Secrets of the Dead (35 page)

‘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 Nikoli
ć
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 Nikoli
ć
. 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.’

Nikoli
ć
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.

Nikoli
ć
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 Nikoli
ć
. ‘Do you have a car? Can you get us out of Belgrade?’

Nikoli
ć
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, Nikoli
ć
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, Nikoli
ć
heard her and turned.

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

Nikoli
ć
’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.

Nikoli
ć
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?’

Nikoli
ć
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,’ Nikoli
ć
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. Nikoli
ć
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 Nikoli
ć
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.

Nikoli
ć
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 Nikoli
ć
’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. Nikoli
ć
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.

Nikoli
ć
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.’ Nikoli
ć
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.

Nikoli
ć
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?’

Nikoli
ć
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 poem 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.’

Nikoli
ć
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 Nikoli
ć
– 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?’

Nikoli
ć
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.’

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.

Simeon, baffled that I was accusing him when the evidence was so obvious:
Symmachus had the documents
. I convinced myself the old man was set up. But what if he had the documents all along? He killed Alexander in the library, took his document case and found all Constantine’s dirty secrets locked inside it. No wonder he wanted to be rid of it.

I don’t care who killed Alexander any more. All I want to know is what Symmachus found out – and why he died for it.

Constantine wasn’t the first emperor to build his palace on the promontory. As ever, he demolished the past and rebuilt on its foundations, to a scale beyond his predecessors’ imaginations. When his engineers started excavating, they found a vast empty cistern underneath the site. Constantine himself came down to inspect it.

‘A shame to waste all this space,’ was his verdict. ‘Use it for the paperwork.’

And so it was allocated to the
Scrinia Memoriae
, the Chamber of Records. In a way, it’s appropriate it sits in the old cistern. It’s the run-off of the empire, the well of memory. And the records stacked on its winding shelves are so deep they’re unfathomable.

You enter the Chamber of Records through a reading room, seldom used, in the palace. An archivist sits at a desk, annotating a manuscript. I lean over and put Constantine’s commission under his nose.

‘There was a bishop called Alexander. He came here, probably often, researching a history for the Augustus.’

‘I remember him.’ He sucks the end of his reed pen. ‘He hasn’t been here in a couple of weeks.’

‘He died. I need to see the papers he was looking at.’

‘Do you know what they were?’

‘I was hoping you’d remember.’

His eyes flick back to the commission lying open on the desk. ‘Those papers have been stored, untouched, under the Augustus’s private seal for ten years. I had to check with the palace three times before I could believe the Bishop was really allowed access.’ He squints up at me: small, boring eyes. ‘You said he died?’

‘Just show them to me.’

He shuffles across to the high door, takes the large key off his neck and slots it in the lock. He snaps the key with a practised movement, like a farmwife wringing a chicken’s neck.