Secrets of the Dead

by Tom Harper

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

  XXVIII

  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.

  XXIX

  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 i
t.

  ‘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.

  Inside, the room was vast and dark, though even the darkness couldn’t disguise how empty it was. The walls were painted a burgundy so deep it looked black, broken every so often by electric pieces of neon sculpted into aggressively abstract shapes. A DJ stood in a box in the centre of the room, turning out high-wattage music, but no one was dancing. The few customers had mostly retreated into the booths at the edge of the room. One of them, an old man sitting on his own, looked up as they entered, and beckoned.

  ‘Who is he again?’ Abby asked as they crossed the floor. She was trying to be discreet, though with the music so loud she had to shout to be heard.

  ‘Mr Giacomo. He’s what, in the old days, you used to call a fence.’

  There was a lot of the old days about Mr Giacomo. He had spiky white hair buzzed flat across the top of his head, tapering to a widow’s peak like the bow of a boat. His face was tanned and lined, his eyebrows bushy and wild. He wore a brown tweed suit and no tie, his white shirt unbuttoned somewhere near the borders of decency. He stood as they approached and ushered them into the booth. He didn’t shake hands, but beckoned a waiter over and ordered two Sidecars.

  ‘You had a good journey?’ he enquired. His accent was unlocatable: it could have come from any one of the half-dozen countries bordering the Adriatic. He stared tactlessly at Abby’s face, and she felt herself blushing. Her ordeal in the forest had added several bruises and one long scratch to the marks that Dragović had inflicted in Rome. She looked like a domestic violence poster.

  ‘We had some problems getting here.’

  He nodded, as if it were the most natural thing. ‘It is your first time in Belgrade?’

  His questions were aimed entirely at Abby.

  ‘I’ve been before.’

  ‘You have visited the castle? The ethnographical museum?’

  ‘Mr Giacomo does a lot of work in museums,’ Michael said. He was trying to make a joke, but Giacomo didn’t smile.

  ‘Mr Lascaris, you went to some trouble to arrange a meeting with me. I am a busy man, but I have obliged you – even though your profession and mine are often … antagonists.’

  He spread his hands on the table and leaned forward. ‘What is it you want from me?’

  Michael lit a cigarette and exhaled. The neon on the wall made the smoke glow red; the strobe lights from the dance floor flickered on the edge of the cloud like distant lightning.

  ‘I want to know what Dragović is after.’

  Giacomo’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is not a good name to say out loud – especially in this city.’ He tapped his ear. ‘Even if you cannot hear yourself, always somebody else can.’

  ‘Dragović has been turning Europe upside down for the last two months.’ Michael made a point of repeating the name. The beat of the music accelerated, pounding like running footsteps. ‘He’s looking for something.’

  ‘A man like him is always chasing something. Guns, girls, drugs … Maybe even a customs inspector from the European Union.’ Giacomo took out his own cigarettes and tapped the pack on the table. ‘Maybe this is something you know more about than me?’

  ‘He’s after some historical artefact. Probably Roman. From the way he’s going about it, he probably knows what it is. I thought you might, too.’

  Giacomo considered it. ‘The man you mentioned, he does not share his thoughts with me often.’

  ‘If he’s looking for a Roman artefact, surely you’d have heard about it.’

  ‘You think I am so notorious?’ He held up his drink, studying his reflection in the glass. ‘Perhaps I am. What makes you think this thing he is looking for is Roman?’

  The ash on the end of Michael’s cigarette lengthened. ‘Everyone knows he’s crazy for the Romans.’

  ‘Really?’

  The question hung in the air, mingling with the smoke and noise. Giacomo stared at Michael, who turned slightly to glance at Abby. He raised his eyebrows. What do we tell him?

  Giacomo stood. ‘Excuse me.’ He tapped his crotch. ‘An old man’s problems. Perhaps we continue this conversation in a moment.’

  He slid out of the booth and edged around the dance floor to the toilets. With his brown suit and shuffling walk, he looked like a sad old man who’d got lost.

  ‘How did you find him?’ Abby asked.

  Michael drained his drink. ‘I’ve got some contact
s in the art world. Smuggling stolen artworks and antiquities is big business. Mr Giacomo is one of the best – or worst, depending on your point of view.’

  ‘And he won’t betray us to Dragović?’ She craned around. Deliberately or not, Giacomo had manoeuvred them so they sat with their backs to the door. With the flashing disco lights and hammer-drill bass, it more or less amounted to sensory deprivation.

  ‘I’m not sure about anything.’ Michael waved to the waiter for another drink. ‘Rumour has it he competes with Dragović’s organisation. For what that’s worth.’

  Worth our lives? Abby wondered.

  Across the room she noticed a man in a leather jacket standing at the bar. He was young, hair gelled into spikes and a bad case of acne on his cheeks. He was nursing a beer, but had angled himself so that their table was in his eyeline. She nodded at him.

  ‘Do you think he’s one of Dragović’s?’

  ‘Probably a friend of Giacomo’s.’ Michael shook it off. ‘How much do you think we should tell him?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ She couldn’t take her eyes off the man at the bar.

  ‘Dealing with someone like Giacomo is like playing poker. We don’t want to show our hand too soon.’

  Abby had to laugh. ‘You don’t think he can tell we’re bluffing?’

  Across the room, Giacomo emerged from the toilets. As he walked back past the bar, Abby thought she saw him swap a glance with the acne-faced man. He sat down and waited while the waiter delivered Michael’s drink. His own was still more than half-full.

  ‘So?’

  Michael took a deep gulp of his drink. ‘There was a tomb – in Kosovo. I found it. There were some artefacts inside, and I sold them to Dragović.’

  ‘You should have come to me. I would give you a better price.’

  ‘There was a poem in the tomb.’ Michael took the napkin from under his drink and wrote out the first line of the poem from memory. He slid it across the table. Giacomo raised his eyebrows.