Saturnalia mdf-18 Read online

  'He's got a good eye,' beamed my father approvingly.

  'Oh he knows when to commit sacrilege. Gaius is a little tyke; he could have got us all arrested if anyone had noticed him looting ritual offerings.' Luckily, in the family tradition, Gaius could bluff his wayout of trouble. He was around sixteen, with a curly rug of black hair just like my father's (and mine), and currently had the air of one born to sprawl under a regal canopy as if being carried to his banker's by a team of eight Mauretanian bearers. 'Now look here, Father, I sent this chancer to you with some important questions-'

  'No, just look at this-' Pa held up a tiny model of a womb. Some patient cured of a tumour or infertility had donated it gratefully to the gods at Olympia, Corinth or Athens, only to have Gaius swan along and swipe it. 'This is quite a rarity.' Pa noticed Gaius taking too much interest, so dropped the praise before my nephew tried to negotiate an improved purchase price. 'Difficult to sell because of the religious connection…' Gaius raised his eyes to the ceiling; he recognised devious backtracking.

  'Uncle Marcus will vouch for the provenance.'

  'No, I'll vouch for you being a bad boy who has no respect for ancient sites, Gaius!'

  'Don't be so stiff-necked,' ordered Pa. 'Give the lad a bit of encouragement. He's shaping up really nicely; I need Gaius, since you refuse to take an interest in the family business.'

  Groaning, I managed to extract from my father a description of the silver ear-rings Justinus had bought to mollify Claudia. I told Pa to look out for Justinus, the ear-rings, or a lost-looking woman of German extraction whose name I was not allowed to mention.

  'Oh you mean Veleda? Everyone is talking about her being free,' said Pa.

  'Is there a finder's fee?' Gaius demanded, voicing what my father would have put to me had he got in first. Instead, Pa, ever the hypocrite, pretended to tut at the greed of modem youth.

  'The reward is a clear conscience.'

  'Not enough!' snorted Pa, and Gaius nodded.

  'Doing your duty to preserve the Empire-'

  'Bugger that for a game of soldiers,' sneered Gaius. This time Pa did the seconding.

  Not long afterwards I was in the Emporium, trying to track down German traders. The Emporium was the long stone building on the banks of the Tiber, which ran from near my present house southwards along the shipping lane, almost to the city boundary. There were unloaded all the best commodities, brought in from worldwide sources, to be sold in Rome. It was a wondrous hubbub of sights, sounds and smells, where tight knots of dealers and double-dealers fixed the rates and the outlets for artwork and marble, precious woods and metals, spices, gemstones, wines, oils, dyes, ivory, fish products, leather, wools and silks. You could buy a barrel of fresh British oysters in saline for your dinner party, peacock fans to decorate the dining room while you ate them, a handsome slave to serve the meal, and a sarcophagus to hold your corpse after you discovered the oysters had not survived the journey safely. The item prices were tempting-until you added in the dealers' premiums, luxury tax and the costs of transport to your house. This was if you managed to get in and out of the building without having your purse stolen.

  My father, in whom snobbery flared high, had declared there would be no importers bringing local wares from either Roman or Free Germany, though I would find plenty of exporters sending fine Roman products to deprived provincials. He was only slightly wrong. Following his directions, I did track down a few sad purveyors of

  Rhenish hides, woollen coats, and even decorated terracotta bowls, but most of the negotiators who were here from the north were sending luxuries back home. Where they were selling, their dinnerware was good (Helena and I already owned a similar set from Gaul), but as they were passing off the stuff as coming from the well-known factory sites at Arretium, the prices here were Italian and there was no cost benefit.

  The men I interviewed wore heavy trousers and tunics, with cloaks fastened on one or both shoulders. Some had brooches in intricately twined Celtic patterns; others fixed their garments with fibulae whose gold filigree was much more Mediterranean, and occasionally ancient. They had been trading with Rome for generations-and probably trading with Greece long before that-whereas they had been trading in the city here for maybe only thirty years, since the Emperor Claudius introduced German allies into the Senate and, while fighting the prejudice of his peers, tried to welcome tribal leaders to Rome and Roman society. This group were mean-eyed capitalists from the west bank of the Rhenus who did not want peace on the east bank because it posed a direct threat to them financially. Theirs was the usual self-serving of commerce. They wanted to remain sole suppliers of Roman goods to their own area. Sharing the trade with Easterners did not appeal. They were very quick to label the east-bank tribes as barbarians.

  I probed delicately how they had felt about Veleda. I was chancing it here. Rebellion was a sensitive subject in Europe. Even on the western bank, which had been in Roman control for a long time, there were those who had sought independence not so long ago when they thought Rome was vulnerable. But if these men had felt any sympathy with Veleda back then, they knew better than to show it now.

  Laeta's injunction to secrecy made it impossible to ask whether they would help Veleda if she came to them as a supplicant. I could see a risk that her well-known hostility to Rome might arouse anti-German feeling generally, if the public heard she was in our city. If that happened, maybe the traders would turn against her for causing them problems. Insofar as they would talk about her, they claimed that Veleda had always denounced them as collaborators and they denied that there had ever been any possibility of an alliance across the river.

  This was bosh. I knew that before Vespasian stabilised the region recently, there had been contact, of which some was very violent but much was friendly. I did not trust the traders, therefore; and since they obviously wondered why I was questioning them, it was fair to say they did not trust me.

  I got nowhere. Since I had to disguise my purpose, I had expected nothing better. I did obtain one useful piece of information: how to find a particular group of Germans who had lived in Rome for decades. The traders sent me to them with sardonic expressions-and I knew why. They were hoping their notorious fellow-countrymen would do me physical damage. In fact, they probably thought I was about to be bent into a mystical Celtic knot with all my protruding bits neatly tucked in.

  The group I went visiting had shrunk to a grim little enclave: I had tracked down the neglected remnants of Nero's legendary German bodyguard.

  I was among elderly men giving off a strong odour of the dangerous past. Those were sour times, and these were sprawling old bullies, nostalgic for a culture that no longer existed. Why had they remained in Rome? Probably to avoid disappointment if they returned to their own land and discovered that it was now populated by neat Roman towns where citizens carried out Romanised occupations in a Roman ethos. Even the fanners and country manufacturers brought in their produce to sell at our kind of market in our style of urban forum. Across Europe, fewer and fewer people lived in roundhouses. Tribal culture was dying. Upper and Lower Gennany were filled with industries making equipment for the legions. Beer was losing out; vineyards were spreading ever northward.

  Originally the bodyguard must have numbered around five hundred. Some had died, some had drifted elsewhere, yet a hard core stayed on, dreaming of the good old days as fighting men do. Now they were pushing pension age-had they been given pensions. From their shabby dress and faded energy I deduced that public handouts for these one-time palace servants were few. In Roman politics during the mad days of the Julio-Claudians, loyalties had tended either towards Nero or Claudius; political advancement had depended on alliances made with one or the other; and Vespasian was a Claudian supporter. When Nero died and he came to power, fortune finally stopped smiling on these men.

  It was thirty years since their heyday. They had not so much run to seed as decayed into compost. I found a mildewed huddle of about fifteen, teasing out a flagon or tw
o at their regular lunch club. A withered Ubian waiter, who must have served their bread and blood-sausage for forty years, tottered away to fetch extra wine that I paid for, muttering what sounded like bitter Ubian curses under his onion-flavoured breath. The old warriors regarded me with greater toleration, aware that few people nowadays would stand them a warm toddy on a cold morning, but even they failed to reach my classification of 'friendly'.

  I seemed to remember that in the old days the German bodyguard had been selected for size. Now the big men were stooped in the shoulder but their once-giant frames supported heavy bellies. They looked truculent. I had had a fight with another group of these bullies a few years ago and it had been vicious. These were older now and might not be able to catch anyone who ran away very fast, but if you stumbled as you tried to escape, they could kill you just by rolling on you-and I was pretty sure they would do it. When the drinkers banged down their metal cups with their fat fists, the reverberation shook sheets off the washing lines three streets away. It was deliberate. Nero's bodyguard had always been violent and uncontrollable. Nowadays they were lazy old slobs and their blond plaits had thinned out to sad wisps, but they were still off-putting.

  They did not like me either.

  Once again I was hamstrung by my order to keep Veleda's name out of my enquiries. And once again, I thought I saw expressions in the watery blue eyes of some here which said they knew exactly why I had come to question them.

  As a lead-in, I asked whether they had had a visit recently from the Praetorian Guard. This elicited a loud burst of laughter and boasting about how they bettered the Praetorians. I joked chummily that the Guards were having a bad week, and we settled down pretending to be allies. It was temporary.

  The Praetorians, never famous for subtlety, had come right out and admitted they were looking for someone, a woman from the old guards' home country. I asked if they had had any visits from anyone like that, and they responded rudely that they wouldn't tell me if they had. They must have spurned the Praetorians with the same derision. While this meant that the Praetorians, and Anacrites, had failed to get ahead of me, it also meant that all of us were getting nowhere.

  The Germans continued drinking the wine I had paid for, pretty well ignoring me. I considered them. Enough had been said for me to suspect that in general they would show no sympathy to a woman. Veleda's fall into captivity would be an excuse to ignore her. Since they spent their time bemoaning the loss of the old days, they were also antagonistic to the younger generation that Veleda represented. I asked if they had sons; a few did, but they were serving in the legions and I guessed that if those soldiers ever came home, there would be distrust and family arguments.

  I wondered which side of the River Rhenus these warriors originally came from. They could even be a mixture of tribes. Although Nero was best known for using this Rhineland protection force, it had been instigated earlier, by Augustus; other emperors and generals had employed them too. Vespasian had stopped that; now the Emperor was meant to be the Father of his Country, utterly loved by his people. Rule by threat had given way to rule by coercion. While bad emperors would continue to be set upon and stabbed, we all pretended the public were devoted. It had become embarrassing to employ foreigners for imperial protection, because that implied that the Father of his Country could not trust his own.

  Suddenly one of the bleached braggarts produced a coin from his bosom. As if he sensed that I was mentally condemning his brothers and him as outdated, he flattened it on the boards in front of me. Typical of imperial propaganda, it showed Nero on a box, addressing three figures in military dress, whom I deduced must be members of his German guard. 'We are history, Falco!'

  'You must be very proud,' I said, pretending to be overawed. I would have felt uncomfortable surrounded by this number of manicure boys at a public bath house. These overweight monsters made me nervous. I had been aware of men coming and going in the low-roofed hall where we were squashed. They could be taking messages, summoning reinforcements. I could no longer see the Ubian waiter. Perhaps someone had recognised me from that fight I had had with the others from their group five years ago. Perhaps somebody had remembered how on that occasion, I had laid out several men who were selling themselves as hired muscle at the house of a certain Atius Pertinax; they fought viciously, but I had left them dying in the road… It was time to leave.

  I thanked them for their co-operation and made good my escape. I walked away from the area purposefully, though not so fast as to let anybody watching know I felt nervous. I thought I had managed it safely. I knew the bastards had loathed me but I thought they had let me go.

  Only as I slowed down and started to relax did I sense that I had been followed.

  XIV

  Being tracked was always dangerous. I never underestimated the risk. Whether it was general muggers emerging from unlit alleys, hoping to follow some lump of off-guard after-dinner flab and snatch his purse along with his fine linen banquet napkin, or whether it was thugs trailing me specifically for reasons connected with a case, I treated them all as potential killers. Never ignore the half-seen shadow you try to convince yourself was nothing; you may very well end up with an assassin's knife sliding under your ribs. That cart being driven erratically in a road where carts don't normally deliver may have a driver who is planning to run you down. The faint noise overhead may be a heavy flowerpot falling down accidentally-or a pot someone has pushed over with a view to crushing your head. It may be three men dropping down on you from a balcony.

  'Hey, Falco!'

  Even before I pinpointed them, I knew I was being hunted by Germans. I had recognised the accent. Not the ex-bodyguards. The voice belonged to a younger man. At the breathy shout from my left, I spun around and checked my right. Long practice.

  No one rushed me. Two quick steps had me with my back against a house wall. As I scanned around, I pulled my knife from my boot.

  My mind raced. I was in the enclave between the Fourth and Sixth Districts. The High Lanes. Not as elegant and lofty as they sound. Somewhere close to the Porta Saluta, named for the Temple of Salus, or well-being. About to be very unhealthy for me.

  I knew nobody in these streets. Had no idea where the nearest vigiles station was. Could not rely on local stallholders. Was unsure of the configuration of local lanes and back doubles, if I had to make a run for it… I identified the Germans. Several, and they looked tough.

  People were about. A woman stood outside a shop with two young children; she was gazing at produce-knives? cushions? pastries?-while the little girl tugged her skirts, whining to go home.

  Businessmen were arguing lazily but long-windedly on a corner. A slave wheeled a handcart laden with cabbages, pretending not to notice when he dropped one and it rolled away. Two dogs stopped sniffing each other and stared at me. Only they had spotted my sudden movement and sensed something interesting was about to occur.

  In the brief pause, one of the dogs walked over to the lost cabbage, which was still slowly rolling, and put his nose down to it as the vegetable teetered on the edge of the kerb then toppled down into the gutter. The cabbage gave a lop-sided lurch, and covered itself with muddy water. The dog licked it, then looked up at me, his curiosity on the wane. The other dog barked once, just making a point about who owned the street.

  My heart was pounding. 'Hey, Falco!'

  Taller than me by several inches and heavier by many pounds, three fair-haired men in their thirties stood in a loose group a few strides away. They had seen my knife. They looked faintly sheepish. I refused to be fooled.

  'Hello. I am Ermanus,' offered the spokesman. He smiled at me. I did not smile back.

  They were well built with heavy bellies; they looked raffish and untidy, but much harder than the old slugs t had been talking to earlier. These large boys went to the gym. If you punched those paunches, your fist would bounce off solid flesh, too fat, but supported by muscle. The black leather straps holding in their guts would barely give, and the metal s
tuds in those workmanlike straps and five-inch belts would break your knuckles. If you hit these men, you would only have yourself to blame. They would fight back-and they would have had practice. Their biceps were bursting below their short, taut tunic sleeves. They had calves like military gateposts.

  'You're Falco?' Ermanus now almost sounded tentative. Not true. In case anyone failed to find him frightening, dark blue patterns in woad wreathed all over his arms. His comrades were equally menacing. None of them wore cloaks, despite the cold. They wanted everyone to see how hard they were.

  'Don't come any closer!'

  'We just need a word…' Every landlord's enforcer, every master villain's back-up gang, every curmudgeon with a cudgel I had ever encountered said that. We just need a word… Dear gods, when would the world's brutes change their script? It was ridiculous when what they all meant was: shut up, don't call attention to us, just give in and lie down in the road quietly while we kick you insensible. Most of them were illiterate. Holding a conversation was the last thing any of the bastards really had in mind.

  I shifted my balance. 'You stay right there. What do you want?' 'You've been talking with our old fellows.'

  'I was talking. Your old fellows were unresponsive. What of it?' 'Was it about a woman?'

  'It may have been.' Or it may not. Or maybe I am not allowed to say. Thank you, Laeta, for putting me in this stupid position. Let me know how I can make you look like an idiot some day.

  'From Germania Libera?'

  I wondered if the heavyweights were lusting after her-but I was starting to suspect that was the wrong scenario.

  'I am searching for a woman from Free Germany, yes. Can you give me information?' I looked at them. They looked at me. 'If! I find her-and find her quickly-there may be a reward.' If I really did find her, I was confident Laeta would pay whatever I had to negotiate. He would have to. I would not hand her over until he covered any debts.