Scandal Takes a Holiday mdf-16 Read online

  'Luckily no suspects are screaming in agony just at this moment,' I teased, acknowledging the atmosphere that hung over the yard, especially at dusk. We went to the room I had been using. The false excuse was to fetch my belongings; the true one was to greet my lady privately. I had not seen her for a week. Since everyone I knew swore that she was bound to leave me one day, I had to reinforce my feelings. Besides, I liked getting excited when Helena showed her affection for me. Even we felt too uneasy there to dally. I promised greater relaxation at an apartment I had found for us.

  'Aren't we staying with Lucius and Maia?' Helena was fond of them both.

  'Not likely. Petro has been loaned a flash mansion by a damned construction magnate.'

  'What's wrong with that?' Helena was smiling. She knew me.

  'I hate handouts.' She nodded; I knew she too preferred our family to live quietly, with no obligations to patrons. Most of Rome operates on favours; we two had always made our own way.

  'But we can go and have a free dinner!' There were limits to my high-mindedness.

  Back at the town house, Petro and Maia were already eating in one of their host's frescoed dining rooms. He had several. This was made airy by folding doors, currently flung open on to a small garden, where a tiled turquoise niche housed a sea god statue. A child's hat was hanging on his conch shell. Small sandals, clay animals and a home made chariot littered the garden area. Space was quickly made for us on the large, cushion-strewn couches. Maia gave us a calculating look, as she rearranged the children. Marius, Cloelia, Ancus and little Rhea, who were aged between twelve and six, all four of them bright as new carpentry nails, together with Petro's quiet daughter Petronilla, who must be about ten.

  'Are you staying or what?' demanded my sister. She and I came from a large, loud, quarrelsome family whose members spent much effort avoiding each other.

  'No, we've taken a holiday apartment, just the other side of the Decumanus,' I reassured her. Maia did not want us cluttering up her already busy household, but she went into a huff.

  'Suit yourselves!' Petronius came back from stabling Helena's luggage cart.

  'It looks as if you've come for the rest of the season by the amount you have brought!' he said.

  'Oh it's holiday reading.' Helena smiled calmly. 'I was rather behind with the Daily Gazette, so my father has lent me his old copies.'

  'Three sacks of scrolls?' Petro asked her, in disbelief. Clearly he had poked through Helena's luggage without shame. Everyone knew that the strange girl I had chosen would rather have her nose in literature than tend to her two little daughters or walk to the corner market for a mullet and some gossip like a normal Aventine wife. Helena Justina was more likely to neglect me because she was deep in a new Greek play than because she was having a fling with another man. She did tend our daughters in her own fashion; Julia, at three, was already being taught her alphabet. Fortunately I liked eccentric women and was not afraid of forward children. Or so I thought so far.

  Helena fixed her gaze on me.

  'The news all looks rather dull at the moment. The imperial family are at their country estates for the summer, and even Infamia has taken a holiday.' Infamia was the pseudonym of whoever compiled the salacious scandal about senators' wives having affairs with jockeys. I happened to know that Infamia was shifty and unreliable, and if he really had taken a holiday, he had forgotten to clear the dates with his employers.

  'If there's no scandal,' Maia announced crisply, 'then there's absolutely no point in reading the Gazette.' Helena smiled. She hated me being devious and was trying to force me to say what I knew.

  'Infamia must have a hotspot villa somewhere. Think of all his payoffs from people who don't want their secrets told. What do you think, Marcus?'

  'Are we missing something?' Maia hated to be left out. She sounded tetchy. Nothing new in that.

  'Falco, you rat. Are you down here on one of your crackpot investigations?' demanded Petronius, also catching on.

  'Lucius, my dearest and oldest friend, when I am commissioned for work, crazy or sane, I shall report it to you immediately.'

  'You are on a job!'

  'I just denied it, Petro.' Petro turned to Maia.

  'Your tight-lipped bastard brother is hiding a commission in his hairy armpit.' He scowled at me, then gave his attention to capturing a tureen of gingered shellfish the children had been scooping up like ravenous gulls. He had to deal with the squeals as they watched him emptying all the good bits into his own foodbowl.

  'What job?' Maia quizzed me rudely.

  'Secret. Clause in my contract says, Don't tell your nosy sister or that interfering boyfriend of hers.'

  I relieved Petro of his trophy and served Helena and myself to the last prawns. Maia snatched one from my bowl.

  'Grow up, Marcus!'

  Ah, family life. I wondered if the man I had come to look for had any close relations. When you are looking for motives, never neglect the simple one.

  IV

  Helena and I had one evening to ourselves. We made the most of it. Tomorrow we would be joined by Albia, a young girl from Britain who took care of our children while we tried to take care of her. Albia had had a poor start in life; running around after Julia and Favonia took her mind off it, in theory. She had experience of family travel from when we brought her to Italy from Londinium, but controlling a toddler and a growing infant on a two-hour jaunt in a cart would be a challenge.

  'Are we sure Albia can find her way here all on her own?' I sounded wary, but not too critical.

  'Settle down, Falco. My brother is bringing her.'

  'Quintus?'

  'No, Aulus. Quintus stays with Claudia and the baby.' Gaius Camillus Rufius Constantinus, our new nephew aged two months, was making his presence felt. The world and all the planets revolved around this baby. It could be why Helena's other brother was very keen to leave the family home. 'Aulus is coming on his way to university. He expressed an interest in law; Papa seized the moment and Aulus is being packed off to Athens.'

  'Greece! And studying? We are talking about Aelianus?' Aulus Camillus Aelianus was the unmarried son of a senator, with money in his pocket and a carefree outlook; I could not see him gravely attending jurisprudence lectures under a fig tree at an antique university. His Greek was awful, for one thing. 'Can't he be a lawyer in Rome?' That would be more useful to me. Expert knowledge for which I did not have to pay was always welcome.

  'Athens is the best place.' Well, it was traditionally the place to send awkward Romans who did not quite fit in. I chuckled.

  'Are we certain he is going? Do you and I have to check that he goes on the boat?' At a little short of thirty, the favourite pursuits of the noble Aulus Camillus Aelianus were hunting, drinking and gymnastics, all done to excess. There must be other, equally vigorous and disreputable habits, which I tried not to discover. That way, I could assure his parents I knew of no nasty secrets.

  'This is a serious shock for my parents,' Helena rebuked me.

  'One of their children can at last be mentioned at respectable dinner parties.' I held back the jokes. Their daughter had left home to live with a lowlife, me. Now that Helena and I had daughters of our own I understood just what that meant. As parents we had better things to do than talk about Aulus. Freed for once from the threat of little visitors in the bedroom, we tested out our apartment with passion. I had hired one of the identical room-sets in a small block set around a courtyard with a well.

  There were balconies on the street side, for show; tenants could not access them. All around us were other visiting families; we could hear their voices and the knocking of furniture, but since we did not know them we did not have to care if they were listening in. We managed not to break the bed. I hate being at a disadvantage when the landlord comes to check the fixtures and fittings schedule before he lets you leave. After a short deep sleep, I awoke abruptly. Helena was face down and dreaming beside me, pressed closely to my side. I lay with my right arm along her long bare b
ack, my fingers lightly splayed. If there had been a pillow, it had gone missing. My head was back, my chin up. As always at the very start of a mission, my brain was full of busy thoughts. I had been hired to find the absent Daily Gazette scribe.

  It was a mission I was foolish to take on, like most jobs I do. The only advantage to this one was that there were no dead bodies, or so I reassured myself. As I lay quiet, I thought back to how it had started.

  Back in Rome, the request first came obliquely via the imperial secretariats.

  There was a top man there called Claudius Laeta, who sometimes gave me business; the business always turned sour, so I was glad that Laeta's name was not attached to this. Well, not obviously. You could never be sure, with that smooth swine. At home two weeks ago, someone on the Palatine had recommended my investigative skills to the scribblers at the Gazette. A scared little public slave was sent to sound me out; he wasn't telling me much, because he knew nothing.

  I was intrigued. If this problem had any significance, then as Chief of Correspondence, Claudius Laeta should have been made aware of it. the Daily Gazette was the official mouthpiece of the government. In fact, when the slave appeared in my office being secretive, one attraction was the delicious idea that scribes at the Gazette might be trying to work a flanker on Laeta. There was something that would make me even happier than going behind Laeta's back, putting one over on Anacrites, the Chief Spy.

  That glorious hope seemed a possibility. If there was a hitch at the Daily Gazette then, like Laeta, Anacrites ought to have been told about it. His role was protecting the Emperor, and the Gazette existed nowadays to burnish the Emperor's name. Anacrites was away at his villa on the Bay of Neapolis. He had told my mother, whose lodger he had been briefly, and she had passed it on to me so I would be jealous of his prosperity. Stuff his prosperity. Anacrites upset me just by talking to Ma, and he knew it.

  What he did not know, apparently, was that the scribes who produced the Gazette were asking for expert assistance. He was away, so they had come to me. I liked that. Initially I was only told by the messenger that there was a problem with an employee. Even so, curiosity grabbed me; I told the little slave I would be happy to help, and would call at the Gazette offices that same afternoon.

  In Rome I worked from an office at my own house on the Embankment, just under the cliff side of the Aventine Hill. At this period of my informing career, I had two younger assistants nominally, Helena's brothers, Aulus and Quintus. Both had their own preoccupations, so I was on my own with the Gazette enquiry.

  I felt relaxed; it had all the signs of a nice little escapade that I could handle blindfold. That fine day two weeks ago, therefore, after my usual lunch with Helena, I had taken a pleasant walk to the Forum.

  There I did some preliminary homework. Most jobs came to me without warning; this time, it was good not to have to make the usual snap decision about accepting the work.

  At the column where the news is hung up daily, a handful of idlers were telling each other utter nonsense about chariot-racing. These time-wasters could not decide which way four horses were facing, let alone work out the odds on the Blues making a comeback with that snotty driver they unwisely bought and their new quartet of knock kneed greys. In front of the column, a solitary slave stood copying headings, using big letters for his extracts so it would fill his tablet and look good. His master was most likely an over-fed slug in a palanquin who never read the stuff anyway.

  When I say 'read', I mean, had it read to him.

  It was late in the day for perusing the column. People who needed to keep up to date would have acquired the news hours ago. Fashionable politicos would want to start outmanoeuvring their rivals before the rivals were up and networking. Adulterers would have to invent a good alibi before their spouses were awake. Even innocent householders liked to be abreast of the edicts.

  Helena Justina's father always sent along his secretary in time for him to bury himself in his copy over breakfast. That, I was sure, had nothing to do with Decimus Camillus wanting to avoid conversation with his noble wife as he blearily ate his nice white morning rolls. I checked today's familiar list. Most just made me yawn. Who cares about the number of births and deaths recorded in the city yesterday, or money paid into the Treasury and statistics relating to the corn supply? The election lists stink. Occasionally I found an intriguing nugget among the magistrates' edicts, wills of famous people, and reports of trials, though not often.

  The Acta Diurna was instituted to list the doings of the Senate, tedious decrees and toadying acclamations; automatically I skipped that. I sometimes consulted the court circular, if I needed to see the Emperor and did not want to waste time hanging around on the Palatine only to learn he had gone to his granny's villa for a festival. Now I skipped to the end, the most popular section. Here would be prodigies and marvels [the usual lightning strikes and calves born with three heads]; notice of the erection of new public buildings [hmm]; conflagrations [everyone loves a good blaze in a temple]; funerals [for the old women]; sacrifices [ditto]; the programme of any public games [for everyone; the most consulted section]; and privately submitted advertisements from snobs who wanted the whole world to know they had a daughter newly engaged to a tribune [boring! Well, boring unless you had once flirted with the daughter] [or with the tribune]. At last I reached the best bit, what the scribes discreetly call 'amatory adventures.'

  Scandal, with the names of the parties robustly revealed, because we are an open city. Deceived husbands need to be told what is going on, lest they be charged with condoning it, which is statutory pimping. And the rest of us like a bit of fun.

  I was disappointed. Where the gossip should be was just a note that Infamia, the columnist, was on holiday. He often was on holiday. Everyone always joked about it. Let's be blunt. it was thought that senators' wives whose affairs he discovered sometimes gave him a free ride to shut him up, but the senators who knew about it then hired thugs to track down Infamia, and the thugs sometimes caught him.

  'On holiday' meant our scandalmonger was laid up with wounds again. With no juicy stories to delay me further, soon I was being interviewed by the rather dour scribes who run the news service. Or so they thought. I had more experience. In reality, I was interviewing them. There were two, Holconius and Mutatus. They looked about fifty, worn out by years of deploring modern life. Holconius, the elder and presumably senior, was a seamy, thin-featured stylus-pusher who last smiled when the story came in about the Empress Messalina plying her trade in a brothel. Mutatus was still more po-faced. I bet he never even chuckled when the Divine Claudius pronounced his edict that farting was legal at dinner parties.

  'Let's go through your problem,' I probed, fetching out a note tablet. It made them nervous so I held the waxed pages upon my knee, with the stylus at rest. They told me they had lost contact with one of their number whose name, they said, was Diocles. I nodded, trying to give the impression I had heard, and of course solved, such mysteries before. 'How long has he been missing?'

  'He is not exactly missing,' Holconius demurred. I could have scoffed, well why call me in then? But those who work for the Emperor, putting an imperial gloss on events, skewing everything to look good – have a special way with words. Holconius had to send everything he wrote for Palatine approval, even if it was a simple list of market days. He then had every pearly phrase redrafted by some idiot until its impact was killed. So I let him be pedantic, this time.

  'We do know where he went,' he murmured.

  'And that was?'

  'To stay with a relative in Ostia. An aunt, he said.'

  'That's what he told you?' I assumed 'aunt' was the new term for fancy woman, but I thought no worse than that.

  'And he never came back?' So the fancy woman was tasty. 'Is this unusual?'

  'He is a little unreliable.' Since no details were supplied, I embroidered it myself.

  'He is lazy, drunk, feckless, he forgets to be where he should be, and he's always letting people down.'


  'Why, do you know him?' interrupted Mutatus, sounding surprised.

  'No.' I knew plenty like him. Especially scribes. 'So the job for me is: go to Ostia, find the bonny Diocles, sober him up if he'll let me, then bring him back?' Both of the scribes nodded. They seemed relieved. I had been gazing at my note-tablet; now I looked up.

  'Is he in trouble?'

  'No.' Holconius still hardly raised a sweat.

  'Any trouble,' I repeated quietly. 'At work, involving work, trouble with women, trouble with money, health worries?'

  'None that we know of.'

  I considered possibilities. 'Was he working on a particular story?'

  'No, Falco.' I reckoned Holconius was telling me the big fibs. Well, he was the political hack; Holconius, I knew, took the shorthand notes in the Senate, so untruths were his stock in trade. Mutatus just listed this month's programme for the games. He could do stupid inaccuracy with effortless grace, but he was weaker on pure lies.

  'And what section of the Gazette would Diocles normally produce?'

  'Does it matter?' asked Mutatus quickly. I deduced it was relevant, but I said sweetly,

  'Probably not.'

  'We do want to be helpful.' Reluctance filled his tone.

  'I would like to be fully informed.' Innocent charm filled mine.

  'Diocles writes the light-hearted items,' stated Holconius. He looked even more sombre than before. As the edict reporter, he disapproved of anything light. I could tell that before I arrived today Holconius and Mutatus had held detailed conversations about how much to confide in me. I worked out what that meant.

  'So your absentee writes the shock-and horror society news?' The two scribes looked resigned.

  'Infamia' is the pseudonym of Diocles,' Holconius confirmed. Even before they admitted it, I wanted the job.

  V

  In my first week of enquiries in Ostia, I made a slow start. I reported my lack of progress to Helena, the morning after she arrived.