The Silver Pigs (6 page)

XVI

I went back to see the senator next day. After my party with Frontinus it was an afternoon call; let's omit details of my morning. Most of it was spent in bed, though there were spasms of painful activity from time to time. When I arrived at his house the senator had mild indigestion after lunch. I had severe indigestion, though I had not been able to face lunch.

I stormed in. He was beginning to judge my moods by the suddenness of my arrival in his sanctuary. Today I popped up like a playwright's villain, cackling with malice which I was eager to share with an audience. Camillus Verus had the goodness to set aside his paperwork and let me spout my colourful spume.

"No silver bars, but I stubbed my toe on quite a plot! You lied to me, sir; more lies than a sick whore at the Temple of Isis, to much less good purpose, but just as expertly told!"

"Falco! Can I explain?"

No, he owed me a rant at least. My violent excitement held him mesmerized.

"Spare me, senator! I don't touch political work; I don't rate the risk. My mother gave one son to Vespasian in Galilee: I'm her only survivor, and surviving suits me fine!"

He looked tetchy. He considered I was belittling the political aspects. Since I considered he was, we were draughts men in stalemate.

"You'll see Vespasian assassinated? Oh Falco! Plunge the country back into civil war? Ruin the Empire? More fighting, more uncertainty, more Roman blood spilt on Roman streets?"

"People are paid heavy salaries to protect the Emperor," I rasped. "I'm paid with lies and promises!" Suddenly I lost patience. There was no future for me here. They had deceived me; they had tried to use me. Cleverer men than this had mistaken me for a country clown in a farce; cleverer men had discovered the mistake. More quietly, I brought the ridiculous piece of theatre to an end.

"Vespasian doesn't like informers; I don't like Emperors. I thought I liked you, but any poor sprat out of his depth can make a mistake! Good day, sir."

I stormed out again. He let me go. I had noticed before, Decimus Camillus Verus was a shrewd man.

I was striding angrily across the hall with its spluttery fountain when I heard a hiss.

"Falco!" It was Sosia. "Come into the garden; come and talk!"

It would have been incorrect to gossip with the young lady of the house even if I had remained in her uncle's employ. I try not to upset senators by meddling with their wards in their own front halls where the servants see everything that goes on. If I spoke to Sosia at all which I must do now, since her noble personage had spoken to me any chat must be quick. And we should stay in the hall.

I scuffed the marble floor tiles with my heel.

"Oh Didius Falco, please!"

From sheer spite I followed her.

She led me to an internal courtyard I had not seen before. Glaring white stonework fought the cold black-green of clipped cypress trees. There were cooing doves and a bigger fountain which worked. A peacock screeched behind one of the lichen covered urns, which were planted with stately white lilies. It was a cool, pretty, quiet place, but I refused to sink into the shade under the pergola and be soothed. Sosia sat; I faced her, on my feet, with my arms folded. In some ways this was just as well; however much I was tempted to slide an arm around her, I had denied myself the chance.

She was wearing a red dress hemmed with damson braid. It emphasized the paleness of her skin beneath the artificial colours she applied. Leaning towards me with a pinched and troubled face, she was for a moment a wan little creature. She seemed apologetic on behalf of her family, though as she tried to win me over she became more earnest than I had ever seen her. Somebody at sometime had taught her how to stand her ground.

"I overheard. Falco, you can't let Vespasian be murdered; he's going to be a good Emperor!"

"I doubt it," I said.

"He's not cruel; he's not mad. He leads a simple life. He works hard. He's old, but he has a gifted son This came out with spirit; she believed it, though I knew such a theory could not originate with her. I was surprised to find the Emperor could claim such support, for he lacked all the traditional advantages. None of Vespasian's family had ever held high office. I did not blame him for that; neither had any of mine.

"Who stuffed you with this horsehair?" I raged.

"Helena."

Helena. The cousin she had mentioned. The senator's daughter, the one some poor sap of a husband with a great deal of luck had managed to divorce.

"I see... So what's she like, this Helena of yours?"

"She's wonderful!" Sosia exclaimed at once, but then she decided with equal certainty, "You wouldn't like her much."

"Why's that?" I laughed.

She shrugged. I had never met her cousin, yet my instinct had been to resent the woman ever since Sosia first tried to use her name as a disguise when she would not trust me. In fact my only real grudge against Helena was that I could see she wielded considerable influence over Sosia Camillina. I preferred to influence Sosia myself. I reckoned Sosia was wrong anyway. I normally liked women. But if this Helena felt protective towards her younger relative, as I gathered she did, the chances were that she would not like me.

"I write to her," Sosia explained, as if she read my thoughts.

I said nothing. I was leaving. There was no longer anything to say. I stood, half aware of the clean scents of summer flowers and the lazy warmth beating off the stones.

"I tell Helena everything."

I stared at her more kindly, smitten with unease. It is an odd fact, you feel more ashamed when you have nothing to answer for than when you are disguising some brazen act of scandal.

Since I was still silent, Sosia continued to talk. It was her one annoying habit; she never could sit quiet.

"You're really going away? I won't see you again? There's something I want to say. Marcus Didius Falco, I've been wondering for days how to"

She had used my formal name. No one ever did that. Her respectful tone was more than I could bear. I had stumbled into a real emergency. My anger fled.

"Don't!" I exclaimed urgently. "Sosia, believe me, when you need to spend days composing your script, the reason is it's best to say nothing at all!"

She hesitated.

"You don't know"

I was a spare-time poet; there were many things I would never know, but I recognized this. "Oh Sosia - I know!"

For one fantastic moment I flashed into a dream where I took Sosia Camillina into my life. I flashed back. Only a fool tries to step across the barriers of rank in that way. A man may buy himself into the middle class, or have the gold ring donated to him for services to the Emperor (especially if the services are of a dubious kind), but so long as her father and her uncle knew what they were about and her uncle must, he was a millionaire then even with that queer problem of having no mother to name, Sosia Camillina would be disposed of in some way to enhance her own position and their family bank account. Our two lives could never converge. At heart she understood, for despite her brave attempt she stared at her toes in their knotted gold sandals, biting her lip but accepting what I said.

"If I need you she began in a subdued tone.

I replied briskly, for my own sake. "You won't. In your sweet, sheltered life you have no need of anyone like me. And Sosia Camillina, I really don't need you!"

I left quickly so I should not see her face.

I walked home. Rome, my city, which had been until then a never failing solace, lay before me like a woman, secretive and beautiful, demanding and rewarding, eternally seductive. For the first time in my life, I refused to be seduced.

XVII

I did see Sosia Camillina again. She asked me to meet her. Of course I went. I went as soon as I could.

By then summer was nuzzling autumn's neck. The days seemed equally long and hot, but towards dusk the air began to cool more quickly. I went out to the Campagna for a grape gathering holiday, but my heart was never in it and I came home.

I had not been able to shift the silver pigs from my mind. This puzzle had gripped my interest; no amount of raging at the way I had been teased along by Decimus Camillus could alter that. Whenever I saw him, Petronius Longus asked after my progress. He knew how I felt, but was too enthralled for tact. I started to avoid him, which depressed me even more. In addition, the whole world was watching our new emperor Vespasian. There was no possibility of gossiping at the barber's or the baths, the racetrack or the theatre, without an awkward twinge because I could not forget what I knew.

For six weeks or longer I lay low. I bungled divorce cases, failed to serve writs, forgot the dates of court appearances, tore ligaments at the gym, insulted my family, dodged my landlord, drank too much, ate too little, gave up women for good. If I went to the theatre I lost the thread of the plot.

Then one day Lenia cornered me.

"Falco! Your girlfriend's been."

Out of habit I demanded which? I still liked to imply I was harassed by half-naked Tripolitanian acrobats every afternoon. Lenia knew perfectly well I had given up women; she missed the clip of their little sandals and the giggles on the stairs when I brought them in. She also missed the shrieks of indignation when my mother swept them out with the dust next day.

"Little miss dainty with the pedigree and bangles. I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she wrote a note upstairs..."

I took the stairs in a rush. I reached the apartment all asplutter with a hacking throat. My mother had been: a pile of mended tunics, a picture of a chariot drawn on a slate by my niece, a mullet in a covered dish. I flung these aside as I searched.

The note was in my bedroom. An odd pang caught me, to imagine Sosia there. She had pegged her message on my pile of poetry under the jet bracelet that I knew. I wondered if she noticed that "Aglaia, Radiant Goddess', was really about her. All the girls in my odes are called Aglaia, a poet needs to protect himself.

Sosia had left me a wooden tablet, unlaced from one of those four-page pocketbooks and then inscribed deeply with a stylus in a round hand that had never done serious writing:

Didius Falco, I know a place where they may keep the silver pigs. If I show you, you can claim your bonus. Will you meet me at the Golden Milestone in two hours? If you are too busy, I will go for you and see...

I pounded back downstairs in a blind panic.

"Lenia! Lenia, what time was she here"

They were waiting for me calmly, at the foot of the last flight.

Smaractusl

Below me, shadows moved, their bare feet noiseless on the stone steps: my landlord's gladiators, after my unpaid rent.

I have an arrangement with the cloak maker who lives on the second floor that in an emergency I can run through his room, fling myself over the balcony onto the fire-fighting porch, then drop into the street. I had passed the cloak maker door. I half turned back. The door opened. Someone who was not the cloak maker came out.

They were straight from Smaractus' insanitary gym and in full fighting rig. Below me, the type called myrmillons, glistening with oil above their body-belts, their right arms padded and ringed with metal from collarbone to fist, their solid high-crested helmets shaped like curling, sneering fish. Above me, when I whirled round, two light, laughing men in tunics only, but each with a fiendish net coiled on his arm his fishermen.

I whipped back.

"Didius Falco! What's the rush?"

I recognized the one who spoke. I recognized his build. He crouched slightly, in fighting stance, faceless behind his helmet grille. I must have exclaimed.

"Oh no! Not now, oh gods, not now"

"Now, Falco!"

"You can't, oh you can't -"

"Oh we can! Let's show the man..." Then both fishers flung their nets down over my head.

I knew, as I struggled hopelessly in two ten foot circles of biting cords, that it was going to be much worse than being arrested by the aedile's bullyboys. If Smaractus was just making his point, they would tenderize me like an octopus slammed on the foreshore rocks. If he had found himself a new tenant for upstairs, I was finished. It was going to be as bad as anything could be. My only comfort was that I would know very little about it once I managed to pass out, and that perhaps I would never wake up.

There were probably five of them, but it seemed more. The fishers could not be seen with their spiked tridents in the open streets, but the myrmillons had brought their wooden practice swords. As I flailed in the nets, they beat me systematically until I faded in a smother of disjointed sounds.

I was coming to. New tenants must be thin on the ground. Perhaps they had heard what life in a Smaractus apartment is like. The office was mine still; I was waking up.

Not in my room; somewhere else.

I felt desperately tired. Pain lapped around me as thick as spilt nectar, then I swirled in a torrent of sensation and fierce noise back up from the whirlpool.

"He's coming round! Say something, Falco!" Lenia ordered.

My brain uttered words. I heard no sound; my cotton ball mouth never moved.

I felt sorry for this Falco if he hurt as much as me. I had left the world for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps a hundred years. Wherever I had been was better than here, and I wanted to go back.

"Marcus!" Not Lenia any more. "Don't try to talk, son." Lenia had sent for my mother. Good heavens.

Slowly the red blur behind my eyelids solidified. Slowly I and that other poor man they called Falco fused together.

This is Who said that? Me or Falco? Him I think.

My mother's voice, acid with relief, spoke: "This is why people keep up with their rent!"

Lenia loomed over me, her neck haggard as a giant lizard. "Lie still!" she said. I sat up.

My mother had helped. Anything to lie down again, but her arm at my back held me upright like a puppeteer's softwood stick.

My mother raised my head, holding me under the chin with the firm, neutral grip of a lifelong nurse. She treats me like a hopeless case. She speaks to me as if I were a delinquent child. The loss of my great-hearted brother burns between us like wormwood in the throat, a perpetual reproach. I don't even know what she reproaches me for. I suspect she doesn't know herself.

She seemed to believe in me now. Mother said, in a voice that forced sense deep into the mash that had once been my brain, "Marcus! I am worried about the little girl. We read her note. I sent Petronius to find her, but you ought to go"

I reached the Forum in a litter, shouldered through the crowds like some gross eunuch with more money than taste. We jostled to the Golden Milestone, from which all the roads in the Empire take their distance. I thought of her, waiting to meet me at the heart of the world. No sign of her now. One of Petro's troopers gave me a message to meet his captain in Nap Lane. The man held back, still expecting someone else. I set off on foot.

Hunting for the right back alley I found some sewer men ferreting round a manhole as sewer men like to do. They were working with more energy than usual. Concrete was being shovelled underground frantically, with not a wine gourd of refreshment in sight.

I addressed them with a formality of tone I reserve for specialists: "Sorry to interrupt. Have you possibly had a moment to spot Petronius Longus, the captain of the Aventine watch?"

The foreman gave me the benefit of his philosophy of life: "Listen centurion, when the Great Drain starts gulping the Sacred Way into the shit after five hundred years, the nav vies shoring up the culvert have better things to do than take a census of passersby!"

Thanks for your trouble," I replied politely. For once it worked.

"Back of the pepper warehouses," he admitted gruffly. "Whole crowd of silly devils stirring up the dust." I was already half way there, calling my thanks.

There was no rush.

Nap Lane lay on the south side of the Forum near the spice markets. It was typical of the steep, twisty side routes that dive off our major streets, only just wide enough for a waggon to force through, clogged with dry mud, littered with broken spars of wood and waste. Shutters leaned off their hinges overhead where the buildings jutted over the street, hiding the sky. There was a musty smell of night-time occupation by degenerates. A cat yowled viciously as I went past. It was the sort of hole where you worry if you see someone coming and worry if you don't. It seemed a sorry end for the stately caravans that swung the treasures of Arabia, India and China halfway across the world for sale in Rome.

The warehouse I wanted looked abandoned; there was lush vegetation clogging the ruts in its gateway and a wrecked waggon lurching on one axle outside. I found them in an open yard, Petronius Longus and nearly a dozen men. Even before I turned in at the gate, the voices of saddened professionals warned me what to expect. I had heard that subdued note so many times before.

Petro strode towards me. "Marcus!"

I lost any hope or doubt.

He reached me, he grasped both my hands. His eyes flickered over my bruises, too preoccupied to take them in. He would never be hardened. While other men sit in oyster bars being cynical over nothing, Petronius Longus merely gives his slow, tolerant smile. Turning back at some movement, he put an arm round my shoulders, completely unable to tell me what had happened. It didn't matter. I already knew.

They had found her inside the warehouse. I arrived at the moment when they were carrying her out, so that was when I saw her for the last time. Her white dress hung like a hank of wool over a grim trooper's arm while her head lolled backwards in a way that was unmistakable: Sosia Camillina was dead.