“Goodwill mission.”
“With three triremes?”
Caninus looked surprised. I let him wonder how I knew. It was hardly a secret. Anyone who wandered around Portus could have seen them and counted them. “Never a warship when you want one, then a whole bunch turn up.” He grinned.
“For a shore exercise?” Petronius, a typical vigiles man, wanted to know what was being arranged by other units in the patch he currently occupied.
“We just flit about from port to port and shout the Emperor’s name. When the high-ups decide we deserve shore leave, they let us come here and join the squash docking at Portus. We’re showing the standard to foreign traders—”
“You haven’t chased some pirate ship ashore?” Petro demanded.
“Jupiter, no. We don’t want ugly scenes on the Emperor’s doorstep.” Until the conversation became political, Caninus had spoken with heat and passion. Now he was blustering in clichés. I did not believe the change was caused by drink; he had shown himself impervious to wine. He was hiding something.
“I’ll be straight,” I said. I was too tipsy for anything complicated. “I was hoping you could explain why a scribe who writes notorious sections of the Daily Gazette would have contacted a man who is reckoned to have been a pirate.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Sorry; I thought I had explained that. The scribe has disappeared.”
Perhaps a change darkened Caninus’ face. “You think he’s been captured? Well, you know how they used to work it in the old days: if pirates had taken a prisoner who was worth something, a note would be brought to people who knew him, by an intermediary, naming a very large ransom.”
“You think that’s possible?” It had never occurred to me that Diocles might have been taken by pirates. In fact, I disbelieved it.
“Of course not,” said Caninus drily. “Ransoming captives is history. We have the Pax Romana now. Lawlessness only exists outside the boundaries of the Empire. Anyway,” he added, almost sneering, “a scribe would not be worth much, would he?”
It was what he knew that might have been important, though I did not trust Caninus enough to say it. “So someone must have bopped my scribe on the head and buried him under a floor after a tavern brawl.”
“All you have to do is find out where he used to drink,” Caninus agreed, as if to an amateur. “Then bring a chisel to lift the floorboards. He won’t have been writing about pirates,” Caninus assured me; he sounded far too bland. “Your scribe can contact as many Cilicians as he likes, but now they are loyal Roman citizens. The scribe is bound to say that. The Daily Gazette is a government mouthpiece. He is supposed to enhance the glint of the Pax Romana.”
True. Infamia would be allowed to publish, however, if he was reporting that the glorious Pax Romana had come under threat.
Had it? Did that explain Caninus? Was that why this expert, working in what he implied was a defunct area, had berthed at Portus with his three triremes?
There was no point in me asking. Caninus would waffle all night about what had happened a hundred years ago. He had no intention of telling us what was happening this week.
I glanced at Petronius. We had our own situation to contend with. If we descended any further into tonight’s debauchery, Petro and I would both be under threat—from Maia and Helena. Somehow we had to encourage our tedious guests to go home. Tomorrow would be soon enough to think up excuses for Privatus about the depletion in his wine supplies, which was far more than the laws of hospitality would support. Tonight we had to get rid of the men who drank it.
Believe me, the rest of the party was laborious.
In the end the sea biscuit left first. He departed with a fairly full amphora of Rhodian red on his shoulder. The steward, good fellow, had ensured that as the joy continued, the quality and cost of the drink diminished, to limit the damage. His last choice was appropriate. Rhodes had been one of the historic venues for the piracy Pompey stamped out. Rhodian red is a passable table wine that travels; that’s because this tangy island vintage is traditionally cut with seawater.
Brunnus was harder to shift than Caninus. When his contact left, he slithered from his couch to the marble floor; Petro and I were beyond lifting him. Slaves appeared, however, which made me think they were used to clearing up after lengthy dinners. I also guessed they had been eavesdropping.
“Caninus—” slurred Brunnus, desperate to communicate. “My contact—”
“Yes, he’s excellent,” I assured him. I was sitting on the edge of my dining couch, unwilling to exert myself lest the results were volcanic.
“Man of few words …” Petronius was still capable of wit.
“Lot of misleading ones,” Brunnus spluttered, as a couple of large slaves gathered him together and made ready to remove him. “I don’t trust him, I’ve decided. Solo artist. Absolutely not sharing. Absolutely not liaising. Absolutely—”
Brunnus fell silent at that point, absolutely drunk.
I stayed with Petronius. We slept there in the dining room, unable to move.
XX
I shall omit what was said in my household next morning.
XXI
Let us pass swiftly to luncheon (which I did not eat), then on into the turgid afternoon. I spent some of it lying down with my eyes closed, on the floor, out of sight behind a baggage chest.
I struggled upright when Aulus returned from a trip to Portus with information that he had found a ship to take him to Athens—and other news. As a member of Falco and Associates he was trained to keep his eyes and ears peeled. I had taught him to stay alert in commercial quarters, in case he was beaten up or robbed. I did not want his mother, a forceful woman, to blame me if anything ever happened while he was working for me.
“There was something going on, Falco.” Aulus could spot interesting situations; in his snooty way, he was a nosy swine. “My ship’s captain was having a real upset—”
One of my daughters pushed by him, so she could stare at her unusually withdrawn papa. “Don’t bother him,” Helena admonished coolly (aiming the barb at me). “He is poorly today. Your father has been ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous!” Julia Junilla lisped her first multisyllable ecstatically. She was three, and all woman.
“Ridiculous,” repeated Aulus, with awe. “A hot night, Falco?”
“Even you would have thought so.”
“Oh I wouldn’t have dared join in. In case you wondered.” He grinned. “I fetched Helena home.”
“Thanks,” I croaked.
“Junia offered to accompany me,” Helena remarked coolly. “Ajax would have protected us. But Gaius Baebius needed her. Junia is nursing him full-time. He has been badly laid up since your jaunt to the seaside.”
“He’s feigning.”
“No, Gaius has had to take sick leave. He wants you to look out for the man who attacked him, so he can claim compensation for his injuries.”
“He won’t get it. The thug was brutish, but if it goes to court I’ll have to say that Gaius Baebius asked for everything he got.”
“Unfair, Marcus. You just hate him because he’s a public servant.”
I hated him because he was an idiot. “His stupidity at the villa was dangerously real, my love. You’re talking as if Gaius will never work again. Has the customs service lost its star?”
“If Gaius has been really hurt, this is not funny.”
“I am not laughing.”
Whatever I thought of my sister Junia, no Roman woman wants a husband who can no longer work. If Gaius was ever laid off from tax collecting, the family would have only their savings—and they had always been spenders—plus a token income from the unpleasant snackshop on the Aventine that Junia ran as a hobby. Only part of the profits ever reached her. Apollonius, her put-upon general waiter, fiddled the figures; in better times he had been a geometry teacher and he could easily persuade my sister that an obtuse angle was acute. He had been my teacher, so I would never snitch on him.
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I forced my bleary brain back to the original subject. “So what’s this ship, Aulus?”
“Well, come and have a look, Falco. I want you to ask the captain about what was going on when I took him my payment.”
“You paid your fare before going aboard?” The lad knew nothing. Even I had failed to teach him common sense. Aulus Camillus Aelianus, son of Decimus, heir to a life of luxury, had been an army tribune somewhere or other and worked on the staff of the provincial governor in Baetica. Who knows how he managed to reach those overseas postings? When I took him to Britain, he had me to make all the arrangements.
“I am a senator’s son,” he retorted. “The master won’t cheat me—not if he wants to return to this port. He makes a fortune from passengers; he has to keep his good name.”
“It’s your money!” It was his father’s money. Still, Aulus was probably right about the captain. “So what’s the story?”
“Are you up to taking the ferry?”
“Only to pursue a really good story.”
“The best!” he assured me. I was too hungover to quibble. He clinched it, however: “That blusterer Caninus who got you sozzled had his nose right in it. It sounded to me as if there had been a run-in with some pirates.”
I agreed to go to Portus.
The vessel selected by our traveler to carry him in search of his legal education was a large transporter in which he had been promised speed, stability, the next best thing to a cabin, and food prepared by the captain’s own cook. If the weather blew up rough, there would be no food and little shelter, but Aelianus was his usual overconfident self. Well, he was going to Greece for education. Let him learn, I thought.
I had assured Helena I would check over this transport and ensure that her brother would be as safe as it was ever possible to be, riding the route to Greece amid the summer storms that thunder out of nowhere in the Tyrrhenian and the Aegean. The ship, called the Spes, was indeed solid. These days Rome was using the biggest traders ever known. This one had just brought a cargo of fish, olives, and luxury goods from Antiochus via the Peloponnese, and was apparently awaiting wine and pottery to take out again.
The captain, Antemon, was a calm Syrian with big feet. He had three warts on his left cheek and a birthmark on the right. While he found time to see us, Aulus briefed me on what he saw that morning, so I went straight into the attack. “Antemon, my name’s Falco. I hear one of your passengers has had a wife go missing. Has she run away with your first officer, or is she getting her leaks plugged by the ship’s carpenter?”
“Nothing to do with you,” the captain told me, looking grim.
“It is now. Please be honest. While Camillus Aelianus was waiting to book his passage, he heard your blow-up with a distressed passenger. When Aelianus came back to pay you his money”—it would do no harm to establish that Aulus had a witness—“a naval attaché was asking you more questions.”
“He was making a huge fuss,” Aulus backed me up. “And you hated it, Antemon.”
“The navy nark is called Caninus,” I said. “We know which rockpool he swims in. He told me himself, only yesterday. So, captain, were you troubled by pirates on your voyage to Rome?”
“No!” Of course Antemon was anxious to avoid deterring passengers. “I have never been bothered by a pirate ship in all my career. I told Caninus that—before I told him which gangplank to jump off.”
“Caninus endorses the myth that before Pompey lost his head in Alexandria, he turned all the Cilician pirates into farmers,” I said. “Caninus says ex-pirates are lovely men who now feed goats and adore their mothers. But if so, why was Caninus on board your ship? And why were you so keen to give him the fast fly-swat?”
“I was only looking after my passenger.”
“With whom you had been arguing?”
“No, I was trying to calm him down so he was fit to deal with the situation.”
“Your passenger is in trouble?” The captain looked stubborn, so I added lightly, “Of course he is. We know the man has lost his wife. Well, he may be new to Ostia and careless in giving her directions to their shore lodgings … Or what happened, Antemon? I’m still supposing the woman had a dirty fling.”
“Mind your language. He is my owner!” growled Antemon.
“This is his ship, you mean?”
“He’s a highly respectable charterer. His wife, poor woman, is chaste, dutiful, and probably scared witless. He’ll get her back. He needs to be left alone with it. He doesn’t want a crowd of uninvited advisers—”
“Advisers on what?” demanded Aelianus.
Last night’s conversation helped me work it out: “You’re talking kidnap!” The captain was silent. I pressed him again angrily. “Your owner’s wife was taken from your ship on the voyage—”
That finally riled Antemon. “No, she was not! No one boarded my ship. No one interfered with my passengers,” he protested hotly. “I brought them here perfectly safely. They left the ship. The only reason Banno came back here to consult me was that he reckoned they were set up when we first landed and he wanted to know if any of the crew saw anything. He and his wife only went ashore yesterday. He reckoned someone watched the ship on arrival, sized them up and decided they were wealthy, then followed them and snatched her.”
“He thought you were in on it!” Aulus rashly accused him.
“No, no. Settle down, Aulus.” I trusted the captain. He was annoyed at his own bad position in this—not least because he could lose his job if the vessel’s owner blamed him. If he really had been passing information about his passengers to kidnappers on shore, he would have had a rebuttal ready and a more brazen manner. But it would be madness to finger the ship’s owner. “Antemon, I take it you have sold your cargo and your owner has the money?”
He nodded. “Banno will be able to satisfy the people who have his wife.”
“And they know it!”
“Of course they do. Keep out of it. Don’t mess things up for him.”
“Answer this, then. Ever come across an old Cilician called Damagoras?” No. “A younger one called Cratidas?” No. “Has Banno any names for whoever took his wife?” No again. That was to be expected. Kidnappers use anonymity to build fear. “And when Caninus poked his nose in, how come he knew something had happened?”
Antemon was terse. “This is a port.”
“You mean everyone in Portus knows that Banno’s wife has been grabbed for ransom?”
“Only navy spies, with narks sitting in the taverns, men who have been hanging around on the docks for months, waiting for a whisper that it has happened again.”
I picked up on “again.” “So it has happened before.” I remembered how Diocles had inserted that taster in the Daily Gazette: “Rumors of piracy reviving are said to be false.” Not false enough for Banno.
“I am a private informer,” I told the captain. “I can be discreet. My trade relies on it.”
Antemon still hesitated. “You can trust Falco,” said Aulus quietly. A senator’s son has influence, and Antemon may have weakened.
I twisted the awl. “Look, I was already working on a case which may connect with this. Let me know where I can find Banno. This is for his own sake and the wife’s safety. Somebody does need to help this couple,” I said. “If you don’t want to cooperate with Caninus and the navy, maybe I can do something for Banno unofficially.”
The captain was still unhappy, but muttered to us where Aulus and I could find his ship’s owner ashore.
XXII
Banno was a pale, tense man, at a guess at least half Egyptian, a negotiator for the salt fish industry. He worked fast: he had already paid up and retrieved his wife.
He made out to us that nothing had happened, but he was not prepared to discuss the matter. We glimpsed the wife, Aline, sitting in a basket chair at their lodgings, deep in shock. Our raised voices in the doorway made her cover her head with her mantle. Aulus and I were kept out of their apartment by Banno, who blocked the doorway. He
was certainly jumpy, as if he had had a close brush with fear.
Banno and Aline were leaving for Rome within the hour, and if they came back to Ostia when leaving Italy, they would pass straight through and board their ship. They might very well prefer now to pick up the Spes at Puteoli, or even take the long overland route to the deep south and rendezvous at Brundisium.
I said quietly, “The only way these criminals will be stopped is if you tell us what you know.”
Banno replied, even more quietly, trying not to let his wife overhear: “They will know if I talk to you. We don’t want to be killed.”
I offered to arrange protection. He shut the door in my face.
We returned to the ship. This time the captain had taken defensive measures: a sailor maintained he had gone ashore, nobody knew where. We were sure Antemon was skulking belowdecks, but it was impossible to look. An extremely large deckhand, coiling a rope in a way that showed off his biceps, made us aware that sneaking around on the Spes without permission would be inadvisable.
Not wanting to end up crammed head down in a row of tightly packed amphorae with another heavy row on top of us, we turned around for home.
It was departure time for everyone who worked daily at Portus. Appalled by the queue for a ride back across the Island, I led Aelianus to the bar where Gaius Baebius and I had chatted two days ago. A carved sign, tail up, indicated its name was the Dolphin. A welcome sight to travelers, it had a large stock of wines and a decent array of food pots. I guessed it served plenty of breakfasts when the early morning workers arrived, and it certainly had a sidewalk full of punters in this evening rush hour.
With nothing to lose, I asked the proprietor what he had heard about kidnappings. He claimed ignorance, but loudly asked his regulars. These barnacles all instinctively feigned puzzlement; to them we were slick town boys. When I said a wealthy woman, newly landed, had been captured and ransomed only that day, they shook their heads and declared it was terrible. But gradually one or two admitted that they had heard of such things happening. After Aulus bought drinks all around (he borrowed the money from me, on the excuse that this was a business expense), they lost some of their scruples and we became as friendly as I ever wanted to be with short sweaty men who manhandled fish-sauce containers all day.
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