I don’t hide my surprise. ‘I thought … as a friend of Symmachus …’
‘Aurelius Symmachus is a Stoic.’ A wry smile. ‘Outward things cannot touch his soul.’
‘He was less accommodating thirty years ago.’
‘We all were.’ His eyes lose focus for a moment, then return. ‘Do you want to know the truth, Valerius? Thirty years ago I persecuted the Christians just as furiously as Symmachus. That was my first encounter with Alexander, and it wasn’t pleasant.’
The web I drew around the dead bishop takes on another strand. ‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I saw the sign of God’s truth.’
It’s impossible to know if he’s serious. He never stops smiling; every word he says has a subjective quality, as if he’s merely testing how it sounds. I try to imagine that smiling face standing over a brazier, digging his iron into the coals.
He shrugs. ‘I was a former proconsul who’d slipped off the path of honour, and I was ambitious.’ A quick look to see if I understand. ‘There was a scandal – perhaps you heard? Carmen et error – a poem and a mistake, as Ovid said. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a small house on the edge of the world, in the shadow of Trajan’s Danube wall, contemplating my errors. Ten whole years I spent there.’ A sigh, a shrug. ‘At least I wrote a lot of poems. And I met Alexander.’
‘Why was he there?’
‘A religious dispute.’
He kicks at a loose stone in the road. ‘You can imagine how awful it was – the persecutor and his victim, thrown together again after all those years. And yet, we became friends. Unlikely, I know, but Alexander was extraordinary. I’d tried to make a martyr of him and now he became a saint. He never mentioned what had happened. I waited and I waited – it drove me mad. I analysed every gesture, every word he said, convinced it was part of some trap. One day, I couldn’t bear it any more. I asked him straight out if he remembered me.’
His voice drops. ‘He forgave me everything. Not the grudging forgiveness you might get from a friend you’d done wrong, lording his generosity over you. No rebuke, no lecture. He said, “I forgive you,” and that was all. He never mentioned it again.’
And a lot of good it did him, the cruel voice inside me retorts. A picture flashes in my mind of the white corpse laid out on the bier. I can smell embalming fluid on my fingers. I feel ashamed, and resent it.
Porfyrius stretches. ‘Do you know what Alexander wrote in one of his books? “In order to rule the world, we have to have the perfect virtue of one rather than the weakness of many.”’
‘He was speaking about Constantine?’
‘He was speaking about God. But what is true of God serves for His creation. For too long we had too many gods and too many emperors and we suffered for it. With Constantine, we have one God, one ruler, one empire united. No division, no hatred, no war. Who couldn’t believe in that?’
That raises my eyebrows. ‘No war? You know Constantine’s massing his army for a campaign against Persia as we speak.’
I stand up from the litter, driven by a surge of anger I thought I’d mastered. ‘You want to know why I didn’t convert, when everyone from the Emperor to the bathhouse attendant did?’
Porfyrius waits politely. That only makes me angrier.
‘The hypocrisy. You preach peace, forgiveness, eternal life – and then you end up like Alexander, laid out on a slab with your eyes glued shut.’
Porfyrius laughs and laughs. ‘Do you think you won’t end up like that too?’
XIX
Pristina, Kosovo – Present Day
ABBY CROSSED THE railway tracks at the bottom end of town and started climbing the hill opposite. The streets were quiet that early on a Sunday morning: no children playing, no traffic. Low cloud pressed over the valley and rendered the air milky white. She’d spent the night in a hotel, one that wasn’t much used by internationals, biting her lip each time the lift next to her room made a sound. As soon as she could pretend it was decent, she’d slipped out the back entrance.
. OMPF was the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics – or had been, until it was rebranded as the Department of Forensic Medicine a year ago. Michael had never been one to take notice of bureaucratic reshuffling. Levin, she guessed, was Shai Levin, Chief Forensic Anthropologist. Abby had met him a dozen times over the years, different encounters in different parts of the world, though she doubted she’d left much of an impression.Levin, OMPF, Michael’s diary had said
She’d been to a party at his house with Michael back in June. He lived in one of the freshly painted villas that climbed the slope opposite the main town, where the foreign proconsuls lived and lorded it over the city they administered. The higher you went, the nicer the houses got and the more elaborate the embassies became. At the very top of the hill, tucked behind the ridge out of sight of the diplomats, stood the ultimate authority: Camp Film City, headquarters for NATO’s mission keeping peace in the restive province. No one could mistake the hierarchy.
Abby walked past the diplomatic cars parked on the kerb, climbed the steps to the private villa and rang the bell. She hoped it was the right door.
‘Can I help?’
Shai Levin stood in the doorway, wearing an untucked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, cargo trousers and bare feet. He had olive skin, curly dark hair and soft dark eyes that gave no hint of the horrors he witnessed every day. His manner was mild and polite, his English faintly accented. Among international aid workers, he was something of a legend. People who didn’t know better often called him a saint, to which he invariably smiled and pointed out he was Jewish.
‘Abby Cormac,’ she introduced herself. ‘I work in Justice.’
She’d wondered how far her notoriety had spread. The look on Levin’s face told her everything she needed to know.
‘You were together with Michael Lascaris, from Customs, right? I’m so sorry – I heard what happened.’
What else did you hear? A grey KFOR helicopter flew low overhead, circling in to land at Film City. Abby edged closer to the door.
‘I was looking through some of Michael’s things. I think he met you not long before he died.’
Levin nodded. ‘I guess that’s right.’
‘I’m trying to find out why he was killed.’
A shadow crossed Levin’s face, the look of someone receiving a long-expected diagnosis. He seemed to hesitate a second, then opened the door wider.
‘Come on in.’
He led her into the living room, modern and open-plan, with hardwood floors and full-length windows giving an uninterrupted panorama down on to the city. She admired it from a leather sofa while he made tea. Even to an uninvited guest, the room exuded calm.
He laid two cups of tea on the mahogany coffee table. ‘Have you been to see the police?’
‘I will.’ Lying to Levin felt like swearing in church. She only really knew him by reputation, but that was plenty. Cambodia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq – wherever bodies lay buried in inconceivable numbers, Levin was the man with a shovel in the mud, piecing them together, making them human again.
‘What did Michael want to see you about?’
‘We were friends from Bosnia. Back in ’98, there was a landowner who wouldn’t give us clearance to excavate on his land, even though we were pretty sure there was a grave there. Michael turned up and made it happen. We crossed paths every so often after that, different postings, different places. It’s a small world – you know how it goes.’
‘And what did he want the last time you saw him?’
Levin looked uncomfortable. ‘Abby, I know this must have been hell for you, but – you need to speak to the police.’