Secrets of the Dead

by Tom Harper

  It’s a private bathhouse, quite large, but I’m well known there. Most of the men who frequent it work in the government. In the main courtyard, young men box and wrestle and strut, as young men do, while their friends look on in knots. In the shadows of the arcade, hawkers drift around with their boxes of oils, combs and foreign potions that will make us stronger or more handsome.

  I undress in the changing rooms, and make my way to the tepidarium. Some days I find the shock of the cold pool invigorates my old body; today, I need warmth. I tip the attendant to make sure the pedlars and masseurs don’t bother me, and slide into the warm water. I close my eyes.

  My thoughts drift in the water. Is Simeon guilty – of Alexander’s murder, or Symmachus’s, or both? I still can’t decide. Simeon was so sincere, he’s almost persuaded me to believe him.

  But then, I know it’s possible for a murderer to live with his crime as if it never happened.

  In my mind, I see poor Symmachus slumped in his garden. Maybe it was a suicide. Other Stoics have chosen that route. Cato, whose marble head is now sunk in Symmachus’s fishpond; Seneca, the great philosopher and statesman who plotted to assassinate Nero. He died in a bath, opening his veins so that the heat would draw the blood out of him. Though I’ve heard another version: that he didn’t die of his wounds, but actually suffocated from the steam.

  I think I’ll avoid the hot room today. Seneca wasn’t the last person to die in a hot bath.

  Aurelius Symmachus is a Stoic. Outward things cannot touch his soul.

  What is it about these Stoics? They claim to have mastered the world, to be beyond its reach. And then they kill themselves. Is it the effort – the vast will required to hold down their emotions in the face of life’s provocations that finally wears them out?

  To be out of reach of the world is to become a god. Stoics think they can do it by intellect and force of will; Christians by faith. Perhaps they aren’t so different after all. They’re trying to escape human nature.

  No wonder so many commit suicide.

  I don’t like where these thoughts are going. I open my eyes and sluice water over my back. ‘It’s too cold!’ I shout at the bath attendant. ‘Throw more wood on the fire!’ And someone says my name.

  I tip my head back and look up. It takes me a moment to place him: a man called Bassus, a functionary at the palace. He served on my staff years ago when I was consul. Now he’s naked, floury skin damp with sweat and his hair plastered to his skull. He looks terrible, but I greet him as cheerfully as I can. He clambers in beside me.

  ‘Did you hear about Aurelius Symmachus?’

  Sitting beside me, he can’t see the surprise on my face. I should have expected it. An ancient family, a murder and now a suicide: the scandal will consume the city for days, until something better comes along.

  ‘I heard he killed himself,’ I say.

  ‘Poison.’ He splashes the water with his hand. ‘Lucky he didn’t come here to do it, like Seneca. Imagine the mess.’

  ‘Imagine.’

  Bassus leans back and scratches his armpit. ‘The strange thing is, I saw him last night. He came to the palace.’

  Some of the other men in the pool drift closer. I half-close my eyes.

  ‘Did he think he’d get a pardon?’ someone asks.

  ‘He was very agitated. He said he had to see the Prefect.’

  ‘He’d probably realised what the Greeks do to old men,’ says a stocky guards captain. There’s laughter, a few obscene gestures. Bassus waits for them to die down.

  ‘He said he’d found out something about a Christian bishop. A scandal.’

  Did the attendant follow my instructions? The water’s so cold I’m starting to shiver. In the general conversation which has broken out, I sidle closer to Bassus and whisper in his ear. ‘Did he tell anyone his secret?’

  ‘No one would speak to him. He hung around for a few hours, then gave up.’

  ‘Did he say which bishop?’

  Bassus slides around the pool so he can give me a long, searching stare. How much scandal do you want to rake? his eyes ask.

  ‘He didn’t say.’ And then, because he can’t resist an easy joke. ‘He wasn’t that suicidal.’

  XXXV

  Belgrade, Serbia – Present Day

  THE MAN IN the baseball cap fired twice.

  Ten yards away, Gruber lurched backwards, as if he’d tripped on something.

  The gun moved towards Michael. Panic greased the air: a lot of the people who’d fled the citadel had gathered here, torn between fear and curiosity. Now fear had free rein. They poured towards the park exit, blocking the police cars which were trying to nose their way in. Screams and sirens battled for supremacy.

  The man in the baseball cap shouted something at Michael. By Michael’s feet, Gruber lay still. Blood seeped into the gravel. The man’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Abby was too far away to help. She wanted to move, but her legs were frozen. All she could see was the gun, Michael, and the short space between them.

  A man in shorts and a black tracksuit top barrelled out of the crowd and flung himself at the gunman. Unlike Abby, he made no mistake. He drove his shoulder into the man’s side, whipped his legs from under him and dropped him heavily to the ground. The gunman struggled; the baseball cap came off, but the man in the tracksuit pinned him down. He wrenched the gun out of his hand and hurled it into a thicket of bushes.

  Michael was kneeling beside Gruber, pulling something from inside his pocket. Blood smeared his hands.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted.

  Abby still couldn’t move. Michael ran over, grabbed her hand and pulled her along. It felt as though he’d tugged open her bullet scar; it was all she could do not to scream. When she looked back, two policemen had converged on the gunman and were pointing machine pistols at him. The man in the tracksuit was speaking quickly, looking around and waving his arms.

  ‘We need to get out of sight,’ said Michael. ‘As soon as the police start interviewing witnesses, they’ll know pretty quick they want to speak to us.’

  ‘What about Gruber?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘No chance.’ He held up the plastic wallet he’d taken off the corpse. A neat hole the size of a five-pence piece had been punched clean through.

  They hurried out of the park and crossed the main road. A tram rumbled past, briefly blocking them from sight.

  ‘Where to now?’ Abby asked.

  ‘Who do we know in Belgrade?’

  Studentski Trg was busier than when they’d been there that morning. Classes had just finished; the students gathered in knots in the square, wondering what was happening at the citadel. They were close enough that they’d heard the shots and sirens. Fortunately, no one seemed to connect Michael and Abby with the chaos.

  The porter recognised them from before and waved them through upstairs. They were just in time. They found Dr Nikolić outside his office door, a leather jacket pulled on over his sweater and a bunch of keys in his hand. He saw them and gave a polite, resigned smile.

  ‘You forgot something?’

  Michael took out Gruber’s plastic wallet and handed it across. Abby had barely looked at it herself – a quick glance on their way over, huddled in a doorway, hoping no one noticed. Just enough to see a dark printout with blurry characters dim against it, and to wipe Gruber’s blood off the plastic.

  But it meant something to Nikolić. He extracted the top sheet of paper and scanned it intently. He didn’t comment on the bullet hole.

  ‘This is a micro-CT scan of an ancient papyrus?’

  ‘It’s the original source for the poem we showed you earlier,’ Abby said. ‘If there’s any more of it, it’ll be in here.’

  Nikolić looked surprised. ‘You have not checked yourself?’

  ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry,’ Michael explained.

  ‘And we need someone who can read Latin,’ Abby added.

  Nikolić slid the papers back in the wallet. Though
they’d done their best to wipe off the blood, some of the residue still streaked the plastic. Police sirens pulsed through the building, so loud they might have been in the square outside.

  Michael turned to Nikolić. ‘Do you have a car? Can you get us out of Belgrade?’

  Nikolić stared at him. Michael pre-empted anything he might say.

  ‘This printout comes from a scroll that belonged to one of Constantine’s top generals. It’s been lost until five minutes ago, never published, and right now it’s looking for a new owner.’

  To Abby’s astonishment, Nikolić didn’t laugh them out of the building, or call security. He stood there for a long moment, looking between her, Michael and the wallet. He looked neither shocked nor offended – just bemused.

  He shrugged, reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a car key on a rabbit’s-foot charm.

  ‘My car is parked around the corner.’

  He led them down the stairs.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this,’ Abby muttered to Michael. Ahead, Nikolić heard her and turned.

  ‘This is Serbia. You think actually this is the weirdest thing that has happened in my life?’

  Nikolić’s car was a small red Fiat. Abby sat in the front, her hair down and pulled forward so that it shielded her face; Michael squeezed in the back and pretended to be asleep, lolling his head away from the window. Traffic was at a standstill: police cars had blocked several major intersections, though there didn’t seem to be any method to it. Abby kept waiting for a roadblock to appear, for someone to tap on the window and demand their papers, but it never came. They followed a series of switchback streets down through the old town, then came out on the main road. They crossed the Sava and accelerated on to the highway that cut through the grid of Novi Belgrad. Within minutes they were out of the city and driving through rolling farmland. It always surprised Abby how abruptly the city ended.

  Nikolić kept his eyes on the road.

  ‘You wanted to be out of Belgrade? Now you are here. What next?’

  Abby looked at the plastic wallet sitting on her lap. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’

  Nikolić pulled the car into a Lukoil station just past the airport turning. There was a small café attached to the minimart: they sat at a plastic table and sipped oily coffee from plastic cups. Paper placemats advertised fast food and offered puzzles to distract children.

  ‘I don’t want for you to tell me what you are doing,’ Nikolić announced. ‘If the police ask me, I will say you forced me to drive you at gunpoint.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Abby agreed. If the police caught them, that was going to be the least of their worries.

  ‘Let me see the document.’

  Abby handed him the wallet. He spread the papers on the table – four sheets of blurred images, and two of Gruber’s typed transcription.

  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.

  Abby could see the Latin text in neat lines on the typescript. But there was more. Nikolić studied it for some minutes, then began, hesitantly:

  From the garden to the cave,

  The grieving father gave his son,

  And buried in the hollow grave,

  The trophy of his victory won.

  They looked at each other with something like awe, aware they were hearing words that hadn’t been read in seventeen centuries.

  ‘“The trophy of his victory won,”’ Michael repeated. ‘You said trophy was another word for the labarum – the battle standard.’

  ‘It can be.’

  Michael made Nikolić read the translation again, slowly, while he copied it out on the paper. He frowned at it. ‘Other than the “trophy”, it doesn’t seem to take us much further.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything more about the poem?’ Abby asked.

  Nikolić looked up. ‘I can maybe tell you the name of the poet.’

  He enjoyed their astonishment. Even under the circumstances, he couldn’t keep from smiling.

  ‘It was written by a Roman politician and poet called Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Further up the scroll, there is a list of names.’ He showed them on Gruber’s transcription. ‘By itself, that would make this a significant find. Eusebius of Nicomedia, the most notorious bishop of Constantine’s reign. Aurelius Symmachus, a noted pagan and minor philosopher. Asterius Sophistes, a controversial Christian theorist. And Porfyrius – a poet who specialised in highly technical, unconventional poetry.’

  It was like reading a Russian novel – a deluge of unfamiliar, unpronounceable names. But Abby got the drift.

  ‘You’ve heard of all these people?’

  ‘For a scholar of Constantine, it is impossible not to.’

  ‘And Porfyrius wrote poetry?’ Michael repeated.

  ‘His poems are called technopaegnia. Riddles for amusing the Emperor. All his surviving poems contain secret messages.’

  The smile had turned into a sheepish grin.

  ‘Is this for real?’ Michael asked at last. ‘This morning, you laughed us out of your office when we thought the poem had a clue to a treasure. Now you’re saying the chap who wrote it is famous for putting secret messages in poems?’

  The smile faded. Under Nikolić’s calm good humour, the strain had begun to tell.

  ‘I don’t know, OK? There’s a poem and the name of a poet. You say the poem has a secret message and his poems are famous for secret messages. I made a connection. Maybe it means nothing.’ He brushed a hand across the table, pushing the papers away. ‘Maybe your German friend invented everything, and said what he thought you wanted to be true.’

  They sat there in silence for a moment. Abby sipped at her coffee and realised she’d finished it. Trucks thundered past on the motorway.

  ‘Let’s assume the poem’s genuine, and written by who you say it is,’ Michael said at last. ‘How do we decode the secret message?’

  ‘It is like … I don’t know the English word.’

  He said something in Serbian, but Abby drew blank. Nikolić stared at the table in frustration, trying to find a translation. Suddenly, his face lit up. He took the paper placemat that had been laid in front of him and spun it around. It was designed for children: a collage of bright pictures of fast food, dancing cartoon animals and puzzle games. There was a maze, a tangle of lines, a join-the-dots picture – and a word search.

  Nikolić tapped his finger on the word search. ‘Exactly like this. You have the text of the poem, and then you read up or down or diagonally to find other words hidden inside it, yes?’

  Abby and Michael both nodded. Underneath the grid of letters, the mat listed a dozen words for the children to find. Abby pointed to them.

  ‘In a word search, you know what you’re looking for.’

  ‘On Porfyrius’s poems, that is not the case.’ Nikolić sat back, doodling on the mat. ‘For the original manuscripts, the letters would have been picked out in red ink, or underlined. Some scholars think they might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters – though no such tablet is surviving.’

  ‘That would have been nice to find,’ said Michael.

  Nikolić ignored him. Absent-mindedly, he drew bubbles around a couple of words in the puzzle on the mat.

  ‘Porfyrius’s poems are much more intricate, actually. The hidden words spell out messages, but they also make pictures.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Nikolić circled some more letters in the grid, apparently at random. When he’d finished, the marks outlined the shape of a stick man. ‘Like so. Porfyrius was very clever. Sometimes the pictures themselves were of letters that spelled out short words, or numbers. For Constantine’s vicennalia, when he celebrated twenty years of his rule, Porfyrius wrote a p
oem where the hidden message made the form XX, the Roman numerals for twenty. One famous poem, the message makes the shape of a ship. In others, the Emperor’s titles or his monogram.’

  Abby stared at him. ‘His monogram?’

  ‘The chi-rho. Like on the labarum.’

  ‘The labarum again,’ Michael said. ‘That’s got to be it.’

  But Abby was thinking further and faster. She pulled Gruber’s printout from the pile – not the typed transcription, but the raw image reconstructed from the scroll.

  ‘Show me where the poem is here.’

  Nikolić pointed to it. The whole page was dim and blurred, the letters dark shapes like twigs floating in muddy water. But she could see the place. A dark block of text, eight lines long.

  She made a square with her forefingers and thumbs and framed the text between them. Keeping the shape, she lifted her hands against her collarbone.

  Some scholars think they might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters.

  ‘There was a gold necklace,’ she said. Michael shot her a warning look – not in front of Nikolić – but she carried on regardless. ‘We found it with the scroll – a square pattern with the chi-rho in the middle. I think it would have fitted perfectly on top of the poem.’ She thought back, remembering the feel of the cold metal against her skin and the way the inset glass caught the light. ‘It had beads set into it. What if they show which letters you need to read to get the hidden message?’

  Nikolić stared at her, as if he couldn’t decide whether to trust her or to dismiss her as a lunatic.

  ‘And where, please, is this necklace now?’

  Abby shot Michael a what-do-we-have-to-lose look.

  ‘The British Secret Intelligence Service have it.’

  XXXVI

  Constantinople – May 337

  THE DAY’S HOT, but the bath has left me chilled to the bone. A new idea grips me like a fever. Perhaps Symmachus was spinning lies in a last attempt to avoid exile, but I don’t think so.