Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Present day
Elli’s plane landed at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport at a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon. It taxied to a quiet corner of the airport reserved for important visitors and stopped.
A limousine was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. A Customs official was standing by the car. He quickly checked her passport, handed it back and bowed to her. She got into the car and it whisked her through the airport grounds and then through the city’s normally car-clogged and pollution-choked streets, along the river Neva.
She could see the Hermitage, the former Winter Palace of the Tsars, in the distance, gloriously reflected on the tame waters of the Neva. In the car she remembered the flower that had become a parchment and which had been burning a hole in her bag. She opened her bag and took it out. It felt warm and it was getting warmer. And it was emitting a strange noise.
It was as if it was some location device that contained a chip, which had homed in on its target and was leading Elli there. It was getting warmer as they approached the Hermitage. It was as if it was showing her the way, its intensity increasing at breakneck speed which was unlike the speed they were supposed to be travelling in this city, notorious for its overpopulation of cars and all matter of fragrant modes of transport.
Their route along the river was, strangely, car-free and eerily soulless. The main gates swung open as if by magic the moment the car drew up to them. Such scarily efficient and troublesome journey was unheard of in this city. This kind of special treatment could only have been organised under the auspices of the country’s highest echelons of government. The director of the Hermitage, one of the world’s greatest museums, was a powerful man.
The museum was busy. At reception she announced her name and started to say that she had an appointment with the director when a man who had been walking briskly towards her, having recognised her, interrupted her.
‘Mrs Symitzis, good afternoon. I am Ivan. The director has sent me to take you to him. Please, follow me.’
They came outside the director’s office and Ivan gently knocked on the door. A strong deep voice came out clearly from the other side of the door.
‘Come in.’
The office was not a modest affair, as it was not an ordinary place of work, but befitting the director of one of the world’s greatest museums, with his choice of rooms in the former Winter Palace of the Tsars. The room’s impact on the visitor was such that it reminded one of the study of a Tsar or a grand room for public occasions rather than a simple office, with its high ceiling and huge windows and elaborate decoration covering almost every surface. Expensive furniture, objets d’art and paintings littered but did not suffocate the space.
The director who had already been standing, looking out of the windows, turned and walked around his large desk towards Elli. He took her hand and kissed it and then seeing Elli proceeding to greet him in the traditional Russian way of three alternative kisses on the cheeks followed her lead.
‘My dear Mrs Symitzis. I am Alexei Sumarov.’ Elli noticed that he did not offer for the use of his first name, so she decided to preserve the respectful formality of her host and do the same. ‘It is an honour and a great pleasure to have you here. Aggelos has told me a lot about you. But of course he did not need to. Your reputation precedes you. I have read and heard so much about you that I feel very excited to finally make your acquaintance in person. Please, have a sit.’ He indicated a pair of armchairs beside the cold fireplace. ‘Could we offer you some coffee or tea or something else perhaps?’
Elli noticed that he had been drinking coffee and that there was a second cup in the tray on the table between the armchairs. She thought it polite to join him in a gesture of accepting his local hospitality. Also she did not want to waste time. She wanted to broach the subject that brought her there as soon as possible.
‘Coffee would be lovely, thank you.’
He poured the coffee and asked whether she took milk or sugar. She declined both. ‘Just black, thank you.’
Once they had settled, or rather sunk, into the supremely comfortable armchairs with their cups, the director jumped straight into the reason she was there. He knew she was a busy woman and understood the urgency of the matter at hand.
‘Now, as I said to Aggelos, we have located the relics in question and I can show them to you. I understand that you wish to use DNA samples from them for comparison. I must say that they both seem very well preserved with hairs and flesh still on the bone. It is not normal procedure to handle them in this way and there is a horrifying amount of bureaucracy to deal with for permission to carry out what you propose to do. However, as it is within my discretionary power, I will personally give dispensation for you to proceed immediately. In fact, I have signed the permission and it is there on my desk.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Aggelos is a very good friend of mine and from what he and the abbot, Spyros, told me about you, I consider you a friend and would extend my help in the same way that I would treat Aggelos. Apologies if I may sound presumptuous. It is not my intention to claim such familiarity with you as I do not wish to in any way cause offence.’
‘My dear Mr Sumarov. On the contrary, I am honoured by your warm welcome and for seeing me at such short notice. I know that you are also a very busy man. As Aggelos must have mentioned to you, I am also interested in a certain book containing inventories and information on the construction of a huge project the location of which I am not aware. Have you located such a book?’
‘I have. And it actually contains plans, as well, and a lot of other details about that project. I have the relics and the book ready for you to take away.’
‘But how?’
‘I have signed them off as part of a temporary special exhibition of Byzantine artefacts in Limassol, Cyprus.’
Elli smiled. She decided that she liked this man already. She would not have hesitated to offer him a position in her organisation, if she knew that there was even a remote chance he might have accepted. ‘Mr Sumarov, you have gone beyond my expectations. This will make my work a lot easier and the result I seek quicker to obtain.’
‘I do not want to keep you any longer than is necessary. Please, come with me.’
Alexei Sumarov led Elli to a room a few metres away from his own. The curtains were drawn and the light was dim. Elli suspected that was so as to protect the items from direct light. The room was empty except for a table against one wall, far from the windows, with some items resting on it that seemed to be covered with velvet cloths. She assumed those would be the items she came here for.
The director went and stood by the table and she followed. She could feel the parchment becoming very warm inside her bag. The director noticed her bag glowing, which was made all the more pronounced in the dimness of the room.
‘Mrs Symitzis. Forgive me, but your bag seems to be glowing in a very peculiar way’ He thought there might have been something dangerous about to catch fire and explode but did not voice his imagination.
Elli looked at her bag and was stunned. She opened it and saw the parchment inside glowing. She took it out. The light emitted by the parchment was like holding a flame in her hand. It lit their faces in the same shadowy glow as would a fire in a dark place. It was awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time. They were both briefly lost for words.
Elli recovered first. ‘I cannot explain it, but it seems that something in this room is causing this item quite some excitement.’
She thought arousal was a more apt word, but she could not say it in such polite and formal company, such surrounds not appropriate to such honesty, not being devoid of the taboos of carrying one’s self with decorum. She unfurled the parchment and recognised the same Pallanian characters she had seen so many times lately. She traced her fingers on the page and felt the story.
It told of the imprisonment of an Emperor, his escape and death, his body carried to Cappadocia on a gruelling march being chased by Ruinands. It told of the arrival in Cappadocia, of the construction of a small chapel to take the sarcophagus and the body, of the entombment of the body with proper honours as befitting an Emperor, of the sealing of the tomb, of an attack by Ruinands, of the killing of the bearers of the body except one who survived.
It told of the Ruinands attempting to open the tomb and a horrifying event killing them all, an event attuned to an asteroid hitting the earth and causing total extinction. It told of Iraklios hearing of the opening of the said tomb a few months earlier and being surprised at the survival of the members of the archaeological expedition, surprise that the latest opening of the tomb was a non-event on the Richter scale stakes, in view of the event that killed the Ruinands that tried to open the tomb around five hundred years earlier.
That told Iraklios that the body of the Emperor could not have been in that tomb in Cappadocia, but had been moved. Iraklios asked in the parchment for forgiveness for not telling Elli about the secret before, but she would understand as he had vowed to protect the secret and not divulge it to anyone, not even to Elli or his own family.
However, he confirmed that he did not know of the location of the real tomb. That was too explosive, too dangerous a secret to be passed on. That was the end of the story on the parchment and the overwhelming torrent of words. It was almost a bit too much for Elli to take it all in, in one bite.
The director had been watching her fascinated and wondering what she was doing, what she was seeing, but he respected her silence and did not break it as she seemed to be in extreme concentration, almost as if in a trance.
He smiled inwardly at the thought of the spectacle of such an extraordinary and formidable woman as Elli Symitzis, one of the most powerful women in the world, looking like someone high on illicit hard drugs. He kept his observation and thoughts to himself.
Elli looked up and caught the eye of the director watching her with interest. She did not think it impolite and therefore said nothing. She uncovered the items on the table. At that exact moment the room looked as if it had expanded to ten times its normal size. It suddenly acquired the look of a strange wintry snowy stage and the temperature dropped considerably.
Both Elli and the director shivered involuntarily. Then it began snowing. It was as if they were in a different dimension, as if they were watching the events unfold behind a mirrored glass or through the eyes of ghosts. Elli turned to the director.
‘They didn’t used to call it Winter Palace for nothing. This is magical.’
‘I agree. But I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they gave it its name. Mrs Symitzis, do you know what is going on? Could it be connected with that parchment and the relics? There is no rational explanation for this strange event.’
‘I’m at a loss to explain it myself.’
As they stood mesmerised witnesses to the bizarre series of events, they noticed golden footprints on the floor that appeared to be made by someone moving away from them. There was a golden light enveloping them, and rushing with tremendous speed, following the footsteps with its wild tail flowing behind and grabbing Elli and the director like a lasso and pulling them forward.
The fiery tail then released them and, briefly assuming the figure of a human, beckoned them over, urging them to move quickly. They obeyed hypnotised. The room kept expanding and becoming the museum itself. They were moving through the throngs of people admiring the magnificent artefacts, which they had no time to even catch a glimpse of. The people did not give them a second glance, as if they could not see them, as if nothing strange was happening, as if only Elli and the director could see that light.
Suddenly they were climbing up the grand staircase, their faces reflected on the huge mirrors and smiling back at them like loyal long-lost friends. The footsteps and the light stopped and disappeared outside the room that used to be the Tsar’s private drawing room, now closed to the public.
It was then that the room they were in, before their weird experience and whirlwind grand tour began, stopped expanding and retracted to its initial incarnation. Except for one thing. The table was no longer there, but there was a door in its place cut into the wall.
The director was shaking his head in disbelief. He could not take much more of this kind of excitement at his age. He craved his usual routine, his boring days. A deathly silence descended.
Elli tried the handle of the newly-appeared door, but it would not budge.
‘Mr Sumarov, is there another way into the Tsar’s drawing room?’
It took Alexei Sumarov a few seconds to respond. He heard Elli’s voice as if coming from far away, through a head swimming in a haze, drowning in a stunned state.
He managed to clear the fog in his mind and emerge to the surface of reality, eventually, with a twenty-second delay, which Elli considered breaking, but thought better of it and gave the director the opportunity to recover from what would have been a much bigger shock than for her. In her line of business she was used to strange events such as these.
The director appeared to be his normal self again, apart from a face with a chalky-white pallor, when he eventually replied. ‘There should be a small door to the side leading into the Tsar’s bedroom that should now be locked.’ As soon as he said it the door to the Tsar’s bedroom appeared and they went in. Once inside the Tsar’s bedroom it did not take them long to find the small door leading to the Tsar’s drawing room. It was indeed locked and the director did not have a key.
But when Elli gently tried the handle, not only did the door open, but it came off as if Elli had used great force to wrench it off its hinges. They entered the drawing room and stood there frozen to the spot.
In front of them floated what looked like a transparent presence, a ghost, but too close to reality to be a ghost. At this point it was as if time had stopped.
Elli stared at this apparition that looked so flesh and bone real. Its face contorted as if in anguish, then as if a wave of anger was rising and it was struggling to control it, she saw it becoming livid, its eyes spitting fire.
Then its face began to change colours at the rate of two a second, its features drawn and redrawn, rearranged into a multitude of expressions of mirth, pity, anger, its brows furrowing and then frowning at the presence of the two people before it. For a few seconds it felt like a face-off between them, but with the first signs of exasperation, Elli started to reflect those emotions of the figure opposite her.
But then as suddenly as it appeared the spectacle ceased and the figure’s inscrutability returned and remained intact and Elli’s face responded in the same way. The figure started to speak.
‘You have won this round. You have “out-expressioned” me. Come this way. Your companion’s memory has been erased. He will not remember anything that his eyes have witnessed. His imagination is another matter. It deceives and inspires. The footprint of its memory cannot be erased. But he can do no harm. At the most he could write a book about it and wonder where those ideas came from.’
The figure led Elli to an antechamber and the door was firmly closed shut behind her.
‘But first, you have a gift for me, don’t you?’
Elli looked surprised. The figure indicated the parchment. She shook it in the air between them.
‘This?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does this have to do with what we are here for?’
‘Firstly, please put the parchment on the stand in front of the glass plate over there next to those items.’
Elli turned and saw the plate. The relics and the book on the huge structure were positioned beside it. She walked to them and did as the figure asked.
For some time nothing happened and Elli started to think the figure was playing with them. She was about to say something and opened her mouth to that effect, but was silenced by a sound coming from the parchment which began to vibrate and then jumped into the air and unfolded layer after layer until the whole of the floor was cluttered with its constituent parts.
Elli’s eyes opened wide and stayed that way until the seemingly alive parchment had no more tricks to throw at her, its ability to give birth and multiply finally exhausted.
‘I had no idea it could be so long. What on earth is going on?’
The figure smiled and instantly became the likeness of the last Emperor and then the Sultan Mehmed II and kept switching between the two.
Elli was not impressed by the spectacle, but was becoming rather exasperated. ‘I’m overwhelmed by this exhibition of royalty paying their respects. There really is no need. You are remembered fondly. Now what’s going on? I presume this is not a courtesy visit.’
In the meantime, part of the parchment flew back onto the plate and started to burn through and become one with the glass which was also melting, revealing a gaping hole underneath, a hole that kept expanding into a passage. The ghost of the Sultan was speaking.
‘Elli, follow me.’
He took her hand and she was shocked that it felt solid and warm.
The moment they touched the mouth of the passage, they were sucked in and walked easily through it. The passage was expanding as they were walking along and was lighting up to show them the way. Behind them the passage was gradually collapsing in on itself.
They came onto a rock chamber. Elli shivered. The chill speared right through her bones. A light descended above her head and the chamber turned into the great hall of the Great Palace of Constantinople, the one built by Constantine the Great when he founded Constantinople in 330 A.D.
The hall was empty apart from a revolving sphere in the middle of the room. It was a representation of the globe, with blinking lights like those of an airstrip at various locations on it. Next to the revolving sphere stood two figures that had their names strapped across their midriff.
The names were floating, moving forward to meet Elli, then reversing course, as if under chase to return chastised to their owners, repeating the feat over and over again, as if intending to drill the identities of the two missionaries in Elli’s mind, until finally stopping, presumably when they judged that their mission had been accomplished.
But Elli didn’t need that performance to know who they were. She recognised them instantly from their likeness on icons she had seen, though most saints looked more or less identical, in simple attire and long hair and beards, doing one of a short list of things, like kneeling and praying and supplicating and offering a hand or some other gift, looking enthralled at an adult or baby Jesus Christ, but mostly standing or sitting holding the Bible or a cross, or writing or doing nothing at all, looking wise and ravaged by time, and staring out ahead, piercing you with their gaze, as if posing for a professional photographer and at the same time trying to appear natural and unscripted and oblivious to the one who captures them for posterity or to their future captive audience. They were Methodios and Kyrillos or Cyril, the Byzantine missionaries that brought Christianity to the Russians.
Elli went closer. The sphere split horizontally in half, one half suspended above the other. In the space between the two halves was a halo and within it there were two icons in a perpetual motion of merging and splitting apart.
One icon showed the figures of Methodios and Kyrillos. She could not make out the other. She stared in disbelief when suddenly something made touch-down, fitted into place and clicked inside her head.
‘Are these what I think they are? They are…, aren’t they?’
The ghost’s appearance stopped at the likeness of the last Emperor. ‘Indeed, they are. The famed Likureian icons.’
It was then that the surface of the upper half of the sphere slid back in a semi-circle movement and the book of the story of the construction of the structure appeared floating inside. The book opened up its pages, releasing its secrets and offering them to Elli’s greedy and supplicating eyes for consumption as an appetising course to temporarily sate their demands. Images, inventories and plans flew by.
The structure was materialising in front of her very eyes. Once it had been completed she stared in awe at the three-dimensional hologram of the structure. Its complexity defied reality and her own imagination. Her brain was still struggling to process it when it disappeared as if in a puff of smoke.
‘Remember. Wake me up when the time is right and I’ll show you all that you can achieve.’ With those last words the ghost was gone.
With a feeling of dizziness, as if thrown around in a washing machine, Elli was back to the normal surroundings, colours and sounds of one of the world’s greatest museums and in the same room she was standing in with the director beside her and the items still covered on the table in front of them.
In reality time had not moved while she travelled through the strange vision. The director, dazed, was leaning his head from side to side as if to shake off something that bothered him and that he could not remember. Elli, whilst not saying anything about what she had just witnessed, broke the impasse.
‘OK, Mr Sumarov, let’s see what we have here.’ The director uncovered the items. Elli allowed him to give her a pair of gloves. She put them on and then began to turn the pages of the book. What she saw was what she remembered seeing in that vision-like experience she just had. She said nothing, but kept turning the pages.
‘I would like to study this book further, but I would not want to use any more of your time.’
The director, as if expecting her to say that, moved to the side of the table and opened up a specially made small chest that Elli had not noticed before. He carefully put the relics and the book inside and then led Elli back to his office where he buzzed for his personal assistant. He gave instructions for the chest to be brought to his office. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and two well-built security men came in with the chest.
‘You are to go with Mrs Symitzis here and only when that chest is in her plane, you are to come back.’
Although Elli trusted the director, she wanted to make sure that the chest now in the director’s office was the chest she saw a few minutes earlier and that it contained the items she was taking away with her. She phrased her request politely.
‘Mr Sumarov, may I please have a quick look at the contents?’
The director understood and did not take offence. He waived his hand at the men who set the chest down onto the floor and opened it. Elli went close, put on the special gloves, flicked through the book and checked the relics and was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to the director and nodded. He bowed to her and smiled in reply.
She was already holding her bag with the parchment inside. She thought it had burned, but that only seemed to have happened in the strange experience she had a few minutes earlier. She found the unharmed parchment in her bag when she opened it to check her phone for any message from Aristo or Katerina.
‘Mr Sumarov, I am indebted to you for your help. Anytime I can do something for you, please let me know.’ Elli handed him her private number.
‘Mrs Symitzis, the honour and pleasure is all mine.’
Alexei Sumarov stood and led her to the door and all the way to a back entrance leading to a small courtyard where Elli’s car had been instructed to wait for her. The two men placed the chest on the back seat and sat next to it. Elli sat in the front passenger seat. Alexei Sumarov waved her goodbye and went back inside. The car drove off.
Later analysis back in Cyprus on the body parts contained in the relics and comparisons with the blood of Elli’s family confirmed Iraklios’ story and the truth of the existence of the impostor who was on the throne of Constantinople in 1453 during the siege and the fall of the city to the Ottomans of Sultan Mehmed II.
The book retrieved, actually borrowed, from the Hermitage revealed that the structure was built in Limassol in Cyprus, but did not refer to the exact location, or provided a description or some indication, at least, of the topography. Elli, through the Valchern Corporation mining division, arranged for geological scans through satellite of the subterranean strata of the city.
Elli was still concerned that she hadn’t heard from Aristo and Katerina and sent people to Crete to find out what happened to them.