Nikolić kept his eyes on the road.
‘You wanted to be out of Belgrade? Now you are here. What next?’
Abby looked at the plastic wallet sitting on her lap. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’
Nikolić pulled the car into a Lukoil station just past the airport turning. There was a small café attached to the minimart: they sat at a plastic table and sipped oily coffee from plastic cups. Paper placemats advertised fast food and offered puzzles to distract children.
‘I don’t want for you to tell me what you are doing,’ Nikolić announced. ‘If the police ask me, I will say you forced me to drive you at gunpoint.’
‘Fair enough,’ Abby agreed. If the police caught them, that was going to be the least of their worries.
‘Let me see the document.’
Abby handed him the wallet. He spread the papers on the table – four sheets of blurred images, and two of Gruber’s typed transcription.
To reach the living, navigate the dead,
Beyond the shadow burns the sun,
The saving sign that lights the path ahead,
Unconquered brilliance of a life begun.
Abby could see the Latin text in neat lines on the typescript. But there was more. Nikolić studied it for some minutes, then began, hesitantly:
From the garden to the cave,
The grieving father gave his son,
And buried in the hollow grave,
The trophy of his victory won.
They looked at each other with something like awe, aware they were hearing words that hadn’t been read in seventeen centuries.
‘“The trophy of his victory won,”’ Michael repeated. ‘You said trophy was another word for the labarum – the battle standard.’
‘It can be.’
Michael made Nikolić read the translation again, slowly, while he copied it out on the paper. He frowned at it. ‘Other than the “trophy”, it doesn’t seem to take us much further.’
‘Can you tell us anything more about the poem?’ Abby asked.
Nikolić looked up. ‘I can maybe tell you the name of the poet.’
He enjoyed their astonishment. Even under the circumstances, he couldn’t keep from smiling.
‘It was written by a Roman politician and poet called Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Further up the scroll, there is a list of names.’ He showed them on Gruber’s transcription. ‘By itself, that would make this a significant find. Eusebius of Nicomedia, the most notorious bishop of Constantine’s reign. Aurelius Symmachus, a noted pagan and minor philosopher. Asterius Sophistes, a controversial Christian theorist. And Porfyrius – a poet who specialised in highly technical, unconventional poetry.’
It was like reading a Russian novel – a deluge of unfamiliar, unpronounceable names. But Abby got the drift.
‘You’ve heard of all these people?’
‘For a scholar of Constantine, it is impossible not to.’
‘And Porfyrius wrote poetry?’ Michael repeated.
‘His poems are called technopaegnia. Riddles for amusing the Emperor. All his surviving poems contain secret messages.’
The smile had turned into a sheepish grin.
‘Is this for real?’ Michael asked at last. ‘This morning, you laughed us out of your office when we thought the poem had a clue to a treasure. Now you’re saying the chap who wrote it is famous for putting secret messages in poems?’
The smile faded. Under Nikolić’s calm good humour, the strain had begun to tell.
‘I don’t know, OK? There’s a poem and the name of a poet. You say the poem has a secret message and his poems are famous for secret messages. I made a connection. Maybe it means nothing.’ He brushed a hand across the table, pushing the papers away. ‘Maybe your German friend invented everything, and said what he thought you wanted to be true.’
They sat there in silence for a moment. Abby sipped at her coffee and realised she’d finished it. Trucks thundered past on the motorway.
‘Let’s assume the poem’s genuine, and written by who you say it is,’ Michael said at last. ‘How do we decode the secret message?’
‘It is like … I don’t know the English word.’
He said something in Serbian, but Abby drew blank. Nikolić stared at the table in frustration, trying to find a translation. Suddenly, his face lit up. He took the paper placemat that had been laid in front of him and spun it around. It was designed for children: a collage of bright pictures of fast food, dancing cartoon animals and puzzle games. There was a maze, a tangle of lines, a join-the-dots picture – and a word search.
Nikolić tapped his finger on the word search. ‘Exactly like this. You have the text of the poem, and then you read up or down or diagonally to find other words hidden inside it, yes?’
Abby and Michael both nodded. Underneath the grid of letters, the mat listed a dozen words for the children to find. Abby pointed to them.
‘In a word search, you know what you’re looking for.’
‘On Porfyrius’s poems, that is not the case.’ Nikolić sat back, doodling on the mat. ‘For the original manuscripts, the letters would have been picked out in red ink, or underlined. Some scholars think they might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters – though no such tablet is surviving.’
‘That would have been nice to find,’ said Michael.
Nikolić ignored him. Absent-mindedly, he drew bubbles around a couple of words in the puzzle on the mat.
‘Porfyrius’s poems are much more intricate, actually. The hidden words spell out messages, but they also make pictures.’
‘What do you mean?’
Nikolić circled some more letters in the grid, apparently at random. When he’d finished, the marks outlined the shape of a stick man. ‘Like so. Porfyrius was very clever. Sometimes the pictures themselves were of letters that spelled out short words, or numbers. For Constantine’s vicennalia, when he celebrated twenty years of his rule, Porfyrius wrote a poem where the hidden message made the form XX, the Roman numerals for twenty. One famous poem, the message makes the shape of a ship. In others, the Emperor’s titles or his monogram.’
Abby stared at him. ‘His monogram?’
‘The chi-rho. Like on the labarum.’
‘The labarum again,’ Michael said. ‘That’s got to be it.’
But Abby was thinking further and faster. She pulled Gruber’s printout from the pile – not the typed transcription, but the raw image reconstructed from the scroll.
‘Show me where the poem is here.’
Nikolić pointed to it. The whole page was dim and blurred, the letters dark shapes like twigs floating in muddy water. But she could see the place. A dark block of text, eight lines long.
She made a square with her forefingers and thumbs and framed the text between them. Keeping the shape, she lifted her hands against her collarbone.
Some scholars think they might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters.
‘There was a gold necklace,’ she said. Michael shot her a warning look – not in front of Nikolić – but she carried on regardless. ‘We found it with the scroll – a square pattern with the chi-rho in the middle. I think it would have fitted perfectly on top of the poem.’ She thought back, remembering the feel of the cold metal against her skin and the way the inset glass caught the light. ‘It had beads set into it. What if they show which letters you need to read to get the hidden message?’