The Silver Pigs mdf-1 Read online

  Ma greeted Petronius with an affectionate smile. (Such a good boy; such a hard-working wife; such a regular well-paid job!)

  My eldest sister Victorina was there. Petronius and I both withdrew into ourselves. I was terrified Victorina would call me Trouble in front of Sosia. I could not imagine why he looked so worried.

  "Hello, Trouble," said my sister, then to Petronius, "Hello, Primrose!"

  She was married now to a plasterer, but in some ways she had not changed since she tyrannized the Thirteenth when we were small. Petronius had not known the rest of us in those days, but like everyone for miles around he knew our Victorina.

  "How's my favourite nephew?" I asked, since she was holding her latest pug-faced progeny. He had the wrinkled face and tearful gaze of a hundred-year-old man. He stared at me over her shoulder with visible contempt: barely crawling yet, but he could recognize a fraud.

  Victorina shot me a tired look. She knew my heart belonged to Marcia, our three-year-old niece.

  My mother sedated Petronius with a casket of raisins while she extracted impertinent facts about his relations with his wife. I managed to get hold of a melon slice, but Victorina's infant seized the other end. He had the grip of a Liburnian wrestler. We struggled for some minutes, then I gave way to the better chap. The wretch hurled the melon onto the floor.

  Sosia watched everything with immense, solemn eyes. I suppose she had never been anywhere where there was so much going on in such good-humoured chaos.

  "Hello, Falco!"

  "Hello, Sosia!" I smiled, in tones that were meant to lap her body in liquid gold. My sister and mother exchanged a derisory glance. I put one foot on the bench beside Sosia and gazed down with a simmering leer until my mother noticed.

  "Get your boot off my bench!"

  I took my boot off the bench.

  "Little goddess, you and I need a private talk."

  "Whatever you need," ma informed me, "can be discussed right here!"

  Grinning more than I thought necessary, Petronius Longus sat down at the table and leaned his chin on his hands while he waited for me to begin. Everyone knew that I had no idea what I wanted to say.

  On several occasions before that, indignant females had described to me the expression on my mother's face when she met some painted madam with a scented skirt in my rooms. Sometimes I never saw them again. In fairness to my mother, my conquests had included bad mistakes.

  "What's going on here?" my mother had rapped at Sosia when she discovered her during my enforced chat with Pertinax.

  "Good morning," responded Sosia. My mother sniffed. She strode to the bedroom, flung aside the curtain, and weighed up the situation with the camp bed.

  "Well! I can see what's going on! Client?"

  "I am not allowed to say," Sosia said.

  My mother replied that she would be the judge of what was allowed. Then she sat Sosia down and gave her something to eat. She has her methods. Pretty soon she had wormed out the whole tale. She demanded what Sosia's noble mama would think, so Sosia unwisely mentioned having no noble mama. My own sweet parent was appalled.

  "Right! You can come with me!" Sosia murmured that she felt safe enough. Mother gave her a sharp look; Sosia went with my mama.

  Now Petronius, bless him, weighed in to help me out.

  "Time we took you home, little lady!"

  I told Sosia how the senator had engaged me. From which she assumed rather too much.

  "So he explained? I thought Uncle Decimus was being overcautious at first' She stopped, then rounded on me accusingly, "You don't know what I'm talking about!"

  "Tell me then," I said very gently.

  She was deeply troubled. Her great eyes flew towards my mother. People always trust my mother. "I don't know what to do!" she pleaded.

  My mother answered huffily, "Don't look at me, I never interfere."

  I snorted at this. Ma ignored it, but even Petro had let slip a stifled guffaw of amusement.

  "Oh, tell him about your bank box, child. The worst he can do is steal it," mother said. Such wonderful faith! I suppose you can't blame her. My elder brother Festus for some peculiar reason made himself a military hero. I can't compete with that.

  "Uncle Decimus is hiding something very important in my bank box in the Forum," Sosia muttered guiltily. "I'm the only person who knows the number to open the box. Those men were taking me there."

  I stared at her with a set face, making her suffer. In the end I turned man-to-man to Petronius. "What do you think?" I had no doubt of his answer.

  "Stroll along and look!"

  Sosia Camillina was behaving very meekly, but she did pipe up to warn us we should need to take a handcart to carry the loot.

  XI

  The Forum was cooler and quieter than when I was here with Sosia before, especially in the long colonnade where moneychangers offered safe deposits for nervous citizens. The Camillus family banked with a grinning Bithynian who had invested unhealthily in excess body fat. Sosia whispered a number to identify her property; happy face unlocked her box. It was a large box, although what was inside turned out to be comparatively small.

  The box lid fell back. Sosia Camillina stood to one side. When Petro and I peered in, her savings were even less impressive than mine. Her uncle hired her this strongbox as a sensible discipline, but she owned no more than ten gold coins and a few decent pieces of jewellery that her aunt thought she was too young yet to wear. (It was a point of view. She was old enough for me.)

  Our object of enquiry was folded up in felt and roped around with hemp. Since the banker was watching us with frank Bithynian curiosity, Petronius gave me a hand to drag it out unwrapped. It seemed impossibly heavy. It was lucky we had borrowed a handcart from my brother-in-law the plasterer, who was out of work as usual. (My brother-in-law was not out of work because all the walls in Rome were sound and smooth. It was because people in Rome would rather look at bare slats than employ a cross-eyed, bone idle swine like him.) We staggered off with our trolley creaking under the weight. Petro let me do most of the work.

  "Don't hurt yourself!" Sosia had the grace to exclaim.

  Petronius winked at her. "Not as puny as he looks. Does secret weight training in a gladiators' gym. Use your muscles, blossom"

  "You must tell me some time," I gasped in retaliation, "why my sister Victorina calls you Primrose!"

  He said nothing. But he blushed, I swear he did.

  Fortunately Rome is a sophisticated city. Two men with a girl and a handcart can crawl into a wine shop without causing comment. We moved down a shady side street and plunged indoors. I bagged a table in a dark corner while Petro laid on some hot pies. It took both of us to raise the precious object up onto the table with a thud. Cautiously we peeled back the felt.

  "Shades of Hades!" Petronius let out.

  I could see why Uncle Decimus did not want this new baby announced in the Daily Gazette.

  Sosia Camillina had no idea what it was.

  Petro and I knew. Both of us felt slightly sick. Petro, with his iron stomach, nevertheless leaned back on his joint-stool and snapped his teeth into a vegetable pie. Rather than surrender to unhappy memories, I bit into one too. Mine was basically rabbit, with chicken livers and, I think, juniper not bad. There was a plate of pork tit bits we let Sosia chew on those.

  That lonely hole of a customs post," Petro reminisced in horror. "Stuck on the Sabrina Estuary the wrong side of the frontier. Nothing to do but count the coracles floating in the mist, and keep one eye open in case the dark little men came over the river on a raid. Oh dear gods, Falco, remember the rain!"

  I remembered the rain. The long, drear rain in southwest Britain is unforgettable.

  "Falco, whatever is it?" Sosia hissed.

  I said, relishing the drama, "Sosia Camillina, this is a silver Pig!"

  XII

  It was an ingot of lead.

  It weighed two hundred Roman pounds. I tried to explain once to a woman I knew, how heavy that was:

>   "Not a lot heavier than you. You're a tall girl, quite a solid piece. A bridegroom could just about heave you over his threshold and not lose his silly smile…" The wench I was insulting happened to be a substantial armful, though by no means overweight. It sounds unkind, but if you've ever tried picking up a well fed young lady you'll appreciate the comparison was fairly exact. In fact, lifting this dense grey slab before we knew what we were doing had left two of us with bad backs.

  Petronius and I gazed at the silver pig like an old, and not entirely convenient, friend.

  "Whatever is it?" Sosia demanded. I told her. "Why do you call them pigs?"

  I explained that when precious ore is being refined, molten metal runs away from the furnaces into a long channel where moulds for the ingots lead off down each side, like sucking piglets beside their mother sow. Petronius stared at me sceptic ally while I said this. Sometimes Petro seems amazed by the things I claim to know.

  This valuable porker was a long dull block of metal, about twenty inches long by five wide and four deep, slightly bevelled at the sides, with the Emperor's name and the date on one long edge. It looked nothing, but a man who tried to carry it would soon find himself bent double. Twenty-four ladles of molten ore to each standard mould, not quite too heavy to handle, but difficult to steal. Worth it though, if you could. The silver yield from Mendips ore is remarkably high, on average a hundred and thirty ounces to the ton. I wondered whether the silver had already been extracted from the bauble on the table.

  The government claims a monopoly of precious ore.

  Wherever it came from, this belonged in the Mint. We rolled it, and banged it topside up, looking for an official stamp.

  It was stamped all right: TCL TRIP, some new piece of nonsense, not once but four times, then EX ARC BRIT the old familiar mark we half hoped and half dreaded to find. Petronius groaned.

  "Britain; a perfect signature! Someone must be sweating."

  An uncomfortable feeling struck us both at the same time.

  "Better move," Petro suggested. "Shall I tidy this away? Our usual place? You take the girl?"

  I nodded.

  "Falco, what's happening?" Sosia demanded excitedly.

  "He's putting the silver pig somewhere smelly where felons will be too sensitive to look," I said. "You're going home. And J need an urgent chat with your Uncle Decimus!"

  XIII

  I took Sosia Camillina home in a sedan chair. There was room for two; she was a diminutive scrap and I could so rarely afford enough to eat that the bearers let us both ride. I stayed silent for a long time, so once she worked out I was no longer disgruntled with her, she chattered. I listened without listening. She was too young to sit in peace after a surprise.

  I was beginning to be annoyed with the entire Camillus family. Nothing any of them ever said was true or complete, unless it turned into something I preferred not to hear. My open-ended contract had led me down a cul-de-sac.

  "Why are you so quiet?" Sosia demanded suddenly. "Are you wishing you could steal the silver pig?" I said nothing. Naturally. I was wondering how that might be arranged. "Do you ever* have any money, Falco?"

  "Sometimes."

  "What do you do with it?"

  I told her I paid the rent.

  "I see!" she commented gravely. She was looking up at me with those great unsettling eyes. Her expression saddened into melting reproach for my aggressiveness. I wanted to suggest it was a bad idea to turn a look like that on men with whom she found herself alone, though I said nothing because I foresaw difficulties explaining why.

  "Didius Falco, what do you really do with it?"

  "I send it to my mother." My tone of voice left her unsure whether I meant it, which was how I liked a woman to be left.

  At that time I thought a man should never tell women what he does with his money. (Those days were the days, of course, before I was married and had this issue placed in true perspective by my wife.)

  What I really did with my money in those days was that sometimes I paid the rent. (More often not.) Then, after deducting unavoidable expenses, I sent half to mama; I gave the rest to the young woman my brother never found the time to marry before he was killed in Judaea, and the child he never even discovered he had.

  None of that was any business of a senator's niece.

  I dumped the girl on her relieved aunt.

  Senators' wives, in my scheme, fall into three types. The ones who sleep with senators, but not the senators who married them; the ones who sleep with gladiators; and a few who stay at home. Before Vespasian, the first two types were everywhere. There were even more afterwards, because when Vespasian became Emperor, while he and his elder son were out in the east, his young puppy Domitian lived in Rome. Domitian's idea of becoming a Caesar was seducing senators' wives.

  The wife of Decimus Camillus fell into my third type: she stayed at home. I knew that already, otherwise I would have heard of her. She was what I expected: glossy, tense, perfect manners, jingling with gold jewellery a well-treated woman with an even better-kept face. She glanced first at Sosia, then her shrewd black eyes flicked over me. She was just the sort of sensible matron a bachelor would be lucky to find when he was presented with an illegitimate child he felt unable to ignore. I could see why the nifty Publius parked his Sosia here.

  Julia Justa, the senator's wife, took back her lost niece without fuss. She would ask her questions later, once the household settled down. Just the sort of decent, deserving woman who has the unhappy luck to be married to a man who dabbles in illegal currency. A man so inept, he hires his own informer to expose him.

  I made my way to the library and marched in on Decimus unannounced.

  "Surprise! A senator who collects not grubby Greek antiques but ingots engraved artistically by the government! You're in enough trouble, sir, why hire me as well?"

  He had a shifty expression for a moment, then he seemed to straighten up. I suppose a politician gets used to people calling him a liar.

  "Dangerous ground, Falco. When you calm down"

  I was perfectly calm. Furious, but lucid as glass.

  "Senator, the silver pig must be stolen; I don't rate you as a thief. For one thing," I sneered, "if you had gone to the trouble of stealing British silver, you would take much more care of your loot. What's your involvement?"

  "Official," he said, then had second thoughts. That was just as well, since I didn't believe him. "Semiofficial."

  I still didn't believe him. I choked back a laugh. "And semi corrupt

  He brushed my bluntness aside: "Falco, this has to be in confidence." The stale crust of this family's confidence was the last thing I welcomed. "The ingot was found after a scuffle in the street and handed in to the magistrate's office. I know the praetor for this Sector; he's a man I dine with and his nephew gave a posting to my son. We discussed the ingot, naturally."

  "Ah, just among friends!"

  Whatever he had done, to a man of his station I was being unacceptably rude. His patience surprised me. I watched him closely; he was just as intently observing me. I would suspect he wanted a favour, had he been a different class of man.

  "My daughter Helena took a letter to Britain we have relatives there. My brother-in-law is the British secretary of finance. I wrote to him"

  "All in the family; I see!" I scoffed again. I had forgotten how clannish these people can be: little pockets of reliable friends sewn into every province from Palestine to the Pillars of Hercules.

  "Falco, please! Gaius my brother-in-law conducted a skeleton audit. He discovered there had been a steady wastage from the British mines at least since the Year of the Four Emperors. Theft on a grand scale, Falco! Once we heard that, we wanted our evidence secure; my friend the praetor asked my help. Using Sosia Camillina's bank box was, I regret to say, my own bright idea."

  I told him our new hideout. He looked ill. Petro had taken the silver pig to Lenia's laundry. We would be banking it in her vat of bleaching pee.

  The senato
r made no comment on either our snaffling his exhibit or its pungent hiding place. What he offered me was much more dangerous.

  "Are you busy at the moment?" I was never busy. As an informer I was not that good. "Look Falco, are you interested in helping us? We can't trust the official machine. Someone must already have talked."

  "What about here?" I interrupted.

  "I never mentioned the ingot here. I took Sosia to bank it without telling her why, then forbade her to talk." He paused. "She's a good child." I gestured wry acknowledgement. "Falco,

  I admit we were careless before we grasped the implications, but if the praetor's organization leaks we can't take further risks. Your face seems to fit this job semi-official and semi-corrupt"

  Sarcastic old beggar! I realized the man had a quietly wicked streak. He was shrewder than he liked to appear. He certainly knew what preoccupied me. He ran one hand over that upright bush of hair, then said awkwardly:

  "I had a meeting today at the Palace. I can't say more than that, but with the Empire to reconstruct after Nero and the civil war those ingots are sorely needed by the Treasury. In our talks your name came up. I understand you had a brother My face really set. "Excuse me!" he exclaimed abruptly in that concerned way the occasional aristocrat has, which I never entirely trust. It was an apology; one I ignored. I would not have these people discussing my brother. "Well, would you want the job? My principal will honour your usual rates; I gather you inflated them for me! If you find the missing silver, you can expect a substantial bonus."

  "I'd like to meet your principal!" I snapped. "My idea of a bonus may not be the same as his."

  Decimus Camillus snapped straight back: "My principal's idea of a bonus is the best you will get!"

  I knew it meant working for some snooty secretariat of jumped-up scribes who would slash my expenses given half a chance, but I took the job. I must have been mad. Still, he was Sosia's uncle, and I felt sorry for his wife.

  There was something odd about this case.