged.