Bodies Politic

by David Wishart

  A clerks’ room, lined with docketed pigeon-holes, with three or four desks and the usual complement of admin slaves. Hamster-face was talking to one of them, his back to me.

  ‘Uh...excuse me,’ I said. ‘Your name Cineas?’

  He turned round. Bull’s-eye! From the look on his face I could’ve been Medusa on a bad hair-day. Whatever the guy said now wouldn’t matter, because I’d already got what I’d come for in spades.

  He recovered, said a word to the slave, and came over. Forget worried; this particular hamster looked sick as a dog. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Yeah. My wife here’s looking for -’ I pretended to do a double-take. ‘Well, well, small world!’ I held out my hand. ‘You came over with us from Rome, didn’t you? A few days ago, on the Erytheis? Valerius Corvinus.’

  ‘I -’ The guy looked ghastly. He swallowed. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course, I didn’t recognise you at first, sir.’ We shook. It was like holding a boned fish. ‘Welcome to Alexandria. Now, how can I help?’

  ‘Perilla?’ I said, turning to her.

  ‘I was looking for dress material,’ Perilla said. ‘Very light-weight, suitable for bridesmaids’ dresses. Smart but not too showy. As far as colour’s concerned -’

  I left her in shopping mode, drifted over to an empty desk and played with the abacus. Well, I’d got my whistle-blower, no doubt about that; and I’d got my contact between Flaccus in Alexandria and his imperial pals in Rome, too. As an unofficial courier, a merchant would be perfect: these guys are back and forward all the time during the sailing season, and if he was a major government contractor, like Gallius had said, then no one would be surprised if he were a frequent visitor to the governor’s offices. And if ever bars were rattled then I’d rattled Cineas’s. The guy was running scared already. I glanced back at him. Perilla was doing well: slaves were scurrying about, the desk in front of her was covered with swatches of material, and she and the Princess were deep in a three-way conversation about the relative merits of cotton and silk, and whether he could manage that one in a slightly paler colour. Clarus, like me, had edged off to the sidelines. I grinned: the poor bastard had had three days of this already, and his brain must’ve been leaking through his ears. Still, like I say, if he insisted on getting hitched then it was a necessary learning experience. He’d just have to work out his own avoidance strategies like the rest of us.

  ‘Marcus!’ Perilla said. She sounded excited.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Come and see this!’

  Oh, bugger. I went over. She was holding up two swatches.

  ‘These are good. Really good. In fact, I think one of them would do very nicely. Which do you think? Marilla says the one on the left, but I prefer the other one.’

  They both looked the same to me. Blue. ‘Ah...I’m with the Princess.’

  She frowned. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely certain. No comparison.’

  ‘Oh, well...’ She turned round. ‘Clarus?’

  Clarus agreed with me. The kid was learning fast.

  ‘Then that’s settled, I suppose.’ She sniffed. ‘Three against one. We’ll have to take them out into the light to make sure, of course. Do you mind?’ she said to Cineas.

  The guy was looking distinctly chewed, which with Perilla is par for the course. I almost felt sorry for him. ‘No, of course not, madam. Carry on.’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ve made my mind up already. The one on the right’s perfect.’

  ‘You said the one on the left.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I meant. Slip of the tongue.’

  She gave me a suspicious look. ‘Fine. Marilla? Clarus?’

  They left.

  ‘So, uh, what were you doing in Rome, pal?’ I said to Cineas when they’d gone.

  ‘Business, Valerius Corvinus,’ he said. He was still looking nervous as hell, and having been thoroughly Perilla’d for the past twenty minutes or so obviously hadn’t relaxed him any. ‘Naturally. I try to get over there two or three times a year to discuss things with my agents. Rome is my biggest overseas market.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’d expect it would be. Ah...material the only thing you handle? Business-wise?’

  ‘Yes. What else would there be?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Favours for friends, perhaps. Packages they want delivered, in one direction or another. Confidential documents too sensitive to trust to strangers. Letters. That sort of thing. It must be pretty handy, in some quarters, to have a pal who shuttles between Alex and Rome on a fairly regular basis.’

  His face was grey. ‘No doubt it is. And of course yes, I do carry things for friends, when I can. It’s the way things are done.’

  ‘Friends like the governor?’

  I thought he’d peg out; he put one hand on the desk to steady himself, and two or three of the swatches slid to the floor. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘I don’t know Avillius Flaccus. Not personally. I meant business friends, naturally.’

  ‘Right. Right.’ I picked the swatches up and put them back. We were getting covert glances now from the bought help, and they were being too busy with their styluses. ‘And your friends at the Rome end. They wouldn’t have connections with the ex-Praetorian prefect, would they? Sertorius Macro?’

  ‘I don’t...Valerius Corvinus, what’s this...I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what...’ He was stuttering, and grey as old porridge. ‘If you’re trying to...’

  ‘Marilla’s quite correct, Marcus. The darker shade’s much better.’ Perilla, back from her sunshine test. Bugger! ‘It’ll do perfectly. Cineas, we’ll take -’ She stopped, her eyes darting between us. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, lady, everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘We were just having a quiet chat, that’s all, only he was taken over dizzy. Seems he has these spells now and again, right, pal?’

  Cineas nodded weakly. You could’ve used the guy as the before picture for a health spa advert and the punters would’ve come flocking.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Perilla said. ‘You’re all right now? Should I tell one of your slaves to bring you a cup of water?’

  ‘He’s okay as he is,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then.’ The lady shot me a look. ‘As I was saying, we’ll take twenty yards.’ Bloody hell! I couldn’t remember exactly who the bridesmaids were going to be, but they must be hefty girls. ‘Can you deliver it, please? We’re staying with Fabius Stratocles, in the Bruchium district.’

  ‘Ah...yes, madam. Certainly.’ Cineas wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t look at me all through the negotiation of the price, either. The guy looked as if he was sleepwalking, and walking through a nightmare at that. Perilla paid, and we left.

  ‘You could’ve given me a few more minutes, lady,’ I murmured as we got into the carriage. ‘When you came breezing back I had him on the ropes.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Marcus.’ She looked stricken. ‘In all the excitement I didn’t think.’

  ‘“Excitement”?’

  ‘Of finding the material, of course. We couldn’t’ve done better. It really is absolutely perfect.’

  Jupiter. I’d never understand women. Still, I couldn’t complain; I’d got what in practical terms amounted to an admission of guilt, and no doubt once Cineas had got over his funk he’d be up at the Palace passing on the glad news that I was well down in the pile of dirty smalls. Before the Roman admin service put the shutters up for the night I reckoned Flaccus would be a very worried man indeed.

  I didn’t think I could’ve done much better either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The next day we left the kids to their own devices and, like I’d promised Agron we would at some stage, paid a courtesy call on Cass’s sister Mika. She and her husband Nikos lived in the south-western district of Rhakotis, not far from the big Temple of Serapis. Not a very upmarket quarter - it’s where most of the native Egyptians live, and in Alexandria’s ethnically-stratified society these poor bugg
ers’re the absolute lowest of the low - but within spitting distance of the main canal which joins the northern harbours with Lake Mareotis to the south. Nikos ran a barge between the Mareotis quays where the goods that come down the Nile from Egypt proper are landed and what the locals call the Box, the square artificial harbour off the Eunostos, and living close to the canal was handy.

  I’d got detailed directions from Cass, so we found the house easily: a big, rambling place built of mud-brick that Mika and Nikos shared with three other families, and that looked like it’d already been there when Alexander’s architects were laying out their grid. As, maybe, it had, because Rhakotis was the original Egyptian town, before the Greeks built Alexandria proper around and on top of it. I had Frontis, Stratocles’s coachman, park on a bit of waste ground so he wasn’t blocking the road; streets were a lot narrower and more haphazard in this part of the city, and barring the style of the buildings and the nodding date-palms behind the courtyard walls we could almost have been back in Rome. We left Frontis to fight off the local kids, who’d been clambering all over the carriage practically from the moment it slowed, and went up to the door.

  There was a gaggle of women outside, sitting on stools and shooting the breeze as they worked on whatever the family were having for dinner, only they’d stopped when we’d pulled up and were eyeing us suspiciously like we had designs on their stuffed vegetables. Mika I recognised straight off from her resemblance to Cass: they bred them big and distinctive in that family, and she would’ve made two of any of the others, easy.

  ‘Hi, Mika,’ I said. ‘Valerius Corvinus, from Rome. This is my wife Perilla. And Cass and Agron told me to say hi from them.’ She’d know our names, sure, from Cass’s letters, but we’d never met. And of course she wouldn’t’ve known we were coming to Alex.

  ‘Corvinus?’ The suspicious look vanished, replaced by a broad grin. She got up and laid the bowl of beans she’d been shelling on the stool behind her. Big was right, in all directions, but she hadn’t got Cass’s looks. Homely just about fitted, although the home in question would have ten rooms and an annexe. A pretty sizeable balcony, too. ‘Goodness! Come in! Welcome!’ The other ladies were rubber-necking now and the suspicion had changed to lively interest: see the exotic foreigners. ‘We’ll go up to the roof.’

  ‘The roof?’

  ‘It’s not too hot yet, and there’s a nice breeze.’ She led the way inside. ‘Well, this is a surprise.’

  ‘Excuse us, ladies.’ I edged through the gaping vine-leaf-stuffing and chickpea-rissole-rolling klatsch, with Perilla behind me.

  The door opened onto a tiny courtyard with a steep flight of open-air steps curving up from it. ‘Just go on up and make yourselves comfortable while I get you something to drink,’ Mika said. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  She disappeared through one of the doors leading off the courtyard.

  ‘Okay, lady,’ I said to Perilla. ‘Roof-climbing time. Onward and upward.’

  The steps gave out eventually onto a flat roof-space a dozen or so yards long by half that wide, with chairs and a table under a trellised vine and a low parapet wall running round its edge.

  ‘Marcus, it’s beautiful!’ Perilla said. ‘And what a marvellous view!’

  It was. There’re only two areas of high ground in Alex, the wooded Park of Pan to the east and this bit, with the Serapion at its peak, to the west. The rest of the city’s more or less flat. Which meant that from where we were we could see all the way to to Pharos Island in one direction and across to Lake Mareotis in the other. Mika’d been right about the breeze, too: you got it in the streets, of course, but it was stronger up here, and it smelled of the sea.

  We parked ourselves on two of the chairs looking towards the Island. Mika was far longer than the minute she’d promised, but the laden tray she was balancing on one hand explained that.

  ‘Mika, you shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble,’ Perilla said as she set out cups, a flask of wine and one of fruit juice, and various trays of pastries and fresh and dried fruits. ‘This is lovely.’

  ‘It’s nothing. You should’ve warned me you were coming.’ But the lady was pleased all the same. She poured two cups of the fruit juice. ‘Help yourself to the wine, Corvinus. It won’t be what you’re used to in Rome, but Nikos says it isn’t bad. He gets it from a friend with a vineyard near Therapeutae.’

  I did, and sipped. Mareotis again, and Mika’s husband knew his wines: as good as the one I’d had at Hagnon’s, if not better.

  ‘This is delicious.’ Perilla had taken a sip from her own cup. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Barley water with lemon, honey and mint. You haven’t had it before?’

  ‘No. You must give me the recipe.’

  I unpacked the bag I’d brought with me - a long letter from Cass, plus a few things we’d brought as presents from Rome - and we did the social chat bit while the plates emptied, particularly the pastry plates: where pastries were concerned, anyway, Mika was as good a cook as her sister. Which explained the spread. Finally, she said: ‘So what brings you to Alex?’

  Perilla told her about the wedding - and the material - at length, while I sipped my wine and looked at the view. ‘Perhaps, though, it wasn’t the ideal time to come,’ she said at last. ‘Not if there’s going to be trouble.’

  Mika frowned. ‘If there is then it’ll be none of our making, originally,’ she said. ‘Those Jews’ve needed putting in their place for years.’

  I felt a chill touch my neck that had nothing to do with the breeze: if Mika was representative of grass-roots Greek feeling in Alex, and she probably was, then we’d just heard the vox populi in no uncertain terms, and it wasn’t encouraging. ‘That what this guy Isidorus is saying?’ I said.

  ‘He’s a good man, Isidorus. He talks a lot of sense.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ I took another sip of wine. ‘He seems to have the support of the governor now, too.’

  ‘Maybe the governor’s just seeing the Jews for what they are at long last and treating them accordingly. They don’t fit in, they never have and never will, from what I hear they’ve been causing no end of trouble in their own country and now they want to bring it over here as well. We should pack them all off home and be rid of them, let them sulk on their own midden. That’s what my Nikos says. What a lot of people are saying.’

  ‘Uhuh.’ Shit, here we went again.

  ‘And that Herod Agrippa. He’s a slimy piece of work, that one. They say he’s a friend of the new emperor, but I don’t believe it for a minute. Anyone’d see him for the crook he is as soon as look. Him and the local Jews, they’re just made for each other, one piece of scum helping the other. The governor should throw him out of the city on his ear, send him back where he belongs, and tell him to take all his Jewish sweepings with him.’

  Perilla was looking at her wide-eyed, a pistachio-stuffed pastry half way to her lips. Bugger, we’d ripped a scab off here, and no mistake. I’d half-expected it after Cass’s reaction, but even so -

  ‘Ah...Flaccus seems a sensible enough guy, certainly,’ I said.

  That stopped her. ‘You’ve met him?’ she said. Obviously impressed.

  ‘Yeah, a couple of days back. Only for about ten minutes, but we had quite a friendly little chat.’

  ‘Nikos says he’s on his way out, more’s the pity.’

  I looked at her in surprise. Her husband was a Greek, of course, and the Greek never breathed who wasn’t interested in politics and didn’t consider himself an expert on the subject. Still, you didn’t expect a bargee to be up on internal Roman affairs. ‘What makes him think that?’ I said.

  ‘He says he’s losing his grip. And that fuss over the Jews’ message wouldn’t’ve done him any good with the emperor, either, even if he was completely right to ignore it. The mud-stirrers’ll’ve seen to that.’ She sniffed. ‘What business did they have sending their own anyway? As if we had two city councils, not just the proper one. I’m telling you, Corvinus, you have to watch those Je
ws like a hawk. Give them an inch and they’ll take a yard.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mika, but you’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘What message was this?

  ‘You mean you hadn’t heard about it?’ She looked incredulous, but then she shrugged. ‘Well, no reason why you should, in Rome, but it was all over Alexandria at the time. When word came that old Tiberius was dead and Gaius had been made emperor the Jews drafted their own message of congratulations and gave it to Flaccus to pass on. They said he’d said he would, but in the event he didn’t, he only sent our one. They were livid.’ She chuckled. ‘Served the pushy so-and-so’s right.’

  ‘We haven’t seen your children yet, Mika,’ Perilla said. ‘Aren’t they around?’

  ‘No, they’re out playing with friends. I’ve got too much to do to have them under my feet in the mornings, so I’m not complaining.’

  ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘Four alive and one on the way.’ Mika patted her stomach and smiled. Yeah, well; at least she was back in housewife mode again: Perilla had done it deliberately, and I was grateful. ‘The eldest’s ten and the youngest is three. All boys. Nikos says -’

  I settled down to my wine and left them to women’s chat. Jupiter, things had really started to get hairy there for a minute. I reckoned that unless matters improved Alexandria in another month or so would not be the place to be. We’d have to be setting off home before that, sure, but it still wasn’t a comforting thought.

  Finally, half an hour or so later, Perilla glanced across at me. ‘We really should be going, Marcus,’ she said. ‘We’ve kept Mika back long enough.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve enjoyed the company,’ Mika said. ‘Nikos will be sorry he’s missed you. He won’t mind dinner being a bit late for once. And thank you for bringing me Cass’s letter. It’s always a worry when you write to someone and give the letter to a stranger that it won’t arrive safely.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, getting up. ‘It was nice to - Shit!’

  ‘Marcus!’ Perilla stared at me.