Caveat Emptor

by Ruth Downie

  “Promise me you’ll stay close to them.”

  “All the time,” she promised. “Believe me, I do not want to meet that man again.”

  Albanus looked relieved at being allowed back into Asper’s office. “I couldn’t quite think what to say to that very tall woman out there, sir. The other one left to go off and argue with your guard chap so she was just standing there with her baby. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be making conversation with her or not, so I didn’t say anything. It was all rather embarrassing. Is it true she’s a descendant of Boudica?”

  “So she says.”

  “Dear me.” said Albanus. “I hope I haven’t offended her.”

  56

  T HE QUAESTOR’S OFFICE was closed. There was no response to Ruso’s knocking. His impatient rattling of the handle only brought out the clerk from two doors down, who told him Nico was ill. The doctor had given orders that he was not to be disturbed.

  As they left the Great Hall by the street doors, Dias looked to right and left. “Where to now, sir?”

  “The quaestor’s house. I need to check some final details for my report to the procurator.” He hoped the excuse did not sound as lame as it felt.

  “The quaestor’s ill, sir.”

  “I know.”

  Dias said nothing as they tromped through a series of right angles from the forum to the narrow and quiet street where Nico lived. On arrival he looked disgruntled at being left to guard the dandelions sprouting in the gutter, but he had to agree that a sickly and mouse-sized quaestor was unlikely to present any danger. Inside, Ruso was in luck. The buxom landlady in charge of the building in which Nico rented rooms was more impressed by the arrival of an investigator than by the faint voice reminding her from somewhere above them that the doctor had said he was not allowed visitors.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Ruso asked as he followed her up the creaking stairs of lodgings that were surprisingly modest for a man who controlled the town’s money.

  “He’s come out in a terrible rash, sir. You can ask him.” The woman flung open a door and announced, “The man from Londinium to see you.”

  Nico was huddled in a narrow bed in the gloom, enveloped in a blanket and an atmosphere that smelled of unwashed man, unemptied chamber pot, and linseed oil. At the sight of his visitor, he shrank away and looked as though he was hoping to slide off his pillows and scuttle away down a gap between the floorboards.

  “I can’t talk to you,” he said. “I’m ill.”

  Ruso waited until the woman had gone, then opened the door again to make sure she wasn’t listening on the stairs. Somewhere outside a dog erupted into frantic barking.

  He said, “What’s this about a rash?”

  Nico’s eyes widened.

  “I used to work in an army hospital,” Ruso explained, clapping back the shutters to let in some light and reveal the source of the barking. A terrier was chained to a stake in the middle of an untidy yard. It was leaping up and rattling the chain, straining to escape toward a rubbish heap piled against a tumbledown fence. Beyond the fence was the stolid form of Gavo, evidently under orders to watch the back of the house no matter what the dog had to say about it. Ruso was satisfied that none of the conversation inside the room would be overheard.

  Nico had pushed his bedding down to his waist. He lifted his pale linen tunic to reveal a bony chest that was indeed covered in an angry rash. A greasy brown substance had been plastered over it.

  “Is it on your back as well?”

  Nico leaned forward to demonstrate that it went across the top of his shoulders and around his waist, but the center of his back was normal.

  Ruso gestured to him to replace the tunic. “Any back pain, headaches?”

  “Terrible pain in my back and legs,” said Nico. “My head hurts and my tongue is hawble.” It was halfway out of his mouth before he finished the sentence.

  “So it is,” agreed Ruso, cocking his head sideways to get a better view of the ugly white coating Nico was demonstrating.

  “The doctor says I mustn’t be disturbed.” Nico waved one hand weakly toward a bottle on the shelf. “He’s given me a powerful new medicine to try, but it’s doing no good.”

  Ruso took out the stopper, sniffed, and wished he hadn’t. “Very powerful,” he agreed.

  “He’s read the signs. He said I mustn’t speak to anybody about the missing money.”

  There was no point in asking which signs: It would be some conjunction of the stars, or an arrangement of freshly spilled animal guts, or whatever local equivalent was peddled to the gullible.

  Ruso crouched to peer under the bed and reached for an old scrubbing brush that lay beyond the chamber pot. He ran his forefinger over the bristles, and then put it back and wiped his hand on his tunic. “How are you sleeping?”

  “Terrible. I just lie awake for hours.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be the only one last night. What did you think of the thunderstorm?”

  “Dreadful,” said Nico. “I hate thunderstorms.”

  “Right then,” said Ruso, straightening up. “I wouldn’t worry too much. I’ve seen this before. It gets better by itself.”

  “It does?”

  “Usually when the patient stops scrubbing his chest with a stiff brush and putting chalk on his tongue. I was an army medic, Nico. I’ve seen some of the best malingering there is and yours doesn’t come close. There wasn’t a thunderstorm. Now sit up and tell me who attacked my wife last night.”

  Nico positively jolted with shock. “Your wife? Attacked? Oh, this is terrible! Was she hurt?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Who? I know nothing about it! What’s happening to us all?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ruso. “Maybe I’ll work it out if you tell me why the hell you’re sending me anonymous death threats.”

  “Me?” Nico drew up his knees under the blanket and wrapped his thin arms around them, but it did not disguise the trembling. “Death threats?”

  Ruso gestured toward the stairs. “I’ll ask the landlady whether you went out of the house last night, shall I?”

  “No! Please, I’m …” He stopped.

  “You’re not ill,” said Ruso. “We’ve just established that.” He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “I’m willing to accept that it wasn’t you who attacked my wife. So are you planning to sneak out and murder one of us, or do you think somebody else is?”

  “Oh, no! I would never hurt anybody.”

  That much at least was credible.

  Nico clamped one hand against his forehead in a gesture that would get him a job in the new theater if it were ever built. “You will think I am deranged.”

  “Try me.”

  “I was trying to warn you,” he said. “I have dreams. Terrible dreams, always the same. A man is being stabbed in the back, and I am supposed to save him but I can’t move. I never knew what it meant until you arrived. Then I realized. You are the man in the dream!”

  “Rubbish,” said Ruso, hoping he was right. He had heard plenty of stories of premonitions in dreams. Some were true and others were nonsense, but he had never heard of one quite so specific.

  “And now your wife has been attacked!” Nico shuddered. “I don’t believe in these things, either, but how would I feel if it came true?”

  “Not as bad as I would,” said Ruso. “So in your dream, who’s doing the stabbing?”

  “I don’t know. I never see his face.”

  “Let me help you,” suggested Ruso. “There isn’t a dream, any more than there’s an illness. You and I both know there’s something illegal going on here, and whoever’s doing it is desperate to cover it up. Dias is involved in it, and probably another man too, and it’s something to do with forged denarii.”

  Nico gave an anguished howl. As he was saying, “I don’t know anything! Help!” the landlady’s voice sounded up the stairs. “Are you all right in there, gents?”

  Ruso grabbed the un
dersides of Nico’s bent knees through the blanket and jerked them upward, tipping him flat before clamping a hand over his mouth. “Shut up,” he hissed. Nico’s arms flailed helplessly as Ruso called down the stairs, “We’re fine, thank you.” He removed the hand. “Talk.”

  Nico took a deep breath, as if he had been starved of air. “Go away. Please, go away before they come after you too. I can’t tell you anything.”

  Ruso closed the shutters and checked the door again. Returning to stand over the bed, he said softly, “If you really want to help me, tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t. Just go away.”

  “Do you want me to go to the procurator and tell him you’re part of it? They’ll put you in chains and have you tortured.”

  Nico snatched at the blanket and pulled it up over his chin. “They made me do it,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to.”

  “Do what?”

  His head jolted from side to side as if he was trying to burrow down backward into the pillow. “I can’t! I can’t tell you!” He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

  The man was reaching a state of panic in which there would be no chance of getting any sense out of him. Ruso seated himself on the floor, leaning back against the bed so he could not see Nico’s face. “This is very difficult, isn’t it?” he observed to the flaking paint on the wall. “I need to know some things in order to protect my wife and find the money you’re supposed to be responsible for, but you don’t want to tell me them.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t want to!” exclaimed Nico. “I can’t. You saw what happened to Asper and Bericus.”

  “It’s all a bit of a mystery, really,” Ruso continued, as if he was thinking aloud. “And you know one of the things I can’t understand? It’s why an obviously decent man like yourself got involved in it. I mean, you don’t look the type.”

  “I’m not! They made me.”

  Ruso waited. He could hear the landlady moving about downstairs. He had hoped Nico would feel the need to fill the silence, but as the moments drifted by he began to wonder if the man had fallen asleep. Outside, a distant blast on a horn signaled midday. He was about to try again when he heard, “It was when I went to Londinium.”

  Ruso held his breath.

  “The Council sent me to hire the architect for the theater plans. I had quite a lot of money for the deposit.”

  There was another long pause during which Ruso wondered if he was supposed to guess the rest.

  “I couldn’t see him till the next morning,” Nico continued. “There was what seemed like a nice bar down the road from where I was staying, and there was this very friendly girl …”

  Ruso had a feeling he knew what was coming.

  “And when I woke up,” said Nico, leaving events with the girl to Ruso’s imagination, “she was gone and so was the money. The people at the bar said they’d never seen her before. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t come home and say I’d lost it. I’d have been shamed. So … somebody said he would help me.”

  “Dias?”

  “I didn’t say the name!”

  “No,” agreed Ruso. “So Dias helped you—how?”

  “He knew somebody who could lend me the money.”

  “And in return?”

  “I can’t talk about that. They’ll kill me!”

  Ruso turned to crouch beside the bed. “We can protect you,” he promised, hoping it was true. “We’ll get you sent somewhere out of their reach.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you anything.”

  “You won’t be safe until these men are caught.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Ruso’s patience snapped. Grabbing the scrawny throat, he hissed, “What I understand, Nico, is that my wife’s been dragged into an alleyway and threatened with heaven knows what if I don’t keep out of this investigation and she doesn’t keep her mouth shut. If I can carry on, so can you. What did they make you do?”

  “Let me go!” Nico seemed to be shriveling in terror.

  “It’s something to do with forging money, isn’t it?”

  “Please!”

  “It must be someone who knows about metalwork. Someone whose family used to make coins in the old days?”

  “You can’t hurt me! You’re a doctor!”

  “Someone with access to a forge. Are we talking about someone in town, or outside? Is it somebody on the Council?”

  “Help!” Whatever else Nico would have said came out as a strangled gurgle.

  Ruso looked down into the bulging eyes for a moment, then sighed and relaxed his grip.

  Nico took a gulp of air, grabbed the blanket, and pulled it up over his head. From underneath came a muffled, “I can’t tell you anything. Please, go away!”

  “Caratius’s grandfather worked in silver. Is it Caratius?”

  “Go away!”

  “Why did he invite Asper to visit him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Caratius know about the plot to murder Asper and his brother?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t think so. No.”

  “Did you?”

  “I had nothing to do with it! They just told me to take Asper into the strong room in the morning.”

  “And do what?”

  “Nothing! I’ve done nothing!” Nico was still hiding under the blankets. “I didn’t know they were going to kill anybody. I just did what I was told. Please, I beg you. Go away.”

  “Where’s the money now?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Where do the false coins go after they’ve been minted?”

  There were footsteps on the stairs. Nico gave a muffled squeal. “They’re coming!”

  Ruso, hand on the hilt of his knife, moved to shield the bed from whoever was opening the door.

  “You! What are you doing here?”

  Ruso let his hand fall to his side.

  The doctor’s pot belly was still bulging under the same blood spatters as yesterday. “I gave specific orders that my patient was not to be disturbed. I can’t have this constant interference. If it goes on I shall complain to the Council. This man is seriously ill.”

  “Seriously ill with what?” inquired Ruso, interested.

  “None of your business,” replied the doctor, just as Ruso would have done.

  “I only ask,” said Ruso, “because it looks like something a lot of men go down with in the army.”

  “Yes. I hear you’ve been passing yourself off as a doctor.”

  “I just thought you might be able to help,” he said to Nico, “but never mind. And don’t worry, I’m sure that medicine will have you back on your feet very soon.” He smiled. “And then we can talk again.”

  After this thinly veiled threat, he paused for a word with the landlady, who was lurking in the hall and jabbing at invisible cobwebs with a feather duster. In response to his request, she assured him that no other visitors would be allowed upstairs no matter how they tried to get in. This was a properly run house and when she and her husband were asleep, the dog was loose downstairs.

  Reassured that his witness was being safeguarded, he gathered up Dias and Gavo. “Well,” he said, as casually as he could manage, “That was a waste of time. Anybody mind if we go and hunt down some lunch?”

  Was that suspicion on Dias’s face, or the reflection of his own tension? He was fairly confident that whatever the man might be thinking, he would not act on it in broad daylight—certainly not while the innocent Gavo was with them to witness it. All the same, he was relieved when they left the quiet street in which Nico lived for the bustle of the main thoroughfare, where to his guards’ evident amusement, he paused to buy a bunch of bluebells from a street vendor.

  57

  W HAT WE NEED, sir,” murmured Albanus, scooping crumbs off Julius Asper’s desk and into his cupped hand, “is a way to make this Nico more frightened of us than he is of Dias.”

  “He thinks Dias is going to kill him,” said Ruso. “It’s hard t
o be more frightened than that.” He glanced at the bluebells, temporarily stationed in a cup of water, and wondered whether the women were back from the cemetery yet. Perhaps he should go and see.

  “Has he got a family he cares about?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “That’s a shame.” Albanus walked across to the high window, stood on tiptoe to check that nobody was outside, and then tossed the crumbs away. “Perhaps we could threaten to kill him more slowly than Dias will.”

  “Albanus, that isn’t funny.”

  The clerk sighed. “I don’t think he’d believe us anyway, sir.”

  “I offered to rescue him,” said Ruso, “but I don’t think he believed that, either.”

  Albanus, to whom Ruso had now explained everything it was safe for him to know and much that wasn’t, shifted the box of records he had just finished checking and perched himself on the desk in an informal pose that he would never have dared to adopt during his official years as Ruso’s clerk. “I’ve had a good look through but I can’t find any details about the wages Asper owed to the guards, sir.”

  Ruso had forgotten about the unimportant task to which he had assigned his clerk before deciding to tell him the truth.

  “In fact, I can’t find any sign that Asper ever paid them anything at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing. I’d imagine the Council considered escorting the tax money to be part of their normal duties.”

  Ruso scratched one ear. “So when Dias said he was looting Asper’s house to make up the wages, he was lying.”

  “He’s the chap with the flashy hairstyle, sir? The one you think was your burglar?”

  “And the one who’s been blackmailing Nico. I suppose he was searching for anything Asper had stashed away that might incriminate him.”

  “If Dias is really forging money, where does he spend it?”

  “He’s up and down to Londinium all the time. Perhaps he’s distributing it there.” Ruso paused. “You don’t look convinced.”

  “Sir, if I were making false money, the last place I would pass it round is the town where all the treasury officials live.”