Jail Bait

XXI

As the pitiless rays of dawn burrowed under eyelids rich and poor, groans rippled out like nibbling fish. Some were minnows, some were monsters-few were spared. Coots which yesterday emitted gentle, subdued honks had acquired trumpets in the night and the tree crickets preferred clashing cymbals to rasping their back legs together. In the town, in the villages, in farmsteads all around Lake Plasimene, faces ranging in colour from soapstone yellow to tundra grey squinted in unimagined agony as the light grew remorselessly brighter and spared not one repentant reveller. And boy, were they repentant. Never again, begged their churning stomachs. Never again, promised ermine-covered tongues.

‘Morning, Phoebe,’ Claudia trilled to the girl struggling into consciousness beneath a marble caryatid in the Athens Canal. By her side an empty goblet lay overturned, and a wine bowl bobbed among the swans in the water.

‘Please,’ Phoebe groaned. ‘Not so loud.’ Her hair was dishevelled, the kohl around her eyes smudged and her gown, where it wasn’t stretched to bursting point, revealed a plump but shapely thigh. ‘Oh lord, that late?’ she asked, squinting at the sun. ‘I must have passed out.’

‘Good night, then?’

The dark-eyed beauty giggled. ‘Hope so.’ She was swaying on her feet as she straightened her crumpled robe. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t remember much after that game of strip chequers in the Forum.’

Quite! Claudia had spent many hours last night wandering round Spesium, analysing the revels of the Agonalia. As the hours progressed, the merrymaking had grown ever more raucous, with behaviour bordering on the manic. Dorcan was wrong, way off course. Last night’s debauchery was not born out of fear of the plague. This level of intensity-as though every day must be lived as the last-went far deeper than that.

As Phoebe tottered off, Claudia explored the little domed loggia, whose recent occupants seemed to have left in such a hurry. A plate of still-warm buns wafted their tantalizing aroma across the open veranda, and a jug of what looked like sherbet hadn’t been touched. The reason, of course, might be connected with the cat curled up on one of the chairs.

‘Well done, Drusilla.’ Claudia sank her teeth into a spicy raisin bun. ‘I was in need of a quiet place to think.’ And where better? Thanks to huge leaps in technology, domes had become a part of modern architecture, and this dome, being small, required support from just eight stone piers. Each had been exquisitely painted to represent an Olympian deity-Jupiter, symbolized by his famous thunderbolt and acorns from his sacred oak, his consort, Juno, represented by birch and geese and marigolds. Claudia did not think the Queen of Light would object to taking her weight while she polished off a second bun.

Did the sky seem a different colour today, a hint of cloud, perhaps, on the horizon? Or was that purely wishful thinking? According to the archivists, this was the longest heatwave on record, and whilst several historians disputed the claim, citing at least five previous hot Mays, two within a hundred years, on one point everyone agreed. When the rains came, no one would be sorry! Irrigation of crops was proving a constant headache, requiring more and more field hands working longer and longer hours. Livestock, too, became restless in a heat which spawned worm and intestinal parasites, while for wine producers, like herself ‘Our bailiff’s a good man, Drusilla,’ Claudia told the dozing cat. ‘He manages the vineyard exceptionally well, only-’

‘Brrr?’

‘The problem is this.’ Claudia prised herself off Juno and flung an arm loosely round Venus. ‘Despite knowing everything there is to know about a vine,’ put simply, the man was a genius, ‘and despite having full managerial control over the estate, he never takes a decision without checking first with me.’ (As if she’d know!)

‘Mrrrrp.’

‘Fine for you to say don’t worry.’ Claudia traced a finger round one of Venus’ holy swans. ‘Suppose I were to tell you that if we don’t get a decent crop of grapes this year, the whole business goes under?’ She was hanging on by her fingernails as it was. ‘I’m afraid that unless this drought is handled properly, both you and I’ll be grovelling for fishheads in the gutter by September.’

‘Mrrr. Mrrr-mrrr.’

‘You think so?’ Claudia examined a painted garland of April flowers, symbolic of the month which came under Venus’ custody. ‘You really think the bailiff will take these decisions on his own?’ She had an idea he was supposed to raise dust storms to shade the roots from the relentless rays of the sun-but suppose he wasn’t whipping up great clouds of soil? Suppose he was sitting up at the estate, anxiously awaiting authorization from the mistress…?

I’m hanging round the wrong damned pillar, Claudia thought. I need Father Vulcan! For a horrid moment it occurred to her that there were twelve Olympian deities and only eight bloody pillars, but praise be to Jupiter, the patron of September, the protector of blacksmiths and the god who also happened to have the vine sacred to his holy personage wasn’t one of those who’d been left out! Claudia flung both arms around the fire god and planted a kiss on the pier, right between a bunch of green grapes and a bunch of red.

‘You won’t let me go bankrupt?’ she begged. ‘You’ll watch over my vineyard?’

But it was not like when, as a child, she flung herself around her father’s knees, to be swept in the air and twirled round and round as she nuzzled against his whiskery chin. Slowly, foolishly, Claudia drew away from the pillar. No enlightenment, no whispered words of reassurance, no spiritual comfort ever came from a pile of stupid stonework. Just the filthy taste of paint on your lips. She looked out across Plasimene, where the hills danced in a shimmering blue reflection, and realized it was not just the lake which was hazy today. There was something in her eye, making it water, and she had the sudden urge to travel far beyond those hills and to keep on travelling. Over the Apennines to the turquoise Aegean, where ships sailed for Dalmatia, Egypt, to Cyprus. Or she could take the road north, cross the Alps to Noricum, Raetia, Germanica, see for herself the lands of sparkling rivers and spectacular cascades… Oh shit! Whatever was in her eye started aggravating further.

‘Mrrrrow?’

Claudia buried her head in Drusilla’s soft warm fur, and saw a small child waving her father off to war and never coming home. She saw the child’s mother, sliding into an alcoholic spiral until one day it all became too much for her and she left the child an orphan…

‘You’re right, poppet,’ noisily, Claudia blew her nose, ‘running away won’t solve anything.’ Heaven knows, she’d tried it enough in the past twelve sodding years…

Kissing the cat between the ears, she helped herself to a goblet of sherbet redolent of wild woodland strawberries and found it surprisingly refreshing. Refilling the cup, Claudia carried it and the jug over to the rail, but this time when she looked across the water, no enticing hand of adventure beckoned. The lake was merely a swimming pool for fish, a place for waterbirds and reeds, where men scratched a living fowling and fishing and farming oysters in the shallows. As her gaze moved inwards from the perimeter, it fell on the wooded hump of Tuder’s island and more unbidden pictures tumbled through her mind. Peacocks. The villa. A line of tall cypresses with a marble seat which overlooked the lake. The colossus, who sings to his mother, the dawn.

‘You see,’ a Spanish voice echoed through the halls of her memory.

The hell I will, you conniving, cocky bastard! The hell I’ll see the dawn in with you!

As she spun away, her elbow caught the jug of strawberry sherbet, tipping it over the side. Bugger! Several seconds seemed to pass before Claudia heard the crash, and yet the sound was not as muffled as she expected. Craning her neck, she realized she was overlooking a thicket of willows and alder. Of course! This was where the tunnel disgorged on to the foreshore.

‘Great Jupiter in heaven, do you know what that means?’

But Drusilla had drifted into a deep, paw-twitching sleep and Claudia was forced to confine her conclusions to herself. Which was a pity, because she’d like to have told Drusilla how easily she and Cal could have been overheard as they stood at the mouth of the passageway…

So what? the cat would have said. You didn’t exactly swap state secrets. Cal, Drusilla would have reminded her, had been behaving like any young buck with a pretty girl to impress-it was sex on his mind that afternoon, not mischief-making.

‘You’re right,’ Claudia told the sleeping cat, relieved the theory tied in with that old jealous husband angle. Of a man spurred into frenzy by Cal’s seduction of a young widow while the boy still dallied with the man’s wife On the other hand, thought Claudia, sipping at the remaining glass of sherbet, his voice had been unnaturally loud. Brash, she put it down to at the time. But suppose it had been a veiled threat, deliberately intended for the ears of someone he knew would be up here…? Rubbish. She crumbled a bun for a dozen eager sparrows. Claudia had seen for herself how deserted this resort became at siesta time! No, she was barking up the wrong alder trunk by imagining there’d been any significance in the possibility that their conversation might have been overheard.

Tossing down the last corner of the bun, she began to pace the circular loggia and let her thoughts turn over more pressing matters, because, ghastly as the idea might seem, the prospect of collaborating with Supersnoop needed serious consideration. Until now, she’d assumed it was the theft of some distant imperial relative’s money that had rattled the authorities, but now it seemed they were after something else. What? What could be so important that its theft needed to be made public? Why should Sabbio Tullus be set up the same way as Claudia had? The same way, in fact, as the architect who’d had his throat slit down some back alley in an incident which may or may not have been murder.

Claudia admitted it was pure speculation, but suppose someone (let’s call him X) had been alerted to the fact that Tullus’ nephew had a piece of paper in his possession. Was X being blackmailed on account of this incriminating evidence? Hardly, or he’d want the whole thing hushed up. The very fact that the robbery must come to light suggested the sequence of events was:

1. (Claudia ticked them off on her fingers.) X blackmails the architect into finding a way into the strongroom.

2. A suitable dupe is selected-and no prizes for guessing which silly bitch they chose!

3. X (or X’s agent) plants in Tullus’ head the need to take his silver with him to Frascati for ‘security’ purposes.

4. An elaborate scene is staged between the architect and Claudia and some young streetwalker, resulting in Claudia shimmying in through the loosened brickwork a few days later at the very time Tullus ‘decides’ to make his withdrawal.

5. Meanwhile, X knows Tullus sufficiently well to predict he’ll scream bloody murder at the outrage (or maybe that reaction also has been planted) and, because of the nephew’s imperial connections, X also knows the army will become involved.

6. However! This is where Claudia’s formative years spent fending for herself in backstreet slums stand her in good stead. Unexpectedly for X, she escapes.

Claudia puffed out her cheeks. So what? Had Tullus caught her red-handed, it would very quickly have become apparent that the nephew’s property wasn’t on her person and if she didn’t have it, where was it? No, on point No. 6 she was wrong. The patsy had been meant to escape, leaving the army with a whole score of leads to follow up, possible accomplices to run to ground, absorbing so much time that, as Orbilio said, the real thief’s scent would have gone blissfully stale.

What she didn’t understand, however, was why. Why make the robbery public? If this document was so damned hot-aha! Suppose that by broadcasting the fact that Tullus had been robbed, it sabotaged the nephew’s plans in some way? The seed began to take root. Surely, then, the logical follow-on must be that by making the robbery hot gossip, the nephew was incapacitated, which meant… Which meant…

Which meant Claudia had absolutely no idea.

Hang on! Yes, she did. It meant X now held the balance of power, the only threat to which lay with the nephew…who could do sod all about it, because he wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place.

Gotcha!

Claudia gulped down the last of the sherbet. All Orbilio need do now is work out who X is and life was hunky-dory once again, she could repay that little loan, maybe treat Tullus to a toga, calm him down, and whoopee, life was back on course. Terrific. She clapped her hands. Case closed. And Supersnoop can shove his wretched tit-for-tat.

In celebration, she twirled round and round the pillar until she made herself and Apollo quite dizzy, and it was only when she stopped reeling that she became aware of just how much sound did carry upwards from below.

‘Marcus Cornelius Orbilio?’ a puzzled voice echoed, setting Claudia’s ears aflap. Down on the path, a dispatch rider, his hair plastered down with sweat and his tunic clinging in dark patches to his back and armpits, was holding out a letter to a shrugging lackey. ‘Never heard of ’im,’ the servant said.

Oh, but I have…

‘Yoo-hoo.’ Claudia waved both arms to catch the rider’s attention. ‘Up here,’ she trilled. ‘But don’t bother to fetch the letter up, you look like you’re in need of a rest. I’ll nip down and fetch it.’

‘We-ell.’ The courier was torn between duty and the prospect of a bath. ‘My orders,’ he called back, ‘are to hand this over personally. Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Oh, I’ll see he gets it,’ Claudia assured him, with a comforting wave of her hand. ‘I’m his wife.’