The Jupiter Myth

by Lindsey Davis

  “Helena is sheltering that sad scrap. She was mine in the first place.”

  “Tell them that! Did they see you?”

  “Afraid so. They call it the Old Neighbour. I just met the old neighbor’s mummified grandmother.”

  “She’ll make a vicious enemy,” Petronius warned.

  “I can handle it. You’ve noticed her?” His reply was a grunt. “Who’s the Collector?” I asked.

  Petronius gave me a sharp look. “Pimp who collects new bait.” He paused. “Dangerous.” After a moment, he told me the full rubric. “You know how it works. They prey on vulnerable girls. The Collector’s on the streets picking them up. Takes them in, rapes and batters them, makes them believe they are worthless, pretends they have no opinion, fits them up in some drab hole and then works them to death. Only management profit. The punters are charged, overcharged, and robbed. The old bag keeps the new flesh in her filthy claws until it’s submissive, then the pimp runs the girls until they drop.”

  I exclaimed angrily. I tried convincing myself Albia had not been part of this trade previously. When they kidnapped her she knew what was coming, but she took her chance to appeal for help and I got to her just in time.

  “So,” I demanded slowly. “Longus, my old mucker, are you on observation over the vice game?”

  “I am on obbo,” he agreed tersely.

  “Vice?”

  “Vice. And everything else.”

  “Do I dare ask how come?”

  “No, Falco.”

  “Did you join the Ostia cohort?”

  “Doesn’t work that way. The Ostia vigiles are not a separate cohort. Ostia is covered by outstationed members of the Rome regulars; the cohorts provide them on rotation. I’m still with the Fourth.”

  “So is it Rome or Ostia that has taken an interest in Britain?” I asked dryly.

  “Both, Falco.”

  “And the governor does not know?”

  “I believe not.” Petro’s note of uncertainty was rhetoric. He knew all right.

  “You are not supposed to be here. What are the vigiles up to, stretching their arms overseas? And secretly?” It must be a secret. If the Prefect of Vigiles asked permission to send men here, the answer would be negative. The army dealt with everything in the provinces. The governor held sole authority; Frontinus would be outraged by this sly maneuver. Even supposing Petro’s superiors had sent him—and I assumed they had, since they knew where to write him—if he were caught here working they would disclaim any knowledge of the mission. Arrest would be the least of his problems with Frontinus. “I’ll ask again, you reprobate: how come?”

  Petronius was standing with his arms folded. I could sense a new dark mood in him, yet he was still himself. Big, generally placid, shrewd, capable, dependable. A pity about his rebuff to my sister, in fact. A shame about her previous rebuffs to him.

  “You’re playing the muscle at this bathhouse?” I guessed. “But that’s a cover?”

  “I’m looking for someone,” he admitted. “Maybe two men. We know one came out to Britain for sure, and the other’s gone missing from Rome. There are henchman involved too, but the operation is to catch the big pair.”

  “You’re talking about a major gang?”

  “Yes, real bastards. They caught attention in Ostia, though Rome is their base. We think they have targeted Britain as a new regional market. They have put managers in place, a whole development team, and it looks as if the leaders are currently over here setting things up. So I’m here too.”

  “You and how many?”

  “Me,” he said. “Just me.” I shivered; maybe he did too.

  “Pigshit, Petro.” At that point I did turn to look at him. “This is a doomed errand.” Petronius Longus, a man of quiet intelligence, did not disagree. “I am with you if you want,” I then commented. He could respond, or dump my offer.

  “Your presence in this godforsaken province,” Petronius confirmed ruefully, “was the sole benefit when I took the job.”

  “Thanks for that.” I stared back at the street again. “I suppose I must not say you could have bloody well told me.”

  “That’s right,” returned Petro. “Don’t say it.”

  Who knows what he was thinking, the rogue? At least he seemed pleased that we were now talking. I was pleased myself.

  “Why you, though?” I asked.

  “I know Britain. And it’s personal.” I was surprised. Petronius Longus was more self-collected normally. “I want to get one of the principals.” His voice was dark. “I’ve been watching him for a long time.”

  “And there’s another out here?”

  “New partner. A man we have never identified. We know he exists, but he has kept his face hidden. I’m hoping to put a name to him while I’m here. He should be visible—a Roman setting up an elaborate crime network of a type that never existed in Britain before.”

  “And what about the one you want?”

  “He could be anywhere—but I believe he’s here with his partner.”

  “And who is he?”

  Petronius thought of telling me, then for some reason kept his own counsel. My work had rarely ventured into the gangland world; presumably the name would mean little. “So long as it’s not bloody Florius this time.”

  “What a joker you are, Falco!” Petronius clapped my shoulder and then smiled sadly. Florius had been the useless husband of his ill-chosen young lover, Milvia. Milvia came from the worst background. Her dead father had been a major racketeer; her mother still was. If anything, she was more criminal than the father. Florius, her pathetic husband, didn’t count. For Petro, little Milvia was in the past—and we let the subject drop.

  “Are you living here?” I asked, jerking my head at the baths.

  “No. Across the river. There’s a mansio.” An official travel lodge. “It’s not bad. I can see who comes and goes into town.”

  “How do I find it?”

  “Don’t show yourself there, Falco.”

  “No, I won’t—but tell me how to find it anyway.” We were almost joshing in the old way.

  “Go over by ferry and it’s obvious.”

  “I’ll remember not to do that.”

  “Good. I won’t see you then!”

  Albia came out. Her idea of cleaning up was feeble, but she had replaced her dress, which covered much of the grime. The brothel odors seemed to cling. There was nothing more I could do about that.

  Petronius returned indoors. I led Albia back up the narrow street, ducking into the colonnade to be less noticeable. A mistake. Suddenly the witch from the Old Neighbour leaped out at us from a doorway. She had her talons into Albia before I could react.

  The girl squealed. It was a scared noise, but filled with resignation. She had been a victim all her short life. Rescue had seemed too good to last.

  Disgust thickened my throat again. As the old woman madly tried to drag the girl back to her stinking house, I grabbed some brooms from a besom stall. I don’t normally attack grannies, but this hag was outrageous and I know when to break rules. I beat at the short, overweight figure, thrashing her furiously while I yelled for Albia to escape.

  No good. She was too used to cringing, too used to taking punishment. The cathouse-keeper was hauling her along, partly by one arm, partly by her hair. At the same time, the old woman had managed to disarm me of my brooms. As they scrabbled on the pavement outside a vegetable shop, I began to pelt the kidnapper with anything I could grab: cabbages, carrots, neatly tied bundles of hard asparagus. Albia may have been struck by a flying brassica by accident; she was screaming much louder now.

  Time to stop being squeamish. The madam snarled, showing rotten teeth and a wine-stained gullet. I’ve looked down prettier throats on blood-dripping boarhounds. I jumped on her, got my arm around her neck, and pulled her head back while I let her feel that I was now wielding my knife. She let go of Albia. Albia’s screams only increased.

  An elbow jammed me in the privates with the force of a de
molition ram. Heels kicked backwards at me with agonizing power as the other elbow took my breath away in a vicious waistline battery. Both hands came back and tried to pull my ears off. Then she gripped me with both legs and fell forward, her great weight toppling me over too.

  I tried to roll sideways. She had all the initiative. I was flummoxed by this huge bundle of stinking fat. My legs were pinioned together by her treetrunk thighs. The knife was somewhere under us, not achieving much. I wanted Albia to fetch Petro, but when in the company of racketeers I still had to pretend he and I were strangers. If the girl had only made a run for it I could have gone limp and wriggled free, but I knew she was still nearby, capering in distress. I could hear her strangled little cries.

  Deadlocked, the woman and I struggled breathlessly. I had overcome my diffidence about her age and sex. It was like fighting a rank slug that had heaved up from some black lake at the gates of the Underworld. As we flailed, her rags loosened so odd ends hung off like long branches of a Stygian weed. She bucked and jerked. I was flung around, but clung to her, digging in my nails. I stabbed one boot into a calf, hard enough to break bone, but I met only flesh and she just growled angrily. Filthy hair strands were whipping in my eyes. I nutted her skull. I don’t know what it did to her, but it hurt me.

  Suddenly my right arm slipped free. I had lost my knife, but I grappled the woman harder. I pulled her up by her shoulders, then banged her face down on the ground, once, twice, and three times. We were lying in the gutter so I was bashing her against the curb. I could hear my own grunts of effort.

  Without warning the situation changed. Other people had arrived. Abruptly I was pulled away, receiving a barrage of pummeling to subdue me. I saw the old woman being dragged backwards up the road, held by her splayed legs. It was her turn to scream; this was rough handling. After being hauled off her, I had been thrown headlong, though I had recaptured my knife. No use: a booted foot trod briskly on my wrist and pinned it down. There was another foot on my neck, applying just enough pressure to threaten breaking it. I lay still.

  “Get up!” I can recognize female authority. I scrambled to my feet.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Don’t talk!” That old cliché.

  I still had my knife; no attempt was made to remove it from me. No attempt was made by me to use the thing, either—not with a pair of swords pricking right through my torn tunic into my back and a third weapon glittering directly in front, aimed upward at my heart.

  I already knew what to expect; I had heard the voices. A glance around confirmed the worst. Albia had vanished. The old woman was lying out cold, dumped near the brothel. And I was being captured by an efficient gang of well-dressed, dangerously armed young girls.

  As they marched me away with them, I saw Petronius Longus on the bathhouse porch. He was watching my removal with a faint sardonic grin.

  XXIV

  The house to which I had been taken by the women gladiators seemed small, but I sensed there were quite a few occupants. The room where they dumped me was almost dark. By now it was evening. Faint domestic sounds and smells suggested people were occupied with dinner. No food was brought to me. For informers, starvation was the curse of the job.

  They had not bound me, but the door was either bolted or jammed. I stayed calm. Well, so far. No violence had been done to me after the capture. These women were fighters, but they killed professionally—for the winner’s purse. If they had brought me here for a reason, it did not seem to be a reason that required me to be dead.

  All the same I was wary. They were fighters, and there were a lot of them.

  When they had reached the entertainment stage of their evening, where some diners might have called up tumblers, witty dwarves, or flautists, they had me fetched. The house was stylish. It must contain a dining room; I thought longingly of leftovers. But they were waiting to amuse themselves with me in a small colonnaded garden. I walked there through quiet corridors on level tesserae. From somewhere came the evocative scent of smoking pine cones, used in arena ritual. From somewhere else a maddening hint of sautéed onion, used merely to torture hungry men.

  My captors leaned gracefully on the pillars, while I stood centrally like a disgraced child. If they noticed my stomach rumbling, these girls ignored it, proving that gladiators are immured in cruelty. I must have made a sorry spectacle: grimy and bruised, depressed, puzzled, smelly, and exhausted. Such qualities are normal in my trade, but a group of female fighters might not see it as colorful. They belonged to a class that was legally infamous, debarred from all rights in society. Informers may be reviled, a subject of satire whose bills never get paid, yet all the same, I was a free man. I was entitled to vote, to cheat on my taxes, and to bugger my slaves. I hoped these women on the edge of society would not envy that too much.

  I was uneasy for another reason. All men know from puberty that females in the arena are balls-grabbing sexual predators.

  To look at, they hid this aspect courteously. Although the two I had first spotted at the baths had had the air of loose women waiting for customers, when relaxed at home the entire group—five or six here currently—seemed like woodland nymphs with nothing on their minds beyond perfecting scurrilous echoes. Laundered white gowns; endlessly combed long hair; manicured toes showing in beaded indoor slippers. You might discuss poems with these beauties—until you noticed their arrogance, their muscles, and their healed scars. They were oddly mixed. Tall or tiny, blonde or ebony: good box-office variety. One stood out: a girl who thought she was a boy, or a boy who thought he was a girl.

  I wondered at first why they were not slung up in chains in a gladiators’ barracks. How could they afford to run a pleasant and sizable house? Then I worked it out. Yes, untried colleagues would be in thrall to seedy lanistae in the training schools, but these had achieved independence. They were the successful fighters. The unsuccessful were dead.

  “Are you planning to let me go?” I asked them meekly.

  “Amazonia’s coming.” It was an extremely tall, lean Negress who addressed me first.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “So be afraid! And who are you?”

  “Didius Falco is the name.”

  “And what do you do, Falco?” Heavy innuendo made me blink. Or was the innuendo all in my mind? Setting aside the urge to joke that I was just a time-waster who played around with girls, I told them straight: that I worked for the governor and was investigating the Verovolcus death. It seemed best to be honest. They might already know who I was.

  They exchanged glances. I could not tell whether it meant they were impressed by my social standing or whether the name Verovolcus was significant.

  “How does it feel to be rescued?” sneered a sturdy brunette.

  “It stinks.”

  “Because we are women?”

  “I didn’t need help. I was holding my own.”

  “Not from where I was standing,” she exclaimed, laughing. They all chortled. I grinned. “Well, fair enough, ladies. Let me thank you, then.”

  “Turn off the charm!” exclaimed the boy who thought he was a girl (or the girl who thought she was a boy).

  I merely shrugged at him (or her). “Do you know what happened to the teenager who was being dragged off by that hag?”

  “She’s safe,” a neat Greek-style blonde chipped in. She had a nose straight off an Athenian temple peristyle but sounded as common as a harbor whelk-picker.

  “Don’t frighten her; she’s endured enough today. She was under my wife’s protection—”

  “Then you should have left her with your wife, you pervert!”

  Now I was beginning to understand why they had grabbed me: this tough sisterhood had been defending Albia. That was fine—but it was unclear whether they saw me as a victimizer. “I never tried to make her a child prostitute. I wanted her to get out of it.”

  Maybe they realized that. (Maybe they didn’t
care.) The Greek put her foot up on a balustrade, revealing lengths of superb, well-pumiced leg through an unsewn skirt. The action, apparently unconscious, made me consciously gulp. “She’s with us now.” This would be tricky to explain to Helena.

  “Well, think again, is my advice. Albia is not a slave. Turning a free citizen into a gladiator unlawfully is serious. You could all end up being butchered with the criminals.” That was the morning event in an arena, where convicts were put to bloody punishment: slash and smash with no reprieve. Each winner goes straight into another fight and the last man is slaughtered by the ring-keeper on the sodden red sand. “Besides,” I tried, “You’ve seen her—she’s totally unsuitable. She has neither the build nor the body. I can tell you too, she has no speed, no fighting intelligence, no movement finesse—”

  As I ladled on the flattery, from somewhere behind me came an ironic burst of clapping. A voice cried loudly, “Oh, why don’t you just add that she had flat feet and bad eyesight and her boobs get in the way?”

  Rome! The accent, the language, and the attitude plunged me straight back home. Familiarity socked me in the empty gullet. I even felt I knew the voice.

  I turned. I had lasted long enough in the confrontations so far to be feeling quite relaxed. That was about to change.

  “Amazonia,” one of the girls to my left informed me. At least these tough maidens were polite. When they had finished battering thick wooden posts with practice swords, someone must sponge sweat off them and put them through an hour of gentle etiquette.

  When my eyes found the newcomer, I was stunned. Wide-apart brown eyes gazed at me playfully. Amazonia wore white like the others, setting off dark and sultry skin. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head, then fastened in a two-foot-long snaky ponytail; flowerbuds decorated the fastening. I was expecting some haughty and humorless group leader, who had plans to humiliate me. I found a little treasure with a flexible body, a warm heart, and a deeply friendly nature. Was this instinctive male recognition of a good bedmate? No. I already knew this woman. Dear gods, at one time in my dubious past I knew her rather well.