Perennius smiled and said, "Yes, well ... I told you, I have experience accepting the remarkable." But the fact that he joked instead of nodding gravely implied that there was a level of belief in the expressed skepticism. As Calvus had said, it was cheaper to believe him and be wrong than it would be to be surprised the other way.
The shadows of the hills had cut off the sun. Now Navigatus glanced over his shoulder at the Headquarters building and saw the windows of the upper story were being swung shut by the cleaning crews against the threat of rain. The lamps hanging from the drawing-room ceiling silhouetted against the panes the figures of men whose need to see the Director outweighed their dignity.
Navigatus stood, scowling. "Here," he said, "this is foolish. We'll go to my house, bathe there, and discuss this over dinner." He looked anxiously toward the bald man. "If you don't mind something simple, Lucius Calvus? I work here so late that I almost never have time to attend a proper dinner party, much less give one."
Perennius and the stranger rose also. "Marcus, I appreciate it, but your household servants already know as much about my affairs as I intend to let them," the agent said. "Besides, if you don't clear those out of your office properly - " he nodded toward the lamps and those waiting beneath them .- "it'll eat at you till you don't sleep tonight. Even though there isn't one of them who's worth a gray hair to either of us."
The Director touched his wig unconsciously. "Well, if you wouldn't feel offended, Aulus," he said apologetically. "I probably would feel better if I dealt with them." He eyed the lighted window again. "Not that you're wrong
about the .. . lack of consequence," he added morosely. "I sometimes fear that I've concentrated too much on minutiae in the past few years because the major problems are ..." His voice trailed off.
"No problem is insoluble," said Calvus. His flat calm made the statement an article of faith. He must have been surprised at how he sounded, because his body at once gave a tiny shudder as if to settle its contents. "Aulus Perennius," the tall man went on, "I will accompany you, then."
"No," said the agent, dipping his head in negation, "that won't be necessary, sir. I'll call for you at the palace in the morning." He smiled. "We're in a transit barracks, my companion and I. I doubt you'd find the accommodations much to your taste." The three of them were drifting back toward the door, now. The social circumstances were too unclear for either of the Bureau employees to act as decisively as they would have preferred to do.
"I'll have to get used to worse accommodations and to none at all," Calvus said simply. He stepped briskly ahead of the others, knowing that the discussion would end when an attendant opened the door for them. "And you'll have to get used to me, I'm afraid, because it is quite necessary for me to reach the site."
The agent laughed. It was Navigatus who actually found words to comment. "In school," he said, "I read Homer's accounts of ships that sailed themselves and gods trading spear-thrusts with mortals. ..." He gestured his companions onward, through the doorway and into the corridor with the men eagerly awaiting their pointless audiences with him.
"I couldn't imagine how anyone ever had believed such nonsense," the Director went on. "But I see now that I just needed exercise to increase my capacity for faith."
CHAPTER SIX
Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. "Slow up, damn you," he snarled to the linkman. "I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!"
It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.
Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.
The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman's scowl. "Through here," he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. "Me go first." As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.
"Hold the damned light where it does some good!" Perennius said. He turned to his companion. "Here, sir, you go first. It won't hurt this - " he gave his travelling cloak a flick - "to get dropped in the slops again."
"This is safe, then?" Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.
"Slow down," Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, "Safe for us. I wouldn't advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but - we're sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the pay-out wouldn't be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us."
"I wondered," said the tall man, "because this - " he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support - "is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel."
"Well, that doesn't - " Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent's sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. "Come on, quick," he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.
The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel's rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.
"Take the dagger!" Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion's hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man's face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.
"Yes," rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. "Kill them."
"Aulus!" cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius' recognition of the speaker.
As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel,
forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.
Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.
The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius' torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.