Finished Business (12 page)

‘How about Anicius Cerialis?’ I said.

‘Frustrated wannabe, with as much flair for politics as a newt. Known in government circles, in as much as he’s known at all, as the Tongue.’

‘Ah … the Tongue? We talking sexual proclivities here?’

‘Oh, no! For completely different reasons. Cerialis has only got as far as he has through gross flattery of the emperor. Emperors, I should say, as I’m including Tiberius. That’s “gross” even by senatorial standards.’ Gods! ‘Mind you, up until recently it’s worked quite well.’

‘So what happened recently?’

‘Gaius—’ He stopped. ‘I’m sorry,
Caesar
, promised him the suffect consulship for the second half of this year. In the event, the place went to Terentius Culleo, and Cerialis was not a happy bunny.’

Uh-huh; we were definitely seeing a pattern here.

‘Last one,’ I said. ‘Valerius Asiaticus.’

‘Ah.’ Crispus smiled, like a gourmet squaring up to a plate of roast flamingo with larks’ tongue sauce. ‘Asiaticus is rather special.’

‘In what way?’

‘You know his wife Saturnina is Caesar’s ex Lollia Paulina’s sister? And that as a consequence they’re invited to the best parties up at the palace?’ I nodded. ‘It seems that a few months back, Caesar, ah, developed a certain fondness for the lady.’

‘You mean he’s screwing her.’

‘No. He
was
screwing her, only because she was putting on such a mediocre performance, he gave it up. Caesar has been pointing out this fact loudly to Asiaticus and complaining of his wife’s failings on a regular basis. At the palace dinners, when the couple are both in attendance.
Compulsory
attendance.’

Ouch. ‘Pattern’ was right.

Fuck. Well, you took what you were given and liked it. Or, as in this case, maybe you didn’t: what I was hearing was really,
really
bad news. I stood up.

‘Thanks, pal,’ I said. ‘Very thorough and informative, as usual. I’ll leave you to get on.’

‘All this is strictly confidential, right, Corvinus?’

‘My lips are sealed.’

‘And you’ll stay the hell clear of my Alban villa?’

‘Of course. My word is my absolute bond. Perilla’ll be seriously disappointed, mind, but—’

‘
Out!
’

I left, grinning.

S
o. Back home to the Caelian, for a serious think.

The lady was definitely
not
going to like this. In view of what Secundus had said about pussyfooting round the fringes of current politics, I didn’t like it more than half myself. Four guys, all highly placed, all with a grudge against the emperor, couldn’t be any sort of coincidence. Oh, sure, when I’d gone round to Longinus’s I might’ve been gatecrashing that common thing in Rome, a group of senatorial soul-brothers getting together to whinge in private about how rotten the emperor had been to them and what a despicable cad the bounder was; in which case as far as I was concerned they could get on with it and do all the whingeing they liked. Even so, particu-larly when you factored in the arranged ambush near the Janiculan, I had a horrible suspicion that I’d stumbled into something a whole lot nastier: we were looking at treason here, or potential treason, anyway, and it had something to do with the death of Naevius Surdinus.

Not that the prognosis was total doom and gloom. For a treason plot to be a viable proposition – if this
was
a treason plot – then the guys behind it had to have something in the bank that, when push inevitably came to shove, they could lay on the table. So far, at least, I couldn’t see that being the case. Oh, they were all senators, sure, but even in respect of that toothless shower they were lightweights: Graecinus was a newcomer from a no-account provincial family; Asiaticus might be a consular but he’d been out of the loop for five years; Cerialis hadn’t even been able to muster the support he needed to make suffect; and after his recall, Longinus was effectively a spent coin. Asiaticus had an in with Gaius himself, certainly, but from what Crispus had told me it was more as a figure of fun than anything else. Longinus … well, as Asian governor with three legions under him, he might’ve had some military clout at one time, but even if he’d hung on to that somehow after his recall, it was very localized, and nothing when measured against the rest of Rome’s armed forces.

Of course, there still remained the wild card of an assassin-ation – taking out the emperor personally – but the chances of success there were about the same as a snowball’s of making it through hell. Even given the opportunity, there’d be Gaius’s Praetorian bodyguard in the assassin’s way, for a start, and these buggers you do not mess with. And when they were off duty he had his personal contingent of Germans, who by reputation were an even worse proposition because they were complete head-bangers and would just
love
the chance to dice up one of the Roman master race with no comeback. So any senator stupid enough to try anything on, either in public or private, wouldn’t get within five feet of his target before he was carved up six ways from nothing like a Spring Festival chicken.

No worries there, then.

Maybe …

Like I said, I was heading back along the Sacred Way in the direction of the Caelian. I’d just reached the junction of Fabricius Street when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned.

‘Valerius Corvinus?’

‘Yeah, that’s me,’ I said, frowning.

The guy was young, in the mid-twenties or so, with a narrow-striper tunic showing under his cloak. And he looked scared as hell.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve been following you, looking for a chance to …’ He stopped, glanced behind him, then went on in a rush: ‘We have to talk.’

‘About what?’

‘Naevius Surdinus.’

My stomach went cold. ‘Sure. No problem, pal,’ I said. ‘There’s a wine shop I know a bit further on. We can—’

‘No, not now. I haven’t the time, I have to get back.’ He was terrified, almost gabbling.

‘Back where? And who are you, exactly?’

He shook his head in a quick, nervous movement, and his hand gripped the edge of my cloak. ‘Tomorrow, right? Anywhere you like, but it can’t be before the seventh hour. I’ll be … I can’t come until then.’

‘OK. That wine shop I mentioned. Pollex’s, about a hundred yards on the right. You can’t miss it.’

‘I know it. Pollex’s it is, an hour after noon.’

And he was gone, walking quickly back towards Market Square.

Gods. What was that about?

One thing, though. I’d noticed, when he’d turned round, the red mark between his chin and his throat; nothing permanent, not a scar or a burn, but the kind of mark made by something that’s been rubbing a lot against the skin. Something, for example, such as a helmet strap. And, taking that together with his age and the narrow purple stripe on his tunic, that could only mean one thing.

My young pal was a military tribune. A Praetorian.

Shit.

Perilla was in the atrium when I got back. She had a book unrolled on her lap, but as soon as I came in she put it aside, and I had the distinct impression that she hadn’t actually been reading it. Taken together with the fact that she had her serious look on, the omens here were not good.

‘Marcus …’ she said, and stopped. She frowned, and shook her head. ‘No. You first. How was your day?’

I put Bathyllus’s cup of wine on the table and lay down on the couch next to it. I was beginning to get seriously worried.

‘Sod that for now,’ I said. ‘You OK? You’re not ill or anything?’

‘I’m perfectly well, dear,’ she said. She didn’t look it:
death warmed up
was the phrase that suggested itself. The worry went up another notch; for Perilla, this was
not
normal behaviour.

‘But something’s happened, right?’ A horrible thought struck me. ‘How’s Marilla? You had a message from Clarus?’ Like I said, our adopted daughter was in the last stages of pregnancy, always a dangerous time, particularly when it’s a first child.

‘Marilla’s absolutely fine, as far as I know. No, we’ve had no messages from anywhere. And nothing at all has happened. At least, nothing involving the family. It’s just that …’ She stopped again. ‘Look, I may be completely wrong about something. I hope I am, but I need your opinion.’

‘Come on, lady! Just forget all the mystery and spill, will you?’

She ignored me. ‘You talked to Surdinus Junior?’

I took a deep breath; we might as well get this over with. I wasn’t going to tell her about the attack on the Janiculan, mind you. ‘No. That turned out to be a wild-goose chase. Forget it, it’s not important. But I did end up having another word with Gaius Secundus. And with Caelius Crispus at the foreign judges’ office. It seems that Longinus isn’t the only guy out of the four to have something against the emperor. In fact, all of them do, of one kind or another.’ I gave her the details. ‘Plus I’d a run-in with a youngster on the way back. Although
run-in
isn’t exactly the phrase; nothing violent. He wants to talk to me tomorrow about Surdinus’s death.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me. No name, no details up-front whatsoever. But the kid was jumpy as hell and seriously scared, and I’d bet my boots he was a Praetorian tribune.’ I paused. ‘And if that’s so, then I’m afraid we have a completely different ball game.’

She nodded; she was looking paler than ever.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You’re not surprised?’

‘No.’ She gave a brittle smile. ‘My turn, dear. I’ll take this step by step, because I really,
really
do want to be told that I’m mistaken. You remember Aristarchus of Samos, that Julia Procula lent to me?’

‘The “Iliad” guy, yes?’ I was frowning: Perilla
wanting
to be proved wrong? That wasn’t normal behaviour either, very far from it. I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this. ‘Sure. So?’

‘Well, I thought I might apply his principle, or something like it, anyway, to Surdinus’s bequest and his letter. That we shouldn’t look at things through our own eyes but through the writer’s.’

‘Sorry, lady, but you’ve lost me.’

‘Actually, when you have the trick of it, it’s quite simple. Horribly so. First of all, the book he left me – Hipparchus’s Commentary on the
Phaenomina
– was in Greek, so I thought perhaps that although Surdinus’s letter was in Latin he wanted us to keep the idea of
Greek
in mind when we read it. You see?’

‘Gods, Perilla …’

‘Just bear with me, dear, please. It sounds complicated, I know, but it does all make perfect sense. Unfortunately. Start with the author’s name. Hipparchus. Does that ring any bells?’

I sighed. ‘Look, lady, you’re the academic in this household. Until I saw his name on the book-tag, I’d never even heard of the bastard.’

‘No, not Hipparchus of Nicea, an earlier one. Much earlier, much more well-known. Historical, not literary.’ Then, when I looked blank: ‘Oh,
Marcus
! I told you, I need confirmation of the train of thought. Or, preferably, refutation. Athens? Just over five hundred years ago?
Don’t
make me say it myself, please!’

I’d my mouth open to say that I hadn’t heard of that bastard either, when I realized I had. About twenty-five years previously, thanks to a particularly vicious rhetoric teacher who’d beaten the name into me, plus the details of how he’d ended up, as an encouragement to morality achieved through abstention from drink and loose women. And with the name two things happened. The first was that I saw where the lady was headed; the second was that I felt a cold ball of ice forming in my gut.

I was now hoping that she was wrong, too. But I didn’t think she was.

‘The Athenian tyrant,’ I said. ‘Got himself—’

‘Yes. But leave it there for the moment, dear. Moving on to the letter. Surdinus calls your father “agreeable” and “the best of neighbours”.’

‘Yeah.’ I was frowning again. I remembered thinking at the time that that made no sense, because making himself agreeable wasn’t exactly Dad’s thing, and he sure as hell hadn’t lived anywhere near the Vatican. Where, I’d discovered early on, the Naevius family had been fixtures for generations. ‘So?’

‘So what would the Greek for that be?’ Perilla said. ‘“Agreeable” and “the best of neighbours”?’

‘
Harmodios
and …’ I stopped as the implication hit me. ‘Oh, shit! Oh, holy fucking Jupiter! Harmodius and Aristogeiton.’ Those two names you couldn’t
not
know, certainly not if you’d spent much time in Athens, as we had, because statues to them were all over the place, particularly where there was a good chance that a Roman or two would stroll past on a regular basis and get the intended message: the two tyrant killers, who’d done for Hipparchus and laid the foundations of Athenian democracy. ‘Surdinus was telling us there’s a plot to kill the emperor.’

‘Yes. It all makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Perilla said. She was perfectly calm now. ‘On your side as well.’

‘Yeah.’ Oh, sure, like I’d said, an assassination had always been on the cards, given the treason scenario, but it hadn’t been likely. However, if I was right about the guy who’d stopped me on the Sacred Way being a tribune, then six got you ten that the local military were involved, and in that case the conspirators’ chances of success had taken a spectacular hike. If some – or all – of the troops that were supposed to be acting as Gaius’s bodyguard were actually his potential killers, then this was a completely new ball-game right enough. ‘He has to be warned,’ I said.

‘I know.’

Bugger; this was
not
going to be easy. Or safe. If Gaius Secundus was right – and I’d no reason to disbelieve him – then the time when I could simply make an appointment with Gaius, stroll down to the palace and have a pleasant chat regarding conspiracies and homicidal Praetorians was over. I’d nothing against the guy, sure, nor him against me. If anything, it was the reverse: I’d done him quite a few favours over the years, and we’d always rubbed along pretty well together when our paths had crossed – but after all he was the most powerful man in the world who could have me chopped on the spot just for the fun of seeing what my insides looked like, and the terrible thing was that that eventuality was no longer remote enough for me to discount it, let alone laugh it off.

If I were to go to the emperor – or even bring myself to his notice indirectly – I’d have to do it with more proof than I had at present. Even if it meant I was too late.

Hell. Hell and damnation.

Well, we’d just have to see what my Praetorian pal had to say.