Aurelius Symmachus is a Stoic. Outward things cannot touch his soul.
What is it about these Stoics? They claim to have mastered the world, to be beyond its reach. And then they kill themselves. Is it the effort – the vast will required to hold down their emotions in the face of life’s provocations that finally wears them out?
To be out of reach of the world is to become a god. Stoics think they can do it by intellect and force of will; Christians by faith. Perhaps they aren’t so different after all. They’re trying to escape human nature.
No wonder so many commit suicide.
I don’t like where these thoughts are going. I open my eyes and sluice water over my back. ‘It’s too cold!’ I shout at the bath attendant. ‘Throw more wood on the fire!’ And someone says my name.
I tip my head back and look up. It takes me a moment to place him: a man called Bassus, a functionary at the palace. He served on my staff years ago when I was consul. Now he’s naked, floury skin damp with sweat and his hair plastered to his skull. He looks terrible, but I greet him as cheerfully as I can. He clambers in beside me.
‘Did you hear about Aurelius Symmachus?’
Sitting beside me, he can’t see the surprise on my face. I should have expected it. An ancient family, a murder and now a suicide: the scandal will consume the city for days, until something better comes along.
‘I heard he killed himself,’ I say.
‘Poison.’ He splashes the water with his hand. ‘Lucky he didn’t come here to do it, like Seneca. Imagine the mess.’
‘Imagine.’
Bassus leans back and scratches his armpit. ‘The strange thing is, I saw him last night. He came to the palace.’
Some of the other men in the pool drift closer. I half-close my eyes.
‘Did he think he’d get a pardon?’ someone asks.
‘He was very agitated. He said he had to see the Prefect.’
‘He’d probably realised what the Greeks do to old men,’ says a stocky guards captain. There’s laughter, a few obscene gestures. Bassus waits for them to die down.
‘He said he’d found out something about a Christian bishop. A scandal.’
Did the attendant follow my instructions? The water’s so cold I’m starting to shiver. In the general conversation which has broken out, I sidle closer to Bassus and whisper in his ear. ‘Did he tell anyone his secret?’
‘No one would speak to him. He hung around for a few hours, then gave up.’
‘Did he say which bishop?’
Bassus slides around the pool so he can give me a long, searching stare. How much scandal do you want to rake? his eyes ask.
‘He didn’t say.’ And then, because he can’t resist an easy joke. ‘He wasn’t that suicidal.’
XXXV
Belgrade, Serbia – Present Day
THE MAN IN the baseball cap fired twice.
Ten yards away, Gruber lurched backwards, as if he’d tripped on something.
The gun moved towards Michael. Panic greased the air: a lot of the people who’d fled the citadel had gathered here, torn between fear and curiosity. Now fear had free rein. They poured towards the park exit, blocking the police cars which were trying to nose their way in. Screams and sirens battled for supremacy.
The man in the baseball cap shouted something at Michael. By Michael’s feet, Gruber lay still. Blood seeped into the gravel. The man’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Abby was too far away to help. She wanted to move, but her legs were frozen. All she could see was the gun, Michael, and the short space between them.
A man in shorts and a black tracksuit top barrelled out of the crowd and flung himself at the gunman. Unlike Abby, he made no mistake. He drove his shoulder into the man’s side, whipped his legs from under him and dropped him heavily to the ground. The gunman struggled; the baseball cap came off, but the man in the tracksuit pinned him down. He wrenched the gun out of his hand and hurled it into a thicket of bushes.
Michael was kneeling beside Gruber, pulling something from inside his pocket. Blood smeared his hands.
‘Come on!’ he shouted.
Abby still couldn’t move. Michael ran over, grabbed her hand and pulled her along. It felt as though he’d tugged open her bullet scar; it was all she could do not to scream. When she looked back, two policemen had converged on the gunman and were pointing machine pistols at him. The man in the tracksuit was speaking quickly, looking around and waving his arms.
‘We need to get out of sight,’ said Michael. ‘As soon as the police start interviewing witnesses, they’ll know pretty quick they want to speak to us.’
‘What about Gruber?’
Michael shook his head. ‘No chance.’ He held up the plastic wallet he’d taken off the corpse. A neat hole the size of a five-pence piece had been punched clean through.
They hurried out of the park and crossed the main road. A tram rumbled past, briefly blocking them from sight.
‘Where to now?’ Abby asked.
‘Who do we know in Belgrade?’
Studentski Trg was busier than when they’d been there that morning. Classes had just finished; the students gathered in knots in the square, wondering what was happening at the citadel. They were close enough that they’d heard the shots and sirens. Fortunately, no one seemed to connect Michael and Abby with the chaos.
The porter recognised them from before and waved them through upstairs. They were just in time. They found Dr Nikolić outside his office door, a leather jacket pulled on over his sweater and a bunch of keys in his hand. He saw them and gave a polite, resigned smile.
‘You forgot something?’
Michael took out Gruber’s plastic wallet and handed it across. Abby had barely looked at it herself – a quick glance on their way over, huddled in a doorway, hoping no one noticed. Just enough to see a dark printout with blurry characters dim against it, and to wipe Gruber’s blood off the plastic.
But it meant something to Nikolić. He extracted the top sheet of paper and scanned it intently. He didn’t comment on the bullet hole.
‘This is a micro-CT scan of an ancient papyrus?’
‘It’s the original source for the poem we showed you earlier,’ Abby said. ‘If there’s any more of it, it’ll be in here.’
Nikolić looked surprised. ‘You have not checked yourself?’
‘We’re in a bit of a hurry,’ Michael explained.
‘And we need someone who can read Latin,’ Abby added.
Nikolić slid the papers back in the wallet. Though they’d done their best to wipe off the blood, some of the residue still streaked the plastic. Police sirens pulsed through the building, so loud they might have been in the square outside.
Michael turned to Nikolić. ‘Do you have a car? Can you get us out of Belgrade?’
Nikolić stared at him. Michael pre-empted anything he might say.
‘This printout comes from a scroll that belonged to one of Constantine’s top generals. It’s been lost until five minutes ago, never published, and right now it’s looking for a new owner.’
To Abby’s astonishment, Nikolić didn’t laugh them out of the building, or call security. He stood there for a long moment, looking between her, Michael and the wallet. He looked neither shocked nor offended – just bemused.
He shrugged, reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a car key on a rabbit’s-foot charm.
‘My car is parked around the corner.’
He led them down the stairs.
‘I can’t believe he’s doing this,’ Abby muttered to Michael. Ahead, Nikolić heard her and turned.
‘This is Serbia. You think actually this is the weirdest thing that has happened in my life?’
Nikolić’s car was a small red Fiat. Abby sat in the front, her hair down and pulled forward so that it shielded her face; Michael squeezed in the back and pretended to be asleep, lolling his head away from the window. Traffic was at a standstilclass="underline" police cars had blocked several major intersections, though there didn’t seem to be any method to it. Abby kept waiting for a roadblock to appear, for someone to tap on the window and demand their papers, but it never came. They followed a series of switchback streets down through the old town, then came out on the main road. They crossed the Sava and accelerated on to the highway that cut through the grid of Novi Belgrad. Within minutes they were out of the city and driving through rolling farmland. It always surprised Abby how abruptly the city ended.