I gave Helena a slow frank stare that was meant to remind her of an evening she should forget. I stopped, because my own heart started racing much too fast. I felt as volatile as if I had lost two pints of blood.
I leaned back against the wall with my hands linked behind my head, smiling faintly as I enjoyed the sight of her. She smiled back, enjoying that. I enjoyed her smile…
I had to stop this. This was a terrible mistake. All I needed in life was some accessible miss with a flower behind her ear, who would giggle when I read my poems to her. I would never read my poetry to Helena. She would read it for herself, then indicate with underlining where the spelling and rhythms were wrong; I would complain fiercely, then alter it exactly as she had said…
There is something else," she began. My face stitched itself happily into a wordless, frog-like grin. "The warehouse in Nap Lane will be released by customs very soon. My father is reluctant for me to go."
My arms dropped abruptly. "Nap Lane was the scene of a murder. Your father's right."
"I really want to look round"
"Take somebody then."
"Would you come?"
"Glad to. Let me know when." I gave her a wicked wide-eyed gleam that said there were things we could do in a pepper warehouse that had spice of their own. Helena looked grave. I cleared my throat sensibly. She rose to leave.
"Tomorrow's the Triumph: will you go?"
"Not for myself family duty. Let's see about your warehouse after that."
Climbing out from behind the table I followed her to the door. Leaving it ajar for camouflage, we stepped outside. Confusion: her maid was still waiting on the landing where she had been left.
Some ladies' maids know how to disappear discreetly when a man wants to kiss the beauty they chaperone. In one way, I was pleased to discover Helena's girl entertained no regular concept that her mistress might be wanting to be kissed. At the same time, I was terrified in case the lady did not want it any more.
"Naissa, walk down. I'll catch you up," Helena commanded in her calm, efficient voice.
We lis tend to Nai'ssa's retreating footsteps until she turned down the next flight. Neither of us spoke another word.
Helena had turned to me with a troubled look. I kissed her hand, at arm's length, then kissed her other hand at half stretch. Swinging her close, I kissed her on both cheeks. With a sigh that answered mine, she fell into my arms, then for a long moment we stood motionless while troubles dropped from us like the single quake of falling petals from an overblown rose. Still holding her and kissing her, I walked her slowly backwards across the landing; eventually, at the head of the stairs, I let her go.
She went down. I watched her all the way to the street. I stood staring for five minutes after she had gone.
She had transformed my day.
I sat back at my table pretending nothing was wrong. My face tingled where Helena had touched me with her hand before she left.
My mother was waiting. She knew there had been plenty of times when I came sauntering back from seeing off a woman with some long-winded pantomime of affection. They came; they went; they threatened no one's peace.
Now mother stomped over to the opposite bench, purse lipped "So that's her!"
My heart turned over beneath a rib. I laughed awkwardly. "How did you know?"
"I know you!"
I stretched my chin and looked up at the ceiling; I half noticed there was a new bulge where rain was coming in. I thought of Helena Justina as my mother must have seen her, so fine skinned and elegant in her understated jewellery, with such beautiful manners that she took on her father's knack of appearing diffident, though that strange mixture of moral grit and mischievous humour constantly shone through. Helena Justina, a senator's daughter, talking to me so coolly about fees and warehouses while her eyes sang in silence of the happiness we had shared… Everyone knew I was searching (when I bothered, because the search was quite haphazard) for someone like Marina, my brother's girl: an uncomplicated soul with some brains and a pretty face, who could just about keep house and who owned enough friends of her own to stay out of my way. Everyone knew that; I knew it myself.
I stared back at the table, fiddling with escaped tarragon twigs.
"Well!" challenged my mother. "Do I start baking saffron cakes, or throw on a black veil and wail at Juno's Temple? What happens now?"
"Nothing," I said, squaring up to the facts. "She told you who her father is. There's nothing I can do."
Another angry quirk puckered my mother's mouth. "Marcus, having seen her, I don't imagine it is up to you!"
Then I gazed at my mother with a long face, while my mother looked rather oddly back at me.
LII
I had nothing to do that evening, so I went to the barber's at the end of our street. I sat out on the pavement while he scraped my chin. I managed to trip up some minor official's lictor and make it look like a genuine accident. The lictor himself was nearly castrated on his ceremonial axe; I felt proud of myself.
I was going to see her again. Who? No one. Just a girl. Just a client. Forget I mentioned it.
The barber's boy ambled up, chewing the end of a Lucanian sausage. He was thirteen, not totally deficient but he managed to make eating a sausage look a complicated challenge for his brain. My sister Maia's children all called him Plato.
"Falco! Lady looking for you outside your house."
Rarely has a man with a Spanish razor at his throat leapt up so fast.
I hopped over a cockle barrel, dashed round a pile of empty amphorae, and cracked my head on a basket of flowers outside the funeral parlour where hired mourners were getting in voice not for a wake, but for the next day's Triumph which would close down the city in public holiday. Every musician in Rome would be out distracting the crowds so pickpockets could do their work efficiently.
I saw no lady. No wonder. That fool Plato should have known better: it was Lenia who wanted to see me. Lenia, hovering outside the laundry looking ashamed.
Twenty years of explaining away lost under tunics made a crestfallen laundress such an unusual sight that I realized the cause must be desperate. It was. To celebrate the Emperor's Triumph she was planning an act of reckless delirium: our strong-armed queen of the washtubs was plunging into wedlock.
When people announce their marriages, I try to avoid informing them that they are making a bad mistake. They generally are, but if all the unsuitable pairings in Rome were suffocated at birth by kind friends' good advice, there would be no new generation of civilized men to subdue the world's barbarians.
"Who is the happy bridegroom?"
"Smaractus."
On reconsideration I gave Lenia the strongest advice I could.
The reason for not bothering is that they never listen anyway.
"Shut up, Falco," Lenia responded amiably. "He's worth half a million sesterces!"
For several reasons this news raised a red mist before my eyes.
"If Smaractus told you that, girl, I can promise you he's lying!"
"Don't be a fool; I never asked him."
"All right, it depends who you seduced. If it was his accountant he's boasting, so halve it. If it was his banker he's being cautious, so double it"
"Neither. Believe me, I'm not taking chances; I've read his will."
"Lenia," I commented sadly, "there are no depths to which a scheming woman will not sink!"
A strategic alliance with my pernicious landlord could only be part of Lenia's devious business plan. He had his eye on her laundry, that small but steady gold mine, but her own attention was riveted on his hefty real estate. Their lives together would be fortified by the keen nip of greed, as each prayed daily to their household gods that the other would die first.
Many marriages endure for decades on this healthy basis, so I wished her well.
"He'll be living here, Falco."
Thought he already was!"
"Just warning you."
"I don't care what tree that foul b
ird exudes his guano in"
"I can't keep him out of the laundry. I thought before the wedding you might carry off your parcel from the vat"
The original silver pig! The one found in the street, which Petronius and I had rescued afterwards from Sosia Camillina's bank box. I had forgotten all about it; so had everybody else…
Hauled up by our mighty Lenia, my pig was soon drying under some seedy temple's weekly batch of soiled smalls. Wiping it with a priest's head cloth amidst a whiff of last Thursday's incense, Lenia asked, "Did you know that someone had attached a laundry list?"
Petronius and I had left a rope round the pig; fixed to the rope now was a single wax tablet…
"Oh dear gods!"
Before ever I took it from Lenia's swollen hand I knew what it was, and whose. I could hear Lenia telling me six months ago, I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she left a note upstairs… Then, too, I remembered Helena Justina when she was raging at me that first night in Britain. She said she had told you…
And so she had. Formally enough to be presented in evidence, Sosia Camillina had given me a list of names.
Sosia Camillina, daughter of P Camillus Meto, to M Didius Falco, private informer. On the Ides of October in the second consulship of
Vespasian Augustus, his first as Emperor
T Flavins Domitianus
L Aufidius Crispus
Cn Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus
Ti Faustus Plautius Ferentinus
A Curtius Gordianus
A Curtius Longinus
Q Cornelius Gracilis
I name these men in duty to the Emperor and devotion to the gods.
There they all were. All? All but one, apparently. Above her final sentence was a one line gap. It looked as if Sosia had written an extra name; as if she had written, then at once pulled the flat end of her stylus back through the wax, deleting the line she had just inscribed there with its point.
In this case, I had once told Helena, there could be no loyalty and no trust. Sosia Camillina possessed both. It must have made a heavy burden for a sixteen-year-old girl.
This tablet proved nothing. Just seven men who knew each other; it read like a dinner-party list. Perhaps Sosia had found one in a house she had visited, a note, written out to give instructions to someone's household steward. Sosia had then carefully copied out the names…
Seven men, who could say, if we challenged them in court, they had been dining quietly together. Though their real purpose might be not one jot less sinister for that.
And who, then, had been this ugly dinner party's host?
I stared at the faint groove where it seemed Sosia's stylus had erased a further name. My poor Sosia had been bound in law by ties that were not mine. Had she stood here now, fixing me with those great eager eyes that I remembered so vividly, I would have had to maintain her silence with her to the end. But she was long gone. And I still wanted bitterly to avenge her death.
There was one more person involved in this case: somebody so adept at shrinking out of view that I had almost deliberately ignored the obvious link. I thanked Lenia, grasped the ingot in my arms, and struggled with it upstairs to my room. Soon, wearing my best toga, the one that belonged to Festus, I came down again and went out to do what was necessary on Palatine Hill.
LIII
By the time I clambered up to the Palace, I felt so hysterical I expected the Praetorians to arrest me on sight. It was comforting to find that the Emperor's Guards could apparently distinguish a true assassin from a hot but honest man. When I begged to see Titus I was passed in through officials of increasing refinement until a tall secretary, who gave the impression he would not flutter one long handsome eyelash if his mother-inlaw caught him buggering the butcher in her backyard, listened and then propped me on a stool with my toga piled neatly in my lap while he walked away into an inner room.
Titus came out.
He made a magnificent sight. He had assumed his full military uniform as commander in chief in Judaea and a confident mood to match. He wore an ornamented breastplate, its torso moulded to heroic proportions, a richly dyed, completely circular purple cloak, and a tunic frogged on every edge with rigid palm leaf braid. Anything he lacked in height to carry this off, he made up in a muscular build. He was ready to go to the Temple of Isis, where he would spend the night solemnly with his father and his brother, before they entered the city tomorrow as victorious Roman generals bringing home their captives and glittering spoils.
Doubt now assailed me. My client had dressed as if to model for the formal statues that would gild his reputation for several thousand years. I did not believe in the power of ceremonial, but I knew that I had come on the wrong day.
I stood up. I handed Titus Sosia's writing tablet, feeling the firm grip of his hand as he took it from me. He glanced in pinched silence at Domitian's name, then ran his eye down the rest.
Thank you, Falco. This is useful, but nothing new…" His eyes seemed remote, his mind half-given to the honours of tomorrow. Even so, he grasped my own hectic excitement in the end. "What do you believe it is?"
I pointed out the gap.
"Sir, Camillas Meto's daughter was no scribe. She wrote like a schoolgirl, pressing hard with her stylus. I had to show you the list, but if you agree, at the cost of destroying it I swallowed for I could not easily forgo anything Sosia Camillina gave to me. "If we melt the wax completely off the backing board, you may find she scraped right through into the wood."
His glance hit mine; the man was as sharp as a Spanish sword.
"The missing name may still be visible?" Titus Caesar took decisions like the general he was. "Little to lose!"
He called back the thin secretary. Hollow-shouldered and slightly showing off, this ghoul soon tilted the tablet over a flame, turning his bony wrist to let the drips skitter into a chased silver bowl. He gave it back with a professional flourish.
Titus glanced at the scarred surface, then signalled the secretary to make himself scarce. For a painful moment we gazed at each other, then Titus quietly said, "Well, Didius Falco, how good an informer are you? Do you want to tell me, before I show you this, who you think it is?"
A military tribune, in the narrow purple bands of the second rank, tripped into the anteroom to meet some official appointment in connection with the Triumph: eyes bright, best boots, inlaid armour burnished to a gleam, and scrubbed from his straight-cut toenails to the red tips of his adolescent ears. Titus did not even look at him.
"Out!" he commanded, almost politely, though the tribune bolted without a second glance.
Once again the room was silent. Titus and me… Titus still holding the tablet, which I still had not seen.
My mouth felt dry. As an informer I was only middling good (too much of a dreamer and too chary of dubious commissions the kind that pay); all the same I was good enough. I had vowed never to align myself with the establishment again; yet I gave my own kind of service to my city and the Empire. I would never accept any Emperor's divinity, but I believed in my own self-respect and securing my fee.
So I told Titus Caesar who I thought it was.
"It must be one of the Camillus brothers, Caesar. But I am not certain which."
LIV
Outside we heard an escort party assembling. Titus strode to the doorway and spoke. The agitation stilled; someone posted a guard.
My abdomen felt sore, as if I had been seriously bereaved.
Coming back, Titus seated me and took his own place on the same couch beside me, laying the tablet between us, face down.
"That poor little girl! Oh, Falco that whole poor family! Well, it has to be done. Tell me your reasoning, please."
"Sir, once you think of it, it seems horribly obvious. I'll go back to the start. When the first silver pig turned up in Rome, what happened to Sosia Camillina was deeply relevant; I have always thought that. Possibly Atius Pertinax, in his position as the praetor's aedile, had been able to tell the conspirators where the ingot was hidde
n. But I now believe that they knew that already and certainly it was someone close to her who realized that Sosia knew the number to the bank box. So, the speediest way to get into it was to take her there herself using ruffians to confuse the issue and prevent her recognizing anyone."
Titus nodded. "Anything else?"
"Yes. Just before she died, Sosia wrote to her cousin that she had identified the house of a man who was connected with the people who abducted her. I believe that is where she had found this list. The point is, at that time, for her own safety following the kidnap attempt she was confined at home that is, in the senator's house though I have no doubt that whenever she wanted, she would still have been given access to her own father's house next door." Titus shook his head in reluctant acceptance of what I said. "Caesar, from the moment I undertook this case for you, someone very close has been watching my progress and thwarting every turn. When Helena Justina and I came back from Britain, after months away, someone knew enough to ambush us that very day. I had in fact sent a message from the Ostia Gate to her family."
"And so you lost the letter from friend Hilaris?" Titus smiled affectionately as he spoke; honest Gaius, with his pedantic dedication to hard work, had that effect. I smiled too, though simply because I liked the man.
"Quite. I always assumed the two names Flavius Hilaris was sending to Vespasian were Domitian and Pertinax. He would not tell me though. I misunderstood; it's most unlikely the mining contractor Triferus would realize your brother was involved. Pertinax, the shipper, must be one of them, but Pertinax had been married to Gaius' own niece. And suppose the other was an even closer relation of his wife's! It must have been painful; no wonder if Flavius Hilaris preferred to stand aloof and let Vespasian decide what to do."
Without comment on that point, Titus suggested carefully, "Did you ever consider Hilaris might be implicated here?"
"Not once I met him!" I told him my joke about this case being one where only the public officers were straight; he laughed.
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