Jail Bait

VIII

As dawn broke across the seven hills of Rome, its residents braced themselves for revelations of an altogether different kind. Are those spots, or just a bruise where she fell over? Are you off your food from fever, or was it curdled milk which made you queer? In every household, from the richest to the squalid, families lined up to inspect one another for the symptoms of the plague, because with seventy more souls ferried over the Styx every day, they needed reassurance they weren’t going to be on the next boat.

For Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, trudging down from the Capitol, he was simply too bone weary to care. His eyelids, he was sure, could double as scouring pads, every muscle he owned cried out for rest. Forty-two hours had passed since his last proper sleep, his stubble itched and the soles of his feet felt like they’d been beaten with paddles. He needed a drink. He knew that he shouldn’t, that his brain and digestion were shot all to hell, but Mother of Tarquin, what he wouldn’t give for a drink!

In the shadow of the Temple of Concord, he glanced across to the Imperial Palace and cursed his boss under his breath. Bastard. Simply because Orbilio had dined with a select group of senators, two of them personal friends of the Emperor, and his superior officer hadn’t been invited! Never mind these were Orbilio’s relatives, that he had no say in who was or wasn’t asked. In his boss’s eyes this was a snub, a sharp reminder that, in class terms, the Head of the Security Police ranked lower than his patrician employee and thus, to keep the upstart in his place, he’d hauled Marcus Cornelius away from the murder he was investigating and assigned him instead to round-the-clock guard duty outside the Imperial Palace.

That he could justify the humiliation by citing the dire consequences of the plague entering the imperial bloodstream made it doubly hard for Orbilio to swallow, because on that particular issue at least he backed his boss to the hilt. Rome had enough on her plate, she daren’t lose Augustus!

It was only seven weeks back, remember, that Agrippa died so unexpectedly, depriving the Emperor in one single blow of best friend, son-in-law, his finest general-and, most importantly, his heir. Rome had become a bucking bronco, with revolution, anarchy and sedition jostling to jump in the saddle, and no one left to hold the reins. Jupiter alone knows what backlash might unfold. No, Augustus’ life needed careful guarding at the moment, that went without saying, but the Palace watch was a job for the Praetorian Guard and, unlike the Head of the Security Police, Augustus was no snob. He wouldn’t give a toss who kept the plague out.

Rather, Orbilio felt, being a red-blooded bloke himself, the Emperor might be sympathetic towards what Marcus’ boss would undoubtedly call deserting his post…

Glancing across to the Senate House, Marcus felt a sour taste in his mouth. Accusations of desertion would not sit well with his ambitions to take a seat one day, so he had to play this right. One step wrong and it’s no use shouting about the double standards of putting the Senate in unofficial recess until May, so the politicians can escape the plague. The mud would stick and Orbilio’s chances of crossing that most illustrious of thresholds would be squashed for ever. On the other hand. His step quickened. Minor slurs could be forgiven, providing he solved enough cases-and naturally, the higher their profile, the higher the odds. Well, the profile of what he’d been working on (leastways until his boss got the hump) could outstrip the Great Pyramid of Egypt. And murder was just the tip of the pyramid…

Once across the Forum, Marcus kept to the diminishing shade of the Via Sacra. The beads of sweat which had linked hands round his belt told him today would be another stinking inferno and already, even at this early hour, fumigatory fires burned the length and breadth of the city. Orbilio did not think that, in this heat, they helped.

How long, he wondered, before the contagion ran its course and the Forum could reflect a different mood? Lately, in place of strings of roped ostriches kicking up mayhem, scrawny pigeons pecked in the dust, with no children to chase them away. Gone were the dancers, the acrobats, the fire-eaters in their gaily coloured costumes. Silent were the taunts of the bare-knuckle fighters, the strident cries of the hucksters, the hup-hup-hup of the litter bearers. For the past week, heads wagged low in sombre consultations with fortune-tellers while augurs studied the stars, the entrails of sheep, even the flight patterns of owls in search of encouraging auspices. The sun might shine, thought Orbilio, but the light had gone out in the city. Swerving past a man up a ladder fixing his gutterspout, he glanced down a sidestreet and saw yet another handcart wheeling away a tiny body concealed by a sheet and heard that most heartrending of sounds-the muted sobs of a father bereaved.

‘Shit.’

As Orbilio pressed on up the Velian slope, the lump in his throat refused to subside. Death he was used to. He was twenty-eight, for gods’ sake, he’d seen men die-good men, bullies, bigots and cowards, he’d watched them expire on the battlefield and from public executionbut a child? Its soul stolen away in the night? That can’t be right. And whilst his objective in visiting Jupiter’s temple had been to gain ammunition to fight his boss rather than to offer up prayers, Marcus couldn’t help wondering when the King of Olympus intended to tear himself away from his drinking and his whoring and send a thunderbolt to put paid to this murderous heat.

People were dying, and Jupiter did not care. Orbilio snorted. Who did that remind him of! Three painstaking weeks he’d spent gathering evidence on that damned murder and, snap, just like that, his boss suspends further enquiries. Well, the case was too important to walk away from, both from the victim’s point of view, as well as Orbilio’s. He needed a weapon to fight back with and this morning he had found it.

A personal application from his boss for his brother to fill the role of Jupiter’s priest. Brilliant!. Just what Orbilio needed.

For the last seventy-five years the job had not so much been vacant, more covered by the collegiate as a group, but lately, to emphasize the importance the king of the gods played in Augustus’ golden age of peace, the Emperor decided to entrust the task once more to a single individual. Heaven knows, the list of applicants would be tremendous (what a feather in their cap, whoever got the job) but the post would not be as easy to fill as some might imagine. Few people in living memory had ever seen the original functions performed, but only a foreigner could not be aware of hundreds of taboos by which Jupiter’s special priest was bound and the job would only go to a man who could recite the rules and regulations.

Well, Orbilio knew. The whole list lay in his family vault.

And with this information, he could trade with his superior officer, for the man’s ambitions knew no bounds. His brother, as weak and clumsy as he was strong and shrewd, would not care a jot. But for the Head of the Security Police to boast a sibling in this prestigious role… Oh, yes. Orbilio was in an excellent position to bargain.

He paused in the street to stroke the ginger tomcat which came rubbing round his ankles, and vowed he would not bargain with his boss unless pushed to the limit. Scrubbing the cat’s ears, Marcus was keenly aware that, if he could solve this outstanding murder case-correction, this Giant Pyramid of a case-there’d be no need for horsetrading at all. His skills would see him through. Hadn’t those selfsame skills put him on to it? Long, weary legs began the long, slow haul up the Esquiline Hill.

It had all started with a bit of gossip. One man in the steamy atmosphere of the public bath house bragging to another how he planned to spend the fortune he’d inherited from his wife. The voice was not that of an old man, and Marcus’ investigative ears twitched, albeit idly.

‘Didn’t she keep cats or something, your late wife?’ the friend asked.

‘Twelve of the fuckers,’ the husband spat. ‘Got rid of them straight away!’

That was all. A snippet of overheard conversation, but somehow it stuck in his mind. Twelve cats, the man said. Twelve’s a lot, an awful lot, but perhaps Orbilio would have thought no more of it, had the husband not sounded so bitter when he snarled out the number. Plus, he didn’t like the way the man laughed when he said ‘straight away’. In fact, the whole tone of it stuck in Orbilio’s craw, and it was more to put his own mind at rest that he checked out the fellow’s history. Which was shabby, to say the least. A wastrel, a womanizer, a professional sponger, but he could not have killed his wife. He had an alibi, his wife was a hundred miles away, and she died of natural causes Except healthy women do not die of natural causes. Uneasy now, Marcus delved deeper, and what he found made his blood turn to ice.

At which point, his boss got the hump.

‘The woman’s been dead three fucking months,’ he had snapped. ‘What difference does another month make? Just get your arse up to the Palace and keep the fucking plague out!’

Well, sorry, but Orbilio had no intention of dropping this case. Not this one! Solving it would propel him through the Senate House doors faster than a tornado and since there’s more than one way to snare a song thrush, even when his brain felt like porridge and every muscle screamed, Marcus Cornelius trekked all the way across town at the end of his shift to verify his boss’s application regarding the role of Jupiter’s priest.

Success. Whichever way it swung now, Orbilio would be a hero.

First, though, a hero needs his beauty sleep. Three or four hours should suffice, and the kudos of scaling his criminal pyramid buoyed his aching feet. In three or four hours, he’d be turning his back on these dark alleyways, the towering tenements, on mournful, plague-ridden wails. He’d be heading for the country, to a place with views of hills across a lake. Where birds sang in untrammelled bliss. Where fish leapt out of the water at sunset. A place, he mused, which offered health-giving springs and baths of hot, energizing mud.

A place, in short, which contained Claudia Seferius.

A python coiled round his innards and undertook serious constriction work. Claudia. The appearance of a goddess, the temperament of a tigress, there were strands of molten metal in her hair. Claudia. Eyes which flashed like sparks off an anvil, she lived life with the wind in her hair. Like lightning in a tempest, the electricity between the two of them was as terrifying as it was rousing. Wild. Unpredictable. He would follow her, he knew, Orpheus-fashion to Hades if she so much as crooked her finger…

Except Marcus was no gentle musician-and Claudia, certainly, no sweet Eurydice!

But such was her pull on him, stronger even than the moon on the tides, that wherever she left her footprints, he’d be there.

Not in front. Not behind.

Alongside.

As equals. The thought of her made his gut lurch. Janus, he really needed that drink.

For all that the sun was beginning to rise, the hour was still early and Orbilio’s house was in darkness as he let himself in. A whiff of proving bread escaped from the kitchens, but his stomach recoiled at the prospect of food. Sleep! He needed sleep. Urgent, replenishing sleep. And then…

Love or lust, who gives a damn? Like a drug, he was addicted to the woman. Try as he might, he could not live without her.

Marcus staggered across the atrium like a drunkard. The bedroom, too, was in darkness. He unbuckled his belt and it clattered as it fell to the floor. Sleep, yes, but surely a drink? To settle the flutters Claudia invariably brought on. By touch he fumbled for the jug beside his bed and without reaching for a goblet drank straight from the jar. The wine hit his stomach like a punch and too late he realized he should have sipped rather than gulped, but the damage was done and in this stifling heat, what difference did one more hangover make?

He was wiping a damp cloth over his face when the crack of a whip made him jump. What the hell…?

Again, the snap of rawhide rang out in his room, accompanied by rich, female laughter. Croesus, what was in that bloody jug?

‘I thought you were never coming home.’ She laughed, and he realized this was no hallucination. This was whatsername. Thingy. Barbia. That’s right. And Barbia, he remembered, had a penchant for whips. And for manacles. And chains…

‘I-’

The wine made his brain fuzzy, he couldn’t think straight. How did she end up here? In his bed? He’d flirted with her in the Palatine Gardens. She’d been a real laugh, earthy and vibrant, and they’d passed two jubilant hours rustling the laurels. But here?

‘I… can’t stop,’ he muttered. ‘Just called in to change my tunicyouch! ’ The whip stung his flesh. Mother of Tarquin, she thought he was larking about.

‘Not playing hard to get, are we?’ Her breathing was heavy and scented with wine. ‘Or else Barbie will have to get rough.’

‘No!’ It came out more terrified yelp than manly denial, but in any case it came out too late. Metal clamped round his right ankle and a second click fastened it firm to the bed. Orbilio let out a shaky laugh. ‘Barbia, look-’

Before he could clarify the misunderstanding that he’d given his address as a joke, a loud rip cut through the air and, whoosh, his tunic was gone. Thanks to glimmers of sunlight beginning to penetrate the cracks in the shutters, he could make out Barbia’s figure. It seemed to be encased in some form of harness…

In the blackness, he heard the jangle of handcuffs and lunged at where he thought they would be. But Barbia had been teasing. A diversion for the chainlink which snapped round his wrist and, shit. He was spreadeagled on his own couch, right ankle, left wrist, and there was not a damned thing he could do.

Orbilio considered the one thin sheet of inadequate linen which concealed his sad lack of enthusiasm and knew that if his boss walked in right now, he’d strangle the oily bastard with this bloody chain, purely for exposing him to the siren from hell!. As Barbia whisked a knife through his loincloth, Orbilio prayed to Priapus to help him in this, his hour of need Somehow the misty shores of Lake Plasimene belonged to a different incarnation, and instead of the quacking of ducks and the croaking of frogs in the bulrushes, he was stuck with Barbia’s fruity laughter and the acid smell of her leather gear. In fact, as the bullwhip stung his thigh, Orbilio’s final thought, as Barbia pressed her ample breasts into his face, was that, sleep or no sleep, by Croesus, he’d be on the first horse out of town the instant this harpy untied him.

Assuming, of course, he survived.