Secrets of the Dead

XXXI

Belgrade, Serbia – Present Day

THE HOTEL WAS on the top floor of an apartment block in the old town, south of the main boulevard Knez Mihailova. The streets were tangled and characterful, the apartment block – imposed on it by Tito’s planners – square and concrete. Drop cloths shrouded the front hall like cobwebs, though there was no evidence in the peeling paint that the workmen had done anything.

A clanking lift took them up to a brown corridor on the sixth floor. Reception was a small cubbyhole in the wall halfway along, where a mustachioed man sat behind an iron grille watching TV. He gave them a key and pointed further down the corridor.

‘Last room.’

The best that could be said was that it had a view – across the river, through the rain, where the high-rise towers of Novi Belgrad made dappled pillars of light. It looked like another world. Michael locked the door and put a chair against it; Abby threw herself down on the bed and burrowed her head into the pillow.

Michael sat down on the bed beside her. He moved to stroke her shoulder, then thought better of it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

‘What are we going to do?’

‘What can we do?’

‘I don’t trust Giacomo.’

‘I don’t trust him either. But – he’s the best we’ve got.’ He rolled on to his back and lit a cigarette. ‘This world we’re in, we have to deal with people like him. You’re not in the Hague any more.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ She lifted herself on her elbows so he could see her anger. ‘I’ve dealt with some of the worst murderers on the planet – men who make Giacomo and even Dragović look like wallflowers.’

‘I know –’

‘You don’t know.’ All the anger, all the terror of the last few days, was rushing out of her in a torrent. ‘You know why it was possible? Why a nobody like me could stand face to face with these monsters – no gun, no guards – and walk away alive?’

‘Because you’ve got guts.’

‘Because we have rules and institutions and laws to deal with these people. Now we’re no better than they are.’

Michael jerked his hand out the window. ‘Look where we are – and this also has been one of the dark places of the Earth. You think rules and institutions and laws made any difference here, when Miloševicć was waging war against all and sundry?

‘Milošević ended up in a jail cell in the Hague.’

‘After he’d killed 140,000 people. And after NATO finally grew some balls and bombed him to hell. And what happened back in that valley in Kosovo? The Americans had Dragović right in their sights, and all they could do was watch him drive over the border, because that’s what the rules say. Is that good enough?’

‘It has to be,’ Abby insisted. ‘Remember what you said about barbarians? About patrolling the frontiers of civilisation so that good people can sleep safely? Following the rules is what lets us draw the line.’

Michael reached out to touch her, but she jerked away. Tears threatened; she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Michael swung himself off the bed. He stared into the mirror, as if looking for someone.

‘So what are we going to do?’ she asked again. Her voice sounded dead.

‘Knowledge lies within you,’ Michael murmured. ‘The only clue we’ve got is the poem. Dragović thinks so, too – otherwise he wouldn’t have stolen the copy from the Forum Museum.’

Abby thought about it. It didn’t make her wounds go away, but at least it took her mind off the pain.

‘The version on the gravestone in Rome only had two lines. The one Gruber deciphered from the scroll had four.’

She took out the paper Gruber had given her, wrinkled and creased from too long in a damp pocket. Michael studied it. ‘Still not much to go on.’

Behind the flimsy curtains, rain drummed on the windows. Abby thought back to another wet day in another city on the fringe of the old Roman empire. I have analysed the first few lines.

‘What if there’s more?’ she said. ‘Gruber hadn’t finished analysing the scroll – he’d barely begun. There might be more of the poem.’

A light went on in Michael’s eyes. He spun around.

‘Wait here.’

He pulled on his coat and headed to the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To make a phone call.’ He wagged his finger at her. ‘Don’t open the door to strangers.’

She was alone for twelve minutes, and each one felt like a year. The room was heated by a cast-iron radiator that banged and popped as if it were haunted. Every noise it made shocked her like a gunshot. She found herself staring at the door, her heart racing, breath held in anticipation. She waited for a knock, for the handle to turn. When Michael came back, she almost fainted in relief.

His face was triumphant.

‘Dr Gruber will be flying to Belgrade first thing tomorrow. He’ll bring us his copy of the scroll, and the words he’s managed to decipher so far.’

‘Did he say there was more? Of the poem?’

‘He hinted.’

‘Couldn’t he just have read it over the phone?’

Michael gave a wolfish grin. ‘He could. But then he wouldn’t have been sure to collect the hundred thousand euros he thinks are coming his way.’

It felt like the longest night of Abby’s life. She lay under the covers, too frightened even to undress. The whole city seemed to be made of endlessly colliding parts: the heating pipes and radiator, the lift mechanism, the cars and trams on the street below. Once, she heard what sounded like shots in the distance, though it might have been an engine backfiring. She wasted half an hour waiting to hear it again – in her career, she’d got pretty good at knowing the sound of gunfire – but it didn’t come back.

It didn’t seem to bother Michael. He slept through, snoring quietly. In the end, she unplugged the clock radio from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom, trying to drown out the night with soft rock. Red numbers flashed the time at her, taunting her efforts to get to sleep. Eventually, slumped in the bathtub with a pillow behind her head and a rough blanket thrown over her, she slept.

She woke with a cricked neck and a headache. Michael stood in the bathroom door wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.

‘I thought you’d gone.’ Perhaps he hadn’t slept as well as she’d thought. His eyes were bloodshot, the hair on his cheeks too long to be stubble and too thin for a beard. The lines around his eyes didn’t look wise, but tired.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Sign of a guilty conscience.’ He forced a smile, so she’d know it was a joke. ‘I’m starving.’

Giacomo’s room rate didn’t include breakfast. They went to a café across the road and ordered omelettes and coffee. The legacy of the Ottoman Empire meant that at least they brewed it strong.

‘Do you actually have a hundred thousand euros?’

Michael sliced apart his omelette. ‘We’ll cross that bridge.’

‘What time is Gruber due in?’

‘Lunchtime. I said we’d meet him at the castle.’

‘How Kafkaesque.’

She chewed her food in silence. Michael signalled the waiter for more coffee.

‘There might be something more,’ she tried at last. ‘When Giacomo said the answer was within us, he didn’t know there was any more of the poem. What if there’s a clue in the text we have?’

Michael took the crumpled paper and smoothed it on the table. He read the English translation first, then tried the Latin, mouthing words under his breath.

‘All Greek to me,’ he said at last.

‘It’s Latin,’ she reminded him. ‘I thought you said you could read it.’

‘I failed my O level.’

‘Then let’s find someone who can.’

Studentski Trg – Student Square – stood at the end of Belgrade’s main promontory, near the citadel, a football pitch’s worth of grass and trees, surrounded by the usual local mix of neoclassical and paleo-socialist buildings that made up Belgrade University. Statues dotted the park – once devoted to heroes of Communism, now torn down and replaced with safer figures from a less contested past. At one stage there had been plans to make it part of a green artery of parks through the heart of the city. Now it mostly served as a bus terminus.

They found the Faculty of Classics and Philosophy in a handsome pink and grey building on the south side of the square. Five minutes in an Internet café had given them a name; that, plus Michael’s charm and Abby’s Serbo-Croat talked them past the porter, up a flight of stairs and into a small office. Files bursting with papers were crammed on to a row of steel shelves; on a facing wall, a tattered map showed the Roman Empire at its height. A green terracotta bust poked out from the pot plants on the windowsill: a round-faced man with a turned-out chin and flat cheeks, and eyes that seemed to be staring at a point just above your head. There was a tension in the face, every muscle clenched in the exercise of power.

The owner of the office – Dr Adrian Nikolić – was an altogether milder proposition: medium build, with a brown beard and brown curly hair and brown eyes that seemed inclined to smile. He wore a Pringle sweater over a check shirt, and brown corduroy trousers with lace-up boots.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see us,’ Abby said, in Serbian.

He nodded, pleased she spoke the language. In a small country with a bad reputation, it made a difference. She saw him take in the bruises on her face, but he didn’t comment.

‘I did not know I had such international fame. Perhaps I should ask for a rise.’ He spun slowly in his chair, gesturing them to sit on the threadbare couch opposite. ‘I have a class in fifteen minutes. Until then, how can I help?’

Abby handed him the battered paper with the poem and the translation. ‘We found this, um, unexpectedly.’

‘Found it?’

‘It’s complicated.’

He nodded. ‘This is the Balkans. Things are found, things go missing. We learn not to ask questions.’

He took a pair of tortoiseshell glasses from his desk drawer and read through the poem.

‘Obviously you have translated it. What else do you want for me to tell you?’

‘Anything you can think of.’

A dry laugh. ‘Anything?’

‘The context we found it in, there were suggestions it dated from the reign of Constantine the Great.’

‘So you thought of me.’ He nodded to the bust on the window. ‘You know he was born in Niš? My home town.’

Abby took a deep breath. ‘This probably sounds crazy – but we think the poem might point to a lost treasure or artefact. Maybe to do with the reign of Constantine.’

Nikolić looked her dead in the eye, his expression unfathomable.

‘You’re absolutely right.’

‘I am?’

‘It does sound crazy. You think this happens in real life, that someone walks into your office with a piece of paper or a map that leads to long lost buried treasure?’ He stood. ‘I cannot help you.’

Abby and Michael stayed seated.

‘The poem’s genuine, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ said Michael.

‘You have the original?’ Michael nodded. ‘Maybe if you let me see I can decide myself. And from which institution do you come from, by the way?’

‘We work for the EU.’ Michael flashed his EULEX ID from his wallet. ‘I’m with the Customs directorate. We’re investigating a ring of art smugglers and this was one of the antiquities we intercepted.’

‘We think there might be other treasures,’ Abby added. ‘All we want to know is if this poem gives any hint of what they might be.’

Still standing, Nikolić picked up the paper and studied it.

‘This word – signum. Do you know what it means?’

‘Sign,’ said Michael. ‘“The saving sign that lights the path ahead.”’

‘So. It is an important word in the life of Constantine. Before his great battle at Milvian Bridge, he saw a cross of light in the sky and heard the words “In hoc signo vinces” – “In this sign you will conquer.” You know what this sign was?’

‘The X-P symbol,’ said Abby.

‘Chi-rho,’ Nikolić corrected her. ‘The first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek. And, if you think ideogrammatically, the X is the shape of a cross and the P superimposed on it is the man.’

Abby remembered the necklace, now locked in a safe in Whitehall.

‘Though, actually, this is not a true Christogram. This one is called a staurogram. From the Greek word stavros, meaning “cross”.’

‘OK.’

‘But the original account of this battle of Milvian Bridge was written in Greek. You know the Greek equivalent of signum?’ They shook their heads. ‘Tropaion. Now this has many meanings, too. It can be a trophy or a war memorial, or the standard that the army carries into battle.’

Another searching glance.

‘You know about Constantine’s battle standard?’

‘The labarum,’ Abby said. She remembered something Dr Gruber had said at the Landesmuseum in Trier. ‘The chi-rho symbol that he saw in his vision. He turned it into a golden standard surrounded by jewels.’

She waited for him to reply. But Nikolić had folded his arms and was staring at her, as if he expected something.

‘You wanted to know something from the age of Constantine that is extremely valuable? A treasure of the first historical significance which has been lost for centuries?’

The penny dropped. ‘You’re saying the poem could refer to the actual labarum. The trophy that Constantine’s army carried?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘But what happened to it?’ Michael asked. ‘A treasure like that can’t just have got lost – I mean, the Byzantine Empire lasted until almost five hundred years ago. Isn’t it in a museum somewhere?’

‘You think because something is important people look after it? Even Constantine’s tomb, in Istanbul, has not survived.

When the Turks conquered Constantinople they destroyed his mausoleum, which was the Church of the Holy Apostles, and built their own mosque on the site.’

He turned to the map on the wall and drew a line with his finger across the Balkans, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.

‘This region has been the frontier for more than two thousand years. Alexander the Great? To the east and south, his empire stretched as far as India and Egypt. But to north and west, it went through Kosovo. The Roman diocese of Moesia – modern Serbia – was tossed back and forth between the eastern and western emperors; when the western empire fell in 476, this city Singidunum – Belgrade – was a fortress looking down on the barbarians across the Danube. Then the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians through to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. You know one of the reasons we fought Croatia in the nineties? Because they were western Catholics, and we were eastern Orthodox – a legacy of the division of the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century. A frontier means wars. So yes – things get lost.’

He pulled a book off one of the shelves and flipped through it. ‘This is a Byzantine account of Constantine’s life, written in the ninth century. After describing the labarum and its use at the Milvian Bridge, the author says, “It still exists today, and is kept as the greatest treasure in the imperial palace, for if any enemy or evil force threatens the city, its power will destroy them.”’

‘So that was’ – Michael did the sums – ‘twelve hundred years ago. Nothing since?’

‘Constantinople was sacked in 1204 by the army of the Fourth Crusade. Many of its treasures were lost or hidden; some were brought back to Venice by the crusaders. The Byzantines reconquered the city, but it fell to the Turks for good in 1453. They would have taken whatever was left.’

‘So it could be in Venice … or Istanbul … or hidden somewhere else completely?’

‘Venice was looted by Napoleon, Paris by the Nazis, Berlin by the Soviets, and Moscow by anyone with money.’ Nikolić gave a sad smile. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi. Or, if you like me to translate as a professional historian: shit happens.’

A bell-tree chime sounded from his computer. ‘It is time for my class. I am sorry I cannot help you more.’

They let themselves out on to the street. Trolley buses sat by the kerb, their drivers clustered round the doors smoking. Michael checked his watch.

‘Perhaps Gruber can tell us more.’