Secrets of the Dead

by Tom Harper

  ‘I brought no peace but the sword,’ he says, inscrutably. ‘I’ve campaigned every summer for the last ten years. I’ll die here with more soldiers around me than priests. Do you think the titles I’ve accumulated will count for anything when Christ meets me at the gates of heaven? Unconquered Constantine, four times victor over the Germans, twice over the Sarmatians, twice the Goths, twice the Dacians … Is that how he’ll call me?’

  At the far end of the room, the bronze doors creak open. A worried priest’s face appears.

  ‘Eusebius …’

  ‘Tell him to wait!’ I shout. But Constantine is running out of patience – and time. He clasps his bony fingers on to the front of my tunic and hauls himself up. I can feel the fever burning off his face.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  Do I? I can hardly draw breath. For eleven years I’ve waited for him to ask me. It’s been the void between us, the death of our friendship and the hollowing out of our selves. And now that he’s asked, the reply sticks in my throat. I don’t know what to say.

  I remember something Porfyrius told me about Alexander: He forgave me everything. No rebuke, no lecture.

  I lean across to embrace Constantine. I put my head against his shoulder, feeling the powdery skin against my cheek, and wrap my arms around his head. I whisper in his ear.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  His body tenses. A scream of strangled rage or despair rasps in his throat until he chokes on it. It takes all my strength to prise his fingers off me so I can push him back down on the bed. Even then, he struggles and flails, throwing back the sheets.

  I blunder towards the door. It’s already open: guards are rushing in, with a mass of priests and soldiers pressing behind them. I struggle against the tide and find myself face to face with Eusebius.

  ‘You can have your prize,’ I tell him.

  I don’t think he hears me. The crowd carries him forward to Constantine’s bedside, while I slink out of the hall.

  The moment I’m alone, remorse overwhelms me. Whatever’s happened between us, who am I to deny an old friend his last comfort. I turn to go back, to tell him I forgive him. That I love him.

  But the throng of courtiers blocking the way is so thick I’ll never get through. They make a circle around the bed, where Eusebius is standing next to the bowl of water. A snatch of what he’s saying reaches back to me.

  ‘Die and rise to new life, so that you may live for ever.’

  The doors close in my face, and Constantine is gone.

  XXXIX

  Split, Croatia – Present Day

  THERE WEREN’T MANY places in the world where you could inhabit a Roman emperor’s palace. Split might be the only one. When the Emperor Diocletian defied all precedent and expectation by quitting his office at the peak of his powers, he built himself a retirement home on an imperial scale: a seafront palace on a quiet bay overlooking the Dalmatian coast, based on the plan of a military camp the area of eight football pitches, with walls ten storeys high. Inside the walls were gardens, where the peasant emperor could tend his vegetable patch; opulent living quarters and ceremonial halls (even a retired emperor expects a certain grandeur); several temples to the old gods, whom Diocletian had defended with cruel vigour against the depredations of the Christians; a garrison, because even though he’d pacified the empire, his successors were jealous, violent men; and his own mausoleum, so he would never need to leave.

  But the Christians had survived his persecution, flourished, and eventually thrown out the old gods and their champion. Five hundred years after his death, Diocletian had suffered the ultimate indignity. His porphyry sarcophagus had been torn out of his mausoleum, his bones thrown into a ditch and replaced with those of a man he’d martyred. The church he’d tried to destroy had appropriated his final monument, turning his mausoleum into a cathedral.

  And the palace remained. When barbarians came, the local citizens retreated inside Diocletian’s walls and squatted in the ruins. Over time, houses grew up like weeds, weaving through the remains and making them their own. New walls absorbed columns and arches; old walls sprouted new roofs. Bit by bit, the palace turned into a town. Roman Spalato became Croatian Split.

  Abby had been there with Michael a few months ago, another stolen weekend away from Kosovo. She’d instantly decided it was one of her favourite places in the world. They stayed in a boutique hotel with bits of Diocletian’s wall jutting into the bedrooms; wandered down narrow alleys that suddenly opened up on intact Roman temples; ate Dalmatian ham on freshly baked bread, and drank red wine late into the night.

  That had been June; this was October. The tourists had gone home, the pavement cafés retreated indoors, the hotels emptied. She’d thought her memories of the summer might bring back some warmth: instead, they only mocked her with echoes of happiness. It reminded her of the dying days of her marriage, when she and Hector had gone back to Venice, scene of their honeymoon, hoping a spark of the old feeling might rekindle something. That was when she’d realised there was no way back.

  At least she and Michael had reached Split. After all her worries, getting out of Serbia had been the easiest part of the journey. At the border, the bus driver had collected passports and handed the stack to the guard, who took them in to his hut. Ten heart-stopping minutes later, the guard came back and returned them to the driver, who redistributed them among the sleepy passengers.

  The bus rolled on, the border receded. Across the aisle and three rows forward, Michael glanced back and winked.

  They checked into the Hotel Marjan, another hulk of Soviet-era luxury squatting on the waterfront half a mile from the old town centre. They registered under their own names – Michael spun the bored clerk a story about how a pickpocket had stolen their passports, until the man surrendered the keys to room 213. Abby went up, washed her face, and got ready to go straight back out. It was already almost one thirty.

  Do it as quickly as possible, Michael had said. Don’t give them time to prepare.

  Michael flopped down on the bed.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right doing this on your own?’

  ‘We’ve got to assume Mark will have people watching. It won’t work if they see you.’

  He leaned over on his side and stared across the room at her. ‘Be careful, OK?’

  ‘I’ll see you later.’

  She walked along a palm-lined esplanade, past the mostly empty marina and the few ferries tied up at the dock. At the far end, the pillars of the palace façade rose above the shops that had been tucked into the wall. Just past a jeweller’s she turned left through an arch into an underground arcade that had once been a water gate, but now housed stalls selling trinkets and art. Ahead, a flight of stairs led up towards daylight.

  Unlike most people living in the West, Abby actually knew what it was like to be followed by secret police. She’d experienced it countless times: a blacked-out car trailing her from the airport in Belgrade; a window cleaner in Khartoum who’d spent an hour outside the meeting room making smudges in the dust; a telephone that clicked all through her conversations and cut out unexpectedly in Kinshasa. She’d once asked her boss if she should have some sort of counter-espionage training to deal with it. Bad idea, she’d been told. If you look like an amateur, they just watch. It’s when you look like you know what you’re doing that it gets dangerous.

  This time, they picked her up the moment she entered the palace. It was the obvious move – seventeen hundred years on, Diocletian’s walls still held good, allowing only five ways in to the old town. She could feel eyes on her as she walked along the arcade. A man in a green anorak who’d been browsing through a rack of art prints peeled off and started walking ahead of her. Just after she’d passed a woman in a red skirt at a coffee stall, she heard a second set of footsteps fall in behind her. She forced herself not to look back.

  She climbed the stairs and crossed a courtyard boxed in by high blank walls. The footsteps behind kept pace, following her through a door into a
high round chamber that had once been the entrance vestibule of the imperial apartments. A pair of Japanese tourists stood in its centre, aiming their cameras at the doughnut hole of the oculus in the domed roof. Off to the right, another man in a black fleece stared at his guidebook. Was it her imagination, or did he glance up at her as she swerved around the two tourists and crossed to the doorway in the far wall?

  Beyond the vestibule was the peristyle – the formal courtyard at the heart of any Roman dwelling. A row of columns soared above it, free-standing and intact; the facing columns were also intact, though now built into the façade of a Venetian palazzo that had become a coffee-house. Behind the arches stood the stone octagon of Diocletian’s mausoleum, now the cathedral. A high belltower rose next to it, overlooking the city; at its foot, a black Egyptian sphinx crouched beside the door and riddled passers-by.

  The man in the green anorak diverted to the coffee shop and took a seat in the window. The woman in the red skirt walked briskly past and climbed the steps to the mausoleum. Abby turned, admiring the architecture, and saw the man in the black fleece lounging against the vestibule doorway taking a photograph.

  ‘Abby?’ Mark wasn’t giving her any time for second thoughts. He’d emerged from behind the sphinx, was hurrying down the well-worn steps. He was wearing a navy blue wool coat, the sort of sensible thing his mother might have bought him, and a striped college scarf. He stuck out his hand, and pumped hers too enthusiastically.

  ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’

  So that’s how he wants to play it. She nodded.

  ‘Do you know anywhere good?’

  Was that a test? She shrugged, noncommittal. ‘This town used to be colonised by the Italians. Pretty much everywhere has good coffee.’

  ‘Might as well stay here, then.’ He led her across the peristyle courtyard, to the coffee shop opposite the cathedral. He offered her a seat with her back to the door, and seated himself facing her and the window. She tried to see the street in the gilded mirror behind him, but it was too high.

  They were the only customers there, except for the green-anoraked man at the table by the window. Presumably that would help with whatever devices Mark had recording the conversation. A white-aproned waiter came and took their order: black coffee for Abby, tea for Mark.

  He looked at her face. ‘You look as if you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘Where’s the necklace?’

  To her surprise, he didn’t stall. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a slim black jewellery box with an Asprey logo on the top. He pressed the catch and flipped open the lid. There was the necklace, laid on a ruffle of black silk. To the waiter, polishing the coffee machine and peering over the bar, she must look like an exceptionally expensive, hard-to-please girlfriend. She shuddered at the thought.

  ‘Are you going to tell me why you want this?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me.’

  Mark snapped the box shut. ‘We took it to a nice man at the British Museum. He said it’s antique – fourth-century Roman. About the same vintage as the tomb in Kosovo where we found Jessop’s body.’

  The waiter brought the drinks. Abby looked at her hands. ‘I’m sorry about Jessop.’

  ‘He was a good man.’ Mark said it stiffly, as though he’d learned the line from a film. ‘He filed a report just before he died, saying he suspected Michael Lascaris had been supplying Dragović with stolen antiquities looted from this tomb.’

  ‘That’s what it looked like.’

  ‘Did Michael tell you differently?’

  ‘You can ask him yourself.’

  Mark looked around, as if he expected Michael to materialise out of the Roman stones. ‘You didn’t bring him here.’

  She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward over her coffee. Her heart was racing.

  ‘Michael’s at the Hotel Marjan on the waterfront. Room 213.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘When I left him.’

  Mark produced a mobile phone and tapped out a text message. She assumed that was for show, that hidden microphones had already radioed the details to whatever accomplices Mark had waiting. They probably had a car. Even on foot, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get there.

  She took the necklace out of the jewellery box and clasped it around her neck, cold metal on cold skin. Mark opened his mouth as if he wanted to stop her, but didn’t.

  ‘What do you want with Michael?’ she asked.

  Mark smoothed back his hair. ‘Michael isn’t the target. Dragović is. All we want Michael for is to lead us to him.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to Michael?’

  ‘Maybe a prison sentence. Maybe not, if he cooperates and it comes to something. And if he gets a good lawyer.’

  ‘He wants the same thing you do,’ Abby protested. She stared into Mark’s young eyes and didn’t hide her contempt. ‘He was getting close to Dragović to bring him down.’

  ‘Then why are you selling him out?’

  Abruptly, Abby stood. Mark jumped up, knocking the table and rattling the coffee cups. The green-coated man in the window looked around.

  ‘Relax,’ Abby said to the room. ‘I just need a wee.’

  Before anyone could stop her, she pushed through the wooden door into the toilet and locked it. She listened for footsteps, for banging on the door, but they didn’t come. The toilet was at the back of the café, a windowless dead end. They didn’t have to worry about her escaping that way.

  She checked her watch and got to work.

  First, she closed the toilet seat and took a piece of paper out of her coat. It was Gruber’s scan of the papyrus, but traced out on clean paper so that the letters were clear and legible. She laid it flat on the toilet seat, then unlatched the necklace and laid it over the text.

  The gold fitted exactly – the square outline of the necklace and the square layout of the writing. Abby peered closer, and swore in quiet amazement. Each of the glass beads that studded the gold lined up perfectly with a letter underneath.

  She checked the time. A minute gone.

  Hands trembling, she took out a magnifying glass she’d bought in Zadar and read off all the letters she could see through the beads. She circled them in pencil on a copy of the text, then traced the outline of the gold over it in case that was important too.

  Three minutes gone.

  She took a slim digital camera out of her coat and photographed the necklace in place over the writing, holding the camera as close and as still as she could. Then she ejected the memory card, wrapped it in the small square of paper, and tucked it into her bra. She picked up the necklace and clasped it back on. Finally, she lifted the lid of the cistern and dropped in the camera and the magnifying glass, then tore up the extra copy of the papyrus and flushed it down the toilet.

  If they don’t find a camera, they won’t look for pictures.

  The whole business had taken five and a half minutes. She washed her hands, just in case anyone was going to sniff them, and went back out. Mark was sitting indecisively in his chair, half-poised to get up. The green-coated man had gone.

  ‘Michael’s not at the Hotel Marjan,’ Mark said. He sounded angry. ‘The receptionist said he checked in an hour ago, but the room’s empty.’

  That didn’t take long. She tried to look apologetic. ‘He probably went for a walk. We’ve been on the road for most of the last fourteen hours.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring him here?’

  ‘Because he knows better than to walk into a walled town that’s crawling with SIS.’

  ‘Did you tell him we were here?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Does he trust you?’

  ‘Maybe. Probably not.’ She let exasperation show. ‘Michael convinced the world he was dead, and then covered his tracks so well that neither you nor Dragović could find him. Do you think he’s just going to sit in a bedroom watching TV, while I go and meet with the people who want to arrest him? If I was him, I’d be sitting in the
café next door to the hotel, watching to see if any flat-footed thugs came charging in looking for Michael Lascaris.’

  Mark’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘By car.’

  ‘Make? Model?’

  ‘It’s blue.’

  Mark started to say something patronising and stereotypical, then realised she was playing with him.

  ‘It’s a Skoda Fabia – the hatchback. I don’t remember the registration.’

  This time, he didn’t bother to pretend with his phone. He pushed back his chair and stood. Outside the window, Abby saw the flash of a red skirt between the columns across the street.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘We. You’re staying with me until we get our hands on Michael.’

  ‘Bollocks to that. If he’s seen your people, he’ll know I’ve turned him in.’ She got up and pulled on her coat. ‘I’ll take care of myself.’

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. Not an order, more a plea. For a moment she could almost believe he cared about her. ‘I’ve got a car waiting on the promenade. A clean passport, too. In three hours you can be back home and safe. You can have your life back.’

  And why not? No more running. No more drifting around these concrete cities at the end of civilisation, waking up every morning not knowing if she’d live or die. Out of the cold, into the warmth.

  But what was her life, after all? An empty flat, a failed marriage and a lost faith. She’d come too far down this road.

  She put a twenty-kuna note on the table. ‘That’s for the coffee.’

  Mark didn’t try to stop her.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ He waggled a finger in the direction of her neck; she gave him an I’m-sorry grimace, unhooked the necklace and laid it back in the box.

  ‘I bet you do that to all your ex-girlfriends.’

  She left the warmth of the café and stepped out into the courtyard. The lady in the red skirt had moved along to the far end and was examining a shop window; the man in the black fleece was enthusiastically photographing the sphinx. The day was so dark the flash kept going off.