The Silver Pigs mdf-1 Read online

  Then because it was my birthday she kissed me on the cheek.

  XXXVI

  She must have felt me flinch.

  "I'm sorry!" she exclaimed. She should have stormed off. We could have left it there. I really would not have minded; her gesture had been civilized enough.

  The damned woman did not know what to do.

  "I am so sorry"

  "Never apologize!" I heard my own voice grate. Since Sosia died, I had shrunk into myself. I could not deal with women any more. "Nothing new, lady! Rich piece of brisket looking for thick gravy gladiators get this all the time! If that was what I wanted you'd have known long before now!"

  She ought to have turned into her room at once. She just stood there looking anxious.

  "Oh for heavens sake!" I cried irritably. "Stop looking at me like that!" Her great tired eyes were lakes of misery.

  For two hours I had been speculating how it would feel to kiss her. So I did. Completely exasperated, I stepped up to the doorway then gripped her with my elbows, while my two hands spread either side of her bone-white face. It was over quite quickly, so lacking in enjoyment it must have been the emptiest gesture of my life.

  She wrenched away. She was shaking with cold from the garden. Her whole face was cold, and her eyelashes still wet from when she wept. I had kissed her; yet I still did not know what it was really like.

  I have known men who will tell you rough handling is what such women want. They are fools. She was distraught. To be perfectly honest, I was distraught myself.

  Helena might have dealt with the situation but I allowed her no time. It was me who stormed off.

  I did go back. What do you take me for?

  I walked down that dark corridor as discreetly as a servant with some message he had forgotten to deliver before. I tapped at her door my special knock: three quick successive little knuckle raps. We had never made a formal arrangment, it just developed as my sign. Normally she came at once to let me in.

  I knocked again. I tried the latch, knowing it would not budge (I had shown her myself how to wedge a latch when she was staying at an inn.) I leaned my forehead against the wood and spoke her full name quietly. She would not reply.

  By now I grasped that she had supposed we had at last reached some kind of understanding. She had offered me a truce, which I in my stupidity could not even recognize, let alone accept. She was as generous as I was crass. I would have liked a chance to tell her I was sorry. She would not, or could not, give me the chance.

  The time came when to wait there any longer would subject her to scandal. She had hired me to protect her from that. The only thing I could do for her was to walk away.

  XXXVII

  In the morning I dressed, packed, then banged her ladyship's door as I went by. She did not appear until I was sitting on the step outside the mansio buffing my boots with goose-grease. She stood slightly behind me. I strapped on my boots slowly to avoid looking up. I had never been so embarrassed in my life.

  Helena Justina stated crisply, "We shall both be happier if we end our contract now."

  "Lady, I'll finish what I began."

  "I won't pay you," she said.

  "Consider your contract ended!" said I.

  I would not allow myself to abandon her. I seized her luggage whether she liked it or not and strode ahead. A sailor handed her quite decently onto the boat; no one bothered about me. She marched off and stood in the prow by herself. I lounged on deck with my feet on her baggage.

  She was seasick. I was not. I walked up to her.

  "Can I help?"

  "Go away."

  I went away. That seemed to help.

  All the way from Gaul to Italy those were the only words we said. At Ostia, in the morning crush, she stood next to me while we waited to disembark. Neither of us spoke. I let her be buffeted once or twice by other passengers, then I moved her in front of me and took the buffeting myself. She stared straight ahead. So did I.

  I walked down the gangway first and commandeered a chair; she brushed past and climbed in by herself. I flung my baggage on the opposite seat, then travelled in a separate chair with hers.

  We were entering Rome in the late afternoon. Spring now, and traffic increasing on the roads. We stopped for a holdup at the Ostia Gate, so I paid a boy to run ahead and warn her family she was on her way. I walked forward, craning at the hold-up that was jamming the Gate. Helena Justina put her head out of the window of her chair as I went by. I stopped.

  I went on looking up the road. After a moment she asked quietly, "Can you see what it is?"

  I leaned my elbow more sociably in the window of her chair. "Delivery carts," I replied, still gazing ahead. "Waiting to enter at curfew. Looks like a waggon of wine barrels has shed a sticky load." I turned my head and looked her in the face. "Plus some sort of official rumpus with soldiers and banners: some mighty personage and an escort to match, entering the city with a flourish…"

  She held my gaze. I was never good at mending quarrels; I could feel the tendons setting in my neck.

  "Didius Falco, do you know my father and Uncle Gaius have a bet?" Helena offered with a wan smile. "Uncle Gaius reckons 7 will dismiss you in a huff; father says that you will leave me first."

  "Couple of villains," I remarked, carefully.

  "We could prove them wrong, Falco."

  My face twitched. "Waste of their stakes."

  She thought I meant it; abruptly she looked away.

  I had a hard pain in the pit of my stomach which I diagnosed as guilt. I touched her cheek with one finger as if she had been Marcia, my little niece. She closed her eyes, presumably in distaste. The traffic began to move again. Then Helena whispered to me dismally, "I don't want to go home!"

  My heart ached for her.

  I understood how she felt. She left as a bride, grew up as a wife, ran her own establishment probably ran it well. Now she had no place. She shrank from remarriage; her brother in Germany had told me that. She must return to her father. Rome permitted women to live no other way. She would be trapped, in a girl's useless life, a life she had outgrown. Visiting Britain had been her brief escape. Now she was back.

  I recognized real panic. She would never have made the confession otherwise, not to me.

  Feeling responsible, I said, "You still look seasick. I like to deliver my commissions in a healthy condition. Come and get a glow. I'll take you on the Embankment and show you Rome!"

  How do I invent such harebrained schemes? In the east of the city, miles from where her father lived, you can climb the high earthworks of the original city wall. Once past the squeaking booths of the puppeteers, the men with trained marmosets and the self-employed loom workers plying for hire, the ancient Servian ramparts form a breezy promenade. To reach it we had to forge right into the city centre, across the main Forum, then out to the Esquiline Hill. Most people turn north towards the Colline Gate; at least I had the sense to walk her in the opposite direction and come down half way home on the Sacred Way.

  Heaven knows what the bearers thought. Well, knowing the things that bearers regularly see, I can guess what they thought.

  We climbed up, then strolled side by side. In early April, just before dinner, we were virtually alone. It was all there. Nothing like it in the world. Six-storey apartment blocks thrust upwards from the narrow streets, confronting palaces and private homes with brotherly disregard for social niceties. Mushroom-beige light flaked the roofs of the temples or shimmered in the fountain sprays. Even in April the air felt warm after the British wetness and cold. As we walked along peacefully, Helena and I counted off the Seven Hills together. While we came west along the Esquiline ridge, we had an evening wind in our faces. It bore tantalizing traces of rich meat dumplings gurgling in dark gravies in five hundred dubious cook shops oysters simmering with coriander in white wine sauce, pork braising with fennel, peppercorns and pine nuts in the busy kitchen of some private mansion immediately below. Up to our high spot rose a distant murmur of the pe
rmanent hubbub below: touts and orators, crashing loads, donkeys and doorbells, the crunch of a marching Guards detachment, the swarming cries of humanity more densely packed than anywhere in the Empire or the known world beyond.

  I stopped. I turned my face towards the Capitol, smiling, with Helena so close that her long mantle clapped against my side. I experienced a sense of approaching climax. Somewhere in this metropolis lurked the men I sought. It remained only to find proof that would satisfy the Emperor, then discover the whereabouts of the stolen silver pigs. I was half way to the answer; the end lay here and my confidence was up. Finally, while I absorbed the familiar scene of home, knowing that at least in Britain I had done all a man could, the desolation which had gripped me in its vice since Sosia died finally relaxed.

  Turning back to Helena Justina, I found her watching me. She had her own misery under control now. There was nothing really wrong with her: she was a girl who had made herself unhappy for a time. Plenty of people do that. Some people do it all their lives; some people seem to enjoy unhappiness. Not Helena. She was too straightforward and too honest with herself. Left alone, she had a deeply tranquil face and a gentle soul. I felt sure she would recover her patience with herself. Not with me perhaps, but if she hated me I could hardly quibble, since when I met her I had hated myself.

  "I shall miss you," she mocked.

  "Like a blister when the pain stops!"

  "Yes."

  We laughed.

  "Some of my ladies ask to see me again!" I teased her suggestively.

  "Why?" Helena flung back in her fierce way, bright-eyed. "Do you cheat them so obviously when you send in your bill?"

  She had lost a few pounds lately but she still had a bonny figure and I still quite liked the way she did her hair. So I grinned, "Only if I want to see them!"

  And she scoffed back, "I shall warn my accountant to jump hard on mistakes!"

  Her father and her uncle had lost their bet. It would never last, but at that moment we were friends.

  She looked nicely dishevelled and pink; I could safely hand her over to her relations looking like that. They would think the worst of me, but that was better than the truth.

  There are two reasons for taking a girl on the Embankment. One is to breathe fresh air. We had done that. I thought about the other reason, then thought better of it. Our long journey was over. I took her home.

  PART III

  ROME

  Spring, AD 71

  XXXVIII

  A reception party was waiting for us in her father's street.

  We had arrived without incident in the Capena Gate Sector, jiggled down a few side streets then lurched towards the senator's house. The chairs stopped. We were both climbing out. Helena gasped. I turned: four or five slave market rejects were rushing us. Each had a pointed hat pulled down more securely over his face than his smallpox scars required, and one hand buried under his cloak as if whatever was hidden there would not be a satchel of bread rolls and country cheese.

  "Hercules, lady! Bang the bell until someone comes!"

  Helena flew to her father's door as I rapidly unhooked a sedan chair's carrying rod.

  I glanced around. Passers-by were melting off the pavements into goldsmiths and flower shops, open for the evening trade with lanterns on their porticos. The area was far too select to expect help. The strollers were vanishing like bursting bubbles on the Tiber in flood.

  The rejects were brisk, but not as brisk as me. Under the cloaks they were carrying thorn wood cudgels, but after three months in a lead mine I had more pent-up aggression than they may have realized. I could do a lot of damage whirling an eight-foot pole.

  Eventually Camillus burst out with his slaves in response to her ladyship's spirited bell jangling. The rejects abruptly scattered. They left a trail of blood and one man dead. He had lunged at Helena. I hauled her sideways, pulling out the knife I stash down my boot, then stamped his shin like a soldier and stabbed upwards as he came. It would never have stopped anyone who had an army training, but plainly he had not; I finished him.

  It is illegal to carry a weapon in Rome. Still, I was defending a senator's daughter; no prosecution lawyer could make a magistrate convict. Besides, I hadn't endured her for fourteen hundred miles to give her up on the home doorstep and throw away my double fee.

  Camillus Verus, sword in hand, breathed heavily and surveyed the lively scene. Chaos welled round us, seeping down the street. Dusk made everything seem more ominous.

  "Lost them! Out of touch, but I nicked one"

  "Not bad, sir. I'll introduce you at my fencing gym!"

  "Falco, you look a bit sick."

  "Overwhelmed by the warmth of our welcome…"

  Killing people has a bad effect on me.

  Both the senator and his wife, who came flittering out among her flock of slab-faced maids, were waiting to embrace their noble child. Once I grabbed her I had forgotten to let go. (A good rule with women, though difficult to follow up in a crowd.) It was probably the first time her honourable parents saw Helena Justina white-faced and silent, crushed to the palpitating chest of a badly shaved, mad-eyed ruffian waving a bloody knife. I released her with a hasty gesture into the arms of her papa.

  He was so shocked at having nearly lost her that for a moment he lost all powers of speech.

  I sat quaking on the edge of a great flower tub while Helena Justina was passed about. Since no one liked to scold me for their fright, everyone scolded her. She seemed too stunned to object. I watched, so used to my role as her protector that I felt awkward hanging back here.

  "Well done, Falco!" Her father strode across and hauled me to my feet. Then he asked, in the voice of a man who had money riding on my reply, "Everything go well on your trip?"

  "Oh, the quietness of the journey matched the thin pay!"

  Helena shot me a tricky look. I gazed at the evening sky like a man who was simply very tired.

  Decimus sent a message to the magistrate about the man I had killed, and in sharp order the body was tidied off his frontage at public expense. I heard no more about the incident.

  No doubt what these villains wanted: when they all suddenly ran, our baggage skipped off with them.

  I organized a search party and the Camillus slaves soon trundled back with our stuff, which they found abandoned only two streets away. I set a candelabrum on the cool tiled floor of the senator's hall. I was on my knees, spreading open each pack for a systematic check; Helena crouched alongside, helping me. While I searched we spoke to each other in the low voices of people who had travelled together for weeks. Her mother looked uneasy, though we were too busy to deal with that. Everyone we met on the journey had livened up their own dull days by imagining some scandal; both of us were used to ignoring it. Even so, I sensed Julia Justa now viewed me as an embarrassment. I had to smile to myself: my proud young lady's elegant mother harried her as much as mine did me.

  These are hardly disturbed; there's very little gone," I told Helena Justina, consulting her like my partner in the case.

  "My uncle's letter"

  "Not fatal. Pointless in fact he can write again."

  Something else. Something that had belonged to me.

  At the moment when I realized, Helena must have seen my face. I knew from her look my own expression had become positively grey.

  "Oh Falco -"

  I touched her wrist. "Lass, it doesn't matter."

  "But it does!"

  I simply shook my head.

  They had taken the jet bracelet, the one Helena gave to Sosia and Sosia gave to me.

  XXXIX

  The senator decided to go to the Palace that night. He would report all we knew, not least how we suspected that Domitian was involved. For me, nothing to do until further instructions; I could manage that.

  They offered me dinner and a night in a feather bed, but I went home. For various reasons I wanted time on my own.

  The laundry was closed so I left the adventure of greeting Lenia until
next day. Six flights of stairs are an indecent obstacle to a travel-weary man. Trudging upwards, I decided to move house. When I reached my apartment, I grew stubborn and decided to stay.

  Nothing had changed. There was an outer room in which a dog might just turn round if he was a thin dog with his tail between his legs. A wonky table, a slanty bench, shelf of pots, bank of bricks, gridiron, wine jars (filthy), rubbish basket (overflowing)…

  But my table was standing in the wrong place. The cooking bricks were blackened with soot. Some soulless bastard was starving a sparrow in a cage: someone else was living in my house.

  I smelt him first. The air throbbed with the dusky reek of used woollen tunics, unwashed for a month. There was a cheesy scarlet dinner-robe I failed to recognize, and a pair of slippers whose whiff rushed to greet me from the far side of the room. Despite Decimus paying full whack to Smaractus, my disreputable landlord had let a hot-wine waiter with every kind of body odour invade my office as a subtenant while I was away.

  He was out. At that moment, it was lucky for him.

  I turfed his stuff onto the balcony, kicked his slippers across the landing outside the front door, fed his sparrow, then rearranged the squalor to suit me. I ate the anchovy eggs he had left in my favourite bowl; they tasted three days old. When he turned up he had greasy hair, bad teeth and a tendency to fart when he was frightened, which soon occurred whenever I glanced his way. That was quite often; he was the type you keep your eye on all the time.

  I informed this wretch that whatever he was paying Smaractus, he ought to be paying me so either he could sleep outside with the stars until he found another room or I would throw him straight out now. He chose the balcony.

  "You've eaten my eggs!"

  "Bad luck," I said, scowling. He was not to know I was scowling because that expression had reminded me of someone else.