Secrets of the Dead (44 page)

For the last month, I’ve been living in a coffin. Asterius’s casual honesty is like a storm wind blowing the lid off my carefully constrained existence. A dangerous elation rushes through me.

‘But Eusebius still killed Alexander. And then Symmachus, who could have corroborated the story.’

Asterius gives me a scornful look. ‘Do you want to know why we killed Symmachus? I can tell you. The week before he died, Symmachus went to the palace twice. He wanted to speak to the Augustus, and when he was refused, he got agitated. He said some things that he’d have been safer keeping to himself.’

‘About Eusebius?’ But I know that’s not true. ‘That he knew the truth about Crispus’s death.’

‘I’d be careful saying that name aloud.’ Asterius glances around the gardens. Families wander among the trees, speaking in hushed voices. ‘Constantine may be a waxwork now, but his sons don’t care to be reminded of it any more than he did.’

Asterius stops at the base of a statue, the great Olympic charioteer Scorpus standing with his legs apart, a whip dangling from his shoulder. He turns. His eyes glow with malicious pleasure.

‘In Alexander’s box of secrets, Symmachus uncovered something that had been kept hidden for ten years. Something even the Augustus didn’t know.’

He’s baiting me. And I don’t have the strength to fight. ‘What?’

‘You know what happened to Crispus?’ He puts an arm on my shoulder in mock sympathy. The touch makes me shudder. ‘Of course you do. And afterwards, poor Fausta in her bath. But did you ever wonder, while you were overseeing the decimation of the Emperor’s household, why she did it?’

I can feel a tightness in my chest, as though a strap’s being buckled around it. ‘She wanted her sons to inherit the throne,’ I say.

‘Of course she did. But who put the idea into Fausta’s head? Who helped her forge the documents? Who found Christians in the bodyguard who were willing to pretend they’d been enlisted in Crispus’s alleged plot, and be martyred for it?’

‘Who?’ I can’t breathe; it comes out a whisper.

Perhaps it’s because of his abbreviated reach, but Asterius has a habit of standing closer than is comfortable. I can almost feel the anger boiling off him. His head’s tipped back like a bird, staring up at me, waiting for me to realise –

‘
You?
’

A ghastly smile spreads across his face. ‘Crispus couldn’t stand Eusebius. Three months after Nicaea, Crispus arranged to have Eusebius exiled to Trier. We knew Eusebius would never be allowed back while Crispus was alive – and that if Constantine went ahead and elevated Crispus as Augustus, that might be for ever.’

‘We?’

‘Eusebius and I. Well, mostly me. Eusebius was a thousand miles away. But I had an ally at the palace.’

Fausta?
I don’t think so – from what he’s said, there was someone else. I wrestle with the question; I don’t want to let Asterius dictate the terms of the conversation. And it comes
to
me. I remember the litter I saw leaving Eusebius’s church service, the proud peacocks embroidered on the purple curtains.
He’s an exceptional man and he has a bright future
. I remember the powder streaked across her lined face, silver hairs on a golden brush late at night.
Did you know, the Augustus once considered marrying me to you?

‘Constantine’s sister. Constantiana.’

The smile gets wider. He’s patronising me.

‘She was always a better Christian than her brother. She struggled so hard to love Constantine. She might have forgiven him for executing her husband Licinius, but killing her little boy was too much. She needed revenge: a spouse for a spouse, a child for a child.’

‘And you encouraged her?’

‘Eusebius was her chaplain. Her spiritual guide. When Crispus exiled him, Constantiana turned to me. I saw how we could all achieve our aims.’

‘I thought your God preached peace and mercy.’

‘Sometimes, we have to do terrible things to achieve God’s will.’

It sounds glib, a throwaway justification. But the pain behind those words is immense, a deep wound that’s scarred to the bone. His arms are trembling in his sleeves. For the briefest instant, I have a glimpse – not even a thought, more a feeling – of how he might deserve sympathy for what he’s suffered.

But not for what he’s done.

‘You killed Crispus to bring back Eusebius?’

‘
You
killed Crispus,’ he retorts. ‘You and Constantine. I just’ – he lifts up his arms, baring the scarred stumps – ‘pulled some strings.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I want you to know. It’s your own story, and you never knew it.’

I can see why he’s brought me to this public place. If we were alone, I’d have killed him by now.

‘And if I expose you?’

‘It won’t matter. Fausta’s sons have just inherited the empire. If you go to them, do you think they’ll punish the people who lifted them on to the throne?’ He cocks his head, as if an idea’s just come to him. ‘If they want justice, they can always execute the man who murdered Crispus.’

‘Why? Because of what happened at Nicaea? Because Crispus made you prefer one form of words over another?’

‘
One form of words
?’ he echoes. ‘We were describing
God
. Do you think we could afford to get it wrong?’ He starts walking again, past the dark gates of the hippodrome. ‘It was Constantine’s fault. Ten or twenty years ago, Arius would have been one voice among many. He could have written whatever he liked, and all his enemies could have done is write against it. But Constantine wanted something definite, something as absolute as his rule. To pin down God. He forced us to choose.’

He pauses, looks at me. For once, there’s no craft in his face: he wants me to understand him.

‘What else could we do?’

I’m desperate to be away, to slink into my cave and lick the wounds that Asterius has opened on every inch of my being. But I have to see this through.

‘You said Symmachus died because he learned the truth about Crispus. Who killed Symmachus?’

‘Constantiana sent one of her men. She told him to make it look like suicide.’

No evasion, not even a blush of guilt. This is the problem with men who spend too long thinking about God. In the
end
, they forget what a mortal life is worth. Perhaps that’s what happened to Constantine.

‘And Alexander? That must have been twice as sweet. Revenge on your enemy from Nicaea, as well as hiding the evidence of your murder.’

He actually laughs. ‘You know the funniest thing?’ He leans so close to me that his tunic rubs against mine. ‘I have no idea who killed Alexander.’

He relishes my surprise.

‘Eusebius didn’t do it – though he might have, if he’d been given the chance. I didn’t. At first I thought Constantine might have ordered it, to bury what Alexander had found, but I don’t think that’s likely.’ He shrugs. ‘It must have been Aurelius Symmachus – he had the document case, after all. Ironic, don’t you think? At least you can console yourself that justice was done.’

I stare at him with dead eyes – his withered body stuffed so full of bitterness and hate. How could he ever preach a religion of love and peace?

‘Why did you do it?’ I ask. ‘In the persecutions – taking the blame for Eusebius’s betrayal of those Christian families?’

He puts the two stumps of his arms together, caressing them against each other. ‘This is what Symmachus did to me. Then he was going to kill me. Eusebius betrayed the Christians to save my life.’ A desperate edge comes into his voice, a man on the brink of losing control. ‘He sacrificed himself to save me.’

‘And you sacrificed me.’

Istanbul, Turkey – Present Day

‘YOU GO IN
alone. Look around, take some photos, then come back.’

Abby sat in the back seat of the taxi in a busy shopping street in a north-western district of Istanbul. The taxi was genuine; the driver was Barry, still in his dark glasses, but now with a leather jacket and a gold chain around his neck. Mark sat in the passenger seat opposite and pointed down the road, where the myriad domes of the Fatih Mosque bubbled down on each other until they vanished behind a large stone gate.

‘Don’t try anything like escaping,’ Barry said from the front seat. ‘You’re not really alone.’

They’d touched down in Istanbul twelve hours ago. She was done with buses, borrowed cars and stolen passports: with Mark in charge, an unmarked plane had flown them out of Split and straight to Ataturk Airport. A delegation of hard-faced men in rigid suits had met them and escorted them through a private channel past customs and immigration.

‘The government here can’t wait to get their hands on
Dragovi
ć
,’ Mark had explained during the drive from the airport. ‘They had him in prison three years ago and he escaped – that was a big embarrassment. They don’t appreciate what he did to Muslims in Bosnia either, for that matter. They giving us everything they can.’

‘How do they know Dragovi
ć
will come? If he was in prison here once before, won’t he be shy of risking it again?’

‘He’ll come,’ Mark had said confidently. ‘All our networks are telling us he’s absolutely obsessed with this thing. Won’t trust it to anyone else.’

Abby got out of the car, made a show of sticking a ten-lira note through the window to Barry, and walked down to the mosque. She’d been to Istanbul once before, for an ICC conference, but that had been high summer when the city groaned with tourists and dust clogged the hot air. Now, in late autumn, the city seemed to have shrunk as it cooled. There was more air; the spaces between the buildings felt wider. The noise of the ships in the Bosphorus sounded unnaturally loud.

The tourists had gone home, but the street was still busy with locals shopping or visiting the mosque for their devotions. A white police van sat on the corner; two more policemen with automatic weapons wandered down the street, chatting to each other. Abby wondered if that was normal.

Mark had given her a guidebook as part of her cover. She opened it to the right page, and read the brief entry on the Fatih Mosque.
Fatih
meant
conqueror
, she learned. On the highest point of the highest hill in the city, the Ottomon sultan Mehmet the Conquerer had razed the old Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles and built his mausoleum on its foundations, when he captured Constantinople in 1453. Three hundred years later, an earthquake had destroyed his mosque;
his
successors had rebuilt it in what the guidebook called Ottoman Baroque style.

She went through the gate, into a wide open park of square lawns and leafless trees. The mosque stood in the centre, as if in a state of siege. Steel hoardings surrounded its base; scaffolding climbed its outer walls. Abby looked for any sign of the Roman building that had once stood there, but couldn’t see anything. She wondered, not for the first time, how a treasure like the
labarum
could have remained hidden through all the centuries of renovations, excavations, demolitions and rebuildings. Surely someone would have noticed something. Or perhaps it lay buried under a thousand years of rubble.

Mark had given her a camera. She took some pictures – a few general tourist views, some of less obvious features like doors, culverts and drainpipes.
Make it look as if you’re scoping it out
, Mark had told her.
Look furtive
. That part was easy enough.

She didn’t go into the mosque, but skirted around the outside to the back. This part was a cemetery: flat graves surrounded by wrought-iron fences; pillars that had once supported canopies now chopped off at the knees. And beyond them, far grander than the others though still dwarfed by the mosque, an octagonal mausoleum topped by a dome.

Abby’s heart beat a little faster. The octagonal shape was exactly like Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split. Could this be Constantine’s? She opened the guidebook again.

‘
Behind the main mosque stands the
türbe
or tomb of Mehmet the Conqueror, reconstructed in the Baroque style after the earthquake
…’

She should have known. And yet she still found the parallel intriguing. Mehmet the Conqueror and Constantine the Unconquered. Two men separated by religion and geography
and
a thousand years, but both wanting the world to know they had
dominated
. Two men who, for all their differences, had chosen to be buried in the same place. Was it Mehmet’s way of conquering the past – burying Constantine beneath him the same way the mosque buried the church? Abby didn’t think so. It was affinity, not rivalry, that had brought him here. He wanted the company.

Gruber:
There are certain places where power abides
. This was one of them – she could feel it. She thought of the dead man in Kosovo, Gaius Valerius Maximus, and wondered if he’d walked through this same courtyard, in the service of the Emperor who first built it.

She snapped a few more pictures, finished her circuit of the mosque and went back out on to the street. A taxi rolled by, the same number as before. She pretended to hail it and got in.

‘Well?’ Mark said.

She clipped on her seatbelt as the car started moving. ‘I didn’t see Dragovi
ć
, if that’s what you were expecting. There’s a lot of building work going on, though. It looks as if they’ve excavated down near the foundations. That might give him a way in.’

‘We’ll get on to the Culture Ministry. Perhaps we can slip a couple of people into the crews to look out for anything dubious.’

His phone buzzed. He tapped the screen, read the message and grunted.

‘No sign of Dragovi
ć
moving yet. We’re watching the airports in all his known haunts. We’ve also put out the word to our networks. Nothing yet.’

Abby remembered the man in the black room in Rome, his silver gun against her head. She shivered.

‘Will he suspect anything?’

‘We gave the necklace and the text to a man called Giacomo in Belgrade.’

‘I’ve met him.’

Mark’s head flicked up; he gave her a suspicious stare. ‘You’ve got some interesting connections. When we get you back to London, we’ll have to sit down and have a conversation about all the people you’ve met.’