Ten minutes after the head of the mob had passed, the street was empty enough that Gaius and Perennius could walk against what had been the flow. The agent was weary from a journey of over a thousand straight-line miles - and he had not traversed them in a straight line. He was used to being weary. He was used to being delayed as well. Throughout the past six months, Perennius had been delayed repeatedly because the draft transferring funds to his account in Antioch had not arrived.
The agent had made do because he was the sort of person who did make do. Perennius had never learned patience, but he knew the value of restraint and the power of necessity. The banker in Antioch had advanced some money and more information when he understood precisely what alternatives the stocky Imperial agent was setting before him. The sum Perennius had set as the bottom line for both of them to walk out of the room alive would not bankrupt the other, even if the "mistake" in Rome were never cleared up.
The banker never seriously considered the possibility that Perennius was bluffing.
The mob had not done a great deal of damage, since its racket was warning enough for most potential victims to drop their shutters or scamper out of the way. Half a dozen shopkeepers had dared a police fine by spreading their merchandise out on the sidewalks in front of their alcoves. Anarchy had punished them more condignly and suddenly than anything the law might have metered out. One old man moaned in the remains of his trampled, looted woolen goods. His wife was chattering in Egyptian as she dabbed blood from the pressure-cut in the fellow's scalp.
Perennius picked his way past them with more anger than sympathy. The Empire would work if everyone obeyed its rules. No one knew better than the agent how great was the Empire's potential if it would cling together, if its millions would accept what the Empire offered them in the knowledge that it was more than they would get from chaos if each went his own way.
But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats. Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.
And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They'd made their choice.
Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra; intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.
The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere in Rome. Its facade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor, beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to which spring was coming late.
Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks differing from that of the surrounding stone.
The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.
That was not a duty Perennius thought he could live with, however. On the borders or across them, the agent could convince himself that he was working to preserve the Empire. When he was at the core of that Empire, he saw that the rot, the waste and treachery and peculation, was as advanced as any nightmare on the borders. What the dour agent was about to do to a finance clerk was a personal thing. If Perennius permitted himself to know that a similar tale could be told of a thousand, a myriad, highly-placed bureaucrats in the capital, he would also have had to know that nothing whatever Aulus Perennius did would have any significant effect.
A pair of armed guards stood in the entrance alcove of the building. Their round shields, stacked against javelins in opposite corners of the short passage, were marked with the blazons of a battalion of the Palatine Foot. The Palatines were one of the elite formations the Emperor was forming as a central field army. All the Empire's borders were so porous that there was no longer a prayer of dealing with hostile thrusts before they penetrated to the cities and farmland of the interior. Because the Palatines were an elite, it was all the more frustrating to Perennius that the younger of the guards had not bothered to wear his body armor.
Both of the uniformed men straightened when they saw that Perennius and Gaius were not sauntering toward the apartment block at the end of the court. The lower floors of that building seemed, from the advertisements painted on the stucco, to have been converted into an inn and brothel. The guard who called out to Perennius was the older of the pair, a man not far short of the agent's own forty years. "All right, sir," the guard announced with no more than adequate politeness, "if you've got business here, you'll have to state it to us."
"Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, straight-leg?" snapped Gaius in reaction to the tone. The young man flopped back the edge of his cloak to display his chest insignia, medallions of silvered bronze. Gaius had been an aide in the Bodyguard Horse before Perennius arranged his secondment to the Bureau as a courier. The morning before, when they had reached Italy - and very nearly the limits of friendly territory - the younger man had unpacked and donned his uniform trappings. That was harmless enough in itself, a boastfulness understandable in an orphan from an Illyrian village no one had ever heard of. What had sent a chill down Perennius' spine was the realization that Gaius had been carrying the gear when he arrived in Palmyra to deliver an urgent message to Perennius.
The situation between Gallienus, who styled himself Emperor of Rome, and Odenathus, who claimed less but perhaps controlled more, was uncertain. The two were not friends . . . nor, at the moment, were they clearly at swords' points. Perennius travelled as a spice trader, but that was only a veneer over his claim to be a secret envoy from Postumus, Emperor of the Gauls. Given what the agent had learned in those paired personae, there was very little doubt as to what the Palmyrenes would have done if Gaius' vanity had unmasked the pair of them as agents of the central government.
Of what liked to think of itself as the central government, at any rate.
The older guard reacted about the way Perennius would have reacted had he been on entrance duty. "Don't worry about how I slept, sonny," he said. "Let's just see your pass." The guard wore a shirt of iron ring mail over his tunic. The metal had been browned, but the linen beneath his armpits bore smudges of rust nonetheless. It was that problem of maintenance which led many men to prefer bronze armor or even leather despite the greater strength of the iron.