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at lunchtime: he has tomatoes and a flatbread on paper across his thighs. All Gallio needs to know. Next in line is a dented Mazda seven-seater and from the middle seat, through the Perspex screen, Gallio studies the driver’sright ear. He makes an effort to imagine this man and his ear in the time of Jesus. Israel may have been brighter then, more optimistic, with a freshness to the lie of life after death. He can’t remember, or needs more time to decide.
    The driver’s right ear has blackheads and a single unplucked hair.
    ‘The Old City. In your own time.’
    The driver activates the meter and the radio, rap music in Hebrew. He likes the song and turns it up, then heaves the Mazda in front of a delivery truck and swears forcefully, even though everyone in Jerusalem should now be good. That’s what Jesus was supposedly for.
    The meet is the Birman restaurant on Dorot Rishonim. Valeria’s choice, and Gallio had checked out the place as best he could without resources, on TripAdvisor.
Great food but terrible service
, which didn’t surprise him. Secret police love a place with terrible service. No eavesdroppers, and the staff barely notice the customers.
    He wonders at the secrecy, and realizes that if he disappears no one will know.
    On Jaffa Street Gallio taps his rolled-up
Time
against the screen. He pays, asks for a receipt, and steps out onto a relaid pavement. Car bomb, he thinks, sign of the times. The leaves are back on the trees so the blast happened at least a year ago, but in Jerusalem past and present coexist. Possibly the future too. Cassius reminds himself he doesn’t know everything, so be careful, be so very careful.
    He stands still for at least a minute, a rube, a tourist. He takes off his jacket and looks for heads in parked cars, for patternsin the traffic, for pedestrians who never quite manage to move along. He folds the jacket into his suitcase.
    Nothing suspicious, or that he wouldn’t expect to see. His wheeled suitcase is loud and innocent on the relaid pavement behind him, handle in one hand, rolled-up magazine swinging in the other. From half a block away he sees Valeria sitting at an outside table.
    For years, ever since the tribunal went against him, Gallio has caught glimpses of women who remind him of Valeria. Valeria turns out not to be one of those women. Since the time of their youth her face has grown angular, stronger than he remembers. She is fuller in the waist, and with her sunglasses and sleeveless top she could pass, like Gallio, for a city-break believer.
    He drops the
Time
magazine on an empty table, the signal to abort, and walks straight past.
    Cassius Gallio can’t arrive in Jerusalem and make the CCU his first point of contact—he has made a vow to be a better man than he was. The magazine stunt buys him perhaps an hour, while Valeria secures the B meet.
    Within ten minutes Gallio is at the International School, and the gates are open: home time. Through the arched gateway he can see children of all colours running and shouting. One of these is his, and he ought to feel an emotion beyond the worry that his daughter won’t be there, or that he won’t recognize her. Then he sees her, he immediately knows which one she is, her movements less supple than the others. She’s chasing a boy but one of her legs doesn’t straighten. Sadness rises in him, to his throat.
    He steps back, an outsider with his suitcase on wheels, a foreign salesman in windcheater and sunglasses, a lost obvious bomber. Fuck. He shouldn’t draw attention to himself, or no more than he can help.
    Alma has a caliper on one leg, a school rucksack over her shoulder. She’s making her lopsided way to the gate, and Gallio imagines Judith will be picking her up. He panics. He retreats into a shop and watches from the shadow of an awning, half hidden by a stack of orange-crates. In her International School sweatshirt Alma looks like the others but the hitch in her step makes her somehow tough,