Enemies at Home

54

I almost ran down several flights of stairs.

At street level, I saw Myrinus so warned him that if he or Secundus saw Cosmus they should only approach him with caution. I had to explain why. Myrinus told me that at one point Secundus taught Cosmus wrestling, but he gave up. The boy was strong, but he had the wrong temperament. Secundus said he wasn’t suitable to train in combative sport, he grew too angry.

Strong and angry. That fitted.

I found Dromo.

‘I packed all the stuff like you ordered me. My master’s belongings that he lent you are all on our handcart, but yours won’t fit.’ My modest luggage was bundled up neatly enough, but lay apart in the atrium, quarantined. If the commission was over, in Dromo’s eyes I ceased to have rights.

‘Either mine goes on the cart as well, Dromo, or the bad news is you will have to make two trips. Never mind that now. The good news is, you don’t have to do it straightaway because I need you to come with me to see the vigiles.’

Dromo kicked the handcart. ‘Well, that’s a waste of my time! I didn’t need to do all that.’

Working with me had failed to teach him any grasp of logic.

At the Second Cohort’s station house, Titianus was about to go off duty. I made him stay to take down details, emphasising that this was not simply a runaway slave, but one who had committed three murders of citizens. Titianus put his head out into the colonnade and shouted a few orders, though I could hear little sound of response.

‘You seem to have cleared up the Aviola case!’ Titianus groused, making no effort to hide his jealousy. ‘So now you want me to do the tiresome bit, put myself out catching him.’

I stayed calm. ‘If you can make the arrest, Titianus, you are welcome to the glory. The whole Esquiline community will be delighted the vigiles have acted with such efficiency. Besides, don’t you have a particular remit to track down runaway slaves?’

Titianus softened up. ‘That’s because we run into so many of the buggers while we’re doing our rounds. The Second funds its entire Saturnalia drinks budget from the rewards we receive for returning lost slaves to their masters. Last year, one good-looking Syrian acrobat from a senator’s entertainment troop covered all our bites for our big do.’

‘Very public-spirited. Do you splurge all your perks on entertainment?’

‘Officially any thank-yous have to be put towards equipment. We can run with that as well. Any time we need new fire mats, we shake out a few homeless varmints from under bridges, make them squeal about who they belong to, march them home and invoice for our finders’ fee.’

‘Well, just make sure you catch this raging boy Cosmus.’

‘Cosmus? Isn’t he that odd boy I spoke to? — Bloody hell!’ swore Titianus. ‘For the record, why is he raging?’

‘Nasty personality … I am not certain. I have a theory, but I need to check it.’

‘Theories, eh? We don’t generally bother with those.’

‘It’s like a new position in sex, Titianus. Give yourself a treat and try it.’

While he blushed, I asked how long the vigiles might take to complete a search for the missing slave, but Titianus had no idea. According to him, his team was fully stretched because everywhere from the Temple of Minerva Medica to the Viminal Gate was full of wounded and dying criminals, with their savage wives and mothers screaming for vengeance and pulling knives to carve up people. This was ever since I and my cronies made such deeply unnecessary attempts to stir up excitement in the gangster community.

‘Gallo’s on crutches, for leaving that man in the cells. It’s a bloodbath!’

‘Just up your street then, hard man.’

Titianus stared at me as if he thought I was being satirical at his expense. He was slow, but like everyone else around me on this case, he was learning.

As he showed me out, he darted off into a side room and came out with an iron collar. ‘This will secure him.’

‘So much easier if every slave who is liable to wander has an I-have-run-away dog-collar riveted on, with a return address!’ I said.

There was nothing else I could do about looking for Cosmus, so I walked Dromo back through the Esquiline Gate to pick up our things at the apartment.

There we found Sextus Simplicius, the overweight executor, dithering in the courtyard. He had brought me a reward for finding the lost silver. I thanked him sweetly for this unexpected bonus, though from the weight of the purse, it was a somewhat small reward.

The mint-scented mooner would have to do better than that, if he wanted his next ploy to succeed. He invited me to take a glass of borage tea at some place he knew, which he said was very close nearby and had an extremely nice vine-covered pergola. Clearly this was one of those moments at the end of a case when a man thinks that now he won’t be seeing you again he can risk a seduction scene.

Why do they never realise we women already know the ‘nice place nearby’ routine?

I declined. In this I was aided by Dromo standing at my side, glaring. I would miss him.

So Dromo and I said goodbye to that tragic apartment, and departed from the Esquiline. I still did not know fully what had gone on there, but by the end of the day I would have found out.

Dromo had the handcart, moaning repeatedly that it was overtaxing him. I heaved my own luggage in one awkward bundle over my shoulder, never complaining. An informer ought to travel light, certainly with no more than she can manage herself; she can be sure nobody will help. We cleanse society of undesirables, yet we receive few thanks. Small change and horrible overtures; no real gratitude.

We went slowly, not taking the route that led to the Aemilian Bridge with its miseries of yesterday, but walking down parallel with the Servian Walls, to the open monumental area between the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Temple of the Divine Claudius. This was near the Capena Gate. I called in to see Uncle Quintus, which was one way to a free lunch.

He was fine. We talked about work. He told me Aulus had sent a written judgement to the Temple of Ceres. After careful historical research, Aulus had advised that the temple’s reputation as a place of sanctuary derived from its plebeian past: thumbing noses at the upper class by offering refuge to those who had been arrested by patrician magistrates. ‘So Aulus recommends taking a hard line: one, the status war should be relegated to the past, as a gesture of new thinking. Bit of a shock for my tight-arsed brother to be a champion of liberal thinking, but he can do it if he closes his eyes and rushes at the idea … Two, the Aviola slaves should therefore be placed under arrest by Manlius Faustus, then passed to the usual authorities.’

‘To be charged with not assisting their master and mistress?’

‘I realise you are now saying only one slave is guilty of murder.’

‘Different household, Uncle Quintus. He also killed his own master, a freedman. When Cosmus is caught, he goes down, no question: execution.’

‘And the other slaves, Albia? Faustus commissioned you to exonerate them, but do you say it can’t be done?’

I nodded. ‘They are certainly guilty of conspiracy. I am off to a final reckoning with them, after which I suspect I can in fact show they are guilty of something worse than non-intervention. You know I am not sentimental and neither is the aedile. If Aulus rules that the slaves have no right to sanctuary, I shall give Faustus very good reasons to arrest them.’

‘Oho! Then your devoted aedile will be even more keen on you.’

‘I told you before; he’s not mine!’

I mimed a lute-plucking gesture. It did no good. Uncle Quintus would keep harping.

I munched a bite but did not dally. Still leading a tired Dromo, I skirted around the southern side of the Palatine, capped with its summit-top burden of marble palaces. We trudged past the apsidal end of the Circus Maximus, then kept going on the flat along the long western side, until we were below the part of the Aventine that held the Temple of Ceres. We climbed slowly up the hill, a short ascent but steep, then we crossed to the aediles’ office beside the squat old-style temple with its wide-set thick pillars and its air of Greek disdain.

As we completed that last part of our journey, I felt a twinge of homecoming. Why should this be? There were the same dusty tenements and introverted private mansions as on the Esquiline, the same teeming stalls and bars, the same colourful crowds in the street. Yet even the taste and smell of the air seemed different. I found myself coughing mildly, before my lungs became acclimatised. It was still June, so the roses that grew in enclosed gardens and the lilies in sun-baked doorstep pots were zapping out pollen at their top rate. The bakers, fishmongers and greengrocers arranged their loaves, sardines and vegetables in special Aventine patterns. Street cries had a new ring. When Aventine dogs chose rats and litter to bark at, they woofed from shallower lungs. Working on the largest, highest hill in Rome, Aventine mules developed a special wheeze. Some of the people had it too. You could hear it when they cursed, every time they made a bad judgement while crossing a road where the dung was deep.

Home. I was home. I realised that although this case had intrigued me, I had not enjoyed working in what had been somebody else’s house, far from my base, a stranger in the neighbourhood. I yearned for my own apartment, containing my own things. However much I derided my own folk, I was longing to be back among them. I wanted the laundry where they still had a tunic and sheet of mine, the bakery and bath house where I had built up customer goodwill, the caupona run by my relatives. Once the rest of them returned from the coast, I wanted to be among my own family in our riverbank town house.

I did not regret working for Manlius Faustus. I would do it again, if ever he asked me. I knew, as a woman, that was a distinct possibility. He had a germ of interest in me that would drag him back. Even so, it would be better if I could somehow turn in this commission with a satisfactory final report.

I was feeling low, as if I had lost my confidence.

I felt truly grim, though I presumed I had the hangover from Hades after that Caecuban wine. Had it gone bad in the ageing process? Was the gorgeous flavour an illusion? Even my stomach seemed to be growling, which could not be from what I had eaten with my uncle just now. Claudia kept a well-run house. She never served slimy salad or covered up the smell of bad meat with strong sauces. You don’t risk six small children performing synchronised diarrhoea.

I preferred not even to think about that.

Well, biliousness could be useful when I had stubborn suspects to interrogate. I would like to believe kindness works, but I knew from experience that shouting at people and tetchily suggesting you are going to throw them to the beasts often has a quicker effect and produces more details.

So in that spirit, for the last time I went in to see the slaves.