The Sacred Scroll (16 page)

‘Tell us what you know or we’ll twist off your balls with wire.’ The voice remained soft. To hear him, you might have thought he was seducing a woman. ‘And that will be just the beginning.’

‘You can kill me,’ replied Dandolo evenly. ‘But Venice would never forget such an insult. My city will reach out and tear the heart from your body.’

‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘It is not our custom to execute criminals such as you.’

Relief flooded him.
Not our custom to execute …
Then, he might be facing a year or two in prison, at the worst, while he waited to be exchanged. He was important enough!

The first man straightened. ‘This is a waste of time,’ he said decisively. ‘We will arrange a confession and have it signed for you. And we’ll send it back with you, hung around your neck. We know you’ve been spying on us. Your network here has been smashed.’

He had been betrayed, then. Who had he been foolish enough to trust? Who had he underestimated? He had answered his questions within seconds. Apart from his own men, there was only one man in the Great City who could have found out about his secret mission.

Contarini. A fellow countryman but not a Venetian; a man who had lived away from home for so long that by now he was more Greek than Italian.

Dandolo cursed himself for his confidence in the man. Had he not learned by now that you can never know what is in the heart even of your dearest friend? Henceforth he would trust in only one thing.

But there was still room for manoeuvre: ‘You’ll send me back?’

The man spread his hands. ‘Of course.’ He paused. ‘But we will also put you in a dungeon from which you will never escape.’

Then Dandolo understood. He remembered what the standard punishment for treachery was in the Greek empire. Tears of panic and rage stood in his eyes.

They came for him in the middle of the morning of the next day. They had bathed and clothed him, and as soon as he could he had placed the tablet back in its hiding place. They had offered him meat and fruit, and wine, but he touched nothing but water, and little of that. He had not slept, wanting to keep his eyes open for as long as he could.

‘Wash him and dress him,’ he heard the quiet voice of the man with the gloves say. ‘And prepare him.’ Dandolo smelt the man’s musky perfume as he leaned close and whispered. ‘We will let you keep your talisman. You will need it.’

The rough clay tablet was placed gently in his right hand. He closed his fingers tightly round it. Nothing mattered more, he told himself, than that he had it back again. If it was with him, nothing they could do, beyond killing him, could stop him.

He drank in everything he could see, no matter how unimportant, from the plain beaker which held his drink to the patterns the light made on the irregular stonework of the walls.

But then they put a black hood over his head. He was led from the cell and bundled into a cart of some kind, seated, then trundled through streets filled with jeering crowds.

They went a long way. When they stopped and he was pulled out of the vehicle, he heard the lapping of the sea, and felt the sun on his hands. It was a hot day, and he sweated under his robes, though he felt calm, almost dead, within himself.

He was made to mount some stone steps. At the top of them a soldier removed the hood, and he looked around him. At first the light dazzled him. The sun was almost at its zenith, and burned white in a hard blue sky. Not a cloud tempered it.

He stood on a broad platform, which must have been placed high on one of the fortified southern towers punctuating the walls which ran along the coast between the city and the Sea of Marmara. The platform was made of white marble, the stones so exactly placed together that they seemed to form one unbroken surface. At the far end was a long raised dais, on which a number of Greeks in official robes were seated. Dandolo squinted to see who they were. At the centre sat the Grand Vizier; the emperor was not present. Near the Vizier Dandolo picked out the figure of Tonso Contarini. For a moment their eyes met. Contarini lowered his.

The two flanking sides of the square were crowded with onlookers, for this was a public spectacle. Dandolo scanned the faces there, and his heart gave a leap of hope when among them he saw Leporo. The monk had exchanged his black habit for a modest Greek tunic. Leporo and he exchanged a brief look. The monk discreetly sketched the Sign of the Cross in the air.

At the centre of the platform stood a table, big enough to take the body of a man laid prone. Dandolo saw that it
was fitted with leather, buckled restraints to go round the ankles, thighs, arms, wrists, torso and neck. A kind of leather pillow, narrow, with raised sides, was ready to take the head and hold it firmly. Above it was fixed an apparatus of some kind – a tripod with an adjustable arm at its top, in turn equipped with a slot into which something must fit.

Dandolo steadied himself as he felt his legs weaken. Two soldiers supported him as they led him to the table where another man awaited him, flanked by two assistants. The three were clad in black
tschalvar
, but their upper bodies were bare. Each wore a leather cap and mask.

It seemed to be happening to someone else. Dandolo’s spirit hovered over his body as he was handed over to the assistants by the soldiers. They were burly men. One held him down as the other arranged and tightened the straps around him. He allowed them to do this without a struggle, and when they were finished he found he could not move. The sweat ran over his body under his robes.

They fitted pegs to his eyelids to hold the eyes open. His hands clawed the air.

Now the assistants drew back and the third man stood over him. Gimlet eyes, eyes of steel, looked into his. The man disappeared from Dandolo’s view then reappeared holding a magnifying glass in a bronze frame, which he fitted to the slot in the arm above the tripod.

It was a burning-glass. Dandolo watched as the man adjusted it so that it aligned with the sun. His eyelids strained to shut against the pegs which held them. His body writhed against the fetters.

A concentrated beam of sunlight bore through the lens and briefly scorched his face as the man moved the glass across it, towards his eyes. The man covered the glass with a black cloth until he had positioned it correctly.

The right eye first.

Dandolo flinched as he watched the man’s steady hand guide his instrument. Pain was near which would be like no pain in the world had ever been before. The white sun screamed into his eye as the imperial executioner burned it out. Dandolo could feel it bubble and burst, and the agony was like a boiling iron spike thrust hard through his head. His forehead poured sweat and he could feel another, more viscous, liquid running down his cheek towards his mouth. He did not know whether he was screaming or not.

The glass moved slowly across the bridge of his nose towards his left eye. The eyelids fought against their restraints, the muscles that controlled them instinctively urged to protect.

And now, a miracle! His surviving eye saw the executioner glance around for a moment. No one else was near. And the man reached up, and tilted the lens slightly so that the sharp beam was diffused. When he set to his work again, the beam that bore through his pupil into his retina hurt him indeed, but it
did not sear out the eye
.

Now he heard himself scream. Now he felt his body arch and stretch vainly against the leather straps. And his left eye saw, after a long minute, huge amoebic shapes of purple and blue and gold float up against it, bumping into one another as they crowded into a narrow space.

The executioner stood back, businesslike, and unscrewed the lens from its slot. The assistants came forward and undid the straps before roughly bandaging the wrecked eyes, then hauled the sobbing Venetian to his feet as he dribbled and spewed down the front of his apparel.

Dandolo closed his eyes, squeezing them shut until multicoloured stars appeared on the insides of the lids, as he was thrust forward, down the steps, and on to the cart again. No hood was necessary now. Sightless, he was taken north through the city, across the Horn to Galata, and deposited at the quay where his ships were moored. He heard troops coming to attention, and the rattle and clatter of their weapons as they did so.

Then a voice. A clipped, official voice in the darkness of his world. The first voice he was to hear that belonged to a face he imagined he would never see.

‘You have been escorted to your ships. You will sail on the first tide to Venice. Reasons for our sentence and its execution will be despatched with you. Be this a warning to your city never again to spy on us.’

He was left alone. He heard people receding and, afterwards, silence except for lapping water and the screaming of gulls. Everything in his head throbbed. He could not bring himself to open his eyes. He could not move. He dared not. He felt himself swaying. But after an eternity there was an arm on his, guiding, and the familiar smell of a man he knew, and a voice he knew too.

‘Lean on me,’ said Leporo. ‘The gangway is close by. We have an apothecary. Once on the ship we will attend to your eyes.’ Leporo placed his head close to Dandolo’s.
Dandolo could feel the man’s lips touch his ear as he whispered: ‘I bribed the executioner. We will bathe your left eye and anoint it. I could not persuade him to spare them both – the job had to be seen to be done properly. But with God’s grace, you may be able to see again – not perfectly, but in part. With God’s grace. In time.’

Ah, thought Dandolo. Time …

Then an urgent thought struck him, and his right hand delved into his sleeve. He sighed, despite his pain, luxuriously.

It was still there.

Istanbul, the Present

They were looking at the last photograph in the batch Marlow had ordered Lopez to extract. This one had not been taken at the site of the tomb but in the laboratory which Adkins had been using at the University of Istanbul.

It was a picture of a key. Not a very large key, though it was of great antiquity.

It was 7cm long, with a diamond-shaped bow and complex teeth; and on its shank an inscription was incised. The key, which looked as if it were made of iron, the metal pitted with age but not rusted, had been photographed from both sides, lying on a matt white surface. The inscription was carried over from one side of the shank to the other.

But the photograph was poor and the writing barely legible.

‘This seems to have been the one artefact removed from the tomb,’ said Haki.

‘Where is it now?’ asked Marlow.

‘We don’t know,’ Haki replied. ‘It must have been taken with the other material that disappeared along with our friends.’

‘Can you make anything of the inscription?’ asked Graves.

‘Major Haki, have you a magnifying glass?’ Marlow said.

After rummaging in his desk, Haki came up with a small plastic one. ‘This is it,’ he said apologetically.

‘Thanks.’

Marlow pored over the photographs for a long time. At last he straightened. ‘It’s not writing, it’s numerals,’ he announced. ‘And if I’m right, it’s in Aramaic.’ He handed the photo to Graves. ‘They invented a numeric code, and this may be an example of it, but we need a better picture.’

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ said Graves. ‘This key, by the look of it, by its design, must date from …’ Her voice trailed off in puzzlement.

‘Yes?’ Marlow prompted.

‘Early medieval. Eleventh century, maybe a little later.’ She looked thoughtful then continued, ‘Aramaic died out as a living language and was replaced by Arabic in the seventh century – three hundred years before this key was made.’

‘What the inscription says may solve that.’

‘As soon as we’re back in New York.’

They were interrupted by a knock on the door.

‘Ah,’ said Detective-Major Haki. ‘At last!’

One of the dark-suited aides came in quickly. He was carrying a plastic box. Haki took it and placed it on the table. ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ he said. ‘The one artefact – if you can call it that – which our people recovered from the tomb itself after Adkins and his friends were abducted. But we had to verify it before passing it on to you.’

Haki opened the box and withdrew something soft, wrapped in tissue paper. This he pulled delicately aside to
reveal, further wrapped in sealed transparent cellophane, a pair of dirty white cotton gloves.

‘We found them under the plinth on which Dandolo’s coffin rests. Look.’ Without removing the cellophane, he turned them over.

‘I needed to know if they had been left behind by your scientists,’ Haki continued. ‘But they looked too old for that. I’m amazed that Dr Adkins and his friends – or anyone else – missed the gloves. But we had more time, and we were looking not for ancient artefacts, all of which were clearly in view in the tomb, but for modern clues – so we delved a little bit deeper.’

‘Yesterday, you said that Adkins and the others were the first to discover the tomb,’ interrupted Marlow.

‘I said that that was how things
appeared
.’ Haki spread his hands. ‘I am no archaeologist. I thought I had better have our experts date them. Now, I hope, we shall see the result of their labours.’

He took out a manila envelope from the box and opened it, taking out a single sheet of A4 paper. He read it quickly.

‘It seems that someone did get there before your people,’ he announced. ‘About a hundred years before.’

Later that day, having taken their leave of Detective-Major Haki, and back at their hotel – a new one, closer to Atatürk International Airport – Marlow and Graves took stock. As he pondered, Marlow found himself looking at Graves’s hand on the table before him. She was wearing her heavy emerald ring, but his eye was attracted to the tiny faded heart tattoo on her little finger. It looked as if someone had tried to erase it, and certainly she should not have had any such easy identifier on her body. He wondered what the story behind it was. Well, it was her story, and broken hearts were not uncommon.