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, preferring 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.
The agent handed over the diploma with his orders. The clerks had returned to noisy confusion as soon as the door had closed them from Calgurrio's sight - or more probably, from Anguilus'. Using the hubbub to mask his words from everyone but the aide, Perennius said, "If he were transferred to a garrison unit in the sticks - one of the little posts in Africa out on the fringe of the desert where the Moors raid every few months. He wouldn't be able to lie about how he split the money with his department head then."
Anguilus closed and returned the diploma. His eyes were as chill as steel in the winter.
"Mother Isis!" Calgurrio blurted. "Anguilus, did you read this? It says - "
The aide put a hand on his superior's shoulder. "Yes, sir," he said with his eyes still watching Perennius, "but I think we can deal with the problem without it having to go beyond these walls." He nodded toward the closed door and the commotion beyond it before he added, "This gentleman is Aulus Perennius, one of the Bureau's top field agents, you may remember. We're very fortunate that the situation was uncovered by someone of his proven discretion." Anguilus flashed a tight rictus, not really a smile, toward the agent.
Zopyrion moaned again. His eyes opened, though without any intellect behind them. The right pupil was fully dilated: the left was not. Anguilus glanced down at the eunuch. When he looked back at Perennius, his sour grin showed that the evidence of concussion only supported what the aide had known all along.
"Sure, I trust you to clean house yourselves," Perennius said. "Maybe the next time I'm here at Headquarters, I'll check just how it did come out." He nodded toward Zopyrion. "Until then, be well." The agent turned and reached for the door's lever handle.
"It won't happen to you again, fellow-soldier," said Calgurrio's aide. The Bureau's field staff was recruited from the Army, but Perennius would not have guessed that Anguilus had the right to use that particular honorific. "Don't worry."