Parthian Shot (Marcus Corvinus Book 9)

by David Wishart

  ‘Good. Thank you. Money is another matter. Of course my son will need –’

  ‘We don’t want your money,’ Jarhades said.

  Peucestas stood up. ‘I won’t quarrel,’ he said gently. ‘Especially today. I owe you and Erato too much for that. The money will be there whether you use it or not. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.’ He held out his hand. After a pause, Jarhades took it. ‘Now. We have a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, and I have to be getting back before I’m missed. Also’ – he smiled again – ‘no doubt you’ll have a lot to talk about after I’ve gone. We’ll meet again before I leave.’ He made a move towards Batis, then seemed to change his mind. Instead, he simply gave him a brief nod, walked past me towards the door, opened it and left without another word.

  There was an awkward silence.

  Gods alive!

  ‘Uh...maybe I should be going as well,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Jarhades was still frowning. ‘Erato; wine for our guest.’ She got up without a word and disappeared into the next room.

  Batis sat down on the bench. ‘Dad, I swear to you,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t know.’

  Jarhades shook his head. ‘Forget it, lad, it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault.’

  ‘Does that mean Batis is a prince?’ Calliste said.

  I turned to look at her properly for the first time. The name fitted: she was a little stunner, even without the makeup and the skimpy costume. But thirteen or not, the question and the tone had been a four-year-old’s. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  Jarhades’s frown had lifted. He reached over and stroked her hair. ‘More or less,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’ That was all. The girl turned her big, vacant eyes on me. ‘You were at the dinner party, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Corvinus. Marcus Corvinus. You’re a very talented girl, Calliste.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  It should’ve sounded arrogant, or precious, but it didn’t: it came out simply, in the same childish voice that was way too young for the body. I glanced at Jarhades.

  ‘Leave us to talk,’ he said gently. She got up and left the room. With a muttered excuse Batis followed her. Jarhades waited until they were gone and then said to me: ‘You can see now why I didn’t want that bastard touching her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I can.’

  ‘It’s nothing serious.’ He was looking down at his hands. ‘She’s just a bit slow. But as a juggler and tumbler she’s first-rate.’

  I didn’t answer. Just a bit slow. Yeah, sure. Well, they seemed happy enough. And he was right; she was good at what she did. That was all that mattered.

  ‘Batis worships her, and it’s mutual.’ He looked up. ‘Still, that’s a problem for the future, isn’t it?’ Erato came in with a tray: two cups of wine and a plate of cheese and olives. ‘Here’s the wine. It’s Syrian, as good as Mano’s or better.’

  Erato was avoiding his eye. She set the tray on the table then sat down on the bench opposite.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d have told you if I could.’

  I got up quickly. ‘Look, you can do without me, right? You don’t need –’

  ‘Sit down. It’s all right.’ Jarhades half-smiled and ducked his head. ‘Though I won’t say it hasn’t been a shock.’ He turned to Erato. ‘You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, girl, quite the reverse. Now. We have a guest. I told him you’d want to thank him for what he did at the dinner. Was I wrong?’

  ‘No.’ Erato wiped her nose on her tunic-sleeve, her expression the stiffly-formal one you get sometimes with peasant women when they’re doing what they see as their duty. ‘You’re very welcome here, Marcus Corvinus. And I’m grateful, very grateful. We all are.’

  I took a swallow of the wine. It was good stuff, and after that little scene with Peucestas I needed it. ‘All the guy really wanted was to make trouble,’ I said.

  Jarhades nodded; he didn’t seem all that surprised. ‘Yes. That I’d believe. That’s him all over. You get people like Mithradates; they meddle for the sake of meddling, then sit back and watch the fun.’

  ‘And at least this time no one got hurt,’ Erato said.

  ‘“This time”?’ I said.

  Jarhades scowled and pushed the plate of cheese and olives over towards me. ‘What these flash young society bastards do to each other at their parties, girl, is up to them,’ he said. ‘They deserve all they get, and you won’t catch me crying.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck were lifting gently. I reached for a piece of cheese.

  ‘What specific flash young society bastards would we talking about here exactly?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll’ve seen one of them at the dinner.’ Jarhades sipped his wine. ‘Damon. Prince Phraates’s son.’

  Something cold touched my spine. ‘Mithradates had a spat at a party with Damon?’

  ‘No. Not him; you said it yourself, he just stirs things up. The other lad went by the name of Nicanor. He –’

  ‘Nicanor?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Jarhades shot me a sharp look ‘You know him? Father’s an Armenian merchant, very big in the spice trade.’ He turned to Erato. ‘What’s his name again? Aratus?’

  ‘Anacus,’ Erato said. ‘His wife’s from Antioch. They’ve got that fancy house near the Caelimontanan Gate, the one with the –’

  ‘This party,’ I interrupted. ‘You care to tell me about it? The whole story, from the beginning?’

  ‘That was the one I was telling you about at Mano’s,’ Jarhades said. ‘When Mithradates made his pass at Calliste. Quite a big affair, a birthday bash. It’d be, what, two or three months ago now?’ He looked at Erato. She nodded. ‘The host had booked us along with another couple of acts. We weren’t there ourselves when the trouble started – we’d had the business over Calliste by then – but we got the story from one of the others. It was young Nicanor’s fault, sure, but Mithradates began it, setting Damon on at him.’

  ‘Damon was always needling the other boy,’ Erato said. ‘If you’ve met him you’ll know why. He’s soft as new-pressed goat’s-cheese.’

  Yeah, well; that was a verdict on Nicanor I wouldn’t entirely agree with, but it didn’t really matter and I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Anyway.’ Jarhades stoned an olive. ‘Then seemingly Nicanor shouts out something about Damon having fooled with his sister – Nicanor’s sister – and goes for him with a knife. When they pull the two apart Damon’s lost a finger.’

  ‘The sister had died,’ Erato put in. ‘Two or three months before that. I forget her name.’

  There was something about her tone that set the prickles in my neck going again. ‘“Died”?’ I said.

  ‘Of a fever. That was the official version, anyway. Rumour was, though, they buried her hand separate. And with what her brother claimed you don’t have to look far for the reason.’

  Right; a pregnancy and suicide. Oh, shit. Not that I thought the story had any relevance, apart from explaining how Damon had come by the wound that put him out of the running for the Great Kingship, even if he was only eligible by his own reckoning. ‘The girl killed herself because she was pregnant by Damon?’

  ‘So people said at the time. And there was no trouble later about the finger.’

  I sat back. Yeah, gossip aside – and the lady was clearly a born gossiper – that last was pretty surprising. Damon might be illegitimate, sure, but he was still a Parthian prince’s son, and in Rome you don’t carve bits off sprigs of the nobility and get away with it unless you’ve got serious clout. Or, of course, for an equally good reason. Hushing up a pregnancy and a suicide – especially if the girl’s father was a big wheel in the city’s merchant community – was as good an explanation as any, even if Phraates was a prince of the blood. It explained why Nicanor hated Damon’s guts, for a start, and why he wanted nothing more to do with him or his cronies. Also why he’d been so touchy on the subject of his family. I tucked the little n
ugget away for future reference.

  ‘What’s your interest, anyway?’ Erato had picked up Jarhades’s wine-cup and was sipping at it. The distraction seemed to have done her good. If I hadn’t seen her onstage in a spangled bra and fringed panties I would’ve placed her as a Suburan housewife swapping scandal with a neighbour over the shelled peas. ‘In Damon and his friends, I mean?’

  The born gossip’s question; I should’ve been expecting it. Erato was no fool, either.

  ‘Uh...’ I said.

  ‘Now, now, girl,’ Jarhades grunted. ‘That’s none of our business. Let the man drink his wine in peace.’

  Well, she knew about the Parthian delegation anyway, or at least that the guys were in Rome and that they were Parthians, if not the whys and wherefores. Also, she and Jarhades had been pretty helpful, and maybe there was more where that came from. ‘No, that’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m looking into a murder. One of the people at the dinner, name of Zariadres.’

  I hadn’t been expecting what happened next. The lady set the cup down sharply, and it caught the edge of Jarhades’s hand, tipped, and splashed wine onto the table-top.

  ‘Who?’ she whispered. The colour had left her face.

  Jarhades and I were both staring at her. ‘Zariadres,’ I said. ‘You know him?’

  She shook her head numbly. ‘No. I...at least, not that...no.’ She stood up. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll get a cloth.’

  I watched her go. Shit; she was lying, sure, that stood out clear as a pig in a swimming pool. The only question was what I was going to do about it.

  ‘What was that in aid of?’ Jarhades said. He looked as mystified as I felt.

  ‘You don’t know either?’

  ‘It seems there’s a lot of things I don’t know. What happened exactly, with this Zariadres?’

  I told him. It took a while, even though I kept strictly to the facts, and I had one eye on the door all the time, but Erato didn’t reappear. Finally, when she did, she came straight over to the table, eyes lowered, and began to wipe up the spilled wine while Jarhades and I watched in silence.

  When she’d finished, she put the cloth down and turned to me. ‘He was a Suren, wasn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘This Zariadres. He’d be from the Suren family.’

  ‘Uh...yeah. Yeah, I think so,’ I said. I had a faint memory of Isidorus – or was it Vitellius? – telling me that.

  ‘How..?’ Jarhades began. I laid a hand on his wrist, and he stopped.

  ‘He must’ve been named after his father, then. Or maybe an uncle.’ Erato sat down, and her voice was as expressionless as her face. ‘The Surens and the Mihrans – Lord Peucestas is a Mihran – are enemies. They always have been. It was a Suren that Artabanus sent that day to castrate the master and execute his family. His name was Zariadres, too.’

  18.

  It was well past noon when they let me go. I was grateful to be out in the street again. The unexpected connection between Zariadres and Peucestas had come as a real facer, and I needed peace and quiet to think it over.

  Peace and quiet and a wine-shop. Sure, I’d had the two cups of Syrian, but that was pleasure, not business. If I was going to think, I needed a wine-shop wall at my back, half a jug within easy reach and the soporific drone of bar-flies slagging off the city admin dole-queue clerks, analysing the last set of races in the Circus or explaining at alcoholic length to the barman how their wives-stroke-girlfriends didn’t understand them and what bastards their bosses were. The usual, in other words. I headed back in the direction of Iugarius and Renatius’s place.

  So; Peucestas might come across as pretty straight, but he had motive in spades. Plus, of course, a prime opportunity: he’d been the one to find the body, and I only had his word for it that Zariadres had been dead before he got there. Sure, the real villain of the piece had been the other Zariadres, his father or uncle, and he was probably long gone – Erato had said, later, when I asked her, that he’d been pushing sixty when Peucestas’s wife and kids had been executed – but for easterners, like our backwoods Sicilians, guilt’s an inherited thing and revenge doesn’t stop with the guy immediately responsible. Having a close relative a corridor’s length away, practically unguarded, in a foreign city where the authorities would chew their own legs off before getting involved would be practically an open invitation to murder.

  The question was, of course, how the situation had been allowed to arise in the first place. I might not know Parthians, or the diplomatic world in general, but common sense told me that sending two men on an embassy one of whom was related to someone who’d been responsible for lopping the bollocks off the other and sticking his family on pointed stakes wasn’t too bright an idea; especially if – as had to be the case – both parties were aware of the link. No doubt Isidorus would say that sort of thing happened all the time in diplomatic circles, but to me it made no sense at all. If Peucestas was the killer then it’d been a crime just waiting to happen.

  Having the motive and the opportunity were one thing; being guilty of the actual murder was another. Besides, from what I’d seen of him I liked Peucestas, and if he’d slit Zariadres’s throat I couldn’t altogether blame him. This case was turning into a real bugger.

  Then, naturally, there was the other important question that Erato’s little scrap of information had raised...

  I was on Iugarius now. As usual this time of day it was packed to the gunnels, both sides and the middle. Not that Renatius’s would be crowded: most of the punters you see around the Market Square district are sharp city types, plain-mantles and above, and Renatius’s is definitely spit-and-sawdust tunic territory. He serves good honest wine, though, better than the overpriced stuff you get in the chichi places in this area that cater for the upwardly-mobile set. And give me droning barflies over pushy execs doing private deals and knifing their absent colleagues in the back over jugs of second-rate Alban any time.

  I’d just passed one of the chichi-est wineshops – there’re quite a few on that stretch, which is another reason why Renatius’s isn’t heaving – when someone called my name. I turned. Nicanor was coming out of the door with two other youngsters of about the same age. All three were wearing party mantles and looking, among the respectable whites of the pedestrian traffic, like louche peacocks in a duck-run. One of his pals was carrying a wine-jug, the other had an arm round his shoulder, and all that was holding the two of them up was hope.

  ‘Hey, Corvinus! How are things?’ The words were slightly slurred: Nicanor mightn’t be as far-gone as his mates, or if he was he carried it a lot better, but he’d still’ve given a newt a close run for its money. ‘Still chasing Parthians, are you?’

  The lad with the wine-jug whispered something into his pal’s ear and they giggled together.

  ‘Yeah, more or less,’ I said easily, ignoring the looks we were getting from disgruntled mantles forced to edge round the sudden pavement-jam. City-centre mantles are the starchiest in Rome. ‘You’re pretty late back from your night out, aren’t you, pal?’

  Nicanor raised his shoulders. The garland slipped down over one eye, and he absently pushed it back. ‘A going-away party. Quintus here’s cousin’ – he nodded at the kid with the jug – ‘is off to join his legion this morning.’ He glanced up at the sun. ‘Oh, shit! Is that the time?’

  A large narrow-striper clutching a precarious bundle of wax tablets in the fold of his mantle glared at us and stepped carefully round, muttering. Quintus blew a raspberry after him. I grinned: those kids weren’t all bad. ‘Yeah. I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’d best get home.’

  He shook his head, almost dislodging the garland again. ‘No hurry. And I owe you a cup of wine.’

  ‘You don’t think maybe you’ve had enough?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He leaned against the wall and forced himself upright. ‘Not here, though. The bugger who runs the place threw us out. We’ll go further up the street.’

  ‘What abou
t your friends?’

  Both of them were out of things. Quintus – the guy with the wine-jug – had sat down and was grinning into space. The other one had his back to the bricks and looked like he was seriously considering throwing up.

  ‘They’ll be OK. They’re used to it.’ Nicanor took my arm. ‘Come on, Corvinus. I owe you a drink, and I pay my debts.’

  Yeah, well; I couldn’t just leave him, that was sure. And after my conversation with Jarhades and Erato I had questions to ask. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just the one. But I choose the wineshop, right?’

  ‘Deal.’

  We left Quintus and his pal – I’d bet the missing bits of their names figured pretty high on the social roll – communing with nature and carried on up Iugarius, drawing disapproving stares and tuts all the way from passing punters. At least Renatius’s would be safe: I could have a quiet word with Renatius himself to make sure that the one cup didn’t turn into five or six, and slip one of the regulars a silver piece or two to see him safe home at the end of it. I owed his parents that much.

  ‘So where was the party?’ I said.

  ‘The Quirinal. Or at least that’s where it started. Quintus had a friend near the old Flaminian Racetrack. We were going to drop in on him when it finished.’

  ‘Iugarius isn’t on the way to Flaminius Circus from the Quirinal.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but we took a detour. Decimus wanted to make a speech on the rostrum. We never did reach Quintus’s friend’s. We were pretty drunk.’

  Were pretty drunk! Bacchus on skates! They’d been lucky the Watch hadn’t lifted them, or worse: the city streets are no picnic area after dark, especially for three legless youngsters with more money than brains. Which in their case wouldn’t be difficult. ‘You’ve been out all night?’

  ‘Sure. We slept in the portico of the Julian Hall until the slaves turned up at dawn and threw us out.’ He sounded like it happened most nights of the month. Maybe it did.

  ‘So how about this morning?’

  ‘It seemed a shame to go home. Flavius’s serves a good breakfast, the wine’s good and one thing led to another. We’d’ve been all right if that bastard Quintus hadn’t been sick over the guy at the next table. He turned out to be a praetor with no sense of humour.’ He glanced at me owlishly. ‘How far’s this place of yours, then?’