through a ventilation shaft, cut the alarm and –
‘Did they take much?’
‘Only this one thing. We think they must be working for a collector who knows
‘Did the police trace anything?’
‘Nothing.’
His radio crackled, summoning him. He stood. ‘Enjoy your visit,
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 all: 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.
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.
She looked up at the arch. Stern men, bearded and cloaked, gazed down on her as if trying to tell her something.
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
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.
She circled the monument to check she hadn’t missed anyone. She checked her phone for messages. She reread the text message for the hundredth time, wondering if she’d missed something.
She’d got it right. The pixelated words on the screen were identical to the ones chiselled in marble above her, over the central arch. She read the rest of it, comparing it with the translation she’d copied from the British Library.
She checked her watch for the umpteenth time. 5.19.
More footsteps approached – another tour group, coming around like clockwork. This time the guide was an elderly man, a white moustache and a tweed suit and the regulation umbrella. Again, Abby scanned the following faces – but these were teenagers on a school trip, and she was invisible to them.
‘The Arch of Constantine,’ the guide pronounced. ‘Built in the year 312 as a memorial of Constantine’s victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge. Constantine was a Christian and Maxentius was a pagan. When Constantine won, Europe became Christian.’
The pupils played with their phones and their music players. A few snapped pictures. But Abby was transfixed. A crazy thought had occurred to her.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked. ‘Where is the Milvian Bridge? I mean, does it still exist?’
The guide looked grateful for the interest. ‘The Ponte Milvio. It is here in Rome, at the end of the Via Flaminia,
