What a bastard. He had known all along that he could give me what I wanted. An hour later I was happy, as I clutched my own note-tablet. I had cribbed several names of complainants, some with addresses in Ostia at the time, though they had probably moved on by now.
I had dates of abductions. A couple had happened in the Sixth's term of duty, but there were others before. It looked as if only one captive was ever held at any time. That might be to lessen the risk, or there might only be one safe house available. All the reported abductions were of women. On return to their husbands they never knew where they had been held, and they seemed very confused. In most cases the husbands paid up at once; they were all carrying large amounts of cash for business purposes.
Sometimes the wife had been snatched immediately after the husband had arranged the sale of a large cargo, at the very moment when he was flush. Each time the clerk's notes said that now the distressed family were either leaving Ostia for Rome, or leaving the country. If Brunnus had gone out today to double-check their Ostian lodgings, he would have little luck; judging by the couple I talked to, Banno and Aline, nobody stuck around. Perhaps the kidnappers actually ordered the victims to leave. Those who complained to the vigiles had been brave. They were trying to protect others from sharing their anguish.
Helpfully, Brunnus had had his thoughts summarised. He calculated that there were several people involved in the abductions and holding the prisoners. All were shadowy so far. Brunnus suggested the victims might be drugged to ensure they would not recognise anyone. One of the captors could write. Husbands were always contacted by letter.
One significant lead came out of these notes. there was a go-between. All the husbands had dealt with a mediator, a man they found very sinister. He asked them to meet him at a bar, different each time; there was no regular venue. He would be a stranger to the barkeeper, – or so all the barkeepers claimed afterwards. He was very persuasive. He convinced the husbands he only wanted to help, and at the time they somehow believed he was just a generous third party. The contact letters [which he always took back from them] would tell the husbands to ask the barman for 'The Illyrian.' The Illyrian stuck to his line that he had been brought in to act as an intermediary. He implied he was a neutral, respectable businessman doing victims a good turn. He warned that the actual kidnappers were dangerous, and that the husbands must avoid upsetting them, lest the missing women were harmed. His advice was: pay up, do it quickly, and don't cause trouble. Once this was agreed, he took delivery of the ransom.
He dispatched his runner, a young boy, to tell the kidnappers he had the cash, kept the husband talking for a while, then suddenly sent him back to his lodgings, where as promised he would find his wife. No husband ever stopped to watch where the Illyrian vanished to.
'He's a member of the gang, whatever he claims… Well, thank you, Virtus,' I said.'Tell me, is Brunnus dealing with this personally?'
'He is. It doesn't tax him, Falco. There are no leads. By the time some brave husband comes to report a new abduction, it's all over. They always beg Brunnus not to have men visibly investigating. Brunnus agrees to that, because he thinks that if any victims are attacked for reporting the crime, he will cop the blame. He knows in his water he'll blunder. You have to admire it,' said Virtus. 'Whoever planned this out is very clever.'
'And Brunnus is playing along with them.'
'Tell me something I don't know!' said his clerk. 'But be fair, Falco. Brunnus listens when anyone brings information direct to us, – but official policy is that he should leave it all to Caninus.'
'So… do we trust the navy to handle this?' The clerk raised his eyebrows expressively.
'What, a bunch of sailors?'
Armed with this new information, I went back to my apartment. It had taken me the first part of the morning to extract the kidnap notes from Virtus, long enough for some new family arrivals to reach Ostia from Rome. I saw a cart, sensibly parked under a fig tree's shade in the courtyard. Then I found my nephew Gaius, sitting on the steps, looking as if he had earache.
Always keen to try new fads, he was poking at his bare chest, on which were infected needle marks from a recent foray into woad tattoos; one thing the poets don't tell you when they extol the blue Britons is that woad stinks. I looked sick; Gaius grinned ruefully. We did not speak. Upstairs I could hear my elder daughter squealing, and from past experience I guessed she was having her hair combed and pulled into tight fancy plaits, – an older generation's fad. Nux was whining in sympathy. Indoors, a large mullet was sitting on a dish I knew from home, with its tail lolling up against a well-trussed bag of leeks. Only one person I knew bought fish in Rome even though they were coming to the seaside. Only one person had access to a market garden which produced better leeks than those at Ostia.
'Marcus!' cried Helena, smiling brightly. 'Here's a big surprise for you.'
As surprises go, this was eerily familiar. I shoved my note-tablet casually under a fruitbowl and braced myself. 'Hello, Mother.'
'You look as if you have been up to no good,' replied Ma.
'I'm working.' Somehow it sounded as attractive as if I had said I was in quarantine with plague. Helena would have told Mother the details. Small, shrewd, suspicious, and convinced the world was full of cheats, my dear mother would not be impressed. My sisters and I had spent thirty years trying to fool Ma, and only managed to annoy her. It was my late brother, her favourite, who had consistently managed to deceive her; even now, Ma never acknowledged what a lying cad Festus had been.
'I'm so sorry to say this, Mother, when you've only just arrived, but I must flee back to Rome to follow up a lead, and I need Helena to come with me.'
'Lucky I came then!' my mother retorted. 'Somebody has to look after your poor children.' I winked at Albia. Albia had met Ma before; she managed to ignore the insult to her babysitting.
'So what is behind your visit?' I ventured.
'You keep your nose out of other people's business, young man!' commanded Ma.
XXIV
My mother was up to something, but Helena and I did not bother to investigate. We knew the answer might have worried us. We were able to travel that same afternoon. Having escaped Ma, the first person we found on returning to our house in Rome was my father. You never lose your parents. Pa was in our dining room, munching a take-away stuffed half-loaf, which had leaked purple sauce on to the couch cushions.
'Who let you in?' My progenitor grinned. He had let himself in. According to Helena, my father's grin is a twin to mine, but I find it deeply irritating. I already knew that whenever we were away, my father treated our house as if it still belonged to him. We had done a house swap a couple of years before; give Pa another decade and he might actually honour it.
'Marcus, tell Maia Favonia to leave that big daft friend of yours and come home to look after her poor old father's business,' he wheedled.
'I'll tell her you said so. Maia will do what she wants, Pa.'
'I don't know where she gets her attitude.'
'I can't think either! So now you're here, when are you leaving?'
'Don't be so unfriendly, lad. I heard you were in Ostia. Did your mother turn up?' My parents had not spoken to each other for nearly thirty years, since Pa ran away with a redhead. Nonetheless, each always knew what the other was up to.
'Arrived yesterday. Galla's Gaius brought her; he's a right little barbarian. I wasn't with Ma long enough to work out what diddles she's planning.' Pa, who was a wide-bodied, grey-haired old trickster full of deviousness himself, looked pleased.
'Oh, I know. She heard her brother has slunk ashore at Portus.'
'Who, Fabius or Junius?' My two uncles from the family farm took it in turns to abscond in a huff, often over woman troubles, always due to some huge slight involving the other brother. They each liked to hone grand, embarrassing schemes for a new life, mad ideas like becoming a gladiator or running a cuttlefish firm. [That was Fabius – ignoring the fact that shellfish brought him out in a rash.]
'Neither of them.' Pa dropped this news, and waited for my amazement. I gasped.
'Not… the one no one ever talks about?' Helena came in behind me.
'Hello, Geminus; this is a surprise.' She was excellent with irony. 'Who do you not talk about, Marcus?'
'Much too long a story!' Pa and I replied, with rare unanimity. Helena Justina smiled and let our enigma pass her by, knowing she could pull the answer from me like a splinter in the finger later. She coiled herself gracefully on the couch beside my father and helped herself to his oozing snack. It smelt delicately of saffron; he could afford luxuries. Strands of green vegetation dangled from the piece of bread she pulled off. Helena managed these with elegant long fingers, while Pa just sucked his up like an enthusiastic blackbird gulping bits of live worm.
'Geminus, now that we have you here…' Helena managed to make this sound inoffensive, yet Pa looked at her sharply. 'Do you know a man called Damagoras?' Pa was the one person I would not have asked. Still, Helena saw him as a man with useful contacts. He answered at once,
'Big old brigand? I have bought things off him.'
'What things?' I barked.
'Rather good things, normally.' Rather meant exceedingly good. And normally meant always.
'Is he an importer?' My father laughed coarsely.
'You mean he peddles stolen goods?'
'Oh I imagine so.' My father was an auctioneer and art dealer; the size of his profits signalled to me that he accepted goods for sale with little regard for provenance. Rome had a flourishing repro market, and Pa was adept at pretending he really believed a bare-faced copy was original Greek marble. In reality he had a good eye, and plenty of genuine statues that had evaded their real owners must have gone under his hammer too. I explained that Damagoras had told me he was too elderly to venture from his villa. My father spelled out for me, as if to a priest's little altar boy, that wicked people sometimes lie. He saw Damagoras as pretty active still.
'Active in what, Papa?'
'Oh… whatever he does.' Helena toyed with an olive bowl. Annoyed, I recognised the olives. It looked as if Pa had opened up the Colymbadian giant queens that I was saving for special occasions. My shameless father would now take big scoops of the luscious green gems back to his own house. I would be lucky to find a lick of marinade at the bottom of an empty amphora.
'Geminus, we think Damagoras is a pirate.' Helena gazed sternly at my father. For her, he always pretended to be a reformed character. He was right; people lie. 'If pirates still exist, that is.'
'He's a bloody Cilician,' retorted my father. 'What more do you need to know?'
'You regard all Cilicians as pirates?'
'It's the only life Cilicians know.' And why should they abandon it, so long as crooked auctioneers in Rome would fence their plunder? I resented all my father stood for, but if he had information, I wanted it.
'I regret to say I need your help, Pa. Might Damagoras or his close associates be connected to a kidnapping racket that seems to be centred on Portus?'
'Oh that!' exclaimed Pa. He might be bluffing, but my father always had an ear to the ground. He now said he had heard of people being held to ransom, though he was unable to link these kidnaps to Damagoras. He swore he knew the old villa-owner only as the seller of a particularly fine 'Aphrodite Surprised', a couple of years back. 'Beautifully modelled drapery!'
'Wearing a wet chiton, you mean?'
'Not wearing much of it!' Pa smacked his lips. When I produced my list of the kidnap victims, the first result was depressing. Pa knew for sure that one man called Isidorus, an olive oil merchant, had left Rome about a month ago. The other names were strangers to him, apart from a certain Posidonius, whom Pa said he could probably find for me. He already knew Posidonius had been a victim; the man had been moaning all around the Emporium about having to ransom his daughter, – and my father added the detail that Posidonius believed one of her captors had interfered with the girl.
Forewarned about this, Helena Justina came with me next day, after Pa did provide contact details and I went to interview the victims. Posidonius was a timber merchant who specialised in exotic woods from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He shipped in the baulks for manufacture in Rome, where they were used to make enormous tables for millionaire show-offs with palatial homes. There was a high returns rate, owing to the fact that eager purchasers forgot that the heavyweight tables had to be delivered and installed. Fine art mosaic floors had crumbled under the massive display pieces, and slaves in two different households had suffered heart attacks while trying to lift table tops through doorways. One had died.
Posidonius was now trapped in Rome, awaiting the outcome of a compensation claim against him. But it had done him good. The publicity had brought in new business. His daughter, called Rhodope, was about seventeen. She travelled around with her father, who was a widower. He had brought up Rhodope single-handed since her birth. He seemed intelligent and cosmopolitan, much annoyed with himself for being caught out by an old routine. She looked quiet; not that that meant much.
Helena took the girl aside while I discussed the abduction with her father. Pa had described him talking freely to Emporium colleagues, but with us he clammed up. Perhaps he had now realised the risks. He would only confirm to me that what had happened fitted the case notes Brunnus had drawn up. Mention of the Illyrian, the sinister go-between, made Posidonius shudder. He was reluctant to discuss his fears for Rhodope, perhaps because if she had been seduced it might affect her marriageability.
Besides, he complained that she refused to talk to him. Helena had more luck. She told me afterwards that in her view, the girl had definitely lost her heart and all that traditionally goes with it. Helena had found her extremely naive. My glimpse of Rhodope had been of a wide-eyed teenager with that guileless look that usually means a young girl is hiding dangerous secrets from her worried parents. I should know; I had been the secret sometimes, in my younger days. While Rhodope pretended to be preoccupied with eye paint, she was probably hoarding her dress allowance for a flight from home. Helena had discovered that the girl, completely infatuated, believed that the captor who had paid her attention was coming back to find her, so they could elope.
'His name is Theopompus. Apparently he is virile, dashing, and very exciting to know.' I said,
'I bet his breath stinks and he already has three wives.'
'If you point that out,' replied Helena sadly, 'Rhodope won't hear you.'
'So how did you persuade the loopy lummock to talk?'
'Oh…' An uncharacteristic vagueness afflicted my beloved. 'She's sweet, and perhaps rather lonely.' It could have been Helena herself when I met her, though in her case I would add, furious with men, ferocious with me, and extremely bright. Among the girls I knew at the time, she shone. If I had had any wives, I would have socked them all with divorce notes.
'That was what made her vulnerable, I suppose, Marcus. She may have opened up to me because I confessed I had once fallen in love with a handsome brigand myself.' I gazed at her benignly.
'Helena Justina, what brigand would that be?' Helena smiled. Retailers of fashionable household goods are not my favourite citizens, but as a father of girls, a deep chasm of sympathy for Posidonius opened in my heart. I left him a note of how he could contact Camillus Justinus in Rome if he needed professional help; I did not say, if Rhodope ran away. With luck she would just mope, and by the time she realised Theopompus was never coming, some other appalling fellow might be hanging around to take her mind off it. Rhodope had been ransomed some weeks before, during the period when Diocles was still staying at his lodgings in Ostia. I checked and no approach for information had been made by the scribe to this family, either at the time or since. Diocles could have been in Ostia for some completely different purpose, or else he knew about the kidnaps but had been prevented from following up the story. The way the mysterious 'Illyrian' always stressed that the kidnappers were violent worried me. If Diocles had dabbled in
this, I started to feel anxious about the missing scribe's fate.
XXV
All the other names on my list were dud throws of the dice. Pa introduced me to people who knew some of them, but the men I needed to talk to, the husbands who had paid up ransom money, had all left town. Most originated overseas, and had gone back there. Perhaps now they would never return. To the kidnappers these victims were just faces in the throng, but if traders were rich enough to fleece, they had had something to offer Rome. The city was losing valuable commerce. I was more angry about the human cost, though. People at the Emporium all spoke of pleasant, knowledgeable commodity traders, good family men, which was why they travelled with their wives.
When Helena and I chased up addresses, we felt the victims had left a strong aura of distress and fear behind them. After some thought and discussion with Helena, I walked over the Aventine to the Twelfth District to the vigiles headquarters of the Fourth Cohort. I went alone. Petronius Longus would not thank me. I was going to see Marcus Rubella. Rubella was the cohort tribune, Petro's loathed superior. I generally found him not so bad, if you could ignore a few flaws: he was an ill-qualified, over-fastidious, self-serving rule-stickler who tidied his desk and ate raisins all day. Rubella was a fellow Petro and I never wanted to go for a drink with, – which was just as well, because he never asked us. I was better-known among the rankers from the other half of the cohort, those who patrolled the Thirteenth, my home district, but even in the Twelfth my face was familiar.
Barracking met me; I returned the banter, then I was allowed in to see the tribune at once. Rubella never had much going on in his office and he knew I only went to see him if there was some big event I could not handle by myself. He was aware that if Petro had been here in Rome I would have consulted him instead.
'Marcus Rubella, I have been working in Ostia. I believe the Fourth is off there soon.'
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