Nemesis

Petronius had cursed him for a piece of offal – - but he managed to reserve this view until he was alone. Perhaps the guild master would come good. Wrong. It took him no time to 'consult his members' – in other words, he had not bothered. He said he had no member of that name on his current list and nobody had ever heard of Volusius. He declared the lad must have been an impostor. Petronius asked why would anyone ever lower themselves to claim fraudulently that they thrashed schoolchildren for a living? The guild master offered to demonstrate his big stick technique. Petro left, not hastily but without lingering.

The vigiles cohorts keep lists of certain undesirable professions (mine, for instance), though teachers are excluded. Impersonating a teacher, as the master had suggested, ought to be illegal but there were no lists for that either: probably because the pay was so low, fraud was in fact so unlikely.

Rubella still refused to allow Petronius to leave Rome. So by the time our meeting broke up, I had volunteered for another trip to Antium, to re-interview people at the bar where the escaped Volusius had turned up screaming for help ten years ago. If the bar was still there, which Petronius doubted, someone surely would remember a hysterical youth falling on the counter while screaming he had been abducted and scared witless. Even in the country, that must be more unusual than calves being run over by hay wagons.

The bar was there. It had been sold to a new owner who knew nothing about the incident. His clientele had changed. They knew nothing either.

Or so the bastards told me.

I pointed out quietly that if they left these killers on the loose, one of them could be a body in a shallow grave one day.

'Never!' a wall-eyed sheep-stealer assured me. 'All of us know better than to accept an invitation from Claudius Pius to go for a little walk down a marsh track to see his brother's spear collection.'

'Who mentioned Claudius Pius?' I asked in a level tone.

He rethought rapidly. 'You did!' he snapped. 'Didn't he?'

They all agreed that I had done so, despite it being obvious I had not. So against expectations I had discovered who lured away the victims – though this feeble conversation would not count as proof.

'Anyone seen Pius around here recently?'

Of course not.

'So tell me about "seeing the spear collection". How do you know that was the lure?'

'It's what the teacher said.'

'I thought you knew nothing about the teacher?'

'Oh no, but that's what people around here all reckon.'

'Anything else people around here know? Which brother's spears were on offer, for instance?'

'Oh Nobilis, bound to be. Probus has some, but nothing by comparison.'

'Any recent sightings of Nobilis?'

No. They said anyone who saw Claudius Nobilis would quickly look the other way.

'So what exactly are you scared of?'

They looked at me as though I was demented if I had to ask.

I was ready to give up. This bar might seem a safe haven to a young man escaping two murderers, but as a watering hole it was deadly. If this was the best place to buy a drink where I lived, I would emigrate to Chersonesis Taurica, die in exile like Ovid at the back of beyond, yet still think I had the best of it.

Preparing to leave, I glanced around the dismal place, then had one last try: 'I just can't work out what a teacher from Rome would have been doing on this road in the first place. None of them earn enough for a summer villa on the coast. I don't suppose "people around here" know why he came, do they?'

'He was coming to Antium to be interviewed for a holiday job.'

'Is that right!'

To my amazement, it turned out to be well known in those parts just which wealthy villa owner had summoned him. Incredibly, the rich man still had the same villa.

I never met the prospective employer, but it was unnecessary. He was the type who, faced with a potential hire who had come to grief, insisted that full details of the man's experience must be written down; in case Volusius tried to sue for compensation, presumably. A transcript still existed. I was shown it. They would not let me take it off the premises, but a scribe sat down and copied out the ten-year-old statement for me.

Volusius described meeting the man everyone now thought was Claudius Pius, who made friends and lured him off the road to meet his brother. Despite having no interest in weapons, the naive young teacher found himself agreeing to accompany Pius. They went further than he expected, down extremely remote tracks, and he was already worried when they encountered the promised brother. This man was sinister. They met him in a clearing, as though he had been waiting. It made Volusius realise he had been deliberately stalked. He knew he had been brought here for evil reasons.

Volusius had made a terrible mistake. Although he felt he was about to be murdered, he managed not to show he understood his danger. Perhaps because there were two of them and they thought they could easily control him, the brothers were careless. Volusius broke away and managed to run off. Shaking with fear, he hid in a thicket for hours, overhearing a discussion about fetching a dog to track him down. As soon as he thought the men were out of earshot, he made a break for it, and ran until he reached the road and found the bar. The barkeeper at the time took him to safety at the villa where he had originally been heading.

The villa owner had clout. A search was conducted, though nobody was found. No one then made a link with the Claudii. Volusius gave a description of the two men, but it was too vague. If he had heard names, he could not remember them. He went into shock, too jittery to be of use as a witness. Some people even doubted his story. There was not a scratch on him. Nobody had seen him with the strangers. His fear might not be caused by trauma, but a pre-existing mental problem that made him imagine things. Enquiries petered out.

'And did he get the job?' I asked the slave I was talking to.

'Out of the question. He was a gibbering wreck. A man in that state could not be allowed to give lessons to respectable boys. He never even met them.'

'What happened to him?'

'He went back to Rome.'

'Was he fit to travel? After such an ordeal, didn't he panic at the prospect?'

'We kept him here a few days. He was allowed to write a letter and his mother came for him.'

'Got her address by any chance?'

'Afraid not, Falco.'

'We've lost him then

'Why do you need to find him? It's all here.'

'And it's invaluable, thank you. But we now believe the two men existed all right and there is an idea who they are. Volusius, as the only known survivor, might be able to identify them.'

'I bet he'd still panic, even after all these years.'

'Maybe. We have to hope seeing them in custody will reassure him. .. Tell me, what was the point of offering him a job here? Don't boys in a wealthy family have their own private tutor? Were they so dumb, they needed extra cramming in the summer holidays?'

'Excuse me! Quite the opposite. My master's sons had an all-round education in which they both excelled. This was to give them special lessons, because they were so gifted and mentally demanding.' It was to keep them occupied, I guessed, to stop them groping the maids and setting the house on fire. 'Volusius had a sideline – - expertise in algebra.'

Now we were getting somewhere. The vigiles do not keep track of the miserable, half-starved souls who teach urchins the alphabet under street corner awnings, not unless there is a very large number of reports of sexual abuse; or, better still, complaints about noise. But in Rome, playing about with numbers carries dark undertones of magic. Like prostitutes, Christians and informers, therefore, mathematicians are classified by the vigiles as social undesirables. Their details are kept on lists.

XLVIII