Wolf Whistle

XXXI

The traffic on the Via Lata was light as Claudia cut across from the Quirinal. What had she hoped to achieve from her visit to Kaeso? A confession? Hardly. On the other hand, do men who slice their victims into twenty-seven pieces dash home for a spot of vigorous sex? She did not think so.

The girls’ terror, their blood, an absolute domination, these were the triggers for a ritual murderer, that’s how these freaks get their kicks.

But then Kaeso was an esoteric individual…

Always, on the Field of Mars, you’d find schoolboys running races, jousters on horseback, wig sellers displaying their curly wares on the marble heads of statues (at least until the wardens found out). The baths were free, the lake invariably jammed with rowboats, so take a deep breath, forget about little Severina, just take time out and relax.

Claudia bought a cinnamon bun from a vendor and inhaled its warmth and spiciness.

Counting today, she reflected, ambling down the Portico of a Hundred Pillars, the Megalesian Games still had three days to run and praise be to Bacchus, whose humble wine dregs had sabotaged Larentia, she could enjoy these Games in peace. Tomorrow, in the Theatre of Pompey over there, already flooded and floating proper warships, they were staging a mock naval battle and on Monday the festivities culminate in The Procession of the Gods and more races at the Circus. Today, however, the Theatre of Marcellus was putting on a riproaring musical farce.

Around Pillar Nineteen, the heel of her sandal snagged in the hem of her gown and as she released it, Claudia thought she caught a movement. Shadows, of course. With its alley of plantains, its frescoes and bronze statues, what do you expect?

The farce should be quite a show. Apparently the playwright was a sparkling newcomer whose wit and musical score There it was again! At Pillar Thirty-one. The flicker from behind. She glanced along the colonnade. Portly merchants eyeing up the painted nudes. Lovers, arm in arm, eyes locked. A small boy sitting on the step, picking intently at a scab on his elbow. People. Not exactly crowds, but nevertheless she wasn’t alone here. So why this flutter of unease for what was probably nothing but the effect of fast-moving clouds?

Around Pillar Forty-three, Claudia simply had to know. Had Kaeso’s House of Silence made a sucker out of her?

Backtracking round a cypress grove, the path diverged. This way to the Pantheon, that way to the baths. But wait. Behind an overhanging branch, a narrow, weed-choked path would prove it once and for all. Claudia did not consider the danger as she draped her bright magenta wrap around her elbows and was swallowed by the shrubs. She was intent only on defying an overheated imagination.

Dappled shade turned to deeper shadows. Dense undergrowth muffled sound, the greenery snagged in her hair. Ought she turn back? Narrowing to the point of obscurity, the path terminated at a building where ivy scrambled over walls for sparrows to make nests in. There was a coldness and a damp about the place. The long, wet grass was a stranger to the scythe and when the leaf litter rustled, Claudia squealed aloud. A blackbird hopped out, dangling a caterpillar from his beak, and she rolled her eyes in disgust. What’s to be scared of? This old voting hall, abandoned because who the hell wanted to traipse this far out of town to hear speeches? There were rumours about it being turned into a bazaar-’

‘BITCH!’

Claudia spun round. ‘Magic!’

He hadn’t changed his clothes, they were filthier than ever and stiff from the dried blood of two days back. ‘You faithless, whoring bitch!’

The hair was matted, just as she remembered, and the same uneven teeth and gagging stench. The only difference seemed to be that this time he wielded a knife in both his hands. Claudia screamed, even before she remembered the doll that he’d sent her, slashed to ribbons.

‘I followed you.’

Spinning on her heel, she raced across the courtyard. Inside the voting hall, I’ll be safe!

‘And saw you with those men!’

Up the steps she ran…

The voice changed, became wheedling. ‘Thought you’d kill old Magic? Well, you can’t.’

…across the portico…

‘Magic is immortal.’

…through the porchway…

‘Magic cannot die!’

…to the doors…

‘But you’ll die, you bitch! You deceived me!’

…which were locked and would not budge.

He stopped running when he knew he had her trapped. ‘All those men,’ he rasped. ‘Why? Why so many men, Claudia?’

Her fingernails chipped in a desperate attempt to claw open the lock. ‘Men?’ she croaked. He was deranged. But maybe she could reason with him and find a way out of this nightmare.

‘First the blond one, then the dark one.’ His eyes glittered harshly. ‘No thought of your promise to me!’ In the dank and slimy darkness, the glint from the twin blades shone menacingly. ‘What about the vows we took, do they mean nothing?’

It was no use, the doors were never going to open. Her heart was pounding, her breathing ragged. Think, girl, think. ‘That we still share, Magic.’ She forced her voice to be soft and reassuring. ‘Those men-’

‘Yes?’ His face twisted.

‘-they were cousins, that was all.’ She swallowed the bile in her throat, and forced herself to look at him and not the knives. ‘I told you…in my letters…about my duties.’ In an effort to quell the rising terror, had she overdone the soothing? Had it come out patronizing?

‘Then-’ He seemed to be trying to grasp something. ‘Then you’ll still come to me every night?’

‘Always.’

He nodded slowly, as though still taking it in. ‘And when the white light hurts my head, you’ll sing to me like Mamma did?’

‘Of course.’

His voice became petulant. ‘She doesn’t come to magic the pain away any more. She-’ The eyes blurred with tears. Was this her moment? Could she dash past him, unnoticed? ‘Mamma’s dead, isn’t she?’ he sobbed. ‘Mamma’s dead?’

Intuitively, Claudia knew that it was true. The mother who’d looked after him, protected him against himself and the world, probably drugged him when the mental pain became too bad. She could almost hear the woman whispering ‘magic’ as she wiped his sweating brow and trickled the draught through his lips.

‘Yes,’ she said, and heard the tremble in her voice. ‘Mamma’s dead.’

Distant eyes re-focused. Became beady. ‘That’s right,’ he said smugly. ‘She died the day your husband died. I wrote you a letter, told you how we were united in grief, you wrote back, remember? That’s when it started. Back in August. You do remember, don’t you?’

Claudia’s breath came out in a series of tiny gasps. ‘Every detail.’

The inadequate creature who called himself Magic shuffled closer in the doorway. ‘You’re mine,’ he said thickly. ‘Mine.’ In the dim light, she saw his eyes clamp on her breasts, and he all but licked his lips. Smile. For gods’ sakes, smile at him! He smiled back. Then the smile hardened and was replaced by a frown.

‘You tried to kill me.’ It came over sulky.

She took a step towards him. One step closer to Magic. One step closer to the steps which led to freedom. She could smell his stale breath and body odour, heard his laboured lungs. ‘No, I-’

‘Yes, you did! You fucking tried to kill me!’

This time, there was no reasoning with him. No words which would mollify, no looks to calm him down. Ducking under the flailing twin blades, Claudia ran headlong across the porch towards the marble stairs. Three steps from the bottom, she slipped, her feet trapped in the fabric of her wrap.

‘Now it’s your turn, you bitch!’

Magic plunged towards her, yelling obscenities and waving the knives. Kicking and squirming, Claudia rolled on to the bottom step, then the madman was on top of her, pinning her down with his knees. With her face pressed into the dirt and no escape possible, she braced herself for the thrust of the knife.

It didn’t come.

And suddenly the weight on top of her was gone. Croesus, he bottled it after all!

Claudia spun round on to her back. Magic hadn’t run off, he’d been hauled off. She saw an arm round his throat, a man’s knee in the small of his back. She watched a knife plunge upwards into his kidneys. Saw him arch with the pain. And as he arched, the knife came down straight in his heart.

The last thing she heard as the darkness swallowed her up was a voice in the distance saying, ‘I think you’ll find that terminates the correspondence course.’

*

As Claudia struggled back to consciousness, strange pictures formed and dissolved. A man with the head of a hawk. Another like a jackal. A woman in a blue dress with cow horns on her head ‘Janus!’

‘It’s only the priestess,’ a deep voice said soothingly. ‘You’re in the Temple of Isis.’ He paused. ‘You passed out, I carried you here.’

Isis? Memory crawled back, inch by inch. The Field of Mars. A path into the woods. The old voting hall. There was a fight…

‘Ssssh,’ the man said. ‘Easy, now.’

A cool compress was pressed against her forehead and the lap in which her head lay smelled of musk. Close by, the woodpecker from hell drummed for all it was worth. It turned out to be Claudia’s teeth.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked, remembering everything now.

Kaeso grinned. ‘Most emphatically.’

He dipped his kerchief in the holy fountain and dabbed at the cuts and bruises on her face as images of Magic flashed through her head. The twin blades clutched between his fingers. The surprise upon his face. The professional assassination, with oh so little blood…

Numbly, Claudia allowed Kaeso to ease her into a sitting position. Amber-coloured walls were painted floor to ceiling with regimented lines of birds and snakes and vibrant coloured figures. Hieroglyphics they were called, and the priestess with the cow horns threw heavy resins on the fire and gently rattled a sistrum before the goddess Isis, robed in dazzling white. Behind her, Osiris weighed a heart against a feather.

‘You followed me.’

‘Yes,’ he said simply, and there was no need to ask why. The answer lay there, in his eyes.

Claudia wanted to thank him for saving her life, but words were inadequate, payment obscene. So she cupped her hands and sipped the icy waters and told him instead about Sargon’s plans to sell the children into brothels.

There was silence, while sharp features scanned the symbols on the walls. Cartouches, they were called. Or, holy names.

‘You know, I never once suspected that of Sargon,’ he said eventually, wrenching his gaze from a painted papyrus. ‘I thought he was my friend, yet he imagined I would track down frightened runaways and send them back to his gang of paedophiles.’ Kaeso shook his head in bewilderment. ‘How could he get involved in an enterprise as sordid as that?’

‘Money,’ she said simply. ‘He can never have enough, it runs through his fingers like this water in my hands.’

The rattle of the sistrum ceased when the blue-gowned priestess disappeared through a door in the stonework.

‘Does Dino know?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Nor the Captain.’

An acolyte emerged from the bowels of the temple, wearing a thick black wig and bangles. Smiling shyly, she began to dust the statue of hawk-faced Horus. Claudia waited until her egret feathers had moved on to Anubis.

‘One other matter I think you ought to know about. Arbil has given up the date liqueur.’ She watched the significance of her statement sink in.

‘I see.’ The only sign of anxiety was the pacing.

‘So you’d better get Angel out of Rome, and fast.’ Her eyes followed the slow, familiar lope.

It could not have been Lugal who Angel hooked up with, the boy was too young, too one-dimensional for her tastes. She’d used the groom, led him on, and poor Lugal was too trusting to suspect he’d been tied up tighter than a goose for the oven. Angel wouldn’t care what befell him, either, once Arbil found out. Remember, this was the woman who affected concern for her husband, when in reality those checks were a necessary excuse to mark the progress of his blackouts and sow further seeds of doubt in his mind. The bruise on her cheek she had flaunted as a badge of Arbil’s deterioration-how she must have laughed, knowing it was the effect of her drugs which, by turns, rendered him impotent, put him to sleep and, when it suited her, made him violent. Claudia imagined that Arbil, when he uncovered her treachery, was unlikely to lean towards clemency.

She recalled her very first meeting with Angel. The Indian had not been able to disguise her suspicion, which she masked with hostility, and in the end, that hostility had betrayed her. Otherwise Claudia would have thought nothing of oleanders and thorn apples and strong, date liqueur… Would not have made the connection between the hothouse lilies up at Arbil’s and the hothouse lilies in Kaeso’s bedroom ‘At the start, it was exciting,’ he said. ‘An affair under Arbil’s nose.’

Claudia could almost feel the intoxication that the plotting and the planning would induce. The illicit meetings, whispered messages. The knowledge that Arbil might find out any moment and exact his terrible revenge…

Kaeso stopped pacing and ran his hands through his collar-length hair. In his belt was the knife he’d used to still Magic. ‘I didn’t know, until yesterday, that Angel meant Arbil harm.’

‘She meant to kill him, Kaeso.’ The bitch wanted him dead. It’s the only way she could get her hands on his money box.

The junior priestess shook her egret feather duster out of doors and began to sweep the steps with a broom. The swishing of the heather twigs grew fainter stair by stair, and the heat inside the shrine intensified. Blood pounded through Claudia’s veins, throbbing at her pulse points and at the base of her ears.

‘Are you…in love with her?’

‘I was,’ he said slowly, turning to look Claudia full in the face.

Her cheeks coloured, and the only sound was the trickle of the fountain. ‘What changed your mind?’ she asked.

For several seconds, Kaeso simply held her gaze without blinking. ‘What changed my mind,’ he said huskily, ‘is that I met someone else.’

A lump blocked her windpipe. There was no mistaking his meaning…

Claudia kept her eyes clear of the powerful frame of the man tracker, the sleek war machine who had silenced her stalker for ever, as she pretended to re-arrange the folds of her gown. ‘Kaeso, I-’

But he had gone.

‘Kaeso?’

She was all alone in the temple. And when she asked the priestess which direction he had taken, the girl frowned. ‘No one came down these steps, but you, ma’am,’ she replied.

Tight-lipped, Claudia smiled. To the end, Kaeso kept up his chicanery, and she knew she could return to that house on the Quirinal a hundred times and never find him.

Not unless Kaeso wanted her to.