Just the two words, and I had a struggle recognizing them, too. Shit; he’d lost his teeth, or most of them, maybe part of his gums as well. A thin trail of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and ran down his cheek.
Sweet immortal gods!
‘Graecinus!’ I said. ‘Come on! It can’t matter now!’
‘Don’t … know.’
‘Again,’ Felix murmured to the slave with the poker. ‘On the testicles. Leave it there for longer this time.’
I turned away before the scream came, but I could still smell the stench and hear the hiss, counting in my head to stop myself thinking. The count went to ten before the hissing sound stopped, by which time I was biting down hard on my lower lip and clenching my fists so tightly the nails pierced the palms.
‘Corvinus, sir?’ Felix said calmly. ‘Try again, please.’
I nodded, and turned back, forcing myself to bend down with my lips close to the man’s ear. ‘Graecinus, for the gods’ sakes!’ I whispered, ‘I don’t want this either, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Just tell me, OK?’
‘Don’t … know,’ he gasped. ‘Swear. Don’t … know!’ The look in his eye now was a mixture of pain and sheer animal terror, and the words were almost unintelligible. ‘Don’t … know … any … more. Ask … them … kill … me. Please!’
Shit, I couldn’t take this, not even with the emperor involved. I raised my head and tried to keep my voice steady.
‘Felix, give this up, right?’ I said. ‘There’s no point. The poor bastard doesn’t know anything about Surdinus’s murder. You’ve had all you’ll get from him already.’
Felix glanced at the emperor.
‘Marcus, dear, you are so terribly, transparently squeamish,’ Gaius said. ‘Gullible, too. Yes, I know, he says he knows nothing about the man’s death. Of course he does. But they can be such persistent liars, the naughties. That’s the whole point of torture. To get behind the lies to the truth in as short a time as possible. Simple but so beautifully effective.’ He smiled. ‘Which reminds me. I must show you something quite amusing that my predecessor had made. A modification, rather, and one of the old man’s better ideas. Watch and enjoy.’ Then, to the slave: ‘Just two turns, I think, to begin with. To take up the slack, as it were.’
The slave bent down and turned a wheel set into the table’s side. The table creaked and moved, lengthening, splitting apart in the middle along a line cutting across Graecinus’s back. Graecinus moaned and shifted, tugging at the bands holding his wrists and ankles which were shackled to iron staples nailed to the wood.
The gap widened to a hand-span, the creaking stopped, and the slave straightened. Graecinus lay rigid, arms and legs fully extended. He said nothing, but his one good eye was staring at me, flecked with madness.
‘That’s lovely.’ Gaius moved to the side of the table with the wheel, and the slave stepped aside. ‘My turn.’ He giggled, and twisted the wheel sharply. The gap widened by the space of two fingers and Graecinus screamed. ‘It’s a pun, you see, Marcus. My turn. I always say it, so it hasn’t exactly much freshness to it any longer, but it is so apt. Don’t you think?’
‘Yes, Caesar,’ I said. I felt like retching again and fought the bile down. ‘Very amusing.’
‘But I’m forgetting my manners. You’d like a turn yourself, of course.’ He moved back. ‘Go ahead, enjoy yourself. Felix won’t mind, will you, Felix?’
Sweet Jupiter!
‘Ah … I’d rather not, Caesar, if you don’t mind,’ I said.
There was a sudden silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Felix shift, and he cleared his throat. Gaius was frowning.
‘Marcus, petal,’ he said slowly and carefully. ‘You’ve been told, we all have our turn, and this is yours. I absolutely insist. Now don’t be tiresome, there’s a love.’
I was beginning to sweat. Oh, sure, common sense told me that I was being a complete fool, that whatever I did or didn’t do, the poor bastard on the table was booked for the urn by the slowest and most painful route imaginable, and that one word from Gaius would mean I was the next one lying there. But I knew I couldn’t turn that wheel. No way. Never.
The silence lengthened. Gaius and Felix were both looking at me; the two slaves, too.
‘Uh … Caesar, that sort of thing’s better left to the experts, don’t you think?’ I said at last. ‘Me, the chances are that I’d just screw things up.’
Gaius was still frowning, and I could almost hear Felix and the brought-in help holding their collective breaths.
Hell. Yeah, well, it’d been sheer bloody stupidity and I’d only myself to blame; still, it was done now, and I’d had a good life on the whole. Not that that was much consolation, mind. I swallowed …
Then, suddenly, Gaius’s frown lifted. He laughed, came over and hugged me round the shoulders.
‘Screw things up!’ he said. ‘Marcus, that is utterly, totally brilliant! Oh, I really must remember that one. Don’t you agree, Felix?’
‘Yes, sir. Absolutely.’
‘You’re still a big girl’s blouse, though, petal; don’t think I don’t see that. And I have more than a sneaking suspicion that the pun was accidental. Not that it matters, of course.’ He grinned at me, but I said nothing: the guy might be a cold-blooded amoral sadistic killer and a cartload of tiles short of a watertight roof, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence. ‘Oh, fuck it, I’m bored anyway, and I need a drink. Let’s call it a day, shall we? Felix, you carry on, please.’ Another giggle. ‘And try not to screw things up too much, won’t you, because we need Graecinus here alive for just a little longer. Oh, yes, find out about Marcus’s Surdinus by all means, if you’ve time, but I’m sure he has lots of other more important secrets to tell us.’ He turned back to me. ‘Now, Marcus, dear; come upstairs for a cup of wine and a chat. You can manage that? No pressing business elsewhere, hmm?’
‘Yes, Caesar. I mean no. Of course; I’d be delighted.’ Slight exaggeration, but not necessarily a complete lie; I was as grateful for the escape as I was worried about the chat, and more than relieved to be walking out with all of my bits still attached. Even so, I remembered what both Secundus and Felix had told me, or implied, anyway, about not relying on the emperor’s prior goodwill any longer.
‘Follow me, then.’ Gaius opened the door and we went out into the fresh air. Or at least that’s what the corridor smelled like now, after the stench in that hellish room. ‘We’ll take the short-cut.’ He turned right rather than left, the way I’d come, and almost immediately up a set of narrow stone steps. ‘Tiberius had this stair put in, and it is so convenient. He did enjoy a good torture session, the bloodthirsty old buffer. Personally, I’ve always wondered whether that wasn’t partly the reason why there were so many traitors around in those days – make your own amusements, as it were – although of course the staircase wasn’t used much after he went to Capri. There again, he did have other ways of amusing himself there, didn’t he?’ He flashed me a sunny smile over his shoulder. ‘But I’m prattling. Marcus, come on, you slowcoach, you’re puffing like an absolute grampus, whatever that might be! You really should do more to keep yourself fit.’
Well, at least the bugger was his usual chatty self so far. I kept my fingers crossed; this Gaius I could cope with. Or hoped I could, anyway. At present I wouldn’t have trusted him any more than I would a rabid dog that happened to be wagging its tail.
We came out, at last, through a door at the top which opened on to a room in the private imperial apartments. At least, from the décor, I assumed that’s where we were; after the vaults, not to mention the torture chamber itself, it was Olympus compared to Tartarus. There were a couple of slaves in matching natty green tunics putting the room to rights. They stopped when they saw Gaius, bowed nervously, and edged over to stand by the wall.
Gaius ignored them. He threw himself onto a couch and indicated the one opposite.
‘Make yourself comfortable, Marcus,’ he said. Then, to the
slaves: ‘Wine. After that you can bugger off.’ One of the slaves went to a corner table, poured two cups of wine from a glass decanter and brought them over. I sat. ‘It is so nice to see you again after all these bum-faces I’m usually surrounded with. When Felix told me you were mixed up in this nonsense, it came as quite a tonic.’
‘Thank you, Caesar,’ I said. I sipped the wine. Caecuban. After the events of the past half hour I could’ve swallowed the whole bloody cupful, but I didn’t want Gaius to know that; it might’ve implied criticism, and I reckoned I’d sailed too close to the wind enough already today without risking it twice. ‘By the way, I should thank you for that flask you left me.’
‘Oh, tush! Tush!’ He waved it aside. ‘The least I could do. But you were becoming quite a nuisance, you know. At first I thought it might be better on the whole if I got rid of you al-together, sad though that would’ve been, but Felix talked me out of it and suggested the cellar instead. What would I do without Felix?’ He smiled. ‘No hard feelings, I hope?’
My stomach had gone cold. ‘No, Caesar, none at all,’ I said.
‘That’s good. Water under the bridge. Let’s forget about it, shall we?’ He took a swallow of his own wine. ‘So. Another case, wasn’t it? Felix told me the connection with Graecinus and his friends was purely coincidental.’
‘He … concluded that, yes. Graecinus happened to be a friend of the murdered man. Naevius Surdinus. And Surdinus’s wife said she’d had an affair with Cassius Longinus. Which turned out not to be true.’
He’d frowned at the mention of Longinus’s name, but the frown cleared.
‘Longinus and Graecinus were together when you visited Longinus’s house, weren’t they?’ he said.
‘Yes, they were.’ I was cautious. ‘With Anicius Cerialis and another man. Valerius Asiaticus.’
‘And you thought they might all be in it together? It at the time simply being Surdinus’s murder?’
‘Yes, Caesar. More or less. It was a possibility, anyway.’
‘Only it turned out to be a conspiracy against me?’
I was beginning to wonder where all this was leading. It was leading somewhere, that was for sure: like I said, there was nothing wrong with Gaius’s intelligence. Mad or not, the emperor was a smart cookie.
He smiled. ‘Well, I can set your mind at rest there, anyway, to a certain extent. Regarding the conspiracy if not the murder. Cerialis you know about; Felix told you, he was our man on the inside. Longinus … a conspirator in embryo, maybe, but not a de facto one, fortunately for him. He’s had a shock, and if he’s wise he’ll learn from it. Asiaticus, now … oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’ He laughed. ‘Marcus, cherub, you cannot possibly suspect Asiaticus!’
‘Why not, Caesar?’
‘The man’s a joke. A fat cuckold with the backbone of a slug. You know why he resigned his consulship five years ago? He said he couldn’t take the pressure, told me so himself. Fact! Marcus, I ask you, common sense, now: what sort of politician does that make him, let alone a conspirator or a murderer? These cold-minded bastards in the senate, they thrive on pressure, they eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All Asiaticus cares about is his belly and swanking around his fancy gardens. Take him off your list, petal, is my advice. I’d as soon suspect my idiot Uncle Claudius.’
Yeah, well, fair enough: Gaius knew him, and I didn’t. And Gaius, in that sense at least, had his head properly screwed on to his shoulders.
‘You’re probably right, Caesar,’ I said.
‘Of course I’m bloody right! Oh, I’ve had Felix pull him in along with the others, but it was just for fun, to tickle him up, give him a little shock, have him pissing in his pants, the tosser.’ He swallowed some more of his wine. ‘Moving on. What put you on to Herennius Capito?’
‘Nothing, sir. Or nothing as such. It was his son I was interested in. He was the last person to see Sextus Papinius alive, and I thought – still think – that he’d had him killed to prevent him talking to me.’
‘Hmm.’ Gaius was frowning again. ‘I could’ve seen you far enough over that business, Marcus. You lost us a good source of information there. He’d still have been alive if it hadn’t been for your cack-handed faffing about.’ Yeah; and downstairs having his dick burned off with a red hot poker. Somehow I didn’t feel too guilty about that. I kept quiet. ‘Even so, we’ve got the father. Or had, anyway.’
‘Had?’
‘Capito’s dead. Died under torture. It should never have happened; sheer damn carelessness on the slaves’ part. After all, what do I keep those jumped-up butchers for?’
Well, at least he was out of it, and again that was a relief rather than anything else. ‘He say anything useful?’
‘Useful to you, you mean, about your man Surdinus?’ Gaius got up, went over to the table where the wine was, brought back the decanter and topped up both our cups. ‘Of course not. If he had I would’ve told you, petal. Not all that useful to me, either, as it turned out. Load of bloody nonsense. But then Capito was a coward; he’d say anything to avoid the pain, and he was babbling at the end so badly you couldn’t make out the half of it.’
‘You were there?’
The frown deepened.
‘He was one of my own,’ he said. ‘Been with me from the start, and Tiberius before me. I thought he was loyal, I’d trusted the fucker, and that’s how he repaid me. I wanted to watch him bleed and hear him scream. Of course I was bloody there!’
‘So what did he say?’
A sudden smile. ‘Nonsense, like I told you, cherub. Not that it started like that, mind, because the first name he came up with was his immediate boss, Callistus. No surprises there, on the surface: Callistus is one of my freedmen, Capito’s a knight, so the seniority should’ve gone the other way. It didn’t, at least de facto, because Callistus is a shit-hot accountant, which Capito isn’t. Capito has always hated his guts, so if he knew he had to go, he might as well take Callistus with him. You see?’
‘Yeah. Yes, Caesar, I see.’ Fair enough.
‘On the other hand, Callistus is a scheming, ambitious bastard who’d take to conspiracy like a duck takes to water.’
‘Ah. Right.’
Gaius grinned and set down his wine cup. ‘You know, Marcus, petal, I do enjoy talking to you,’ he said. ‘Even when you’re doing the careful Yes, Caesar and No, Caesar bit and answering in monosyllables, I feel that I’m dealing with a working brain, not just a ragbag collection of petty ambition, half-baked prejudices, vested interests and self-serving tat. Believe me, that’s what I get in this job, most of the time, and it is just so boring you would not believe. I’m glad I didn’t have you killed.’
I half-smiled myself, despite the touch of cold on my spine at the offhand tone. Yeah, when you got Gaius on a good day – or maybe a good half-hour might be more realistic, given the pace of the mood changes – there was something there apart from the monster that I could identify with and even feel sympathy for. It was buried pretty deep, mind you, and the rest of the psychotic bugger was a walking toxic nightmare you wouldn’t want to get within a mile of, no arguments, but there it was.
‘Me, too, Caesar,’ I said.
‘Ah, the monosyllables again. Well, well.’ He sighed, picked up the cup and drank some more of his wine. ‘So. Callistus was a definite possible, and so was the next name. Arrecinus Clemens.’
‘Who’s Clemens?’
‘One of the Praetorian prefects.’
‘Ah.’
Another grin. ‘As you say, dear, and justifiably so, ah. Again, perfectly possible and believable. Certainly that, yes, but no more: I’ve nothing in particular against Clemens. He’s a knight, of course, although from a nothing of a family, and he’s good at his job. He’s loyal, or if he isn’t he’s given me no reason to suspect it, and more important he’s neither ambitious nor a risk-taker. Very god-fearing, although his god-fearing-ness, if there is such a word, does take peculiar forms.’
‘Such as?’
‘He seems ver
y taken with the Jews, poor lamb – don’t, please, ask me why, cherub, the silly stiff-necked buggers – and them with him. In fact, they call him just that, “The God-fearer”, although in their case they’re being quite specific. Still and all, I thought he was one of my prefects, top of the Praetorian tree, and if you’re organizing a conspiracy then who better to have on your side than a Guard commander? No, I was perfectly prepared to believe in Clemens as a conspirator. Particularly because, as far as I knew, Capito didn’t know him from Romulus.’
‘So where did the nonsense come in?’
‘Oh, that! The third name he came out with was my wife’s. Caesonia’s. Now don’t laugh, petal.’ I wasn’t going to. ‘But really, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Caesonia wouldn’t conspire against me. She hasn’t a conspiratorial bone in her body or thought in her fluffy little head. To tell you the truth, she hasn’t got all that much in her fluffy little head to begin with. Great little body, though. Anyway, that’s where he lost me. I mean, credibility’s one thing. Callistus and Clemens, fine, in theory, but did he take me for a gullible bloody imbecile? So no, I decided we could forget friend Capito. Then of course the treacherous sod went and died on me, and that was that.’ He suddenly yawned and stretched. ‘Marcus, dear, I wonder if you’d excuse me? I know it’s only the middle of the afternoon, but these sessions downstairs are so tiring, and I had quite a heavy night last night. A nap, I think. You don’t mind if I throw you out now?’
‘Not at all, Caesar.’
‘I have enjoyed our little chat. As I say, I’ve found it very refreshing. We must do it again sometime. Or perhaps you and your lovely wife – Rufia Perilla, isn’t it? – would like to come to dinner one evening soon. Nothing too formal, just a few friends.’
‘Thank you, Caesar. But we’ll be going through to the Alban Hills tonight to see our adopted daughter and her husband, and staying until after the festival.’
‘What a shame! Perhaps when you come back. We must arrange something.’
‘Certainly.’ Not if I could help it. ‘I look forward to it.’
Finished Business Page 17
