Family Commitments (Marcus Corvinus Book 20)

by David Wishart

‘There are no buts. None. I’m telling you straight and for your own good: drop it. It’s none of your business, and it’s sure as hell none of mine. My involvement stops here. That’s all I’m going to say.’ He picked up the pen again and reached for a tablet. ‘Now push off, and take your slave with you.’

  There was no point in arguing, not with him in this mood. I nodded to Bathyllus, and we left.

  I was sorely puzzled, to say the least of it. There was a litter rank just down the hill from Eutacticus’s place, and despite his protests I put Bathyllus into one – the little guy was dead-beat and worn ragged – and told the litter-men to take him back to the Caelian. Me, despite the fact I’d had more than enough exercise for the day, I’d walk.

  I needed the time to think.

  13

  When I got home Bathyllus had the door open for me before I’d reached the top step. He’d spruced himself up in the interim, and although he was still looking tired and somewhat lacking in his usual bounce and zip there didn’t appear to be any lasting damage. He took my cloak and handed me the customary cup of wine.

  ‘Good to have you back, pal,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you. I mean, really thank you.’

  ‘None of my doing. If you want to be grateful to anyone be grateful to Eutacticus.’

  ‘I am, sir. Very much so, believe me.’

  ‘The mistress in?’

  ‘In the atrium, sir.’

  I went through.

  Perilla was on her couch, beaming. ‘Marcus, isn’t it marvellous?’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Bathyllus came in. He’s told me all about it, of course. He was incredibly lucky to escape with no harm done.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I stretched out on the couch opposite. ‘Yes. He was.’

  ‘Those men. The ones who kidnapped him. Have you any idea who they were, or what they wanted?’

  I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. Not so much as their names. Eutacticus must know, but he’s not telling. Seriously not telling, which is curious as hell.’

  ‘Yes.’ She frowned. ‘Bathyllus told me that as well. What do you think it means?’

  I shrugged. ‘Search me,’ I said. ‘But it’s not good news, that’s for sure. Not good at all. The guy was...scared is completely the wrong word, but then I very much doubt that Eutacticus does scared to begin with. All the same, I suspect if it’d been anyone else then scared might’ve fitted. The long and the short of it is that I don’t know; I can’t think. But it wasn’t just that he thought whatever it was was none of his business, it went way beyond that: he didn’t want so much as to touch it with a very long pole and gloves. He didn’t want me to touch it, either.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Come on, Perilla! I’m hardly likely to give up now, am I?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But just be careful, please. Particularly since we don’t know what’s involved.’

  ‘Oh, I will, I will!’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  Yeah, I’d been mulling that over on the walk home. Not that I’d got very far.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What’ve we got? Scrub the necklace, but we’re still left with the fact that our two kidnappers were looking for something valuable, that Oplonius had in his possession. Some thing, right, so it’s an object, something small enough to be hidden, carried or passed on. Any ideas?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, dear. How could I have?’

  ‘Right. Me neither.’ Bugger, we were wading through mud here! ‘Fine. Take it from the other direction, then. Oplonius himself. He’s a small-time crook, a professional con-man, an opportunist rather than a big forward planner: he’s close to the breadline, obviously used to living hand to mouth and operating on a shoestring. Give him a big heist, like Eutacticus’s necklace, and he’s way out of his depth and knows it. Me, I think that’s what’s happened here, at least it’s the likeliest explanation. It’s the necklace all over again, but not the necklace. He’s acquired – stolen – something or other that he didn’t know the value of originally, and now he’s up the creek without a paddle because whoever he took it from wants it back.’

  ‘Hold on, Marcus. Aren’t you assuming far too much of a coincidence here?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, as you say, or rather as Eutacticus said, Oplonius was only a small-time crook. His operational method was to look for a likely traveller – an ordinary likely traveller – and rob him of whatever of value he was carrying. The necklace was an accident that for him should have been a once-in-a-lifetime one. What you’re suggesting is that lightning has struck in the same place twice, as it were, and in a ridiculously short period of time. Surely that would be much too coincidental for comfort?’

  ‘Coincidences happen. You have a better suggestion, Aristotle?’

  She ducked her head and smiled. ‘No, dear, of course I don’t. But I’d like the comment to be noted, please.’

  ‘Duly noted and logged. Even so, if it’s okay with you, we’ll work along these lines for the present until another theory springs to mind. Agreed?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Fair enough. Fine.’ I took a slightly-miffed swallow from my wine cup: the lady could be seriously annoying at times. ‘The rest’s pretty straightforward, and much the same scenario as we had before. Judging from what Lydia told me, the likelihood is that Oplonius had got in touch with the thing’s original owner and done a deal for its return; at least that was what the owner had led him to believe. In actual fact he’d no intention of paying up in the first place; he sends his minions to kill Oplonius and get it that way. Only the minions discover that the whatever-it-is has already been had away by the guy’s slave and partner Damon, and the owner’s in deep schtook. That all hang together?’

  ‘Yes, of course it does. Except that I’d add the caveat, as we did with the necklace, that your ‘original owner’ could be another interested party altogether whom Oplonius approached with an idea of selling the thing.’ She tugged at a curl of hair. ‘None of this takes us very far, though, does it? All we’ve really done is add another unknown. We assumed that what Oplonius’s murderers, whoever they were, were looking for was the necklace. Now we know that wasn’t the case, but that’s all we know.’

  ‘It’s not as black as all that, lady. There’s another avenue to explore now.’

  ‘Yes? And what’s that?’

  ‘Eutacticus may not be willing to help any more, but he did tell me that Bathyllus was being held in the cellar of a wineshop out by the Latin Gate. A wineshop. Tenements are anonymous places; if the kidnappers had been holding him in the room of a tenement they could’ve stayed anonymous, easy, taken the let special for the job and given false names. But a wineshop’s different, that’s personal. So we’ve our own alternative source of information, haven’t we?’ I raised myself on the couch and shouted, ‘Bathyllus!’

  He must’ve been hovering just outside, because he was straight in with even less of a pause than usual.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The wineshop where they were keeping you. You remember where it was, exactly?’

  ‘Of course, sir. On Latin Road, just outside the gate on the left.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Thanks, pal,’ I said. ‘That’s all. Unless you’d like to top up my wine cup for me.’ I handed it over.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ He hesitated. ‘One thing that has been puzzling me, by the way. The men made no attempt to hide where we were going. And if by any chance you had produced Damon at the rendezvous and they’d subsequently released me then I’d have been able to tell you where they were, wouldn’t I? It seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?’ I just looked at him and said nothing. ‘Ah.’ He swallowed, and paled. ‘Ah, I see. Rather a...disquieting thought. I’ll go and get your wine, sir.’ He tottered out.

  ‘I’ll take a trip out there tomorrow,’ I said to Perilla. ‘The guys themselves are dead, both of them, but someone’s sure to know who they were and quite a bit about them: if you’re a stranger you don’t get th
e use of a wineshop cellar just for the asking, particularly if you’re keeping someone prisoner down there. And like I say if they’d wanted to stay anonymous they’d’ve booked in to a tenement or found an out-of-the-way disused shack somewhere.’

  ‘Marcus, be careful,’ Perilla said. ‘The wineshop business goes both ways. If they weren’t strangers, which I agree they can’t have been, then it’s very unlikely that whoever is still there was unaware of what was going on.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘But we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. With any luck–’ Bathyllus came back in. ‘That was quick, sunshine.’

  ‘No, sir. It’s Alexis. He wants to talk to you.’

  I frowned: Alexis was our volunteer gardener, and the sharpest of the household bunch. ‘What about? No, never mind, just wheel him in.’

  He did. The guy was carrying a small kid-skin bag.

  ‘I found this in a rose bed, sir,’ he said. ‘By the back wall.’

  I got up, took it from him, untied the draw-strings and emptied the contents onto the table. They poured out in a single stream of red and sparkling liquid fire.

  We all stared.

  ‘Oh, Marcus, it’s beautiful!’ Perilla breathed.

  I held the thing up by both of its ends. It was the necklace, of course: it couldn’t’ve been anything else. And if Eutacticus had paid only half a million sesterces for it he’d got a real bargain: there were at least a dozen fair-sized rubies in it, plus twice that in smaller stones, all set in a delicate lacework of gold filigree. Queen Philistis had been a lucky lady. Occusia certainly was.

  ‘You any idea how long it’s been there, pal?’ I said to Alexis.

  ‘It wasn’t there yesterday, sir. That I’m sure of, because I hoed the bed almost last thing. But I was working in a different part of the garden today, so I wouldn’t have seen it straight off.’

  Yeah, right. That made sense. Damon – it had to be Damon – had slung it over the wall under cover of darkness. A trade-off or a peace offering, whatever you liked to call it, through me to Eutacticus. At least the slippery bugger was finally showing some sense: he couldn’t have offloaded something like this himself, not in a million years. Nor, in all probability now I’d seen the thing with my own eyes, could a low-grade shyster like Oplonius, free man and Roman citizen or not; the pair of them had been on a hiding to nothing in that direction from the start.

  And that Damon hadn’t delivered it personally didn’t surprise me either. Bathyllus had been right: the guy’s natural instinct, if he had any doubts about his own safety, was to run and hide, and to stay hidden until he was absolutely, hundred-per-cent, cast-iron sure that the coast was clear. He’d trusted Bathyllus, sure – they were brothers and fellow-slaves, after all, and as a stranger on the run in Rome he’d needed someone’s help – but once I was involved all that had stopped. The fact that he clearly still had serious beans to spill and I’d be doing my best to get him to spill them made certain of it.

  Ah, well, at least when I took the necklace over to the Pincian, which I would do first thing the next morning, he’d be off the hook where Eutacticus was concerned, I was sure of that: for all his faults Eutacticus was a man of his word and I’d no doubts that he’d keep to his side of the bargain. The other bastards who were looking for him, though, whoever they were, they were another matter entirely. We’d just have to keep keeping our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t find him before we cleared this thing up. If we ever did.

  ‘You think I could try it on, dear?’ Perilla said. ‘Just the once. Just to say I’d done it.’

  I grinned: as a general rule she’s not one for fancy jewellery, Perilla, but I had to admit this was a special case, and I doubted she’d taken her eyes off it since it had come out of its bag. ‘Go ahead, lady,’ I said. ‘Enjoy. Up you get and I’ll put it on you.’

  She did, and I fastened it round her neck from behind.

  ‘Mirror, please, Bathyllus,’ she said. He went upstairs to fetch it. ‘Who did Eutacticus say it belonged to originally?’

  ‘Philistis. Hiero of Syracuse’s wife,’ I said. I went round the front to look. ‘Two hundred years old plus. Not bad. Suits you.’

  She dimpled, which is not something you see very often where Perilla’s concerned. ‘Nearer to the two hundred and fifty, then,’ she said. ‘Depending when exactly it was made in Hiero’s reign. Oh, my!’ She ran her hands over it.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘It’s not going anywhere until tomorrow, and I’d only be putting it in the strongbox. Wear it for the rest of the day.’

  ‘You think I could?’

  ‘Sure. Why not? As long as you don’t decide to sleep in it. Ruby necklaces in bed are a real bummer, worse than cake crumbs. Now lie back down and look regal.’

  She did. Bathyllus came back with the mirror and she inspected herself critically and at length.

  ‘Marcus,’ she said finally. ‘Would it be too late to get Phryne to do my hair, do you think?’

  Phryne was her maid. Oh, shit; what had we unleashed here?

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  She glanced sideways at me, smiled, and put the mirror down. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Point taken, I was only joking anyway. But it is rather beautiful.’

  ‘To change the subject completely,’ I said. ‘Bathyllus? What time’s dinner?’

  ‘Not for an hour or so yet, sir, but I could always ask Meton if it could be a little earlier.’

  ‘You do that, sunshine,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a bite all day, and I’m starving.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He exited.

  ‘If you’ve finished with me, sir, I’ll go as well,’ Alexis said. ‘There’s an hour of sunlight left and I’ve still things that need doing.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Alexis.’

  ‘You’re welcome, sir. And madam – very impressive!’

  I grinned: I’ve always thought our shy-and-retiring Alexis has a soft spot for Perilla. ‘Bugger off, pal,’ I said. ‘And thanks again.’

  He left.

  Well, that was that little problem cleared up finally. We’d just have to see what new joys the visit to the Latin Gate wineshop brought. For the present, though, I reckoned we were due some quality time involving a cup of wine, a good dinner, and a complete lack of thought about the case. I stretched out on the couch and reached for my wine-cup...

  At which point Bathyllus re-buttled in.

  ‘You, ah, have a visitor, sir,’ he said cautiously.

  Oh, hell, I didn’t believe this: we never had visitors, especially this close to dinner. Besides, Bathyllus’s face was straight and expressionless as a poker, which was a bad, bad sign. I set the wine-cup down and sat up straight on the couch.

  ‘Yeah? Who’s that, then, little guy?’ I said.

  ‘Your mother, sir. The Lady Vipsania.’

  Oh, fuck. Perilla and I exchanged glances. Bloody hell’s teeth, with everything else going on I hadn’t even thought about Priscus; I’d put the affair completely out of my mind, or at any rate when I had felt a twinge of guilt about doing nothing about it shoved the feeling firmly to one side. It’d been five days now since Mother and I had had our little chat and I’d promised to tail him, four since I’d seen him snogging the brunette in the curio shop, and Mother had never been one to allow the grass to grow under anyone’s feet, particularly mine. Now Nemesis had finally arrived, and as a consequence, barring some minor miracle, the shit was about to hit the fan in no uncertain terms.

  Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped, but all the same I was buggered if I knew what I was going to say to her. I steeled myself.

  ‘Okay, Bathyllus,’ I said. ‘Show the lady–’

  Too late; she was already in, and heading for me like a warship under full sail plus oars closing in for the kill.

  ‘Marcus,’ she said. ‘I am totally disappointed in you! You promised me faithfully that you would–’

  –at which point her eyes wen
t to what Perilla was wearing, and she stopped dead.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said. ‘Perilla, dear, where on earth did you get that?’

  ‘The necklace?’ Perilla said. ‘Alexis found it in the garden,’

  ‘In the garden?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. In one of the rose beds.’ She gave Mother her most brilliant smile. ‘It’s a long story. It isn’t mine to keep, unfortunately. We’re just looking after it until tomorrow.’

  ‘But it’s beautiful! May I see?’ She reached out a trembling hand.

  ‘Certainly.’ Perilla reached behind her neck, undid the clasp, and passed the thing over. Thank the gods for a woman’s priorities. Not even a possibly-erring husband could trump a half-million-sesterce ruby necklace, at least in the short term, and Mother was well and truly sidetracked. I breathed again.

  ‘It used to belong to Queen Philistis. Hiero of Syracuse’s wife,’ Perilla said. ‘Marcus has just recovered it for the real owner. That’s why he’s been so busy lately. He hasn’t had a moment for anything else.’

  I grinned; no mention of the fact that the real owner was the biggest crook in Rome and unlikely to figure in Mother’s list of socially-acceptable dinner guests. When the lady fudged things she did it in style.

  ‘Well, Marcus, I suppose as an excuse it’s more valid than most of the ones you usually come up with, so I’ll have to accept it.’ Mother sniffed and handed the necklace back with obvious reluctance. ‘Even so, I really did expect better of you. Haven’t you done anything about Titus?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Yeah, I have, actually,’ I said. ‘I followed him, like I said I would. On the one occasion, at least.’

  ‘Marvellous! And?’

  ‘Zilch.’ I kept my face straight and did a Damon, sticking as closely to the truth as possible. ‘All he did was visit a curio shop on the Sacred Way.’

  ‘There was no...hanky-panky?’

  Jupiter! I didn’t think even Mother used euphemisms like that any more! ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘It was a shop, right? A public place. What could he have got up to in there?’ I crossed my fingers. ‘Besides, I told you: that’s what Priscus does, he goes round the antique and curio shops to check their current stock. It was probably just one of the ones on his list.’