Secrets of the Dead (9 page)

She checked into the Römische Kaiser Hotel, across the road from the Porta Nigra, the Black Gate featured on Michael’s postcard. She couldn’t stop staring at it.

Did you see it?
she asked Michael, carrying on a dialogue
she
’d been having all the way from London.
Did you stay in this very same hotel? When were you here?

At least she could guess that. The letter from the museum was dated late July, a month before Michael died. Michael had been unexpectedly away around then, at a conference of EU border agencies in Saarbrücken. She thought she could remember a conversation about it: a sudden change of plan, a colleague who’d dropped out at the last minute, forcing Michael to go. He’d brought her back a sausage and a bottle of Reisling – the only good thing to come out of the conference, he’d said.

He hadn’t mentioned going to Trier.

Most towns, Abby supposed, stood on the foundations of the past. In Trier, past and present stood side by side. It seemed everything in the last thousand years was just a threadbare carpet laid down over the Roman town, whose remains poked through the holes at every turn. The Black Gate, four stories high and completely intact. The modern road bridge across the Moselle, supported on piers originally sunk by Roman engineers. The high brick walls of the Roman basilica, dwarfing the pink gingerbread mansion beside it. And beyond it, across a green lawn and a lake, the museum.

She had an appointment, but the receptionist said Dr Gruber was in a meeting that had run over. Abby bought a ticket and wandered through the museum while she waited. In a long, semi-circular gallery, she found huge pieces of sculpture lined up in rows. When she read the descriptions, they all seemed to be tomb monuments.

‘To reach the living, it is necessary first to navigate the dead.’

She turned. A thin man in a blue suit had come up behind
her
. His hair had receded, revealing a bulging, glossy forehead. He had a bony face, and a bristling moustache that ought to have gone out of fashion seventy years earlier.

‘Mrs Cormac?’

That caught her out. Even when she was married, she’d never felt like a
Mrs
. She shook his hand. ‘Dr Gruber?’

‘The Romans believed that the dead contaminated the living. They buried them outside the city walls. You could not enter a Roman city without walking past the tombs, sometimes for many kilometres. That is what we try to replicate here.’

He led her out through an unmarked door and up a flight of stairs to his office. A beige machine stood on a table against the wall. Behind the desk, tall windows overlooked the park and the high brick building across the lake.

‘You know what that is?’ Gruber asked.

‘Constantine’s basilica.’ She’d read it in a leaflet in the hotel.

‘It was the throne room of Constantine’s palace, when he ruled the empire from here in Trier.
Der Kaiser Constantine
.’ He fiddled with a pen on his desk. ‘Of course, today you ask most people, they say Beckenbauer is
Der Kaiser
.’

Abby smiled as if she knew what he meant. ‘What’s the building next to it?’

‘The local government.’

‘Not quite the same as a Roman emperor.’

‘But functionally it is the same, no?’ He scratched at his moustache. ‘There are certain places where power abides. One thousand and seven hundred years ago, Constantine built his palace there. Since then it has been used by Frankish counts, medieval archbishops, Renaissance prince-electors, Prussian kings and now our local government. Every generation of power comes to this place. Do they think that the history
gives
them legitimacy? Or is there some animal response inside us, which these places subconsciously provoke? That attracts.’

Abby had heard men talk about animal responses before. Usually, they only had one particular thing in mind. She pulled her cardigan closer across her chest and forced herself to look him in the eye.

‘You said that Michael came to visit you here.’

The pen in his hand stopped moving. ‘This is correct.’

‘You said you could tell me what he wanted.’

‘I said I could not tell you on the telephone.’

‘He brought you something – a piece of papyrus he wanted you to analyse. I’ve read the letter you gave him.’

She’d picked up some basic German on the mission in Kosovo: that, together with an online translation tool and a dictionary had allowed her to piece together most of the meaning. She hadn’t wanted anyone else to see it.

This is to confirm receipt of a late antique papyrus, unknown provenance, for micro-CT scanning. All results will be kept highly confidential and informed to the owner solely
.

‘If you have read the letter, you know this is confidential. The results of the tests, I can give only to Mr Lascaris himself.’

‘Michael’s dead.’

‘And you are his executor? His heir? You have papers that prove it?’

‘I was his partner.’

‘I am sorry. He did not mention you.’

Abby leaned forward. ‘Dr Gruber, Michael was murdered in some pretty extreme circumstances. I was there. I don’t know how much he told you about himself …’

Gruber pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his desk and lit one. ‘He was economical with his biography.’

‘Michael worked for the European Union, and his murder was an international incident. The police are still investigating. I’m sure they’ll be keen to retrace his movements in the weeks before his death – and find out what was in his possession.’

‘But you are talking as if we are some sort of criminal enterprise here.’ He frowned, to show he wasn’t insulted, simply expected better. ‘We are a government-funded institution with an impeccable academic reputation. The most advanced in the field. If the police come here with questions, naturally we will cooperate.’

But she’d sat at tables opposite infinitely more difficult men than Gruber – and learned how to play them. The cigarette had burned down quickly. She could see the thought rattled him.

Provenance unknown
, the letter said. In other words:
if no one claims it he gets to keep it
.
And he definitely wants to keep it
.

‘I only want to see it. And the papyrus wasn’t the only artefact. There was something else that Michael left me – perhaps you could advise me on it, after I’ve seen the manuscript.’

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
.

The cigarette had burned down to the filter. Gruber stubbed it out in a copper ashtray, then stood. He took a fat bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked a deep drawer in the filing cabinet behind his desk. Out came a steel briefcase with a combination lock. Gruber’s finger hovered over the dial.

‘I appreciate if you keep this in confidence. The analysis is incomplete. It would be unfortunate if misinformed speculation created confusion – before we can publish in the correct channels.’

‘Of course.’

He snapped open the case. A soft bed of tissue paper and raw cotton filled it: in the centre lay a dark brown, tusk-shaped lump that reminded Abby of some petrified wood she’d seen in a museum. Gruber pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and lifted it carefully into a white mould that looked like a plaster cast.

‘You are familiar with our work here in the institute?’

‘I read a bit on your website.’

‘Micro-CT. The CT stands for Computed Tomography. It is a multiple X-ray scan which builds a fully three-dimensional digital model of an object to a resolution of twenty-five microns.’ He saw the look on her face. ‘Very precise.’

‘OK.’

He slid the mould into a perspex cannister and carried it across the room to the machine that Abby had noticed when she came in. It looked like a cross between a microwave oven and an early Eighties computer – a small compartment with a glass door, between two angular blocks of beige metal. A yellow sticker in one corner warned of radioactivity.

‘Is that it?’

‘Michael Lascaris was unusual in bringing the papyrus to us – most manuscripts must be scanned in the libraries which hold them. We make the machine portable enough to travel.’

He put the papyrus upright in the chamber and closed the glass door. He pressed a button. A white light came on, spotlighting the canister, which slowly rotated in place.

‘Forgive me, but what’s the point of all this? You’re trying to read the scroll with X-rays?’

‘Eventually. To begin, we must first unravel it. The papyrus is a scroll that has been rolled up for centuries. Over that time, the paper has become damp and fused together. To physically
unroll
it would destroy it. What we are doing is using X-rays to build a 3-D model of the entire roll on a microscopic level. Then, with powerful algorithms, the computer can virtually unroll this into a single sheet as it would have appeared to the man who wrote it.’

‘And then you can read it?’

‘Perhaps. Before about ad 300, the ink is carbon-based. They use soot to make the ink black. After that, they start to write with iron-gall ink. This uses a chemical reaction between acid and iron sulphites to make an ink that lasts much longer. Because there are actually tiny particles of iron in the ink, it absorbs light differently, and so it is possible to register it on the scan.

A picture appeared on the wide screen mounted on the wall above the scanner – a monochrome image of the scroll spinning in virtual space. In black and white it looked like a lump of coal. When Gruber touched it, the image seemed to fly towards them until it filled the screen. It turned end-on, revealing tiny concentric whorls.

‘Those are the spirals of the scroll,’ said Gruber.

‘Can you read it?’

Gruber touched the corner of the screen and it went blank. ‘Scanning is easy. Unravelling …’ He sighed. ‘Imagine cutting an onion into the smallest possible pieces. Then imagine you have to put back the pieces to reassemble the original onion. The analytical power required is immense. And this is not an official project. If I run the analysis, I must do it when the computer cluster is not in use.’

Hope withered inside her.
And what was Michael doing with an ancient papyrus scroll?
‘Did he say where he found it?’

Gruber sat down and lit another cigarette, offering Abby one as an afterthough. She took it gratefully.

‘Mr Lascaris was – I think it is the right word – reticent, yes? He did not tell me where he found this thing. He did not tell me how he happened to possess it. He did not even say his occupation, though it was obvious he was not a researcher. I was hoping if you came here, you might give me some answers.’ He tapped some ash into the ashtray. ‘At least now I know he was a diplomat.’

Abby took a drag of the cigarette. The nicotine was like a gift. ‘I wish I could help you.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You said you had something you would show in return.’

‘I do.’ She took the gold necklace out of her bag and passed it across. Still wearing his white gloves, he held it up between finger and thumb and squinted at it through the magnifier he kept on his desk. His eye went as big as a tennis ball.

‘Did he find this with the manuscript?’

Abby blew out a long stream of smoke. She hadn’t smoked in years – she was already feeling dizzy. ‘I didn’t know he even had the manuscript until you told me.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘An old Christian symbol.’

‘It’s a variant on the Christogram – the monogram of the Emperor Constantine. You know this story? He had a vision the night before a battle, an angel came and showed him the sign. It’s like the Greek letters X and P, which are the first two letters of
Christos
– Christ – in Greek. He made a jewelled model of this sign, the
labarum
, and carried it into the battle as his standard. He won the battle – and ever since we are all Christians in Europe.’

‘Could it relate to the manuscript?’

‘The Christogram has been in use ever since Constantine.
You
can go into any church here in Trier and find it today, probably. The most I can say is that the necklace looks like late antique workmanship.’

‘What about the ink? You said if it contained iron it would be after ad 300.’

‘Preliminary analysis suggests the ink is the gall-iron variety. And there is the language. Most papyrus scrolls that have survived are written in Greek. This one is in Latin, which suggests it dates to the fourth century after Christ. The Roman Empire was changing in this period.’ He waved out the window to the high basilica. ‘Regrettably, Trier did not keep the Emperor Constantine’s affection. He built a new capital – Constantinople, now Istanbul – a new Rome for a new Christian empire.’

But Abby wasn’t interested in Gruber’s history lecture. She could feel her heart throbbing against the bandages.

‘How do you know it’s Latin?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You said this manuscript’s in Latin. But you also told me you haven’t managed to analyse the scan yet. So how do you know what the language is?’

Gruber stood. ‘Thank you for your interest, Frau Cormac, but I think you must be leaving. I am a busy man; I have given you already too much time.’ He moved around the desk to open the office door, but Abby stepped in his way, blocking him in next to the machine. She put her hand on the glass hatch.

‘If you send me away now, I’m taking this with me.’

Gruber’s moustache twitched. ‘That is theft.’

‘You’re welcome to call the police.’

‘But you cannot read the manuscript. If you even try, you will destroy it.’

‘There are other machines like this in the world. I’ll try them.’

Leverage
, they’d called it on her Foreign Office-approved training courses. Out on the field they’d just called it squeezing the bastards.

Gruber sank back and sat on the edge of his desk. ‘You think someone else will help you? An unknown woman with a manuscript that has probably been stolen. Maybe you try to take it to an American university. The Americans will confiscate it. They will lock it away in a warehouse without temperature or humidity controls, and in ten or twenty years, if anyone thinks to look, they will find nothing but dust.’