scratch on the forehead made it look creased in thought, as if having been pulled from the darkness he was squinting to see her.
‘Did Michael say where he found the skeleton?’
‘He said he’d been up north, near the Serbian border. Bandit country. I didn’t ask why he was playing Indiana Jones there. Must have needed protection, though, because he arrived in a US Army Landcruiser. An American soldier helped bring the body in.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘He left his autograph. Michael made him sign the paperwork, said it was better if his name wasn’t on the docket.’ Levin shuffled through the documents in the folder. ‘Here – Specialist Anthony Sanchez, 957th LMT.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘As far as I know, all the Americans are down at Camp Bondsteel, by Ferizaj.’ He could see what she was thinking. ‘Have you got a yellow badge?’
Yellow badges were what admitted you to KFOR bases. They were supposed to be limited to NATO personnel, but Michael had had one, somehow. He used to drop in on the bases to buy duty-free cigarettes and alcohol at the PX’s.
‘Did you tell the police about this? After Michael was killed?’
‘I showed them the body, just in case it had anything to do with Michael. When they found out how old it was, they didn’t want to know – told me to send it to the cold-case squad. I didn’t mention Specialist Sanchez. I didn’t think it would do him any good.’
The clinical smell in the enclosed basement was beginning to make Abby light-headed. She desperately needed air.
‘Thanks for everything, Dr Levin. I hope I haven’t got you in trouble.’
‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t end up back here on my table. The sort of questions the police were asking when they came here …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You might not want to know the answers.’
‘I need to know.’
‘I know.’ Levin locked the file back in the cabinet. ‘You have the look in your eyes. I see it all the time.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The look of someone chasing ghosts.’
Two-handed, Levin pushed the drawer back into its steel mausoleum and slammed the door shut.
XX
THE MESSAGE IS waiting for me when I return home.
The Hall of Nineteen Couches stands in the palace complex in the shadow of the Hippodrome. A larger-than-life statue of Constantine with his three sons commands the entrance, staring down the length of the hall. In the apse at the opposite end, Constantine and his half-sister Constantiana lounge on the top couch like some incestuous pair of Egyptian gods. From there, the other eighteen couches run down the sides of the hall like the two straight tracks of the hippodrome. This is where the race is decided: the closer you are to the imperial couple, the nearer you are to winning. Constantine never used to like giving dinner parties: he hated having to rank the world so baldly. The sentimentalist in him couldn’t bear to see his guests’ disappointment when they found themselves next to the door; the pragmatist knew the value of uncertainty. You move more carefully when you don’t know where you stand.
I take my allocated place – second from the end, left-hand side, sharing the couch with a gaunt chancery official, who wolfs down his food as if he hasn’t eaten in a week; a senator from Bithynia; and a grain merchant who can only speak in bushels. I listen to his prattle about a blight in Egypt and whether the Nile flood will fail this year, as I scan the other guests. Eusebius is there, near the head of the room, deep in conversation with Flavius Ursus. I wonder what a bishop and a soldier have in common to talk about.
‘The price is already up five denarii from last month.’ The merchant tears into a skewered dormouse. Fat veined with blood dribbles down his chin. ‘It’s curious, you see? Usually in the spring the price drops as the seas open and the grain ships start to arrive again.’ He chuckles, as if it’s a riddle worthy of Daedalus. ‘Augurs and conjurors read the future in dead entrails and the flight of birds. I can read it in the price of wheat.’
I humour him – it’s the least painful option. ‘What do you see?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He looks at me as if I’m a child. ‘Trouble.’
At last the meal’s over. Slaves clear the platters away. Guests stand and begin to mingle. The grain merchant makes his excuses and escapes to the other side of the room, as bored of me as I am of him. I push forward to the front of the room, trying to catch Constantine’s eye, but the press of bodies is too thick. Instead, I stumble into a circle of men deep in a conversation. They fall silent when I intrude.
‘Gaius Valerius Maximus.’ It’s Eusebius, in a gold-trimmed toga hardly less grand than Constantine’s. Again, there’s an edge of ridicule in the emphasis as he says my last name. ‘Have you found the truth yet?’
