I whipped back.
"Didius Falco! What's the rush?"
I recognized the one who spoke. I recognized his build. He crouched slightly, in fighting stance, faceless behind his helmet grille. I must have exclaimed.
"Oh no! Not now, oh gods, not now"
"Now, Falco!"
"You can't, oh you can't -"
"Oh we can! Let's show the man…" Then both fishers flung their nets down over my head.
I knew, as I struggled hopelessly in two ten foot circles of biting cords, that it was going to be much worse than being arrested by the aedile's bullyboys. If Smaractus was just making his point, they would tenderize me like an octopus slammed on the foreshore rocks. If he had found himself a new tenant for upstairs, I was finished. It was going to be as bad as anything could be. My only comfort was that I would know very little about it once I managed to pass out, and that perhaps I would never wake up.
There were probably five of them, but it seemed more. The fishers could not be seen with their spiked tridents in the open streets, but the myrmillons had brought their wooden practice swords. As I flailed in the nets, they beat me systematically until I faded in a smother of disjointed sounds.
I was coming to. New tenants must be thin on the ground. Perhaps they had heard what life in a Smaractus apartment is like. The office was mine still; I was waking up.
Not in my room; somewhere else.
I felt desperately tired. Pain lapped around me as thick as spilt nectar, then I swirled in a torrent of sensation and fierce noise back up from the whirlpool.
"He's coming round! Say something, Falco!" Lenia ordered.
My brain uttered words. I heard no sound; my cotton ball mouth never moved.
I felt sorry for this Falco if he hurt as much as me. I had left the world for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps a hundred years. Wherever I had been was better than here, and I wanted to go back.
"Marcus!" Not Lenia any more. "Don't try to talk, son." Lenia had sent for my mother. Good heavens.
Slowly the red blur behind my eyelids solidified. Slowly I and that other poor man they called Falco fused together.
This is Who said that? Me or Falco? Him I think.
My mother's voice, acid with relief, spoke: "This is why people keep up with their rent!"
Lenia loomed over me, her neck haggard as a giant lizard. "Lie still!" she said. I sat up.
My mother had helped. Anything to lie down again, but her arm at my back held me upright like a puppeteer's softwood stick.
My mother raised my head, holding me under the chin with the firm, neutral grip of a lifelong nurse. She treats me like a hopeless case. She speaks to me as if I were a delinquent child. The loss of my great-hearted brother burns between us like wormwood in the throat, a perpetual reproach. I don't even know what she reproaches me for. I suspect she doesn't know herself.
She seemed to believe in me now. Mother said, in a voice that forced sense deep into the mash that had once been my brain, "Marcus! I am worried about the little girl. We read her note. I sent Petronius to find her, but you ought to go"
I reached the Forum in a litter, shouldered through the crowds like some gross eunuch with more money than taste. We jostled to the Golden Milestone, from which all the roads in the Empire take their distance. I thought of her, waiting to meet me at the heart of the world. No sign of her now. One of Petro's troopers gave me a message to meet his captain in Nap Lane. The man held back, still expecting someone else. I set off on foot.
Hunting for the right back alley I found some sewer men ferreting round a manhole as sewer men like to do. They were working with more energy than usual. Concrete was being shovelled underground frantically, with not a wine gourd of refreshment in sight.
I addressed them with a formality of tone I reserve for specialists: "Sorry to interrupt. Have you possibly had a moment to spot Petronius Longus, the captain of the Aventine watch?"
The foreman gave me the benefit of his philosophy of life: "Listen centurion, when the Great Drain starts gulping the Sacred Way into the shit after five hundred years, the nav vies shoring up the culvert have better things to do than take a census of passersby!"
Thanks for your trouble," I replied politely. For once it worked.
"Back of the pepper warehouses," he admitted gruffly. "Whole crowd of silly devils stirring up the dust." I was already half way there, calling my thanks.
There was no rush.
Nap Lane lay on the south side of the Forum near the spice markets. It was typical of the steep, twisty side routes that dive off our major streets, only just wide enough for a waggon to force through, clogged with dry mud, littered with broken spars of wood and waste. Shutters leaned off their hinges overhead where the buildings jutted over the street, hiding the sky. There was a musty smell of night-time occupation by degenerates. A cat yowled viciously as I went past. It was the sort of hole where you worry if you see someone coming and worry if you don't. It seemed a sorry end for the stately caravans that swung the treasures of Arabia, India and China halfway across the world for sale in Rome.
The warehouse I wanted looked abandoned; there was lush vegetation clogging the ruts in its gateway and a wrecked waggon lurching on one axle outside. I found them in an open yard, Petronius Longus and nearly a dozen men. Even before I turned in at the gate, the voices of saddened professionals warned me what to expect. I had heard that subdued note so many times before.
Petro strode towards me. "Marcus!"
I lost any hope or doubt.
He reached me, he grasped both my hands. His eyes flickered over my bruises, too preoccupied to take them in. He would never be hardened. While other men sit in oyster bars being cynical over nothing, Petronius Longus merely gives his slow, tolerant smile. Turning back at some movement, he put an arm round my shoulders, completely unable to tell me what had happened. It didn't matter. I already knew.
They had found her inside the warehouse. I arrived at the moment when they were carrying her out, so that was when I saw her for the last time. Her white dress hung like a hank of wool over a grim trooper's arm while her head lolled backwards in a way that was unmistakable: Sosia Camillina was dead.
XVIII
Darkness, flares, the patrol waiting for the magistrate. They coped with strangled prostitutes and fishwives battered with staves, but this touched the senate no worse to solve, but menacing paperwork.
Petronius groaned in despair. "We wasted hours searching. Squeezed the throats of a trail of pimps who had watched her. Found the lane, battered five different watchmen before we identified the place. Too late. Nothing I could do. Just nothing I could do… This damned city!"
He loved Rome.
They laid her down in the yard.
It is usually easy to maintain some detachment at this point. I rarely know the victim; I don't meet the victim until after the crime. That order of events is what I recommend.
I covered my face.
I was aware of Petronius Longus dragging back his men. We had been colleagues for a long time. We fought life from the same side. He granted me as much leeway as he could.
I stood, a yard from her. Petronius came to my shoulder. He muttered. Crouching, his big hand softly closed her eyes. He stood by me again. We were both looking down at her. He was looking at Sosia to avoid looking at me. I was looking at Sosia because there was nothing else on this earth that I ever wanted to look at again.