A woman in a black dress with dusty grey hair sat behind a trestle table, reading a gossip webpage on a black laptop.
‘I’d like a passport for my sister,’ Michael said in Serbian, gesturing to Abby. ‘Her aunt in Zagreb is very ill and she must go at once.’
The woman frowned. ‘The passport office is shut.’
A fifty-euro note appeared in Michael’s hand. The woman gave it a disapproving look.
‘You are police? You think you can bribe me?’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘This is honest shop.’
‘I’m not police. I need a passport for my sister. Her aunt is very ill.’ Two hundred-euro notes came out.
The woman studied Abby’s face, taking in the bruises staining her cheek, the cut above her forehead. She gave Michael a knowing look, her tongue stuck in the corner of her lips.
She thinks he’s trafficking me, Abby realised. Her skin crawled as if she’d been smeared with filth; she felt naked.
‘Maybe you come back in a week. Maybe your aunt gets better. This is honest shop,’ the woman said again. But she was smiling as she said it.
Michael laid the money on the table. ‘Perhaps you could just see what you have in the back room,’ he encouraged her.
They walked out of the travel agent a thousand euros poorer, though that wasn’t what made Abby feel cheap. But they had the passport. She studied the photograph under a streetlight, sucking in her cheeks to try and mimic the pinched face of the woman it had once belonged to.
‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ Michael told her. ‘Just credible enough for the border guards to accept the bribe.’
She checked her watch, eager to have something else to think about. ‘It’s been over an hour. I should call London.’
She found a payphone in the main square and dialled the number from memory. Michael waited outside the booth.
The same routine with the Foreign Office front desk took her through to the Office of Balkan Liaison. This time, Mark answered straight away.
‘Where are you?’
‘In the Balkans.’ They’d probably trace the number, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
‘What the hell’s going on? Jessop’s dead; you’re missing. I’m hearing barmy things about a shooting war in Kosovo and a Roman tomb.’
‘It’s crazy,’ Abby agreed. ‘Remind me to tell you about it some time.’
Mark’s tone altered. ‘You have to come in Abby. You haven’t done anything wrong. We just need to speak to you.’
‘You remember the necklace you and Jessop took off me?’
‘What about it?’
‘I want you to bring it to me.’ She felt the stiff new passport in her pocket and prayed it would do the job. ‘You know the town of Split, in Croatia? Meet me at the cathedral there at two o’clock tomorrow.’
‘You’re expecting me to drop everything and fly out, just to give you a piece of jewellery? You’ve got to give me more than that.’
She put her hand over the receiver and looked around. Michael didn’t fit in the phone box; he’d wandered across the square and was buying some cigarettes from a Gypsy woman. He had his back to her.
‘Michael’s alive,’ she said.
‘Michael Lascaris?’
‘He didn’t die that night in the villa. He’s with me now.’
Across the square, Michael was sauntering back towards her.
‘Two o’clock, the cathedral in Split,’ she repeated. ‘Bring the necklace.’
‘Wait –’
She hung up. Michael had opened the door and was peering in.
‘Did they bite?’
‘He’ll come,’ she said. She took out the passport again and stared at the unfamiliar face. ‘The question is, will we get there?’
XXXVIII
Constantinople – May 337
THE DARKNESS IN the Chamber of Records is immense. I’ve wandered so far, I don’t know where the door is. I can barely tell which way is up.
But still there’s a voice calling my name. I open my eyes. The darkness recedes. A light approaches, flickering through the gaps in the shelves.
‘Gaius Valerius?’
It’s the archivist.
‘I told you to come out if you wanted to read,’ he reproves me. ‘The atmosphere down here, it can overwhelm you.’
I’m too exhausted for pride. ‘Thank you for coming to rescue me.’
‘Rescue you?’ He sounds amused. ‘I came to fetch you. The Augustus wants to see you.’
I don’t understand. ‘Constantine? Has he returned from the war so soon?’
‘He’s at Nicomedia.’
And there’s a finality in those words that tells me he won’t be coming back.
Villa Achyron, near Nicomedia – May 337
It’s seventy miles to Nicomedia. In my youth, I’d have flogged every post horse on the road to get there in a day. Now, it takes me the best part of two. It isn’t just my age. The road’s busier than I’ve ever seen it; at every waystation, there are long queues for fresh horses. The messengers are tight-lipped, but the grooms know the gossip. From them, I gather that Constantine’s final campaign ended before it really began. He didn’t even get as far as Nicaea before he started complaining of a pain in his stomach. He diverted to the hot baths at Pythia Therma, hoping for a quick cure, but it only made the symptoms worse. His doctors said he was too ill to make the journey back to Constantinople; instead, they decamped to an imperial villa, one of Diocletian’s old estates near Nicomedia: the Villa Achyron. Achyron means ‘threshing floor’, where the grain and the chaff are separated. I don’t suppose Constantine finds that comforting.
The villa stands five miles outside Nicomedia, on terraces cut into the slopes above the coast. Fields of corn surround it, though the threshing floor that gave the villa its name is long gone. The corn should be ripening gold in the May sunshine, but there’ll be no harvest this year. The crop’s been trampled back into the earth by the boots and tents of two thousand soldiers camped around it. It’s hard to tell if they’re guarding the villa or besieging it. I trudge up the hill along an avenue of poplars, and announce myself to the clerk, who has set up an administrative headquarters in the vestibule. Not a secretary or a palace functionary, but an officer of the Protectores.
‘How’s the Augustus? Is he … ?’ Dying? I can’t say it – can barely think it.
An unforgiving stare. ‘His doctors prescribed rest.’
‘He sent a message – he summoned me here from Constantinople.’
‘Your name?’
The question spins me off balance like a slap in the face. Is he making a point? Deliberately putting me in my place? People never ask my name: they know it.
He taps his pen on the desk. He’s a busy man; an ambitious young officer in a thankless job. And he has no idea who I am.
I tell him; the eyes don’t blink. All I am is a name to be compared against a list. And found absent.
‘Is Flavius Ursus here? The chief of staff?’ That earns me a few seconds more of his time. ‘Tell him Gaius Valerius Maximus is here to see the Augustus.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
They leave me to wait in an anteroom near the heart of the villa. Priests, officials and soldiers pass in and out and through the chamber: Schola guards in their white uniforms, but also field commanders in red battledress. This is still a campaign headquarters, after all.
Hours stretch by, and my mind reaches back to a different villa on a different sea.
Pula, Adriatic Coast – July 326 – Eleven years ago …
Pula’s a small port near the head of the Adriatic. It’s a quiet, well-maintained town, full of merchants who’ve made modest fortunes in regional trade. I imagine it’s the sort of place Constantine has in mind when he rhapsodises about the delights of his peaceful empire: neat, prosperous and dull. A backwater. A good place for a man to disappear.