The Silver Pigs

VI

The senator Decimus Camillas Verus lived in the Capena Gate Sector. The Capena Gate was the district next but one to mine, so I walked. On the way I passed my youngest sister Maia and at least two little roughnecks off our family tree.

Some informers give the impression we are solitary men. Perhaps that was where I went wrong. Every time I was surreptitiously trailing some adulterous clerk in a shiny tunic, I looked up to find one of these midgets wiping his nose on his arm and bawling my name across the street. I was a hobbled donkey in Rome. I must have been related to most people between the Tiber and the Ardeatine Gate. I had five sisters, the poor girl my brother Festus never found the time to marry, thirteen nephews and four nieces, with several more visibly on the way. That excludes what lawyers call my heirs of the fourth and fifth degree: my mother's brothers, and my father's sisters, and all the second cousins of the first marriage children of the stepfathers of my grandfather's aunts.

I had a mother too, though I tried to ignore that.

I waved back at the roughnecks. I keep them sweet. One or two of them are. Anyway, I use these artful urchins to trail the adulterers when I slope off to the races instead.

Decimus Camillus owned a freehold mansion on his own square of land among quiet domestic streets. He had purchased the right to draw water direct from the old Appian aqueduct nearby. He felt no financial necessity to lease his frontage out as shops, nor his upper storey as lodging rooms, though he did share his desirable plot with the owner of an identical house next door. From which I deduced that this senator was by no means extravagantly rich. Like the rest of us, the poor muffin was struggling to keep up the way of life appropriate to his rank. The difference between him and most of us being that to qualify for the senate Decimus Camillus Verus must be a millionaire.

Since I was visiting a million sesterces I risked my throat under a barber's razor. I wore a worn white toga with the holes folded out of sight, a short clean tunic, my best belt with the Celtic buckle, and brown boots. A free citizen, his importance signalled by the length of his train of slaves in my case, none.

There were spanking new escutcheon plates on the senator's door locks but a hangdog porter with a badly bruised cheekbone looked through his grille and opened up as soon as I pulled at the rope on the big copper bell. They were expecting someone. Probably the same someone who socked the porter yesterday and carried off the girl.

We crossed a black and white tiled hall, with a spluttery fountain and faded cinnabar paint. Camillus was a diffident man in his fifties who lurked in a library among a mass of paperwork, a bust of the Emperor, and one or two decent bronze lamps. He looked normal, but he wasn't. For one thing, he was polite.

"Good morning. How can I help you?"

The name's Didius Falco. Credentials, sir." I bowled him one of Sosia's bracelets. It was British jet, the stuff they ship down from the northeast coast, carved in interlocking pieces like whale's teeth. She had told me her cousin sent it. I knew the style from my army days, but they were rare in Rome.

He inspected it gently.

"May I ask where you obtained this?"

"Off the arm of a decorative party I rescued yesterday from two thieving hulks."

Ts she hurt?"

"No, sir."

He had heavy eyebrows above decently spaced eyes that looked at me directly. His hair bristled straight up from his head even though it was not particularly short, giving him a cheerful, boyish look. I saw him brace himself to ask what I wanted. I put on my helpful face.

"Senator, would you like me to bring her back?"

"What are your terms?"

"Any idea who took her, sir?"

"None." If I had realized he was lying, I should have admired the brisk way the man spoke. As it was, I liked his insistence. Your terms please?"

"Just professional curiosity. I've tucked her away somewhere safe. I'm a private informer. A watch captain called Petronius Longus in the Thirteenth will vouch for me"

He reached for his ink pot and made some notes across the corner of a letter he had been reading. I liked that too. He intended to check.

I suggested, without pressure, that if he was grateful he might hire me to help. He looked thoughtful. I outlined my rates, adding something for his rank since it would all take slightly longer if I had to keep calling him "sir'. He showed some reluctance, which I reckoned was because he did not want me hanging round the girl, but eventually we agreed I would advise him on household security and keep an ear to the ground about the kidnappers.

"You may be right about keeping Sosia Camillina out of sight," he said. "Is your hideout respectable?"

"Supervised by my own mother, sir!" True: she scoured my rooms regularly for evidence of loose women. Sometimes she found it, sometimes I hustled them out in time.

This senator was no idiot. He decided someone had to come back with me to make sure the wench was safe. I advised him against that. I had seen some greasy meatballs in the cook shop opposite, watching visitors to his home. There was nothing to say they were connected with Sosia, they could have been casual burglars who had picked an unlucky day to size up a future break-in. Since he was walking me round his property anyway, we went to look.

On the front door they had a sound wooden lock with a six inch, three-toothed iron rotary key, plus four brass bolts, an inspection grille with a natty little slider, and a great holm oak beam inside to sling across on two well-bedded cradles at night. The door porter lived in a cubbyhole at the side.

"Adequate?" remarked the senator.

I gave him a long look, including the dozy sprite they used as a doorman the slack-mouthed strip of wind who had let Sosia's abductors walk in.

"Oh yes, sir! A wonderful system, so let me offer some advice: use it!" I could see he took the point.

I made him peer through the grille to inspect the two loafers in the cook shop

"Those peepers saw me come. I'll hop out over your back wall; give me a chance to survey the rear of the house. Send a slave to the local lockup and get them arrested for causing a breach of the peace."

"But they are not"

"They will be," I told him. "When the praetor's posse starts arresting them."

He was persuaded. The leaders of the Empire are so easily led.

The senator spoke to his doorman, who looked annoyed but mbled off on the errand. I made Camillus Verus show me his upstairs accommodation, then when we came down ten minutes later I looked out again and saw the two loafers from the cook shop with their arms up their backs, being marched off down the street by a brisk group of soldiers.

Reassuring to discover that when a citizen of substance complains to a magistrate the response is so prompt!

With all that cast iron work on the front door, at the back they had seven different entrances to the garden, with nary a decent lock among them. The kitchen door opened when I tried my own home latch-lifter. None of the windows had bars. A balcony around the upper storey offered access to the entire house. Their elegant smoky blue dining room possessed flimsy folding doors which I forced with an edging tile from a flowerbed, while the senator's secretary watched. He was a thin Greek slave with a hooked nose and the air of superiority with which Greek secretaries are embalmed at birth. I dictated instructions at length.

I decided I enjoyed dictating. I also enjoyed the look on the Greek's face when I grinned goodbye, clambered onto a sundial, found a toehold on a knot of ivy, and hoisted myself up the sheer dividing wall to see about the house next door.

"Who lives there?"

The master's younger brother."

As a younger brother myself I noted with pleasure that Camillus junior had sense. He had fixed up every window with solid slatted shutters, all painted in dark malachite green. Both houses had been faced in standard lava blocks, with their upper floors supported on skinny pillars hewn from a very ordinary grey stone. The architect had been lavish with his shaped terra cotta gable ends, but by the time he came to stock the grounds with the customary statues of graceful nymphs in their underwear, his contingency funds ran out. The gardens were furnished with meagre sticks of trellis, though their plants burgeoned with health. It was the same building contract on both sides of the wall. Hard to say why the senator's house bore an approachable, easygoing smile while his brother's felt formal and cold. I was glad Sosia lived in the house with the smile.

I gazed at the brother's house for a long time, not quite sure what I was looking for. Then, with a wave to the Greek, I walked along the top of the divider to the far end. I jumped nonchalantly off.

I got covered in dust and twisted my knee, landing in the alley behind the senator's garden wall. Hercules knows why I did it, there was an entry for delivery carts with a perfectly good gate.