Rufinus frowned. Something there had triggered a memory. He fretted at the information, replaying it in his head. What was it?
‘Consequently,’ Severus said, ‘I am putting any further movement of ours on hold. I have a few things in place and one more plan underway, but we need to be absolutely clear of all trouble now until this latest nightmare blows over. If by some chance we get away without becoming involved in this failed plot, we must lie low for a few months before we dare move once more. Be careful and do not do anything other than your precise job until I give you the word. We will drop all threads of our web until at least Saturnalia. Be absolutely innocent of everything until then and pray that we ride this out. Seius Fuscianus and his informer have no connection to us, so with luck we…’
‘The informer,’ Rufinus spat, sitting forward, gripping the chair arms tight and interrupting Severus.
‘What?’
‘The man who passed the information on to the Urban Prefect. What was his name again?’
‘Decimus Curtius.’
‘Shit. I think that I might have to do one more thing before we lie low for a time.’
Severus narrowed his eyes. ‘What is it?’
‘I told you of the six cavalrymen and why I was hunting them?’
‘Yes, but your personal vendettas have to take second place to the true goal at the moment, you understand that?’
‘Quite, but one of the remaining three cavalrymen retired with Cleander’s support. He became something of a hub of informers for the chamberlain. Decimus Curtius is Cleander’s man, and he is one of the men I’m hunting.’
Severus sat back, sucking his teeth. ‘Perhaps it would be better to let this man keep about his business. His death would be another suspicious event, and we don’t want anything else that might point our way right now.’
Rufinus shook his head. ‘Curtius is too dangerous to allow his freedom. He has already been responsible for the downfall of our senatorial friends. How long before his web of informants learns something of us.’
‘Still…’
‘And there is no known connection between he and us, official or not. As long as I’m careful, there should be no reason to trace anything back to us. In fact, it will likely be seen as revenge by one of the senators’ co-conspirators.’
Severus nodded slowly. ‘There is something in that, for sure. And I have to admit that having one of Cleander’s principle sources of information silenced would be more than a relief. But you are too high profile. I think I should pass this on to Vibius Cestius. He and his ilk are experienced in dealing with problems like this.’
Rufinus shook his head. ‘He might be the natural choice, and I have every confidence in Cestius, but this is my task. I vowed to Apollo and Nemesis both that I would kill those men, and I will hold true to that vow. Would that we could do something about Seius Fuscianus while we were about it. Not only does he now seem to be in bed with Cleander and part of this web of treachery, but he was also in the purse of Clodius Albinus. It was his name I found on bars of gold that were meant for the treasury. Do you think Albinus might be in league with Cleander?’
Severus shook his head. ‘Cleander only has underlings, not equals, and Albinus is far too ambitious to tie himself to Cleander. Like every man of position, he knows that the emperor’s succession is wide open and has his eyes set on the throne. No, likely the Urban Prefect is simply taking what he can get from two different masters. A lucrative game, but it will prove a dangerous one if either of them finds out.’
Rufinus sucked air in through his teeth, thoughtfully. ‘It’s a shame I came out of Dacia without the evidence. If I could have dropped that beautiful gold bar somehow with Cleander, he’d have killed Fuscianus himself. Little is more satisfying than watching your enemies remove each other.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think we have spent long enough talking of such dangerous matters. It matters not how secure you believe this place, nowhere is safe for long. When I leave here, I shall be heading back to Lugdunum, where I shall quietly wait out the rest of this year in the hope that the torturers manage to wheedle out of our senatorial friends only their close conspirators. I need you to send orders for a few of your ships – preferably with very loyal, trustworthy trierarchs – to be assigned to the Rhodanus river between Lugdunum and the sea.’
Severus retrieved a scroll case from his belt and dropped it on the desk. ‘Official request from the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis for the support of the Misenum fleet in securing the trade route of the Rhodanus in the wake of the deserters’ uprising. Also to guard the Arelate grain mills and secure their supply of the fleet. In fact this did need doing anyway, and is somewhat overdue, but it is also a very good reason for my being here and explains away our meeting perfectly. I shall be in touch again in due course. Be very careful in everything you do, and I wait with bated breath for news of a certain informer’s untimely demise.’
Without further ado Severus rose, shook Rufinus’ hand once more and left. Rufinus saw him out and closed the door behind him, satisfying himself once more that no one had been within earshot during their conversation. He felt oddly panicky that Severus was returning to his posting in Gaul. He, Dionysus, Nicomedes and Cestius were all influential and clever men, he knew, but it was Severus who was the driving force behind what they were doing, and without him nothing would happen. That he would be absent from the city for months, especially when their names might appear on a proscription list at any moment, was not a comforting thought.
He took a deep breath and returned to his desk, sinking into his seat, deep in thought. He could do with speaking to Cestius but Severus had been quite definite that none of the five of them should meet now, while the danger of the failed senatorial plot hung over their heads. In some ways, Rufinus felt that what he should really be doing is packing up everything of importance and preparing to disappear into the provinces somewhere under an assumed moniker, before the senators revealed his name under the torturer’s knife.
It was darkly humorous that being Gnaeus Marcius Rustius Rufinus had become so dangerous that he had faked his own death and lived under the assumed identity of Aulus Triarius Rufinus, who was now in danger of being even more sought-after and troubled than the real him. Might he now have to somehow kill off Triarius and become someone else? He’d grown a beard and shaggy hair to change last time. What was next? Shaved bald like an Aegyptian priest? How many hims would there be before he could walk free and safe once more?
He forced himself to calm down, knowing that he was becoming more and more agitated as he thought about the many dangers pressing in on him. He needed to be more relaxed and careful. He needed to be ready for anything, but not to plan for failure. Severus seemed content that there was a chance at least that their names would not be blurted out in some Praetorian cellar, and he was quite correct that the best thing they could do was seem to be absolutely normal and to avoid any suspicious activity.
How then to go about the murder of a prominent citizen, and friend of the man who effectively controlled Rome, without being suspicious?
He drummed his fingers on the chair arm. First thing’s first, he would need to know exactly where Decimus Curtius lived. His eyes strayed to his gladius, hanging on the wall in an ornate scabbard that had been supplied by Severus, decorated with bronze fretwork leaping dolphins and all the imagery of the navy. That sword would be used soon enough.
The days passed as Rufinus worked at his job, doing nothing that might draw undue attention. He paid attention to all the news that came out of the forum and the Palatine, mostly related verbatim by Philip wit ever increasing relief. It transpired that somewhere along the line between the senators and the Praetorian prefect, who had begun to plan their assassination, and the ears of Curtius who passed it on to Cleander, the details of the plot had become confused. By the time Cleander and the Urban Prefect sent out men to round up the conspirators, it was believed that the villains had been plotting to kill
the emperor, and had nothing to do with his chamberlain. Consequently it became a trial of treason against the state under the lex maiestatis, and brutal execution awaited them all.
It seemed miraculous to many, and no doubt unacceptable to Cleander, that somehow word of the conspiracy’s unmasking reached many of those destined for the knives of the torturers and they managed to open their own veins in their homes before the Guard came for them. It must have been staggeringly irritating for him that even Antistius Burrus and his nephew, the two most high profile arrests made, managed to hang themselves between being captured and being tortured. In the end only one man made it to the tables in the Praetorian cellars, and that was the other senator, Arrius Antoninus. It would all seem so miraculous to Cleander’s web of villains, because unlike Rufinus they did not know that the Praetorian prefect Laetus, who was the leading figure in the arrests, was also one of the conspirators and one of the few who had gone unnamed. Laetus in the end received something of a dressing down for his shoddy handling of the whole affair, including assigning over-zealous men to the interrogation of Antoninus, men who accidentally killed the senator before he could say too much.
It appeared that, despite everything, Rufinus and his friends had come through the whole affair unscathed. Prefect Laetus, a guiding light behind the failed attempt, and a man who had managed to contain the damage, dropped out of sight after that for a while, keeping his nose clean. Rufinus silently thanked the man for his care and vowed to make his gratitude tangible when this was all over.
He wondered now how long Severus would wait before he returned to the city. But then he was a provincial governor and was naturally expected to spend most of his time in his province. The longer he stayed there, the more normal it would appear.
Rufinus waited ten days after the whole arrest and execution affair died down before beginning to move again. Firstly, he needed to find that house. To do so, he would need either to ask someone in the know or search official records. The first option was out, unless he wanted to make his actions too well known. So he had to find a reason that he could explain away readily to visit the tabularium – the city’s central record office.
It was easy enough in the end, when he thought it through, and was quite pleased with his own subtlety, which he felt was approaching that of Severus and Cestius. He searched the records in his own offices until he located a former trierarch by the name of Sextus Curtius. Close enough. He then managed to make a few minor adjustments to the retirement records of said ship captain and, once he was satisfied that he had done it all well and nothing could be traced back to him, he announced to Philip that he had come across a captain who had retired some years ago, but due to an error in accounting made by some clerk or other he had been dismissed with only three quarters of a full pension. Philip was appropriately horrified, unleashing a tirade of blistering invective against the poor long-gone clerk, and had vowed to see it all put right immediately. Rufinus carefully and heartily assured his secretary that it was all the fault of the clerk and that Philip suffered no culpability, but that Rufinus felt it should be the senior officer who delivered the news and the back pension to the man.
And so all his reasons went down as a matter of record in official channels. He visited the tabularium at the base of the Capitol to find the address of his retired sailor, and it was a simple task while looking up the residence of trierarch Sextus Curtius to also check the location of one Decimus Curtius.
That evening he complained of a bad back, attained, he said, from leaning over a desk so much. He took a walk to straighten out the kinks. That walk took him up the Quirinal some way until he passed the small temple of Florus and entered a leafy lane where the warm and sultry night was alleviated a little by the lines of trees by the road. The low wall on his left reached neck height and afforded him a fine view of a sprawling villa set amid sculpted grounds with a large ornamental lake, arcaded walkways, a grand nymphaeum and more. Working for Cleander really was lucrative if this was now the house of a man who had been no more important than Rufinus in his time.
There would be private guards, of course. Any man of that kind of wealth had such a force of mercenaries, and a man who had served in the Praetorians would be more careful than most. But this estate was large, full of structures and flora, and the perimeter was low and easily accessible.
He returned to the Castrum Misenatum, claiming the walk had done his back the world of good and there spent the next two days doing nothing unusual, keeping his nose clean while he waited for the bean counters of the classis to produce a small chest full of coins that constituted the ‘missing’ pension for trierarch Curtius. That evening, at dusk, he left the camp with his honour guard of eight burly marines, and strolled up to the house of the trierarch, refusing a litter as the evenings were currently far too hot to travel in a curtained vehicle.
He reached the man’s modest but pleasant house and was greeted with some surprise. His guard remained in the atrium as Rufinus explained how an accounting error had left the man short of pension money. The trierarch was baffled, clearly, since he knew he had received the correct figure, but no man turns down free money from his employer and so he gratefully, and with stolid forgiveness for the error, took the chest of money. Rufinus managed to steer the conversation to his own experiences with the fleet, and soon the trierarch was launching into stories of his days at sea. Predictably, and a relief to Rufinus, he insisted that Rufinus stay for the evening meal and entertainment, and much good wine. He offered to make room for the guards among his servants, but Rufinus declined, dismissing his marines and sending them back to barracks. He then stayed, and genuinely enjoyed the meal and some social time with a man full of wonderful tales. He made sure every now and then to be visible from windows, enjoying himself like a good Roman noble. Once he thought he saw a figure in the street opposite, watching him. His alibi was good. He carefully cut his wine with a lot of water. He had become used to not drinking in the past year or two, and while he trusted himself these days to stay within respectable limits, he also did not push it. Plus he had much to do.
He left the trierarch’s house late in the evening. He kept his senses alert and his eyes open as he moved, heading back towards the castrum, but by the time he had gone six streets and turned several corners, he was convinced he was entirely alone up here in this open area. Content that anyone following him earlier had given up in the knowledge that he was busy socialising with a former sailor, he changed direction and headed for the Quirinal.
He met only five people on his journey, for much of Rome’s elite were absent at their summer retreats, and the posher areas of the city were something of a ghost town in the hottest months. The poor, who couldn’t afford to have a seaside villa, did not venture up to these empty spaces, staying near the Subura where the nightlife raged on.
For almost half an hour he stood in the street near the wall of Curtius’ estate, watching from the shadows of a beech tree. There were, indeed, roving guards on the estate, but they had been assigned with the military precision of a career soldier. In half the time he stood there, Rufinus had worked out the routines and routes taken by each man on guard. Just the slightest observation had given him his best route.
He waited until the man with the white hair had passed to the left, where he would disappear into the hedged garden for a count of almost a hundred, and the tall man with the limp had passed to the right, where he would next investigate the bath house. As soon as the two men were out of sight, he moved, crossing the street and vaulting the wall with ease. He landed on soft grass and began to run, bent low, counting under his breath all the time as he went. At fifty, he had crossed the main lawns and was at the row of tapering poplars that lined the path from villa to bathhouse.
He waited there, hidden in the shadow of a tree, until those two same guards returned, met and departed again, and then began to count once more as he ran along the grass beside the path to cut down any noise.
He stopped at the
edge of the nymphaeum. Here he could barely see the wall he had initially vaulted, which meant he was more or less invisible to those two guards. He listened carefully. Over the splash of water he could hear the voices of various folk, and footsteps on gravel and stone. He would still be visible, but any low noise he made now would go unnoticed. Rounding the nymphaeum, he moved to the wall of the villa proper. Along the wall he crept in the shadows, pausing at each window to rise momentarily and peer in. He found two occupied rooms swiftly, one of which was a triclinium, occupied by three men drinking. One had to be Curtius, for the master of the house would surely be there. A quick glance at the men and he was fairly sure which of them was his target, two appearing a little wet and soft, while the third was too rough for this rich life. Marking the room and the man he moved on, quietly, in the shadows. He found what he suspected was the room he sought three windows further on. Lit only by one dim lamp it was a bed chamber decorated and adorned to the highest quality. It had to belong to the master.
It was not difficult to reach up inside the half-closed shutter and lift the catch, allowing access. Moving the shutter slowly and carefully to avoid suspicious creaks, he opened sufficient space to climb into the room. Once inside, he paused to let his sight adjust and then checked out the room. The sword hanging on the wall, soldier-style, confirmed it for him. This was the room of a former Praetorian. Curtius himself.
Crossing the room, he carefully drew the sword. He had thought to use the small knife at his belt, but this was much better. Weighing the sword and deciding that it was a good example of the type, he breathed deeply. He didn’t like killing. Oh, not in battle, mind. That was different, though. Killing a man deliberately in his home felt wrong, and it sat badly enough with Rufinus that he had to wind himself up the act, even though he knew even the gods themselves would demand this death, for he was thoroughly deserving of it.
Lions of Rome Page 9
