Secrets of the Dead (28 page)

She was lost. Michael read it in her face. ‘You can’t stay in the Balkans. Dragovi
ć
has eyes on every street corner between Vienna and Istanbul. He’ll eat you alive.’

‘Am I supposed to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder?’

‘Who’s going to protect you? You won’t get a NATO helicopter flying in every time you’re in trouble. The EU? The British government?’

The vision of Jessop’s body lying in the mud was the only answer she could come up with.

‘Why did you spend ten years of your life tramping around deserts and jungles? So you could nail people like Dragovi
ć
, right?’

Abby looked at her hands. ‘I gave up on saving the world.’

‘You can’t.’ Michael leaned forward, a shadow in the gloom. ‘That Roman guy in the tomb – you know what he was doing in this God-fucking-forsaken place? Patrolling the frontiers of civilisation to keep the barbarians out. That’s what we have to do, Abby. Because if you don’t stamp on the barbarians, they’re all over you before you know it. Look at Yugoslavia or Rwanda or Germany in the thirties. One moment you’re in a nice, middle-class country washing your car on Sunday afternoon. The next, you’re hacking up your neighbour with a machete or pumping him full of Zyklon B.’

‘What are you saying? That this mess you’re in is somehow like fighting the Nazis?’

‘I’m saying
please
. Help me do this. For my sake, and Irina,
and
all the good people who’ve suffered because a shit like Dragovi
ć
thinks no one will stop him. And do it for yourself. You’re not going to escape until he’s put away.’

Michael scoured the bowl to get the last of the sauce out. The spoon scraped the metal like a knife being sharpened.

She needed more time. Choices swirled around her head, offering infinite consequences, but no answers. In the fog, her mind went back to some of the mundane places she’d been in her life: a warehouse in Bosnia, a technical school in Rwanda. Places that the full authority of the international community had once declared safe havens. Thousands had gone there – trusting, praying, clinging to hope until it was too late. The only haven for most of them had been the silence of a mass grave.

‘Where are you going to go?’ she asked. Buying time.

‘There’s a man in Belgrade who knows about this kind of thing,’ Michael said. ‘I took some photographs of the tomb; I want to see if he has any ideas.’

And the moment he said it, she knew she would go to Belgrade – and, afterwards, wherever else this mad chase led. Not to save the world, or for love of Michael, or revenge, but because the only choice she had was to wait or to run. And she was tired of waiting.

Michael turned the knob on the stove and the flame went out.

Constantinople – May 337

EVEN IN MAY
it’s cold before the sun comes up. Constantinople is a city of shadows: footsteps echo on the empty colonnades, the statues seem to come alive. A hundred feet in the air above the forum, Constantine watches me from the top of his column. Thirty feet tall and every inch the god: naked, with a radiate crown whose long spikes reach out to meet the dawn. He carries a spear in one hand, the orb of the world cupped in the other. The engineers mounted it on the column in a single night, so that when the sun came up next day Constantine had appeared above the city as if from heaven. I heard the Christians were furious.

The city feels empty. Constantine left for his war three days ago, dressed in golden armour and drawn in a gilded chariot by four white horses. In his hand was the
labarum
, the standard he forged before the Milvian Bridge. It’s almost twenty-five years since he unveiled it, and there’s hardly been a year since then it hasn’t led the army into battle. Goths, Sarmatians, Franks, rival emperors – they’ve all met the unconquerable
standard
and been crushed. And yet it’s hardly suffered a scratch. The golden wreath which frames the monogram is as bright as the day it was made; the sun shines through the nested jewels like stars.

And now it’s time for another departure. Symmachus leaves today on the boat to Piraeus, with an onward journey to some anonymous rock in the Aegean. I’ve come to see him off. I feel I owe him that much.

I descend the steep steps between two warehouses and come out on the quay. And at one end, where a ladder leads down to a waiting skiff, four soldiers from the palace guard stand swapping dirty stories.

I approach. ‘Is Aurelius Symmachus here?’

None of them recognises me, or salutes. They’d still have been children the last time I stood in front of a legion. The sergeant eyes me cautiously, just in case I make trouble.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘A friend of the Augustus.’ I show them the ivory diptych Constantine gave me and they snap to attention.

‘Not arrived yet,’ the sergeant says. He glances at the sky. ‘He’d better be here soon. My shift ends at dawn.’

‘There’s that one,’ a soldier adds. He points to a figure lurking in the doorway of a grain warehouse, the hood of his cloak over his face. ‘He was looking for the prisoner too.’

The figure hears our conversation and steps out of the doorway. The hood drops back: it’s Porfyrius. He seems to have aged in the last week. The theatrical energy I remember from Symmachus’s garden has been subdued; the spark in his eyes has dimmed. To my surprise, he embraces me like an old friend.

‘We old men should stick together,’ he says. ‘Before the young drive us out completely.’

He steps back and gives me a searching look. ‘I heard you didn’t approve what they did to Symmachus.’

‘The Augustus judged the case himself.’

‘You’d have thought if Symmachus wanted to make it so obvious, he’d just have confessed.’

Is he trying to make me say something incriminating? I glance around at the busy wharf: a stevedore sitting on an amphora eating a wrapped pie, a shipping clerk tapping his stylus on a tablet. Wherever you go in this city, there’s always an audience. Best to say nothing.

‘I heard the slave’s testimony was decisive,’ Porfyrius persists. ‘Did you interrogate him yourself?’

I wish I had. Whoever set up Symmachus, the slave was the key.

‘He was tortured in the palace. By next morning, he was on his way to the silver mines in Dardania.’ I open my hands. ‘Sometimes Roman justice moves too quickly for an old man to keep up.’

He nods – it’s as much as he’ll get from me. ‘But you still came to see Symmachus off. It’s good of you.’

‘The Augustus will want to be sure he’s really gone.’ I meant it as a joke, but it comes out sounding cruel. Porfyrius steps back a little.

‘No doubt on that score. Symmachus is a Stoic – he’ll leave with dignity, if nothing else.’

But there’s still no sign of him. The sun comes up; the soldiers grumble. Crates of fish get carted up the road to the market. Porfyrius starts to pace the quay, glancing up the hill expectantly.

The sergeant comes over to us. I have the Emperor’s commission: suddenly, I’m an authority.

‘He was supposed to be here an hour ago. Should we go to his house?’

I’m getting tired of waiting. ‘I’ll go.’

Porfyrius joins me without asking. It’s a hard climb for two old men. By the time we reach Symmachus’s house, we’re both puffing like cart horses.

The door to the house is locked. We ring the bell hanging outside, but no one answers. All his possessions were forfeit: his slaves will have been confiscated and sold, but he should have been left a freedman to prepare for his departure.

‘Maybe he took a different route down to the dock,’ I suggest. ‘We could have missed him on the way down.’

‘There’s a side door.’ Porfyrius is already heading towards the corner of the building. I’ve half a mind to let him go alone, but curiosity makes me follow. There are no windows on this side of the house, just a narrow alley between Symmachus and his neighbour’s mansion. And, halfway down, a wooden door in the brick wall.

Porfyrius tries the handle and it gives. We push through, into a vaulted storeroom that smells of sawdust. Splinters and bark litter the floor: even his firewood’s been taken away. In the adjoining rooms, dust’s already begun to settle.

Another door, another empty room, and suddenly we’re in the bright light of the peristyle, overlooking the garden.

The fish sit motionless in their pond. The blind philosophers watch from their perches in the colonnade. And in the centre of the garden, Aurelius Symmachus lies propped against the side of the pool, head lolling forward.

One glance is enough to know he’s not going anywhere.

Novi Pazar, Serbia – Present Day

NOVI PAZAR MEANT
‘New Bazaar’. There was a bazaar in the town and it must have been new once, though now it was derelict. The whole town was the Balkans in miniature: a southern half of minarets and winding Ottoman alleys, a northern district of monolithic concrete, and a small river dividing them. Even the refugees who thronged its streets had a symmetry to them: Muslims expelled by Serbs from Bosnia, and Serbs expelled by Muslims from Kosovo.

Abby bought some new clothes in a drab shop and changed in the toilet at the coach station. They bought two tickets from the kiosk, and took seats at the back of the bus. It was five hours to Belgrade. The countryside scrolled past the windows: river valleys and scrubby hillsides mottled green and brown, broken every so often with orchards or quarries. A primitive, lonely landscape.

Michael took a camera out of his bag and turned it on. He cupped his hand around the screen to shade it, though the bus was mostly empty. He played back pictures from
the
tomb, fiddling with the controls to pan and zoom for detail.

‘That’s the lid of the sarcophagus.’ He went closer. ‘You see the inscription?’

Despite their age, the letters were deep and sharp. ‘
C VAL MAX
,’ Abby read.

‘Gaius Valerius Maximus,’ Michael expanded. She glanced at him.

‘I didn’t know you read Latin.’

‘Grammar school boy. Back before they all went private.’ He tapped the screen. ‘I did some research after I saw this. This man Valerius has a record. He was a consul in
AD
314, and there are inscriptions that make him Praetorian Prefect to the emperor Constantine the Great. Sort of a chief of staff – or
consigliere
, if you like
The Godfather
. Important.’

‘Until he got a sword through his heart.’

Michael thumbed on through the next pictures – the faded frescoes, their plaster falling off in scabs. He tried to zoom in on the writing, but the closer he went the more it dissolved into a pixelated blur. He put the camera down in frustration. Abby took it.

‘Don’t you think it’s strange?’ She’d pulled back out so she could see the paintings in what remained of their fullness. ‘I don’t see any Christian iconography. No crosses or Christograms; nothing that looks like a Bible story.’

‘From what I read, Constantine’s reign was a pretty confused time religiously. It’s not as if everyone woke up one morning and decided they were going to be Christian.’

‘Think about the necklace you gave me. You found it in the tomb, right?’

‘Sealed in the vase with the scroll.’

‘It’s a Christian symbol. Why would the dead man, Gaius
Valerius
, want that right beside him in his grave, but not anywhere on the decoration?’

Michael shrugged. ‘Deathbed conversion?’

She thought of the blade sliding into the man’s chest, forceful enough to break the rib. She shuddered.

‘Speaking of the necklace, do you still have it?’

‘The Foreign Office took it.’

Michael stared out the window. ‘It probably doesn’t matter.’

Belgrade, Serbia – Present Day

The bus dropped them at the terminus at the bottom of the hill near the city centre. A black sky had brought an early twilight; relentless rain hammered the streets, and thunder rolled around the river valley. They bought an umbrella from a shop in the station concourse.

‘How are we for money?’ Abby asked.

‘Fine,’ said Michael. ‘The advantage of pretending to be crooked is that a lot of cash came through my hands.’

‘Then let’s find somewhere to stay. There’s a hotel I used to –’

‘No.’ Michael was firm. ‘You know the drill in Serbia. Every hotel guest gets registered with the nearest police station. Even if they don’t recognise our names, they’ll see we don’t have an entry stamp. Do you even have a passport?’

Abby patted her trouser pocket and felt nothing. She remembered reaching for it at the checkpoint; the hand closing around her wrist, dragging her out of the car; the passport falling unheeded into the mud.

A pang went through her. She felt herself dissolving away, a little girl lost in a foreign city. No way to get out, nothing even to prove who she was.

Michael didn’t seem to have noticed. He checked his watch. ‘Anyway, we’ve got a meeting to go to.’

She trailed after him through the bus station and out on to the busy street beyond. Michael held the umbrella low, covering their faces. Abby clung on to his arm and tried not to get soaked by the passing cars.

‘Where’s the meeting?’

‘On a splav.’

Abby had never been on a splav before, though she’d seen them in the distance during her trips to Belgrade. They were a Belgrade institution – bars and nightclubs on rafts that lined the banks of the Sava and the Danube for over a mile. Some looked like houses, and others like boats: the one they’d come to had a curved steel roof and exposed girders more reminiscent of an aircraft hangar. It floated about twenty yards out in the stream, tethered to the shore by a very makeshift bridge of scaffolding poles and planks. A sign above the door said
Hazard
, though it wasn’t clear if that was the name of the bar or just a general warning.

Abby looked at the rickety gangway, slick in the rain, and the grey river sweeping under it.

‘We’ll be in trouble if we have to leave in a hurry.’

‘I didn’t choose the venue.’

They wobbled and tottered across the wet planks. A security guard gave them a rudimentary pat-down – a reminder that this still wasn’t a city entirely at peace with itself. A sign on the door said
NO GUNS
, which didn’t reassure her.