One Virgin Too Many (25 page)

Belatedly, I caught up. "Surely the Queen is not being linked to the disappearance of a child she had only met once, and then formally?"

As soon as I said it, I could see the predicament. Slander need not be believable. Gossip is always more enjoyable if it looks likely to be untrue.

Berenice was Judaean. It was believed that Titus had promised her marriage. He may indeed have done so, though his father was unlikely ever to allow it. Ever since Cleopatra, Romans have had a horror of exotic foreign women stealing the hearts of their generals and subverting the peace and prosperity of Rome.

Titus spoke harshly. "Madness!" Maybe. But an accusation that Berenice was a child-killer--or a Vestal Virgin abductor--was just the kind of ridiculous rumor that fools would want to believe. "Falco, I want this girl found."

For a moment, I did feel sorry for them. The woman had to go home again--but it ought to be for the proper reasons, not because of some sleaze dreamed up by political opponents. Instead, the Flavians would have to show that they understood what Rome required and that, if he were to become emperor one day, Titus was man enough to face his responsibilities.

To lighten the atmosphere, I said gently, "If I do find Gaia safe and alive, and if it is too late for the lottery, I have just one request--can somebody else have the task of explaining to the weeping child that she will not be a Vestal Virgin after all?"

Titus relaxed and laughed.

* * *

Helena, who had been quietly munching the tidbits while I talked, now jumped to her feet and pulled me after her. Visitors were supposed to wait until they were dismissed by royalty, but that did not bother her. Until I was made middle-class, it would not have bothered me either--so I reached back shamelessly for another lobster knickknack. "He needs to rest," my beloved told Titus.

Titus Caesar rose, then came and clasped my hand. He had the good fortune to choose the nonfishy one. "I am extremely grateful, Falco." The one benefit of my new rank was that all my clients were perfectly polite to me. That did not mean the fees would arrive any quicker (or at all).

After his farewell to me, Titus had lifted Helena's hand. "I am glad to see you here tonight." He was speaking in a low voice. Helena looked nervous, though not as nervous as I was. "I want you to explain something discreetly to your brother."

"Aelianus?"

"He applied to join the Arval Brethren. Look; do let him know, they have nothing against him personally. He is well qualified. But there will have to be a period of readjustment after your uncle's unfortunate escapade."

"Oh, I see," replied Helena in an odd tone of voice. "This is a reference to unhappy Uncle Publius?" She meant the senator's brother, who some time before had unwisely plotted to destabilize the Empire and dethrone Vespasian. Misguided Uncle Publius was no threat now. He was out of it, his corpse rotting in the Great Sewer. I knew; I shoved him down there myself.

"You see what I mean?" asked Titus, eager for her acquiescence.

"Oh, I do," Helena answered. With a cool turn of her head, she offered her cheek for Titus Caesar to kiss, which he stalwartly did. Before I could stop her, she then leaned in like some old childhood friend who was about to kiss him back. Instead she added very, very gently, "It was four years ago; my uncle is dead; the conspiracy was completely unraveled; and no question marks ever hung over my father's or my brothers' loyalty. Sir, what I see is just a feeble excuse!"

Titus had turned back to his lustrous lady love, pretending to make a joke of it. "This is an exceptional couple!" Berenice looked as if she thought so too, though not for the same reasons. "I love them both dearly," Titus Caesar proclaimed.

I grabbed Helena's hand and tucked it firmly in my arm, pulling her back and keeping her close to me. Then I thanked Titus for his confidence in us, and took my defiant girl away.

She was extremely upset. I had seen it even before she answered. Titus, of course, had no idea. She would talk to me about it, although probably not for days. When she did speak, she would be raging. I could wait. I just kept my arm tightly around her while she controlled her immediate anger.

* * *

We walked together in silence for some distance. Since Helena was wrapped in her own thoughts, I could sink into mine. The pressure I felt upon me now was the same old dead weight. In addition to the domestic tragedy that I was trying to avert from the Laelii, my task had acquired much wider significance. This new burden, of saving Berenice from grief for Titus, was a tricky one.

So that was the ravishing Queen Berenice! If this had happened to my brother Festus, a scented notelet would have followed before he reached the street door.

Mind you, when Didius Festus visited fabulously beautiful women, he made sure that he went by himself.

XXXIX

IN NERO'S DAY the entire ground floor of the Esquiline Wing of the Golden House had been given over to dining rooms. There were matched pairs, one half looking into a spacious courtyard, the complementary mirrored groups facing out over the Forum, where Nero installed a wildlife park but where Vespasian was now building his Amphitheatre. With his rather different lifestyle, Nero had needed not one elegant hall for feeding flatterers--his best being the famous Octagonal Room--but complex suites in threes or fives that would contain the wild parties he loved. It was among the labyrinth of these that we had seen Titus.

The Flavians were another breed from Nero. They conducted most official imperial business in the old Palace of the Caesars, high on the Palatine. It was said they intended to dismantle the Golden House soon. It represented not just hated luxury, but Nero's contempt for the people he had deliberately burned out and displaced in order to build it. The Flavians respected the people. At any rate, they would do, so long as the people respected them. But they were also frugal. While their predecessor's mad, gloriously ornate dwelling still existed, it did seem proper to them that Rome--in the person of the frugal Flavians--should make use of it. It had cost a great deal and Vespasian was hot on the value-for-money principle.

I had been here for private meetings before, and for one formal conference held in the Octagon. Titus often lurked here when he was off duty. He would call me in sometimes for a staid heart-to-heart.

The place was vast. Tall frescoed corridors ran in all directions. Most of the rooms were not too ostentatious sizewise, but they ran into each other in a bemusing honeycomb. There were peculiar backdoubles and dead ends, due to this wing having been hewn from the naked rock under the Oppian Hill. Unescorted, it would have been easy to get lost.

There was a casual atmosphere. Occasional Praetorian Guards had parked themselves in corridors, not least because Titus was their commander now. On the whole, nobody looked at visitors too closely, and it seemed possible to wander at will.

Somehow, you never did. Somehow your feet were guided out of the building quite rapidly and on what I was coming to realize was a well-worn path. The result was that despite the huge number of rooms, with their variety of exits and entrances, and despite the temptation to tiptoe into them to collect ideas for home decor, if two groups of people were visiting Titus on the same evening for the same purpose, although it hardly seemed feasible, they would actually end up face-to-face.

That was how Helena and I met Rubella and Petronius.

* * *

Those two big snide bastards were not pleased.

"Looks like we got to the buffet first," I greeted them. I knew they would be hopping mad that the vigiles were firmly refused permission to investigate the Laelius house, whereas I had been called in specially. The gap between private informers and the vigiles would never close. "Don't worry; I gave Titus Caesar a thorough briefing. You can just show your faces, then bunk off back to your patrol house."

"Skip it, Falco," growled my onetime partner, Petro.

"All right. Owning-up time: I've failed to find any trace of the lost baby. How about you boys?"

"Nothing," Rubella deigned to say. The Fourth Cohort tribune was a wide, tough, shaven-headed ex-centurion who practiced the lowest degree of fairness and unpleasantness. In that, he was better than average. Fanatical ambition had hauled him up all the rungs in the vigiles; he really wanted to be a Praetorian. Still, so do lots of lads.

At his side Petronius looked taller, less wide in the body yet more powerful in the shoulder, quieter, a couple of pounds heavier because of his height, and far less intense. He was in brown leather, with a thong twisted around his head to hold down his straight hair during a tussle, triple-soled boots so heavy it made my feet tired just looking at them, and a night stick through his wide belt. He was a good-looking boy, my old tentmate.

I gave him an ironical grin of approval. "The luscious Berenice will love you!"

"As he said, skip it, Falco." That came from Helena. She was still subdued over the unfair snub to her brother. I introduced her to Rubella, though he had worked out who she was.

"Falco is tired," she announced. "I am taking him home to recover from gawping at flashy Judaean pulchritude."

"Have you given up the search?" Petro asked, sticking to the job in hand. He had a prudish streak. Alone with me, he would happily discuss leer-worthy women, but he believed it improper for women to know that that was what men did.

"Not me. How about you lot?"

"We'll find her if she's out on the streets. But will you, if she is still at home?"

Temporarily riled, I abandoned my plan of asking him to join me tomorrow. Obviously, the raucous members of the Fourth Cohort--and probably members of all the other six--were just standing around watching and waiting for me to make a mess of the task. I would disappoint them. But I needed to keep all options open: "Don't let's quarrel when a child's life is at stake."

"Who's quarreling?"

Petronius was, but thinking about Gaia, I changed my mind again about tomorrow: "Lucius Petronius, I just asked Numentinus for permission to bring you in, for the benefit of your experience."

Petronius mimed an irritating bow. "Marcus Didius, whenever you're stuck, just ask me to set you right."

"For heaven's sake, stop playing about, you two," Helena grumbled.

I shrugged, and prepared to leave. Rubella decided to take a hand. To him, normally, I was an interfering amateur whom he would like to lock in a cell until my boots rotted off. Tonight, since he always overruled Petro and since Petro was niggling, he chose amicable cooperation. "Anything you need, Falco?"

"Thanks, but no thanks. It is a routine house search, and the family are not being difficult. Well, not that I can see."

"Found anything to help us?"

"I don't think so. The last time the girl was seen she was at home. She ought to be still there. There are no known external contacts." Well, apart from me. I chose not to dwell on that. Rubella was suspicious as Hades. He would love to arrest me on a trumped-up charge of personal involvement. "I have seen no sign that the Laelii are concealing a ransom demand. All the problems that I know about are family ones. That's going to be the answer."

"They do have problems." Rubella loved to repeat part of your briefing as though it was his own. I caught Petro's eye. He and I had always reckoned that persons in senior positions stole our ideas.

"Plenty. By the way--are either of you law-and-order experts able to tell me this about the rules for guardians?" I asked them. "Could a son who was still officially in his father's control accept the job?"

"Oh yes." It was Petro who answered. "It's a civic duty. Like voting. Anyone who has come of age is entitled to do it, whatever his status otherwise. I thought you yourself would be standing guardian for Maia now, Falco."

"Jupiter! I would hate to be the person who told Maia she had to report formally to me."

Petro gave me an odd look, almost as though he felt I was abandoning my sister.

"So what's that to do with the missing girl?" Rubella asked.

"Gaia's father spun me some yarn. There was talk of legal pleas and all sorts--all for nothing, apparently. Either the father is up to something extraordinarily devious--or he is, as
his
father defines him, a complete idiot."

"Where is this idiot?" Rubella mused.

I told him where Laelius Scaurus lived. "I advised the family to inform him that Gaia was lost--"

"Oh, we can do better than that," said the tribune, smirking. "If his darling daughter is in terrible trouble, we must bring the poor suffering man to Rome as quickly as possible--in fact, he can have an official escort of vigiles to clear the way for him!"

Refusing the assistance of the vigiles, as Numentinus would find, was unwise. Their cohort tribunes do not submit to rebuff.

I grinned. "Dear me. Laelius Scaurus received an innocent, priestly upbringing. This will be a terrible shock. He will think you are arresting him."

"So he will!" Rubella grinned evilly.

I had no idea what good this could possibly do, but anything unexpected can shake people up to good effect. To have the Fourth Cohort of vigiles explain his legal rights and responsibilities would certainly alarm Scaurus.

However, I was not sure I wanted to be in Rubella's shoes when this influential family complained with shrieks of outrage to the Prefect of the City that one of them had been subjected to an unfair arrest. The Laelii were more than just influential. They were being treated with elaborate care by the highest authorities--and I still did not know why.

XL

INCREDIBLY IT WAS still eight days before the Ides of June. Dusk had fallen, but this was the same day that I rose at dawn and went to the House of the Vestals, trying to meet Constantia, followed her to Egeria's Spring, was sent for by Rutilius Gallicus, and gained entrance to search the Laelius house. Now I had endured a visit to the Golden House as well. This was as long a day as I ever wanted to endure, but it was not over yet.

"You take the litter. Go home and rest," said Helena. She sounded wan.

"Where's Julia?"

"I managed to find Gaius." When my scruffy nephew could be deterred from totting in the backstreets, he made a dedicated nursemaid (if we paid him enough). "I told him to sleep in our bed if we were late."

"You'll regret that. He's never clean. What are you up to, as if I don't know?"

"I had better walk over to my father's house and break this news about my brother's fate."

I went with her, of course.

* * *

The senator lent me his barber, and they gave me more to eat. While I was being cleaned up and pampered, I had a lot to think about. It did not really concern the Camilli and their dead traitor. For me, Publius Camillus Meto was a closed case. His relations, however, would never be free of him. Memories for scandal are long in Rome. A family could have scores of statesmanly ancestors, but biographers would dwell on their one ancient traitor.

When I rejoined the party, they were all absorbed in frantic debate over their new suffering. Aelianus saw me appear in the doorway; he rose and led me to an anteroom, asking for a private word. The conversation in the salon behind him dropped slightly, as his parents and Helena watched him draw me aside.

"Aelianus, you have to ask your father for the details." My situation had always been difficult; I badly wanted to avoid anybody finding out that I had disposed of Publius down a sewer.

"Father told me what happened. I was abroad. I came home and found my uncle gone, and what he had done settling on us like blight. Now I am stuck with the results, it seems. Falco, you were involved--"

"Anything beyond what your father has told you is confidential, I'm afraid."

"So I am being shafted, yet I cannot be told why?"

"You know enough. Yes, it is unfair," I sympathized. "But a stigma was inevitable. At least there were no wholesale executions, or confiscation of property."

"I always rather liked Uncle Publius." That aspect must frighten his parents, though I did not tell Aelianus so. They feared he might yet follow his uncle in temperament. He too was restless and impatient with society. Like his uncle, Aelianus might lose patience with the rules and seek out his own solutions, unless he was handled just right in the next few years. An outsider. Latent trouble.

For a moment, I wondered whether this was the kind of trouble the Laelius family had gone through with Scaurus.

"Your uncle seemed quite hard to get close to." To me, he had had a cold, almost gloomy outlook.

"Yes, but he was supposed to have lived a wild life; he spent all that time abroad; he lived on the edge. He had an illegitimate child too--and I heard that she was killed in peculiar circumstances." Aelianus stopped.

"Sosia," I said reproachfully. "Yes, I know how she was killed."

"She was just a girl. I don't really remember her, Falco."

"I do." I stared him down, as I fought back a tear.

* * *

Aelianus still wanted to press me for information. He was out of luck. I was sinking under the effects of a long, depressing day. I had two choices now: to collapse and sleep, or to keep alert in the search for little Gaia by tackling some new activity. This was what I had been brooding on, while the barber grazed my neck. As I lay still, while I tried to avoid having my throat cut, my body had rested and my mind cleared. My thoughts had had time to concentrate, as they had not done all that afternoon while I was bound up in physical effort at the Laelius house.

Now I knew what was needed next. I also knew I required help. The best person would be Lucius Petronius, but in fairness to him I could not ask. He had already nearly lost his job over his dalliance with the gangster's daughter. What I planned was far too big a risk.

"So what's your advice to me, Falco?" Aelianus asked, surprisingly.

"Forget the past."

"I have to live with it."

"Build for the future. The Arvals were probably the wrong choice for you anyway: too much of a clique, too restrictive and backward looking. You don't want to dance around some grove where mad wives are killing their corn-wreathed husbands with sacrificial knives." I remembered something I wanted to tackle him about. "By the way, I hear you asked the Chief Spy to discover who the victim was?"

Aelianus had the grace to blush slightly. "We were getting nowhere--"

"We? It was your puzzle, which you told me you were giving up anyway."

"Sorry."

"Right."

"Anyway, Anacrites is useless, Falco. I never got an answer."

"He told me instead. Ventidius Silanus is the man's name. Ever heard of him?" Aelianus shook his head. "Nor me." I gazed at him quietly. "I was surprised you had approached Anacrites."

"Well, it seemed the only hope. I had done all I could. I even thought of riding out along the Via Appia and looking at all the patrician tombs for evidence of a recent funeral. There was nothing. If that's where the urn went, all the funerary flowers and so forth have been swept up."

He had really shown initiative. I hid my astonishment. "You're lucky. The Chief Spy does not know."

"Know what, Falco?"

I let him stew just long enough. "But he could easily find out."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, the evidence is still sitting there in his pigeonholes. I am amazed you should have risked reminding him. Of course, somebody else could do so."

"You?" He was starting to notice my threats.

"You're in my power!" I grinned. Then I got tough. "You were entrusted with a secret document, on which the fate of the Baetican oil industry, and perhaps the whole province of Hispania Baetica, hung. You let it fall into the hands of the very men named as conspirators. You allowed them the time and opportunity to alter it. Then, realizing you had betrayed your trust, you pretended not to notice and handed in the corrupt scroll, in silence, to the Chief Spy."

Aelianus was very still.

"Just like Uncle Publius, really," I taunted him. "And we know what then happened to him--well, no; we have to imagine it." I stopped, imagining all too vividly the stench of the traitor's gaseous and disintegrating body. "Now listen hard: Anacrites is extremely dangerous. If you want a career--in fact, if you want any kind of future at all--don't tangle with him."

The young man ran a dry tongue over drier lips. "So what now, Falco?"

"Now," I said, "I have to attempt something that is sheer madness. But I am fortunate because you, Aulus, do owe me a large debt. So you--without any argument or hesitation, and certainly without telling your family--will be coming along to support me."

"That is fair," he acknowledged. He put a brave face on it. "What is my task?"

"Just holding a ladder."

He blinked. "I can do that."

"Good. You will have to be very quiet while I climb up. We cannot risk discovery."

He looked more nervous. "Is this something illegal, Falco?" Sharp fellow!

"About as illegal as it can be. You and I, trusty comrade, are about to break into the House of the Vestals."

Aelianus knew it was bad news, but it took him a moment to remember precisely that for an offense against the Vestal Virgins, the penalty was death.