Secrets of the Dead

by Tom Harper

  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.

  XXXVII

  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 Nikolić 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 Nikolić. ‘Can you get us to the Croatian border? We’ll make it worth your time.’

  Nikolić 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?’

  Nikolić 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.

  Nikolić 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 fa
mily 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, Nikolić 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,’ Nikolić 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.

  Nikolić 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 Nikolić 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. Nikolić 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. Dragović 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 Dragović’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.

  A woman in a black dress with dusty grey hair sat behind a trestle table, reading a gossip webpage on a black laptop.

  ‘I’d like a passport for my sister,’ Michael said in Serbian, gesturing to Abby. ‘Her aunt in Zagreb is very ill and she must go at once.’

  The woman frowned. ‘The passport office is shut.’

  A fifty-euro note appeared in Michael’s hand. The woman gave it a disapproving look.

  ‘You are police? You think you can bribe me?’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘This is honest shop.’

  ‘I’m not police. I need a passport for my sister. Her aunt is very ill.’ Two hundred-euro notes came out.

  The woman studied Abby’s face, taking in the bruises staining her cheek, the cut above her forehead. She gave Michael a knowing look, her tongue stuck in the corner of her lips.

  She thinks he’s trafficking me, Abby realised. Her skin crawled as if she’d been smeared with filth; she felt naked.

  ‘Maybe you come back in a week. Maybe your aunt gets better. This is honest shop,’ the woman said again. But she was smiling as she said it.

  Michael laid the money on the table. ‘Perhaps you could just see what you have in the back room,’ he encouraged her.

  They walked out of the travel agent a thousand euros poorer, though that wasn’t what made Abby feel cheap. But they had the passport. She studied the photograph under a streetlight, sucking in her cheeks to try and mimic the pinched face of the woman it had once belonged to.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ Michael told her. ‘Just credible enough for the border guards to accept the bribe.’

  She checked her watch, eager to have something else to think about. ‘It’s been over an hour. I should call London.’

  She found a payphone in the main square and dialled the number from memory. Michael waited outside the booth.

  The same routine with the Foreign Office front desk took her through to the Office of Balkan Liaison. This time, Mark answered straight away.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the Balkans.’ They’d probably trace the number, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

  ‘What the hell’s going on? Jessop’s dead; you’re missing. I’m hearing barmy things about a shooting war in Kosovo and a Roman tomb.’

  ‘It’s crazy,’ Abby agreed. ‘Remind me to tell you about it some time.’

  Mark’s tone altered. ‘You have to come in Abby. You haven’t done anything wrong. We just need to speak to you.’

  ‘You remember the necklace you and Jessop took off me?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I want you to bring it to me.’ She felt the stiff new passport in her pocket and prayed it would do the job. ‘You know the town of Split, in Croatia? Meet me at the cathedral there at two o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re expecting me to drop everything and fly out, just to give you a piece of jewellery? You’ve got to give me more than that.’

  She put her hand over the receiver and looked around. Michael didn’t fit in the phone box; he’d wandered across the square and was buying some cigarettes from a Gypsy woman. He had his back to her.

  ‘Michael’s alive,’ she said.

  ‘Michael Lascaris?’

  ‘He didn’t die that night in the villa. He’s with me now.’

  Across the square, Michael was sauntering back towards her.

  ‘Two o’clock, the cathedral in Split,’ she repeated. ‘Bring the necklace.’

  ‘Wait –’

  She hung up. Michael had opened the door and was peering in.

  ‘Did they bite?’

  ‘He’ll come,’ she said. She took out the passport again and stared at the unfamiliar face. ‘The question is, will we get there?’

  XXXVIII

  Constantinople – May 337

  THE DARKNESS IN the Chamber of Records is immense. I’ve wandered so far, I don’t know where the door is. I can barely tell which way is up.

  But still there’s a voice calling my name. I open my eyes. The darkness recedes. A light approaches, flickering through the gaps in the shelves.

  ‘Gaius Valerius?’

  It’s
the archivist.

  ‘I told you to come out if you wanted to read,’ he reproves me. ‘The atmosphere down here, it can overwhelm you.’

  I’m too exhausted for pride. ‘Thank you for coming to rescue me.’

  ‘Rescue you?’ He sounds amused. ‘I came to fetch you. The Augustus wants to see you.’

  I don’t understand. ‘Constantine? Has he returned from the war so soon?’

  ‘He’s at Nicomedia.’

  And there’s a finality in those words that tells me he won’t be coming back.

  Villa Achyron, near Nicomedia – May 337

  It’s seventy miles to Nicomedia. In my youth, I’d have flogged every post horse on the road to get there in a day. Now, it takes me the best part of two. It isn’t just my age. The road’s busier than I’ve ever seen it; at every waystation, there are long queues for fresh horses. The messengers are tight-lipped, but the grooms know the gossip. From them, I gather that Constantine’s final campaign ended before it really began. He didn’t even get as far as Nicaea before he started complaining of a pain in his stomach. He diverted to the hot baths at Pythia Therma, hoping for a quick cure, but it only made the symptoms worse. His doctors said he was too ill to make the journey back to Constantinople; instead, they decamped to an imperial villa, one of Diocletian’s old estates near Nicomedia: the Villa Achyron. Achyron means ‘threshing floor’, where the grain and the chaff are separated. I don’t suppose Constantine finds that comforting.

  The villa stands five miles outside Nicomedia, on terraces cut into the slopes above the coast. Fields of corn surround it, though the threshing floor that gave the villa its name is long gone. The corn should be ripening gold in the May sunshine, but there’ll be no harvest this year. The crop’s been trampled back into the earth by the boots and tents of two thousand soldiers camped around it. It’s hard to tell if they’re guarding the villa or besieging it. I trudge up the hill along an avenue of poplars, and announce myself to the clerk, who has set up an administrative headquarters in the vestibule. Not a secretary or a palace functionary, but an officer of the Protectores.