Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (88 page)

I nodded. ‘What about the amount? The Ides is only two days away. A hundred thousand sesterces amounts to ten thousand gold pieces. Can you raise that sum?’

Quintus Fabius snorted. ‘The money is no problem. The amount is almost an insult. Though I have to wonder if the boy is worth even that price,’ he added under his breath.

Valeria glared at him. ‘I shall pretend that I never heard you say such a thing, Quintus. And in front of an outsider!’ She glanced at me and quickly lowered her eyes.

Quintus Fabius ignored her. ‘Well, Gordianus, will you take the job?’

I stared at the letter, feeling uneasy. Quintus Fabius bridled at my hesitation. ‘If it’s a matter of payment, I assure you I can be generous.’

‘Payment is always an issue,’ I acknowledged, though considering the yawning gulf in my household coffers and the mood of my creditors, I was in no position to decline. ‘Will I be acting alone?’

‘Of course. Naturally, I intend to send along a company of armed men – ’

I raised my hand. ‘Just as I feared. No, Quintus Fabius, absolutely not. If you entertain a fantasy of taking your son alive by using force, I urge you to forget it. For the boy’s safety as well as my own, I cannot allow it.’

‘Gordianus, I
will
send armed men to Ostia.’

‘Very well, but they’ll go without me.’

He took a deep breath and stared at me balefully. ‘What would you have me do, then? After the ransom is paid and my son released, is there to be no force at hand with which to capture these pirates?’

‘Is capturing them your intent?’

‘It’s one use for armed men.’

I bit my lip and slowly shook my head.

‘I was warned that you were a bargainer,’ he growled. ‘Very well, consider this: if you successfully arrange the release of my son, and afterwards my men are able to retrieve the ransom, I shall reward you with one-twentieth of what they recover, over and above your fee.’

The jangling of coins rang like sweet music in my imagination. I cleared my throat and calculated in my head. One-twentieth of a hundred thousand sesterces was five thousand sesterces, or five hundred gold pieces. I said the figure aloud to be sure there was no misunderstanding. Quintus Fabius slowly nodded.

Five hundred pieces of gold would pay my debts, repair the roof on my house, buy a new slave to be my bodyguard (a necessity I had gone without for too long), and give me something left over.

On the other hand, there was a bad smell about the whole affair.

In the end, for a generous fee plus the prospect of five hundred pieces of gold, I decided I could hold my nose.

Before I left the house, I asked if there was a picture of the kidnapped boy that I could see. Quintus Fabius withdrew, leaving me in his wife’s charge. Valeria wiped her eyes and managed a weak smile as she showed me into another room.

‘A woman artist named Iaia painted the family just last year, when we were down at Baiae on holiday.’ She smiled, obviously proud of the likenesses. The group portrait was done in encaustic wax on wood. Quintus Fabius stood on the left, looking stern. Valeria smiled sweetly on the right. Between them was a strikingly handsome hazel-haired young man with lively blue eyes who was unmistakably her son. The portrait stopped at his shoulders but showed that he was wearing a manly toga.

‘The portrait was done to celebrate your son’s coming of age?’

‘Yes.’

‘Almost as beautiful as his mother,’ I said, stating the matter as fact, not flattery.

‘People often remark at the resemblance.’

‘I suppose he might have a bit of his father about the mouth.’

She shook her head. ‘Spurius and my husband are not related by blood.’

‘No?’

‘My first husband died in the civil war. When Quintus married me, he adopted Spurius and made him his heir.’

‘Spurius is his stepson, then. Are there other children in the household?’

‘Only Spurius. Quintus wanted more children, but it never happened.’ She shrugged uneasily. ‘But he loves Spurius as he would his own flesh, I’m sure of it, though he doesn’t always show it. It’s true they’ve had their differences, but what father and son don’t? Always fighting about money! Spurius can be extravagant, I’ll admit, and the Fabii are famous for stinginess. But the harsh words you heard my husband utter earlier – pay them no attention. This terrible ordeal has put us both on edge.’

Valeria turned back to the portrait of her son and smiled sadly, her lips trembling. ‘My little Caesar!’ she whispered.

‘Caesar?’

‘Oh, you know whom I mean – Marius’ nephew, the one who was captured by pirates last winter and got away. Oh, Spurius loved hearing that story! Young Caesar became his idol. Whenever he saw him in the Forum he would come home all breathless and say, “Mater, do you know whom I saw today?” I would laugh, knowing it could only be Caesar, to make him so excited.’ Her lips trembled. ‘And now, by some jest of the gods, Spurius himself has been captured by pirates! So I call him my little Caesar, knowing how brave he must be, and I pray for the best.’

I left the next day for Ostia, accompanied by the armed force which Quintus Fabius had hired and outfitted for the occasion. The band was made up of army veterans and freed gladiators, men with no prospects who were willing to kill or risk being killed for a modest wage. There were fifty of us in all, jammed together in a narrow boat sailing down the Tiber. The men took turns rowing, sang old army songs and bragged about their exploits on the battlefield or in the arena. If one were to believe all their boasting, taken together they had slaughtered the equivalent of several cities the size of Rome.

Their leader was an old Sullan centurion named Marcus, who had an ugly scar that ran from his right cheekbone down to his chin, cutting through both lips. Perhaps the old wound made it painful for him to speak; he could hardly have been more tightlipped. When I tried to discover what sort of orders Quintus Fabius had given him, Marcus made it clear at once that I would learn no more and no less than he cared to tell me, which for the moment was nothing.

I was an outsider among these men. They looked away when I passed. Whenever I did manage to engage one of them in conversation, the man quickly found something more important to do and in short order I found myself talking to empty air.

But there was one among their number who took a liking to me. His name was Belbo. To some degree he was ostracized by the others as well, for he was not a free man but a slave owned by Quintus Fabius; he had been sent along to fill out the ranks on account of his great size and strength. A previous owner had trained him as a gladiator, but Quintus Fabius used him in his stables. The hair on Belbo’s head was like straw, while the hair on his chin and chest was a mixture of red and yellow. He was by far the largest man in the company. The others joked that if he moved too quickly from one side of the boat to the other he was likely to capsize us.

I expected that nothing would come of questioning him, but soon discovered that Belbo knew more than I thought. He confirmed that young Spurius was not on the best of terms with his stepfather. ‘There’s always been a grudge between them. The mistress loves the boy, and the boy loves his mother, but the master has a hard spot for Spurius. Which is odd, because the boy is actually more like his stepfather in most ways, even if he is adopted.’

‘Really? He looks just like his mother.’

‘Yes, and sounds and moves like her, too, but that’s all a kind of mask, if you ask me, like warm sunlight sparkling on cold water. Underneath, he’s as stern as the master, and just as wilful. Ask any of the slaves who’ve made the mistake of displeasing him.’

‘Perhaps that’s the trouble between them,’ I suggested, ‘that they’re too much alike, and vie for the attentions of the same woman.’

We reached Ostia, where the boat was moored on a short pier that jutted into the Tiber. Farther down the riverfront, at the end of the docks, I could just glimpse the open sea. Gulls circled overhead. The smell of salt water scented the breeze. The strongest of the men unloaded the chests containing the ten thousand pieces of gold and loaded them into a wagon, which was wheeled into a warehouse on the docks. About half the men were sent to stand guard over it.

I expected the rest of the men to head for the nearest tavern, but Marcus kept order and made them stay on the boat. Their celebration would come the next day, after the ransom and whatever else resulted.

As for me, I intended to seek lodgings at the Flying Fish, the tavern mentioned in Spurius’s letter. I told Marcus I wanted to take Belbo with me.

‘No. The slave stays here,’ he said.

‘I need him for a bodyguard.’

‘Quintus Fabius said nothing about that. You mustn’t attract attention.’

‘I’ll be more conspicuous
without
a bodyguard.’

Marcus considered this for a moment, then agreed. ‘Good,’ someone called as Belbo stepped onto the dock, ‘the giant takes up the room of three men!’

At this Belbo laughed good-naturedly, perceiving no insult.

I found the Flying Fish on the seaside waterfront where the larger, seafaring vessels pitched anchor. The building had a tavern with a stable attached on the ground floor, and tiny cubicles for rent on the second floor. I took a room, treated myself and Belbo to a delicious meal of stewed fish and mussels, then took a long walk around the town to reacquaint myself with the streets. It had been a while since I’d spent any time in Ostia.

As the sun sank beneath the waves, setting the horizon aflame, I rested on the waterfront, making idle conversation with Belbo and looking at the various small ships along the dock and the larger ones moored farther out in the deeper water. Most were trading vessels and fishing boats, but among them was a warship painted crimson and bristling with oars. The enormous bronze ram’s head at its prow glittered blood-red in the slanting sunlight.

Belbo and I passed a skin of watered wine back and forth, which kept his tongue loose. Eventually I asked him what orders his master had given to the centurion Marcus regarding the armed company.

His answer was blunt. ‘We’re to kill the pirates.’

‘As simple as that?’

‘Well, we’re not to kill the boy in the process, of course. But the pirates are not to escape alive if we can help it.’

‘You’re not to capture them for sentencing by a Roman magistrate?’

‘No. We’re supposed to kill them on the spot, every one of them.’

I nodded gravely. ‘Can you do that, Belbo, if you have to?’

‘Kill a man?’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not like some of the others on the boat. I haven’t killed hundreds and hundreds of men.’

‘I suspect most of the men on the boat were exaggerating.’

‘Really? Still, I wasn’t a gladiator for long. I didn’t kill all that many men.’

‘No?’

‘No. Only – ’ He wrinkled his brow, calculating. ‘Only twenty or thirty.’

The next morning I rose early and put on a red tunic, as the ransom letter had specified. Before I went downstairs to the tavern I told Belbo to find a place in front of the building where he could watch the entrance. ‘If I leave, follow me, but keep your distance. Do you think you can do that without being noticed?’

He nodded. I looked at his straw-coloured hair and his hulking physique and was dubious.

As the day warmed, the tavern keeper rolled up the screens, which opened the room to the fresh air and sunlight. The waterfront grew busy. I sat patiently just inside the tavern and watched sailors and merchants pass by. Some distance away, Belbo had found a discreet, shady spot to keep watch, leaning against a little shed. The bovine expression on his face and the fact that he seemed hardly able to keep his eyes open made him look like an idler eluding his master for as long as he could and trying to steal a few moments of sleep. The deception was either remarkably convincing, or else Belbo was as dull as he looked.

I didn’t have long to wait. A young man who looked hardly old enough to have grown his beard stepped into the tavern, blinked at the sudden dimness, then saw my tunic and approached me.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked. His accent sounded Greek to me, not Cilician.

‘Quintus Fabius.’

He nodded, then studied me for a moment, while I studied him. His long black hair and shaggy beard framed a lean face that was accustomed to sun and wind. There was a hint of wildness in his wide green eyes. There were no scars visible on his face or his darkly tanned limbs, as one might expect to see on a battle-hardened pirate. Nor did he have the look of desperate cruelty common to such men.

‘My name is Gordianus,’ I said. ‘And what shall I call you?’

He seemed surprised at being asked for a name, then finally said ‘Cleon,’ in a tone which suggested he would have given a false name but couldn’t think of one. The name was Greek, like his features.

I looked at him dubiously. ‘We’re here for the same purpose, are we not?’

‘For the ransom,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Where is it?

‘Where is the boy?’

‘He’s perfectly safe.’

‘I’ll have to be sure of that.’