Porfyrius joins me without asking. It’s a hard climb for two old men. By the time we reach Symmachus’s house, we’re both puffing like cart horses.
The door to the house is locked. We ring the bell hanging outside, but no one answers. All his possessions were forfeit: his slaves will have been confiscated and sold, but he should have been left a freedman to prepare for his departure.
‘Maybe he took a different route down to the dock,’ I suggest. ‘We could have missed him on the way down.’
‘There’s a side door.’ Porfyrius is already heading towards the corner of the building. I’ve half a mind to let him go alone, but curiosity makes me follow. There are no windows on this side of the house, just a narrow alley between Symmachus and his neighbour’s mansion. And, halfway down, a wooden door in the brick wall.
Porfyrius tries the handle and it gives. We push through, into a vaulted storeroom that smells of sawdust. Splinters and bark litter the floor: even his firewood’s been taken away. In the adjoining rooms, dust’s already begun to settle.
Another door, another empty room, and suddenly we’re in the bright light of the peristyle, overlooking the garden.
The fish sit motionless in their pond. The blind philosophers watch from their perches in the colonnade. And in the centre of the garden, Aurelius Symmachus lies propped against the side of the pool, head lolling forward.
One glance is enough to know he’s not going anywhere.
XXIX
NOVI PAZAR MEANT ‘New Bazaar’. There was a bazaar in the town and it must have been new once, though now it was derelict. The whole town was the Balkans in miniature: a southern half of minarets and winding Ottoman alleys, a northern district of monolithic concrete, and a small river dividing them. Even the refugees who thronged its streets had a symmetry to them: Muslims expelled by Serbs from Bosnia, and Serbs expelled by Muslims from Kosovo.
Abby bought some new clothes in a drab shop and changed in the toilet at the coach station. They bought two tickets from the kiosk, and took seats at the back of the bus. It was five hours to Belgrade. The countryside scrolled past the windows: river valleys and scrubby hillsides mottled green and brown, broken every so often with orchards or quarries. A primitive, lonely landscape.
Michael took a camera out of his bag and turned it on. He cupped his hand around the screen to shade it, though the bus was mostly empty. He played back pictures from the tomb, fiddling with the controls to pan and zoom for detail.
‘That’s the lid of the sarcophagus.’ He went closer. ‘You see the inscription?’
Despite their age, the letters were deep and sharp. ‘C VAL MAX,’ Abby read.
‘Gaius Valerius Maximus,’ Michael expanded. She glanced at him.
‘I didn’t know you read Latin.’
‘Grammar school boy. Back before they all went private.’ He tapped the screen. ‘I did some research after I saw this. This man Valerius has a record. He was a consul in AD 314, and there are inscriptions that make him Praetorian Prefect to the emperor Constantine the Great. Sort of a chief of staff – or
‘Until he got a sword through his heart.’
Michael thumbed on through the next pictures – the faded frescoes, their plaster falling off in scabs. He tried to zoom in on the writing, but the closer he went the more it dissolved into a pixelated blur. He put the camera down in frustration. Abby took it.
‘Don’t you think it’s strange?’ She’d pulled back out so she could see the paintings in what remained of their fullness. ‘I don’t see any Christian iconography. No crosses or Christograms; nothing that looks like a Bible story.’
‘From what I read, Constantine’s reign was a pretty confused time religiously. It’s not as if everyone woke up one morning and decided they were going to be Christian.’
‘Think about the necklace you gave me. You found it in the tomb, right?’
‘Sealed in the vase with the scroll.’
‘It’s a Christian symbol. Why would the dead man, Gaius Valerius, want that right beside him in his grave, but not anywhere on the decoration?’
Michael shrugged. ‘Deathbed conversion?’
She thought of the blade sliding into the man’s chest, forceful enough to break the rib. She shuddered.
‘Speaking of the necklace, do you still have it?’
‘The Foreign Office took it.’
Michael stared out the window. ‘It probably doesn’t matter.’
The bus dropped them at the terminus at the bottom of the hill near the city centre. A black sky had brought an early twilight; relentless rain hammered the streets, and thunder rolled around the river valley. They bought an umbrella from a shop in the station concourse.
‘How are we for money?’ Abby asked.
‘Fine,’ said Michael. ‘The advantage of pretending to be crooked is that a lot of cash came through my hands.’
