Birds of Prey (3 page)

Gaius shrugged. “Sure,” he agreed. “I'll catch you there.” The glance he cast over his shoulder as he walked off was from concern over Perennius, not because the older man was manipulating him.

The agent took a deep breath. “Look,” he said to Maximus in a calm, even friendly, tone, “if you wear your body armor, you'll live longer. Whether or not that's a benefit to the Empire sort of depends on whether you have sense enough to take good advice.”

Maximus nodded stiffly, but there was no belief in his eyes—only fear of the result of giving the wrong answer to a test that he did not begin to understand.

Perennius sighed. He looked at the older guard, the one with the mail shirt and the scar snaking up his right arm to where the sleeve of his tunic hid it. The infantryman smiled back at the agent. The expression was forced but perhaps it was the more notable for that. “Quintus Sestius Cotyla,” he volunteered. “Third Centurion of the Fourth Battalion, Palatine Foot.”

“Tell him about it,” Perennius said with a nod toward the younger guard. “When the shit comes down, habits'll either save you or get your ass killed. For a soldier, walking around on duty without armor is a damned bad habit. But blazes, I've got work to do, I guess.”

Sestius nodded. He rapped sharply on the door with a swagger stick. “Pass one,” he called through the triangular communication grate.

“The tribune doesn't object so long as our brightwork's polished,” said Maximus unexpectedly. He held a rigid brace with his eyes on the opposite building instead of on the man he was addressing.

The door groaned and began to swing inward. Perennius looked at the guard without anger. “Your tribune,” he said “may not have seen as many feet of intestine spilled as I have, sonny. But, like I say, it's a problem that'll cure itself sooner or later.” He stepped between the men into the short passageway that led to the shabby elegance of the entrance hall.

The interior of the building was very dark by contrast to the sunlit street. Perennius nodded to the functionary who had opened the door, but he did not notice that the fellow had raised a hand for attention. “A moment, sir,” the man said in a sharp voice as Perennius almost walked into the bar separating the passage from the hall proper.

The hall was a pool of light which spilled through the large roof vent twenty feet above. The agent's eyes adapted well enough to see by the scattered reflection that the man who spoke was too well dressed to be simply a slave used as a doorkeeper. There was a shimmer of silk woven into the linen of his tunic. “Your pass, sir,” he said with his hand out. Beside him stirred the heavy-set man with a cudgel, the civilian equivalent of the two uniformed men outside. Since the last time Perennius had been here, the Bureau had added its own credentials check to duplicate that of the army. Clerks seated at desks filling the hall glanced up at the diversion.

Perennius fingered out his diploma again and handed it to the doorman. “First,” he said, “I need to see a fellow named Zopyrion, Claudius Zopyrion, in one of the finance sections.”

The doorman ignored what the agent was saying. He closed the document with a snap and a smile. “Very good, Legate Perennius,” he said in a bright voice. “The Director has requested that you be passed through to him at once. His office is—”

“I know where the Director's office is,” Perennius said quietly. He could feel muscles knotting together, but he managed not to let his fists clench as they wanted to do. Rome always did this to him; it wasn't
fair.
“First I need to see—”

“You can take care of your travel vouchers later, I'm sure, Legate,” the functionary interrupted. His smile was a caricature, now, warping itself into a sneer. “The Director says—”

“Read my lips!”
the agent hissed. His voice did not carry to the assembled clerks, but the bruiser in the passage straightened abruptly. “I said, I'll see Navigatus when I've finished my business with Zopyrion. Now, if you want to tell me where to find the bastard, fine. Otherwise—” and his eyes measured the bruiser with cool detachment before flicking back to the doorman—“I guess I'll go look for myself.” Unconquered Sun, Father of Life! He should never have come back.

“Upstairs,” the doorman said. He slid aside a curtain behind him. There was a doorway, punched through a frescoed wall when the house was converted. The plain wooden staircase might have been original. “He's the head of Finance Two. Follow the corridor to the left.”

“Thank you,” Perennius said with a nod. He strode to the staircase.

“I'll inform the Director that you're here, Legate,” the doorman said in a distant voice. “No doubt he'll be amused by your priorities.”

“Wish to blazes his priorities amused me, buddy,” the agent flung over his shoulder as he stamped upward. He had replaced his orders in the wallet. Now he was taking out another, similar tablet.

CHAPTER TWO

When the building was a residence, its upper floor had been divided into small cubicles—slave quarters, storage, and ladder-served additions to the shops and rental housing on the exterior of the lower floor. The open peristyle court and the garden provided light wells for the rooms to the rear. The entrance hall, though double height, was roofed except for the vent which served as a skylight and fed the pool beneath it. The area at the top of the stairs was lighted and ventilated only by the outside windows.

Most of the partition walls had been knocked down during conversion. The windows were opened out from their frames like vertical louvers to catch what breeze wandered through the maze of higher buildings and surrounding hills. Even so, the atmosphere within was warm and stuffy. Perennius unpinned his cloak and gripped it with his left hand. Even in the street, he had worn the garment mostly to keep his weapons from being too obtrusive. The sword and dagger were legal for him but he preferred to avoid the hassle of explanations.

A unit of forty or so clerks occupied the area to the left of the staircase. They sat on low stools in front of desks which were boards slanted from pedestals with holes for ink pots. There was an aisle between the desks and the enclosed main hall. Perennius followed the aisle in accordance with the doorkeeper's instructions. The room was alive with noise. Most of the clerks read aloud the reports which they copied or epitomized. Baskets of scrolls and tablets sat on the floor beside each desk. The din seemed to bother neither the men who were working nor those who were talking with others at neighboring desks. Some of the clerks worked and chatted simultaneously. Their fingers and pens followed lines of manuscript while their tongues discussed the chariot races of the day before.

A supervisor almost walked into Perennius at the corner. “Yes sir?” the man said, startled into Greek.

“I need Claudius Zopyrion,” the agent replied. He flashed the document in his hand so that the other man could see the name of the addressee. Battle in closed ranks had made Perennius as facile at separating information from noise as any of the gobbling clerks around him.

The supervisor gestured down the aisle in the direction from which he had come. Perennius edged around the corner so that he could follow the pointing finger. A dozen cubicles remained along the outside wall, though the partitions of most of the rooms which had faced the light wells had been removed to seat more clerks. “Third office on the left,” the supervisor said.

“Thanks,” replied the agent. “And who's his boss? Zopyrion's?”

“Gnaeus Calgurrio,” the other man said. He had begun to frown, but he did not ask the agent's business. “Head of Finance. First office.”

Perennius smiled his gratitude and walked off in the indicated direction. He could feel the bureaucrat's eyes follow him past the ranks of clerks.

The first office was double the width of the others in the row. As Perennius stepped past, he caught a glimpse through the doorway of a plump, balding man reclining on a brocaded couch. Seated upright between the couch and the door was a younger man with hard eyes and a face as ruthless in repose as Perennius' own. Perfect, the agent thought. He had no immediate need for the department head and his aide, however. Not until he had prepared things in the second office over.

Perennius slipped in the door and closed it before the cubicle's inhabitant could more than glance up from the scroll in his hand. “Zopyrion?” the agent asked in a husky whisper.

“Herakles! Who are you?” the other demanded. Zopyrion was a short man with the cylindrical softness that marked him as a eunuch more clearly than his smooth chin. Like his department head, Zopyrion had a couch and window; but only one window and a couch with a frame of turned wood instead of the filigree of his superior's.

The section head spoke Latin with a pronounced Carian accent. Perennius answered in that dialect, though he was not fully fluent in it. The partitions separating the offices were thin, and the agent wanted only Zopyrion to understand him at the moment. “I've got a letter from Simonides,” the agent said, proferring the sealed tablet in his hand. “He said for me to take back an answer.”

There was a one-legged tablet near the head of the couch. It held writing instruments. “Simonides?” the bureaucrat repeated as he took the document. He picked up a stylus with which to break the thread which held the tablet closed. Concern had replaced the initial anger in his voice.

“Simonides of Antioch, the banker,” Perennius said as he stepped closer. “You know, the one you used to wash the—”

“Silence, by Herakles!” Zopyrion gasped. He too had slipped into his native Carian. That was a result of confusion rather than a conscious desire for secrecy, however. He looked down at the document in his hand.

It was a tablet of three waxed wooden leaves, hollowed to keep the writing from being flattened to illegibility when they were closed. Zopyrion began to read the first page in a low sing-song, holding the page by habit at a flat angle to the light so that shadows brought the wax impressions into relief. “‘Simonides, son of Eustachios, greets Sextus Claudius Zopyrion. I return herewith the draft by which you ordered me to transfer two hundred gold solidi from Imperial accounts to your brother-in-law, Nelius Juturnus.…'” The clerk looked up again in utter, abject terror at Perennius, who now stood beside him. The agent's left hand rested on the table, covering the alabaster ink pot there. “Why in the name of Fortune did he write this?” Zopyrion demanded.

The agent laughed. “Oh,” he said, “maybe it was when I asked him which orifice he wanted to swallow my sword through, hey? But take a look at the draft—” he tapped with his right forefinger the pair of pages which were still closed. “You know, it seems to me your department head's seal is a bit fuzzy, like somebody used a plaster copy instead of the original.”

Zopyrion's eyes followed the tapping finger. As his head bent slightly, Perennius hit him behind the ear with the base of the ink pot. It was an awkward, left-handed blow, but there was enough muscle behind it to spill the clerk flaccidly onto the floor. The table went over on top of him with a crash.

Perennius set the stone pot down on its side carefully, so that there would be no additional noise. There was a neat circle of ink on the palm of his left hand. He did not wipe it off, because the smear might be harder to hide than the ink where it now was. Working fast, the agent unhooked a skin of powerful wine from the inner hem of his cloak where it had been hidden. He tilted up Zopyrion's face and squirted a jet of wine into the corner of the unconscious man's mouth. The liquid drooled back down his chin. The air of the office filled with the wine's thick, sweet odor. Perennius laid the skin, still uncorked, beside the eunuch's outflung hand. Its contents leaked and pooled across the terrazzo, drawing whorls of ink into them.

The agent straightened. In a voice that even he could barely hear, he said to the fallen man, “Next time you leave somebody hanging in hostile territory, make damn sure that he doesn't make it back.”

He threw open the office door. “Sir! Sir!” he cried as he ran toward the double office at the head of the row. “Sir, you've got to come here!”

Calgurrio's sharp-eyed aide was on his feet before Perennius completed the two strides to his door. The department head himself was far slower to react, though he did swing his heavy thighs over the edge of his couch. Startled clerks leaped from stools in the aisle to crowd around the door of Zopyrion's office. “Get back!” snapped the aide. The group dissolved in a flurry fearfully righting the stools they had knocked over in their haste.

Speaking rapidly, Perennius followed the aide back to the unconscious eunuch. “A banker in Antioch wouldn't fund my mission like he was supposed to,” the agent said, “but he gave me a letter for this Claudius Zopyrion when I got to Rome. The guy was drinking when I got here—”

The aide knelt down by Zopyrion, keeping the hem of his tunic clear of the pooled ink and wine. He picked up the open tablet and skimmed it, keeping the wax side turned away from Perennius at his elbow.

“Ah, I looked at it after he fainted,” the agent said softly. “I was horrified. What sort of punishment could be sufficient for an embezzler like that?”

“What happened, Anguilus?” demanded Calgurrio as he waddled into the room. The department head stared at Zopyrion in amazement. The eunuch was beginning to moan. “Isis and the Child, what
is
this?”

Anguilus swung the door closed and handed the tablet to his superior. “I think we have a problem with Zopyrion, sir,” the aide said. Calgurrio began to read the document to himself with increasing astonishment. To Perennius, Anguilus whispered, “And just who are you, good sir?” The words were polite, but there was no deference in the aide's tone. His face was as blank as a sheet of marble and as hard.