Hot Night in the City

corners of their mouths. And the victim. The poor woman! Pleading... weeping... trying to reason with them as the stones struck her, knocking dust puffs from her robes. She tried at first not to show pain, because she sensed that pain would stimulate their frenzy... then she panicked when she tasted the blood running down her face. She fell, and the stones rained down upon her. She staggered to her feet, but the storm of stones continued. The stones they use are small ones, too small for any one blow to kill. This has the double advantage of freeing individual members of the mob from the guilt of murder and prolonging the victim's torment. She fell again and lay unmoving, and the mob waited, silent and panting. She quivered, then moved, then slowly rose and stood there, weak and swaying, blinded by her own blood, muttering words of gratitude as best she could through broken teeth, thinking that they had decided to show her mercy after all. The crowd listened and watched in tense, tingling silence. Then, as though stirred by a single urge, they began pelting her again. Finally... more than two hours after the thing began... a pulpy mess lay in the middle of the panting, sweating circle. The occasional stone made a thick plopping sound as it hit the amorphous bog they had created out of a woman. Then the crowd moved away in silence, chastened, satisfied, and no doubt many of them expressed to their families their disgust at the animal nature of their fellowman.' My master's eyes focused again upon the here and now. 'And the worst part was that no one was responsible. No individual citizen had killed her. It was the anonymous, snarling mob that had done this terrible thing.' He looked at me, his eyes haggard from having reseen the horrors of the stoning in his memory. 'Have you ever noticed, Greek, that when I am obliged to punish some rogue everyone says: 'Pilatus had the poor devil whipped', or 'The Procurator crucified three murderers'. But when they speak of a stoning, they always use the passive voice, saying: 'The criminal was stoned to death', as though the stones themselves had done the deed, not those who cast them? No, I will not let them stone this poor fanatic whose only crime is a terrible lust for fame and significance. If there is no option but to execute him, I'll oblige them to use a more humane way.'

'Crucifixion?' I asked.

'It's the quickest and least painful of the public methods available to me.'

'But stoning is the established punishment for blasphemy. You cannot change that.'

'No. But I can change the charge. I can order him executed for treason to Rome, rather than for blasphemy.'

'But, sire! That will shift the responsibility for this fellow's death from the shoulders of the priests to your own!'

'I'm aware of that. But my mind is made up. If he must be killed, it will be for treason, and he'll be crucified. I'll see to it that they use nails to shorten the suffering. Those who are only tied onto the cross with rope can linger, suffering, for days. And I'll order a guard to give him a coup de grace with a spear. But... but let's hope it doesn't come to that. Let's hope that Herod Antipas finds a way to subvert the will of the Sanhedrin. He's a crafty old devil.'

'Crafty enough to dodge his responsibilities and send the decision back to you, master. And you will ultimately harvest most of the blame in this matter.'

He nodded, resigned.

At this juncture, the officer-of-the-guard came stamping in again, announcing a delegation of priests awaiting the Procurator down in the Hall of Judgment. They had a prisoner with them.

'So soon?' Pilatus said, setting his wine cup down. 'Has Herod already managed to slither out of the trap?'

I offered to go first and speak to the scribes, then advise Pilatus of their intentions and mood. I had decided to reason, to bargain, to plead with the priests... anything to extricate my master from their snare. When, having made the priests wait for a quarter of an hour, Pilatus appeared at the top of the stairs I met him with a smile, relieved to be able to inform him that the prisoner they had with them was not, thank the Gods, the poor devil we had questioned earlier.

'Yet another suicidal messiah?' Pilatus asked, looking down upon the bound prisoner standing surrounded by priests and scribes. 'Two in one day. Is there no end to them?'

'Apparently not, my lord.'

'And I suppose this one also claims to have been born of a virgin, and to have descended from the family of David, and fled to Egypt to avoid persecution, and taught in the wilderness, and performed miracles and—all the rest of it.'

'No doubt, my master.'

Pilatus sighed. 'Ah, well.' He gestured for the prisoner to be brought to him. 'Who knows? Perhaps this one will allow himself to be saved.'

'Let us hope so, sire. This messiah's name is Joshua. Joshua of Nazareth. But he affects the Greek version of his name: Jesus.'

POSTSCRIPTUM FOR THE CURIOUS

The historical spore left behind by Pontius Pilatus is surprisingly faint, considering that he is the most famous Roman of them all—more widely known than even Julius C?sar. We only have two passing mentions of his name in official records, and one rather dodgy inscription on a long-ago-vandalized tomb. He must be regarded, therefore, as a figure in church history, rather than Roman history. And even within church history, the sources are few and unreliable.

Among the spurious, quasiapocryphal writings of the Pseudoepigraphia we find accounts of Pontius Pilate by Josephus and Philo, and in the thoroughly apocryphal 'Letters to the Emperor' and 'The Acts of Pilate,' Eusebius tells us that Pilate was eventually ordered back to Rome to explain his inability to calm and quell the Jews; but by the time he arrived, Tiberius had died (that would be in March of A.D. 37) and Pilate was not reappointed as Procurator of Jud?a. Eusebius goes on to recount the tradition that Pilate became a Christian in result of his encounter with Joshua of Nazareth and subsequently committed suicide—presumably in a paroxysm of guilt and grief. Those with a taste for irony can reflect on the fact that Pilate's wife was eventually elevated to the rank of a minor saint of the Orthodox Church (because of her prophetic dream?), and Pilate himself is a saint of the Coptic Church.

THE ENGINE OF FATE

It was an outrage! Earlier that afternoon he had interrupted his hectic preparations for returning to his native village, and he had rushed all the way down to Telephone Central, where he had been obliged to stand for half an hour with his ear pressed to the listening tube, groaning with impatience while the woman sitting before her infernal tangle of wires and plugs struggled to keep him in contact with the Lafitte-Caillard travel office. He had subjected himself to the mysterious complexities of the 'phone because he knew that the usual New Year rush for places on the night train for Hendaye would be intensified by holiday makers wanting to mark the arrival of the new century in a special way, so to avoid any delay he wanted to make sure his tickets would be ready and waiting for him when he showed up later that evening. But after arriving at the Lafitte-Caillard's at the last minute, jumping out of his fiacre, shouting orders to the driver to wait there for him, dashing through the snow and, spurning the slow elevator, running three stairs at a time up to the third-floor office, intending to slap his money down on the counter and snatch up his tickets, what did he find? He found himself at the end of a queue of last-minute travelers, that's what he found! It was an outrage!

He chewed the ends of his new moustache in frustration while the incompetent fools in front of him bumbled their way through their trivial (but interminable) business, collected their tickets, examined each leaf of them to be absolutely sure there were no mistakes, then waddled off to take the elevator down to the line of black fiacres waiting in front of the building, their horses fidgeting and snorting jets of steam into the night air while the drivers huddled on their high seats, collars turned up against the first snowfall of the year.

He had timed his arrival at the ticket office so as to allow himself enough time (none to spare, it's true, but enough, enough!) to get him and his sister to Austerlitz station and settled into their sleeping car before the train pulled out. Who could possibly have anticipated this clogging wad of last-minute travelers? Oh. He had, come to think of it. That's why he had ordered his tickets in advance. Well then... who could possibly have known that the company wouldn't have a separate line for those prescient enough to order their tickets in advance?

Rocking from his toes to his heels to burn off some of his anxiety, he suddenly realized that the minute hand of the clock above the desk had not moved for at least—then it made a click-thunk as the