'This place always reeks of suspicion,' Petro mumbled, keeping an eye on the mopper. Once she looked up and automatically he smiled at her. Like any healthy Roman male, he kept in practice as a flirt.
I agreed. 'To say they all plot is like saying slugs eat lettuce.'
Laeta worked late. As a bureaucrat he genuinely believed his vital work required more than an ordinary business day, even from an expert like him. He kept us waiting. That was to make us impressed that he should find time for us. Petronius and I slouched on corridor benches below a high, elegant ceiling and remarked loudly that being so disorganised at his rank was pathetic. We made sure the usher heard. Enlivening the life of underlings is a ploy worth spending time on.
Maia and Helena said we had never grown up. We could be mature – - though kicking our heels in boredom brought out the worst in us.
Finally Petronius was called in and I followed. When he saw me on his marble threshold, Laeta looked irritated. He was a middle-aged, middle ranker with an astute gaze. He was bursting to ask what I was doing there; he wondered whether somebody had failed to brief him on a policy issue – or, worse, had he been briefed but had forgotten it? He felt obliged to nod a greeting, but some unease showed.
We shimmied across the doormat – a pleasing integral mosaic – and began our next role-play. It involved extravagant respect from Petronius, while I stared as if flattering a senior official had never occurred to me. Petro declared he was honoured to meet such an important man of whom (he said) he had heard much, all of it impressive. Laeta fended off a blush. Everyone must suck up to him, but he was unsure how to take it from us. Well, I said he was astute.
Tiberius Claudius Laeta was a rising comet, experienced but still with a decade or two of conniving in him. His forenames indicated he had been a slave in the imperial house, freed under a previous emperor; from his age it would be Claudius. The imperial household had produced many senior bureaucrats, including my bugbear Anacrites, who had wormed his way up to be Chief Spy very quickly and, to me, quite unaccountably; he was the kind of light garbage that floats. Anacrites was younger than Laeta and had been freed by Nero – - hardly a recommendation, to have that eye-rolling maniac think well of you.
'You submitted a man's petition, Watch Captain.' Prepared for the meeting, he waved it at us.
'Found in a murder victim's baggage,' Petro confirmed. 'I assessed it as the dead man's last words. Delivery seemed the decent thing.'
'Yes, you explained – -' Laeta laid down the tablet abruptly, hoping to cut off bloody descriptions of the corpse. I made a grab to see what was written. Laeta was too refined to snatch the tablet back but watched jealously, like a man seeing his lover depart on an international journey.
The complaint was as Petro had described. The handwriting was decent, the language civil service Greek. If the author was not a professional scribe, he had certainly had general clerical training. One aspect surprised me: a tone of familiarity. 'Had this man written in before?'
'One of our regulars.' Laeta sounded weary.
'Classic aggrieved citizen?'
'Let's say, detailed!' Free Roman citizens have the right to petition the Emperor. That did not mean Vespasian personally read every scroll. He thought he did. So did those who made petition-writing their hobby. In truth, officials like Laeta censored out the batty ramblings of obsessives, at the same time as they were checking for unhinged threats against the Emperor's person and simple-minded do-gooders offering religious advice.
'Bit of a menace then?' Petronius asked, more mildly than me.
Laeta was too professional to insult a member of the public. His duty required him to be fair, to defend the high principle of equal access to the Emperor. 'On the one side -' elbows on the table, he turned back his left hand as if holding up a market weight, '- he has the right to campaign. And on the other – -' he balanced the hypothetical weight with his other hand, '- resources are limited, so we just cannot investigate every perceived problem.'
Perceived said a lot. No wonder Laeta looked relaxed. He perceived he could ignore such stuff.
'Did this fellow always make the same complaint?' I asked.
'Usually. He worried over law-and-order issues. He was agitated about a large tribe of petty criminals who should, in his opinion, be exterminated. The fact is,' Laeta informed us smoothly, 'all over the Empire, groups exist who arouse their neighbours' prejudice, perhaps because they seem feckless or a little different. They live rough, they rebuff approaches from the community. People suspect them of stealing, of luring away women, insulting priests, depressing property values and having lewd habits. Drink and putting curses on cattle are a constant theme of complaints.'
'Living next door to deadbeats can be a real problem,' Petronius corrected him. He had no truck with social misfits. He didn't believe curse tablets could make cows barren, but he did reckon that when people bestirred themselves to complain formally, the thefts and assaults they protested about were probably real. To him, Laeta's bland remarks were official excuses for inaction.
To be angry about neighbours' bad behaviour would seem a crazy waste of time where we grew up. On the Aventine, there were too many persons of lewd habits to write petitions about it. Everyone drank, to take away the pain of existence. Nobody wore themselves out trying to have ethical standards. Even joining the army when we were eighteen was such a nod to the establishment it had made Petro and me objects of raucous derision.
'Of course we take all such reports seriously,' Laeta assured us. Tell that to the man who wrote in, I thought.
'You rush to rootle out the villains?' I teased him. 'Their horrid shacks are upended by military-style machines, their filthy possessions tossed away, and the pilfering layabouts are made to take regular jobs in nasty occupations?'
Laeta scowled. 'We ask the district magistrate to make enquiries.'
'And if your correspondent writes again – - when he does, since he refuses to give up – you just send another soft request to the same magistrate who let everyone down the first time?'
'Dispersed responsibility, Falco.' Laeta let my jibes trickle off like river water from a cormorant.
'Well, it's hardly corrupt, but I'd define it as inept and complacent.'
'Always yourself]' smiled Laeta. 'I do admire that, Falco… Sometimes these complaints die down,' he said to Petronius, as if addressing the reasonable man in our pairing. 'So much better if a situation is dealt with peacefully, and at the local level. Nevertheless, should there be a flare-up that the local authorities cannot handle, it will be tackled – tackled aggressively.'
'This involves more than bad neighbours,' Petronius assessed. He was glum. 'Now a man has died. Tortured, killed, and his body deposited in a blasphemous way. He appears to have been coming to Rome to appeal to the Emperor personally. That, to me, places a moral duty on Rome to look into what happened – - and to pursue the victim's complaints.'
'Quite.' Laeta, too, became more subdued. He clasped his hands on the surface of his shining marble table. Mention of moral duties always casts a blight on bureaucrats. He admitted, in a frank way that from him was an apology, 'It now appears the man's petitions were justified.'
We had reached the crux of the meeting. Claudius Laeta half rose from his throne-like chair, so he could wriggle out of his toga. In palace code, this told us whatever was said next must be in confidence. Petronius Longus eagerly shrugged off his own formal robe. He and I moved closer to Laeta. We three were alone in the enormous room, but all of us dropped our voices.
'What are we dealing with?' The expert now, Petronius was terse, calm and impressive.