Time To Depart

XVIII

WHEN WE RETURNED to the station house Petronius had just come in. At the same time his deputy, Martinus, had gone off duty, so Petro was in an affable mood. In our absence the day patrol had brought in two suspected lodging-house thieves, and a man who kept an unleashed dog that had bitten a woman and a child (the suspected wolf' from the Temple of Luna). Petro told Fusculus to do the interrogations on these.

`What, all of them, chief?'

`Even the dog.'

Fusculus and I exchanged a grin. It was his punishment for palling up with me. Petronius wanted to keep me on a very tight rein – one that could be personally jerked by him.

`And you can stop smirking!' he snarled at me. `I've seen Rubella. I know you're setting up special little escapades that I haven't agreed to!'

Looking innocent, I made sure I told him how friendly my chat with his tribune had been, and how I had been given a free hand to interview Nonnius.

`Bastard,' Petro commented, though it was fairly automatic. `You're welcome to the rent-collector. I warn you, he's a snake nesting in a midden heap, be careful where you shove your garden fork.' He relaxed. `What did you think of Rubella?'

Assessing the tribune seemed to be a cohort obsession. It's the same anywhere that has a hierarchy. Everyone spends a lot of time debating whether their supervisor is just an ineffectual layabout who needs a diagram in triplicate before he can wipe his backside clean – or whether he's so poisonous he's actually corrupt.

`Snide,' 1 said. `Could be more dangerous than he looks. He can make a sharp judgement. It was like being interviewed by a crap fortune-teller. Rubella chewed some magic seeds, then informed me that as a legionary I didn't like my centurion.'

Petro feigned an admiring look. `Well he was right there!' We both laughed. Our centurion in the Second Augusta had been a brutal lag named Stollicus; both Petro and I were constantly at loggerheads with him. Stollicus reckoned we were a pair of unkempt, unreliable troublemakers who were deliberately ruining his own chances of promotion by dragging down his century. We said he marked down our personnel reports unfairly. Rather than waiting to find out after twenty years of failing to make centurion ourselves, we manufactured invalidity discharges and left him to it. Last I heard he was tormenting the local populace in Nicopolis. Interestingly, he was still a centurion. Maybe we really had been successful in blighting his life. It was a pleasing thought.

`Your honourable tribune spoke as if it were a promise to find out who our centurion was, and ask.'

'He loves handing out some hint of blackmail that sounds like a joke but might not be,' scoffed Petro.

`Oh well,' I teased. `At least he won't have any trouble tracing Stollicus. He will have already found him once, to ask about you!'

Thinking about our military careers we were silent for a moment, and allies again. Perhaps, being more mature now, we wondered whether it might have been wiser to placate the official and salvage our rights.

Perhaps not. Petronius and I both believed the same: only crawlers get a fair character reference. Decent characters don't bother to argue. For one thing, the truly decent know that life is never fair.

Changing the subject, Petro asked, `Did you get anywhere with Nonnius?'

`No. He swears the Emporium raider isn't him.'

'Hah! That was why,' Petro explained, fairly mildly, `I myself wasn't, going to bother to visit him.'

'All right. I just thought I'd been assigned here to volunteer for the embarrassing jobs, so I might as well get on with one.' 'lo! You're going to be a treasure."

'Oh yes. You'll be asking for a permanent informer on the complement… So what lying ex-mobster do you reckon we should tackle next?'

Petro looked thoughtful. `I've had Martinus doing the rounds of the other big operators. They all deny involvement, of course. The only hope is that one of them will finger the real culprit out of spite. But Martinus can handle that. Why should we upset ourselves? The only trouble is he's slow. Martinus reckons never to break into more than a decorous stroll. Asking three gang warlords where they were on a certain Thursday night will take him about five weeks. But left to himself he'll tell us in due course if anything has an abnormal whiff.'

`You trust him?'

`He has a reasonable nose – with expert guidance from his senior officer!'

'So while he's sniffing villains extremely cautiously, what do we two speedy boys get up to? Investigating the races?'

`Depends…' Petro looked whimsical. `Do you see this as an office job, or will you take a mystery assignment that could ruin your health and your reputation?'

`Oh the office job for me!' I lied. If I had realised what mystery assignment he meant, I might have stuck to this joke.

`That's a pity. I thought we could go visiting my auntie.' A very old euphemism. Petronius Longus did not mean his Auntie Sedina with the big behind and the flower stall.

`A brothel?'

`Not just any old brothel.'

`Ooh! A special brothel!'

`I do have my standards, Marcus Didius! You don't have to come with me -

`True, you're a big lad.'

`If Helena wouldn't like it’

I grinned gently. `She'd probably want to come too. The first time I slept with Helena Justina we'd been to a brothel earlier that night.'

Petronius snorted disapprovingly. `I didn't know Helena Justina was that kind of girl!' He thought I had been implying she had once been one of those senatorial stiffs who descend on bawdyhouses for a thrill.

`We were just passing through…' Calling his bluff could be easy. `Oh get wise. Helena could have been a vestal virgin if she hadn't met her heart's delight in me.' I shook my head at him. He winced. I didn't worry him by mentioning the rest of the story. `So where is this palace of delight you're luring me to? The dives in the Suburra where the practices are ancient and the whores positively mummified? The out-of-town cabins where runaway slaves solicit travellers for a bit of brass? Or the lousy dens of push-and-shove in the deeply plebeian Patrician Street?

'Home ground. Down by the Circus.'

`Oh Jupiter! You can catch something just thinking about those filthy holes.'

`Shut your brain off then. You get by without thinking often enough… We've had a hard morning. I thought we-deserved an afternoon of exotic entertainment with the exquisite Lalage!'

`I'll buy you lunch first,' I offered promptly. Petro accepted, agreeing with me that we needed to build up our strength before we went.