Family Commitments (Marcus Corvinus Book 20)

by David Wishart

  Mother frowned. ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ she said. ‘Of course he isn’t dead. He’s perfectly fine, health-wise, as am I. What on earth made you think otherwise?’

  I grinned, only partly with relief; well, that was me told. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘So why haul me over here at a moment’s notice? What’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Then, when I looked at her, ‘Oh, I know what the problem is, dear, I just don’t know why it is. Or indeed if it is at all, for that matter, and if it is then what I’m to do about it. That’s what I need you to tell me.’

  Gods! Mother at her most mind-bendingly cryptic I could do without at this time of the morning!

  ‘Look,’ I said, steering her towards the grape arbour with its reclining couches. ‘Just lie down, make yourself comfortable, take a deep breath, and start from the beginning. Any time you’re ready. Okay?’

  ‘Very well.’ She took herself through the first three; I waited. Finally she said, ‘I think – and I stress think, Marcus, because I have no solid proof whatsoever of this – that Titus might have a mistress.’

  I had to stop myself from laughing: not only could Priscus have doubled for the contents of a thousand-year-old Egyptian coffin but the guy’s field of interest began and ended with ancient Italian relics and the use of the optative in early Oscan. Plus, however bored and jaded she might be, I couldn’t see any woman in her right senses considering him as her inamorato of choice for two consecutive seconds.

  ‘Come on, Mother!’ I said. ‘That’s nonsense!’

  That got me a very sharp look, and a definite sniff. ‘Your stepfather,’ she said, ‘has hidden depths. I will not go into details, but nonsense it most certainly is not. I may be wrong, and I hope I am, but that is for you to find out.’

  Oh, hell. ‘And how am I supposed to do that, then?’ I said.

  ‘Follow him when he goes out. See where he goes, who he meets. You’re good at that.’ Another sniff. ‘Or at least so you keep telling me.’

  ‘I do nothing of the kind!’

  ‘Yes, well, you are. In any case, that’s what I need you to do, please. Off you go. Spit spot.’

  ‘Hang on, Mother, we haven’t finished with this. You say you’ve got no proof that Priscus is having an affair, right? So what makes you think that he is?’

  ‘Little things that only a wife would notice. He’s taken to going out regularly immediately after breakfast and sometimes not coming home until dinner time, when he’s very evasive about where he’s been. He’s become more interested in the cleanliness of his laundry –’

  ‘Underwear?’

  That got me a withering look. ‘Don’t be crude, Marcus. Overthings is what I mean. Cloak. Tunic. And he brings me small presents practically every day.’

  ‘Yeah? What kind of presents?’

  ‘Small, as I say, but all antiques. Curios. Yesterday it was a faience hairpin, which is fairly typical.’

  ‘Mother, be sensible! That’s what the guy does: he haunts antique and curio shops to see what’s on offer. If anything was made yesterday he’s not interested.’

  ‘I know that, dear, of course I do. But generally he’s a looker, not a buyer. And when he does buy he generally goes for something rare and expensive.’

  Yeah, well, that was certainly true, at least: bibs and bobs like hairpins just weren’t Priscus’s style. As little guilt-offerings, though...

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ I said.

  ‘Half a month. And yesterday I caught him whistling.’

  Whistling? Priscus? Gods! I was beginning to be convinced. Oh, no, not that the guy was having some unimaginable form of senile fling with a baker’s wife in the Public Pond district, but still; for all her wooliness, Mother was no fool, and there was something odd going on, that was certain.

  The whistling clinched it. Priscus had never whistled in all the years I’d known him. And where carrying a tune was concerned tin ear didn’t cover half of it.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So how do I go about this?’

  ‘It’s easy enough. As I said, he generally goes out immediately after breakfast, as he did this morning. We’re very early risers, so if you’re outside the front gate and in position half way through the first hour that should be about right. Whatever you do, though, don’t be late.’ She frowned. ‘In fact, just to be safe, perhaps immediately after dawn would be more sensible. Or even before that, if you can manage it.’

  Jupiter! ‘You don’t think maybe I should just bring a blanket and bunk down in the street for the night?’ I said.

  ‘If you think that would be a good idea, then yes, certainly, Marcus. I leave the details completely up to you.’ Not a flicker. Yeah, well, I’d known the woman for forty-odd years and sarcasm had never worked yet; it just bounced off her, like dried peas off a rhino. ‘Further I’m afraid I can’t help you; you’re on your own.’

  Oh, thank you, gods. Thank you so much. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Leave it with me.’ I turned to go.

  ‘Oh, and you will make sure he doesn’t see you following him, won’t you? That is terribly important.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I’ve taken the principle of the thing firmly on board, Mother,’ I said. Mind you, given Priscus’s razor-sharp powers of observation I could probably have dressed up as a priest of Cybele and followed on his heels chanting and shaking a bloody sistrum and he’d still not have noticed me. Unless it was an antique sistrum, of course.

  ‘Don’t forget, then.’ She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Off you go, dear, and good luck. Let me know when you find out something useful, won’t you?’

  Hell’s teeth; dogging Priscus was something I could cheerfully do without. Still, I wasn’t otherwise occupied at present, so it was no big deal. And I’d be interested myself to see what the old bugger was getting up to.

  At least Mother hadn’t asked us round for dinner.

  Well, that little visit hadn’t taken as long as I’d thought it would, fortunately, and I’d plenty of time in hand for the promised cup of wine at Renatius’s. Besides, after even a short interview with Mother I needed one badly.

  I like Renatius’s; in fact, taken by and large, it’s my favourite city wineshop. Nothing special on the inside, just bare walls, the bar counter with its stools, and a few tables for the less socially-minded drinkers, but for me that’s part of its charm. Since it’s on Iugarius, which runs round the foot of the Capitol and connects with Market Square, if it’d gone a bit more up-market it would’ve been popular with the Eighth District’s Great and Good, but as things are they tend to patronise the more chi-chi watering holes around Augustus Square and the foot of the Palatine, with their themed decor, overpriced wines and off-the-wall recherché gourmet snacks. Which is absolutely fine with me: you get a far better and more intelligent standard of conversation when your wineshop punters are tunics.

  So I spent a very pleasant couple of hours propping up Renatius’s bar and shooting the breeze with the regulars. I may’ve underplayed things a little for Perilla with the ‘one cup’ business, but not by much, and I spun things out with a plateful of cheese, olives and sliced sausage. I was stone-cold sober when I left just shy of noon and made my way across town to the Subura and Polydamas’s bookshop.

  Safety Incline was packed, which was par for the course late morning. Streets in Rome are narrow and winding at the best of times, but the Subura, one of the oldest and poorest districts in the city, does narrow and winding in spades. Plus the fact that there’re more tenements in rickety condition than you can shake a stick at, not that you’d risk it, which means that in addition to fighting your way through the crowd, watching where you’re putting your feet, and keeping one hand on your belt-purse, you have to keep a leery eye out above for inconsiderate slop-tippers and falling roof-tiles.

  Yeah, well. It’s all part of Rome’s rich – and rich-smelling – tapestry. At least walking there you’re never bored.

  I found Polydamas’s shop, collected Per
illa’s Timaeus, and carried on down the Incline in the direction of the Caelian. I’d almost reached the junction at the end when I spotted Bathyllus about a dozen yards ahead of me, disappearing into the entrance passageway of one of the tenements.

  There was no mistake: I’d’ve recognised the little bald-head anywhere. I stopped dead, and the guy behind me barged into my back. Words were exchanged, mostly on his side, before he pushed on past, still cursing, leaving me standing.

  I was seriously puzzled; the Raudusculan Gate was a good mile off, and Safety Incline wouldn’t be anywhere near his way home. As far as making any sort of sense went, it was a complete bummer.

  Besides, what the hell business would a stay-at-home arch-snob like Bathyllus have in a Suburan tenement?

  Yeah, well, at least I could find that out. I pushed through the last of the crowd, between two vociferous bag-ladies on their way home with their net bags of vegetables, and slipped into the tenement entrance. Now I was off the street, I paused and listened. I could hear the slap of his sandals as he climbed the stairs above me.

  ‘Salubrious’ isn’t exactly the word you’d use in relation to any city-centre tenement, but this one didn’t even come up to undemanding Suburan standards. The walls were so thick with graffiti you couldn’t see the plaster, the stairs were filthy, and from the smell it would appear the residents were chronic incontinents who didn’t have much use for chamber-pots and preferred to do their business beyond their own front doors, albeit close at hand. I held my breath, watched where I was stepping, and carried on up, being careful to keep it quiet and not to move too quickly.

  He was obviously going all the way to the top, all six floors, and I had to stop a couple of times while he gasped his lungs out on the landing ahead of me: fit was something our major-domo definitely wasn’t, which was fair enough since the only exercise he normally got was buffing up the bronzes. I took the last flight of steps at a snail’s pace and waited until I heard a knock, the rattle of a door being opened, and the sound of voices. As the door closed again I shoved my head round the corner in time to see which of the two possibles it had been.

  The flat on the left. Okay. Here we went.

  Luckily, the door was still unlocked from the inside. I pushed it open.

  You don’t get much for your money when you rent a top-floor tenement flat, even in areas more upmarket than the Subura. There was just the one room, of course, and that was small and cramped, scarcely big enough for the truckle bed, table, stool, and clothing-chest. What light there was filtered in through a hole in the roof where the tiles hadn’t quite managed to cover the rafters. Bathyllus was standing with his back to me, and sitting on the bed was a seriously-unshaven late-middle-aged man in a grubby threadbare tunic.

  Bathyllus turned round, the guy got up, and they both stared at me, jaws dropping, like actors at the end of a play where the god is lowered from a crane to sort out a too-convoluted plot.

  ‘Hi, sunshine,’ I said to Bathyllus. ‘So who’s your friend?’

  I’d never, ever seen Bathyllus lost for words before, but I saw it now. He swallowed a couple of times, coughed, and then said:

  ‘This is Damon, sir. He’s my brother.’

  3.

  ‘He is what?’ Jupiter, whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t that: before it I’d even have accepted the revelation of a clandestine sexual relationship, and considering this was Bathyllus that takes some admitting. ‘Since when have you had a brother?’

  Silly question, sure, but you have to remember I was in shock. More so even than they were, which again is saying something. To give Bathyllus his due, he ignored it.

  ‘We haven’t seen each other since we were children, sir,’ he said. ‘Until a few days ago for all I knew he was dead.’

  I glanced down at the table. On it there was a wine jug, a cup, half a loaf of bread and a piece of cold ham. Yeah, well, that cleared up that little mystery. He must’ve finished the chicken.

  ‘Maybe you’d better explain,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course, sir.’ Bathyllus cleared his throat. ‘If you’d like to sit down. It may take some time.’

  I pulled up the stool and sat. Brother Damon – Jupiter, I still couldn’t get my head round this! – sat back down on the bed. Now that I knew who he was, I could see the resemblance. He was younger, sure, by a few years, and he still had some of his hair, where if you’d polished Bathyllus’s scalp you could’ve used it as a mirror for shaving. The nose was the same, and the set of the ears. There was something, though, that didn’t sit right about the expression: if push came to shove, I reckoned I wouldn’t altogether trust Brother Damon. But then maybe I was being unfair. After all, I hadn’t so much as heard the guy speak for himself yet.

  ‘You know your grandfather bought me at the slave market in Pergamum, sir?’ Bathyllus said.

  ‘Yeah. When he was out there on a job for the Emperor Augustus.’

  ‘Indeed. I was twelve at the time, Damon was seven. Our father was a stonemason, quite a good one from what I can remember. Originally, anyway. Unfortunately he was also a drunk and a gambler, which was why he got into debt and was forced to sell us. It was that or we’d all have starved.’

  Gods! Well, you know that’s the way the world works – selling off unwanted kids to clear a debt is standard practice among the poorer classes throughout the empire – but when it’s your own major-domo that you’ve known for years who’s telling you that, and in Bathyllus’s matter-of-fact tones, it stops you in your tracks. Sure, I knew that old Grandpa Marcus had bought him fifty-odd years back in Pergamum and taken him to Rome, but that was as far as it went.

  ‘What about your mother?’ I said.

  ‘She was dead, sir. In childbirth, two years previously.’

  ‘Ah.’ There wasn’t much more I could say, really. And even I knew that under the circumstances adding an ‘I’m sorry’ would’ve been crass.

  ‘Anyway, I was bought first, by your grandfather, and brought straight to Rome. I didn’t know what had happened to Damon until years after, and then only the barest details.’

  Damon cleared his throat.

  ‘Me, sir,’ he said, ‘well, they sold me a couple of hours later. First master was a Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus, not that he bought me personal, mind, that was his agent, a real bastard by the name of Lucrio. Pardon my Greek. Saturninus, he was the provincial governor at the time, but he’d a big estate near Padua. I got took back there with most of the rest of his slaves when his stint was finished and I grew up as part of the household.’

  Much rougher-spoken than Bathyllus, sure, but that was to be expected given the background life had handed him. More important – and vitally so – I’d noticed that wasn’t wearing a freedman’s cap. Which meant...

  Hell; this could get seriously complicated. Still, I shelved thinking about that particular problem for the time being. Let’s get the facts straight first.

  ‘I knew – but not until much later – that Damon had been sold into the Sentius household,’ Bathyllus said. ‘But nothing further. As I say, not even that he was still alive. I didn’t know about the Paduan estate until a few days ago, or I would’ve tried to get in touch somehow. And Damon only discovered where I was when he came to Rome.’

  Uh-huh. So now we got to the real nitty-gritty. Came to Rome, right? If everything was above board – which from what I’d seen so far I’d bet a gold piece to a wooden sesterce it wasn’t – then what the hell was he doing holed up in a Suburan tenement?

  Mind you, I could probably answer that question myself. Unfortunately..

  ‘So you, uh, still belong to the Sentius family, Damon,’ I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. Gods alive! Didn’t Bathyllus know what would happen to him if he was caught aiding and abetting an escaped slave? I’d be in serious schtook with the authorities myself, and I was a purple-striper.

  Damon looked at me. ‘Here, now, sir,’ he said mildly. ‘You just hold your horses. I said Sentius Saturninus was my first m
aster. He wasn’t my only one. When he died his son sold me to a Gaius Oplonius. Oplonius, he was a Paduan merchant.’

  ‘“Was”?’ I said.

  ‘Died himself five years back and left me to his son, also Gaius.’ Jupiter! This was getting complicated! ‘I’m his slave now.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Or I was until a few days ago.’

  Well, Bathyllus’s brother or not I couldn’t mess about here. It had to be said.

  ‘It makes no odds whose slave you were or are, sunshine,’ I said gently. ‘The fact is, if you’re still one and you’ve run away, then –’

  ‘No, sir,’ Bathyllus said. ‘You still don’t understand. Five days ago Damon’s master was murdered.’

  I stared. ‘He was what?’

  ‘Stabbed to death. In a tenement flat on the Aventine.’

  Gods! Could we please, please have a bit of normality for a change?

  ‘O – kay,’ I said. ‘I think I’m going to need just a few more details here. Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Damon said. ‘It’s like I told you. My master’s name was Gaius Oplonius. That’s the son, of course. From Padua. He was in the wool business like his father, nothing fancy, but he got along. We’d come to Rome three days previous looking for new markets. The idea was, we’d be here for about a month, so the master, instead of bunking down at an inn, he takes a short let on a room in a tenement. North side of the Aventine, opposite the Racetrack. You with me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I think I’m just about coping.’

  He shot me a look. Well, at least this Damon was more up on satire than Mother was.

  ‘Anyways,’ he said, ‘five days ago we’d finished up for the day and gone back home, and the master sends me down to the local cookshop for a takeaway. When I come back he’s on the floor dead with a hole in his chest and blood all over him. So I scarper.’ He paused. ‘‘S it. ‘S all I know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the Watch?’ I said.