Secrets of the Dead

XIII

London – Present Day

ARCUMTRIUMPHISINSIGNEMDICAVIT. FRIDAY 17H. I can help.

She ran back into the reading room, barely stopping to show the guard her pass. She sat down at the computer and copied the words into a search engine.

Your search – arcumtriumphisinsignemdicavit – did not match any documents

She couldn’t believe it. The whole Internet, and this doesn’t appear once. And yet, in a perverse way, it gave her hope. Whoever sent it, they didn’t want it to be easy to understand. They knew it might be read be someone else.

It looked like Latin. She wrote it out in block capitals on a request form, then accosted the librarian at the Reference Enquiries desk.

‘Do you know what this means?’

The librarian, a tall black woman in an extravagantly patterned dress, pulled on her glasses.

‘“He dedicated the arch as a sign of triumph.”’

‘Do you know where it comes from?’

The glasses came off. ‘At a guess? From a triumphal arch.’

‘Is it possible to find out which one?’

‘You could try the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. It’s a catalogue of all the Latin inscriptions which survive from the Roman Empire. If it is Roman, of course. It could be a Second World War memorial.’ She saw Abby’s blank look and sighed. ‘People still wrote them in Latin.’

She scribbled a shelfmark number below the Latin and pointed Abby across the reading room. It wasn’t hard to find: the Corpus volumes took up most of a shelf, and probably weighed more than a human body. But they were well organised. In five minutes Abby found what she wanted. The full text of the inscription that ended with the line, ‘He dedicated this arch as a sign of his trumph.’ And underneath, the location.

Rome. Arch of Constantine.

Rome, Italy – Present Day

Once, voyagers bound for Rome landed at Ostia, the thriving port at the mouth of the Tiber river. But the harbour had silted up centuries ago, first burying the ancient city and then preserving it for future generations of tourists and archaeologists. Now, visitors landed three miles away on the other side of the river, at Fiumicino Airport. Abby took the train in to Rome and checked in to a small hotel in the Trastavere quarter. She could barely sit still.

It was only mid-afternoon. She had hours to kill before the meeting. She bought herself a guidebook and took a cab to the forum. On her right, across a bare excavation, a huge brick building rose up the hill in expanding concentric curves. Trajan’s Market, the guidebook called it, and when she went inside it was breathtakingly easy to imagine it as a shopping mall. She’d thought that most Roman ruins were either two-dimensional foundations, or hollowed-out shells like the Colosseum. But this seemed to be perfectly preserved: an open atrium overlooked by three full stories of galleries above. She was disappointed to learn that they’d probably housed government offices, rather than shops.

She wandered through galleries of sculpture and fragments recovered from the ruins of the Roman forum until she found the hall she wanted. Funerary Architecture. The exhibits were displayed in mock-stone cabinets that had been erected around the room to mimic tombs. You had to stoop to see inside.

Fragment of a grave plaque, 4th century AD said the placard. Her breath came faster as she read the inscription printed underneath. UT VIVENTES ADTIGATIS MORTUOS NAVIGATE. To reach the living, navigate the dead. She took Gruber’s piece of paper out of her pocket and compared it. Exactly the same.

But the tomb was empty – nothing but a blank, black wall. A forlorn card taped to the backing offered a meek apology in three languages: This item is temporarily unavailable.

A young security guard sat on a stool in the corner. Abby went over and forced a smile. ‘Do you speak English?’

A nod, and a warm smile in return.

‘Do you know what happened to this piece?’

A solemn look came over him. ‘It has been stolen. One night two months ago, a gang broke in and took it.’

Something tightened inside her. ‘That’s terrible.’ She looked around the room. Red lights blinked at her from the dark corners. ‘Aren’t there alarms?’

‘They were professional. The hill behind here is very steep – it is simple to come on the roof. They climbed through a ventilation shaft, cut the alarm and – ciao.’

‘Did they take much?’

‘Only this one thing. We think they must be working for a collector who knows exactamente what he likes.’ He shook his head. ‘Is strange. The museum was open for them, and we have many more valuable things. Why they do not take them?’

‘Did the police trace anything?’

‘Nothing.’

His radio crackled, summoning him. He stood. ‘Enjoy your visit, signorina.’

She still had time to kill. There was a modern road which Mussolini had bulldozed through the ancient heart of Rome, but she took the old route, the Via Sacra through the forum. She wandered among the broken temples and shattered columns, trying to imagine it filled with life. Past the Senate, where Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar; past the church of San Lorenzo, a baroque church caged within the columns that had once been the pagan temple of Antoninus and Fausta.

Clouds began to mass over the gaudy heights of the Victor Emmanuel monument. The vast hollow arches of the Basilica of Maxentius loomed on her left, a scale of architecture not seen again until nineteenth-century railway stations. And ahead, the biggest relic of all: the breached caldera of the Colosseum. Even this late in the season, tourists were still queueing to get in, as they had almost two thousand years ago. Abby ignored them, and wandered across the surrounding square to a dirty white arch standing like an afterthought in a corner of the great plaza. Behind her, traffic roared around the ancient arena. She looked at her watch: 4.58.

The Arch of Constantine. Built to commemorate Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, which made him undisputed master of the Western Roman Empire, the guidebook said.

Constantine the Great. She knew the name, but not much more than what Gruber had told her. Roman emperor, converted the empire to Christianity, and thereby Europe and afterwards wherever Europe’s tentacles spread. The guidebook gave a thumbnail sketch that didn’t add much, except the trivia that he’d been born in modern-day Serbia, and his mother had been a brothel-keeper’s daughter.

But there had to be more. Ever since she’d woken in hospital, Constantine had been a strange, flickering companion, greeting her at every turn, then melting into shadow. The gold necklace with his monogram. The fourth-century manuscript left in the shadow of Constantine’s palace at Trier. The text message quoting the inscription. Is it a coincidence? A joke? Am I going mad? She felt as if she were trapped in a dream, running through a labyrinth where every turn brought her up against the same wall.

She looked up at the arch. Stern men, bearded and cloaked, gazed down on her as if trying to tell her something.

And what does it have to do with Michael?

She heard footsteps behind her and turned. A guide was leading a group of tourists across from the Colosseum, a severe-faced woman holding up a furled umbrella like a military standard. Abby scanned the faces and wondered what she was looking for. No one noticed her – they were too busy staring at the arch on the screens of their cameras, while the guide lectured them with facts they didn’t really want to know. She was speaking English. Abby drifted close enough to hear, waiting for someone to jostle her arm or meet her eye.

‘In fact, modern scholars think the arch was originally built by Constantine’s enemy, Maxentius. When Constantine defeated him in the battle, he adapted it for himself.’

The tourists who were bothering to listen looked surprised.

‘Everybody assumes that the Romans built everything from scratch, right?’ the guide said. ‘But no. The marble carvings were taken from other monuments. The big relief panels come from, we think, an arch dedicated originally to Marcus Aurelius. The frieze is from the forum of the Emperor Trajan, also in the second century. The round tondi come from a monument of Hadrian – like the wall, you know? In each case, the faces have been recut or replaced to look like Constantine.’

The tourists peered dutifully at the carvings, the stone men jumbled up in battle and hunts, the stone emperor bareheaded in their midst. They finished taking their photographs and ambled off for their next serving of history. Abby stood there like the last girl at the dance, waiting for someone to swoop down and rescue her. No one turned back; no one came.

She circled the monument to check she hadn’t missed anyone. She checked her phone for messages. She reread the text message for the hundredth time, wondering if she’d missed something.

ARCUM TRIUMPHIS INSIGNEM DICAVIT. Friday 17h. I can help.

She’d got it right. The pixelated words on the screen were identical to the ones chiselled in marble above her, over the central arch. She read the rest of it, comparing it with the translation she’d copied from the British Library.

She checked her watch for the umpteenth time. 5.19.

He’s not coming, she thought bleakly. The sheer futility of it hit her like a brick. The ruins of the past lowered over her and rebuked her. What had she been thinking, coming here on the basis of an anonymous text message? She reached out and leaned on one of the bollards that protected the arch from motorists. She felt if she didn’t touch something real, she might float free of the world for ever.

More footsteps approached – another tour group, coming around like clockwork. This time the guide was an elderly man, a white moustache and a tweed suit and the regulation umbrella. Again, Abby scanned the following faces – but these were teenagers on a school trip, and she was invisible to them.

‘The Arch of Constantine,’ the guide pronounced. ‘Built in the year 312 as a memorial of Constantine’s victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge. Constantine was a Christian and Maxentius was a pagan. When Constantine won, Europe became Christian.’

The pupils played with their phones and their music players. A few snapped pictures. But Abby was transfixed. A crazy thought had occurred to her.

‘Excuse me,’ she asked. ‘Where is the Milvian Bridge? I mean, does it still exist?’

The guide looked grateful for the interest. ‘The Ponte Milvio. It is here in Rome, at the end of the Via Flaminia, past the Villa Borghese. Popular with lovers,’ he added, for the benefit of the teenagers.

‘Thanks.’

Abby found a taxi opposite the Colosseo metro station. At half-past five on a Friday evening, the Roman traffic was locked tight. It took twenty minutes just to get into the Via Flaminia. She sat on the back seat, gripping the door handle and staring straight ahead. Rain began to bead on the windscreen.

He dedicated this arch as a sign of his victory. The inscription pointed to the arch, but the arch itself was just a symbol, a sign pointing to the battle it commemorated. It was a dim hope, even she could see that – a mad detour on a fool’s errand. But she had to try.

The bridge stood on the northern edge of Rome, just where the Tiber’s concrete embankments took over from nature. She paid off the taxi and advanced on to the bridge. Thick trees crowded the riverbank; ripples gouged the surface of the river where it ran fast over shoals. If you tuned out the apartment blocks and market stalls beyond, you could almost imagine it as it must have been in Constantine’s day, a wild place beyond the city.

The ancient Romans had built it as a road bridge, but modern Romans preferred not to trust their traffic to its 2,100-year-old arches. She had it almost to herself, except for a few businessmen walking back from work, and a pair of teenagers giggling in front of her. As she watched, they knelt together in front of a rail at the edge of the bridge. The boy took a padlock from his pocket and locked it on to the rail. He said something, and the girl kissed him. Then they both stood, and with one arm around the girl the boy threw the key over his shoulder into the river.

Curious, Abby went over and looked at where they’d been. Locked on to the rail was a gleaming, shaggy coat of literally hundreds of padlocks. Some had hearts and words scrawled on them in black marker pen: messages of love, passion, perpetual devotion. None of them, so far as she could see, was for her.

A tide of loneliness washed through her. She stared at the steel wall the padlocks made, a barrier locking her out. All those people tight together in their loves, and a lonely woman standing there because an anonymous text message might have told her to.

Mark’s right, she thought sourly. I do need a psychiatric evaluation.

She walked back across the river. Halfway along, she caught herself dawdling, clinging to the hope that someone might yet tap her on the arm, sweep her up like a lost teenager and give her the key she needed. Idiot. The bridge was empty. Even the teenagers had gone home. She redoubled her pace and wondered where she could catch a tram back into the city.

As she stepped off the bridge, she noticed a black Alfa Romeo sedan parked on the kerb, engine running. A man jumped out of the passenger seat.

‘Abigail Cormac?’ He had an accent, probably not Italian. Something more guttural. He was wearing a black rollneck jumper and black jeans, with a long black leather coat and black leather gloves. ‘I need to speak to you about Michael Lascaris.’

Michael. The name was a narcotic, overriding all caution. As if hypnotised, she carried on walking towards the car. The man smiled, baring teeth that glinted with gold. He was nodding, encouraging her forward like a cat into a cage. The black butt of a pistol bulged against his stomach where it stuck out of his waistband.

And suddenly she saw how stupid she’d been. I can help, the message had said, and she’d believed it because she was desperate. But people who wanted to help didn’t send you cryptic messages you couldn’t reply to, or drag you halfway across Europe on an obscure treasure hunt.

She turned to run, but she was too close and too slow. The man was beside her in a single step. A black arm wrapped around her, pinning her arms; a second locked itself around her throat and forced her down into the car.

A voice in her ear said, ‘If you struggle, we will kill you.’