Secrets of the Dead (37 page)

‘How can you ignore what’s in front of you?’ There’s a hysterical edge to Fausta’s voice. ‘Do you want to wait until all our children are dead before you’ll believe it?’

‘And believe my heir’s a murderer?’

Fausta spreads her arms around her children.

‘I’m taking our sons back to Constantinople. They won’t spend one more hour under the same roof as this monster.’ She advances across the room, eyes blazing. She’s a head shorter than Constantine, but just at the moment she seems to have grown to an equal size. And he’s shrinking; he doesn’t know what to do. This was supposed to be his triumph, his moment of mastery, and it’s all disintegrating.

Junius steps forward. ‘If I may …?’

Constantine nods.

‘There’s a villa at Pula, three days ride from here. The governor’s a loyal man. Send Crispus there, out of the way, until the facts can be established.’

‘
No
.’ Desperation makes Crispus’s voice unnaturally high. ‘If you want to establish the truth, keep me here so I can prove it.’

‘If he stays, I go,’ says Fausta.

They both look to Constantine, whose gaze is fixed at a point on the wall midway between them. His face is as hard as
marble
, unreadable. The whole room – the whole world – hangs on his decision.

Something Crispus said about the bishops at Nicaea comes back to me.
They need a judge
. He never guessed it would be him in the dock.

Constantine decides. The merest twitch of the head – that’s all it takes. Fausta bows. Four guards in white surround Crispus and lead him out of the room. He doesn’t resist.

‘I’ll send someone,’ Constantine says, but it’s so faint I doubt Crispus hears him.

Constantinople – May 337

In the Chamber of Records the lamp’s burning low. I sit cross-legged on the floor, ringed by a circle of scattered papers. I’ve pulled out so many, they spill beyond the light and into the infinite darkness beyond. Alexander did his work too well. I’ve read for an hour, maybe more, and I haven’t seen the least hint that Crispus and Fausta were there in Aquileia. Or that they even existed at all.

I’m defeated. I sweep up the papers and jam them back into their files, cramming them in like rubbish. I struggle to my feet. A wash of dizziness rocks me; I sway, clinging on to the lamp for dear life. If I lose that, I’ll be lost in this darkness for ever. I try to anchor my gaze on a distant point, but there’s nothing to latch on to. The shelves stretch for ever. The harder I look, the further they retreat.

I feel as if I’m floating, my physical self dissolved in the air. I’ve been reduced to my soul. Or perhaps this whole room
is
my soul, my own personal Chamber of Records. I inhabit it; I walk its dark passages, plucking memories from the shelves without regard for space or time.
The mind is a strange land – many walls but no distance
.

I can’t blame Alexander for what he did to the records. I’ve done the same thing in my own memory, editing it and cleansing it to make it bearable. It isn’t painless: each cut leaves a hole, so many that in the end I’m little more than a paper cut-out of a man. But how else could I live with myself?

I put out an arm and feel something solid. One of the pillars. It’s cold against my palm and the cold feels real. My fingers claw into the stone, feeling the grooves where the characters have been chiselled. XV /
Ω
. I press my skin against the sharp edges.

A thought comes to me. All the files have the same designation – XV /
Ω
– as you’d expect. But when I was looking through the scraps in Alexander’s case, that night in the palace, there were other marks.

XII /
Π
I’m writing with deepest condolence for the death of your grandson
.

The thought gives me purpose. Purpose makes me real again. I lift the lamp and hurry down the passages between the shelves, counting off the columns until I find the right place.

Simeon’s voice drifts back to me through the paper walls.
All your life, you’ve been walking in darkness
.

Alexander definitely came here – the seals give him away. I pull out anything where the wax is fresh. After a few pages it’s clear that most of these papers have come from the court of the Dowager Empress Helena. She never settled in Constantinople; she lived in Rome and died nine years ago. Constantine must have had her papers shipped here for safekeeping.

A lot of the boxes have been opened, and a lot of the pages have been mutilated. Helena doted on her eldest grandson and wrote to him often. Unlike the imperial chancery, she
kept
her records bound up in codices like the Christians use. I can follow Alexander’s path through them by the holes left in the pages like footprints in snow. The only sound in the vast chamber is the murmur of my own voice as I read aloud.

The lamp’s starting to flicker; the oil must be almost dry. I know I have to get out, but I still sit there, turning the pages compulsively.

To reach the living, navigate the dead
.

My sight’s so blurred from the thousands of words I’ve read, I almost don’t notice it. I’ve already started to turn the page. But something registers. I turn back.

It’s a letter to the empress. It must be a duplicate, copied into the correspondence book by a secretary. There’s a tear in the corner of the page, as if Alexander began to rip it out and then thought better of it. Instead, he contented himself with excising the first paragraph. It means the sender and the date have gone. The text picks up halfway down the page.

To reach the living, navigate the dead,

Beyond the shadow burns the sun,

The saving sign that lights the path ahead,

Unconquered brilliance of a life begun.

From the garden to the cave,

The grieving father gave his son,

And buried in the hollow grave,

The trophy of his victory won.

I stare at the page, trying to tease out some meaning. I wonder why Alexander removed the version that he had in his case, but not this one. Perhaps I understand his ambivalence. Everything in the poem screams Crispus, but there’s
nothing
explicit that mentions him. Is it a riddle? Who wrote it?

I’ve stayed too long. The lamp flickers, spits – and goes out. A shudder passes through me. I cry out like a child. My old hands aren’t so firm as they used to be. The lamp drops and shatters on the floor. I’m trapped in total darkness.

Far away in the labyrinth, I hear a voice calling my name.

Near Belgrade, Serbia – Present Day

‘GOOD EVENING, THE
Foreign Office. How may I direct your call?’

‘I need to speak to the Office of Balkan Liaison.’

‘One moment, please.’

The telephone played Bach – an ethereal sound among the diesel engines and squeaking brakes of the service station. Standing outside the café, Abby pressed the phone tighter to her ear.

‘Duty Officer.’ A woman’s voice, young and weary.

‘I need to speak to Mark Wilson.’

‘I’m afraid he’s out of the office at the moment. Can I –?’

‘Get hold of him.’ The ferocity in her voice surprised her. ‘Tell him Abby Cormac wants to speak to him.’

‘Do you have a number he can reach you on?’

Was it her paranoia, or had the voice changed?
Do I know you?
Abby wondered.
Did we exchange e-mails, or sit opposite each other in the canteen?
She tried to put a face to the voice, but found she lacked the imagination.

‘I’ll call back in an hour. Make sure he’s there.’

She rung off and went back inside. Michael and Nikoli
ć
were still at the table, staring at their coffee cups.

‘Well?’ Michael asked.

‘He wasn’t there. I said I’d call back in an hour.’

Michael pushed back his chair. ‘We need to keep moving.’ He turned to Nikoli
ć
. ‘Can you get us to the Croatian border? We’ll make it worth your time.’

Nikoli
ć
checked his watch. ‘I have two sons with no mother. My sister fetches them from school, but they already must be wondering where I am. I can drive you to Sremska Mitrovica. From there, you get a bus.’

They carried on down the dark highway.

‘What else do you know about Porfyrius?’ Abby asked.

‘A little. He was exiled for some time – nobody knows why or how long. We think he wrote most of his poems in exile, to persuade Constantine to let him come home.’

‘Did it work?’

Nikoli
ć
nodded. ‘Around 326 he was pardoned and came home. He must have done something so that the Emperor liked him: he was made Prefect of the City of Rome. Like the mayor. This is all we know.’

He lapsed into silence. ‘It is strange …’

He broke off as he changed lanes to overtake a petrol tanker lumbering towards the border.

‘What’s strange?’ Abby asked, when they were past.

‘The poem – this line:
The grieving father gave his son
.’

‘Isn’t that just some Christian stuff?’ Michael put in from the back seat.

Nikoli
ć
frowned. ‘The whole poem is very full of Christian Neoplatonist thought. But here there is a historical parallel
also
. The Emperor Constantine had a son named Crispus – a successful general, a loyal deputy and his presumed heir.’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Abby said.

‘In 326 Constantine had him murdered. Not only murdered, but erased also from history. The Roman state had a policy called
damnatio memoriae
– the damnation of the memory – for disgraced senior officials. They become an unperson, if you like George Orwell. The statues are torn down or defaced, the inscriptions removed, the histories edited. Constantine’s official biographer, Eusebius, rewrote his book to exclude any mention that Crispus ever existed. We only know because copies of both editions have survived.’

‘What did Crispus do to piss him off?’ Michael asked.

‘No one knows. The earliest reference to the killing comes nearly two hundred years later, in the work of a pagan historian who wants to discredit Constantine. He says Crispus was poisoned for allegedly having an affair with Constantine’s second wife, Fausta, who died as well that year.’

‘This family sounds like
The Sopranos
.’

‘You said it was strange that the poem references the death,’ Abby said. ‘Strange because it should have been edited out?’

‘Several of Porfyrius’s other surviving poems praise Crispus. Historians assume this means he wrote them before 326, when Crispus was still favoured. But to write a poem that mentions Crispus after his death – even more, one that seems to refer to his murder – doesn’t help the poet. In fact, he risks his own execution.’

‘And where does all this get us?’ Michael asked. Impatience was never far away.

By way of answer, Nikoli
ć
flipped the indicator and pulled off the motorway. He nodded to the road sign.

‘Sremska Mitrovica,’ he announced.

Night had fallen; a light rain had begun again, glossing the streets and dappling the windscreen. Abby looked out through the reflected neon smeared on the windows, taking in the puddles and empty doorways as they drove through the deserted town. It felt like the last place on earth, a film noir set that had fallen through a wormhole.

‘In Roman times this was a great city of the empire,’ Nikoli
ć
said. ‘Sirmium, it was called – capital of the Emperor Galerius. In fact, it is here that Constantine’s son Crispus was proclaimed Caesar.’

‘It’s gone downhill,’ Michael observed.

Nikoli
ć
pulled up against the kerb opposite the bus station.

‘Last stop,’ he announced. ‘From here, you can go to Zagreb, Budapest, Vienna – wherever you want. Me, I go home to my boys.’

Abby looked at the photograph tucked behind the gearstick, two boys in their cowboy hats and the sheriffs’ stars. She imagined Nikoli
ć
parking outside his flat, the screams of delight as his children heard him coming up the stairs. A warm home and dinner on the table, and the concern in his sister’s eyes, asking
Where have you been?

On impulse, she leaned across and planted an awkward kiss on his cheek. ‘Thank you for everything.’

He looked embarrassed. ‘Be careful, OK?’

‘You too. Don’t publish that poem until it’s safe.’

‘How will I know?’

‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘Unless you see us on the news first,’ Michael added.

Abby got out. The rain was harder than it had looked from inside the car, wetting her face almost at once. She slammed the door and ran across the pavement into the shelter of a doorway. Nikoli
ć
waved, then pulled away.

‘What now?’

As if he’d heard the loneliness in her voice, Michael put his arms around her and hugged her close. He nodded towards the bus station. ‘We have to get out of Serbia. Dragovi
ć
has the whole country covered.’

‘Do you think it was his people in the park this afternoon?’ Had it only been that afternoon? Her memories had begun to collapse in on themselves again, a house of cards falling flat and shuffled out of order.

‘Maybe Dragovi
ć
’s people. Or Giacomo’s. Or both. Giacomo wouldn’t hesitate to sell us out if he saw a profit.’ He glanced at the bus station. ‘All the more reason to be on our way.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ She pulled away, looking up into his face. ‘I don’t have a passport.’

‘I work for the customs service.’ He pushed back a damp lock of hair from her face and smiled. ‘The fact that you don’t have an umbrella –
that’s
something to worry about.’

He took her arm. Down a side street, littered with junk food wrappers, they found a travel agent. Faded posters taped to the window showed Air Yugo planes soaring against a blue sky; socialist families smiling on socialist beaches in Dalmatia or the Crimea. More recent signs advertised discount international calls, foreign currency, SIM cards. And in the bottom corner, framed by flashing Christmas lights, a cardboard sign in red felt-tipped letters offered
VISAS
.