The Silver Pigs

LII

I had nothing to do that evening, so I went to the barber's at the end of our street. I sat out on the pavement while he scraped my chin. I managed to trip up some minor official's lictor and make it look like a genuine accident. The lictor himself was nearly castrated on his ceremonial axe; I felt proud of myself.

I was going to see her again. Who? No one. Just a girl. Just a client. Forget I mentioned it.

The barber's boy ambled up, chewing the end of a Lucanian sausage. He was thirteen, not totally deficient but he managed to make eating a sausage look a complicated challenge for his brain. My sister Maia's children all called him Plato.

"Falco! Lady looking for you outside your house."

Rarely has a man with a Spanish razor at his throat leapt up so fast.

I hopped over a cockle barrel, dashed round a pile of empty amphorae, and cracked my head on a basket of flowers outside the funeral parlour where hired mourners were getting in voice not for a wake, but for the next day's Triumph which would close down the city in public holiday. Every musician in Rome would be out distracting the crowds so pickpockets could do their work efficiently.

I saw no lady. No wonder. That fool Plato should have known better: it was Lenia who wanted to see me. Lenia, hovering outside the laundry looking ashamed.

Twenty years of explaining away lost under tunics made a crestfallen laundress such an unusual sight that I realized the cause must be desperate. It was. To celebrate the Emperor's Triumph she was planning an act of reckless delirium: our strong-armed queen of the washtubs was plunging into wedlock.

When people announce their marriages, I try to avoid informing them that they are making a bad mistake. They generally are, but if all the unsuitable pairings in Rome were suffocated at birth by kind friends' good advice, there would be no new generation of civilized men to subdue the world's barbarians.

"Who is the happy bridegroom?"

"Smaractus."

On reconsideration I gave Lenia the strongest advice I could.

The reason for not bothering is that they never listen anyway.

"Shut up, Falco," Lenia responded amiably. "He's worth half a million sesterces!"

For several reasons this news raised a red mist before my eyes.

"If Smaractus told you that, girl, I can promise you he's lying!"

"Don't be a fool; I never asked him."

"All right, it depends who you seduced. If it was his accountant he's boasting, so halve it. If it was his banker he's being cautious, so double it"

"Neither. Believe me, I'm not taking chances; I've read his will."

"Lenia," I commented sadly, "there are no depths to which a scheming woman will not sink!"

A strategic alliance with my pernicious landlord could only be part of Lenia's devious business plan. He had his eye on her laundry, that small but steady gold mine, but her own attention was riveted on his hefty real estate. Their lives together would be fortified by the keen nip of greed, as each prayed daily to their household gods that the other would die first.

Many marriages endure for decades on this healthy basis, so I wished her well.

"He'll be living here, Falco."

Thought he already was!"

"Just warning you."

"I don't care what tree that foul bird exudes his guano in"

"I can't keep him out of the laundry. I thought before the wedding you might carry off your parcel from the vat"

The original silver pig! The one found in the street, which Petronius and I had rescued afterwards from Sosia Camillina's bank box. I had forgotten all about it; so had everybody else…

Hauled up by our mighty Lenia, my pig was soon drying under some seedy temple's weekly batch of soiled smalls. Wiping it with a priest's head cloth amidst a whiff of last Thursday's incense, Lenia asked, "Did you know that someone had attached a laundry list?"

Petronius and I had left a rope round the pig; fixed to the rope now was a single wax tablet…

"Oh dear gods!"

Before ever I took it from Lenia's swollen hand I knew what it was, and whose. I could hear Lenia telling me six months ago, I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she left a note upstairs… Then, too, I remembered Helena Justina when she was raging at me that first night in Britain. She said she had told you…

And so she had. Formally enough to be presented in evidence, Sosia Camillina had given me a list of names.

Sosia Camillina, daughter of P Camillus Meto, to M Didius Falco, private informer. On the Ides of October in the second consulship of

Vespasian Augustus, his first as Emperor

T Flavins Domitianus

L Aufidius Crispus

Cn Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus

Ti Faustus Plautius Ferentinus

A Curtius Gordianus

A Curtius Longinus

Q Cornelius Gracilis

I name these men in duty to the Emperor and devotion to the gods.

There they all were. All? All but one, apparently. Above her final sentence was a one line gap. It looked as if Sosia had written an extra name; as if she had written, then at once pulled the flat end of her stylus back through the wax, deleting the line she had just inscribed there with its point.

In this case, I had once told Helena, there could be no loyalty and no trust. Sosia Camillina possessed both. It must have made a heavy burden for a sixteen-year-old girl.

This tablet proved nothing. Just seven men who knew each other; it read like a dinner-party list. Perhaps Sosia had found one in a house she had visited, a note, written out to give instructions to someone's household steward. Sosia had then carefully copied out the names…

Seven men, who could say, if we challenged them in court, they had been dining quietly together. Though their real purpose might be not one jot less sinister for that.

And who, then, had been this ugly dinner party's host?

I stared at the faint groove where it seemed Sosia's stylus had erased a further name. My poor Sosia had been bound in law by ties that were not mine. Had she stood here now, fixing me with those great eager eyes that I remembered so vividly, I would have had to maintain her silence with her to the end. But she was long gone. And I still wanted bitterly to avenge her death.

There was one more person involved in this case: somebody so adept at shrinking out of view that I had almost deliberately ignored the obvious link. I thanked Lenia, grasped the ingot in my arms, and struggled with it upstairs to my room. Soon, wearing my best toga, the one that belonged to Festus, I came down again and went out to do what was necessary on Palatine Hill.