Perfiditas (20 page)

Although 19.00, the sun’s warmth hadn’t diminished much. It was only late August, after all. But a few red streaks in the sky had slashed across the yellowing sky. In an hour, it would be dark, the time when bad guys came out to play. I was sitting in the corridor outside Conrad’s office looking through the sliding glass doors to the little internal garden. Long limbs of two birch trees stretched up, chased by a photinia in hot pursuit. Lavenders and rosemary added scent and, somehow, bees made their way in there. And out again.

Somna arrived with Lucius, who looked sour. I stood and waited quietly behind them. Sella appeared next and we exchanged brief smiles. There were a few minutes to go. Daniel would cut it fine as usual and he didn’t disappoint. Summoned by the legate’s EO, we traipsed in. He invited Somna, Sella and Lucius to sit on the couches and waved Daniel and me to find a seat somewhere.

‘We appear to have acquired the core plotters,’ the legate said in a neutral tone. ‘Naturally enough, you will wish to interview them, Colonel.’ He nodded at Somna. ‘Please liaise with Major Stern and Captain Mitela for operational information. They will be detailed to you for as long as you wish.’

Wonderful.

He scanned around. ‘I require detailed diaries and reports of all actions you each took part in over the past three weeks. I include myself, of course,’ he said. ‘These will be examined by an internal security board, and appropriate disciplinary or commendation action taken as necessary.’

Nobody said a word. He rubbed the first two fingers of his right hand on the hairline at his temple – the stress sign. ‘I will have to think exactly who will make up this board – none of us here are fit to sit on it, except perhaps Sella. For the time being, everybody will continue as usual. Daniel, could you step up the training schedules – please hand over to Colonel Sella on this while you are detached to the Interrogation Service.’

He looked down at the coffee table. To me, he looked pinched and pale. ‘You realise the legal team will be all over us as they prepare the trials. It is therefore imperative that you complete your accounts as soon as possible.’

The dejection in his voice permeated the room. He wasn’t only thinking of the past weeks, but trying to prepare us and protect us from the inevitable fallout.

After the meeting broke up, I hung around.

‘Do you really want everything?’ I asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll kill my legend. I’ve kept it alive for seven years.’

‘I know.’

‘I could use it again. If I could come up with an alternative—’

‘Don’t try. I want it finished.’

‘Is this to do with pushing me out? Should I go voluntarily?’

‘I think you have to make a decision where you belong.’

I couldn’t believe he was putting me in this place. I was trying to stand on both sides of a crevasse that was opening up under me. The two sides were parting at an increasing pace. I looked at my wristband. ‘I’m due at the palace very soon. After that, I’ll have to take a couple of days, maybe less.’

His face was neutral, but the voice was clipped and cold. ‘Very well. But this is the last time.’

‘I— I don’t—’ I couldn’t say any more. I swallowed hard. I resented being forced to abandon a part of my life I felt strongly about. Apollodorus had helped me grow up. He was my mentor, my colleague, my friend.

Conrad stood up, came over to me, laid his right hand on my good shoulder, and gently stroked my cheek with the other.

‘Go and do what you have to do,’ he said quietly, ‘and then come back to me.’ He kissed me lightly on my forehead and gave me a sad little smile.

XXVII

Flavius picked me up at the palace and we drove to Apollodorus’s house. In the cooler evening, I was grateful for the black fleece uniform jacket over my shoulders. We approached the gate with its graceful stone arch. The gatekeeper would be tucked up in a warm hole somewhere, so I tried the coded entry system. I was surprised and, in a strange way, wary when it worked. The vidcamera swung in our direction as the gate opened. Flavius drove in and parked in the visitors’ area at the front. By now, they would have ID’d us and be ready. To say I was apprehensive was an understatement. I was trembling inside and out.

Flavius gave me a sympathetic look. He jumped out, came around and opened the passenger door for me. He held out his hand. ‘C’mon, Bruna. Let’s get on with it.’

Our boots crunched across the gravel. The inner metal barred gate with its Venetian scrollwork opened almost silently for us. We continued up the path, all twenty metres of it. The sound would have alerted the house even if we weren’t already being tracked on the cameras. As we reached the house door, it was swung open by a servant I didn’t recognise. His outstretched arm invited us into the covered courtyard.

Waiting for us with grim expressions were Justus and Philippus, plus two bodyguards carrying compact assault rifles, angled ready for use. We were the opposition – that was obvious. Our uniforms reinforced it. Both men made a show of looking at us indifferently, but I could see wariness in Philippus’s eyes. I looked across at them, a vast chasm between us now. These were comrades, loyal friends as close to me in some ways as my ART. Maybe not Justus.

‘Against the wall,’ Philippus said, pointing at me. His tense face, his whole manner silently begging me not to do anything stupid so he’d have to shoot me. ‘Please.’

I placed my left hand at shoulder height on the cold stone. My right arm stiff, but no longer painful, lay in its sling. One bodyguard stood a metre away to my side and glued her weapon to a point fifteen centimetres away from my head; the other covered Flavius.

Philippus lifted my jacket off, handed it to Justus who searched it. Next my belt and side arm. Philippus gave me the most thorough frisking I’d ever had. I’d never before appreciated how inquisitive his strong hands were. He unclipped the sling and eased my arm out, lifting the dressing to inspect the entry wound. I gasped as the skin pulled. The wound was still weeping a little liquid and blood.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Where are the knives?’

‘I left them behind.’

Justus snorted. Fair enough. Pulcheria always carried her knives. ‘Take off your boots. Slowly and carefully.’

Not so easy one-handed. It took forever. The silence was oppressive. I didn’t even hear the birds that normally flew around here. I went to hand the boots to Justus, but he pointed to a spot on the ground a metre away. He picked them up, searched them, grunted and threw them back at me. As I brought my good arm up to catch them, and missed, the two bodyguards brought their weapons up. Gods, they were tense. What had they expected me to do?

‘She’s clean. You next.’ Justus gestured at Flavius. Philippus couldn’t meet his eyes as he moved forward to search Flavius. He took Flavius’s side arm, belt and nightstick.

I couldn’t retie my boots – the fingers on my right hand were nerveless and throbbing by now. Despite the weapons trained on him, Flavius threw a look of concentrated hatred at them both, knelt down and fastened them for me. Philippus couldn’t look back at him.

‘Follow me,’ Justus said, as if we didn’t know where to find anything in this so familiar house. He sounded resentful – no, bitter.

This was going to be ten times worse than I thought.

Philippus peeled off somewhere with our weapons, and Justus led us to the meeting table in the atrium where Apollodorus sat with his senior staff in exactly the same formation as our operations meetings. Hermina and Albinus scrutinised us coldly. Cassia smiled. It was the most animated I had ever seen her face. If we came out of this alive, I would find out exactly why she had left the Censor’s office and if there was anything prejudicial we could bust her on. Justus came to roost by Hermina. He looked satisfied for some reason. We weren’t invited to sit.

Apollo and I stared at each other. I looked into the black pits and thought I saw hurt, fury, cynicism all mixed up. I could never work him out. Who knew what he saw? Perhaps my profound sadness. He’d known I was PGSF and had been DJ before; he’d kept it hidden from the others until now, but he’d known from the very beginning. He was angry for different reasons.

‘Always a pleasure to see you, Captain,’ he began. Gods, if the chill in his voice could go lower, I didn’t know how. I waited. He was obviously deriving some unhappy pleasure from our uncomfortable situation.

‘I do hope this is not an official visit – I fear you may have come a little light-handed if you wished to succeed on that path.’

Cold washed over me. We couldn’t have been more vulnerable.

‘No, this is not an official visit, as I’m sure you realise.’

Hermina started at the sound of my normal voice. Of course, she’d only heard me as Pulcheria who had an incredibly irritating nasal whine. Albinus looked more interested than before.

Flavius and I were walking on a very fragile surface. One click of Apollo’s fingers and we’d be gone. Philippus was standing less than a metre away. Justus wouldn’t even take the space of a breath to think about pulling the trigger. It would bring down repercussions of fifteen on a scale of one to ten, but I didn’t have a doubt Apollodorus had some exit strategy already in place in case he chose to terminate us. I scared myself thinking so clinically when I was seconds away from a bullet through my head. I should have been shitting bricks. My blood was pumping chemicals around my body, but it wouldn’t help. Even together, Flavius and I couldn’t take them all, but neither could we try running. We’d be dead in seconds. I felt a tremor of fear trying to crack my shell but I pushed it back. Maybe I was going to die, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me afraid.

I cleared my throat. ‘I must thank you for the special delivery we received this afternoon.’

Justus and Hermina exchanged glances, and Justus flicked his gaze towards Apollo who didn’t respond or even make any kind of movement. He just stared at me like he was trying to bore into my soul. I felt powerless and trapped. What did he want? After a full two minutes, I caught on – he was going to make me beg. At that thought, I felt both relieved and humiliated. A pilot light of anger lit up in the back of my mind. Then it flared up to full strength. The hell with that and to Hades with him.

Nobody said a thing. Waiting for time to pass, I listened to the faint sound of a vehicle moving a short distance away and the hum of some kind of machine nearby. I would stand still for as long as it took. After a quarter of an hour, Justus and Cassia started to fidget and I heard Philippus’s boots as he flexed his feet. Hermina looked uncomfortable and moved her head from side to side. Flavius and I just stood there. We’d endured hours’ long parades – a favourite trick of the tribunes when they became bored with nothing to do in the barracks. It was mostly a case of making your mind adapt to the inaction. I looked straight down at Apollo, daring him to do something. Because there was no way I would.

I started counting the pores on his skin, on his nose and under his eyes. I moved on to the brows. Then I counted the eyelashes on each edge, upper and lower of each eye. That took up a good twenty minutes. Then the grains in the floor tiles I could see just off the edge of his head. When I’d finished half an hour later, Philippus was sitting at the side, defeated; one bodyguard was sitting on the floor, the other gone; Justus was walking up and down; Hermina and Cassia had disappeared.

‘Enough!’ Apollodorus shouted, banging the flat of his hand on the table. He stood up abruptly and strode over to stand in front of me. Very little space separated us. He glared right at me with an angry intensity I’d never seen before. ‘
Sacra flamma
! I’d forgotten just how stubborn you can be,’ he growled.

With my peripheral vision, I saw Justus, mouth open, feet frozen to the flagstone. He couldn’t believe his eyes – he’d obviously never seen Apollo lose control.

Apollo still stared at me. He didn’t blink once; his face had returned to impassive.

‘Philippus, take Flavius with you and get lost somewhere. You,’ he said to me, ‘come with me.’

Flavius looked towards me. I nodded. The crisis had passed, thank Juno. But we couldn’t relax yet. I signed Flavius to use a significant amount of care. Even signing with his fingers, his reply was unrepeatable.

Apollo abandoned his usual languid stroll and strode ahead of me. As I coaxed my stiffened legs into action to catch up with him, I noticed how set his shoulders were, how rigid his neck was.

We were on the way straight to his
tablinum
– not very private, but I had no choice. To my surprise, we went past the open-ended room. To the left, he opened a plain door outward. It had always been locked, and I’d thought it was a cupboard, or steps to a cellar. It was dark inside, and I hesitated.

‘In,’ he commanded, holding the door open.

I sighed. I was sure he wasn’t going to kill me now. I just hoped Conrad would pay the ransom. I took three steps and encountered a cloth curtain, soft and thick like velvet. He pulled the door shut behind him and all light vanished. It didn’t smell cold or damp like a cellar. The floor under my feet was springy like wood. I sensed him right behind me and jumped when he put his hand on my upper arm. A tingle ran across my shoulders.

‘Have you lost all your wits? Pull the curtain back.’

I did and stepped out into another century.

The first thing I saw was a walnut fireplace carved with leaves curling around each other along the top edge. Below, flames flickered behind a decorated wrought-iron grill sending warmth into the room. Over the fireplace hung an enormous mirror with lotus leaves and irises in gold-painted wood around the rim. Apart from my shocked face, the mirror reflected sinuous ivory and jet female statues standing on top of the mantel. Dull gold and crimson brocade drapes hung down the walls. Two carved wood couches, padded with red velvet mounds, and gold glass-shaded lamps shedding soft light reinforced the voluptuous style. This was a room for seduction.

The intimacy and unrestrained sensuality unnerved me. Not for itself, but because it conflicted in every way with the austere, controlled man standing behind me.

‘Sit,’ he commanded.

I did, both entranced and stunned. My eyes adapted to the dim light. On the left hung a print of an unclothed river nymph with flowers in her long, wavy tresses. Such women always had “tresses”, never just hair. On the opposite wall was a painting of a tall, slender woman with long black hair, and wearing a pseudo-medieval robe. The artist had made her beautiful in the style of the age, but there was no mistaking from her black eyes who she was related to.

‘Who is she?’

‘My grandmother.’

In all the years I’d known him, I’d never thought of Apollo in the context of a family. That was ridiculous, I knew; even he must have had a mother and father. I’d never known his real name nor his age – they weren’t questions you asked serious criminals. Despite his studied old-fashioned ways which I thought he used to distance people, he couldn’t have been more than late forties or early fifties.

He handed me a glass of wine. I’d recovered enough to be able to hold it without spilling. I took one sip then set it down on a side table that had swan neck curved legs.

‘This is my grandmother’s boudoir – well, a copy of it,’ he explained. ‘She was French, you know, a well-known
salonnière
after the Great War. My mother, who was from Castra Lucilla, insisted that her mother-in-law came and live with them when she married my father. Although my grandmother was a
parisienne
, born and bred, she moved perfectly willingly. She feared for her son who had fatal weaknesses.’ His face hardened. ‘She was right, but as a small boy I didn’t know that until one very bad day.’

He looked at the painting with longing. ‘She gave me unconditional love. She was my anchor during the nightmare that followed.

‘I won’t bore you with the rest of the sordid details,
ma chère
. Nobody likes to hear about an addicted father pimping a child, a mother reduced to thieving. He even beat and terrorised his own mother when she no longer had any money left to service his addiction. Not exactly edifying examples, are they, as parents?’

So that was why he’d so hated the drugs trade when it had threatened us those years ago.

‘I clawed my way through my adolescence and eventually rid my family of my parasitic father.’

I wasn’t going to ask what he meant by “rid”, but the hate must have boiled long and hard. It was heartbreaking. I nearly forgot to breathe.

‘I became a mildly successful criminal and maintained my mother and grandmother a few rungs above poverty. My mother I honoured and was sorry for, but I have loved no woman as I have my grandmother…until seven years ago.’

We sat silently, the only noise a clock somewhere on the side. After a few minutes, I pulled myself up and went to sit at his feet. I stretched my hand up to lie on his. His other hand touched my hair, and I rested my head against his knee. We had never been so physically intimate. Nor so emotionally in tune.

I felt myself slipping away in the warmth of the room. Almost before I realised it, Apollo had scooped me up in his arms and was carrying me. I was so tired and overwhelmed I didn’t care what he did. I felt my boots being removed, my uniform following, my hair released, the soft sheets, the slender hands, then no more.

When I woke, I was by myself. A thin line of light outlined the window frame. It was early, around half seven, I guessed. I switched on a light and found a green silk kimono lying on the bed. As I tied it on, I caught my reflection in the cheval mirror. I looked like Madam Butterfly. I didn’t know if the past twelve hours had been a series of scenes from a comic opera or the deepest tragedy. Tears welled in my eyes as I realised what I’d found and lost all at once. I closed my eyes and shook my head to try reset my mind, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. Flavius’s face appeared around the edge.