Germanicus

4

'Who?' I said.

'Martina. One of the locals.'

'A freedwoman?' I held up my cup for Bathyllus to fill. I wasn't drinking much (you've probably noticed); at this stage in the investigation I needed a clear head.

'No. She was freeborn, so far as I know.' Cotta flicked the loosened peach stone onto his plate. 'Local girl, like I said. Syrian, despite the Roman name. She laundered the imperial drawers. Something like that, anyway.'

'One of the house servants,' Perilla interpreted. I smiled.

'Right. Anyway, Martina and Plancina were thick as eels in a stewpot. And our lovely laundress had a reputation for dealing in what you might call noxious substances.'

'Poisons?'

'Indeed.' Cotta quartered the peach and bit messily into one of the sections. 'Plus certain equally nasty literary efforts. The sort you see scratched on lead tablets and buried at midnight.'

Germanicus had accused Piso and Plancina of killing him by poison and witchcraft. I was beginning to get the picture sharp and clear. Shit. It was too pat. It couldn't be this obvious, surely?

'So what happened to Martina?' I said, passing him a napkin. 'After Germanicus's death?'

He wiped his chin. 'Oh, they got her. Picked her up easy as pie and shipped her over to Italy as the prime prosecution witness. Only the silly bitch managed to swallow one of her own concoctions at Brindisi, so that was that.'

Something cold touched my spine. That was that. Sure it was.

'But why should…' Perilla began. I reached across under cover of the table and put a hand on her thigh. She shut up tight as a clam. Yeah, she'd seen the implications too, but I didn't want her going into them now. Obvious, hell! I should've had more faith in Livia. Or maybe less.

'What's that, Perilla?' Cotta was busy with his second slice of peach.

'Nothing.' She gave him a brilliant smile. 'Just a muddle-headed observation. Go on, Uncle Cotta.'

He grunted. 'Right. So exit the star witness. They found an empty ampoule tied up in the woman's pigtail. Pity. If she'd had her day in court we'd really have had the bastards cold. As it was Vitellius and Veranius had to drop the murder charge and get the pair for treason instead. Or Piso, anyway.' Vitellius and Veranius, I knew, were the friends of Germanicus who'd put the case itself carefully together in Syria and brought it to Rome. With Martina dead they must've been left spitting blood. 'Once the poisoning charge went down the tube, of course, they'd no call to hold Plancina.'

'Especially since she was such a good friend of Livia's,' I said. The bitch! The scheming old bitch! 'Are they still in Rome, by the way? Vitellius and Veranius?'

'No.' Cotta frowned at his last two pieces of fruit and dug out a blemish from one of them with the point of his knife. 'Vitellius went back out to Antioch. Veranius is on his estate in Sicily. What's that to you anyway?'

'Nothing. Just curious.' The guy was beginning to twitch. Pity. I'd've liked to ask a few more questions about Martina the Witchy Laundress, but he would really have begun to smell a rat, and that I didn't want. 'So Plancina was off the hook?'

'She reserved her defence. We went through the motions, sure, but in the end the Wart begged as a personal favour to him and Livia that the charges be quashed.'

'Tiberius used his veto?' I couldn't help myself. The question slipped out sharper than I'd meant it to. Perilla's head went up.

'No.' Luckily Cotta was still busy with the peach. 'Not as such. Of course not; he's got no legal rights in a criminal trial. But you know how it is. He stood there embarrassed as hell with his boils glowing like a fifty lamp candelabrum asking us to let the bitch go and we had to tug our forelocks and do it. Right?'

'Right.' Yeah, that figured. You don't buck the emperor, whatever the legal ins and outs. But it smelled, and no mistake. 'So Tiberius protected Plancina. How about Piso? You said they were friends. Personal friends.'

'Sure. But with friends like the Wart you don't need enemies. Tiberius had made it clear right from the start that the guy was on his own. No umbrella, no safety net.' Cotta popped the last slice of peach into his mouth and chewed. 'No nothing. We had to decide two things, and two things only: whether there was a murder rap to answer and whether Piso had tried to subvert the legions and retake the province by force. The first was easy. With Martina dead there was no case, however much we might want to think otherwise. And the second was what my smart lawyer pals call incontrovertible fact.' He reached over for another filbert and cracked it. 'If we'd been given access to the letters, mind, it might've been another matter.'

My stomach went cold; and beside me I felt Perilla stiffen.

'And what letters are these, Uncle Cotta?' she said.

Cotta held up his cup. I motioned wearily to Bathyllus. Shit. I didn't want the guy drunk now. He'd as hard a head as mine, but another cup was pushing it.

'The ones between Piso and the Wart, of course.' Bathyllus was splashing wine into the cup: it'd look more than it was. I made a mental vow to up the little guy's perquisites. 'We asked to see them but they turned us down flat.'

'"They"? Tiberius and Piso? Both of them?'

'Sure. Odd, right?' Gods! If Cotta said it was odd you could bet your last copper penny it was downright weird. 'They must've had some reason, but they weren't saying.'

'They didn't give a reason?'

'Zero. Zilch. Pan faced and poker arsed, the pair of them. Like I said, all we got was the flat refusal.' He drank. 'Then there was the business of the note.'

'What note was this?' You could've cut the tension now with a knife. I was amazed Cotta didn't seem to feel it, but then he's more self-centred than I am.

'If it existed.' His hand scrabbled in the nut bowl and came up with a stuffed date. He stared at it pop eyed for a while like he'd never seen one before in his life. That, and the non sequitur, told me his last swallow of wine had taken him over the limit. 'If it existed,' he said again.

'Go on, Uncle,' Perilla prompted. 'This is fascinating.' How the woman could be so calm and patient beat me, but she was. Personally I had a dozen ice cold centipedes doing clog dances all up my backbone, and I was having difficulty stopping myself from grabbing the bastard by the throat and shaking the information out the hard way.

'Yeah.' Cotta gave her a fatuous grin, nodded, and bit the date in half. 'If it existed.' Shit. The wine had definitely got to the guy. He'd always had an irritating habit of sticking with a phrase when he was drunk, like a non-swimmer hanging on to an inflated bladder. It was the one way you could tell he'd had enough, before he actually passed out. 'Maybe it didn't. Jupiter knows we never saw hide nor hair of the bugger.'

'Let's pretend,' I said carefully, 'that it did. Okay?'

'Okay.' Cotta was frowning. 'Okay, Marcus. The day Plancina reserved her defence Piso went home, wrote a note for his lawyer and gave it to his freedman.'

'His freedman?'

I got the full bland pop-eyed look. 'You want the guy's name?'

'Yes, I want his name!'

'Carus? Carillus? Something like that.'

'You like to pick one, maybe?'

'Corvinus!' Perilla laid a hand on my arm.

'Okay.' I backed down. 'Never mind.'

'Anyway,' Cotta went on, 'Piso wrote a note and handed it to this freedman guy — '

'Sealed?'

'Marcus!'

Cotta gave me his bug eyed stare again. 'Sealed. Then he went to bed as usual. Or so everybody thought at the time.'

I knew what was coming next. I just knew it. 'And that was the night he killed himself, right?'

'Right.' He nodded. 'Right. They found him in the morning with his throat cut. Best thing the bastard could've done, of course. It would've come to the same thing anyway. At least this way he didn't pull his family down the tube as well.'

'I shouldn't have thought he'd be too concerned about Plancina,' Perilla said dryly.

'Yeah.' Cotta grinned. 'By that stage he couldn't've given a toss about her. His sons were different, they'd been involved in the treason. Or the elder one had, anyway. Tiberius included him in the amnesty, buggered if I know why. Personally I'd've nailed the bastard's foreskin to the Speakers' Platform.'

I settled back and held up my cup for Bathyllus to fill. My brain was spinning. What was going on here? Cotta's story had as many holes in it as a maggoty Raetian cheese, and it stank even worse. Maybe Piso had been guilty, maybe he and Plancina had murdered Germanicus. But if so how did the Wart fit in? How much, now, could I afford to believe that bitch Livia? And if the Imperials were involved, did I want any part of it, promise to the empress or not?

The answer to that last one was no. And yes. That was the real bummer.

I was suddenly aware that someone was saying something. Nothing very important, but it meant I had to pay attention.

'Hey, this is good Falernian, Marcus.' Cotta was swirling the last inch or so round in his cup. 'Better than I get at your father's. Messallinus has a palate like a camel's arse.'

Hint, hint. What the hell. It didn't matter any more. Let the guy get plastered, he'd earned it and so had I. The thinking could wait. I signalled to Bathyllus to go all the way and turned my attention to the postprandial chit-chat.

'Uh…you seen Dad lately, Uncle Cotta?'

'Every day, boy.' He took a mouthful of wine, held it and swallowed. 'It's the drawback to the job. One of the many. He's on the grain supply commission I'm heading. Along with old what's-his-name. Sejanus's uncle.'

'Blaesus?'

'Blaesus. Your father hasn't lost his talent for arselicking, boy. He knows how to pick his friends. And the Sejanus tribe will be telling us when we can scratch our balls soon, you mark my words. You're better off out of it, the way you are.'

Perilla shifted in her seat. Uh-oh. I could've cheerfully strangled Cotta. My refusal to stand for public office is the only real no-go area I've got with Perilla (yeah, well, maybe there are one or two others. Like the late night squid and pickle snacks or not letting the barber pull the hairs out of my nostrils. But these are minor). She sees it as a shirked duty, which is true enough, I suppose. I see it as on a par with not wishing a set of impacted anal glands on yourself. Anyway, knowing how highly she valued Uncle Cotta's opinions in general bringing out that particular gem was like tossing a pork chop to a wolverine.

'Like yourself, I suppose, Valerius Cotta,' she said sweetly. 'You didn't have to run for consul, did you?'

I knew that tone. It meant that whoever she was talking to had about ten seconds to find a deep hole somewhere, pile the dirt on top of them and stay put till spring. It didn't faze Cotta, though. Maybe the guy was going deaf in his old age. Or maybe he was just drunk and didn't care. No prizes for guessing which.

'No. I didn't have to run for consul.' He beamed at her. 'But then rank has its rewards, my dear. You'd be amazed how many prim and proper matrons want to be screwed by one of Rome's serving senior magistrates. To coin a phrase. Isn't that right, Marcus?'

I had to laugh. Even if I knew, from the expression on Perilla's face, that I'd pay for it later. Uncle Cotta may've been no great shakes as a politician or a criminologist, but he could certainly handle himself. Even against Perilla.

We finished the flask cup for cup, while Perilla looked on in resigned disapproval. Ah, well. I had an excuse, apart from the simple fact that the wine deserved it. Starting from tomorrow, whether I liked it or not, I'd be up to my eyes in the political trash-heap again. And that wasn't a thought I wanted to face sober.