Time To Depart

XVII

NONNIUS LIVED IN the Twelfth region – about two streets from Helena Justina's father. Which proves that money can buy you respectable neighbours – or a house next door to criminals. It was no better than where I lived. The criminals in the Capena Gate sector just happened to be richer and more vicious than the ones in Fountain Court.

The senator was a millionaire; he had to be. This was the rough-and ready qualification for the job. Well, nobody needs exorbitant talents like judgement, or even a sense of honour, to vote in an assembly three times a month. But possessing a million is useful, I'm told, and the Camillus family lived comfortable lives. Helena's mother wore her semi-precious jasper necklace just to visit her manicurist.

Nonnius Albius had been chief rent-runner for a master criminal. The qualifications for his job were simple: persistence and a brutal temperament. For employing these over thirty years of violent activity he had earned the right to live in the Capena Gate area, just like a senator, and to own his own freehold, which in fact many a senator has mortgaged away. His house, which looked modest but was nothing of the kind, had a subdued portico, which carefully refrained from drawing attention to itself, where callers had to wait while a growling porter who had only peered at them through a fierce iron grille took news of their arrival indoors.

`It's like visiting a consul!' I marvelled.

Fusculus looked wry. `Except that Nonnius' bodyguards are better groomed and more polite than consuls' lictors tend to be.'

There were stone urns with well-watered laurel bushes just like those at Helena's father's abode. Clearly the topiary-tub supplier at the Capena Gate didn't care who his customers were.

`What did you make of Rubella?' queried Fusculus as we still tapped our boot heels in the unobtrusive portico while the porter went off to vet us. `A bit of a complicated character?'

`He has a secret sorrow.' `Oh! What's that, Falco?'

`How would I know? It's a secret.'

Petro's team had investigated too many inarticulate inadequates. None of his lads could spot a joke coming. `Oh, I thought you were in on something.'

`No,' I explained gently. `I just get a deep sexual thrill from speculating wildly about people I have only just met.' Fusculus gave me a nervous look.

Nonnius was, as everybody knew, a dying man. We could tell it was true because when we were let in we found him lying on a reading couch – but not reading – while he slowly ate a bowl of exquisite purple-bloomed plums. These were the hand-picked fruits, weeping unctuous amber, that are sent to console invalids by their deeply anxious friends. Perhaps thinking of your friends laying out silver by the purseload takes your mind off the pain.

The bowl they were in was a cracker too: a wide bronze comport two feet across, with three linked dolphins forming a handsome foot and with sea-horse handles. The bowl was far too heavy for a sick man to lift, so it was held for Nonnius by an even featured eight-year-old Mauretanian slave-boy in a very short, topless tunic with gold fringes all around the hem. The child had gilded nipples, and his eyes were elongated with kohl like a god on an Egyptian scarab. My mother wouldn't have taken him on even to scrub turnips.

Nonnius himself had a lean face with an aristocratically hooked nose, big ears and a scrawny neck. He could have modelled for a statue of a republican orator. In the old Roman manner he had features that could be called `full of character': pinched lips, and all the signs of a filthy temper if his dinner was late.

He was about sixty and pretty well bald. Despite being so poorly he had managed to shave; to make it more bearable his barber had aided the process with a precociously scented balsam. His tunic was plain white, but scrupulously clean. He wore no gems. His boots looked like old favourites. I mean, they looked as if they had already kicked in the kidneys of several hundred tardy payers, and were still greased daily in case they found a chance of kicking more. Everything about him said that if we annoyed him, the man would cheerfully kick us.

Fusculus introduced me. We had fixed a story: `Didius Falco has a roving commission, in a supervisory capacity, working alongside the public auditor.'

Nobody believed it, but that didn't matter.

`I'm sorry to learn you're off colour,' I mouthed sympathetically. `I may need to go through some figures eventually, but I'll try to limit the agony. I don't want to tire you -'

`You being funny?' Nonnius had a voice that sounded polite, until you noticed threads of a raw accent running through it. He had been brought up on the Tiber waterfront. Any semblance of culture was as inconguous as a butcher calmly discussing Heraclitus' theory of all things being in a state of eternal flux just as he cleavered the ribs of a dead ox. I knew one like that once; big ideas, but overprone to making up the weight with fat.

`I was told you had to take it easy…'

`Raiding Balbinus' accounts seems to have given me a new lease of life!' It could just have been the desperate jest of a genuine deathbed case. I was trying to decide if the bastard was really ill. Nonnius noticed, so he let out a pathetic cough. The exotic slave child rushed to wipe his brow for him. The tot was well trained in more than flirting his fringes, apparently.

`Is the Treasury man helping you?' I asked.

`Not a lot.' That sounded like most Treasury men. `Want to see him?' Nonnius appeared perfectly equable. 'I put him in a room of his own where he can play with the balls on his abacus to his heart's content.'

`No thanks. So what's the score so far?' I tossed at him unexpectedly.

He had it pat: `Two million, and still counting.'

I let out a low whistle. `That's a whole bunch of radishes!' He looked satisfied, but said nothing. `Very pleasant for you,' I prompted.

`If I can get at it. Balbinus tried to lock it in a cupboard out of reach.'

`Not the old "present to wife's brother" trick?'

He gave me a respectful gleam. `Haven't come across that one! No: "dowry to daughter's husband".'

I shook my head. `Met it before. I took a jurist's advice and the news is bad: you can't touch the coinage. So long as the marriage lasts it has passed away from the family. Title to the dowry goes with the title to the girl. The husband owns both, with no legal responsibility to the father-in-law.'

`Maybe they'll divorce!' sneered the ex-rent-collector, in a tone that suggested heavy whacks might be used to end the marriage. Once a muscleman, always a thug.

`If the dowry was big enough, love will triumph,' I warned. `Cash in hand tends to make husbands romantic.'

`Then I'll have to explain to the girl that her husband's an empty conker shell.'

`Oh I think she must have noticed that!' Fusculus put in. He glanced at me, promising to elaborate on the gossip later.

I saw Nonnius looking between us, trying to work out how Fusculus and I were in league. None of the vigiles wore uniforms. The foot patrols were kitted out in red tunics as a livery to help them force a right of way to the fountains during a fire, but Petro's agents dressed much as he did, in dark colours with only a whip or cudgel to reveal their status, and with boots that were tough enough to serve as an extra weapon. They and I were indistinguishable. I wore my normal work clothes too: a tunic the colour of mushroom gravy, a liverish belt, and boots that knew their way around.

The room was full of working boots. There were enough soles and studs to subdue a crowd of rioting fishmongers in five minutes flat. Only the slave boy, in his embroidered Persian slippers, failed to match up to the rest of us.

`What's your background?' Nonnius demanded of me, bluntly suspicious.

`I'm an informer basically. I take on specials for the Emperor.'

`That stinks!'

`Not as much as enforcing for organised crime!'

I was pleased to see he did not care for me standing up to him. His tone became peevish. `If you've finished insulting me, I've got enough to do chasing my stake from the Balbinus case.'

`Stay busy!' I advised.

He laughed briefly. `I gather your "roving commission" will not include helping me!'

I wanted to tackle the area that Rubella had called past history; the one that had big implications for the future. `I need to rove in other directions.'

`What do you want with me?'

`Information.'

`Of course. You're an informer! Are you buying?' he tried brazenly.

`Not from a jury fixer!'

`So what are you looking for, Falco?' Nonnius asked, ignoring the insult this time as he tried to startle me.

I could play that game. `Whether it's you who masterminded the Emporium heist.'

It failed to nettle him. `I heard about that,' he said softly. So had most of Rome, so I couldn't accuse him of unnatural inside knowledge. Not yet anyway. I was starting to feel that if he had been involved, handing him over to justice would give me great pleasure. I had a distinct feeling that he knew more than he ought. But crooks enjoy making you feel that.

`Somebody could hardly wait for Balbinus to leave town,' I told him. `They snatched the inside lane of the racecourse – and they want everyone to know who's driving to win.'

`Looks that way,' he agreed, like a convivial friend humouring me.

`Was it you?'

`I'm a sick man.'

`As I said earlier,' I smiled, `I'm very sorry to hear that, Nonnius Albius… I've been away. I missed your famous court appearance, so let's run over a few things.'

He looked sulky. 'I said my piece and I'm finished.'

`Oh yes. I heard you're quite an orator -'

At this point Fusculus, who had been watching with amused patience, suddenly cracked with anger and had to butt in: `Get a grindstone and sharpen up, Nonnius! You're a committed songbird now. Tell the man what he needs to know!'

`Or what?' jeered the patient, showing us the ugly glower that must have been forced on countless debtors. `I'm dying. You can't frighten me.'

'We all die,' Fusculus replied. He was a quiet, calm philosopher. `Some of us try to avoid being hung up in chains in the Banqueting Chamber first, while Sergius gives his whip an airing.'

Nonnius was hard to terrify. He had probably devised and carried out more excruciating tortures than we two innocents could even imagine. `Forget it, shave-tail! That's the frightener you use for schoolboys filching oysters off barrows.' He glared at Fusculus suddenly. `I know you!'

`I've been involved in the Balbinus case.'

`Oh yes, one of the Fourth Cohort's brave esparto-grass boys!' This was the traditional rude nickname for the foot patrols, after the mats they were issued with for smothering blazes. Used of Petro's team, who thought themselves above firefighting, it was doubly rude. (All the worse because the esparto mats were regarded as useless anyway.)

I managed to break in before things got too hot. `Tell me about how the Balbinus empire worked.'

`A pleasure,. young man!' Nonnius decided to treat me as the reasonable person in our party in order to show up Fusculus. The latter settled back again, quite content to simmer down. `What do you want, Falco?'

`I know Balbinus was the uncrowned king of rat thieves and porch-crawlers. He ran small-time crime as an industry and had drop shops on every street corner to process the loot. I haven't even mentioned the brothels or the illicit gaming houses yet -'

`He could run an estate,' Nonnius conceded, with visible pride at being an associate.

`With your help'. He accepted the smarm. I choked back my disgust. `It was more than stealing scarves from washing lines, however.'

`Balbinus was big enough to have carried off the Emporium raid,' Nonnius agreed. `Were he still in Rome!'

`But sadly he's travelling… So who might have inherited his talent? We'll take it that you personally have retired to lead a blameless life.' Nonnius allowed that lie too. `Were there any other big boys in the gang who could be showing a flash presence now?'

`Your sidekick ought to know names,' Nonnius sneered nastily. `He helped close down the show!'

Fusculus acknowledged it with his normal grace, refusing to lose his temper this time. `They all had cheap nicknames,' he said quietly to me, before running off one of his competent lists: `The Miller was the most sordid; he did the killings. The more brutal, the more he liked it. Little Icarus thought he could fly above the rest, the joke being that he was a complete no-hoper: Same for Julius Caesar. He was one of those madmen who think they're an emperor. Laurels would get the blight pretty quickly on his greasy head. The others I knew were called Verdigris and the Fly.'

We looked at Nonnius for confirmation; he shrugged, pretending at last to be impressed. `Clever boy!'

`And where are they all now?' I asked.

`All gone to the country when the trial came off.'

`Quiet holidays in Latium? You reckon that's true?' I put to Fusculus.

He nodded. `Minding goats.'

Petro would have kept tabs on them as far as possible. `So, Nonnius, those were the centurions, and now they're living in rural retirement like a legion's colony of veterans Who were the big rivals to your dirty group?'

`We did not allow rivals!'

I could believe that.

There was no need to press the point. Better to think about the other criminal gangs after we left him. I sensed that Nonnius was taking a gloating delight in my interest in the rivals – who undoubtedly existed, even though Balbinus Pius must have done his best to strong-arm them out of his territory. I saw no need to gratify the rent-collector's pernicious taste for making trouble.

`We'll be in touch,' I said, trying to make it sound worrying.

`Don't wait too long,' leered Nonnius. `I'm a sick man!'

`If the Fourth want you, we'll find you in Hades,' Fusculus chortled. A pleasant threat, which somehow carried a darker tone than his mild, cheery nature led one to expect. Petronius knew how to pick his men.

Fusculus and I left then, without bothering to make contact with the Temple of Saturn auditor.