'It is now. Please be honest. While Camillus Aelianus was waiting to book his passage, he heard your blow-up with a distressed passenger. When Aelianus came back to pay you his money…' It would do no harm to establish that Aulus had a witness, 'a naval attache was asking you more questions.'
'He was making a huge fuss,' Aulus backed me up. 'And you hated it, Antemon.'
'The navy nark is called Caninus,' I said. 'We know which rockpool he swims in. He told me himself, only yesterday. So, captain, were you troubled by pirates on your voyage to Rome?'
'No!' Of course Antemon was anxious to avoid deterring passengers.'I have never been bothered by a pirate ship in all my career. I told Caninus that, -before I told him which gangplank to jump off.'
'Caninus endorses the myth that before Pompey lost his head in Alexandria, he turned all the Cilician pirates into farmers,' I said. 'Caninus says ex-pirates are lovely men, who now feed goats and adore their mothers. But if so, why was Caninus on board your ship? And why were you so keen to give him the fast fly-swat?'
'I was only looking after my passenger.'
'With whom you had been arguing?'
'No, I was trying to calm him down so he was fit to deal with the situation.'
'Your passenger is in trouble?' The captain looked stubborn, so I added lightly, 'Of course he is. We know the man has lost his wife. Well, he may be new to Ostia and careless in giving her directions to their shore lodgings… Or what happened, Antemon? I'm still supposing the woman had a dirty fling.'
'Mind your language. He is my owner!' growled Antemon.
'This is his ship, you mean?'
'He's a highly respectable charterer. His wife, poor woman, is chaste, dutiful and probably scared witless. He'll get her back. He needs to be left alone with it. He doesn't want a crowd of uninvited advisers.'
'Advisers on what?' demanded Aelianus. Last night's conversation helped me work it out.
'You're talking kidnap!' The captain was silent. I pressed him again angrily. 'Your owner's wife was taken from your ship on the voyage.'That finally riled Antemon.
'No, she was not! No one boarded my ship. No one interfered with my passengers,' he protested hotly. 'I brought them here perfectly safely. They left the ship. The only reason Banno came back here to consult me was that he reckoned they were set up when we first landed and he wanted to know if any of the crew saw anything. He and his wife only went ashore yesterday. He reckoned someone watched the ship on arrival, sized them up and decided they were wealthy, then followed them and snatched her.'
'He thought you were in on it!' Aulus rashly accused him.
'No, no. Settle down, Aulus.' I trusted the captain. He was annoyed at his own bad position in this, – not least because he could lose his job if the vessel's owner blamed him. If he really had been passing information about his passengers to kidnappers on shore, he would have had a rebuttal ready and a more brazen manner. But it would be madness to finger the ship's owner. 'Antemon, I take it you have sold your cargo and your owner has the money?' He nodded. 'Banno will be able to satisfy the people who have his wife.'
'And they know it!'
'Of course they do. Keep out of it. Don't mess things up for him.'
'Answer this, then. Ever come across an old Cilician called Damagoras?'
'No.'
'A younger one called Cratidas?' No.
'Has Banno any names for whoever took his wife?' No again. That was to be expected. Kidnappers use anonymity to build fear.
'And when Caninus poked his nose in, how come he knew something had happened?'
Antemon was terse. 'This is a port.'
'You mean everyone in Portus knows that Banno's wife has been grabbed for ransom?'
'Only navy spies, with narks sitting in the taverns, men who have been hanging around on the docks for months, waiting for a whisper that it has happened again.' I picked up on 'again.'
'So it has happened before.' I remembered how Diocles had inserted that taster in the Daily Gazette.
'Rumours of piracy reviving are said to be false.' Not false enough for Banno.
'I am a private informer,' I told the captain. I can be discreet. My trade relies on it.' Antemon still hesitated.
'You can trust Falco,' said Aulus quietly. A senator's son has influence, and Antemon may have weakened. I twisted the awl.
'Look, I was already working on a case which may connect with this. Let me know where I can find Banno. This is for his own sake and the wife's safety. Somebody does need to help this couple,' I said. 'If you don't want to co-operate with Caninus and the navy, maybe I can do something for Banno unofficially.' The captain was still unhappy, but muttered to us where Aulus and I could find his ship's owner ashore.
XXII
Banno was a pale, tense man, at a guess at least half Egyptian, a negotiator for the salt fish industry. He worked fast. he had already paid up and retrieved his wife. He made out to us that nothing had happened, but he was not prepared to discuss the matter.
We glimpsed the wife, Aline, sitting in a basket chair at their lodgings, deep in shock. Our raised voices in the doorway made her cover her head with her mantle.
Aulus and I were kept out of their apartment by Banno, who blocked the doorway. He was certainly jumpy, as if he had had a close brush with fear.
Banno and Aline were leaving for Rome within the hour, and if they came back to Ostia when leaving Italy, they would pass straight through and board their ship. They might very well prefer now to pick up the Spes at Puteoli, or even take the long overland route to the deep south and rendezvous at Brundisium. I said quietly, 'The only way these criminals will be stopped is if you tell us what you know.' Banno replied, even more quietly, trying not to let his wife overhear.
'They will know if I talk to you. We don't want to be killed.' I offered to arrange protection. He shut the door in my face. We returned to the ship. This time the captain had taken defensive measures: a sailor maintained he had gone ashore, nobody knew where.
We were sure Antemon was skulking below decks, but it was impossible to look. An extremely large deckhand, coiling a rope in a way that showed off his biceps, made us aware that sneaking around on the Spes without permission would be inadvisable. Not wanting to end up crammed head down in a row of tightly packed amphorae with another heavy row on top of us, we turned around for home. It was departure time for everyone who worked daily at Portus.
Appalled by the queue for a ride back across the Island, I led Aelianus to the bar where Gaius Baebius and I had chatted two days ago. A carved sign, tail up, indicated its name was the Dolphin.
A welcome sight to travellers, it had a large stock of wines and a decent array of food pots. I guessed it served plenty of breakfasts when the early morning workers arrived, and it certainly had a pavement full of punters in this evening rush hour. With nothing to lose, I asked the proprietor what he had heard about kidnappings. He claimed ignorance, but loudly asked his regulars. These barnacles all instinctively feigned puzzlement; to them we were slick town boys. When I said a wealthy woman, newly landed, had been captured and ransomed only that day, they shook their heads and declared it was terrible. But gradually one or two admitted that they had heard of such things happening.
After Aulus bought drinks all round [he borrowed the money from me, on the excuse that this was a business expense,] they lost some of their scruples and we became as friendly as I ever wanted to be with short sweaty men who manhandled fish-sauce containers all day. Between them, they were able to recall at least three stories of abductions. Since the victims wanted secrecy, there could have been plenty more. Details were skimpy. women were taken, their male relations pressurised. A common thread was that afterwards the ransomed women were traumatised. The tendency was to leave Ostia fast.
'You don't know who does it?'
'Must be foreigners.' Anyone who came from outside Ostia was a foreigner to this lot. They meant that the kidnaps did not form part of the age-old pilfering, skiving, ca
dging, diddling, dawdling and mislaying that were regarded as normal trade practice by the long generations of intermarried families who worked in the ports. One gnarled stevedore with a lop-sided shoulder did suggest that someone had reported the problem to the vigiles.
'Give those Rome boys something else to think about!' he grinned gummily. These men who worked on the docks and in the warehouses preferred not to be policed.
'Have you seen anyone hanging about around here?' I asked. 'Other than us two, of course?' There was muttering and a little laughter. Somebody mentioned Caninus. Someone else turned his back on the conversation, disgusted. They loathed the navy even more than the vigiles, it seemed.
'I know about Caninus. I was thinking of a clerkish sort, a scribe looking for something exciting to write about. His name is Diocles. Ever seen him?' Apparently not.
Aulus and I finally hitched a lift back to the ferry on a slow cart, but all across what they called the Island the traffic jam was terrible. Like many others, we soon jumped off and walked. At the ferry dock we herded with the crowds, with people's toolkits jammed in our backs and elbows in our sides. On the boat, we were hanging off the gunnels, clinging to any handhold, and bruised every time the oars made a stroke. The oarsmen had their work cut out. Accustomed to this frenzy, they just stopped rowing when they were impeded too much. That added to the torture, as we drifted downstream and had to be brought back. The haze of garlic, wine, and perspiration from work tunics formed a breath-stopping miasma above the low-slung boat as it crept across to Ostia. Charon's filthy punt must be more pleasant. At least there you know you are heading to interminable rest in the Elysian Fields.
Another thing. Charon makes every dead soul pay. Aulus and I were the only men from Rome in this ferry, and we seemed to be the only two who had been asked to cough up fares. At last we landed, and walked straight back home. It was too late to achieve anything more. I wanted to think first, because I had not come to Ostia to investigate kidnaps; no one would thank me, – or pay me. I had to keep sight of my target. My brief was to find the scribe, Diocles. So far, I had linked him to a possible retired pirate, but the Damagoras connection led nowhere definite. I had no cause to think Diocles had known about the kidnaps we had just uncovered.
He would have liked to know, yes. Kidnap for ransom was an old pirate tradition, but I couldn't prove Diocles had realised it was going on here. For all I knew still, he might really have come to Ostia to see his auntie as he told the other scribes. Once here he may have considered moonlighting on the Damagoras memoirs while he was invisible to his Rome superiors. Perhaps he dropped that idea when he realised he would earn better pocket money on a building site. In the end I might find him alive and well, mixing mortar for a construction team and unaware of the fuss he had caused. Mind you, he would find construction hard labour; he was no stripling.
I possessed some personal details. The vigiles' recruiting officer had said Diocles was thirty-eight, a few years past retirement for an imperial freedman. Palace slaves were normally manumitted and pensioned off with a bag of gold when they were thirty. Holconius and Mutatus had told me the only reason Diocles was still working at the Daily Gazette instead of marrying and setting up a scrollshop behind the Forum, was that the Emperor wanted reliable old hands buffing up the imperial name.
Why did Vespasian care about the Infamia column? According to Holconius, the court circular would constantly display good news affecting members of the ruling Flavian dynasty, impressive deeds in the fields of culture, adorning the city and bashing barbarians. But Vespasian, famous for his old-fashioned ethics, also wanted tales of immorality toned down in the Gazette so that he, – as the Father of his Country, – would appear to have cleaned up society. The old spoil-sport needed to feel the scandal column was no longer so titivating as it had been in Nero's day.
I could not see, or could not see yet, how piracy came into that. True, if there really were pirates still roaming the seas, Vespasian would clear them out again. But would he want to be 'the new Pompey'? Pompey was an unlucky politician, murdered in Egypt for the delight of his rival, Caesar. In the end the great Pompey was a loser. Vespasian was too canny for that. Wrong message from the signal post. And wrong messages were not Vespasian's style.
XXIII
First thing next morning I was off to the vigiles station house. Petronius was not there. In fact, no one much was around. I addressed myself first to the clerk. He told me Brunnus was out somewhere. At the time I took that for a good omen. Ignoring cries of protest from the arsonists and thieves who would have to wait longer to be freed on bail, I extracted Virtus [the clerk's name, I discovered] and drew him to the open courtyard where nobody would overhear.
'You'll know this,' I complimented him. 'You're the only one here I can rely on to be up to date with case-work.'
'Stop buffing the bronze, Falco. What's the score?'
'Kidnap.' Virtus shook his head. He turned to go back to his duties. I grabbed his arm. I told him there had been several victims, and I thought some at least had made vigiles reports. Virtus assumed the vague expression clerks do so well.
'Maybe the snatches occurred months ago when the last cohort were here.'
'Which preceded the Sixth?'
'I forget. The Fourth? No, the Fourth are due to replace us next week. They are Petronius' unit.'
'I'm well aware of that,' I said. 'But it's an ongoing crime, – and you're a permanent clerk. Don't mess me about. Now the kidnappers apply frighteners, but people do get angry when their shock dies down. Victims have been here, – and somebody has interviewed them.' Virtus wavered.
'There's only one place these records may be, Falco.' I produced a sweetener. Sometimes clerks tell me secrets because they like my approach; sometimes they hate their bosses and are glad to cause trouble. For Virtus, his job would be endangered if he talked [he protested, therefore a bribe was essential.] I paid him. I liked him, and I reckoned it would be worth while.
He was still nervous. We walked to the end of the exercise yard, and right into the shrine. It honoured the Imperial Cult. Indoors, we were shadowed by busts of the current Emperor, flanked by his sons, Titus and Domitian Caesar, along with older heads of Claudius, who first brought the vigiles to Ostia, and even the disgraced Nero. That was quite enough witnesses. I made sure no one else was lurking.
Now I was nervous too. The way Virtus and I had entered must look suspicious. Anyone who had seen the two of us skulk up the portico and nip in here would imagine we were planning indecent acts. Sodomy was not my sin, and the Fourth Cohort would have known that, but to the Sixth I was an unknown quantity. I had just handed over money to a public slave, then led him to a murky place. Such an act might ruin my reputation, – and since this was a shrine, there could be a blasphemy charge.
'Get on with it, Virtus.'
Anxious to flee, Virtus muttered, 'It may be in the Illyrian file.' I groaned. Just when I had done enough research to master a Cilician angle, here came another provincial bundle of trouble. Illyria, in Dalmatia, is much closer to Italy but yet another rocky coast, also full of inlets and islands, also harbouring a nest of pirates in every cove where fishing fails to bring in enough money.
'What's with Illyrians, Virtus?'
'We keep a set of notebooks that gets passed to each new officer at cohort handovers. Don't ask what's in it.'
'You don't know?'
'It's top secret, Falco.' Not the straight answer to my question. This vigiles clerk was falling back on tricks of bureaucracy. 'I always thought it was a dead subject. Just because it comes with a high security category, doesn't mean the case is live-' He was waffling.
'Case, or cases?'
'Can't say. There is another set of notes just like it, on Florius.'Florius was the gangster Petronius was pursuing as his special subject.
'Florius is irrelevant. You're telling me another secret bunch of notes relates to someone with an Illyrian background. Is there a special navy contact on this issue? I had t
he impression Caninus only covers Cilicia.'
'No, it's the same. Caninus.'
'You sure about that, Virtus?'
'Every time a new detachment arrives, Caninus makes contact with their officer. Brunnus, for instance, had to be told to give Caninus special respect.'
'Who told Brunnus?'
'I did. It's my job to brief the officers on sensitive issues.'
'So who told you Caninus was sensitive?'
'He did.'
'Caninus instructs you, tell any new officer I'm an important secret contact? But you don't know what secret issues you are briefing them about?' Virtus laughed.
'So what? I'm a clerk. I do that all the time.' I failed to find it funny.
'How can I get to see the Illyrian notes?'
'Not possible, Falco.'
'More cash help you?'
'Still not possible,' said Virtus, – with regret. 'Brunnus slept with the Illyrian notes under his pillow last night. Don't ask me why he suddenly took an interest.' I guessed our party with Caninus had aroused his curiosity. 'Today he's gone off with the tablet in his satchel. I suppose he is chasing up the old cases… Problem, Falco?' asked Virtus, innocently.
'It's a little inconvenient.'
'If you don't want Brunnus to know that you have an interest.. .'
'Yes?'
'Don't you want to know what I can offer?'
'If you swindle me, you'll regret it. But I've reached my limit, cash-wise. So just tell me.' Virtus demurred. I got tough. He submitted. No officer wrote out his own case notes, however confidential. If a clerk was preparing a top secret report which would have a long forward timeline, – that is, notes that would eventually be handed on to other cohorts, – the officer would want them to look good. So the clerk would draft out a rough version, then rewrite it neatly. Unless the officer was extremely efficient and demanded to see the rough copy being destroyed, then naturally if the case was exciting the clerk preserved his rough copy.
'If I liked you enough,' said Virtus, I could show you my drafts.'
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