I don’t like where these thoughts are going. I open my eyes and sluice water over my back. ‘It’s too cold!’ I shout at the bath attendant. ‘Throw more wood on the fire!’ And someone says my name.
I tip my head back and look up. It takes me a moment to place him: a man called Bassus, a functionary at the palace. He served on my staff years ago when I was consul. Now he’s naked, floury skin damp with sweat and his hair plastered to his skull. He looks terrible, but I greet him as cheerfully as I can. He clambers in beside me.
‘Did you hear about Aurelius Symmachus?’
Sitting beside me, he can’t see the surprise on my face. I should have expected it. An ancient family, a murder and now a suicide: the scandal will consume the city for days, until something better comes along.
‘I heard he killed himself,’ I say.
‘Poison.’ He splashes the water with his hand. ‘Lucky he didn’t come here to do it, like Seneca. Imagine the mess.’
‘Imagine.’
Bassus leans back and scratches his armpit. ‘The strange thing is, I saw him last night. He came to the palace.’
Some of the other men in the pool drift closer. I half-close my eyes.
‘Did he think he’d get a pardon?’ someone asks.
‘He was very agitated. He said he had to see the Prefect.’
‘He’d probably realised what the Greeks do to old men,’ says a stocky guards captain. There’s laughter, a few obscene gestures. Bassus waits for them to die down.
‘He said he’d found out something about a Christian bishop. A scandal.’
Did the attendant follow my instructions? The water’s so cold I’m starting to shiver. In the general conversation which has broken out, I sidle closer to Bassus and whisper in his ear. ‘Did he tell anyone his secret?’
‘No one would speak to him. He hung around for a few hours, then gave up.’
‘Did he say which bishop?’
Bassus slides around the pool so he can give me a long, searching stare.
‘He didn’t say.’ And then, because he can’t resist an easy joke. ‘He wasn’t
XXXV
THE MAN IN the baseball cap fired twice.
Ten yards away, Gruber lurched backwards, as if he’d tripped on something.
The gun moved towards Michael. Panic greased the air: a lot of the people who’d fled the citadel had gathered here, torn between fear and curiosity. Now fear had free rein. They poured towards the park exit, blocking the police cars which were trying to nose their way in. Screams and sirens battled for supremacy.
The man in the baseball cap shouted something at Michael. By Michael’s feet, Gruber lay still. Blood seeped into the gravel. The man’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Abby was too far away to help. She wanted to move, but her legs were frozen. All she could see was the gun, Michael, and the short space between them.
A man in shorts and a black tracksuit top barrelled out of the crowd and flung himself at the gunman. Unlike Abby, he made no mistake. He drove his shoulder into the man’s side, whipped his legs from under him and dropped him heavily to the ground. The gunman struggled; the baseball cap came off, but the man in the tracksuit pinned him down. He wrenched the gun out of his hand and hurled it into a thicket of bushes.
Michael was kneeling beside Gruber, pulling something from inside his pocket. Blood smeared his hands.
‘
Abby still couldn’t move. Michael ran over, grabbed her hand and pulled her along. It felt as though he’d tugged open her bullet scar; it was all she could do not to scream. When she looked back, two policemen had converged on the gunman and were pointing machine pistols at him. The man in the tracksuit was speaking quickly, looking around and waving his arms.
‘We need to get out of sight,’ said Michael. ‘As soon as the police start interviewing witnesses, they’ll know pretty quick they want to speak to us.’
‘What about Gruber?’
Michael shook his head. ‘No chance.’ He held up the plastic wallet he’d taken off the corpse. A neat hole the size of a five-pence piece had been punched clean through.
They hurried out of the park and crossed the main road. A tram rumbled past, briefly blocking them from sight.
‘Where to now?’ Abby asked.
‘Who do we know in Belgrade?’
Studentski Trg was busier than when they’d been there that morning. Classes had just finished; the students gathered in knots in the square, wondering what was happening at the citadel. They were close enough that they’d heard the shots and sirens. Fortunately, no one seemed to connect Michael and Abby with the chaos.
