‘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 alclass="underline" 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.