Secrets of the Dead

XLV

Rome – Present Day

THREE MILES FROM the centre of Rome, Via Casilina was an unlovely artery: four lanes of traffic split down the middle by a light rail line. Behind the San Marcellino metro station, a pink plastered church stood dedicated to the early Christian martyrs Saint Peter and Saint Marcellinus. Next door was a brick school that looked like a warehouse, and in between ran a concrete wall with two gates, one large and one small. The large gate opened on to an asphalt car park that doubled as a playground for the school; the small one, which was barely high enough for an adult, led on to a narrow passage between two walls. A metal gate barred the way.

Mark studied it through a pair of binoculars. They were parked in the forecourt of the petrol station across the road – Mark and Abby, Barry and Connie. Abby was getting sick of the sight of them.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Barry said. About fifty metres back from the road, the broken curve of a brick rotunda poked above the line of the wall. It had no roof, and more than half its wall was missing. It was a poor cousin to the grandeur of the Fatih Mosque, or even Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split.

‘It belongs to the Vatican,’ said Connie from the back seat. ‘I suppose they can’t look after everything.’

Mark swore. ‘First it was a mosque, now it’s the Pope. Can’t we go somewhere that doesn’t belong to a touchy religion that’s famous for starting holy wars?’

‘Why don’t you bring in the police?’ Abby asked.

‘And piss off another country?’ Mark shook his head. ‘Our ambassador in Ankara is currently grovelling in front of Turkish intelligence explaining why we mobilised five hundred policemen, almost invaded one of their holiest mosques, then skipped town without so much as a thank you. From now on, we act on the basis of credible intelligence.’

‘I’m sure that’ll make a pleasant change for you.’

A white Fiat pulled in to the petrol station and stopped alongside them. Mark rolled down his window and gestured the driver to do likewise. Barry cradled a black semi-automatic pistol on his lap.

‘Dr Lusetti?’ Mark enquired.

The Fiat driver nodded. They all got out and shook hands, like travelling salesmen carpooling to a conference. Dr Mario Lusetti from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology was a middle-aged man with a severe buzz cut and rimless spectacles. He wore jeans, a white shirt and a black blazer. He didn’t look as if he smiled very often; just then, he looked particularly unhappy.

‘You want to see the catacombs?’

‘We think one of Europe’s most wanted men – a dangerous criminal – will try to break in to steal a priceless artefact,’ Mark said. He spoke loudly, an Englishman abroad; it made him sound ridiculously melodramatic.

Lusetti pursed his lips and blew out a puff of air. ‘The catacomb has a footprint of thirty thousand square metres. There are four and a half kilometres of passages and galleries spread over three levels, with twenty or twenty-five thousand burials inside. Even maybe there are more places that nobody has ever excavated. And, by the way, the catacombs have been discovered since the sixteenth century: every grave robber and thief in Rome has been down there. If your criminals are looking for something, probably they are four hundred years too late. If not, for sure it will take them another four hundred years to find it.’

‘I don’t care what they find. As long as we find them.’

Connie stayed in the car to watch. Lusetti led the others across the road and unlocked the little gate, then shepherded them down the narrow alley. At the end, a second gate led them through a steel fence topped with razor wire, into the circular enclosure that surrounded the old rotunda. Close to, Abby could see how vast it must have been: so big, in fact, that a two-storey house had been built inside the ruin. There were a few signs of restoration work – a couple of concrete buttresses, some broken-ended walls that had been squared off – but no evidence of recent activity.

‘You know the story here?’ Lusetti asked. ‘It was the tomb of Saint Helena. The Emperor Constantine decided he did not want to be buried in Rome, so he gave it to his mother instead. Before, it had been the cemetery of the Imperial Cavalry Guard – but they fought against Constantine at the battle of Milvian Bridge. He disbanded the legion and pissed on their bones.’

He unlocked the door to the house and led them in to a marble-floored hall. Shutters shaded the rooms, and Abby could taste dust and damp in the air.

‘This whole area had been an imperial estate called Ad Duas Lauros for centuries. After the Dowager Empress Helena was buried here, Constantine gave it to the papacy. We have it still.’

Two owners in two thousand years. In that moment, Abby began to understand the timescales that popes and emperors thought in.

Lusetti took hard hats, head torches and fluorescent workmen’s vests off wooden pegs and handed them round. Barry stared at the reflective stripes on the vests and frowned.

‘Do we want to be highly visible if we’re chasing a dangerous criminal?’

‘In the catacomb is very dark. If we lose you, maybe we never see you again.’

They pulled on the protective clothing. Lusetti opened a side door and flicked a light switch. The naked bulb illuminated a stone staircase going down.

‘Is that it?’ Mark asked. It looked like nothing, the sort of entrance any Victorian house might have going down to its cellar.

‘This is the way down.’

‘Is there any other way in?’

‘Officially, no.’

‘Unofficially?’

‘It is an ancient city.’ Lusetti shrugged. ‘If anyone digs under his basement, he will find caves, old quarries, lost tunnels. Not so long ago, they found a completely unknown catacomb under Via Latina.’

With Lusetti leading the way, they went down into the darkness.

Constantinople – June 337

‘Let me tell you some things about the dark places of this world.’

In the chamber beneath Constantine’s mausoleum, the darkness is absolute. My captors have pushed me down on to a stone bench against the wall – not so as to hurt me, but not gently either. They’ve let go my hands, though I can sense them hovering just out of reach, ready to pounce if I try to escape.

Where would I go? What would I say?

The only sense I have in that room is my ears. I listen to Porfyrius’s story.

‘Thirty years ago, during the persecutions, Symmachus sent me on a mission to Caesarea Palaestina. For a zealot like me, it was a career-making assignment: the heartland of the Christian religion.

‘I knew what to do. I commandeered a basement, not unlike this, and turned it into a dungeon. I was scrupulous in chasing down every rumour of a magistrate who refused to sacrifice, or a wife who didn’t emerge from her house on a Sunday.

‘One day, in winter, my agents heard rumours of a Christian hiding in a certain merchant’s house. They searched it and found nothing; then they noticed he didn’t have the heating on. They stoked up the fire and waited. Soon enough, they heard noises from the hippocaust under the floor where the Christian was hiding. What they hadn’t realised was that he had no intention of coming out. When they opened the hatch, they found him trying to burn a manuscript on the very fire they’d set. Naturally, they were curious. They seized the man and the manuscript and brought them both to me.

‘The man told me nothing. I tried every tool in my arsenal and just played into his hands. All he wanted was martyrdom. But the manuscript …’ Porfyrius sighs, the sound of a great weight settling. ‘The manuscript told an extraordinary tale. You know that the Christian god Jesus Christ was crucified during the reign of Tiberius Augustus?’

I do. One of Constantine’s early reforms was to outlaw crucifixion as a punishment, because it offended him.

‘When Christ came down from the Cross, his followers kept the wood, because they couldn’t bear to let him go. When he rose again from the dead, they realised it had a power beyond any man – the weapon that killed a god. They kept it in a secret place that only a tiny circle knew, down eleven generations. The manuscript listed them all. Read carefully, it was easy to guess where they’d hidden it.’

‘You found it?’

‘Not then. My efforts hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Symmachus brought me back to Nicomedia. With Christians purged from every imperial office, there were plenty of opportunities for promotion. But I never forgot. Years later, in exile, I wondered if it might be true – if I could use it to negotiate my return to Rome. I sent a batch of poems to Constantine, hoping to impress him, but he rebuffed me. Then I heard what had happened to Crispus.’

Out in the darkness something stirs, like a monster from the old world chained up in its cave.

‘The manuscript told a legend that the early Christians attached to the Cross – that on the day when Christ was crucified the blood he shed seeped into the wood and transformed it. From then on, they said, it had the power to raise men from the dead.’

It’s such an absurd thing to say I actually burst out laughing. A stony silence reproaches me from the shadows. Porfyrius is deadly serious.

‘I guessed that the Dowager Empress Helena would have taken the death of her grandson badly. I wrote to her, hinting at what I knew. She was a pious woman, shattered by grief: she was ready enough to believe. She recalled me, heard what I had to say and set out at once for Palestine.’

This bit I know. The streets of Rome had barely been swept clean from the vicennalia celebrations before Helena took her trip to Jerusalem. At the time, we all assumed she was undertaking some sort of ritual purification for what had happened to Crispus, or that she wanted to get as far away from Constantine as possible. She returned a year later and died soon after.

‘She found it,’ Porfyrius says abruptly. ‘She followed the clues I gave her, and she found the old Cross. She brought it back to Rome. By then, thanks to her patronage, I was a praetor of the city – soon to be Prefect. I oversaw the estate at Duas Lauros.’ A touch of his old, crooked humour surfaces in his voice. ‘I think you might have been there, once.’

Once. June, that doomed vicennalia year. Constantine going through the motions of the vicennalia ritual like a statue, while a hundred thousand blank-faced Romans watched and cheered and pretended they’d never heard of Crispus. And late one night, when Constantine was drunk, I remember riding three miles out of Rome down the Via Casilina, to the old cemetery where Constantine had built his mausoleum. With me came two trusted guards from the Schola, and a long coffin we’d carried all the way from Pula. I remember the shadow of that vast rotunda over the old gravestones; the squeak of the lock and the slap of our feet as we went down the stairs. I remember the lamps like eyes in the walls, the deep shadows they cast down the endless tunnels. I remember the slam of the lid as we closed the sarcophagus in the deepest, furthest part of the catacomb; the noise echoing around the small chamber, knocking loose grit off the ceiling, and the flash of terror that I would be buried alive with the man I murdered. I remember the tears, wet on my face as I kissed his coffin and murmured my final farewell.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ The memories are throttling me. My voice barely comes out as a croak.

‘So you’ll understand.’

A light flares in the darkness. One of the men around me has touched a glow-worm to a lamp. For a moment, my eyes can’t see anything. As they adapt, I see brick vaults above my head; a circle of men standing around me. And a little distance away, hanging back as if ashamed of something, the face that’s haunted my nightmares for ten years.

I stare. My heart shatters at the impossibility of it.

I’m looking at a dead man.

Rome – Present Day

She’d never been claustrophobic, but this was something else. All Abby could think of was being surrounded by the dead. The passage was so narrow her shoulders almost rubbed the walls – a waxy grey rock that still carried the scars of the chisels that had carved it. Abby tried to imagine the gravediggers who’d quarried out the catacombs by hand, trapped below ground without light or air. How did they survive?

Dr Lusetti put a hand on the wall. ‘You know this rock? It is called tufa. In a natural state, it is soft and easy to quarry, but when you expose it to the air, it becomes hard like concrete. It is why the catacombs were so easy to dig – and why they have survived so well.’

The walls weren’t solid. From floor to ceiling, with minimal gaps in between, shelves had been cut into them. Some lay open; others were walled up with pieces of tile or marble. The whole effect was to make the walls seem like giant filing cabinets.

‘Cubicula,’ Lusetti said. ‘This is where they buried the people.’

He pointed his head torch at a marble plaque. Scratched into the striated surface was a crude X-P Christogram. ‘They decorated the tombs so they knew where to find their ancestors.’

It made Abby think of something. ‘Do you know a symbol called the staurogram?’

‘Of course.’

‘Are there any instances of it down here?’

Lusetti frowned. ‘This catacomb has been closed for many years – it is a long time ago I have been down myself. And most of the inscribed pieces have been stolen by the thieves.’

For the first few hundred yards, a string of electric bulbs lit their way. Then they gave out. The lamps on their helmets were the only light now, four narrow beams nodding and swivelling as they advanced deeper into the tunnel.

‘How did people find their way down here?’ Mark asked. Abby thought he only said it to hear the sound of a human voice.

Lusetti’s torch beam moved to a small niche, about waist high. ‘This shelf is for an oil lamp. We find them everywhere we dig in the catacombs. In Roman times, you saw hundreds, maybe thousands of lamps lighting the way.’

They carried on, past countless rows of cubiculae. After another twenty yards, the tunnel split into three. They halted.

‘Which way now?’ Barry asked.

‘There’s no sign of Dragović’s people.’ Mark’s torch beam inscribed an arc across the walls as he looked around, back the way they’d come. ‘If he’s coming, he hasn’t arrived yet. We should get back upstairs and set up the surveillance.’

He hates this even more than me, Abby thought. She wondered if the catacomb had tapped some dark terror – or if it was just the discomfort of youth suddenly faced with the bare bones of mortality. She forced herself to breathe slowly. It’s not an evil place, she told herself. On the wall, her torch beam settled on a small piece of marble lodged in the opening of a cubicula. IN PACE, said the inscription, and even Abby knew what it meant. In Peace. Next to it was a Christogram, and above it a crudely drawn dove with an olive branch in its mouth.

Peace and hope. For a moment, Abby glimpsed the humanity of the people who’d been buried here, row upon row of them patiently waiting. The tombs no longer seemed so macabre. They felt almost companionable.

Her beam moved along – and as it moved, it caught something. A shadow in the stone, a pattern flitting into the light like a moth. She turned her head back slowly, trying to pin it down.

There. The design was thin and shallow, angled slightly so that lit from below it cast almost no shadow. It was only because the lamp was mounted on her helmet that she’d caught it. Even then, she had to keep the beam slightly oblique: if she pointed it straight, the incisions melted back into the rock. The shape that had governed her life since Michael gave her a jewellery box in Pristina two months ago. The staurogram. It sat above the door of the left-hand passage, inviting her on.

She squeezed past Lusetti and padded down the passage. She heard a plaintive ‘Hey’ from Mark behind her, but ignored him. Ten yards further along, the passage ended at a T-junction. She looked left and right, and there it was again: the same symbol carved above the left doorway.

The saving sign that lights the path ahead.

* * *

Lusetti led the way, with Barry and Mark behind him. Abby brought up the rear. Sometimes she imagined she could hear soft footsteps behind her, though each time she pointed her torch back down the tunnel she saw nothing but the graves.

It was like walking through fog – timeless and placeless. The rows of tombs, sometimes interrupted by doorways that led into small chambers where richer or grander families had been buried; the dark passages that forked and crossed, weaving a web deep underground. If the staurograms had led them in a circle, they might have followed it round and round for ever.

They went down a staircase, then another. The air grew colder. The ground underfoot was damp and clammy, like wet sand. The ceiling got lower, pressed down by the weight of the world above them. Abby lost count of the number of turns they’d made. Without the staurograms, she was pretty certain they’d never find their way out.

They stopped – so abruptly she bumped into Mark. The tunnel had reached a T-junction. Lusetti, in the lead, shone his torch right and left, and right again.

‘There is no mark here.’

‘There must be,’ said Mark. Tension told in his voice. ‘They can’t have brought us all this way to drop us now.’

‘They?’ echoed Lusetti. ‘You think they are leading you where you want to go?’

Four torch beams crisscrossed the grainy rock. All they illuminated was the scrapes and gouges of the hand tools that had cut the passage. And, ahead, a dirty brick wall filling a niche in the rock from floor to ceiling.

‘Is this recent?’ Mark asked. Lusetti shook his head.

‘This is Roman brickwork.’

‘Maybe we’re supposed to go straight on,’ Abby said. She edged past Mark and Barry and tapped the brickwork. Even after so many centuries, it felt solid.

‘I think maybe –’

The bullet caught Mark clean in the chest. The gunshot roared down the catacomb. Barry dropped to one knee, turned and squeezed off three shots of his own. Abby hurled herself to the floor of the passage and started to crawl.

More shots echoed behind her; lights flashed. In the tight space, it sounded like an artillery battle. She picked herself up and ran down the tunnel, looking for a side passage that might help lose her in the labyrinth.

The tunnel ended in a rough-finished wall. No bricks, no turnings – just a piece of rock where the diggers’ patience or will had run out, where they’d shouldered their tools and turned for the surface.

The sound of gunfire settled in the tunnel like dust. The silence was even more unnerving, though it didn’t last long. From behind – not far – Abby heard slow footsteps coming after her.

Metal snapped on metal as the slide of a gun slid back.