Signing the contracts completed this basic ceremony. Curtis Gordianus let out a short, grim laugh.
'Well! Time for the happy bridegroom to kiss his lucky bride…
There were four yards between them when she lifted her veil and Pertinax braced himself for Helena's usual cool, reasoning contempt. He met a younger, brasher prettiness: huge dark eyes and tiny white teeth, clear skin, tinsel earrings, and an air of perfect innocence that was flagrantly Falco.
'Tullia!'
'Oh dear!' I exclaimed sympathetically. 'We seem to have brought his honour the wrong bride!'
As he started towards her, I threw off my white veil. 'Falco!'
'Always check a pre-written contract just before you sign it, sir. Some villain may have altered a critical element! Sorry; we lied about Helena Justina wanting to read through the documents, but then we had already lied about Helena agreeing to marry you-'
Tullia gathered up her skirts and scurried for the door. I whipped open the mysterious box which the priest's assistant carries at any wedding. In our family the joke is that the youth keeps his lunch in it – but I had a sword.
'Don't move! Gnaeus Atius Pertinax, I arrest you in Vespasian's name-,
His lip curled, revealing a dog tooth unattractively. 'Trust you!' Then he turned his head and let out a screeching whistle. 'Two can cheat, Falco-' There was rush of feet, and out from a corridor burst half a dozen tall, bristly-chinned warriors in scale-armour trousers and glistening bare chests. 'Every bridegroom wants his own witnesses at his wedding!' jeered Pertinax.
His supporters were not rushing forwards with the aim of flinging nuts. Pertinax had obviously given them orders to kill me.
LXXXVIII
Luckily I had not expected the victim of a trick wedding to respond with graceful oratory. My first reaction was surprise. My next was to get my back to the wall, my blade up, and my eye on them.
From a man of his type, something of this sort was inevitable. Heaven knows where he found them. They looked like German mercenaries, big, long-haired, flaxen braggarts, originally hired by the dead Emperor Vitellius – now stranded in Rome after the civil war, with their fare home drunk in the stews along the Tiber and a new, more fastidious Caesar who would not be employing foreign auxiliaries within Rome.
They were heavy in the belly from too much beer and black pudding but they could fight, especially with the odds in their favour at an easy six to one. Some grim auxiliary captain on the Rhine frontier had put these hulks through several years of legionary drill. Their weapons were the huge, flat-bladed Celtic type which they swung over their heads and at waist height while I, with my short Roman stabbing sword, was hard-pushed to duck in underneath. Beneath my priestly costume I had a leather jerkin and arm guards – not enough against six skirling maniacs who were enjoying themselves with the threat of slicing off my salted crackling like a Black Forest pig.
Pertinax laughed.
'Keep smiling,' I seethed, watching the Germans. 'I'll deal with your guttural lap dogs, and then I'll come for you!'
He shook his head, making for the exit. But Tullia was there first. Her terror of him, now he knew she had deceived him, made her foot fleet and her hand sure. She darted down the porter's corridor, past the two empty cubicles, and dragged open the huge, metal-plated door. Out rushed Tullia – and in thundered Milo instead.
At the sight of our humourless monster Pertinax skidded to a halt and turned about. I saw him run lightly to the staircase. I was trapped, hard-pressed by half a dozen heavy blades whose force when they touched down wrenched the power from my wrist as I desperately parried them. It was Curtius Gordianus who took off after Pertinax – an ungainly, sack-like figure fired with the long-nurtured hope of vengeance, who blundered upstairs at an alarming pace. He was wielding the small, sharp knife he had used in the ceremony, still wet from the throat of our sacrificial sheep.
Milo was considering what he should do, all bovine stupidity: my favourite thug.
Do me a favour, drop your flute and grab a sword. Milo acquired a sword by the simple method of seizing the nearest mercenary, lifting the wild man off his feet, and crushing him until his eyes bulged and he limply dropped the blade.
'Cuddle a few more!' I gasped, managing to disarm the next while my boot made an imprint on his ragged chain-mesh truss which if he was one for the women he would bitterly regret.
Now Milo and I could set ourselves back to back and work away from the wall. The opposition circled more widely, but we had more time to watch for them. When two charged from different directions we ducked by common agreement and let them impale themselves with an ugly crunch.
The crude fencing practice lasted less time than I thought. The last two who could run dragged off the wounded. To disguise their connection with the Pertinax house, Milo and I threw the dead outside in the street gutter opposite, like the dirty dregs of some drunken brawl the previous night.
'You caught it, Falco?
Nothing hurt yet, but I was dripping badly: a long cut, down my left side. After five years as an informer I no longer felt the need to faint at the sight of my own blood but this was the last thing I wanted today. Milo was urging me to seek medical attention but I shook my head.
We hurried back, to look for Gordianus. No one answered when we called. I locked the street door and took the key. I found the spigot and turned off the fountain; as the water hung and then dropped, a nerve-racking silence fell throughout the empty house.
We stalked upstairs, constantly listening. One by one we flung open doors. Empty salons and deserted bedrooms. Dust undisturbed on pediments. Woozy flies flinging themselves against closed windows in warm solitude.
Gordianus was in the last room of the first corridor we explored. He had slumped against the marble dado and we thought he must be dead. Not so; only despairing.
'I had him – I got my knife in him – but he attacked me and I bungled it.
Checking him over for physical damage, I muttered sympathetically. 'There's a world of difference between dispatching something woolly at the altar, and taking human life -' Pertinax had belted the Chief Priest viciously against a wall. Not much surface bruising, but at his age shock and exertion were taking their toll. He was having such difficulty breathing I worried for his heart.
I joined Milo in carrying the priest downstairs, and hurriedly let them out together. 'Milo, you look after him.'
'I'll come back-'
'No. What's here is mine.'
He helped make a pressure pad and bind up my side with the white veil I had worn at the ceremony. Then I watched him and Gordianus leave.
This was how I wanted it: Pertinax and me.
Inside the house again I relocked the door behind me. Pertinax probably had his own key when he had lived here, but it was no use to him now. When I act as an executor, the first thing I do is fix new locks.
I walked from the door slowly. One of us might leave that way eventually. It was the only door. This was a rich man's mansion. Rome was alive with cat burglars, and this gem of a property had been built for multimillionaires with treasures to protect. The external walls were completely blank for security. The windows faced inwards. All the light which flooded in came from internal courtyards and the open roof of the atrium. What happened in the streets outside belonged to another world.
He was here. So was I. I had the key. Until I found him, here we would both stay.
I started to search. There were scores of rooms and in some places there were passages where he could slip past me, so I had to patrol some areas twice. I took a long time. My wound started to burn and bother me. Blood was oozing through the cloth. I trod quietly, to avoid warning him and to conserve my own strength. Gradually I covered every room. And in the end I remembered the one place I had missed; so I knew where he must be.
I walked slowly down the red corridor for a second time. My boots slipped unwarily on the shining, level tessellation of the passageway floor. I stepped between the two plinths w
here basalt portrait busts had once stood, and into the elegant azure and grey bedroom that had once been a private haven for the lady of the house. The warm, deep blue of the wall panels welcomed me graciously. I felt like a lover, treading an accustomed secret route.
I noticed a small, rust-coloured smudge staining the geometric pattern of the silver and white mosaic. I knelt, with some difficulty, and touched it with my finger. Dry. He had been hiding here a long time. Perhaps he was dead.
Hauling myself upright, I dragged my tired feet over to the wooden folding door. It was closed. But when I opened it, from the far side of Helena's garden his angry eyes met mine.
LXXXIX
I limped to a stone border and edged myself painfully into a half-sitting position facing him. 'Couple of wrecks!'
Pertinax grimaced, eyeing up my own condition as he struggled to ease himself. 'What happens now, Falco?'
'One of us will think of something…'
He was in the shade. I was in the sun. If I moved to avoid it the fig tree would block my view of him. So I stayed.
He was the fidgety, hasty type; I had plenty of time. He fell silent watching me from that taut, narrow face.
'Your wife's garden!' I carolled, looking round. It was a small peristyle, full of muted sunlight and rich greenery. On one side of the colonnade, a worn stone seat with lion's paws. Low, sculptured hedges, with the faint scent of rosemary where I had crushed bushes as I found somewhere to perch myself. A thin trail of laburnum. And a small statue of an urchin pouring water -a ragamuffin in a patched tunic- who looked as if Helena might have chosen him herself.
Helena's garden. A good-tempered, mature little courtyard, as quiet and civilized as she was. 'This is a peaceful, private place for a talk,' I told him. 'And a good, private place for a man who doesn't exist anyway to die… Ah, don't worry. I promised your wife – your first wife – not to kill you.' I let him relax, then put iron in my voice: 'I'm just planning a series of hard, non-fatal blows that will persuade you staying alive is so painful you will finish off yourself!'
The priest had made a decent start of it. Better this way; some deaths need time.
He was on the ground, sideways to me, leaning on one hand. Almost no position was comfortable. He had to twist into the hasp of the wicked religious knife Gordianus had prodded into his ribs. He wanted to hold it firm. If he pulled it free, the rush of blood might bear his soul away. Some men would take the risk; I would have done.
I said, 'A military surgeon could safely get that out of you?' Then grinned, to let him know I would never let a surgeon into the house.
He was white. So was I, probably. Tension does that. He thought he was going to die. I knew he was.
My eyes drooped. I saw him move, hopefully. I opened my eyes again, and smiled at him.
'This is pointless, Falco.'
'Life is pointless?'
'Why do you want me dead?'
'You'll see.'
'Today was pointless,' Pertinax mused. 'Why the trick with the barmaid? I can repudiate the marriage as soon as I want-'
'Got to get out of here first, sir!'
He thought about the marriage bitterly, ignoring me. His old restless bad temper jerked behind those pale, turgid eyes. His face had grown gaunt with his obsessions – that sense of outrage, not at his own failure, but at the world's refusal to give him recognition. His was a soul inching into madness. But he was not mad yet. I judged him still capable of answering for his crimes.
'Did my wife arrange this?' He demanded, as if the sunshine of sudden understanding had flooded him.
'Your first wife? She has the brain’s, but is she that vindictive, sir?'
'Who knows what she would do!'
I knew. In any situation I could make a fair guess: look for the obvious, then look for the oddest deviation from it and there would be Helena. Helena, making her quaint choice appear to be the only course anyone with any culture and moral fibre could take. He had owned her for four years whilst she struggled to do her duty by them both – yet he did not know the first thing about that eccentric mixture he called his wife.
'Helena Justina wanted to help you. Even when she knew you were a traitor and a murderer-'
'Never,' he stated briefly. 'This was the one thing I asked her to do for me…' He watched me easing the bloodstained cloth around my ribs. 'We could help each other, Falco. Neither of us stands much chance alone.'
'Mine's a scratch on the surface. You're bleeding internally.'
Whether he was or not, the threat frightened him.
'Your wife's no fool,' I said, taking his mind off his terror of death. 'She told me, in Campania, "Every girl needs a husband."
'Oh she does!' exclaimed Pertinax. 'Did she tell you she picked up a pregnancy?' He said it as if he meant a heat rash she had caught on holiday.
'No,' I replied calmly. 'She never told me that.'
'My father found out while she was staying in his house.' Remembering how she had looked sometimes in Campania, that was allowable. Anyone who knew Helena's normal stamina should have realized without being told. Including me.
Although he was in the shade, Pertinax was sweating heavily; he blew out his cheeks. I suggested, 'I suppose it was your father's idea to use the situation; to rescue Helena's reputation – to offer a respectable name for her child?'
'I'm starting to think he wants a grandchild even more than he wants to do something for me!'
'Have you quarrelled with him?'
'Possibly,' he squeezed out.
'I saw him after you left Campania. I thought his attitude had changed.'
'If you must know, Falco, my father made it a condition of standing up for me that I should reestablish relations with Helena Justina – and when she rejected the favour he blamed me… He'll come round.'
'Did she ask for this favour?
'No!' he retorted in his most contemptuous tone.
'You surprise me!' I said softly. I let him settle, then put to him, 'This unlooked-for infant of hers must have a father somewhere.'
'You tell me! In fact I wish you would. If Helena Justina has slipped up with her father's driver it's irrelevant, but if she's involved with a man of quality I can put pressure on. You were her bodyguard; if you did the job properly you must know what pools she has been dandling her fingers in.'
I smiled faintly. 'You can assume, sir, that I do my job properly.'
The sunlit air was motionless in the small courtyard. Light gleamed broadly off the open-palmed leaves of the fig. Heat tingled a clump of scratchy lichen on the old stone seat and thrummed along the pierced wall where I sat.
'Ever see Helena Justina flirt with another man?'
'No one who got past me, sir.'
Pertinax spat with exasperation. 'The proud piece refuses to tell me – and you're no help!'
'What's it worth?'
'So you do know? Nothing,' he snarled abruptly. 'I'll find out for myself!'
'Thrash it out of her?' Pertinax made no answer. Something made him look at me more carefully. I asked softly, 'Does this man bother you?'
'Not in the least!' His defiance faded slightly. 'When I told her she was a fool not to take my offer she admitted she found it impossible to forget we had been married – but someone had a claim on her…'
I let out a long, low, suggestive whistle. 'That's tough! Some sly double-dealer with an eye on her bank box must have persuaded Helena Justina that he is in love with her.'
He stared at me, as though he could not decide whether I was being satirical.
My side was aching more than I could easily tolerate.
'Talking of well-stocked bank boxes, I have some news for you, Pertinax. Caprenius Marcellus had decided that placing his hopes in you is the short road to a long disillusionment. When you left without seeing him, he made other arrangements-'
'Arrangements? What arrangements?'
‘Same as you today; he got married.'
His first reaction was disbelief. Then he be
lieved it. He was too crazed even to feel hurt; I could see him immediately planning ways to extricate himself. The busy thoughts of a madman were moving in his sick eyes; I interrupted relentlessly: ‘Marcellus was extremely fond of Helena. With her help you might have held him – but Marcellus had realized the truth. Oh, in many ways she will always be tied to you! The very high-mindedness you despise her for ensures that. She hated being divorced. But anyone who could offer Helena a refuge from her own sense of failure was bound to supersede you easily enough. Accept it,' I warned him steadily. 'You lost Helena Justina the way you failed at everything else you tried.' Before he could insult me in return I went on, 'I know why she rejected you. Marcellus knew.' I straightened my spine as I sat there, bracing myself against the hot pains in my side. He lay, half reclining in the damp shade against the far wall, refusing to ask me. I told him anyway.
'You think such a lot of yourself, Pertinax!' Whether I was making any impression on him or not, I had now convinced myself. The insults flowed much faster after that. 'You were useless – she soon did better once she was free of you. I expect you think you know her very well, but I doubt it! For instance, in all the years you were married to her, did you ever once discover that when a man has made Helena a happy woman, she cries in his arms?'
The truth came home.
'That's right,' I said. 'You lost her for the oldest reason in the world – she found a better man!'
Pertinax jerked with fury. As he started to come at me, the palm he was leaning on slipped and slid outwards. His bare arm scraped full length on the loose gravel path. I made no attempt to move. At the critical moment I had my eyes closed, but I heard the soft hiss of escaping air as the sacrificial dagger pierced his lung.
He died at once. So I knew that as he fell forwards the Chief Priest's knife had pierced his heart.
XC
When my own heart had stopped pounding I slowly stood up. Helena's garden.
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