The Silver Pigs mdf-1 Read online

  He inspected it gently.

  "May I ask where you obtained this?"

  "Off the arm of a decorative party I rescued yesterday from two thieving hulks."

  Ts she hurt?"

  "No, sir."

  He had heavy eyebrows above decently spaced eyes that looked at me directly. His hair bristled straight up from his head even though it was not particularly short, giving him a cheerful, boyish look. I saw him brace himself to ask what I wanted. I put on my helpful face.

  "Senator, would you like me to bring her back?"

  "What are your terms?"

  "Any idea who took her, sir?"

  "None." If I had realized he was lying, I should have admired the brisk way the man spoke. As it was, I liked his insistence. Your terms please?"

  "Just professional curiosity. I've tucked her away somewhere safe. I'm a private informer. A watch captain called Petronius Longus in the Thirteenth will vouch for me"

  He reached for his ink pot and made some notes across the corner of a letter he had been reading. I liked that too. He intended to check.

  I suggested, without pressure, that if he was grateful he might hire me to help. He looked thoughtful. I outlined my rates, adding something for his rank since it would all take slightly longer if I had to keep calling him "sir'. He showed some reluctance, which I reckoned was because he did not want me hanging round the girl, but eventually we agreed I would advise him on household security and keep an ear to the ground about the kidnappers.

  "You may be right about keeping Sosia Camillina out of sight," he said. "Is your hideout respectable?"

  "Supervised by my own mother, sir!" True: she scoured my rooms regularly for evidence of loose women. Sometimes she found it, sometimes I hustled them out in time.

  This senator was no idiot. He decided someone had to come back with me to make sure the wench was safe. I advised him against that. I had seen some greasy meatballs in the cook shop opposite, watching visitors to his home. There was nothing to say they were connected with Sosia, they could have been casual burglars who had picked an unlucky day to size up a future break-in. Since he was walking me round his property anyway, we went to look.

  On the front door they had a sound wooden lock with a six inch, three-toothed iron rotary key, plus four brass bolts, an inspection grille with a natty little slider, and a great holm oak beam inside to sling across on two well-bedded cradles at night. The door porter lived in a cubbyhole at the side.

  "Adequate?" remarked the senator.

  I gave him a long look, including the dozy sprite they used as a doorman the slack-mouthed strip of wind who had let Sosia's abductors walk in.

  "Oh yes, sir! A wonderful system, so let me offer some advice: use it!" I could see he took the point.

  I made him peer through the grille to inspect the two loafers in the cook shop

  "Those peepers saw me come. I'll hop out over your back wall; give me a chance to survey the rear of the house. Send a slave to the local lockup and get them arrested for causing a breach of the peace."

  "But they are not"

  "They will be," I told him. "When the praetor's posse starts arresting them."

  He was persuaded. The leaders of the Empire are so easily led.

  The senator spoke to his doorman, who looked annoyed but mbled off on the errand. I made Camillus Verus show me his upstairs accommodation, then when we came down ten minutes later I looked out again and saw the two loafers from the cook shop with their arms up their backs, being marched off down the street by a brisk group of soldiers.

  Reassuring to discover that when a citizen of substance complains to a magistrate the response is so prompt!

  With all that cast iron work on the front door, at the back they had seven different entrances to the garden, with nary a decent lock among them. The kitchen door opened when I tried my own home latch-lifter. None of the windows had bars. A balcony around the upper storey offered access to the entire house. Their elegant smoky blue dining room possessed flimsy folding doors which I forced with an edging tile from a flowerbed, while the senator's secretary watched. He was a thin Greek slave with a hooked nose and the air of superiority with which Greek secretaries are embalmed at birth. I dictated instructions at length.

  I decided I enjoyed dictating. I also enjoyed the look on the Greek's face when I grinned goodbye, clambered onto a sundial, found a toehold on a knot of ivy, and hoisted myself up the sheer dividing wall to see about the house next door.

  "Who lives there?"

  The master's younger brother."

  As a younger brother myself I noted with pleasure that Camillus junior had sense. He had fixed up every window with solid slatted shutters, all painted in dark malachite green. Both houses had been faced in standard lava blocks, with their upper floors supported on skinny pillars hewn from a very ordinary grey stone. The architect had been lavish with his shaped terra cotta gable ends, but by the time he came to stock the grounds with the customary statues of graceful nymphs in their underwear, his contingency funds ran out. The gardens were furnished with meagre sticks of trellis, though their plants burgeoned with health. It was the same building contract on both sides of the wall. Hard to say why the senator's house bore an approachable, easygoing smile while his brother's felt formal and cold. I was glad Sosia lived in the house with the smile.

  I gazed at the brother's house for a long time, not quite sure what I was looking for. Then, with a wave to the Greek, I walked along the top of the divider to the far end. I jumped nonchalantly off.

  I got covered in dust and twisted my knee, landing in the alley behind the senator's garden wall. Hercules knows why I did it, there was an entry for delivery carts with a perfectly good gate.

  VII

  As I walked towards home the streets became more clamorous, with traders' cries, hoofbeats and harness bells. A small black dog, his fur clinging in spiked clumps, barked madly at me as I passed a baker's shop. When I turned back to swear at him, my head bonked against a sequence of jugs that had been hung on a rope by a potter whose idea of advertisement was to show his work could take a bashing; luckily my head was also strong. In the Ostia Road I was buffeted by bodkin sellers and footmen in crimson livery, but I managed to get my own back by squashing the toes of several slaves. Three streets from home I glimpsed my mother buying artichokes with the purse-lipped look that means she is thinking about me. I ducked behind some barrels of winkles and then backtracked to avoid finding out whether this was true. She did not appear to have seen me. Things were going well: friends with a senator, open-ended contract, and best of all, Sosia.

  I was brought up sharp from this reverie by two bullyboys whose greeting made me grunt with pain.

  "Whoops!" (cried I). "Look lads, it's all been a mistake. Tell Smaractus my rent's with his accountant' I failed to recognize either, but Smaractus rarely keeps his gladiators long. If they can't run away they inevitably die in the ring. If they don't make it that far they perish from starvation, since Smaractus' idea of a training diet is a handful of pale yellow lentils in lashings of old bathwater. I assumed these were my landlord's latest bruisers from the gym.

  My assumption was awry. By now my head was being gripped under the first bully boy elbow. The second put his face down to grin at me; I had a sideways view of the cheek guards of the latest design of helmet and a familiar scarlet neckerchief under his chin. These beggars were army. I considered coming the old soldier but in view of my legion's record, a dropout from the Second Augusta was unlikely to impress.

  "Guilty conscience?" (cried the sideways face). "Something else to worry you Didius Falco, you're under arrest!"

  Arrest by the boys in red felt familiar, like being tickled for cash by Smaractus. The biggest of these two big lads was attempting to squeeze out my tonsils with the racy efficiency of a cook's boy pod ding peas with his thumb. I would have asked him to stop but I was speechless with admiration for his technique…

  VIII

  A social at-ho
me in a guard post courtesy of an aedile called Atius Pertinax. I was expecting to be hauled off to prison, the Tullianum, or even the Mamertine if my luck had completely run out. Instead, they trooped me all the way back east into the First. This startled me, since until that morning I had never done business in the Capena Gate Sector. I was astonished that I had offended the authorities in quite so short a time.

  If there is one class of person I hate above all others, it is aediles. For the benefit of provincials let me say that in Rome the praetors govern law and order, senior senators elected six at a time, who divide the fourteen districts between them. Each has a junior to do all the legwork these aediles, brash young politicians in their first public posts, filling time before the better jobs that bring in bigger bribes.

  Gnaeus Atius Pertinax was typical of the breed, a short-haired pup yapping up the political ladder, nagging butchers to sweep clean their shop fronts and beating the hell out of me. I had never seen him before. In retrospect I remember no more than a washed-out grey streak, half hidden by a shaft of dazzling sunlight. The greyness may be lost recollection. I think he had light eyes and a stiff nose. He was in his late twenties (just younger than me), his tight nature reflected in a constipated face.

  There was an older man, no purple on his clothes not a senator who sat on the sidelines and said nothing. A bland unremarkable face and a bald unremarkable head. In my experience, men who sit in corners are the ones to watch. But first, pleasantries with Pertinax.

  "Falco!" he commanded, after brisk preliminaries established who I was. "Where's the girl?"

  I had a serious grudge against Atius Pertinax, though I did not know it yet.

  I was wondering how to answer in a way that would be rude enough, when he ordered his sergeant to encourage me. I pointed out I was a freeborn citizen and that laying a fist on a citizen was an affront to democracy. It turned out neither Pertinax nor the bullyboys were students of political science: they set about affronting democracy without a qualm. I had the right of appeal directly to the Emperor but I decided there was not much future in that.

  If I had thought Pertinax was being so violent out of affection for Sosia, it might have been easier to bear, but we shared no fellow feeling. The whole event troubled me. A senator might well have second thoughts, cancel our contract and report me to the magistrate, yet Decimus Camillus had looked a soft touch and he knew (more or less) where his missing miss was. So I braved it out, bruised but proud.

  "I shall return Sosia Camillina to her family when they ask me, and do your worst, Pertinax – I shall return her to no one else!"

  I saw his eyes travel to the middle ranker in the corner. The man had a lean, sad, tolerant smile.

  "Thank you," this one said. "My name is Publius Camillus Meto. I am her father. Perhaps I can ask you now."

  I closed my eyes. It was quite true nobody had actually told me the senator's relationship to Sosia. This must be his younger brother, the man who lived in the frosty house next door. So my client was only her uncle. All the rights of ownership would lie with her papa.

  In response to further questioning, as they say, I agreed to take her father and his pleasant friends to fetch her.

  Back at the laundry Lenia popped out, intrigued by the uncoordinated tramping of large numbers of feet. Seeing me under arrest caused no surprise.

  "Falco? Your mother says Oh!"

  "Out of the way, you filthy old bladder!" shouted the aedile Pertinax, flinging her to one side.

  To spare him the indignity of being fruit-pressed to a pulp by a woman, I interceded gently: "Not the time, Lenia!"

  After twenty years of wringing out heavily wet togas, she possessed deceptive strength. He could have been badly damaged. I wish that he had been. I wish I had held him down for Lenia while she did it. I wish I had damaged him myself.

  By then the momentum of our arrival had carried us up the stairs. Their visit was brief. When we all burst into my apartment, Sosia Camillina was not there.

  IX

  Pertinax was furious. I felt depressed. Her father looked weary. I offered to help him find her: I saw him snap.

  "Stay away from my daughter, Falco!" he cried angrily.

  Understandable. He could probably guess my interest. Keeping layabouts away from a daughter like that must occupy a lot of his time. I murmured, in a responsible tone:

  "So I'm off the case"

  "You were never on it, Falco!" the aedile Pertinax crowed.

  I knew better than to argue with a touchy politician. Especially one with such a pained face and pointy nose.

  Pertinax let his men rummage through my apartment for evidence. They found nothing: even the sardine plates had been washed, though not by me. Before they left, they rearranged my furniture into handy cordwood sticks. And when I protested, one of them smashed me in the face so hard he all but broke my nose.

  If Atius Pertinax wanted me to think him a frowsty lout with the habits of a gutter rat, he was halfway home.

  As soon as they had gone, Lenia rushed upstairs to see whether she could inform Smaractus that one of his tenants had expired. My wrecked belongings stopped her short.

  "Juno! Your room and your face, Falco!"

  The room was nothing special, but I had once been proud of my face.

  "I needed a new table," I groaned wittily. "You can buy wonderful ones nowadays. Decent slice of maple six feet across, bolted on a simple marble stand, just right with my bronze candelabrum I used to light my room with a tallow-dipped rush.

  "Fool! Your mother says"

  "Spare me," I said.

  "Suit yourself!" She flounced off with her I'm just the baggage who takes messages face.

  Things were not going so well. Still, my brain was not completely pulverized. I was too keen on good health to ignore a message from my ma. No need to trouble Lenia; I knew what it would be. And regarding my lost moppet with the mellifluous brown eyes, I did have an idea where she was.

  News travels fast in the Aventine. Petronius turned up, fussing and none too pleased, while I was still exclaiming in agony as I bathed my face.

  "Falco! Keep your filthy-mannered civic friends off my patch-" He whistled. Then at once took the black pottery jug from my shaking hand and poured for me himself. It was like old times, after a bad night's brawling outside the centurions' dining club in Isca Dumnoniorum. At twenty nine it hurt much more than when we were nineteen.

  After a while he propped up what remained of my bench on two bricks from my stove, then sat me down.

  "Who did this to you, Falco?"

  I managed to tell him, using only the left half of my mouth. "An overexcited aedile called Atius Pertinax. I'd like to open him out like a spatchcock chicken, completely boned, on a very hot grill!"

  Petronius growled. He hates aediles even more than I do. They get in his way, they upset local loyalties, they take all the credit, then leave him to tidy up their mess.

  He prised up my loose floorboard and brought me some wine, but it stung me too much, so he drank it himself. We both hate waste.

  "You all right?" I nodded, and let him do the talking. "I've been checking on the Camillus family. The senator's daughter is away on travel leave. There are two sons, one doing his year in the army in Germany, one bashing a desk wiping the governor's nose in Baetican Spain. Your little girlfriend is some hushed up indiscretion of the senator's brother. He's not married don't ask me how he gets away with that! According to the Censor's office Sosia was recorded as the child of one of his slaves, acknowledged then adopted by him. Could just be her father is a decent type. Or could be her mother was someone more important than he can say."

  "Met him," I squeezed out like a sour pip. "Bit thin-lipped. Why not in the senate too?"

  "Usual story. Family could only buy in the political votes once: elder son was put into purple stripes, younger foisted into commerce instead. Lucky old commerce! Is it true that you've lost her?"

  I tried to grin. What a failure. Petro winced.
<
br />   "She's not lost. Come with me, Petro. If she's where I think, I need your support…"

  Sosia Camillina was where I thought.

  X

  Petro and I ducked down a tiled entry between a cutler's and a cheese shop. We took the stairs before the elegant ground floor apartment that was occupied by the idle ex-slave who owned the whole block (and several other blocks too; they know how to live). We were in a flaky grey building behind the Emporium, not far from the river but not so near that it flooded in the spring. It was a poor neighbourhood, but there were green creepers wound round all the pillars on the street side, sleek cats asleep in window boxes summer bulbs brightening the balconies; someone always kept the steps swept here. It seemed to me a friendly sort of place, but I had known it a long time.

  On the first floor landing we banged at a brick-red door, which I had under pressure painted myself, and were admitted by a tiny waif of a slave. We found our own way to the room where I knew everyone would be.

  "Hah! Wine shops all closed early?"

  "Hello, Mother," I said.

  My mother was in her kitchen, supervising her cook, which meant the cook was nowhere in sight but ma was doing something rapid to a vegetable with a sharp knife. She works on the principle that if you want anything done properly, do it yourself. All around were other people's children, with their steely jaws clamped into loaves and fruit. When we arrived, Sosia Camillina sat at the kitchen table gorging a piece of cinnamon cake with a gusto that told me she was already well at home, as people in my parents' house tend to be.

  Where was my father? Best not to enquire. He went out to a game of draughts when I was seven. Must be a long game, because he still hasn't come home.

  I kissed my mother's cheek like a dutiful son, hoping Sosia would notice, and was whacked with a colander for my trouble.