The Silver Pigs (15 page)

XXXVIII

A reception party was waiting for us in her father's street.

We had arrived without incident in the Capena Gate Sector, jiggled down a few side streets then lurched towards the senator's house. The chairs stopped. We were both climbing out. Helena gasped. I turned: four or five slave market rejects were rushing us. Each had a pointed hat pulled down more securely over his face than his smallpox scars required, and one hand buried under his cloak as if whatever was hidden there would not be a satchel of bread rolls and country cheese.

"Hercules, lady! Bang the bell until someone comes!"

Helena flew to her father's door as I rapidly unhooked a sedan chair's carrying rod.

I glanced around. Passers-by were melting off the pavements into goldsmiths and flower shops, open for the evening trade with lanterns on their porticos. The area was far too select to expect help. The strollers were vanishing like bursting bubbles on the Tiber in flood.

The rejects were brisk, but not as brisk as me. Under the cloaks they were carrying thorn wood cudgels, but after three months in a lead mine I had more pent-up aggression than they may have realized. I could do a lot of damage whirling an eight-foot pole.

Eventually Camillus burst out with his slaves in response to her ladyship's spirited bell jangling. The rejects abruptly scattered. They left a trail of blood and one man dead. He had lunged at Helena. I hauled her sideways, pulling out the knife I stash down my boot, then stamped his shin like a soldier and stabbed upwards as he came. It would never have stopped anyone who had an army training, but plainly he had not; I finished him.

It is illegal to carry a weapon in Rome. Still, I was defending a senator's daughter; no prosecution lawyer could make a magistrate convict. Besides, I hadn't endured her for fourteen hundred miles to give her up on the home doorstep and throw away my double fee.

Camillus Verus, sword in hand, breathed heavily and surveyed the lively scene. Chaos welled round us, seeping down the street. Dusk made everything seem more ominous.

"Lost them! Out of touch, but I nicked one"

"Not bad, sir. I'll introduce you at my fencing gym!"

"Falco, you look a bit sick."

"Overwhelmed by the warmth of our welcome..."

Killing people has a bad effect on me.

Both the senator and his wife, who came flittering out among her flock of slab-faced maids, were waiting to embrace their noble child. Once I grabbed her I had forgotten to let go. (A good rule with women, though difficult to follow up in a crowd.) It was probably the first time her honourable parents saw Helena Justina white-faced and silent, crushed to the palpitating chest of a badly shaved, mad-eyed ruffian waving a bloody knife. I released her with a hasty gesture into the arms of her papa.

He was so shocked at having nearly lost her that for a moment he lost all powers of speech.

I sat quaking on the edge of a great flower tub while Helena Justina was passed about. Since no one liked to scold me for their fright, everyone scolded her. She seemed too stunned to object. I watched, so used to my role as her protector that I felt awkward hanging back here.

"Well done, Falco!" Her father strode across and hauled me to my feet. Then he asked, in the voice of a man who had money riding on my reply, "Everything go well on your trip?"

"Oh, the quietness of the journey matched the thin pay!"

Helena shot me a tricky look. I gazed at the evening sky like a man who was simply very tired.

Decimus sent a message to the magistrate about the man I had killed, and in sharp order the body was tidied off his frontage at public expense. I heard no more about the incident.

No doubt what these villains wanted: when they all suddenly ran, our baggage skipped off with them.

I organized a search party and the Camillus slaves soon trundled back with our stuff, which they found abandoned only two streets away. I set a candelabrum on the cool tiled floor of the senator's hall. I was on my knees, spreading open each pack for a systematic check; Helena crouched alongside, helping me. While I searched we spoke to each other in the low voices of people who had travelled together for weeks. Her mother looked uneasy, though we were too busy to deal with that. Everyone we met on the journey had livened up their own dull days by imagining some scandal; both of us were used to ignoring it. Even so, I sensed Julia Justa now viewed me as an embarrassment. I had to smile to myself: my proud young lady's elegant mother harried her as much as mine did me.

These are hardly disturbed; there's very little gone," I told Helena Justina, consulting her like my partner in the case.

"My uncle's letter"

"Not fatal. Pointless in fact he can write again."

Something else. Something that had belonged to me.

At the moment when I realized, Helena must have seen my face. I knew from her look my own expression had become positively grey.

"Oh Falco -"

I touched her wrist. "Lass, it doesn't matter."

"But it does!"

I simply shook my head.

They had taken the jet bracelet, the one Helena gave to Sosia and Sosia gave to me.

XXXIX

The senator decided to go to the Palace that night. He would report all we knew, not least how we suspected that Domitian was involved. For me, nothing to do until further instructions; I could manage that.

They offered me dinner and a night in a feather bed, but I went home. For various reasons I wanted time on my own.

The laundry was closed so I left the adventure of greeting Lenia until next day. Six flights of stairs are an indecent obstacle to a travel-weary man. Trudging upwards, I decided to move house. When I reached my apartment, I grew stubborn and decided to stay.

Nothing had changed. There was an outer room in which a dog might just turn round if he was a thin dog with his tail between his legs. A wonky table, a slanty bench, shelf of pots, bank of bricks, gridiron, wine jars (filthy), rubbish basket (overflowing)...

But my table was standing in the wrong place. The cooking bricks were blackened with soot. Some soulless bastard was starving a sparrow in a cage: someone else was living in my house.

I smelt him first. The air throbbed with the dusky reek of used woollen tunics, unwashed for a month. There was a cheesy scarlet dinner-robe I failed to recognize, and a pair of slippers whose whiff rushed to greet me from the far side of the room. Despite Decimus paying full whack to Smaractus, my disreputable landlord had let a hot-wine waiter with every kind of body odour invade my office as a subtenant while I was away.

He was out. At that moment, it was lucky for him.

I turfed his stuff onto the balcony, kicked his slippers across the landing outside the front door, fed his sparrow, then rearranged the squalor to suit me. I ate the anchovy eggs he had left in my favourite bowl; they tasted three days old. When he turned up he had greasy hair, bad teeth and a tendency to fart when he was frightened, which soon occurred whenever I glanced his way. That was quite often; he was the type you keep your eye on all the time.

I informed this wretch that whatever he was paying Smaractus, he ought to be paying me so either he could sleep outside with the stars until he found another room or I would throw him straight out now. He chose the balcony.

"You've eaten my eggs!"

"Bad luck," I said, scowling. He was not to know I was scowling because that expression had reminded me of someone else.

I won't say I missed her. Filthy-tempered women who reckon their lives are tragedies are two a penny where I live. What I missed was the warm sense of earning money just by keeping her company. I missed taking responsibility for another human being. I even missed the pulse of excitement wondering whatever the daft girl would do to irritate me next.

News still travelled fast in the Aventine. Petronius Longus banged in a good hour before I expected him; his familiar solid presence and that familiar modest grin. He had grown a beard. It looked terrible. I told him; he said nothing, but I knew next time I saw him he would have shaved.

The hot-wine waiter had discovered and drunk my cellar (though he denied it, since lying is what hot-wine waiters do best). Luckily Petro had lugged up an amphora of his favourite Campagnan. He perched on a bench, leaning back against the wall with his long legs stretched to the table and his booted heels up on its edge, balancing his cup on his stomach comfortably. It seemed a long time since I had last seen Petronius making himself at home. Taking one look at my gaunt face and frame, he merely asked, "Rough?"

Nursing my ribcage, I summed up the past four months for him: "Rough!"

He was perfectly prepared to endure the whole story, but knew what I needed at that moment was a long stiff drink alongside a quiet friend. His brown eyes gleamed. "And how was the lady client?"

Petronius has always been fascinated by the flocks of ardent women he visualizes besieging me. Usually I oblige him with salacious details even if I have to make them up. He could tell I was exhausted when all I managed was, "Nothing to brag about. Just an ordinary girl."

Give you any trouble?" he queried longingly. I forced a sad smile. "Oh, I soon sorted her out." He didn't believe me; I didn't believe myself. We drank all his red Campagnan, without water, then I think I fell asleep.

XL

Helena Justina visited my office the next day. It was extremely embarrassing because I had a young lady in a short ruby tunic sprawled across my lap with her legs in the air; this chancy miss was sharing my breakfast and being rather silly about it too. The miss was pretty, the scene intimate, and Helena the last person I expected to see.

Helena Justina looked neat and cool in floating white, and I felt distinctly awkward that that light-robed stately creature had struggled up six flights to my grim hole before I had had a shave.

"I would have run down"

"Not at all. I was longing to see you enthroned in your kingdom!" She surveyed me fastidiously, sniffing at the sordid air. The place looks clean. Does somebody look after you? I expected gloomy great swags of spiders' web and evidence of rats."

Somebody my mama had bustled round earlier, so the spiders had temporarily hopped it under the rafters with the pigeons. I tried not to think about the rats.

I shifted my giggly armful sideways onto the bench.

"Go and wait on the balcony."

"That man's there! He stinks!"

The waiter; he would have to go. I sighed. Her ladyship gave me a maddening smile.

"M Didius Falco: half-asleep and cradling a wine cup Bit early, Falco, even for you?"

"Hot milk," I croaked.

It sounded as if I was lying, so Helena leaned over the table to see: it was hot milk.

The senator's daughter, amid her usual impolite aura of perfumed condescension, sat on the chair I keep for clients and stared at my squirming companion. I gave in.

This is Marcia, my favourite little friend." Marcia, my favourite friend, aged three, cuddled up possessively and glared over my arm in a gruff way that probably reminded Helena of me. I gripped the neck of her tunic, hoping to keep her under some kind of control.

Then to my horror the senator's daughter held out her arms to Marcia and heaved her over the table with the confidence of a person who has always been good with children until then. I thought of that clean, well-behaved little maiden I had seen on her lap in Londinium, and cursed inwardly. Marcia flopped like a sack in her arms looking thoughtful, gazed up at her, deliberately dribbled, then blew bubbles with the spit.

"Behave," I instructed feebly. "Wipe your face."

Marcia wiped her face on the nearest material, which was the embroidered end of Helena Justina's long white scarf.

"Is she yours?" Helena asked me in a guarded tone.

It was my own affair if I let myself be used as a morning nursery school, so I just said, "No."

That was rude, even for me, so I condescended to add, "My niece." Marcia was the child my brother Festus never knew about.

"She's difficult because you spoil her," Helena commented.

I told her somebody had to; she seemed satisfied with that.

Marcia began to examine Helena's earrings, which had blue glass beads hung on gold links. If she pulled the beads off she would eat them before I could reach across the table and grab them back. Fortunately they seemed well-soldered together and firmly hooked onto her ladyship's delicate ears. I myself would have gone for the ears, which lay close to her head and were pleading to be nibbled. Helena looked as if she guessed what I was thinking. Rather stiffly I enquired what I could do for her.

"Falco, my parents are dining tonight at the Palace; you're wanted there too."

Trough with Vespasian?" I was outraged. "Certainly not; I'm a strict republican!"

"Oh Didius Falco, don't make such a fuss!" Helena snapped.

Marcia stopped blowing bubbles.

"Keep still!" I instructed as she suddenly rolled about, chortling with exaggerated glee; the child was as heavy and ungainly as a calf. "Look, give her back; I can't talk to you while I'm worrying"

Helena gripped her, sat her upright, dried her face again (identifying for herself the cloth I kept for this task) while competently straightening her earrings as she continued to do business with me. "She's no trouble. There's no need to talk; Falco, you talk too much."

"My papa's an auctioneer."

"I can believe that! Just stop worrying." I sealed my lips in a bitter line. For a moment she seemed to have finished, then she confessed, "Falco, I've tried to see Pertinax." I said nothing, since what I would have said was unfit for her respectable shell-like ears. The spectre of another girl in white, lying still at my feet, was strangling me. "I went to the house. I suppose I wanted to confront him. He was not there"

"Helena I protested.

"I know; I should never have gone," she muttered swiftly.

"Lady, never walk in alone on a man to inform him he's a criminal! He knows that. He's likely to prove it by coming at you with the first weapon to hand. Did you tell anybody where you were going?"

"He was my husband; I wasn't afraid"

"You should have been!"

Quite suddenly her tone melted: "And now you are afraid for me! Truly, I'm sorry." A sick shiver ran round me under my belt. "I wanted to take you"

"I would have come."

"Provided I asked you properly?" she teased.

If I see you in that kind of trouble," I said tersely, "you won't have to ask."

Her eyes widened, with a look of surprise and shock.

I drank my milk.

I was settling down again. Marcia lolled her tousled head against Helena's handsome bosom, watching us. I watched the child well that was my excuse as Helena cajoled me, "Will you come tonight? It's a free dinner, Falco! One of your employers has rushed from abroad to meet you. You know you're too inquisitive to let that pass."

"Employers plural!"

She said there were two possibly three, though probably not. I tried suggesting two meant double rates but she retorted: "Your rates are what my father agreed! Wear a toga; bring your dinner napkin. You might consider investing in a shave. And please, Falco, try not to embarrass me..."

"No need, lady you embarrass yourself. Give me back my niece!" I snarled venomously; so at last she did.

When she had gone, Marcia and I walked onto the balcony hand in hand. We hauled out the hot-wine waiter, who had been snoring in a loincloth on a pallet, and waited in his foul fug until Helena Justina emerged into the street. We watched her climb aboard her chair, her head far below like a shining teakwood knob amidst a foam of snowy veils. She did not look up; I was sorry about that.

"That lady's lovely!" decided Marcia, who normally liked men. (I encouraged that condition, on the premise that if she liked men when she was three she would grow out of it and leave me a lot less to worry about by the time she was thirteen.)

"That lady has never been lovely to me!" I growled.

Marcia gave me a sideways look that was surprisingly mature.

"Oh Didius Falco, don't make such a fuss!"

I went to visit Pertinax myself. Everything I had told Helena was true; it was a stupid thing to do. Luckily the bullying lout was still not at home.