Family Commitments (Marcus Corvinus Book 20)

by David Wishart

  ‘The boss wants to see you,’ the other guy said. ‘Right away. And he is not a happy bunny.’

  ‘Is that so, now?’ I said. ‘And what boss would that be, then?’

  Heavy Number One – the half-familiar one – chuckled. ‘Always the joker,’ he said. ‘The boss. Sempronius Eutacticus. Remember him? ’Course you do. And like my friend here says: you, pal, are in serious schtook.’

  I swallowed. Uh-oh. Sempronius Eutacticus, eh? Right. Right. Now there was a name I’d never wanted to hear again, far less renew acquaintance with the crooked bastard it belonged to. And now that I had a context to fit him in, I recognised Laughing Boy here from the last time our paths had crossed six years back.

  Oh, shit.

  7.

  So we set out for the Pincian, where Eutacticus had his not-so-humble little mansion, with me carefully flanked and watched every step of the way.

  I was seriously worried. This did not look good, because Sempronius Eutacticus was bad, bad news. To say the guy was a crook was like saying that Hannibal had shown pretty fair promise as a military man, and as far as range and complexity were concerned his organisation had the imperial civil service beaten into a cocked hat. Added to which, or rather as a corollary of it, he’d probably sent more poor bastards to swim the Tiber in concrete sandals or buried them where no one would find them for a couple of thousand years than I’d had hot dinners. The last time we’d met he’d twisted my arm to find out what had happened to his missing stepson, and although I’d solved the case as a result he’d ended up minus one favourite daughter. Not my fault, as it happened, but when you’re dealing with an evil-minded homicidal control-freak like Eutacticus reason, logic and the correct allocation of blame tend to get lost along the way. I didn’t know what connection he had with the business of Oplonius’s murder, but obviously judging by events his finger was very deeply in the pie somewhere or other. And just the thought of that sent shivers down my spine.

  We’d done the trip in silence: neither of my flanking heavies, evidently, was a sparkling or eager conversationalist, and I’d matters of my own to think about, largely concerning concrete sandals and unmarked graves. Finally the familiar gateposts of Eutacticus’s place with their dinky tritons perched atop – seriously OTT even by generous nouveaux-riches Pincian standards – hove into view. Then we were past the doorkeeper-gorilla, up the gravelled drive, and through the bronze-studded front door. I’d expected, like last time, to be taken up to the great man’s study, but we kept to the ground floor, all the way to the colonnaded private garden at the back.

  Eutacticus was standing on the lip of the ornamental fish-pond, with a slave beside him holding a tray of meatballs. Raw meatballs. He took one of them and threw it into the pond.

  Beneath the surface, dark shapes converged on the splash and the water boiled, briefly.

  He turned.

  ‘You took your time getting here, Corvinus,’ he said.

  Heavy Number Two’s assessment of him not being a happy bunny was evidently smack on the button. If anyone ever looked seriously unchuffed then Sempronius Eutacticus was it.

  Fuck. Double fuck.

  ‘Ah...yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Possibly.’

  He indicated the pond. ‘Know what those are?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘I’ve, ah, met up with them before. Moray eels, right?’

  ‘Correct. Want to feed them?’ My blood ran cold. He chuckled. Not a very reassuring sound, the way it came out; me, if I were giving a prize for the one with the better sense of humour, I’d go for the eel. ‘With one of these.’ He picked up a ball from the tray and handed it to me. ‘Go on. Throw it.’

  Bastard; he’d done that deliberately. I tossed the meatball towards the circling shapes, and the water boiled again.

  Eutacticus took the napkin that was draped over the slave’s shoulder and wiped his hands clean.

  ‘You two,’ he said to my pair of minders. ‘Get lost. But not too far away. You’ – that was to me – ‘over here. We need to talk.’

  There were a couple of chairs in the shade of an arbour formed by a trellised vine. We sat.

  ‘Okay,’ Eutacticus said. ‘So what’s your connection with Oplonius?’

  ‘Ah...strangely enough, that’s the question I was going to ask you, pal,’ I said.

  ‘That so, now?’ His top lip lifted slightly to one side. Maybe he intended it as a smile, but the fact that all it did was to reveal one of his incisors did a lot to spoil the effect. Basking crocodiles came to mind. ‘Interesting. Let’s just say I asked first so I have priority, right?’

  ‘His slave Damon is my major-domo’s long-lost brother,’ I said. ‘Bathyllus – that’s the major-domo – had him squirrelled away in –’ I stopped myself just in time; maybe, under the circumstances, handing Eutacticus the information concerning Damon’s present whereabouts wasn’t such a clever idea. ‘In wherever he was hidden. Seemingly, the guy’s master had been stabbed to death a few days before, cause unknown, perp or perps unknown.’ I gave him a quick sideways glance, but his face was expressionless. If you didn’t count the crocodile expression, that was. ‘He ran, Bathyllus hid him, I got interested, that’s all. And that’s about it, really.’

  ‘You got interested.’ You didn’t get any deader-pan than that.

  ‘Yeah, well, you know me,’ I said. ‘Can’t keep my nose out of things that aren’t really my business.’

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘So you’d no dealings with him while he was alive?’

  ‘Oplonius? Uh-uh. Never even saw the guy, alive or dead.’

  ‘This slave of his. You know where to find him?’

  Bugger; well, I couldn’t say the question was unexpected. ‘That might be tricky. According to Bathyllus, he moves around a lot.’

  ‘Pity.’ He let the word hang just long enough to show me he knew I was telling porkies. ‘Fair enough, we’ll leave it. For the present, anyway. He happen to mention a necklace?’

  ‘Uh... Yeah.’ Oh, bugger: so that was what all this was about! I started to sweat. ‘Yeah, he did, in fact.’

  ‘That’s good.’ The top lip lifted again. ‘Then maybe we’re getting somewhere after all. He knows where it is?’

  ‘Oplonius sold it the day before he died. At least, that’s what Damon claims.’

  ‘You don’t believe him?’

  I shrugged. ‘Me, I’d take whatever the slippery bugger told me with a very large pinch of salt. But it’s certainly possible. Maybe even likely.’

  ‘Now that would be a real pity.’ He frowned. ‘So you’re sure whoever killed that bastard Oplonius doesn’t have it?’

  Everything went very still. Something went gloop in the pond. Possibly one of the eels varying its diet courtesy of a passing frog.

  ‘Hang on a minute, pal,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back a bit here. Are you saying your lads didn’t? Kill Oplonius, that is.’

  Eutacticus grunted. ‘They might’ve done, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s if they’d tracked the fucker down in time and got my necklace before someone else did the job for them. But no, as a matter of fact they didn’t. That what you thought?’

  ‘Uh...yeah. Yeah, it is. More or less.’ Jupiter! ‘I’d good reason to, hadn’t I? When I went to the tenement the buggers were hanging around outside mugging it like bad extras in a tragedy, then when I tried to talk to them they took off like they’d been greased.’

  ‘Put that down to surprise, Corvinus. They’d been told to keep an eye on the place, nail Oplonius when he went in or came out, whichever, and bring him back here relatively undamaged. That’s about as much detail as those boys can hold in their heads at one time.’ Despite myself, I grinned. ‘Only what happens is five minutes after they turn up this mad purple-striper comes straight at them out of nowhere and blows their cover six ways from nothing. What the hell would you expect them to do? They didn’t even know at the time that Oplonius was dead; he could’ve been upstairs and seen the whole thing from his windo
w. It was just lucky Satrius recognised you.’

  Satrius? Oh. Right. Heavy Number One, Laughing Boy; I remembered the name now. And ‘lucky’ wasn’t exactly the word I’d use, not from my side of the fence. Witness my being hauled up to the Pincian and threatened with playing dinner to Bastard Eutacticus’s piscine menagerie. More important, though, and back-tracking again...

  ‘Uh...you said “my necklace,’ I said.

  Eutacticus frowned. ‘That’s right. So?’

  ‘It’s, like, yours then.’ I had to quash the sudden inward vision of Eutacticus sporting a snazzy ruby-and-emerald necklace plus matching tiara, earrings and carefully-coiffeured wig. ‘Your property. It belongs to you.’

  He was staring at me.

  ‘Naturally it does,’ he said. ‘Who the hell else would it belong to?’

  Good question. So much for the star-crossed lovers saga. I felt my teeth gritting; next time I saw Damon, I would kill the lying bastard myself. He wouldn’t die quickly, either.

  ‘Ah...so you haven’t heard of a guy in Padua by the name of Postumius with a marriageable daughter called Matronilla?’ I said. ‘Just checking, you understand.’

  ‘No, I fucking haven’t. Why should I?’

  ‘No reason. None at all.’ I told him. The whole story. Or at least the Alexandrian tunic-ripper fable that Damon had foisted off on me. When you actually came to put it into your own words it sounded thin as hell. Evidently Eutacticus thought so too, because he laughed; genuinely laughed, and that’s something I never expected from that humourless bugger.

  It wasn’t a pleasant sound or sight, mind.

  ‘You’ve been had, Corvinus, right, left and centre,’ he said. ‘Me, I’d be ashamed.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Well, he hadn’t met Damon, had he? Evidently where the rogue brother was concerned all the energy and brain-power that in Bathyllus’s case made him the administrative genius that he was had gone into forming the archetypal con-man. ‘Never mind that now. So. You going to tell me just how Oplonius did get his hands on this necklace of yours?’

  ‘It was an anniversary present for Occusia.’ His wife: I’d met her the time of the missing stepson incident, a small, dumpy, ultra-respectable, old-style Roman matron, and about as unlikely a mate for Rome’s top criminal mastermind as you could ever imagine. ‘I bought it through a colleague of mine in Brundisium.’ Colleague. Right. Right. Well, whoever the guy was, I’d bet a gold piece to a handful of beans he wouldn’t’ve been a member of the Brundisium Jewellers’ Guild. ‘Over two hundred years old, used to belong to Philistis, Hiero of Syracuse’s wife.’ He shot me a sideways look. ‘The necklace, not the colleague.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Got you.’ Jupiter! First the laugh, now a joke. Or what passed for one. Eutacticus was certainly lightening up. Maybe it had been the fun of throwing meat to the eels. ‘And Oplonius stole it, yes?’

  ‘It was pure bad luck. The courier who was bringing it to me stopped at an inn and got himself robbed.’ I winced; in so few words are whole tragedies writ. I’d bet the unfortunate courier was now very much an ex-employee, wherever Eutacticus’s lads had stashed him. ‘Turned out later that this Oplonius bastard and his pal – that’d be your major-domo’s brother – worked a nice little scam in that direction. They pick a likely mark, tag along with him for part of the way to get acquainted and overnight wherever he puts up. Then that evening they sucker him into sharing a flask of wine, slip him a go-to-sleep googly and rob him blind. After which the pair of them vanish into the night with the loot.’ He sucked appreciatively on a tooth. ‘Not bad, as amateur scams go. As long as you target low-grade punters and move around a lot, if you’re careful there’ll be no come-back. Only this time the bastards overreached themselves.’

  Yeah, right: that I would believe. When they’d found out what they’d got – and I’d bet Damon’s estimate of fifty thousand for a two hundred-year-old antique which had belonged to a reigning queen was well on the low side – plus, and far, far worse, who the courier had been taking it to, they’d’ve had conniptions.

  Bad luck was right – and not just for Eutacticus and the courier, either. Oplonius and Damon would’ve known with horrible certainty that they were dead men walking. No wonder they’d been keeping their heads down.

  Still, it left us with the great unanswered question: if our pair of watchers – aka Eutacticus’s Satrius and his mate – weren’t the killers, then who was? And how the hell did they fit in with this necklace business?

  ‘So I want to talk to this slave,’ Eutacticus said.

  Shit.

  ‘Ah...I told you,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where he is. He moves around.’

  ‘Corvinus, you’re not listening, are you? Read my fucking lips. I want. To talk. To the slave. Okay, Oplonius might’ve sold the necklace already, but I can work round that.’ Yeah, I’d bet he could: should the unfortunate buyer be offered the choice of either giving up Eutacticus’s wife’s birthday prezzie of his own free will or spending the happy occasion on crutches drinking the toast through a straw the poor bugger wouldn’t be able to agree fast enough. ‘And if by any chance he didn’t before he was stiffed then I’m sure his erstwhile colleague will know of its whereabouts.’

  ‘Not if whoever killed him has it, he won’t,’ I said. ‘Now your pair of stooges are off the list of possible perps that scenario is back on the table again.’

  He looked at me pityingly. ‘Come on, Corvinus! You’re supposed to be the great brain. If that’d been the case your Damon would’ve told you so straight off, or better still not have mentioned the thing at all. Why faff around?’ That stopped me. True, and certainly something to think about: why had Damon brought the necklace into the story? ‘Anyway, I’m going to work on the reasonable assumption that he knows damn well where it is until he convinces me different.’

  By which time, no doubt, the poor bastard would be lucky to have a single intact bone in his body, sight in both eyes, all his bodily parts attached, and the ability, should he ever have the opportunity in future, to reproduce himself. And much as I was beginning to feel seriously pissed off with Damon I wouldn’t’ve wished all that on him.

  Well, not quite all that, anyway.

  ‘Hold on, pal,’ I said. ‘I hate to bring this up’ – absolute truth; you didn’t cross Sempronius Eutacticus on his home ground if you’d a single ounce of sanity in your makeup – ‘but you owe me. In fact, you owe me twice now, once for that racehorse business and again for the business of your missing stepson. Simple old-fashioned Roman do ut des, and now I’m calling in the payback.’

  He was staring at me like I’d crawled out from under a rock and he was wondering how best to rise up and smite me dead.

  ‘You what?’ he said.

  ‘Listen. Here’s the pitch. We do a deal; I talk to Damon, see if I can get the truth out of him about this necklace of yours.’ Touch wood, it shouldn’t be all that difficult, given that I’d tell him in no uncertain terms what the alternative was. ‘If by any chance he does have it, or knows where it is, and hands it over, then that’s the end of it. No comeback, no recriminations, above all no concrete sandals. Agreed?’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’ll just have to hope you’re right about him knowing, won’t we?’ If that happened I could always turn my back on him for a second, give him the chance to split and run. He wouldn’t get very far, sure, but at least I’d’ve done my best. ‘We’ll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.’ I held out my hand. ‘Deal?’

  ‘On one condition. You go now, and my lads tag along.’

  ‘That’s two conditions.’

  ‘All right, so it’s two. I’m not having you tip that crooked bastard the wink and let him slip away this time around.’

  ‘Would I do that?’

  He gave me his crocodile-fang smile. ‘Too fucking right you would, and we both know it. So I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen.’

  Bugger. ‘Fine,’ I said. Well, I’d trie
d my best for the little rat. He was on his own now, and serve him right. Mind you, it might not be altogether a bad arrangement: having two of Eutacticus’s brightest and best glowering at him in the background as a reminder of what happened to duplicitious slaves who continued to play fast and loose with the truth might make all the difference.

  ‘Fair enough.’ My hand was still stretched out. He shook it. ‘Deal.’ He turned his head in the direction of the house and shouted: ‘Satrius! Largus!’

  My two heavies must’ve been kicking their heels just inside. They came through the portico and lumbered over.

  ‘He giving you trouble, boss?’ Satrius glared at me under brows like a couple of mating earwigs.

  ‘No. I’ve a job for you. I want you to go with Corvinus here and watch him have a talk with Oplonius’s slave. Just watch him, okay? Don’t interfere, and no rough stuff.’

  ‘Got you, boss,’ Heavy Number Two – Largus – flexed his fingers. ‘You’re sure, though? Bastard might need a little encouragement.’

  ‘I’m sure. If he hands over the necklace then and there, fine, you take it and leave like lambs. If not, whatever he says, you bring him back here.’

  ‘What about Corvinus? You want him back as well?’

  Eutacticus gave me a long, considering look, and I held my breath. Finally –

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think we’ll be needing Valerius Corvinus any further. He can go where he likes.’ I exhaled. Thank the gods for that, at least. ‘All that clear?’

  ‘As crystal, boss.’ Satrius turned to me. ‘Let’s go, pal.’

  . . .

  We got to the tenement without incident, and again with a total lack of conversation. I led the way up to the flat, knocked and waited. No answer. I tried a second time, then a third...

  ‘Bugger this,’ Satrius grunted. He pushed me aside, raised his industrial-grade-sandalled foot to the level of the lock, and drove it at the door like a pile-driver.

  The lock burst with the sound of splintering wood and tortured metal and the door sprang open. We went inside.