‘Falco, you’ll have to be careful!’
I tried not to laugh. In ten years of watching my contorted relationships, this was the first time Petro had bothered to give me brotherly advice.
‘Trust me,’ I said. (It was what I had told Helena. I blocked out how at the crucial moment when I tried to restrain my efforts, she had cried out and would not let me go -)
Petro growled, ‘For heavens’ sake, Marcus! What will you do if there’s a mistake?’
‘Apologize to her father, confess to my mother, and find a priest who keeps his prices down… What do you take me for?’
My shoulder was aching, but nothing could make me shift. The joy of my life had her head on my heart and was profoundly asleep. All her troubles had been drained away; her tranquil lashes were still spiky from her helpless tears afterwards. I could easily have wept myself.
‘The lady might see things differently. You ought to stop this!’ Petro advised perversely, now that this expedition up the mountain had ensured I never could.
His wife woke on the bench beside him. Now I watched Silvia interpret the scene: Helena Justina tucked against my side with her knees under mine; Helena’s hand clasping my own; her fine hair, crumpled by my arm; the depth of her sleep; my own unsmiling peace…
‘Marcus! What are you going to do?’ she insisted in a worried undertone. Silvia liked everything to be neat. ‘Finish my commission, and put in a claim for payment as rapidly as possible…’ I closed my eyes.
If Silvia thought we had started something scandalous she must have blamed me for it, because when Helena awoke the two of them went off together to wash their faces and reorganize themselves. When they came back it was with the secretive, satisfied air of two women who had been gossiping. Silvia had her hair wound on the nape of her neck the way Helena usually wore hers, and they had knotted Helena’s with ribbon. It suited her. She looked as if she ought to have been doing something typically Athenian on a black-figure vase. I would have liked to be the free-spirited Helena lying in wait to catch her just around the vase handle…
‘This is confusing,’ Petro joked. ‘Which one was mine?’
‘Oh I’ll take the one with the topknot, if you like.’
He and I exchanged a look. When one of two friends is married and the other stays a bachelor, rightly or wrongly the assumption is that you operate by different rules. It was a long time since Petro and I had been out together on such easy terms.
Anyone who knew Petronius and his interest in wine also knew that he would seize on this opportunity to make a few purchases for domestic use. True to his usual thoroughness, once he found a crisp white at a few coppers an amphora (with a petillance he described to me lovingly, as connoisseurs do), Petronius Longus acquired as much as he could: while I left him on his own he had bought a adleus. Seriously. A huge barrel as tall as his wife. At least twenty amphorae. Enough to put a thousand flasks on the table if he kept an inn. (More if he watered the drink.)
Silvia was hoping I would dissuade him from this mad bargain, but he had already paid. We all had to wait while he burned his name in the cask then made complicated arrangements for coming back with Nero and the cart, which was the only way be would ever get his culleus away from here. Silvia and I asked how he intended to transport his family home now (not to mention where they would live, if their house was full of wine), but he was lost in euphoria. Besides, we knew he would manage it. Petronius Longus had done stupid things before.
Eventually we rode back.
I had the one with the topknot. She sat in front, intensely quiet. When we reached the villa letting her go was almost impossible. I told her again that I loved her, then I had to send her in.
Petronius and Silvia had tactfully waited at the estate entrance while I took Helena up to the house. When I rode back with the hired donkey they stayed politely silent.
‘I’ll see you when I can, Petro.’ I must have looked grey.
‘O Jupiter!’ Petronius exclaimed, swinging down from his mount. ‘Let’s all have another drink before you go!’ Even Arria Silvia forbore to complain.
We broke into a wineskin, sitting under a pine tree in the dusk. We three drank, not too much but with a certain desperation now Helena had left us.
Afterwards I walked up to the house, reflecting that love was as hard on the feet as it was on the pocket and the heart. Now I noticed something I had missed before: a chink of harness under the cypress trees led me to two rough-coated, saddle-sore mules, tethered away from the track with nosebags on. I listened, but caught no other sign of life. If revellers - or lovers - had come up the mountain from the coast, it seemed odd that they should travel so far onto a private estate for their happy purposes. I patted the animals, and went on thoughtfully.
By the time I arrived at the villa again, it was an hour since I had brought Helena back.
Any murderer or coffer-thief could have got into that house. The servants who greeted Helena had long disappeared. No one was about. I went up, confident at least that her bedroom would be well staffed; a safety measure I had insisted on. It meant I myself could only expect five minutes being polite to her but I was looking forward to a silly charade in front of other people, playing her surly bodyguard, all gristle and grim jokes…
Reaching Helena’s room I opened the heavy door, slipped in and closed it silently. It was an open invitation; I had to fix a bolt on the door. The outer space was dark again, with the same lights beyond the curtaining.
She had company. Someone spoke, not Helena. I should have left. I was asking for every kind of disappointment, but by then I felt so desperate to see her that it carried me straight into the room.
The green dress lay folded on a coffer; her sandals were tumbled askew on a bedside rug. Helena had changed into something darker and warmer with woollen sleeves to the wrist; her hair was plaited on one shoulder. She looked neat, grave, and impenetrably tired.
She had come home so late she had her dinner on a tray. She sat facing the door, so when I batted in through the curtain her shocked eyes watched me frantically absorb the scene.
There was a man with her.
He was sprawled in a chair with one knee over its arm, casually scoffing nuts. Helena seemed more sullen than usual as she chewed at a chicken wing, though she was getting on with it as if the presence of this person in her bedroom was commonplace.
‘Hello,’ I stormed angrily. ‘You must be Barnabas! I owe you half a million bits of gold-‘
He looked up.
It was certainly the man who had attacked me in the warehouse, and probably the one I had glimpsed harassing Petro in the ox cart on the Gapua Road. Then I stared at him harder. After three months of chasing the man in the green cloak, I finally discovered who he really was. The freedman’s old mother in Calabria had been right: Barnabas was dead.
I knew this man. He was Helena Justina’s ex-husband; his name was Atius Pertinax.
According to the Daily Gazette, he was dead too.
LXI
He looked healthy for a man who had been murdered three months before. But if I had any choice in the matter, dead was how Atius Pertinax would soon be. Next time I would arrange it myself. And make it permanent.
He wore a very plain tunic and a new jaw-line beard, but I knew him all right. He was twenty-eight or nine. Light hair and a spare build. He had pale eyes I had forgotten and a sour expression which I never would forget. Permanent bad temper tightened the muscles round his eyes and made his jaw clench.
I had met him once. Not when I tailed him to the Transtiberina; the year before. I could still feel his soldiers pulping my body and hear his voice calling me savage names. I could still see his pasty legs below a senatorial toga, striding from my apartment where he had left me lying beside a broken bench, helplessly spitting blood on my own floor.
He was a traitor and a thief; a bully; a murderer. Yet Helena Justina was letting him lounge in her bedroom like a lord. Well he must have sat with her lik
e this a thousand times, in that grand, tasteful, blue-and-grey room he allowed her in their house…
‘My mistake. Your name’s not Barnabas!’
‘Is it not?’ he dared. I could see him still wondering how to react to my sudden arrival.
‘No,’ I responded quietly. ‘But officially Gnaeus Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus is mouldering in his funeral urn-‘
‘Now you see the problem!’ Helena exclaimed.
I wondered how she could bear to sit there eating until I noticed how she was nibbling at her chicken bone, showing her teeth as if she despised his predicament too much to let it interfere with her appetite.
I strode into the room. Apart from the fact I was intent on arresting him, it was a good old Roman custom that in the presence of your moral superior you leapt to your feet. Pertinax tensed, but sat tight.
‘Who the hell are you?’ He had made too much noise before too. ‘And who gave you permission to enter my wife’s room?’
‘The name is Didius Falco; I go where I like. By the way - she’s not your wife!’
‘I’ve heard about you, Falco!’
‘Oh, you and I are old acquaintances. You once arrested me for the pleasure of it,’ I reminded him, ‘though I like to think I have the character to rise above that. You destroyed my apartment - but I helped dispose of your house on the Quirinal in return. Your Greek vases did well,’ I smiled annoyingly. ‘Vespasian was pleased with those. Your Praxiteles Cupid was a disappointment though -‘ I knew Pertinax had paid a lot for it. ‘A copy; I expect you realized…
‘I always thought it had big ears!’ Helena told me conversationally. Pertinax looked peeved.
I hooked a footstool forwards with my heel and squatted where I could cover Helena yet still fix him. She coloured slightly beneath my quiet scrutiny; I found myself wondering if Pertinax realized I had been her lover - with a passion I was proud of - a few hours before. A glance at him told me: it never crossed his mind.
‘So what happened?’ I wondered thoughtfully: ‘In April this year the Praetorians burst in to question you -‘ He listened with an exaggerated, weary look as if 1 was being ridiculous. ‘Barnabas was dressed up in your senatorial stripes; the shortsighted Praetorians whisked him off to jail. He would expect a nasty beating when they found out, but no worse. Poor Barnabas definitely shook hands on a bad bargain that day. One of your fellow plotters decided to silence their luckless jailbird-‘
Pertinax sank back, his thin shoulders hunched. ‘Cut it, Falco!’
I was fascinated by those nuts. Some of the shells fell loose on a table as he spat them ineffectively back at the bowl; most dropped onto the striped Egyptian floor rug.
‘You soon realized your fellow plotters were being picked off by the Palace.’ I let him absorb this, watching him again. Bryon the trainer had called him desperate, but to me he looked merely unpleasant. In fact I found Pertinax so offensive, the hairs on my neck prickled at sharing the same room. Yet he was one of those men who seem quite unaware of their own obnoxiousness. ‘If you reappeared you were a marked man. Your half-brother was dead. You took his identity in order to claim his corpse from the jail. You buried him, and paid him the last respect of telling his mother the truth, even though a wrong word from that batty old basket in Tarentum might expose you. Then you realized that you and Barnabas were so alike you had a first-rate, possibly permanent, disguise. So you have foolishly stuck yourself, honourable sir, only one step up from slavery!’
Pertinax, whose manners were as uncouth as you would expect in a Calabrian who had been given more luck in society than he ever deserved, cracked another nut. If he had been a commoner my exposing his story would be the first step to jail; he knew as well as I did that a consul’s son could stare me out derisively. For several reasons, all of them personal, I would have liked to smash my fist through his pistachios - after he had eaten them.
Helena Justina had finished her meal and tidied her own tray. She went down on her knees, collecting the shells Pertinax had scattered, like a wife trying to prevent their servants noticing what a boor her husband is. Pertinax, like a husband, let her do it.
‘You don’t exist!’ I reiterated in his direction as cruelly as I could. ‘Your name has been sponged off the Senatorial list. You have less social standing than a ghost.’ Pertinax moved restlessly. ‘Now all your attempts to contact your fellow conspirators are going awry. Tell me, did Curtius Longinus meet his fate because when he saw you in Rome again, alive, he threatened to expose you to gain Vespasian’s goodwill for his brother and him?’ He made no attempt to resist the charge. It could wait. ‘Crispus too has plans of his own now, in which you do not feature,’ I harassed him as my anger grew. ‘You saw him at Oplontis. You tried to coerce him, but he gave you the brushoff; am I right? Your dining couch was reassigned to a woman - Aemilia Fausta, who had not even been invited - then Crispus pointed me straight at you, hoping I would get you off his neck. Aufidius Crispus,’ I emphasized, ‘is another double-dealer who would cheerfully see you strangled, Pertinax!’
Helena was still on the floor, sitting back on her heels.
‘That’s enough,’ she interrupted quietly.
‘Too near the knuckle, lady?’
‘Too strong, Falco. What will you do?’
Good question. The ex-Consul was unlikely to allow me to drag his precious son off the estate.
‘Suggest something,’ I offered, ducking it.
Helena Justina folded her hands in her lap. Always ready with a plan: ‘The easiest solution is to leave the conspirator Pertinax at peace in the Marcellus mausoleum. I think my husband should put his past mistakes behind him, and start life afresh.’ Although Helena was trying to help him, Pertinax sat biting his thumb contemptuously. He had nothing to contribute.
‘As Barnabas?’ I queried. ‘Fine. His children will count as full citizens; his descendants may be senators. A freedman can use his talents; assemble a fortune; even inherit from Marcellus, if Marcellus can bring himself to cause a social upset by doing it. You are a wonderful lady; it’s a wonderful solution, and he’s a lucky man to have you to support him like this. Just one problem!’ I grated in a changed voice. ‘Pertinax the conspirator is supposed to be dead - but Barnabas is wanted for arson and a senator’s premeditated death.’
‘What are you saying, Falco?’ Helena glanced quickly between the two of us.
‘Augus Curtius Longinus died in a fire at the Little Temple of Hercules. I’m saying, “Barnabas’s lit the fire.’
I had never told Helena the details. She was shocked, yet remained acutely logical. ‘Can you prove that?’
Pertinax finally troubled himself to interject unpleasantly, ‘The lying bastard can’t.’
‘But Falco, if you wanted to pursue it,’ Helena reasoned, ‘there would have to be a trial -‘ You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him. ‘A trial would force recent events into the open-‘
‘Oh, plenty of adverse rumours will fly!’ I agreed.
‘Curtius Gordianus will be embarrassed over his priesthood in Paestum; Aufidius Crispus has been promised the past may remain confidential—
I laughed softly. ‘Yes; they lose any chance to back out of their plot discreetly! Helena Justina, if your ex-husband adopts your suggestion I might support him to the Emperor.’ I would sooner have prepared him a legionary ambush: a ditch across his path some dark night, set with barbed stakes viciously peeled back like lilies… but producing him as a penitent would earn me greater favour. ‘So now he has to decide what he wants.’
‘Yes, he must.’ Her eyes left me, and fell rather disparagingly on him. He looked at her without expression. Knowing his real identity, I understood why Helena felt so troubled. He was alive, minus his property. So he was demanding back the legacy he had bequeathed to her. At least that; perhaps much more.
I had a sense of them wrangling, though I may have imagined it.
Helena Justina climbed to her
feet carefully, holding one wrist behind her as if she had backache.
‘I should like you both to leave now.’ She rang a bell. A slave came in immediately, as though when Pertinax was here swift service was expected.
‘I’ll go with you,’ I said to him. I had no intention of letting him out of my sight.
‘There’s no need, Falco!’ muttered Helena swiftly. ‘He cannot leave the villa,’ she insisted. ‘He has no identity - nowhere to go.’
‘Besides,’ Pertinax weighed in, with a dreary attempt at nonchalance, ‘your filthy associates harry me if I try!’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t you know?
It was Helena who enlightened me in a troubled voice. ‘Two men have been following Gnaeus everywhere. He went out riding yesterday and they prevented him from coming home all night.’
‘What were they like?’ I asked him curiously.
‘One built like a gladiator, and a runt.’
‘Means nothing to me. You managed to shake them off? ‘They were on commercial mules; I had a decent horse.’ ‘Really? I did not tell him I had found the two mules here tonight on his father’s estate. ‘I work alone. I had nothing to do with it.’
If Helena thought I would leave a man in her bedroom she could think again. But Pertinax shrugged a goodnight to her almost at once, then sneered at me and went out onto the balcony.
I followed him as far as the folding door and watched him down the stairs and on his way, a thin figure strutting with a little too much confidence. From the far side of the garden court below he glanced back once. He would have seen me, a solid black shape in the doorway, outlined from behind by the bedroom lamps.
I came back in, fastening the catch on the folding door. With her servants now present, Helena and I were not free to speak openly, but I could see that sharing the secret was a heavy relief. I confined myself to commenting, ‘I might have known he would be someone who makes a mess with his food, and has never learnt to close a door when he goes out!’ She smiled wearily.
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