‘We’re at it.’ I pushed open Renatius’s door and went in.
Half a dozen pairs of eyes swivelled towards us, the same number of eyebrows climbed towards the ceiling and there were a couple of whistles. Then the punters went back to their drinks. As far as reaction went, that was it: as a whole, Renatius’s customers tend to keep themselves to themselves, at least until the newcomer’s bought his own wine and if he doesn’t look a soft touch.
Nicanor was looking around the bare wooden tables and benches and the plain walls. ‘You drink here?’ he said.
One of the tunics in the corner next to us sniggered into his cup and I sighed. Yeah, well, at least Charax the loud-mouthed cowboy builder wasn’t in evidence today. The mileage that smart bugger could’ve got out of a spoilt-brat kid dressed up in a fancy party mantle just didn’t bear thinking of. ‘My choice, remember?’ I said. ‘And I happen to like it. Sit down and I’ll get the drinks.’
‘No, it’s my treat. I’ll get the –’
‘Shut up.’
For a wonder, he did. While he parked himself none too steadily at an empty table I went over to the bar. Renatius was rinsing cups, and from the sour look on his face he’d heard the kid’s initial comment.
‘Afternoon, Corvinus,’ he said. ‘Who’s your fancy friend? Or are you nursemaiding?’
‘Just make it two cups of the usual, pal,’ I said. ‘No added smartass comments. And some bread, cheese, sausage and olives.’ It was past lunchtime, I was getting peckish and no doubt Nicanor could do with something to soak up the booze.
Renatius’s eyebrows rose for the second time. ‘Cups?’
‘Cups. And don’t come over asking if we want refills, either.’
‘Suit yourself.’ Renatius cast a professional eye over my shoulder. ‘He looks like he’s had as much as he can take for one afternoon, anyway.’
‘Right. Exactly.’ I opened my belt-pouch to pay, adding a few silver pieces on the side. ‘And see if you can get one of the lads to scare up a litter and watchdog him home when we’ve finished.’
Renatius poured the wine. ‘This another of your cases?’ he asked.
‘Could be.’
‘You certainly pick them, don’t you?’
‘He’s OK. Or he will be in a few years when he comes out the end of it. If he lives that long.’
I carried the wine and the plate of food over to the table. Now he was off his feet, Nicanor had taken on a sort of boiled-fish look: stiff and slightly glazed. I put a winecup in front of him, laid the plate between us and sat down opposite.
‘Cheers,’ he said, taking a swig. ‘Hey, this isn’t bad.’
I took a mouthful from my own cup. ‘Renatius’s Spoletian is about the best in Rome,’ I said. ‘He gets it from his cousin’s farm. Same goes for the cheese and sausage. Tell me about Damon and your sister.’
I’d been wondering how to broach the subject, and I’d decided the in-your-face approach was best. For the next five seconds, I thought I’d made a mistake. It was as if I’d thrown a bucket of ice-water over him. Nicanor set his cup down slowly, staring at me and reddening, all the signs of drunkenness gone.
‘How do you know about Sebasta?’ he said.
So that was the girl’s name. ‘One of the jugglers at the dinner party when you cut off the guy’s finger told me.’ Deliberately, I avoided his eyes and reached for a slice of sausage. ‘He got her pregnant, didn’t he?’
‘That’s none of your fucking business!’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I agreed.
He took another swallow of wine. ‘She was sixteen. Three years younger than me. Yes, Damon got her pregnant. When she found out she killed herself.’
‘She had an affair with him?’
‘Sebasta wouldn’t’ve looked twice at that piece of filth. He raped her.’
Uh-huh. Yeah, well, it was possible, but only just: families in Rome keep a close eye on their daughters of marriageable age, and under these circumstances rape isn’t all that common. More often than not, a pregnancy comes about because the girl has made at least some of the running and has been seeing the lad concerned behind her parents’ backs. That was more likely, in this situation too. Besides, Nicanor had been fond of the girl – more than fond from his reaction – and any account I got from him was bound to be biased.
Nicanor had been watching me, scowling. He got to his feet, lurching slightly. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, Corvinus, you can just –’
I grabbed his arm across the table and pulled him down. Although I had my back to the room, I could feel the other punters’ sudden interest. You don’t often get a floor show in Renatius’s, and the customers tend to make the most of it.
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Sure I believe you. Why not? Besides, like you say it’s none of my business.’
Nicanor sat. The effort seemed to have taken all the energy he had, because he slumped like a sack of grain. ‘My fucking father had been throwing her at Tiridates,’ he said. ‘Tiridates wasn’t interested. Damon was, though, but not in marriage. The two of them – and that bastard Iberian – cooked it up between them. They got her on her own one day and Damon raped her. Satisfied?’
So. It made some sort of cockeyed sense, anyway. Maybe I might believe the story after all. ‘You want to tell me the whole thing from the beginning?’ I said quietly.
Nicanor reached for his wine-cup and drank most of what was left at a gulp. ‘You don’t know my family, Corvinus,’ he said. ‘My mother’s OK, most of the time, but she wants to get on in society and she does whatever my father tells her. He’s a real bastard. He’d swim through shit to get his feet on the ladder. Any ladder. Marrying his daughter to a Parthian prince would’ve done that, and to hell with what she thought herself. He could’ve been a pimp and Sebasta one of his whores. Mother wasn’t much better. We had some real screaming matches.’ He swallowed the last of the wine. ‘Trouble was, it was all the one way, wasn’t it? Tiridates wasn’t interested. Why should he be? He’s fucking royalty. You know what that means?’ I nodded, but didn’t interrupt; the guy was off and running with the grudge between his teeth, and all he wanted now was a sympathetic audience. ‘He wouldn’t’ve had Sebasta as even a secondary wife, not the daughter of an Armenian merchant and a low-class Syrian who hadn’t even looks going for her. He strung Dad along, sure, but only for what he could get. Snob or not, Dad’s stinking rich, that’s one thing you can say for him, and he threw money at Tiridates like he was Croesus. I know that crowd. They were just playing games, all of them. I told Dad they were laughing at him up their sleeves and he was wasting his time, but he wouldn’t believe me. It was just a joke to them, a mean, evil, sordid joke.’ He lifted the empty cup to his lips and set it down. Despite what I’d said, I was going to signal Renatius to bring him another, but he didn’t seem too concerned so I left it. ‘Then Tiridates asks him if he can take Sebasta out in his carriage for the day to Fidenae, with just her maid as chaperone. Dad agrees although Sebasta herself’s against the idea, and that’s it. She never reaches Fidenae. They take her to some mutual pal’s fancy villa outside the city where Damon’s waiting and he rapes her. Big laugh all round. Big joke. Who cares about a social-climbing Armenian merchant’s daughter, anyway?’
He was scowling into the empty cup. I reached mine over and poured half the contents in, and he drained them at a swallow. It hung together, sure it did. Especially if you knew Damon and Tiridates. ‘She didn’t say anything? When she got back?’
‘No. But then she wouldn’t. Sebasta hated Dad as much as I do. Mum worse.’
‘And she didn’t tell you?’
‘No. I knew something was wrong because she kept to her room most of the time after that, and Tiridates stopped coming. But I didn’t know what, until she hanged herself a month later and left the note saying she was pregnant. Then I got the story from the maid. Finally. They’d paid the bitch to keep her mouth shut, and she was never Sebasta’s anyway.’
‘Your
sister didn’t say anything about Damon in the note?’
‘No. Just that she was going to have a child and preferred to die first. My father thought – he still thinks – it was Tiridates’s. He blamed her – blamed her! – because knowing she carried a Parthian prince’s child she still killed herself when she could’ve had it and put him under an obligation to marry her, or at least taken her as a formal concubine. Bastard!’
Yeah, I’d tend to agree. Social climbers aren’t nice people at the best of times, and Nicanor’s Papa Anicus sounded like the arse-end of the breed. Not that the story was unusual: I’d heard it a dozen times before. Or, if not the third-person-rape permutation exactly, its straightforward equivalent. Marriage brokering isn’t always all sweetness and light, and the upper social stratum has things crawling around in it that’d disgrace a sewer. The people that really get hurt – like Nicanor’s sister – are the poor kids caught in the middle.
‘So you went after Damon?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Not at once. And not openly. I’m a coward, too, in my way, and his father could’ve made trouble, especially since no one was accusing him. I waited my chance. I didn’t want to kill him. Killing wasn’t bad enough.’
‘You took the opportunity of a silly drunken brawl to cut off his finger. So even Damon would have to realise he’d never make Great King.’
‘And live knowing it. Knowing who to thank and why. Right.’ Nicanor bared his teeth in a grin. ‘I don’t want Damon to die. Not for a long, long time.’
‘What about your parents? You didn’t tell them? About it not being Tiridates who was responsible?’
‘Why should I? They didn’t care in the first place, and Sebasta’s gone anyway. Besides, Dad’s still pretty thick with him. And he’s got a new prospect lined up to help him on his way.’
‘Yeah? Who’s that?’
‘One of the consulars. A guy by the name of Lucius Vitellius.’
I nearly swallowed my wine-cup.
19.
I bundled Nicanor into the summoned litter – he was sober enough not to need watchdogging after all – and went back into Renatius’s to have my postponed half jug and my think, the latter of which had added to itself considerably in the last half hour.
The kid hadn’t had any details about his father’s involvement with Vitellius, none at all, just the fact and the name, which was maddening but not altogether surprising given his current family circumstances. Sure, the likelihood was that it was a complete red herring: as far as I could tell, the whole business with Sebasta, nasty as it was, had nothing whatsoever to do with the case barring shedding some barely-needed light on the characters of Tiridates and Damon and explaining how Phraates’s son had lost his finger. All the same, I didn’t feel too happy about the coincidence, if it was a coincidence, of a name from the sharp end cropping up where it shouldn’t. I poured my first cup from the new half jug and made a start on the untouched bread and cheese. One aspect certainly posed no problems: as far as dodginess of character went, Lucius Vitellius had it in spades; I’d known that long before I’d got into this business. Also, although one end of the conundrum was flapping around loose the other was pretty firmly tied in. Vitellius, as the head of the senatorial commission to dicker with the Parthian delegation, had a definite, central connection with that side of things. On the other hand, slippery and devious as the bugger undoubtedly was by nature, he seemed to be toeing the official line like a good Roman public servant should. What he did in his private capacity – and even Roman public servants had their own private business to conduct in their own time – wasn’t relevant. So long as the two didn’t clash, it was all fine and dandy.
So long as the two didn’t clash...
I sipped my wine. Yeah; that was the clincher, and it was where Vitellius’s character came in. Me, I wouldn’t’ve trusted the bastard an inch. If he saw some kind of personal advantage offer itself and felt safe to grab it then my bet was he’d take the chance with both hands. The question was, did it exist and if so what was it? That was something I’d have to find out.
Tiridates. That was the other puzzler. Nicanor had said that his father was still on good terms with the guy. Anacus might be a social climber and having once got his hooks into a Parthian prince he wouldn’t want to let go in a hurry, but even if he were the double-dyed bastard his son described him as that took a lot of swallowing. By Nicanor’s account again, he knew nothing about Damon being responsible for Sebasta’s pregnancy, but even if he had in the circumstances it would’ve made things worse, not better. As far as Anacus knew, Tiridates had seduced the girl, got her pregnant and so caused her suicide. Even if he did put the blame for the last squarely on his daughter, to carry on treating the guy responsible as if he was still a bosom buddy just wasn’t natural; or rather, given the bastard Anacus evidently was, it’d need a pretty hefty reason. Sebasta was dead; there was no question of a marriage alliance or whatever any longer. So what could the reason be?
The obvious answer was blackmail, or rather the prettied-up society version of blackmail. Tiridates had taken advantage of a girl from a rich, if not socially-distinguished family, and as a result the girl had killed herself. Her death might not be directly his fault, sure, but under the rules of the social stratum he moved in he’d owe a debt; just how big a debt being decided by where exactly her family came in the social stakes. In actual fact, Anacus would be in a better position there than he knew, because what Tiridates would be paying for if the truth ever got out was something far worse than a simple seduction. He wouldn’t be paying in money, mind, nothing so crude: that was where this high-class type of blackmail differed. Anacus was rich enough already, probably richer than Tiridates. His price – whatever it was – would be something else, and it wouldn’t be cheap. That might bear thinking about, too.
On the other hand, I couldn’t buy blackmail as an idea, or not altogether, anyway, not even the high-society version. Tiridates hadn’t seemed all that bothered about possible repercussions when he’d set the rape up, and he certainly couldn’t rely on the girl not peaching, either immediately or later. Also, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be blackmailed easily, not by the likes of Anacus, anyway: he was too arrogant, too sure he could do what he liked with other people beneath him socially, and to hell with the consequences. Like Nicanor had said, he and his pals had been laughing in their sleeves at the Anacus family all the time. Setting things up so Damon could rape Sebasta was nothing but a joke.
Fine. Great. The bugger of it was that if I scratched the blackmail angle and assumed that all this had some sort of relevance to the case I had to explain why despite everything Anacus and Tiridates were still an item. It might make some sort of sense – just – from Anacus’s side, but what was in it for Tiridates? And, more important, how, if anywhere, did Lucius Vitellius fit in?
I sank a mouthful of wine and topped up my cup. I didn’t know, I just didn’t know. The whole thing was probably a mare’s nest. All the same, I had a gut feeling about it; it was too much of a coincidence to be coincidental, if you like, and two members of the triangle being involved with the Parthian business was suspicious as hell. It was just lucky that when I’d asked Crispus to recommend a Parthian expert he’d put me on to young Nicanor. If he hadn’t done that then I’d never have known...
I stopped as the implication hit me. Bugger. Crispus! Caelius fucking Crispus!
It hadn’t been an accident, no way had it been an accident: the devious, muck-raking bastard had given me Nicanor’s name deliberately. Why he’d done it – probably, knowing Crispus, for unsavoury reasons of his own – I didn’t know; but I’d bet a year’s income to a mouldy sprat that he had all the answers at his greasy fingertips.
The foreign judge’s staff would be back after their festival break, and the afternoon still wasn’t all that far gone. If I hurried I could catch him.
I got Renatius to put the rest of my half jug on the shelf, bolted the rest of the cheese and heade
d off for the Capitol.
He was in; just. And he wasn’t too pleased to see me either. But then, what else was new?
‘Hi, Crispus,’ I said. ‘Have a nice Festival?’
I thought he was going to bite my head off. When I’d come in he’d been fastening a very pricey-looking dove-grey cloak round his shoulders while the secretary I’d seen last time adjusted the folds at the back. His hand paused on the buckle-pin like he was thinking of taking it off again, but he didn’t. ‘It’s been a long hard day, Corvinus,’ he said. ‘You don’t improve it.’ He turned to the secretary. ‘Tell the others I’ll be along shortly, Menelaus. And don’t forget the bathing cap.’
The secretary left with a sniff. I sat down in the visitor’s chair. ‘Bathing cap?’ I said.
Crispus sighed, took the cloak off after all and went back behind his desk. ‘What do you want this time? Make it quick, please.’
Shit, not a nibble; he was certainly coming on. Just a few months ago we’d’ve had threats and temper tantrums, but he’d got the busy executive manner down pat. Maybe it was the snazzy new office. Yeah, well, I shouldn’t criticise: being a linchpin of the great wheel of government a whole six hours out of the twenty-four was a pretty gruelling job. ‘What’s Lucius Vitellius got cooking with the Armenian Anacus?’ I said.
Pause. ‘Who?’
‘Come on, pal! You put me on to his son Nicanor. You mentioned the guy’s name yourself.’
‘Did I?’ He was inspecting his nails, but I had the distinct impression of nervous smugness. ‘Oh, yes. He’s a spice merchant, isn’t he? Now why on earth should Lucius Vitellius be involved with someone like that?’
It occurred to me that so far the bugger had asked more questions than I had. And I knew prevarication when I met it. I leaned forward and had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch.
Parthian Shot (Marcus Corvinus Book 9) Page 17
