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flat hands, gentle, bring it to a slow dead stop. He checks the pale skin for abnormalities, marks, signs of a struggle. Breathe. The hands, the ragged tips of the fingers, look for blood beneath the nails. Judas has withered fingernails, self-inflicted by eating himself to death. His body stinks of sweat and alcohol.
    At the base of the tree a folded pile of clothes and a wallet. His killers left the money. Clever. Make it look in every way, besides the absence of a note, like suicide. Time goes by while Cassius Gallio doesn’t know what to do. He hears the whine of a petrol strimmer on a wind from the city. A plastic bag tumbles across the field, snags on a scrub-thorn. The rope creaks, heats in the midday sun while Judas turns, slowly, like a man afloat. His heavy body swells with gases, inflating with the hours of the day. Judas has been hanging three hours, maybe four, long enough for his skin to tighten and flies to breed on his tongue.
    Here is a body, the wrong body. This isn’t the body Cassius Gallio had wanted to find.
    He might cry. Where are his people, his agents, his officers? Where is his Valeria, and his wife and the child? How did they let this happen to him? His frustration pushes from the inside out and distorts his face. He grimaces, his nostrils flare. He punches the body, and flesh envelops his knuckles. He punches Judas again, a left–right combination, punishment for needing protection. And again, with gritted teeth, for failing to be protected. A flat right to the belly.
    The rope snaps.
    The body thumps to the ground, the exploded rope whipping over the branch, following Judas down. His ripened belly heaves and here it comes, the bursting asunder, the innards and green-grey muck of Judas Iscariot sliding across stony ground.
    A crow lands, cocks its mad-eyed head.

II
James
     
    “BEHEADED”
    Heat haze on the runway tarmac, petrol-blue C&A windcheater, sunglasses against the Jerusalem white light. Inside the terminal, blocking a long corridor between the gate and Immigration, a pair of officials ask for his papers. Just Cassius Gallio, not anyone else off the flight from Munich. The other passengers flow on past.
    Terrorist prevention officers, one man, one woman. Security has tightened globally since the fire in Rome. They examine the name on his passport, check the photo against his face.
    ‘Sunglasses. Take them off.’
    His naked face against the photo. They get a good look at Gallio’s blue eyes. Yes, he thinks, take your time. You know whoI am, the idiot who let a corpse escape, but much older and with a face creased like a veteran. Of something, of everything.
    ‘Business?’
    Gallio puts his glasses back on. ‘Holiday.’
    They laugh. ‘Love to see that particular brochure.’
    So they know he’s here. Cassius Marcellus Gallio has landed in Jerusalem. All these years later and he’s back, following orders, no idea what the Complex Casework Unit want from him. Presumably the Israelis are equally bemused, which explains their charade with the passport. They’re watching. Everyone is watching. Now they know he knows they know.
    The officials hand back Cassius Gallio’s passport and wave him through.
    Arrivals. He checks the limo name-cards, but no one has been sent to meet him. A local driver holds up a sign for Mr. Williams, and Gallio could borrow Mr. Williams’s car as far as the old city centre. We all look alike to them, he thinks, pale-haired, blue-eyed, and in his case the cold-hearted north. However hard he has tried to assimilate.
    Don’t do anything foolish. Gallio tells himself he’s been out of action a long time, and he’s nervous. He’s not the man he was, and should proceed with caution. As instructed, he buys a magazine
—Time
in English—Valeria’s sense of irony. Then he follows the everyman signs for a disgraced Speculator without a waiting limo to
Exit
, to
Taxis
.
    Cassius Gallio wades through the Israel heat, but the first cabbie won’t take him, not