The Sacred Spoils

by The Sacred Spoils (retail) (epub)

  God save your most pious servant Flavius Justinian lover of Jesus giver of these tokens of your glory

  Flavius Justinian, better known as Justinian I or Justinian the Great, ruler of the Byzantine Empire from CE 527 through to 565. Patron of many of the great buildings of late antiquity, including Constantinople’s sumptuous Hagia Sophia and Jerusalem’s own famous Nea Ekklesia, short-lived though that had been. And countless other churches too, across the ancient world. She glanced at Kaufman, her eyes watering. ‘This is… this is amazing.’ She looked up at the grey slab prison wall that towered above her, at the cell blocks either side, and realised how precarious it was.

  ‘Quite,’ said Kaufman. ‘The prison can’t be moved. The mosaic can. Not at once, obviously. But eventually. So the warden and I provisionally agreed a plan. To bury this again beneath protective sheeting of some kind while I arranged sponsorship for a new home where it could be properly protected, studied and displayed. Then we’d come back to cut it out and transfer it.’

  ‘This new home,’ she said drily. ‘It wouldn’t be at your university, would it?’

  His chin went up. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘No reason,’ she agreed. ‘You deserve it.’

  He squinted suspiciously at her until he realised that she was sincere. Then he nodded. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘as part of this plan we scanned this whole area to measure the floor’s dimensions and see how deep it goes, for a better idea of the logistics.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There are cavities beneath it. Chambers. A whole string of them. They start directly beneath this mosaic here, run nine metres to the prison wall, then another twelve metres out the other side.’

  ‘Catacombs?’

  ‘I expect so. Though we won’t know for sure unless we look. Unfortunately, we may not get that opportunity.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘To you and me, this is a discovery of immense historical importance. To my friend the warden, it is a tunnel out beneath the wall of his high-security prison.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Zara. ‘Hell.’

  ‘Quite. Which is why he has arranged for these mosaics to be drilled through first thing tomorrow morning, in order to flood the chambers beneath with cement.’

  Chapter Two

  I

  There was a bridge at the end of Via Popilia that took them across a broad and stately river that ran through the heart of modern Cosenza. It offered Carmen Nero too good an opportunity to resist. ‘So I guess this must be the famous Busento,’ she said.

  The responses of both Suraces were equally telling in their own way. Vittorio put a hand to his stomach, as if suddenly feeling queasy, while Giulia forced a smile that didn’t quite make it to her eyes. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘This is actually a river called the Crati.’ She pointed a little way upstream, where two tributaries of roughly equal size merged together. ‘The one up there on the right, that’s the Busento.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Carmen. Silence fell. Their route took them back across the divided rivers. Vittorio again placed his hand upon his stomach and Giulia did the same, as if in unconscious sympathy. It gave Carmen a pang to see, for it brought her own father suddenly to her mind. Their relationships could hardly have been more different, yet he’d influenced her choice of studies every bit as much as Vittorio had influenced Giulia’s.

  In photos, Carmen’s mother had been a strikingly pretty young woman, with dimples, sparkling eyes and bobbed fair hair. Landing jobs had been easy for her. Holding them had been the challenge. Waitressing in the executive dining room of one of New York’s top auction houses, she’d managed to spill soup into the lap of a young Italian classical art expert in America on a three-year placement. Within one week, she’d moved in with him. Within six, she’d fallen pregnant. They’d become proud parents, from what little Carmen had gleaned. But then the idyll had turned sour. He’d left America the moment his stint had ended, and had never been back since.

  He’d not abandoned them altogether. He’d paid enough support that they could live in modest comfort whenever Mom had had one of her sporadic jobs. And he’d sent her a beautifully wrapped birthday present every year with Italian stamps and a Rome postmark. The gifts hadn’t been crazily expensive, but they’d always been thoughtful. For years she’d refused to sleep without Larry, her stuffed lion, beside her. And she still prized the set of wooden dolls he’d sent.

  For her fourteenth birthday he’d sent her a gorgeous, hand-cut jigsaw puzzle of the Good Shepherd mosaics from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, along with a potted history of the woman herself. She’d looked forward with absurd excitement to her fifteenth birthday. But it had passed without anything arriving. Nothing had arrived the following morning either, nor in the days afterwards – on each of which she’d felt a pounding echo of that first hurt. Her sixteenth birthday had come and gone unmarked too. And every birthday since. She’d wondered whether something had happened to him. She’d almost hoped it had. Better that than being forgotten. Yet the support payments had continued uninterrupted. She’d felt both furious and confused. She’d kept returning to her jigsaw puzzle and potted history as though they could somehow explain it – as though they themselves had been pieces in some larger puzzle that she’d needed somehow to solve. She’d become mildly obsessed with Galla Placidia. She’d read obsessively about her – this remarkable yet relatively unheralded woman. She’d daydreamed of making herself into the world authority on her, and of her father attending one of her lectures and timidly asking a question, for which she’d cut him dead. Yet, since arriving in Rome, she hadn’t so much as looked his name up in the phone book. She’d learned the hard way since how difficult parenthood could be.

  The silence in the van grew uncomfortable. Vittorio reached across his daughter to tap Carmen on her forearm. ‘Cosenza old town,’ he said, pointing up through the windscreen. ‘We’ll take you while you’re here. Not to be missed. Especially the castle.’ He kissed his fingertips. ‘You have to see the views.’

  ‘I’d love that,’ said Carmen, though his clumsy attempt at distraction only whetted her curiosity further. They drove past a vegetable market, then a line of men filling bottles at a public spring. They crossed the Busento yet again, this time over a humpback bridge low enough for her to see the rounded stones beneath the water. The bulrushes and bamboos that lined its banks swayed gently in the breeze, until the river was swallowed further upstream beneath a lush canopy of trees. ‘I’d imagined it as bigger,’ she said.

  ‘You should see it in a storm.’

  They turned up a hill, long and steep enough to make their engine strain. The road was so badly potholed that it made Carmen’s overnight bag bump and jolt on the flatbed like a Mexican bean. Repairs were underway, at least. The left-hand side of the road had been closed off for resurfacing. They reached the top, turned right and crossed yet another bridge, far higher above the river now, a thin grey thread beneath. Her curiosity grew too much for her. She turned to Giulia with an inquisitive smile. But Giulia didn’t even wait for her to frame the question. ‘Please don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t ask. Not yet. I’ll tell you everything later. I promise.’

  ‘Then why not now?’

  ‘We gave our word.’

  ‘Who to?’

  Giulia glanced at her father. He gripped the steering wheel tight enough to turn his hands pale. ‘A friend of mine,’ said Giulia. ‘An archaeologist. He’ll be joining us tonight.’

  Vittorio’s hands relaxed again on the wheel, so that Carmen couldn’t help but wonder whether this was a lie. ‘An archaeologist, huh?’ she said. ‘Will I know him?’

  ‘I doubt it. He’s still young. On sabbatical from Oxford right now, to write a book. But from here originally. From Cosenza, I mean. You’ll like him, I know you will.’ She gave a shiver of fond memory. ‘Wait till you see his eyes! The most beautiful blue eyes you’ll ever see.’

 
Carmen laughed. ‘And you’ll tell the both of us together?’

  ‘I promise.’

  She nodded and sat back. It wasn’t in her to push harder. Besides, there was finally some countryside worth looking at, woodland and rolling hills topped by small citadels of brightly coloured houses. A large meadow of wispy grasses was dotted with spring flowers in scarlet, yellow and pale blue. A scarecrow in a high-vis jacket swivelled to follow them on the breeze. She was craning her neck to look back at it when Vittorio slowed sharply and then turned off the road, bumping between a pair of peeling white gateposts then back along a farm track through woods that opened up to their right, sloping steeply down to the river. The land between was crammed with neat rows of vines tethered to teepee frames, and young vegetables sprouting from moist hoed soil; with olive groves and citrus orchards jewelled orange and lemon with young fruit, and a pair of polythene greenhouses through whose translucent fronts she could see long tables crowded with greens. They jolted onwards. The river bent towards them in a small oxbow, making the embankment beneath too steep to farm. She craned to look down it even so, for it offered her best view yet of the—

  A flash of yellow to their left. A roar of engine. She looked around in shock that turned to horror as a heavy truck came hurtling out of the trees to smash into their side with such brute force that it sent the old Fiat pickup tumbling off the track and rolling down the steep embankment to the river.

  II

  Cesco Rossi looked in bemusement at Dieter and his three friends. ‘A photograph? On my website? How could there be? You only just found it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Dieter.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said Cesco. ‘Let me have a look.’ He took Dieter’s phone and the amphora handle to check against each other. He frowned briefly, then his expression cleared. ‘I remember that piece,’ he said. ‘It was one of the very first we found here. It looks a bit like this one, yes, but actually the colouring’s completely different.’

  ‘It’s the same fucking piece,’ said Dieter. ‘It’s broken in exactly the same way.’

  ‘That happens more often than you’d think, with jars from the same batch. They have structural weaknesses in the same places, you see.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Dieter. ‘It’s the same fucking jar.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Arturo, from the helm.

  Dieter turned to address him directly. ‘Your professor friend here is running a scam,’ he said. ‘There is no Alaric shipwreck. He planted those pieces himself so that he could charge mugs like us absurd sums to go dive a patch of sand.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ said Cesco furiously. ‘I can prove it too. I still have that piece in my lock-up. I’ll bring it to your villa tonight.’

  Dieter snorted. ‘Sure you will.’

  ‘I give you my word. Or you can come with me, if you prefer?’

  Dieter nodded. ‘We’ll go there from the dock.’

  ‘After I stow my gear.’

  ‘Screw your gear. We go straight there. You show us that piece. Then you can stow what the hell you like.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Cesco. ‘But I’ll expect an apology. In fact…’

  ‘What?’

  He glanced right. They were heading north alongside Scilla’s main beach, with its pebbly grey sand and perfect grids of coloured umbrellas, while sunlight flashed like semaphore from the windows of cars on the twisting hillside roads behind. Directly ahead, the great turret of rock on which Scilla’s famous castle was built thrust vertically up out of the sea. The town’s harbour lay on its other side, barely five minutes away. ‘I’ve got more photos of that piece on my laptop,’ he said. ‘Better ones, from other angles. You’ll see for yourself they’re different.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Dieter. ‘Show me.’

  Cesco nodded and got to his feet. The Germans parted grudgingly to let him through, bumping him with their chests as he went. He knelt by his bag, zipped his phone away in a pouch. It was a rare luxury, this bag, not just waterproof but buoyant too. He’d bought it last year to take on long swims, packing himself a picnic lunch and a book, then striking out for Sicily or wherever the mood took him.

  Another glance towards the shore, at the teenage boys splashing noisily in the shallows, showing off for the girls in their florescent bikinis; and, just ahead, the low waves breaking white around the rocky foot of the castle promontory. He stood and shouldered his bag, pulled tight its straps. He turned to nod at Dieter and his friends, gave Anna a wink, then stepped up onto the rail and dived headlong into the sea.

  III

  Zara Gold looked in horror at Professor Kaufman. ‘Flood the chambers with cement? But he can’t! It’s not possible. Not until we’ve had a look.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been telling him,’ said Kaufman. ‘He will not listen. Literally. He’s not even come in to work today. He refuses to take my calls. He’s terrified of a mass escape through a tunnel he’d been told of but hadn’t yet dealt with.’

  ‘Dear lord,’ she said. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We go over his head.’

  Zara closed her eyes. Finally, she understood why Kaufman had called. The prison service was part of the Interior Ministry. For several years she’d gone out with the current minister’s youngest son; they’d even been engaged for a while. But it hadn’t ended well. ‘I haven’t seen any of the Bernsteins for almost two years,’ she said.

  ‘But you were close, yes? With Avram, not just his son. You can get us in the door. If we can just talk to him…’

  ‘He’ll take the warden’s side, I assure you. He doesn’t give a shit for history.’

  ‘For this he will.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Look at the map again. Not as a map but as a journey. One that starts here in Jerusalem.’

  She looked back down, unsure what he was getting at. Then she noticed the caravan making its way down the mosaic’s right-hand border. Yet it was headed towards Jerusalem, not away. The only means of transport away from Jerusalem was a ship with swollen sails set for Rome. From there, a second ship sailed south from Rome to Carthage, from which a third headed north-east to Constantinople, only for the caravan to take her back south again, to journey’s start. Jerusalem. Rome. Carthage. Constantinople. And finally Jerusalem again. All served in a thick Justinian sauce. She turned to Kaufman in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that story in Procopius is bullshit, that’s why not. It’s propaganda. Obvious propaganda, at that.’

  ‘Are you sure? One hundred per cent sure? So sure you don’t even feel the need to check?’

  Zara hesitated. An hour ago she’d have staked her reputation on it. Not any more.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Kaufman. ‘So let’s go see the minister.’

  Chapter Three

  I

  Carmen threw up her arms as the truck struck, but the impact still whiplashed her head against her window, shattering the glass into opaque white hailstones that cascaded all around her even as the Fiat pickup tumbled down the embankment, her companions spinning around her like clothes in a dryer as she alone remained strapped into her seat, lost in the shock and noise of it, the crunch and thump and screech of metal on rock, the screams of mortal terror. Finally, the gradient eased. The pickup tipped up once more, almost regaining its wheels, then fell back on its side and came rocking to a rest.

  Carmen lay there a few seconds, too dazed to think. A stone, dislodged by their descent, came bounding down the embankment after them to ding into their roof. It made her aware of the precariousness of the situation. That truck had come out of nowhere. Its driver must have lost control on the road and come plunging through the trees. But what if it hadn’t stopped completely? What if it was right now starting to trundle down the slope after them? Panic slapped her to her senses. She looked around. Giulia was lying beside her, with Vittorio on top, groaning, his hand pressed to his c
heek, blood squeezing out between his fingers even so. The air smelled pungently of fuel, her leg felt wet. She tried again to release her seat belt, but the buckle was still jammed. She twisted around and wriggled free. She hauled herself up by the steering wheel. The windscreen had come loose at the top, and had turned a murky, underwater green. She stamped it with her foot until it fell away, then scrambled out on hands and knees over shards of broken glass.

  To her relief, the truck had stopped where it had struck them. And there was a black SUV parked beside it. Some Good Samaritan come to help. Vittorio crawled out of the empty windscreen then promptly collapsed onto his back, like an exhausted shipwreck victim reaching shore. Blood flowed from his cheek but he ignored it and gestured instead towards his daughter. Carmen crawled back in for her. She grabbed her beneath her armpits and dragged her out, then arranged her in the recovery position and put fingers to her throat to check for a pulse before nodding reassurance at Vittorio.

  There came a scuffing noise of boots on stone. She looked up. Her Good Samaritans were coming down to help, the sun directly behind them turning them into black silhouettes. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that their blackness wasn’t due to the sun so much as to the balaclavas and gloves all three were wearing. And, with a sense of disbelief stronger even than her fear, she realised that she’d somehow fallen into the middle of someone else’s nightmare.

  II

  Cesco looked back at the dive boat as he resurfaced. It was swinging around in a tight turn, throwing up a curtain of white spray. He couldn’t expect Arturo to help him in any way. He was a business associate rather than a friend, and one to whom he owed a lot of money. But nor would he risk his hull over someone else’s feud, so Cesco sprinted the first thirty metres to the relative sanctuary of the shallows, where jagged, protruding rocks forced Arturo to slow right down despite the furious urging of Dieter and his friends.