‘Morban. I should have known you’d manage to find a way to get out of having to work up a sweat with the rest of your century, rather than just strutting about and pretending to be a soldier. Let’s hope our new colleague here knows what he’s getting into if he’s going to trust this new enterprise of his to your tender care!’
The standard bearer saluted and snapped to attention with a precision that widened the eyes of the men at his back before they caught the look on Julius’s face and hastily followed his example as he stalked past them and out into the street, calling to Avidus who was staring intently at the local architecture with a look of bemusement.
‘Well then, Centurion, that’s not a look I wanted to see on your face.’
The engineer scratched his head, waving a hand at the apartment block at whose base the shop stood.
‘I’m just trying to work out whether what you want is possible. The good news is that this block looks reasonably sturdy, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to do the work without bringing it down on top of us.’ He looked up at the building with a professional’s disdain. ‘Although it wouldn’t take much to have the whole block fall in on itself, since it’s not exactly built to last. The bad news however …’ He looked about him again, shaking his head. ‘Is that I have absolutely no idea what we’ll find once we get the floor up, and if it’s rock we’re going to make a right bloody racket.’
Julius pointed at the main road up the hill, less than fifty paces distant from Felicia’s house on the far side.
‘See that street? It’s quiet enough now, but once it’s dark it’s a non-stop procession of carts, with all of the banging and crashing you could ever want to cover up any noise you’ll be making, not to mention the cursing and shouting when a horse or a mule isn’t pulling its weight or just drops dead from overwork. You could probably quarry out enough rock to build a bath house without anyone being any the wiser. Are your boys ready?’
Avidus grinned and then whistled sharply, and a dozen men lounging against the shop front got to their feet, their tools held ready to work.
‘They’re as eager as shithouse dogs with the smell of a sausage. A night in the brothel of their choice after a month of nothing better than changing hands at ninety-nine, that’s enough to get my lads working up a sweat any time you like!’
Julius nodded, raising his eyebrows in silent comment.
‘And it’s a promise I’ll keep once I’ve got a nice big storeroom underneath the shop, ready to fill with shields and weapons.’
‘You’re sure that’s wise? If the Watch find out …’
The engineer left his statement unfinished, but both men knew the risk involved in what Scaurus and Julius were planning.
‘You can leave me to worry about that. Just concentrate on getting my hole dug, eh?’
Avidus saluted ironically.
‘Same old fuckin’ army. Only difference is I won’t have to fill this hole in once it’s dug.’
The first spear turned away, his face creased by an evil smile.
‘Who says you won’t be filling it in again?’
Excingus met his spies at the Ostian gate, looking about him with his customary caution before squatting down to join the ragged group of children. A grizzled and filthy man wearing the remnants of a military tunic was dozing in the morning sun twenty paces away, but otherwise the scene around the gate was one of busy normality. The children’s leader, a boy so worldly wise before his time that the informant was still uncertain whether to be repelled or fascinated by the urchin, looked up at him with apparent disinterest.
‘We was wondering when you was going to turn up. Or if you was going to turn up, given what you told us to do yesterday got us caught by them bastards in the fort.’
Excingus raised an eyebrow.
‘Somebody’s brighter than I gave them credit for. What did they do to you?’
The child shook his head disparagingly.
‘Nothing. The officer in charge offered us money to work for him.’
The informant clapped his hands together.
‘Excellent! And I presume that you accepted?’
The urchin looked up at him with an expression of disbelief.
‘’Course I did!’
Excingus smiled at him with apparent fondness.
‘You’re a little brighter than your father, aren’t you, Gaius? Silus must have married above himself when it came to intelligence. Very well, what was it that Julius wanted from you?’
Gaius picked at a fingernail.
‘You ain’t getting it that easy. Remember what you said to me when you took us on to be your eyes and ears?’
The informant smiled knowingly.
‘There’s a price for everything …’
‘And everything has its price. So there you go.’
The child raised an expectant eyebrow at Excingus, who sighed and dipped a hand into his pocket.
‘Here.’ He placed a coin on the outstretched palm, shaking his head as the child examined it with pursed lips. ‘Don’t push your luck, brat. Either take the coin or consider the consequences. After all, you have just sold me out.’
Gaius nodded equably.
‘He told me that they don’t trust you.’
Excingus’s face took on a pained expression.
‘I’d managed to deduce that already. What else?’
‘They want us to report back on where you go and what you do. Everything.’
Excingus nodded.
‘Excellent. I do so enjoy the realisation of a scheme.’
The child frowned, tilting his head to one side.
‘You wanted us to get caught?’
‘Oh, well done …’
Gaius shook his head as the man clapped his hands together in ironic applause.
‘You fuckin—’
Excingus reached out and took a handful of the boy’s tunic, pulling him close and showing him the blade of a small dagger.
‘Let’s never forget who the real brains is here, shall we, Gaius? You think in terms of where tonight’s dinner is coming from, whereas I consider how best to set myself up for the rest of my life. This is going to be the last job I ever do, if I get it right, because there’s enough gold washing around for a small but nicely significant fraction of it to stick to my fingers. I dangled you outside that barracks until Julius couldn’t resist taking the bait, and now I have a means of making him believe anything I want. Those idiots are going to dance to my music from now on, and you’re going to make sure that they hear exactly what I want them to hear. Aren’t you?’
By lunchtime the engineers were well into their task, having ripped out the shop’s dingy floorboards and enthusiastically dug down into the spongy tufa beneath them at a pace, which had made the Tungrians wide-eyed with amazement.
‘They’re going at it like madmen!’
Cotta looked down into the rapidly deepening pit, grinning at Morban as the sweating Tungrians passed the clods of freshly hewn tufa out into the street, where it was thrown into the cart waiting at the door.
‘Ah, well that’s the joy of tufa, standard bearer. When you cut it out of the ground it’s more like thick, spongy mud than rock, but once it’s exposed to the air it hardens up like brick. These lads know that as long as they keep going, and don’t give it time to set, they can have a much easier time of it. We’ll …’
He frowned as one of a group of diggers who had been labouring hard at a spot close to the door, which was stubbornly resisting their picks, raised a hand, calling for Avidus. The weather-beaten engineer took one look at whatever it was that his man had unearthed, and looked up at Cotta, beckoning him down into the hole. Intrigued, Morban followed, only to recoil as he realised what it was that the engineers had uncovered.
‘No wonder your boys were going slower in this spot, the tufa’s already been dug up and replaced once. He waved a hand under his nose and grimaced.
‘Stinks too …’
The excavation had reveal
ed a human hand, black with putrefaction but nevertheless clearly recognisable.
‘You!’ Cotta pointed to one of his men. Fetch the doctor.’
Felicia arrived shortly after, and looked at the corpse for a moment before speaking, her professional curiosity softened by compassion and more than a little relief at the news that only one body had been found.
‘I was worried that you might have found my former husband’s brother and his family.’ She bent closer to look at the now fully excavated corpse, ignoring its revolting smell. ‘It’s a woman’s body, but she must have been dead for weeks, poor thing. Will you bury her?’
Cotta nodded at the question.
‘Yes. We’ll wrap her in enough material to disguise what it is we’re carrying out to the cart, once we’ve got something to take the edge off the smell.’ He looked round at Morban, smiling wanly at his green complexion. ‘Make yourself useful, eh, standard bearer? Do the rounds of the local shops for a block or so. Introduce yourself as the new proprietor of this shop, and explain that we’re digging out a basement for storage. While you’re at it, make enquiries, gently mind you, after the owner of this place.’
Morban stared at him grimly.
‘You want me to find out if he had a wife—’
Cotta raised a finger.
‘Has a wife. Let’s assume that nobody else knows about this act of concealment, in which case the lady in question might just be “visiting her mother”. Or this might not be his wife, it might be a girlfriend who threatened to reveal all and paid for it with her life. So gently does it, eh? And while you’re at it, buy some quicklime.’
Morban was back an hour later, the look on his face no less grim than it had been when he left, and which darkened further at the sight of the dead woman’s excavated corpse.
‘The locals seem like a decent enough lot, especially once they realised we’re not going to give them any competition. Seems our landlord had a young wife, much younger than he is, and the first flush of love was long since over the horizon. More than one of the people I talked to found it fit to mention gladiators …’
Cotta and Avidus exchanged knowing glances.
‘So she was over the side of their canoe and paddling vigorously with men of a more suitable age …’
Avidus nodded wryly at Cotta’s opinion.
‘And stamina.’
‘As a result of which she ended up under the floorboards of his shop. I presume he was just going to give any questions as to her whereabouts a blank face, and wait for her to be forgotten.’
Morban took a foot-high earthenware pot from one of his men and handed it to Avidus.
‘Quicklime. Ought to be more than enough for one little girl like that. What will you do with her?’
Cotta looked down at the corpse for a moment before speaking.
‘Get her in the cart and bury her in rubble, with enough lime to stop her stinking while we take her past the gate guards, and dump her somewhere quiet.’ He gestured to Avidus. ‘You look after that, and I’m going for a chat with our landlord …’
Qadir walked into the tribune’s office and saluted, standing to attention and staring at the wall behind Scaurus’s head, much to Cotta’s amusement. The tribune waved a hand at the spare chair, smiling at his centurion’s determined expression.
‘Do sit down Centurion, and relax just a little?’
Julius nodded encouragingly, and the Hamian perched on the stool provided. Cotta resumed his story of the day’s events in his usual matter-of-fact tone.
‘So I went round to his house, covered in dust from the digging of course, and he came out to greet me with the usual haughty look on his face.’ He grinned at the recollection. ‘I asked him if he had a bad smell in his nose, and then while he was frowning at that, I tossed a piece of her tunic on the floor in front of him. A lovely colour when it was new, I’d imagine, and still recognisable as green despite the fact we had to peel it off her like it was her own skin. He went as white as a vestal’s virgin’s stola, the poor bastard.’
‘And?’
The veteran shrugged at Julius’s question.
‘He stood there for a moment and then just sat down on his arse, as if his legs had suddenly given up on him. I suppose he’d been shitting himself ever since he did it, and then to have the evidence slapped on the floor in front of him without any warning was all too much for him. I helped him up, and got him inside, and then we had a little chat about it. Seems that she got a little too brazen for her own good, thinking that just because he couldn’t get it up any longer he’d tolerate her parading around with her lover. Some gladiator or other. Once she was dead, he realised how deep the shit he’d blundered into was, given that her family aren’t the forgiving kind, so he buried her in the shop by lamplight and then pretended that she’d run off with another man, and that he was the wounded party.’
‘I see.’ Scaurus leaned back in his chair. ‘And what do you propose we do about this crime of passion?’
Cotta shook his head.
‘Beyond using it to make sure that he gives us every little bit of help we ask him for? Nothing. He killed her in a fit of rage, he’s still full of remorse three months on, and turning him over to the Watch isn’t going to bring her back. I think we leave this sleeping dog to lie. Besides, I expect that we can use the leverage to good effect at some point. He owns a selection of commercial properties in some rather nice areas, so there’s bound to be a favour of some sort he can do for us soon enough.
The tribune thought for a moment.
‘I concur. And you, Centurion, what news do you bring?’
Qadir’s Latin, as impeccable as ever, was gently accented from his upbringing in the empire’s east.
‘Tribune, I have a report for you from our spies in the city.’
Scaurus nodded, leaning forward.
‘Julius tells me that you’re to be congratulated on the speed with which you’ve turned some of our wilier soldiers into spies. One of these days you really must take me through how it all works, and where you learned this particular trade for that matter. You’ve had men following Excingus all day?’
‘Indeed, ever since he came here this morning, Tribune.’ Qadir looked down at the tablet he had placed on the desk in front of him. ‘Firstly, the target met with the children who were detained in the barracks yesterday. My best man was close enough to hear the tone of the discussion although not the words, and he reported that it all seemed quite amicable.’
Scaurus looked at Julius.
‘So either they’ve chosen not to tell him about your bribe …’
Julius shrugged.
‘Or they told him and he took his usual pragmatic approach to almost anything, up to and including having a knife at his throat.’
‘Yes. He does rather tend to roll with whatever gets thrown at him, doesn’t he? So we’ll either get accurate information from these children or be fed a pack of lies on the basis that he’ll promptly outbid us on the bribery front.’
Qadir coughed gently, and the two men turned back to him.
‘In either case my men will, it is to be hoped, provide us with definitive evidence of his movements. After meeting with the children, Excingus then went back into the city, and made his way to a rather unexpected location. One of the men set to tail him ran back to our usual meeting place and briefed me, and I had time to make my way to the spot in time to see him leave.’
He stood, pointing to an area on the map of the city that Scaurus had commissioned in order to be able to plan his next steps with better understanding of the distances involved.
‘He went to this place, and was inside for over an hour.’
Scaurus stared at him in silence.
‘The Gardens of Sallust? You’re sure about this? I wouldn’t have had Excingus in mind when I thought about a keen botanist.’
Qadir nodded.
‘And now you understand why I went to see for myself. When Excingus left the gardens, he looked more than usually
pleased with himself, and I would judge from his expression that whatever business he had been transacting inside had gone very well.’
The tribune nodded.
‘And the Gardens of Sallust are less than half a mile from Senator Albinus’s villa. It’s as we suspected, I suppose, Excingus has been making friends in high places. And after that?’
The Hamian turned to face Julius.
‘After that, First Spear, he walked across the valley to a small house on the Viminal Hill. He was most cautious as he approached the location, changing direction three times and doubling back twice to expose any potential followers, but by the grace of the goddess Deasura we managed to keep sight of him. His destination appears to have been his home, as he had not come out by the time that night fell.’
Scaurus sat back with a look of satisfaction.
‘Excellent. One day of your men’s work has shown us who’s behind him in this interesting little matter and where our supposedly tame informant lives. That’s good work by any measure.’
Qadir inclined his head gravely in acceptance of the praise.
‘And if I might make a suggestion, Tribune?’
‘Please do.’
The Hamian assumed a thoughtful look.
‘I am comfortable that we have the skills necessary to continue tracking him around the city, but I feel that we were a little lucky to have followed him back to his home without alerting him, given how thoroughly he tried to expose anyone that might be following him. I suggest that now we know where he lives we keep well clear once we know he’s heading in that direction?’
Scaurus nodded.
‘You’re right, there’s no point tipping him off that we know where he sleeps. We’ll stay clear of him once he’s heading for home, but perhaps we ought to watch him once he’s there?’
Qadir smiled slightly.
‘I have predicted this suggestion, Tribune. Rome’s gutters have a new pair of beggars this evening.’
The next morning, with the new cellar excavated, a narrow, open side set of stairs dug into the rock to allow easy access, and with rather better-quality floorboards installed in the shop above, Morban’s men set about renovating their establishment in preparation for its opening. Working at their various tasks under the standard bearer’s guidance, jibes and cajoling, they made swift progress in re-plastering and painting the walls and ceiling.
The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII (Empire 7) Page 14
