When people announce their marriages, I try to avoid informing them that they are making a bad mistake. They generally are, but if all the unsuitable pairings in Rome were suffocated at birth by kind friends' good advice, there would be no new generation of civilized men to subdue the world's barbarians.
"Who is the happy bridegroom?"
"Smaractus."
On reconsideration I gave Lenia the strongest advice I could.
The reason for not bothering is that they never listen anyway.
"Shut up, Falco," Lenia responded amiably. "He's worth half a million sesterces!"
For several reasons this news raised a red mist before my eyes.
"If Smaractus told you that, girl, I can promise you he's lying!"
"Don't be a fool; I never asked him."
"All right, it depends who you seduced. If it was his accountant he's boasting, so halve it. If it was his banker he's being cautious, so double it"
"Neither. Believe me, I'm not taking chances; I've read his will."
"Lenia," I commented sadly, "there are no depths to which a scheming woman will not sink!"
A strategic alliance with my pernicious landlord could only be part of Lenia's devious business plan. He had his eye on her laundry, that small but steady gold mine, but her own attention was riveted on his hefty real estate. Their lives together would be fortified by the keen nip of greed, as each prayed daily to their household gods that the other would die first.
Many marriages endure for decades on this healthy basis, so I wished her well.
"He'll be living here, Falco."
Thought he already was!"
"Just warning you."
"I don't care what tree that foul bird exudes his guano in"
"I can't keep him out of the laundry. I thought before the wedding you might carry off your parcel from the vat"
The original silver pig! The one found in the street, which Petronius and I had rescued afterwards from Sosia Camillina's bank box. I had forgotten all about it; so had everybody else…
Hauled up by our mighty Lenia, my pig was soon drying under some seedy temple's weekly batch of soiled smalls. Wiping it with a priest's head cloth amidst a whiff of last Thursday's incense, Lenia asked, "Did you know that someone had attached a laundry list?"
Petronius and I had left a rope round the pig; fixed to the rope now was a single wax tablet…
"Oh dear gods!"
Before ever I took it from Lenia's swollen hand I knew what it was, and whose. I could hear Lenia telling me six months ago, I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she left a note upstairs… Then, too, I remembered Helena Justina when she was raging at me that first night in Britain. She said she had told you…
And so she had. Formally enough to be presented in evidence, Sosia Camillina had given me a list of names.
Sosia Camillina, daughter of P Camillus Meto, to M Didius Falco, private informer. On the Ides of October in the second consulship of
Vespasian Augustus, his first as Emperor
T Flavins Domitianus
L Aufidius Crispus
Cn Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus
Ti Faustus Plautius Ferentinus
A Curtius Gordianus
A Curtius Longinus
Q Cornelius Gracilis
I name these men in duty to the Emperor and devotion to the gods.
There they all were. All? All but one, apparently. Above her final sentence was a one line gap. It looked as if Sosia had written an extra name; as if she had written, then at once pulled the flat end of her stylus back through the wax, deleting the line she had just inscribed there with its point.
In this case, I had once told Helena, there could be no loyalty and no trust. Sosia Camillina possessed both. It must have made a heavy burden for a sixteen-year-old girl.
This tablet proved nothing. Just seven men who knew each other; it read like a dinner-party list. Perhaps Sosia had found one in a house she had visited, a note, written out to give instructions to someone's household steward. Sosia had then carefully copied out the names…
Seven men, who could say, if we challenged them in court, they had been dining quietly together. Though their real purpose might be not one jot less sinister for that.
And who, then, had been this ugly dinner party's host?
I stared at the faint groove where it seemed Sosia's stylus had erased a further name. My poor Sosia had been bound in law by ties that were not mine. Had she stood here now, fixing me with those great eager eyes that I remembered so vividly, I would have had to maintain her silence with her to the end. But she was long gone. And I still wanted bitterly to avenge her death.
There was one more person involved in this case: somebody so adept at shrinking out of view that I had almost deliberately ignored the obvious link. I thanked Lenia, grasped the ingot in my arms, and struggled with it upstairs to my room. Soon, wearing my best toga, the one that belonged to Festus, I came down again and went out to do what was necessary on Palatine Hill.
LIII
By the time I clambered up to the Palace, I felt so hysterical I expected the Praetorians to arrest me on sight. It was comforting to find that the Emperor's Guards could apparently distinguish a true assassin from a hot but honest man. When I begged to see Titus I was passed in through officials of increasing refinement until a tall secretary, who gave the impression he would not flutter one long handsome eyelash if his mother-inlaw caught him buggering the butcher in her backyard, listened and then propped me on a stool with my toga piled neatly in my lap while he walked away into an inner room.
Titus came out.
He made a magnificent sight. He had assumed his full military uniform as commander in chief in Judaea and a confident mood to match. He wore an ornamented breastplate, its torso moulded to heroic proportions, a richly dyed, completely circular purple cloak, and a tunic frogged on every edge with rigid palm leaf braid. Anything he lacked in height to carry this off, he made up in a muscular build. He was ready to go to the Temple of Isis, where he would spend the night solemnly with his father and his brother, before they entered the city tomorrow as victorious Roman generals bringing home their captives and glittering spoils.
Doubt now assailed me. My client had dressed as if to model for the formal statues that would gild his reputation for several thousand years. I did not believe in the power of ceremonial, but I knew that I had come on the wrong day.
I stood up. I handed Titus Sosia's writing tablet, feeling the firm grip of his hand as he took it from me. He glanced in pinched silence at Domitian's name, then ran his eye down the rest.
Thank you, Falco. This is useful, but nothing new…" His eyes seemed remote, his mind half-given to the honours of tomorrow. Even so, he grasped my own hectic excitement in the end. "What do you believe it is?"
I pointed out the gap.
"Sir, Camillas Meto's daughter was no scribe. She wrote like a schoolgirl, pressing hard with her stylus. I had to show you the list, but if you agree, at the cost of destroying it I swallowed for I could not easily forgo anything Sosia Camillina gave to me. "If we melt the wax completely off the backing board, you may find she scraped right through into the wood."
His glance hit mine; the man was as sharp as a Spanish sword.
"The missing name may still be visible?" Titus Caesar took decisions like the general he was. "Little to lose!"
He called back the thin secretary. Hollow-shouldered and slightly showing off, this ghoul soon tilted the tablet over a flame, turning his bony wrist to let the drips skitter into a chased silver bowl. He gave it back with a professional flourish.
Titus glanced at the scarred surface, then signalled the secretary to make himself scarce. For a painful moment we gazed at each other, then Titus quietly said, "Well, Didius Falco, how good an informer are you? Do you want to tell me, before I show you this, who you think it is?"