Terror of Constantinople (11 page)

    The slave pointed silently towards a table on the far side of the room from ours. A single diner sat there. I’d noticed him playing with some bread.

    His assistants two paces behind him, the Tall Man approached the indicated table. As they passed each table, I could sense a slight sagging of the tension. But it was only a very slight sagging. Everyone remained still and silent.

    The slave lightly touched the diner on his shoulder, and fell back. He squatted down on the floor, covering his face. His body shook with suppressed sobs. I could see dark bruises on his arms and his bare legs.

    ‘Justinus of Tyre,’ the Tall Man opened now, still quiet but in a peremptory tone, ‘do you know the reason why we stand before you?’

    The face of the diner turned grey in the lamplight. He was short and balding, in early middle age, the fingers of his upraised hands heavy with gold rings. His appearance cried merchant of the richer sort. He muttered a few words I couldn’t catch. Those at the next table looked down steadily at their wine.

    I noticed that all the other diners in the restaurant were also looking away. One man at a table near mine was breathing heavily despite himself. With shaking hands he fingered what looked like a pagan charm. The other diners hardly seemed to be breathing. Mine was the only head turned in that direction.

    Martin had drained his cup with a single gulp. He was looking carefully down at the table, his hands spread out before him. He kicked under the table at my foot, desperate to have me do likewise. I ignored him and continued watching the scene played out before me.

    ‘There are questions to be put to you –
in the usual place
,’ the Tall Man added with an ominous stress. ‘You will come quietly.’

    With a clatter of overturned cups, Justinus rose unsteadily to his feet. The vase of yellow flowers placed on his table went over, and, from a good fifteen feet away, I clearly heard the spattering of water on to the floor.

    ‘Please—’ he gasped in a deathly voice. His words were cut short with a heavy blow to the face from the Tall Man. Justinus fell back against a chair that broke under the shock. The two assistants reached down and pulled him to his feet. The neighbouring diners rose quickly and went over to stand with outspread arms and their faces pressed to the far wall. I could see one of them shaking as if in a mild epileptic fit.

    ‘You will remain silent,’ the Tall Man said in a soft voice. ‘You will speak only in the place where you are questioned, and when you are questioned.’

    As they moved away from the table, one of the serving slaves restrained himself from hurrying forward to pick up the broken vase from the floor. Instead, he remained squatting on his haunches with the others.

    With a sudden convulsion, Justinus broke free from the grasp of the men in black and looked desperately round for escape. The door was blocked by another of those men in black who stood just outside the room. He looked menacing, though seemed not to be armed. The only window was shuttered against the evening draught.

    A look of wild despair on his face, Justinus crashed heavily through the tables in my own direction. Crockery and knives clattered to the floor behind him.

    Knowing he was trapped, the arresting officials stood watching to see what he might do.

    I suppose, with my size and colouring, I stood out the most from the other diners. It didn’t help that I was the only one not looking carefully away or down at the table.

    Justinus made straight for me. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he cried in a deathly voice, clutching at my robe. ‘Tell them I can explain everything. Nothing is what it seems  ...’

    Before I could so much as open my mouth, the two assistants in black were with us. They pulled Justinus back from me. He fell to the floor, his hands clamped round my left calf. They pulled harder, but nothing could break his grip on me. I tried to shake him loose but with no success. Big as I was, I was nearly pulled to the floor with him. But for the attendant circumstances, there was something faintly comic about the scene.

    From his robe, the Tall Man pulled a heavy cosh. With two short and exact blows, face still without marked expression, he smashed hard on Justinus’s wrists. I heard the dull crunching of lead on bone and felt the grip relax.

    The Tall Man stood back to admire his work. He wiped a splash of blood off the cosh and balanced it in his right hand.

    As the assistants pulled Justinus away from me, he curled into a ball, now screaming with pain and fear. They still couldn’t get him to his feet. Each time they seemed about to get him up, he’d go limp on them, and his dead weight fell through their grip.

    The two assistants now set about him with their coshes. They hardly seemed to move as, with careful and practised blows, they smashed his body to pulp. Blood oozed though his clothing as flesh burst and bones cracked. The screams gave way to an animalistic whimpering, and then to rattling gasps as blow after blow continued to fall on the more delicate and exposed areas of his body.

    Trembling with excitement, the Tall Man directed his assistants to areas of the body that hadn’t yet come under the cosh. In that silent restaurant, I could hear every blow and every rasping breath. Blood splashed my sleeve. There was a rich, high smell of shit as the man’s bowels relaxed.

    The other diners continued looking away.

    Moving round to get a new position, one of the assistants knocked into me. My cup went over, spilling red wine into my lap.

    ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, disgust taking the place of alarm – ‘for God’s sake, is this really necessary?’

    I stood up and faced the Tall Man. My cup hit the floor, shattering on its hard surface. Lacking my bulk, his height was deceptive. I stared him straight in the face. His assistants fell back before me, obviously unsure how to respond to this kind of challenge.

    The Tall Man held his ground. His pale features again took on a thin smile. He stepped over the motionless body of Justinus. He put his face close to mine and I could smell some kind of spiced drug on his breath.

    ‘Do you presume to interfere in the arrest of a convicted traitor?’ His soft voice reverted to its silky, menacing tone.

    ‘My Lord,’ one of the assistants said. ‘My Lord’ – he bent to take up a letter that must have rolled out from that bloody robe.

    The Tall Man ripped at the seal and scanned the contents. His face contracted into what looked like the beginnings of a seizure, but he gripped the back of a chair and fought to recover himself.

    ‘You are aware of the treasons in this document?’ It was both a question and a statement. His voice still smooth by effort, his hand was shaking.

    ‘Of course not,’ I snapped, suddenly aware that I was splashed all over with blood. I was wearing the clothes I had brought from Rome. It would be days yet before the new ones were ready.

    ‘Please, Illustrious Sir,’ Martin broke in, scrabbling in his satchel for our documents, ‘please, but my colleague is a stranger to the City. He doesn’t understand City ways. We are under the protection of—’

    The Tall Man held up his arm for silence. ‘Not another word,’ he said with a grim pleasure. ‘You are the known associates of a convicted traitor. I have no doubt you will come quietly.’

    ‘Traitors?’ I blurted out, incredulous. ‘How about some charges?’ I asked, remembering my law.

    The smile expanded to reveal a row of stained teeth. The Tall Man waved at the other crouched, silent diners.

    ‘These are the accused. They wait the call of the Emperor’s Divine Justice. That offal on the floor’ – he glanced down at Justinus – ‘is the convicted one. And you are now his convicted associates.’

    He turned to one of his assistants.

    ‘Cuff them.’

    Then he turned to the slave who had denounced Justinus. He was still grovelling hopelessly on the floor. I could now see that the fingers on his left hand were broken and already swollen black.

    ‘Return to your master’s house,’ he said, his voice silkier than ever. ‘I’ll send for you again when I need you.’

    As we left, the restaurant had all the still silence of an hermetic monastery. I looked briefly back. No one moved. No one so much as breathed heavily. On the bright ceramic tiles of the floor, a dark smear showed where the body of Justinus had been dragged along behind us.

    The sky overhead was now black, and I felt a chill breeze on my face as we emerged from the restaurant. There was a small crowd in the street outside. Blank faces lit by the flickering of the torches, no one spoke. A few turned their backs to us as the Tall Man looked in their direction.

    We were pushed into a black windowless carriage. The possibly still living body of Justinus was thrown in beside us.

11

I’d nearly vomited at my first smell of the place: it was like an unwashed abattoir – all stale blood and rotted offal which almost overpowered the smell of damp.

    The creatures running this imitation of Hell kept up the resemblance to an abattoir. They wheeled silently about us in the stained leather aprons you normally see in a butcher’s market. As one whispered with the Tall Man, another darted a hand inside my robe. He squeezed hard on a nipple, all the time looking up at me with the bright, panting smile of a mad dog.

    ‘Tomorrow!’ he whispered triumphantly – ‘And tomorrow and tomorrow, and all for us!’

    I cut him short with a smart head-butt to the face. ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled. The others danced back out of my reach.

    I was in the Ministry where I’d earlier visited Theophanes. No – I was in the basement that ran far beneath the Ministry. Once unloaded from the carriage, we had been dragged in through a small side entrance, and then taken down worn steps that had twisted round and round and round on their course into a subterranean world of endless corridors lined every few yards with iron doors.

    At first, all down there had seemed quiet. As my ears began to adjust, though, I could hear a chorus of low, despairing moans. They came from behind the closed doors of the cells. They came from all directions. They came from as far as the ears could reach, and from further than the eyes could see in the dim glow of the lamps hung at every junction in that labyrinth of horror.

    As the one I’d butted lay grovelling on the floor, the Tall Man pushed his own face close to mine. ‘Tomorrow, indeed, my fine young barbarian,’ he crooned, ‘but not for these trash. You belong to me.’

    He stood back and took a deep breath to savour the endless despair of our surroundings before continuing in a tone of eager intensity: ‘I will show you how pain is very like pleasure. It too has its rituals and instruments. It too has its orgasms. It too can be prolonged by those who have studied the responses of the body.’

    ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled again, though I’d not felt inclined to try anything physical with this living image of Satan. He was on his home territory, and had seemed to grow taller and more substantial with every breath of that foul air.

    ‘We shall see how long your courage holds up under my personal ministrations,’ he said, turning to rap a few orders to his minions. ‘You will give me the answers to my questions, and much else before the end.’

    Still cuffed, we were pushed into separate cells spaced far apart. I don’t know how long I sat in darkness on that damp, stinking floor once the door had swung shut on me.

    Few definite sounds now reached me through those stone walls and the heavy door. But I felt aware of continual movement outside, and perhaps the occasional low moan.

    ‘I’m a guest of the Emperor,’ I shouted in the darkness. ‘I demand immediate release.’

    No answer. Instead, the sound of my voice within the invisible walls of that blackness chilled me more than the dank air. The wine fumes that had so far buoyed me up were now dispersing like a morning fog, and I was beginning to realise the full horror of my situation.

    Once I did hear voices. Though muffled by the close-fitting iron door, they’d come from just outside my cell.

    ‘So is this one Justinus?’ one had asked.

    ‘Nah!’ another had replied. ‘That’s the one back there. We’ll see what we can get out of him come the morning. I don’t think, though, there’s much left for us to do. He’s all smashed up now.’

    ‘Shame,’ had come the answer. ‘I suppose it is the right Justinus this time. I said the other one was telling us the truth.’