Shadows in Bronze

LXXXVIII

Luckily I had not expected the victim of a trick wedding to respond with graceful oratory. My first reaction was surprise. My next was to get my back to the wall, my blade up, and my eye on them.

From a man of his type, something of this sort was inevitable. Heaven knows where he found them. They looked like German mercenaries, big, long-haired, flaxen braggarts, originally hired by the dead Emperor Vitellius – now stranded in Rome after the civil war, with their fare home drunk in the stews along the Tiber and a new, more fastidious Caesar who would not be employing foreign auxiliaries within Rome.

They were heavy in the belly from too much beer and black pudding but they could fight, especially with the odds in their favour at an easy six to one. Some grim auxiliary captain on the Rhine frontier had put these hulks through several years of legionary drill. Their weapons were the huge, flat-bladed Celtic type which they swung over their heads and at waist height while I, with my short Roman stabbing sword, was hard-pushed to duck in underneath. Beneath my priestly costume I had a leather jerkin and arm guards – not enough against six skirling maniacs who were enjoying themselves with the threat of slicing off my salted crackling like a Black Forest pig.

Pertinax laughed.

'Keep smiling,' I seethed, watching the Germans. 'I'll deal with your guttural lap dogs, and then I'll come for you!'

He shook his head, making for the exit. But Tullia was there first. Her terror of him, now he knew she had deceived him, made her foot fleet and her hand sure. She darted down the porter's corridor, past the two empty cubicles, and dragged open the huge, metal-plated door. Out rushed Tullia – and in thundered Milo instead.

At the sight of our humourless monster Pertinax skidded to a halt and turned about. I saw him run lightly to the staircase. I was trapped, hard-pressed by half a dozen heavy blades whose force when they touched down wrenched the power from my wrist as I desperately parried them. It was Curtius Gordianus who took off after Pertinax – an ungainly, sack-like figure fired with the long-nurtured hope of vengeance, who blundered upstairs at an alarming pace. He was wielding the small, sharp knife he had used in the ceremony, still wet from the throat of our sacrificial sheep.

Milo was considering what he should do, all bovine stupidity: my favourite thug.

Do me a favour, drop your flute and grab a sword. Milo acquired a sword by the simple method of seizing the nearest mercenary, lifting the wild man off his feet, and crushing him until his eyes bulged and he limply dropped the blade.

'Cuddle a few more!' I gasped, managing to disarm the next while my boot made an imprint on his ragged chain-mesh truss which if he was one for the women he would bitterly regret.

Now Milo and I could set ourselves back to back and work away from the wall. The opposition circled more widely, but we had more time to watch for them. When two charged from different directions we ducked by common agreement and let them impale themselves with an ugly crunch.

The crude fencing practice lasted less time than I thought. The last two who could run dragged off the wounded. To disguise their connection with the Pertinax house, Milo and I threw the dead outside in the street gutter opposite, like the dirty dregs of some drunken brawl the previous night.

'You caught it, Falco?

Nothing hurt yet, but I was dripping badly: a long cut, down my left side. After five years as an informer I no longer felt the need to faint at the sight of my own blood but this was the last thing I wanted today. Milo was urging me to seek medical attention but I shook my head.

We hurried back, to look for Gordianus. No one answered when we called. I locked the street door and took the key. I found the spigot and turned off the fountain; as the water hung and then dropped, a nerve-racking silence fell throughout the empty house.

We stalked upstairs, constantly listening. One by one we flung open doors. Empty salons and deserted bedrooms. Dust undisturbed on pediments. Woozy flies flinging themselves against closed windows in warm solitude.

Gordianus was in the last room of the first corridor we explored. He had slumped against the marble dado and we thought he must be dead. Not so; only despairing.

'I had him – I got my knife in him – but he attacked me and I bungled it.

Checking him over for physical damage, I muttered sympathetically. 'There's a world of difference between dispatching something woolly at the altar, and taking human life -' Pertinax had belted the Chief Priest viciously against a wall. Not much surface bruising, but at his age shock and exertion were taking their toll. He was having such difficulty breathing I worried for his heart.

I joined Milo in carrying the priest downstairs, and hurriedly let them out together. 'Milo, you look after him.'

'I'll come back-'

'No. What's here is mine.'

He helped make a pressure pad and bind up my side with the white veil I had worn at the ceremony. Then I watched him and Gordianus leave.

This was how I wanted it: Pertinax and me.

Inside the house again I relocked the door behind me. Pertinax probably had his own key when he had lived here, but it was no use to him now. When I act as an executor, the first thing I do is fix new locks.

I walked from the door slowly. One of us might leave that way eventually. It was the only door. This was a rich man's mansion. Rome was alive with cat burglars, and this gem of a property had been built for multimillionaires with treasures to protect. The external walls were completely blank for security. The windows faced inwards. All the light which flooded in came from internal courtyards and the open roof of the atrium. What happened in the streets outside belonged to another world.

He was here. So was I. I had the key. Until I found him, here we would both stay.

I started to search. There were scores of rooms and in some places there were passages where he could slip past me, so I had to patrol some areas twice. I took a long time. My wound started to burn and bother me. Blood was oozing through the cloth. I trod quietly, to avoid warning him and to conserve my own strength. Gradually I covered every room. And in the end I remembered the one place I had missed; so I knew where he must be.

I walked slowly down the red corridor for a second time. My boots slipped unwarily on the shining, level tessellation of the passageway floor. I stepped between the two plinths where basalt portrait busts had once stood, and into the elegant azure and grey bedroom that had once been a private haven for the lady of the house. The warm, deep blue of the wall panels welcomed me graciously. I felt like a lover, treading an accustomed secret route.

I noticed a small, rust-coloured smudge staining the geometric pattern of the silver and white mosaic. I knelt, with some difficulty, and touched it with my finger. Dry. He had been hiding here a long time. Perhaps he was dead.

Hauling myself upright, I dragged my tired feet over to the wooden folding door. It was closed. But when I opened it, from the far side of Helena's garden his angry eyes met mine.