Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Cleomenes scowled impatiently. ‘I don’t know what else. This isn’t my case. We need to get out before the landlord realises I’m entertaining tourists. And I’ve got to get home.’

  Reluctantly, Sulien followed him. ‘Could I look at those papers, please? What is this?’ Despite his height he felt like an annoying child, pestering an adult for something held out of reach. But Cleomenes, sighing, let him take the pages. Sulien skimmed hastily through the sheets of print: there was a list, spreading over a sheet and a half, cataloguing the things that had been removed from the flat. After all, there had been some personal items.

  ‘What does this mean, here?’ he asked. ‘Does it mean pictures of his family? Can I see any of these things?’

  ‘For the gods’ sake, no,’ said Cleomenes.

  *

  In Salvius’ house, Drusilla Terentia was no more comfortable than in the prison. The umber building stood out of the centre of Rome, among the pines and plane trees on the wooded hill that rose above the Flaminian Way and the Milvian bridge. In the atrium, Drusilla uttered a little cry of stifled shock as something charged across the room and struck her. She took a flinching step back and looked down to find a breathless boy with dark, curly hair, wielding an elaborate toy gun that flashed and purred. He grinned at Drusilla with easy, bright-faced charm before rushing past, pursuing battle into the garden, sweeping a few subordinate boys along in his wake, ignoring the smilingly unconvincing rebukes of Salvius’ plump, girlish little wife. The boy’s bare legs were so bruised and scraped that he might have been the battered young slave of sadistic masters, if he had not been so carelessly luminous with confident health. He could have been nine or twelve; Drusilla had lost any eye she’d ever had for interpreting the foreign faces of children.

  Salvius, kindly and urbane, welcomed her in, led her courteously into the sitting room, which was squarely dark and masculine, except for the portraits of four girls, or young women, ranged on the table – Salvius’ daughters. Salvius put a cup of wine into Drusilla’s hand, and she held it, rigidly forgotten in the air, for long minutes, neither lifting it to her lips nor putting it down.

  ‘I do sympathise with you. It must be very hard to bear,’ he said, gently.

  Drusilla nodded at him in stiff, speechless agony, enduring being pitied. She had barely said a word since she had arrived. ‘Thank you,’ she managed at last, in a harsh whisper.

  Salvius braced himself a little, but tried to relax into a friendly, receptive posture. ‘So, what have you come to see me about?’ he asked, pleasantly. He was apprehensive. He hadn’t seen Drusilla before; she lived so privately as to fulfil the old Greek maxim that the best compliment a woman could be paid was never to be spoken of. And he’d felt it would have been cruel to refuse to meet her now, but he feared the poor woman would beg him for something impossible, or begin sobbing. He knew she’d had a hard life, what with Lucius Novius, and now this. Even in the public reports over the longvision, it had been made clear that the actual charge against Drusus, the attack on the girl, was only part of it. He remembered: the new head of the Praetorian Guard had made a statement:

  ‘It is our understanding and belief that Drusus Novius assaulted the young woman after she discovered a close connection between himself and the Emperor’s former wife, who of course died awaiting trial for involvement in the assassinations of Novius Faustus Leo and Clodia Aurelia, and the attempts on our present Caesar’s life three years ago.’

  And Salvius had seen more than that; there was a file that had been circulated among the upper levels of power, to senators, governors and generals – anyone, he understood, whose doubt might cause a problem. It detailed more closely what had happened, how Drusus had trapped Una on the roof. Before Drusilla Terentia arrived he had swiftly thrust it into a drawer of the low table that now stood between them, so that she should not be confronted with the dark, roughly printed images of her son’s accuser. He had been studying Una’s face, tilted towards the camera to show off her bruised eye, while one hand lifted her hair away from the marks around her throat. Her mouth was compressed, so that the lips barely showed, the dark eyes wide and glaring. One could just see how the loose short sleeve of her dress was torn at the shoulder. Salvius had been more than shocked. The news had destroyed some hope he’d never quite acknowledged. And it troubled him that all this came from Una. Of course there had been no public mention of who she was, how close she was to Marcus, while the confidential reports assumed that it was already known. And he was distressed too that the head of the Praetorians had plainly been used to make known this story about Drusus and Lady Tullia, despite the declared fact that it could not be proved. For the man had gone on, smiling bluffly:

  ‘Now, unfortunately, given the amount of time that’s passed, and the upheavals that have taken place since then, it does not seem likely those specific allegations can be pursued in law. But we believe we have strong evidence to connect Drusus Novius with a violent and prolonged attack that was certainly intended to be fatal. It has been decided, given previous lapses such as that which allowed Lady Tullia’s death in custody, that Drusus Novius should not be held until his trial in a private house but in a public prison, like any other citizen charged with a crime of this nature. There can be no more special treatment for the aristocracy. The Roman people need to know that no one is above the law.’

  It would not have been easy for an official spokesman to say the same thing – he would have had to touch at least on why the Roman people had to be told this, explain how the girl was supposed to have uncovered the secret, something that had never truly been made clear. How could Drusus’ trial be fair now, Salvius had asked himself bitterly, with that playing all over the Empire? But none of this meant that he simply assumed the reports were not true. For one thing he’d never really thought Marcus guilty of anything more sinister than folly. And it was hard, once Drusus’ name had been linked with Tulliola’s, to dismiss how plausible it was – they must often have been thrown together; they had been young, attractive, close to each other in age when Faustus was so much older. And more damningly, Tulliola’s crimes made far more sense if you assumed she’d been acting alongside Drusus, for Drusus. And despite Salvius’ discomfort about the Praetorian broadcast, he could see that, if all this was true, and the girl really had made some unprovable discovery – if Drusus had perhaps said something to give himself away? – then Marcus could not afford for it not to be known, and would not have had many options. In those circumstances, Drusus was probably lucky to be having a trial at all. Salvius would have had him unobtrusively shot. Leo deserved that much revenge.

  ‘My son hopes you might have time to visit him,’ Drusilla told him at last.

  Salvius sighed. ‘I don’t know if I can promise that.’

  Drusilla shifted awkwardly to and fro on her seat. ‘I know you must be busy,’ she acknowledged tautly.

  ‘That’s true. And – I am sorry – but given what he’s accused of …’

  ‘It is false.’

  Ill at ease, Salvius grimaced. Like Drusilla Terentia herself, he had thought of other possible reasons for some kind of struggle between Una and Drusus that might account for her bruises. The end of a furtive, soured affair …? It didn’t seem entirely likely; there hadn’t been much time for it and the girl, who looked like a canny little thing, would be a fool to risk what she already had. But Drusus might, perhaps, have been stupid and vicious enough to think that being a former slave, she was fair game, there for the taking. This was of a different order from the assassinations, and it was a bad time for Rome if something like that had been pumped up into these terrible claims, but still it remained repellent, sordid. Salvius didn’t want anything to do with Drusus if it were true.

  ‘Madam, I hate to say this to you, and I don’t wish to anticipate the outcome of his trial, but it does seem that something happened.’

  ‘No, there is no truth in it,’ insisted Drusilla, passionately, her face blazing with strained convictio
n. She meant it. For the moment she had forgotten her own suspicions. ‘He is my son. I should know that my son would not have any part of this.’

  Salvius nodded, but with politeness rather than with agreement. ‘Even so, there’s nothing I can do to help him. You know that. The law will have to take its course.’

  ‘I have not asked you for any help,’ said Drusilla, hoarsely. ‘There is no help, probably. Visiting him is not help. I have done it. It would be – a kind action.’ Salvius didn’t reply and she stared, mortified, at her knees, which were trembling again, aware that these were not Drusus’ words, and she was breaking her promise. At length she ventured tentatively, ‘He only wants to speak to you.’

  ‘It wouldn’t serve any purpose,’ murmured Salvius.

  ‘It would. It would to him.’ Away from her son, and now that it came to it, she found she had more confidence in what Drusus had told her to say. ‘What tortures him is not that he could lose his life. It’s knowing in whose eyes his name is being ruined. Those that truly care for Rome. You, above all.’

  Salvius looked at her, silently, eyebrows a little raised but not exactly with incredulity, more with a kind of foreboding as he began to sense where his doubts, or curiosity, or discontent, would drive him from here.

  ‘He admires you. There aren’t many honest men in Rome, as times go.’

  ‘I hope he’s wrong if he says that,’ replied Salvius, with some difficulty. It was becoming increasingly hard to find answers. ‘You’re flattering me. Or he is. And the fact remains, I can’t help him.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ So much improvisation, then back to her script: ‘He has no hopes of the trial. How can he have? And neither of us knows what will happen to him afterwards. But he says, if he dies, at least he won’t have to see what becomes of Rome in the hands of that girl. Because – he told me – make no mistake, no one else has any real power these days. And he says, if he had put the truth into your hands, even if you don’t believe it yet, he could face what’s to come. Even if it’s his death.’

  And after all, by the end of this, her voice was shaking, and her eyes were glassy with tears.

  *

  In the crook of the Tiber, in the basement of the vigile headquarters, the bare, grey-green painted room was strangely cold. Inside an oblong niche in the wall, still motionless, a scuffed conveyor belt made up of narrow aluminium slats disappeared into unlit cavities of the building. Cleomenes complained, ‘Do you get any work done, when you’re not hassling me?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ replied Sulien, needled, because the shaft was at once unfair and accurate. Although by now he was working as many hours as he ever had, he knew that it wasn’t the same. It had grown hard to sustain either attention or his usually profligate pity. He could hardly think of Faustus, say, as anything more than a convoluted problem, tediously slow in the solving. And sometimes, even more pitilessly, as he tried to train the cells to repair or compensate, the old man seemed a kind of leech to him, wasting Sulien’s time as he wasted the Empire’s money and abused its freedom. Faustus would die in the end anyway and might as well have done with it. It was only by thinking of the time Faustus’ recovery would buy Una and Marcus, and of the fact that it was these cases – ill rich men – that kept the clinic alive, that Sulien could concentrate at all.

  Cleomenes felt remorseful. He had been exaggerating an air of put-upon martyrdom largely out of amused habit, acquired over days of Sulien’s persistence. Of the three young slaves into whose long anarchic night he’d found himself suddenly caught up, he’d always thought Sulien the most normal, the easiest to like. Una and the other one, with the horrifying round marks on his wrists that should have been impossible on living skin, had been so desperate, so relentless.

  Sulien watched him feed a large card, punched with an intricate pattern of square holes, into a slot in the panel beside the alcove. The mechanism whirred and there was a dull noise of shifting weight in the darkness, as the belt began to move, slowly, finally bearing into view a dark crate and depositing it on the metal-topped table. Cleomenes flicked swiftly through its contents and handed Sulien a photograph trapped between rigid boards of transparent plastic.

  The picture was old. The label below it told him it had been pinned straight to the wall, unframed. The sweetness of it surprised Sulien: the little boy who must have been Atronius stood between his parents, restrained by each hand as if he could not stand still and might have made a dash towards the camera, but he was smiling. The parents seemed to be laughing, there were pots of hibiscus at their feet.

  ‘Are they still in Maia, these two?’

  ‘Took a while to trace. Dead in the Maia–Mexica uprising,’ said Cleomenes.

  Sulien felt another flash of excitement at this news, a bright mirage of understanding as he thought of the failed separatist mutiny that Marcus’ father had quelled more than twenty years ago. But then he sighed. If Atronius was still alive, he must have been prepared to leave this photograph behind. Could it, then mean so much? He slid the picture back into the crate and began unsystematically browsing through the other plastic-cased sheets.

  ‘Don’t get anything out of order,’ moaned Cleomenes.

  ‘I’m not.’ Papers to do with the factory that gave up nothing. Receipts and bills. A torn and crumpled sheet of card: a ticket, which he was about to replace – and then stopped, staring at it, feeling as cold and raw as though he were being shaken awake.

  Cleomenes leant over. ‘That’s how we placed him in Byzantium, remember?’

  Speechlessly, Sulien handed him the plate. Uncomprehending, Cleomenes looked at it, and at Sulien’s face. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘That’s the clinic’s code,’ answered Sulien in a soft, flat mutter. His mouth felt parched and rough.

  Cleomenes studied the uneven, rather childlike sequence of symbols on the scrap of card. It was hard to read and not complete; it vanished over the torn edge of the card. There was room for doubt as far as he could see; if it was the clinic’s code, he couldn’t blame the team for focusing on the ticket’s provenance and missing it. ‘You’re sure?’ he said, gently dubious.

  ‘That’s my name.’

  Above the code was an S, a U, and yes, Cleomenes saw what could have been the upright of an L. Cleomenes sucked his breath in anxiously, not quite certain.

  ‘I know that’s my name,’ insisted Sulien, sounding angry and betrayed now. ‘You can see it’s my name. Think what happened. They called me out of the clinic, by name. And he had this at the same time. It was the same people. They did want to kill me. Why in hell wasn’t this found before? This is a fucking joke.’ Unfocused, he turned back to the box and pulled another sheet, scanning it. ‘The handwriting isn’t the same, is it? One of the others must have written it down.’

  ‘He’d been there for two weeks already, though,’ suggested Cleomenes, uncomfortably. ‘He couldn’t have known you and Varius were going there. That was before you’d decided yourselves, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand. Veii must have been on their list anyway. Maybe they brought it forward when I got away the first time. I was being followed. They could have found out fast enough what I was doing. They tried twice in one day, Cleomenes.’ He began an agitated attempt to retrieve the picture of the little boy. ‘He must have hated Leo, after what happened to his family. I guess that includes Marcus, don’t you?’ The hunt for the photograph was futile; he couldn’t remember where it had been; his fingers weren’t steady. He brandished the ticket. ‘How long had he had this?’

  Cleomenes shook his head helplessly – it could have been from any time after the ticket was printed, there was no way of telling.

  Sulien thought he’d been relieved earlier, when Cleomenes had scoffed at the profusion of bodyguards following him, and sent them away for the afternoon promising, ‘I can keep an eye on him.’ Now he wondered if all his complaints had been anything more than show, and whether after all the guards had made him feel safe.
He remembered the scale of the fire at Veii. What could any number of armed men trailing about with him do against that? He let the ticket fall back loosely on top of the crate. ‘Well, whatever else it means, you were right about him. He did it.’

  *

  Entering the room with its division of bars, Salvius found himself feeling less awkward than he had expected. Of course Drusus’ look of physical deterioration was unmistakable, but the young man stood up composedly, as if greeting Salvius in his own home. He smiled, at once confident and self-deprecating, as though he found his own predicament faintly amusing, and extended his hand between the bars towards Salvius.

  ‘The orders are that no one is to touch him,’ interrupted the warden, as Drusus had known he would.

  ‘I am General of the Legions of the Roman Empire. You take orders from me,’ said Salvius instantly, automatic anger at being challenged overriding any misgivings he might have felt about grasping Drusus’ hand.

  ‘Bless you for coming,’ said Drusus.

  *

  Sulien was growing used to feeling always slightly sick; for hours or days he even forgot the reason for the bands of tension around his shoulders and stomach; he was confused to wake up with an ache in his hands from clenching his fists in his sleep. When he remembered he was exasperated: was there anything more he could reasonably do to protect himself? And had anything further happened to him, in the weeks since that one day? No, of course not. And so he should get it out of his mind – he had done so, really. And yet it remained in his body, and he kept the printed copies of the picture and the ticket with the fragment of his name, and a later, smudged, unremarkable image of Atronius in the army, the only adult picture the vigiles had been able to find. They were folded into tight squares in his wallet, so that they were always with him. Sometimes, without premeditation, sitting becalmed on a tram carrying him west to Transtiberina, he would mechanically take them out and straighten them, looking at the child’s face, at the parents. He knew the scratchy handwriting of the fragmented code so well now that he could see the missing symbols extending over the torn edge, glowing in space. It was not easy to account to himself why he still needed to have them. Perhaps at first he’d had some unlikely thought that someone at the clinic might recognise the handwriting or the face. But he kept them out of some feeling of balancing the scales, of redress. He was making up for the killer’s possession of his name.