Secrets of the Dead

XXIII

Kosovo – Present Day

‘NOT LONG BEFORE he died, Michael turned up a seventeen-hundred-year-old Roman body. I don’t know how or where. An American soldier called Sanchez helped bring it in.’

In the passenger seat, Jessop looked thoughtful. It was his car, but after three near-accidents in Monday morning traffic before they were out of Pristina, Abby had insisted on driving.

‘Dragović, as you may have spotted, has the Roman bug,’ Jessop said. ‘He’s a nut on the subject. You know he enjoys the nickname “The Emperor”? Zoltán means “emperor” in Hungarian, apparently. Dragović carries on like he’s Caesar reincarnated. If Michael had connections with him – which he did – and he found something left over from the Roman empire, Dragović would be the obvious person to call.’

If Michael had connections with him. If the man you loved was corrupt and in the pocket of the Balkans’ most wanted man … The idea was toxic, too terrible to really understand. She had to keep it well away from her, locked in a glass box and handled with utmost care lest it shatter and poison her.

‘I’ve been to two of Dragović’s houses.’ That, too, was a horrible fact. ‘Dragović owns more Roman art than the British Museum. What could Michael have found that he’d want so badly?’

‘According to our man, the necklace you found probably dates from the reign of Constantine the Great, around 300 AD. Heard of him?’

‘Mmmm.’

He doesn’t know about the Trier manuscript, she thought. She still had Gruber’s transcription with her, folded in her jeans pocket, but she hadn’t mentioned it. After what Jessop had done with the necklace, she wasn’t going to tell him about the manuscript unless she had to.

‘As you say, Dragović doesn’t exactly need any more art. Or money.’ Jessop stared out the window at the scrapyards and builders’ yards that had sprung up along the road. ‘But whatever Michael found must have been pretty special to get him so fired up.’

Abby turned on the wipers as rain began to spatter the windscreen. ‘Maybe Specialist Sanchez knows what it is.’

The rain was falling hard and unforgiving by the time they pulled into the car park at Camp Bondsteel. They ran up the path between the blast walls and the wire. White tank traps serrated the road like teeth. By the time they reached the guard station, they were both soaked.

The guards had changed since the day before: there was no one to recognise Abby, and no fuss when Jessop presented his credentials. A captain in a high-collared jacket met them and ushered them into a green Toyota Landcruiser.

‘You’re here to meet with Specialist Sanchez?’

‘He’s not expecting us,’ said Jessop.

‘He’s down in South Town. I’ll drive you over.’

Abby got in the back and stared out the window as they drove along wide, rammed-earth roads. Everywhere she looked, the landscape’s rolling hills had been forced into rigid grids: lines of cars, lines of huts, and straight roads connecting them.

Yet for all its size, there was something desolate about the base. They drove for several minutes, past long rows of brown huts, and barely saw a soul. There were no tanks or Humvees: most of the vehicles they saw were civilian Landcruisers like their own. On one stretch, a row of huge tents provided helicopter hangers, strangely impermanent in this re-engineered landscape.

‘Is it true you’ve got a Burger King here?’ Jessop asked the captain.

‘And a Taco Bell. I’ve been here eleven months and never eaten in either of them.’ He laughed. ‘Just like being back home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘North Dakota.’

If he resented being shipped halfway round the world to police age-old feuds, in a country that was probably the size of the average farm back in his home state, he didn’t show it. Abby thought of Rome, and wondered if this was how the last days of the empire had been. A few men far from home, shrinking into a fortress built for greater times. Or perhaps frontiers had always been like this: lonely, removed places where barbarians lurked and the rain fell.

The captain parked the Landcruiser at the side of the road and led them on to a veranda along the front of the densely packed SEA huts. They came to a door, knocked and entered.

Specialist Anthony Sanchez was sitting on a wooden bunk, playing an Xbox on a forty-inch TV screen perched on a steel chair. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a khaki T-shirt that left plenty of room for his gym-worked biceps. He looked around as the door opened. On screen, a racing car careered off the road and exploded in a fireball.

‘I guess you’re why they told me not to go out today.’ The brim of his patrol cap sat low on his face, covering his eyes. His voice was husky, his features surprisingly delicate for the strong body.

‘I’ll wait in the car,’ the captain said.

Sanchez punched the power on the television. Without its light, the room was so dim they could barely see him. He reached across to the facing bunk and swept a pizza box off it. ‘Sorry we don’t have crumpets or tea or none of that.’

Jessop sat. ‘Tell me about Michael Lascaris.’

The patrol cap turned from Abby to Jessop, then down to the floor. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘You brought a body in to the Forensics department together,’ Abby said. ‘It’s your signature on the docket.’

The cap didn’t move. Rain drummed on the roof of the hut. A long, slow sibilant escaped from Sanchez’s lips: maybe a drawn-out expletive, or just the air deflating from him.

‘I haven’t seen Mr Lascaris in a while.’

‘He’s dead,’ Jessop told him.

‘I don’t really follow the news.’ Sanchez fiddled with the game controller in his hand, thumbing the joystick in aimless circles.

‘Tell me how you met Michael,’ Abby said.

‘In a bar.’

‘That sounds right.’

‘He came to find me here on base. He was a civilian, but I guess he knew his way around. Bought me some beers, it was all cool. Then he said he read a report I put in from one of the LMT missions.’

‘LMT?’ Jessop queried.

‘Liaison and Monitoring Team. My unit. We go out in teams of three in an SUV and talk to the locals, feed it up the chain of command. Bridge-building, right?’

‘What was your report about?’

‘Up north, round about Nothing Hill. We were in this mahallah –’

‘A what?’

‘A mahallah. You know, like a village? Anyways, we were talking to some guys up there, and some farmer rides up on his Kosovo Harley.’ He saw they didn’t understand. ‘You’ve seen them, right? They take a garden rotovator, put on some wheels instead of the blades, then bolt a handcart on the back of it to make like a pick-up. We call them Kosovo Harleys.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Abby. Jessop looked mystified.

‘This guy says he thinks his neighbour’s got a weapons stash on his land. He’s an upstanding citizen and he wants us to know. Truth to tell, he probably wants the field for himself. So what, right? We go and look where he says, and sure enough there’s a hole and a cave with a couple of rusted AKs and some sidearms. It’s a big deal, but it’s not that big a deal. Where it gets crazy is when we shine our flashlights around. This place – it isn’t just a cave. It’s like a tomb or something, old paintings on the walls and a big-ass stone coffin.’

The rain beat harder than ever. All Abby could see of Sanchez was his silhouette against the barred window.

‘And that was where you found the body?’

‘Not then. We had a mission. We took the guns and called the cops to arrest the landowner. The CO put a guard on the door. Then we came home. It’s not really our sector – we’re Battle-Group East, and that was way north. We were just up there generating some goodwill.’

Goodwill to whom? Abby wondered.

‘I wrote it down in a report, and a week later Mr Lascaris showed up in the bar asking if he could see this place. I told him sure, but it ain’t going to be on the clock. I only go where they tell me. And two days later, the staff sergeant calls me in and says I’m assigned to escort a civilian on a fact-finding mission. He was kind of pissed about it because it screwed up his schedule, but Michael was one of those guys, he made things happen.’

You can say that again.

‘We went north towards Mitrovica, back to the cave. Like I said, Battle-Group North had put a guard on it, Norwegian dude, but Michael had some fancy paperwork and it was no problem. We went in there with some pry-bars and hammers. Michael points to the coffin and says, “Let’s get that thing opened up.”’

The rain had eased. The only sound in the room was the drip of water from the eaves outside.

‘Now I did two tours in Iraq before I came here, and I saw some shit. But this was freaky. It was dark as hell in there, and I’m thinking about King Tut’s curse and all that History Channel bullshit. And that lid was heavy. Almost bust my fingers lifting it – specially when I saw what was inside.’

‘A skeleton,’ said Abby. She remembered the empty sockets, the waxy bones against the steel table.

Sanchez’s head flicked up at her. ‘Guess you seen it, too. We wrapped that thing in a tarp and carried it out, right past the guard. Michael wanted to take the coffin lid, too, but there was no way we were carrying that thing. He took some pictures of the paintings on the walls, and the vase –’

‘The what?’

‘The vase.’ He pronounced it the American way, to rhyme with ‘haze’. ‘Like a clay bottle, about the size of a forty-ounce of malt liquor. It was inside the coffin with the dead guy, all sealed up with wax or something.’

‘Did Michael open it?’

‘Not that I saw. We got out of there pretty fast. The Norwegian was on his radio and Michael started to get antsy. We drove off with the dead guy in the trunk. Like Goodfellas.’

Sanchez took off his cap and twisted it between his fingers. For the first time, Abby could see his eyes, twin points of light in the darkness.

‘That’s how it was. I just did what he told me. I didn’t think nothing would come of it.’

I feel your pain, Abby thought. I’m in the same boat.

‘Did Michael give any sense of why he was interested?’ Jessop asked.

‘He talked all the time, but he didn’t say much, if you know what I mean. I asked him what it was all about. He told me it was just routine procedure.’

‘You didn’t believe that.’

‘No, but what the hell? It’s not against the Geneva Convention to take a body to a morgue, especially with it being dead a few hundred years. Like I said, I just do what they tell me. Some dead Roman guy’s not my problem.’

Abby looked up sharply. ‘How did you know it was Roman? Did Michael say that?’

‘Maybe, I guess. I don’t recall. But I’m Catholic, I’ve been in plenty of churches. I knew the writing was Latin.’

‘What writing?’

‘The writing on the coffin.’