city seemed to be made of endlessly colliding parts: the heating pipes and radiator, the lift mechanism, the cars and trams on the street below. Once, she heard what sounded like shots in the distance, though it might have been an engine backfiring. She wasted half an hour waiting to hear it again – in her career, she’d got pretty good at knowing the sound of gunfire – but it didn’t come back.
It didn’t seem to bother Michael. He slept through, snoring quietly. In the end, she unplugged the clock radio from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom, trying to drown out the night with soft rock. Red numbers flashed the time at her, taunting her efforts to get to sleep. Eventually, slumped in the bathtub with a pillow behind her head and a rough blanket thrown over her, she slept.
She woke with a cricked neck and a headache. Michael stood in the bathroom door wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.
‘I thought you’d gone.’ Perhaps he hadn’t slept as well as she’d thought. His eyes were bloodshot, the hair on his cheeks too long to be stubble and too thin for a beard. The lines around his eyes didn’t look wise, but tired.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Sign of a guilty conscience.’ He forced a smile, so she’d know it was a joke. ‘I’m starving.’
Giacomo’s room rate didn’t include breakfast. They went to a cafe across the road and ordered omelettes and coffee. The legacy of the Ottoman Empire meant that at least they brewed it strong.
‘Do you actually have a hundred thousand euros?’
Michael sliced apart his omelette. ‘We’ll cross that bridge.’
‘What time is Gruber due in?’
‘Lunchtime. I said we’d meet him at the castle.’
‘How Kafkaesque.’
She chewed her food in silence. Michael signalled the waiter for more coffee.
‘There might be something more,’ she tried at last. ‘When Giacomo said the answer was within us, he didn’t know there was any more of the poem. What if there’s a clue in the text we have?’
Michael took the crumpled paper and smoothed it on the table. He read the English translation first, then tried the Latin, mouthing words under his breath.
‘All Greek to me,’ he said at last.
‘It’s Latin,’ she reminded him. ‘I thought you said you could read it.’
‘I failed my O level.’
‘Then let’s find someone who can.’
Studentski Trg – Student Square – stood at the end of Belgrade’s main promontory, near the citadel, a football pitch’s worth of grass and trees, surrounded by the usual local mix of neoclassical and paleo-socialist buildings that made up Belgrade University. Statues dotted the park – once devoted to heroes of Communism, now torn down and replaced with safer figures from a less contested past. At one stage there had been plans to make it part of a green artery of parks through the heart of the city. Now it mostly served as a bus terminus.
They found the Faculty of Classics and Philosophy in a handsome pink and grey building on the south side of the square. Five minutes in an Internet cafe had given them a name; that, plus Michael’s charm and Abby’s Serbo-Croat talked them past the porter, up a flight of stairs and into a small office. Files bursting with papers were crammed on to a row of steel shelves; on a facing wall, a tattered map showed the Roman Empire at its height. A green terracotta bust poked out from the pot plants on the windowsill: a round-faced man with a turned-out chin and flat cheeks, and eyes that seemed to be staring at a point just above your head. There was a tension in the face, every muscle clenched in the exercise of power.
The owner of the office – Dr Adrian Nikolic – was an altogether milder proposition: medium build, with a brown beard and brown curly hair and brown eyes that seemed inclined to smile. He wore a Pringle sweater over a check shirt, and brown corduroy trousers with lace-up boots.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see us,’ Abby said, in Serbian.
He nodded, pleased she spoke the language. In a small country with a bad reputation, it made a difference. She saw him take in the bruises on her face, but he didn’t comment.
‘I did not know I had such international fame. Perhaps I should ask for a rise.’ He spun slowly in his chair, gesturing them to sit on the threadbare couch opposite. ‘I have a class in fifteen minutes. Until then, how can I help?’
Abby handed him the battered paper with the poem and the translation. ‘We found this, um, unexpectedly.’
‘Found it?’
‘It’s complicated.’
He nodded. ‘This is the Balkans. Things are found, things go missing. We learn not to ask questions.’
He took a pair of tortoiseshell glasses from his desk drawer and read through the poem.
‘Obviously you have translated it. What else do you want for me to tell you?’
‘Anything you can think of.’
A dry laugh. ‘Anything?’
‘The context we found it in, there were suggestions it dated from the reign of Constantine the Great.’
‘So you thought of me.’ He nodded to the bust on the window. ‘You know he was born in Nis? My home town.’
Abby took a deep breath. ‘This probably sounds crazy – but we think the poem might point to a lost treasure or
