"Are you busy at the moment?" I was never busy. As an informer I was not that good. "Look Falco, are you interested in helping us? We can't trust the official machine. Someone must already have talked."
"What about here?" I interrupted.
"I never mentioned the ingot here. I took Sosia to bank it without telling her why, then forbade her to talk." He paused. "She's a good child." I gestured wry acknowledgement. "Falco,
I admit we were careless before we grasped the implications, but if the praetor's organization leaks we can't take further risks. Your face seems to fit this job semi-official and semi-corrupt"
Sarcastic old beggar! I realized the man had a quietly wicked streak. He was shrewder than he liked to appear. He certainly knew what preoccupied me. He ran one hand over that upright bush of hair, then said awkwardly:
"I had a meeting today at the Palace. I can't say more than that, but with the Empire to reconstruct after Nero and the civil war those ingots are sorely needed by the Treasury. In our talks your name came up. I understand you had a brother My face really set. "Excuse me!" he exclaimed abruptly in that concerned way the occasional aristocrat has, which I never entirely trust. It was an apology; one I ignored. I would not have these people discussing my brother. "Well, would you want the job? My principal will honour your usual rates; I gather you inflated them for me! If you find the missing silver, you can expect a substantial bonus."
"I'd like to meet your principal!" I snapped. "My idea of a bonus may not be the same as his."
Decimus Camillus snapped straight back: "My principal's idea of a bonus is the best you will get!"
I knew it meant working for some snooty secretariat of jumped-up scribes who would slash my expenses given half a chance, but I took the job. I must have been mad. Still, he was Sosia's uncle, and I felt sorry for his wife.
There was something odd about this case.
"By the way, sir, did you set a slick lynx called Atius Pertinax on my tail?"
He looked annoyed. "No!"
"Has he ties with your family?"
"No," he chipped in impatiently, then checked. Nothing was simple here. "A slight connection," he corrected himself, and by now his expression had deliberately cleared. "Business links with my brother."
"Did you tell your brother that Sosia was with me?"
"I had no opportunity."
"Someone did. He asked Pertinax to arrest me."
The senator smiled. "I do apologize. My brother has been frantically worried about his daughter. He'll be delighted you brought her home."
Tidily cleared up. Petronius Longus had said my description was known, so an aedile might track me down. Pertinax and
Publius assumed I was a villain. Big brother Decimus had omitted to mention to little brother Publius the fact that he hired me. I was not surprised. I come from a large family myself. There were lots of things Festus had never remembered to tell me.
XIV
This silver leak was a clever scheme! The British mines, which in my day were guarded so cautiously by the army, had apparently been tapped off as neatly as those illegal standpipes plugged in by private citizens all along the Claudian aqueduct; silver bars sparkling all the way to Rome like the crystal waters of the Caerulean Spring. I wished Petro and I had done it ten years before.
Passing the Capena Gate lockup, I nipped in to see the loafers from the cook shop whom I had seen being arrested that morning for spying on the senator. I was out of luck. Pertinax had let them go no evidence to hold them, he maintained.
I gazed at the duty guard with my world-weary fellow comrade sigh.
"Typical! Did he bother to question them?"
"Few friendly words."
"Brilliant! What about this Pertinax?"
"Knows it all!" the squaddie complained. We were both acquainted with the type. We exchanged a painful look.
Ts he just inefficient, or would you say it was something else?"
T'd say I don't like him but I say that about them all."
I grinned. "Thank you! Look," I cajoled frankly, "what's the word on an ingot of government lead? This is unofficially official, if you understand what I mean." This was a lark. I didn't understand what I was saying myself.
He insisted he was under strict orders to say nothing. I chinked some coinage his way. Never fails.
"A drayman handed it in last week; turned up hoping for a reward. The magistrate himself came down to look. The drayman lives…" (Another magic chink.) Tn a river booth on the Transtiberina bank, at the sign of the Turbot, near the Sulpician Bridge…"
I found the booth, but not the drayman. Three days after his horse stumbled over the silver pig in the dark, he was dredged out of the Tiber by two men fishing from a raft. They took him to Tiber Island, the medical hospice at the Temple of Aesculapius. Most of their patients die. It didn't worry the drayman; he was already dead.
Before leaving the island I leaned on the parapet of the old Fabrician Bridge and did some hard thinking. Someone approached in that all too casual way, the way that is never casual at all.
"You Falco?"
"Who wants to know, princess?"
"My name's Astia. You asking about the man who was drowned?"
I guessed Astia was the drayman's floosie. She was a thin, bleached waterfront shrimp with a tired, hard waterfront face. Best to know where you are: "You his woman?" I asked her straight out.
Astia laughed bitterly. "Not any longer! You with the Praetorians?" she spat at me.
I played down my astonishment. "Life's too short!" I waited after that. It was the only thing to do, since I had no idea what I was waiting for. She seemed to consider whether I could be trusted, then after a moment, out it spilled.
"They came here afterwards. They didn't care about him, they only wanted information."
Tell them anything?"
"What do you think! He was good to me when he had any money… I went to the Temple; I buried him myself. Falco, he may have been found in the river, but I know he didn't drown. They told me at the Temple he must have tipped in when he was drunk. But when he was drunk that was probably quite often, but I had more tact than to ask "he used to lie down in the cart and let the horse walk him home."
"Anyone find the cart?"
"Left in the Cattle Market Forum, minus the horse." "Hmm. What did the Guards want, princess?" "He had found something valuable. He wouldn't tell me what, but it frightened him. He handed it in at the nearest lockup instead of selling it himself. The Guards knew he found it. They didn't know what he had done with it." So it was not the Guards who snatched young Sosia. Unlikely anyway; she would not have escaped so easily she might never have escaped at all.
"I'll have to speak to them. Any chance of a name?" Astia knew very little. Their captain, she told me, was called Julius Frontinus. As a member of an elite regiment, he undoubtedly possessed the full three names of a substantial man, but two were enough for me to pin him down. For the first time in my life I volunteered to face an interview with the Emperor's Praetorian Guards.
XV
The Praetorian Camp was on the far side of the city. I walked slowly. I was expecting when I got there to be crushed like an eggshell beneath a Guard's heavy boot…
I recognized Frontinus at once. He wore an enamelled breastplate and a great silver buckle on his belt, but he had once learned his alphabet sharing a stool under the primary school awning at the corner of our street, side by side with a curly haired rogue called Didius Festus. To Julius Frontinus, therefore, I was a national hero's baby brother and since he could no longer take Festus to a tavern and get him joyously drunk because Festus was dead in the desert in Judaea he took me.