The police officer bowed and stood back as he pushed the door open. One smell of what lay beyond, and the breath caught in my throat. It was like a butcher’s market at the end of a hot day. I’d been in the City Prefecture building any number of times. But it was never on police business, and never in the cellars, which were sealed from the main building by doors at each end of the narrow, winding stairs that led down from a room just off one of the side entrances.
I must have known this place existed. I’d been twice in the dungeons under the building in Constantinople that had served much the same purpose before the revolution. But these are places normally considered only when brought undeniably into mind.
As if he’d been going there every day for a lifetime, Priscus went up to the crabbed, pasty-faced official who sat in the first room of the City Prison. An underground room, about fifteen feet by fifteen, it would have been normal enough but for the smell. It was a place of filing racks and keys on numbered hooks. We’d entered through the door that led directly from the bottom of the stairs. Immediately opposite this, and to the right of the reception desk, another door led to what I could easily guess lay beyond.
‘I take it you have the investigation room prepared,’ Priscus said easily, dropping his message on to the desk.
The official looked closely at the unrolled sheet and nodded. He got up and bowed to Priscus and to me, and motioned us towards the other door.
Some of the more imaginative – or perverted – divines have written about Hell as a series of levels, beginning with the moderately unpleasant and finishing with the indescribably awful. I suppose the long, dimly lit corridor that ran from that door under the whole length of the Prefecture would rank about halfway down the scale of horror. Imagine cells five feet square and barely that high, each one crammed with half a dozen naked wretches beside whom the lowest trash of the mob in the streets above was clean and well fed. Imagine the smell of putrid excrements and sores burst open and left to fester. Imagine those desperate faces pressed against the bars of their cell doors. Imagine the whispered, hopeless cries for justice or simply for mercy, and you have the smallest gears of the machinery with which such order as Alexandria normally enjoyed was maintained.
If Priscus had seemed to have grown physically larger from the joy to setting things to right in the dockyard, he now almost filled the passageway separating those two lines of dehumanised horror. I heard a continual whispering of prayers behind me from Martin. For myself, if I could have squeezed my eyes shut and stopped up my ears and nose, I’d have done so. I wanted to be through this as quickly as possible. I wanted to get back to the Palace and soak myself in a bath until the afternoon, and stupefy myself with opium and with wine. If no fragmentary recollection of this ever came back to haunt my dreams, I told myself, I’d die content. But Priscus walked ahead of me exactly as if he’d been inspecting some guard of honour. He stopped once – I could scarce believe it – and actually pushed his arm through one of those grilles to stroke the bowed head of one of the prisoners.
‘Like Christ Himself,’ he whispered exultantly, ‘we must bear whatever cross Our Heavenly Father makes for us. Let His Will be done!’
‘Let His Will be done,’ came the response in cracked unison from the few voices that still could be understood at all.
We stood at last in a room deeper beneath the Prefecture. If low enough for the ceiling to brush my topmost hair, it was otherwise too large for the one lamp set into a recess by the door to do more than throw vague shadows beyond its pool of light. I could hear the gurgling rush of the flood waters through the stone grilles in the floor. With the waters came a chill breeze that made the smell almost bearable by comparison with what had been so far.
‘Do you know why I’ve had you separated from your companions and brought here?’ Priscus opened in conversational tone. He sat himself carefully on a small table that shifted under his weight, and looked at the three tightly bound figures who lay on the floor about a yard from his crossed feet. They could move their heads for looking around. Otherwise, they could do no more than shuffle like serpents on that cold and damp and sick-makingly dirty floor.
They were young men, I could see as my eyes adjusted to the still deeper gloom of this place – very young men. They certainly weren’t my age. If any of them had seen seventeen, I’d have been surprised. Obviously natives, they had the good build and clean look of the higher classes in any nation. Except for the different cut of their clothes, they might have been Greek. One of them looked away as Priscus leaned forward. His mouth moved wordlessly as if revealing some chant or prayer going again and again through his mind.
‘Your companions are low creatures,’ Priscus said again. ‘Their usefulness to me was limited. Before I have my afternoon shit, some of them will be dead. The others will be praying for death. This they might receive today. Or it might be tomorrow, depending on the mood of the assistants who have been set to work on them.’
Priscus stopped and recrossed his legs. He looked at his fingernails. He spoke with the calm authority of a man giving instructions to his secretary. Unblinking, the young men stared back. I wanted to take Martin by the hand and run away as quickly as our legs would carry us. I’d recognised some of the dim shapes outside the pool of light. All that kept me there was the knowledge of what I’d have to pass through before regaining the light of day – and, I suppose, the knowledge that Priscus would never let me forget what, if I remained, I might yet contrive to blot out.
‘You, however, are persons of far greater quality,’ he went on, his voice still bordering on the friendly. ‘You were not intended to fall into my hands. But you have, and you must accept that the Divine Providence has frowned on the plot conceived against the Empire by your elders – a plot of which I am assured you have far better knowledge than your companions.
‘Let me tell you now that you can make this easy for us all. Do you see that fat man over there by the door?’
I heard Martin drop something from his shaking hands.
‘If you give what I think are truthful answers to my questions, he will write them down. You will then be transferred to a more salubrious confinement than this until your evidence has been considered in court. You will then be released unhurt. If you incriminate any persons under whose will you would normally have inherited, your rights will be respected despite any confiscations that are made.
‘You have my word in this. You may not know me, but I am a person with full authority to make this promise. And I am sure you know the Senator Alaric. You will surely know that he is always good for his word.’ He broke off and looked at me.
I looked down at the young men. I was sure I’d seen one of them in a shop somewhere. It was hard to tell in these surroundings. I swallowed and tried to get some moisture into my throat.
‘Do as he says,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. ‘Answer his questions and I promise you your lives. I promise this in the name of the Emperor.’
Silence. One of the young men looked up at me. His dark eyes glittered scared in the lamplight. I stared back and pleaded in silence for him not to be so stupid. Priscus had involved me in his promise. That meant I could enforce it on him, should he feel inclined to break it. The young man looked away. The other two didn’t so much as move their heads in my direction.
Priscus stood up and stretched his arms. He stood over the young man who’d looked at me. His voice echoed oddly in that low but extended room as he spoke slowly and with exaggerated clarity.
‘I will give you one final chance before we start some Greek lessons of my own. I must warn you, though, I am running out of time even before I run out of patience.’ He went to the door and tapped three times on the inside. He stood back as it opened. It was like watching slaves bring in the dining things for a banquet. There were lamps. There was a brazier, well heaped with glowing charcoals. There was even one of those little travelling desks that officials would carry about on their errands. Its inner compartment was stocked with waxed tablets and pens. Priscus pointed to it and looked at Martin.
The light and heat excepted, nothing more was needed. I’d been right about the dim shapes. When you’ve seen one set of torture instruments, you don’t fail to recognise more of the same. There were the spiked cabinets, the tables with their leather restraints and man-shaped depressions, the kettles for heating oil or water, or containing the corrosive fluids. On the walls were the usual racks of knives and pincers and hooked gloves.
I hardly need mention the rack. None of these places would be complete without one. Here, it had what amounted to pride of place. In all, it was about ten feet long, a fixed bar at one end with leather thongs attached, an elaborately geared roller at the other, also with leather thongs attached. I looked away from the instruments. I found myself looking instead at the two craftsmen of pain who’d stayed when the lamp bearers had withdrawn. They might have been brothers. Both were short creatures with heavily muscled arms and shaven heads, both obscenely fat, both with faces that flitted from moment to moment between the ecstatic and the totally blank. But if they had been brothers, I knew well enough they’d have had to be part of a family that had its members in every city of the Empire. Whatever your appearance when you take on that job, that is how in no time at all you end up looking. Naked apart from their stained loincloths, they stood bowed and respectful before Priscus.
‘It is my custom,’ he opened again – still calm, still bordering on the friendly – ‘to give those whom I must question a tour of these places. An explanation of how these various instruments work can have a most loosening effect on the tongue. You will appreciate, however, that time grows ever shorter. I will therefore ask you once more and once only – do as I ask of you.’
‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ From what may have been the oldest of the three, the familiar slogan rang out in Egyptian. ‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ he said again, now louder. The other two joined in, defiant in unity. They varied this with something I hadn’t heard before, but contained the Egyptian word for Greeks.
Priscus stood looking down at them, waiting for them to run out of energy or defiance. He waited in the silence that followed. The silence continued. He shrugged. He turned to the torturers.
‘We’ll start with the rack,’ he said quietly.
The torturers bowed.
‘I want’ – his finger moved uncertainly over the three – ‘that one.’ His finger stopped and pointed firmly at the one who’d been looking up at me.