by Tom Harper
‘I don’t remember.’ It came out as a croak. She was desperate for water, desperate to sit down before she fainted. ‘He shot me.’
‘He never came back.’
‘I don’t know what happened to him.’
‘No one does. You will say, perhaps he ran away.’ He held up the gun, as if he were addressing it and not her. ‘Impossibility. My men do not run away. If they try, I always find them. And him I cannot find.’
Abby rubbed her eyes, hoping she’d wake up and find this was all a nightmare. ‘He killed Michael. I saw him.’
‘If I cannot find Sloba, it means he is dead.’ Dragović swung lazily in his chair, like a boat swaying on its anchor. ‘Let me give you some facts, Miss Cormac. Sloba came to the villa in a car. When the police arrived, this car was still there.’
Look at the man, not at the gun. That’s what they’d taught in her Hostile Environment training, years ago. Looking at the gun makes it more likely he’ll use it. That didn’t make it any easier.
‘You were lying on the floor with Sloba’s bullets in you. In your shoulder, but not in your heart or brain. Why? Sloba was not a careless or a sentimental man. If he let you live, it means he was dead.’
Look at the man. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you want to know.’
‘Who else was there?’
‘No one. Just Michael and me.’
But was that true? She thought back to something they’d said in hospital. Somebody rang the police. Her memories were so scrambled it was hard to be sure of anything, but she didn’t think it had been her. It rang false.
So who else was there?
Dragović rolled back on his chair and stood. He sauntered over to the wall and examined one of the stone plaques. This one was painted, not carved, the colours washed out but still clear. A mummified man, wrapped in bandages, stretched out a hand from a stone sarcophagus, while a bearded Christ reached to stand him up. A dog played at his feet.
‘Here is another fact. Sloba died and Lascaris died. But I have seen the police reports. They found only one body.’
He spun around and fixed his gaze on Abby. She took a half-step backwards, though immediately a hand pressed against her back to stop her getting any ideas.
‘Did your man have an accomplice?’
‘Sloba worked alone.’ Dragović moved on to a marble statue, a female nude with upturned breasts and no arms. He stroked a finger across her throat. ‘Two deaths, one body. How do you explain this?’
‘I don’t know.’
And suddenly Dragović was right in front of her, crossing the room so fast she barely saw him move. The guard behind her pinned her arms and almost lifted her off the floor. Cold metal pressed on her jaw as Dragović jammed the pistol against her face. The dead smell of lilies stifled her.
‘Understand this, Miss Cormac. You are already dead. If I decide someone will die, they die. If I keep you living a little longer, it is only because I need you to tell me some things. But I can kill you now and throw you in the Tiber, and no one will care. They will not even recognise you, when I am finished.’
His face was so close to hers his bristles scraped her cheek. Tears ran down her face and soaked into his beard. The intimacy felt like a violation.
‘I don’t know,’ she pleaded. She heard herself repeating it again and again, caught in a stuttering loop she couldn’t escape. Dragović stepped away in disgust. The guard behind her loosened his grip, so she sagged limply into him. She felt him move against her, rubbing himself on her like a dog.
‘Enough.’ Dragović snapped his fingers; the guard let go. Abby fell forward on the floor, crouched on all fours.
‘Your lover Lascaris was meant to give me something. That is why he came to my house.’
‘A briefcase,’ Abby mumbled – too clumsy for them to understand. The guard stepped forward, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back so she was looking up at Dragović. The mouth of the gun yawned open above her, and this time there was nothing she could do but look at it.
‘Michael had a briefcase. I saw it.’
‘It was not there when the police arrived. What happened to it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Another yank on her hair pulled her to her feet. The guard dragged her after Dragović, across the room to a spotlit stone on the wall. There were no carvings or paintings, just two lines of text in sharp capital letters, and a monogram above. Abby stared.
Dragović waved the gun at it. ‘You recognise this?’
There was no point lying. He’d read it in her face. ‘I’ve seen the symbol before. At the villa – there was a gold necklace.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘The police gave it to me. I took it back to London. My Government found out and confiscated it.’
Dragović pointed back to the stone tablet. ‘And the text? You recognise that?’
‘I don’t know Latin.’
Her jaw went numb as the butt of his pistol smashed into it. She spun away, but the guard held her hair tight and dragged her back. She dropped to her knees. Dragović stood over her, his breath fast and excited.
‘You went to the Forum Museum this afternoon. You looked where this tablet came from. Why?’
She spat out a gob of blood on the floor. He doesn’t know about the scroll, about Trier and Gruber, she thought. With horror, she realised she still had Gruber’s translation in her jeans pocket.
She stared at the tablet, the sign like the cross above the words she couldn’t read, and prayed to the God she didn’t really believe in to help her.
‘The symbol,’ she mumbled. She flapped an arm towards the plaque. ‘The tablet had the same symbol as the necklace. I wanted to see it.’
‘Is that why you have come to Rome?’
Now her surprise was genuine. ‘The message.’
‘What message? Who told you to come here?’
She looked at him blankly. Blood dribbled down her chin – she didn’t know if it came from inside her mouth or out. ‘Didn’t you?’
He almost hit her again. She saw his arm tense, felt the grip on her head tighten in anticipation. She saw the fury in his face, and knew that if he hit her again, he’d keep going until there was nothing of her left to hurt.
The blow didn’t come. ‘Tell me why you came to Rome,’ he repeated, his voice tight with the strain of self-control.
‘The text message. I don’t know who sent it. He quoted the inscription on Constantine’s arch. He said he could help.’
Dragović said something over her head. The hand let go; she slumped on to the floor again. Footsteps went and came back. When she opened her eyes, Dragović was rifling through her handbag. They must have got it from the car. He pulled out her phone and read off the screen. He looked surprised, Abby thought.
‘You see?’ she mumbled. ‘Wasn’t that you?’
The guard lifted her up and a cloth went over her head. The last thing she remembered was the choking smell of lilies closing in around her.
XVI
Constantinople – April 337
THE SOLDIERS AREN’T palace guards. The badges on their cloaks show twin men wrestling each other. The fourteenth, the Gemini. By rights, they should be a thousand miles away on the Rhine frontier, watching for barbarians trying to creep across the river.
The centurion salutes. ‘General Valerius. Please come with us.’
It’s a long time since anyone called me General. ‘Who wants to see me?’
‘An old friend.’
It must be a lie. All my friends are long gone, one way or another. But there’s no point resisting. I pull on a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat and let them take me. We avoid the obvious destinations – the palace, the Schola barracks, the Blacherna Prison – and instead plunge down the steep-stepped hill towards the Golden Horn. Early afternoon on a Sunday, the city dozes like a dog: the market halls are empty, the shops shuttered, the ovens cold. Even the picks and hammers have gone quiet. The whole world’s s
topped, because Constantine commanded it. Who’d reject a god who gives you a day off once a week?
A skiff’s waiting for us, bobbing among the litter and debris that clog the harbour. Twelve strong slaves bend over their oars. I’m expecting them to take us across the Horn; instead, they turn out into the open water of the Bosphorus. I glance down into the bilge. A length of chain makes an iron nest near the bow, and the anchor fastened to it looks heavy enough to sink an old man. With the wind up, blowing spray off the whitecaps, you wouldn’t even see the splash.
I pull the cloak closer to keep off the wind, and fix my attention on the city on the Asian shore – Chrysopolis, the city of gold. It’s lost some lustre in recent years – the magnificence of Constantinople casts a long shadow across the strait – but a certain class of person still values its amenities. The houses are spacious, the air’s clear, and the jealous eyes that watch every inch of Constantinople can’t reach quite this far.
The boat steers clear of the town harbour, and pulls along the coast to a private stone landing. Long gardens stretch away from the water towards a handsome villa at the top of the slope. Almond trees are in bloom; bees buzz among the cyclamen and roses. Halfway to the house, two men wait on a terrace. One hurries down the steps to greet me.
‘General Valerius. After all these years.’
It takes me a moment to place him – not because I don’t recognise him, but because to see him here is almost the last thing I expect. It’s Flavius Ursus, Marshal of the Army, the most powerful soldier in the empire after Constantine. I knew him when he was Tribune of the Eighth. Flavius the Bear, we called him. In the field he wore a bearskin cape and a necklace of claws and teeth. He’s short, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a full beard that hides most of the scars on his face. His father was a barbarian who crossed the Danube in the chaos before Diocletian’s reign, and then joined the Roman army to stop his countrymen from following him. The son, I think, is similarly flexible.
He shows me up to the terrace.
‘My men coming to get you – I hope you didn’t mind. I’m sure you understand.’ We climb the final step and come out on a broad terrace. ‘And here’s another face from the old days.’
The man waiting there is younger than both of us, probably half my age, with short dark hair cut straight across the forehead, and a smug patrician face. He looks pleased to see me, though I can’t think why.
‘Sir.’
He clasps my hand, but doesn’t introduce himself. He’s waiting, hoping I remember him.
‘Marcus Severus?’ It’s half-guesswork, but his smile says I’ve got it right. ‘I haven’t seen you since …’
‘The Chrysopolis campaign.’ Now I’ve recognised him, he’s happy to remind me. ‘I was on your staff.’
‘And now the Gemini?’ I guess. ‘You must be a tribune by now, at least.’
His face flushes. ‘I’m Chief of Staff to the Caesar Claudius Constantinus.’
‘Of course.’ It’s been fully twelve years since our last campaign, when he was a hot-headed young officer buzzing around my staff, angling for any command that might give a whiff of glory. I flap my hand, an apology for my age. ‘An old man’s memory … I knew and I forgot. Congratulations, richly deserved.’
An awkward silence descends between the three of us. Why is Severus here? He should be a thousand miles away in Trier. And why is Ursus harbouring him?
A slave brings us cups of spiced wine on a silver tray. I sip mine, and stare across the water. A brown haze of dust and smoke smears the sky over the city.
‘Is this your house?’ I ask Ursus.
‘It belongs to a merchant, a contractor for the army. He lets me use it from time to time, when I need somewhere private.’
Obviously, the merchant’s done well out of supplying the army. ‘And did you row an old man across the water just to reminisce about the old days?’
‘In the old days, General, you always had your finger on the pulse,’ says Severus.
‘I retired. I have a villa in the mountains of Moesia, and in a month I’ll be there for good. As soon as the Emperor lets me go.’
Ursus gives a short, barking laugh. ‘Nothing changes. Every campaign I fought with you, you said it would be your last. And I hear the Emperor has you doing yet another last job for him. Still his trusted right hand.’
Of all the things I expected when the soldiers arrived at my door, this must be the least likely. What did this bishop have that makes everyone from an old pagan to Constantine’s field marshal so sensitive to his fate?
‘It’s trivial,’ I assure him. ‘I don’t know why the Augustus bothered himself with it.’
A fringe benefit of my reputation is that people always assume I know something when I plead ignorance. Severus gives me a conniving smile. ‘There are rumours, General. You must have heard them.’
‘Imagine I haven’t.’
‘They say that when your dead bishop was found, a document case was missing.’
When did he become my dead bishop? ‘Bishop Alexander was writing a book for Constantine – a compendium of the events of his reign. Whatever papers he had were just for that.’
Severus leans in closer. ‘We’re not interested in the past.’
I believe him. Constantine’s raised a new generation in his image, and the past is simply embarrassing. The ancestral gods get lodged in the attic, and old books make good kindling.
I glance at Ursus, looking for a hint.
‘You know there are factions at court.’
‘That’s why they call it a court. People choose sides and play games.’
Neither of them smiles. ‘They say that Constantine’s sister, Constantiana, has a secret will he’s written,’ says Severus.
‘Benefitting whom?’
‘No one knows.’
‘Then who’s spreading the rumours?’
Ursus grunts. ‘You know how it goes. Whispers and glances and shadows in the smoke.’
I know how it goes. ‘There is no secret will,’ I say flatly. ‘Even if there were, why would Alexander have it? When was the succession ever decided by a priest? The army’s loyal.’ I fix on Ursus’s brown eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘To Constantine.’
‘But after Constantine …’ The red wine has stained Severus’s lips purple. ‘It’s important that all the sons inherit equally.’
‘The army wants an orderly succession,’ Ursus confirms.
I know what he means. The army wants Constantine’s three sons to divide the empire. Three emperors means three armies, three times as many generals, three times the profits for the contractors in their palatial villas on the Bosphorus shore.
‘One heir would be more orderly.’
‘Only if he was undisputed.’
‘That time has passed,’ says Severus. ‘This is a new age.’
‘Every age thinks so.’
‘And old men think nothing changes.’
I study him more closely. He’s wearing a leather thong around his neck: it dips under his tunic, but when he tips his head back I glimpse a curved, scaly fish-back rendered in bronze.
‘I remember when you were the crow, and I was the scorpion,’ I say. Severus looks at me as if I’m spouting gibberish, as if the phrase genuinely means nothing and he never heard it while squashed together with his comrades in a damp basement with frontier earth oozing through the stones. As if he never knelt in front of me so I could sign the blood of Mithra on his forehead and induct him into the mysteries he was so desperate to know.
‘There is only one God, Jesus Christ,’ he says blandly. Ursus, who stood beside us in those caves, says nothing.
There’s no point arguing. I could accuse Severus of treachery, of abandoning the old gods, but he wouldn’t care. He’s not interested in the past, not even his own.
‘Why is he here?’ I ask Ursus. ‘Does Constantine know?’
Their faces tell me he doesn’t.
‘The Caesar Claudius is
worried for his father’s health,’ says Severus.
Translation: Constantine’s an old man. If anything happens, Claudius wants his man in place to guard his inheritance. No wonder Severus is holed up here, watching the palace from across the water. If Constantine found out, he’d have Severus counting gulls on some rock in the Aegean for the rest of his life.
An aide sidles up and presents a scroll to Ursus. He withdraws a little distance to study it, leaving me and Severus alone.
‘I saw the Augustus two days ago,’ I tell him. ‘You can go back to Trier and report that he was in rude health.’
Severus nods, as if my news is helpful. We both know he’s not going anywhere. ‘I need to know about the will, Valerius.’ He’s dropped the ‘General’. ‘There are factions at court, and who knows what they might do to deny Claudius his inheritance.’
‘Constantine knows his own mind – more than any man who ever lived.’
‘He can still be swayed by gossip. As you know.’
Again, that twist of the knife in my heart. I want to hurl him into the water, hold him under the waves until the fish nibble the privilege off his face for good.
‘You’re still the crow, Severus, even if you don’t remember those days. Sitting in your tree, waiting for the wind to bring you the smell of death.’
It’s my last attack, and it doesn’t touch him. I never had a family of my own; I’ve been spared the experience of seeing my offspring start treating their parents like their own children. Now I know how it feels.
Ursus, who’s been waiting at a safe remove, interposes himself again.
‘My boat will take you back.’
He doesn’t escort me. But as I step on to the landing stage, a final question follows me down to the shore.
‘Have you wondered why Constantine asked someone who knows nothing about the Christians to investigate the death of a bishop?’
XVII
Rome – Present Day
UNTIL THE VERY last minute, she didn’t guess what they’d do to her. Blindfolded, she was dragged back downstairs to the car, then driven for what seemed an eternity. The hand on her back never relaxed. She lay curled in a ball, face down in her stale vomit, reliving her nightmares. The villa on the coast and the black museum and all the evil places on earth she’d been. Different voices spoke inside her, overlapping ghosts. Hector: You spend too long chasing dead people, you need to come up for air. Michael, on a beach somewhere on holiday: Never get involved. Reports she’d written, dispassionate and correct. Witnesses saw the victim being bundled into a car by unknown men; she was found dead in a forest eight hours later.
