Man Eater

XII

In the opulence of Sergius Pictor’s dining room, where vivid paintings of Ganymede, cup-bearer to the gods, covered the walls and Bacchanalian revels patterned the floor, the death of one slave girl, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio reflected sadly, had left no appreciable impact on the diners. Only Claudia, he noticed, avoided his-and indeed anyone else’s-eye, picking at her baked eggs and slipping a partridge into her napkin when she thought nobody was looking. The others, predictably hyped up from the outing, were drinking heavily and laughing loudly. Except one.

‘For pity’s sake,’ Tulola chided. ‘Cheer up.’

‘What’s up, sunshine?’ asked Timoleon. ‘You’ve got a face as long as an elephant’s dongler.’

‘A yellow one,’ put in Taranis, without bothering to empty his mouth.

Sergius’ petulant expression deepened. ‘The Megalesian Games kick off in a fortnight, what’s to be cheerful about?’

‘Uh-oh.’ Corbulo took a deep draught of wine. ‘I feel a nag coming on.’

‘Hands off,’ mocked Barea. ‘Horses are my job.’ Everyone laughed, the slaves topped up the glasses and even Sergius was tempted to smile.

‘I hear the Emperor’s most trusted general, his closest friend, his dearest ally has come home sick.’ Provocatively Tulola licked mustard sauce from a spear of asparagus. ‘Isn’t that right, policeman?’

‘The prognosis does not look good, I’m afraid.’ Orbilio was relieved the conversation had moved to more general topics. ‘He bypassed Rome and headed straight for his house in Campania. That tells you how serious it is.’

‘If I’d spent all winter freezing my bollocks off,’ Timoleon snapped, ‘I’d want to defrost them, too.’

‘Oh? Where he been, then?’ Taranis wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

Tulola ruffled his shaggy mophead. ‘That’s what I like about you, my little barbarian. You’re so blissfully, utterly ignorant.’

Taranis stiffened. ‘I am foreigner. I no understand Roman politics.’

‘Pannonia.’ Orbilio was too weary to sit through Tulola’s explanation and the indignation that would inevitably follow. ‘The Danube campaign’s not fully resolved, and-’

‘You don’t understand!’ Sergius thumped the table and the glassware rattled. ‘The Megalesian Games are without parallel.’

‘Give it a rest, old son,’ Barea interjected, but Sergius was unstoppable.

‘There’s a full week of spectacles I’ve missed, and two days after they wind up, the Ceres Games kick off. That’s another eight days I could be exhibiting.’

Corbulo assumed a mock-serious expression. ‘It takes time to-’

‘Bollocks! You’ve had six months and more to knock those beasts into shape.’

This time the trainer’s solemnity was not forced. ‘Your Syrian lions had been caged for three months by the time they reached me,’ he said, his eyes narrowing. ‘They weren’t very amenable to being asked to play parlour games. Not with half their fur rubbed off on the bars.’

‘I’ve told you it won’t happen again, but there’s no reason why the elephants and the leopards-’

‘-and the bears and the giraffe and the horses. What about them?’ When the Etruscan thumped the table, not only the glasses but the plates and the pots and the serving trays danced. ‘Or the camels, the warthogs and the rhino? And let’s not forget the ostriches and the seals and the monkeys, either. Janus, man, what do you think I do all bloody day? Play hoops and throw javelins?’

‘You’ve done well, Corbulo, but surely-’

The trainer hurled a silver platter across the room. ‘If you don’t fucking like what I’ve done, then fucking sack me!’

‘Sit down,’ pleaded Alis. ‘Sergius doesn’t mean it, he’s tired-’

‘He’s drunk.’ Pallas, as usual, took the shortcut. ‘So I suggest the rest of us catch up. All right by you, my friend?’

Corbulo shrugged irritably but settled back down on the couch nevertheless.

‘I’m not bloody drunk,’ Sergius protested.

‘Well, you look like shit,’ said Euphemia, ‘and if you’re going to throw up, you want to do it outside.’

‘Euphemia!’ Alis had about as much control over her sister as Salvian had over his prisoner.

‘I do feel groggy,’ Sergius admitted. ‘Maybe I’ll just-’ His knees buckled as he tried to stand.

‘Bedtime,’ Timoleon intoned musically, slinging his yellow-faced host over his shoulder as though he were a roll of cloth. ‘But no rumpy-pumpy for you tonight, Alis!’ He guffawed at the high spots of colour that appeared in her cheeks. ‘He’s too far gone.’

‘She doesn’t get it, no matter what state he’s in,’ Euphemia said spitefully. ‘What is it you practise, sister? The Emperor’s strategy?’ She turned to Orbilio. ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’

‘Well, um, Augustus has several strategies.’ Somehow he’d lost the thread here.

‘Sergius hates his darling wife to talk about it, but hadn’t you wondered about the lack of brats? He wants his precious circus first-’

‘Euphemia, please!’ Alis wailed.

‘Hence the Emperor’s strategy. Abstinence! Can you believe that?’

Frankly, no, thought Orbilio. Augustus might cart his wife with him round the provinces, but his infidelities were legendary. Who, he wondered, thought that one up?

‘You’ll have to excuse me.’ He yawned noisily. ‘Long day.’

He was enjoying the quiet of the garden, with the cicadas rasping and moths dicing with death round the torches, when the messenger arrived from Rome. The letter bore the seal of the heron and Orbilio swore under his breath. He tipped the rider, and made two full, slow circuits of the colonnade before he even thought about reading it.

His boss was an oily bastard, who’d weaselled his way to the top, surrounding himself with high-calibre officers whose consistent results compensated for his own shortcomings. When they did well, he did well. When they failed-huh-talk about a man with sloping shoulders! A foul-mouthed so-and-so at the best of times, Jupiter alone knows what he had to say to an officer who’d abandoned a complex fraud case in the middle of the night to investigate a murder that was not even in his jurisdiction.

Orbilio found a marble bench and broke open the seal.

As ever, his boss was to the point.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ the letter began. ‘The Emperor is shouting down my throat and I’ve had to transfer Metellus to your case-not because you’re arsing about in the country, but because a certain ex-tribune, an ex-prefect as well as an ex-consul claims you raped his wife.’

The bitch! Orbilio rubbed his forehead. The absolute bitch!

‘If that’s not enough, now I get a complaint from Gisco to say you’re shagging his wife, too. What is it with you, Orbilio? Too much red meat? Is that what makes you ride every filly within reach?’

He put it down. He couldn’t read, the parchment was shaking so badly it was making him cross-eyed. Mother of Tarquin, I’ve really cocked up this time. He leaned back and closed his eyes, waiting for the nausea to subside before picking up where he left off.

‘The rape charge I’ve thrown out,’-did he know the woman’s reputation? – ‘but get this. Under no circumstances can I allow an officer of mine to be responsible for any further outbreaks of cuckolding, least of all amongst our most prominent citizens. A few weeks of “night starvation” ought to bring you to your senses, so until I say so, you will not set foot within these city walls. Do I make myself clear?’

Underneath, and written in his boss’s own writing, as opposed to that of his scribe, was a postscript.

‘So you know I mean business, I’ve told Gisco where to find you.’

*

For a cheap inn down the squalid end of town, it was doing a roaring trade by the time Froggy elbowed his way through the guffaws of laughter, the maudlin tales, the off-key shanties. The rest of his gang, he noticed with a tinge of rancour as he thumped down his goblet, had already dipped deep into one pitcher of wine and were calling for a second before he’d taken so much as a swill of the first.

‘You’re late tonight,’ chimed Pansa, tipping a set of knucklebones out of a dog-eared leather bag before stacking up an assortment of coins. ‘Much longer and we’d have started without you.’

Froggy said nothing. He drained his goblet then pulled up a stool in the space the others had made for him, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t pee without checking with him first.

‘Put the bones away,’ he ordered.

‘No one’s watching,’ Ginger protested amiably. ‘You can’t see what goes on in this corner.’

‘I know that,’ Froggy replied irritably. It was why they always sat here on a market-day evening. Gambling, even in this dive, was still illegal. ‘I want to talk.’

A collective groan rippled round the table, but the coins disappeared back into their respective purses. Froggy had been their leader since they could remember and they knew when they were beaten-Ginger, imaginatively named after his thatch of red hair; Pansa, who walked with his hand shielding the birthmark on his cheek; the two brothers Lefty and Restio; plus Festus, the shield-maker’s son. Reluctantly Pansa scooped up the knucklebones.

Glancing about, Froggy satisfied himself the other revellers weren’t listening. Right now their attention was fixed on a couple of newcomers making passes at the serving girls, and the innkeeper, who was having none of that, was pointing out a brothel over the way if they wanted, and of course they did. This was Narni. The Via Flaminia passed through it, so did the river Nera, and so did a constant procession of soldiers, bargees, porters and stevedores. The wealthier types-the merchants and their agents-lodged in more salubrious establishments, but there remained a whole host of clerks and labourers left to fend for themselves until their masters’ business was done. The whores of Narni, like those of many a staging town, offered a bright spot of comfort in an otherwise bleak and ragged existence.

Froggy turned back to his friends. ‘You know that job we did recently?’

‘The burglary up by the-’

‘The other one,’ he said, brushing his hair as a spider-or worse-fell from the rafters. Whatever the creature, he crushed it under his fist on the table. ‘Sunday morning.’ He wiped the remains of the insect down the seam of his tunic. ‘When we ran that rig off the road.’

Easy money, that. He paused as plates piled high with boiled bacon and lentils were plumped in front of them, another part of the market-day ritual. A dish of grits completed the feast.

‘What about it?’ asked Ginger, blowing on his spoon. ‘Something go wrong?’

‘Not exactly.’ Froggy was idly twirling his knife round his plate. ‘But that’s what made me late. Apparently some widow was on board, and now she’s been charged with murder.’

Restio whistled. ‘What a psycho!’

‘Not half,’ echoed Pansa. ‘Count ourselves lucky she didn’t do for one of us, eh, lads?’

A drunk bumbled over, a bargee-Froggy could tell by the smell of oxen which clung to him no matter how clean the poor sod’s clothes. ‘Piss-house is that way, mate,’ he said, jerking his thumb towards the far corner. The drunk belched gratefully and lumbered towards the door.

‘The trial’, he continued, taking care not to raise his voice beyond the reach of the table, ‘takes place here, in Narni, on Wednesday. You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘Narni?’ asked Ginger, through a mouthful of vegetables. ‘Why not Tarsulae?’

‘Where’, Froggy scoffed, ‘could they scrape up fourscore jurists in that shithole? No, the show’s coming here, so you see the significance? Everyone, and I mean everyone at the Villa Pictor will be called as a witness.’

‘Wow!’ said Restio, because although he hadn’t a clue what Froggy was driving at, he sensed it was important enough to warrant reverence.

Froggy leaned forward. ‘It seems to me, lads, that here’s our chance to make a bit of dosh-’

‘We got paid well for that,’ Pansa put in, but Froggy ploughed on.

‘As I see it, we have two choices. According to my contact at the courts, this old bag’s supposed to have arranged to meet with the bloke who got killed-’

‘But she couldn’t have,’ Restio protested. ‘Because we run her off the road and, according to that innkeeper in Tarsulae, she was headed north.’

‘Thank you, witness for the defence, you may step down now,’ said Froggy, topping up his wooden goblet. ‘Now if you’ll let me get on, as I said, we have two choices. Either we approach the widow’s lawyer, tell him what we know-oh, we can say it was an accident, didn’t realize anyone had been hurt, how sorry we were-only there’s no mileage in that.’

In all probability the widow was old, and she certainly wasn’t well off or she’d have been travelling the main road with a retinue of slaves and baggage. Frankly Froggy couldn’t see the old girl heaping rewards upon his head for coming forward-not on the scale he fancied, anyhow.

‘Which leaves us with our second option. You see, boys, I don’t think our client will want it bandied about that we were paid to run that rig off the road, do you? In fact, I think we’re on to a nice little earner with this one.’