The Terror of Constantinople a-2 Page 7

  No sun reached the paving stones of that narrow street. Aside from the thin slit of blue sky overhead, the only splash of colour came from a caged bird just outside the door. It sang and sang, and no one looked on.

  Nothing unusual about this, I should say. Wise bankers don’t go for the sort of frontage that allows easy access. Baruch in Rome always did his business from the basement cells of a converted prison.

  The difference between this and its smaller equivalent in Rome was the seemingly recent absence of any Jewish symbolism. The Star of David had been hacked from above the entrance and the gap partly filled with an enamelled icon of the Risen Christ. Inside, the walls were covered with painted icons – most of them jewelled and gilded.

  ‘Welcome, O Welcome, dear Brother in Christ!’ said Baruch of Constantinople. He shuffled into view, a much larger and heavier version of his brother in Rome. Indeed, this Baruch had the same shape as my building contractor. Also unlike his brother, he had a gold cross embroidered on his shabby robe and a jewelled icon of the Virgin hung round his neck so large it had to be seen to be believed. He spoke loudly in Latin of the saints who must surely have watched over my journey to Constantinople. To this he added even louder praise of the divine care of the Emperor in keeping the sea routes clear. Then he fell to a more reassuringly Jewish inspection of the draft I’d brought with me.

  ‘That’s a pretty sum you’re expecting me to honour, isn’t it, my dear Brother in Christ?’ he rasped in Greek, hurriedly crossing himself at the mention of Our Saviour’s name. ‘A pretty sum indeed. What will you be doing with all this gold – buying a palace?’ Without moving his nose from the parchment sheet, he looked up at me from the corners of his eyes.

  ‘I must ask this, you know,’ he explained, seeing my look of slight shock. ‘There is a new ordinance limiting cash withdrawals without good reason. I can give you some gold, but the rest in promissory notes. You’ll have no trouble passing these, I can assure you. The House of Baruch is the strongest in the city.’

  ‘All the stronger now for your conversion?’ I hazarded. He gave me a queer look, then darted a glance at one of his clerks, who’d been paying us much attention from the moment I came in.

  ‘My poor brother in Rome,’ he sighed. ‘He may be close in the confidence of His Holiness, but he lacks the stern and loving command of the Great Augustus to abandon the error of our ancestors for the Word of Christ – as clarified, of course, at Nicaea and at Chalcedon and by all lesser Councils of Holy Mother Church.

  ‘You must come to dinner on the next main feast day,’ he said loudly, reaching under a blue scarf to scratch his head. ‘There will be pork with every dish, you know, or shellfish. This is a good Christian house, be assured. We serve no kocha muck here.’

  I thanked him. Trying to turn the conversation, I complimented him on the icon.

  ‘Picked up at an auction of confiscated property,’ he said proudly at the recollection. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see the bloody tears that run down her cheeks are picked out in rubies – genuine rubies too, I’ll have you know, not glass. I paid a tenth of its true value. I…’ He trailed off. Then, very loud: ‘Of course, I’d have paid ten times more than its true value if I could thereby have shown my loyalty to the Lord Augustus who watches over all of us.’

  ‘I am a true son of the Church,’ he bellowed after me as we left. ‘I pray twice a day at the Church of All the Saints!’

  Turning out of the little street, I noticed another Jewish bank – this one closed, with the Imperial Seal on its door and a notice of auction above.

  There followed the best spending spree I’d ever yet known.

  You can forget Rome for shopping. If you have no taste, the shops there are good enough. If you search and nag, you can usually get the basics of a civilised existence. If you want something really special, though, you have to order it from Ravenna, and hope it won’t get pilfered or spoiled on the way.

  In Constantinople, you can get absolutely everything. Most of the shops are just stalls set up outside houses in the side streets, the owners calling out and catching at you as you pass in the street. You ignore these. They are for the lower classes. Those in the main streets are large establishments, with many rooms, all gorgeously furnished, where the staff behave like the best household slaves. Some even have glazed windows, so you can stop and gloat over the riches within. Mostly, the shutters block off any view by night. But a couple of the very grandest shops, where the city guards can be trusted to patrol, keep the windows exposed all night long, with lamps to give a clear view within.

  Once you get used to the fact that the Greeks are the most shameless rip-off merchants, who’ll try selling you moulded for carved work and silver plate for the real thing, you can have a glorious time in those shops. And it isn’t just the shopping. The better shops are places of general resort. The upper floors have private dining rooms and even the occasional brothel. You can meet old friends there. You can make new ones.

  It was turning out fortunate that all our main baggage from Rome had never arrived. The clothes I had brought with me, it seemed, were rather frumpy for Constantinople. Trousers were not at all the thing in the city. They showed you up as a provincial or even a barbarian. Tunics there were the fashion. You could have shortish ones, with close-fitting stockings right up above the hemline if you had legs to show off. But no trousers.

  I passed an age at the most expensive tailor Martin could remember, inspecting bales of cotton and the finest silks to be had from the East. Rather pretty youths of about my own age sauntered around my chair, showing off the elegance that could be achieved for just a few of those Baruch notes. I must have assumed every conceivable pose while the assistants hurried round me pinning lengths of cloth into the most fashionable styles.

  ‘If you’ll pardon my liberty of comment,’ Martin told me over dinner in a decidedly fancy restaurant opposite the Legation, ‘you’ll soon be needing more of those notes.’

  The complete new wardrobe I’d forced on him now forgotten, he’d gone back to looking anxious. His idea of the evening had involved another takeaway in the Legation, and then making up a shopping list to send with our slaves to the Covered Market. I’d wanted something grander, so had chosen the restaurant on the basis of its evident expensiveness and the just as evident quality of the other diners I’d watched going in.

  My attention had been drawn to it by the two blazing torches set up each side of its main door. The shops had been closing one after another with the onset of the dusk that comes late to Constantin ople in summer, and I was feeling starved after walking what must have been five miles through the shops.

  ‘I suppose I shall need eventually to go back to Baruch,’ said I, dipping my bread into a glass bowl of some delicious yellow sauce. ‘But rest assured – more wine, if you please, and unwatered this time,’ I added to the owner of the restaurant, who’d come over to serve us with his own hands – ‘rest assured, there can be plenty more notes where those came from.’

  And there were. Cash, I’ll grant, has its uses. It’s good for small purchases. It’s good in quite large sums for bribing officials. In a crisis, nothing can beat it: that is, after all, what got me to Jarrow after that pig Constantine had ordered all my accounts frozen. But it also has its limitations. You don’t use it for big purchases. You certainly don’t carry large amounts when you travel.

  ‘Listen, Martin,’ I said, with another attempt at introducing him to the ways of finance. ‘The letter from Baruch in Rome creates a debt against him with his brother in Constantinople. This can be paid from Rome by a later shipment of gold. More likely, it can be offset by issuing a draft in Constantinople to someone who wants to buy goods – relics for illegal export, perhaps – in Rome. It may be bought by the Imperial authorities if they ever want to remit funds for Italian defence. Or it may be traded via third parties in Carthage or Alexandria.’

  ‘And if the Roman Baruch has no money?’ Martin asked with a glimmer of understa
nding.

  ‘The web of trust is broken,’ I replied, ‘and everyone’s in the shit. But that won’t happen. Those brothers know which way the wind is blowing before others feel the draught. Besides, I have letters of credit from the Papal Bank. I don’t want to use them, though, because of the discount.’

  That lost him again. But never mind. It’s enough that I wasn’t short of money, and wasn’t likely to be. In any event, if I wanted quick and ready service to get us out before Heraclius turned up to sound the political equivalent of the Last Trump, it wouldn’t do to go about looking like some semi-barbarian from the outer fringes of the Italian Exarchate.

  ‘Leave the money to me, Martin,’ I said, giving up on explanation. ‘That bag of clipped silver you had nicked off you in Corinth won’t be missed here.

  ‘Any further thoughts on the old eunuch?’ I asked. I’d dropped my voice, but was speaking in a Latin that it seemed unlikely that anyone else in the restaurant could understand.

  ‘He plainly knows everything about us, and took great pleasure in having us know that he knows.’

  Martin opened his mouth to answer, but no sound issued.

  10

  Instead, the whole restaurant fell suddenly quiet. It was as if a singer were about to begin a performance. There was that same feeling of hushed expectancy. The chattering and laughter of the diners had ceased. The serving slaves left off their darting around and clattering of dishes. All was suddenly fallen silent. All was still.

  I looked round to my left. Over by the door, their set faces pale in the glimmer of the lamps, three men dressed in the black I’d earlier seen at the Ministry stood looking at the diners. They were as still and silent as everyone else in the room.

  Then one of them stepped forward. Taller than the others, his wiry build partly compensated by the bulk of the armour under his cloak, he added to the impression of a performer about to begin. He looked from table to hushed, expectant table, dwelling on none. A smile on his thin lips, he seemed to bask in the terror his appearance had created. A slave was pushed forward to stand trembling beside him.

  ‘Well?’ the Tall Man asked in a voice of quiet but silky menace. ‘Where is he this time?’

  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.’