"Still the tender-hearted giant! Well, well, Cornix Who let you out of your cage?"
"You"re going to die," he glowered. "Unless you"ve got a girl to rescue you again?"
This kind of delay - with its attendant danger - was the last thing I could afford. The girl who had once rescued me was heading for the coast, in a condition where she sorely needed me.
"No, Cornix. I am alone and unarmed, and I"m in a strange place. Obviously you have all the advantages."
I was being too meek for him. He wanted threats. He wanted me to defy him and force him to fight me. One or two people were already watching. Cornix was yearning for a big display, but it had to be my fault. He was the kind of rowdy who only picked on slaves, and then covertly in corners. His official role was as a tough manager who never put a foot wrong. In Britain his superiors had been told the truth eventually, and it must be due to me that after the shake-up I organised there he had had to roam abroad to find himself a new position. Just my luck he had found it here.
"I"m glad we"ve had this little chat," I said very quietly. "It"s always good to renew acquaintance with an old friend!"
I ruined away. My contempt was iron-hard and just as cold. Refusing to antagonise the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was the surest way to achieve it. There were tools and timber everywhere. Unable to bear my forbearance Cornix grabbed a mining pick and came after me. That was his mistake.
I too had sized up possible weapons. I caught up a shovel, swung it, and banged the pick from his grip. I was angry, and I had no fear. He was out of condition and stupid, and he thought he was still dealing with someone utterly exhausted. Three years of exercise had given me more power than he could cope with. He soon knew.
"You have two choices, Cornix. Give up and walk away - or find out what pain means!" He roared with rage and rushed me with his bare hands. Since I knew where Cornix liked to put his snag-nailed fingers, I was determined not to let him get in close. I used my knee, my fists, my feet. I released more anger than I even knew I had, though dear G.o.ds, I had lived with the memories long enough.
The nick was short. It was nasty. Slowly his oxen brain realised more was called for than he generally had to use. He began to fight harder. I was enjoying the challenge, but I had to be careful. He possessed brute strength, and he had no qualms about how he used his body. I was staving him off with punches and kicks when he bore down on me and grappled me. His roars and the familiar smell of him were churning me up. Then I broke free for a moment. Someone else took a hand. A bystander I had hardly noticed stepped forward adroitly, and pa.s.sed me a gallery prop. The roughhewn round timber weighed something terrible, though I hardly felt it. I swung the pole at chest height, with all my force. It felled Cornix with a pleasing crack of broken ribs.
"Oh nice! I learned that from you, Cornix!"
I could easily have brought the timber down on his skull. Why sink to his level? Instead, I raised the prop above my head and crashed it down across his shins. His scream sangsweetly in my ears. When I left he would never be able to follow me.
Suddenly I felt a lot better about a lot of things.
I turned to thank my rescuer and had a shock. For the second time I had escaped that brute"s clutches through intervention of a female kind.
I knew I had seen her somewhere, though she lacked the kind of beauty that my brain catalogues. She was of an age where her age had ceased to matter, though clearly full of spirit and energy by the way she had helped me out. She looked nothing, just a dumpling you could see selling eggs on a market stall. She wore a brown outfit with extra swaddlings in unbleached linen, topped by untidy swags of straw-like hair emerging from a scarf. A battered satchel was slung across a bosom that wouldn"t raise excitement in a galley-slave who had just set foot on land for the first time in five years. Eyes of an indeterminate colour were surveying me from a face as lively as wet plaster. She showed no reserve about being here on a site that seemed otherwise exclusively for men. Most of them had not even noticed her.
"You saved my life, madam."
"You were coping. I just threw in some help."
"We must have met before." I was still gasping. "Remind me of your name?"
She gave me a long stare. While I blinked back at her she stretched out one pointed shoe, and drew a sign in the dust with her toe: two curved lines with a smudge in between them. A human eye.
"I"m Perella," she said matter-of-factly. Then I remembered her: the surly blonde who had originally been booked to dance for the entertainment of the Olive Oil Producers of Baetica.
LXIV LXIV.
Without another word we turned away from the procurator"s office, leaving Cornix writhing on the ground. No one made a move to help him. Wherever he went he was a man with enemies.
Perella and I walked right through the mine environs to the gate where I had left my mules. She had a horse. She mounted without help. I swung up with an element of slickness too. For once.
We rode single file - me leading - down the one-way road from the settlement towards the major cross-country route through the Mariana mountains. When we reached a suitable quiet spot I signalled and reined in.
"I"ve been dodging another Spanish dancer, name of Selia. Nice little mover with castanets, and even better with a cleaver in her hand. She won"t be t.i.tillating men any more though - or murdering them either. She"s learning new dance steps in Hades. MI the breath"s been squeezed out of her."
"You don"t say!" Perella marvelled. "Persons unknown, would that be?"
"I believe so."
"Better keep it that way."
I let her see me looking her over. She was bundled up like a wet cheese. I could not see a weapon. If she carried one it could be anywhere. Her satchel, perhaps. But if she killed Selia, she had adequate skills even without weapons.
"I"m not after you, Falco."
"You"ve been trying to track me down."
"Only when I had a moment. You dodge about a lot. Falco, if we"re intending to have a cosy chat we could get down and sit under a tree."
"Far be it from me to refuse to exchange sweet nothings with a woman in a wood!"
"You don"t look happy on a mule."
Apt, though I was not sure I wanted to be cosy with Perella; still, she was right about me hating life in the saddle. I dismounted my mule. Perella jumped off her horse. She unwound a large st.u.r.dy shawl which formed one layer of her garments and spread it on the ground. Equipped for everything. Obviously if I wanted to vie with such a specialist I would have to improve myself.
We placed ourselves side by side like lovers on a picnic rug: lovers who had not known each other very long. Midges started to take an interest immediately.
"Well, this is nice! All we need is a flagon of wine and some rather stale rolls, and we can convince ourselves we"re a couple of skivers enjoying a holiday." I could see Perella was not one for light-hearted quips. "Last time I saw you I believed you were a regular dancer who had lost an engagement due to trickery. You never told me you were employed by the Chief Spy."
"Of course I didn"t tell you. I"m a professional."
"Even so, eliminating the beauteous Selia just because she pinched your dinner-date seems to be taking your rivalry too far."
The woman regarded me with those mud-coloured eyes. "What makes you think I killed her?"
"It was very neat. Professional." I lay back with my hands folded under my head, gazing up through the oak tree boughs. Bits of leaf flittered down and tried to land in my eyes, while I felt that old forest dampness starting to seize up my joints. Going home to hold conversations sensibly in wine bars became an attractive thought.
She sighed, squirming on the rug so she could still see me. "Too flash, that Selia. So painted up that everywhere she went she was unmissable."
"Good intelligence agents know how to blend in, eh? Like informers! So the flash la.s.s has had her lamp snuffed out by the decent working girl?"
Perella still managed not to admit it. "Her time was up. I reckon the young fool quaestor had sent for her from Hispalis to finish you off, Falco."
I owe somebody a thank-you then."
She showed no interest in my grat.i.tude. "My bet is, Selia thought he was losing his nerve and she intended to do for him as well. If he talked she would have been in trouble."
"Letting her remove Quadratus would have solved a problem."
"If you say so, Falco."
"Well, let"s be practical. Apart from whether it"s likely anyone can persuade a judge to try him, when any judge in Rome is liable to have his inclination to do so suborned by large gifts from Attractus - somebody has to catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d first. You"re chasing round the mines now, and so am I. I"m definitely looking for Quadratus, and you"re either after him - or me."
She turned around and grinned at me.
"What was the game?" I asked in a dangerous voice. "You"ve been lurking around all my suspects - Annaeus, Licinius, Cyzacus - they"ve all had a visitation. I gather you even made a trip to see me."
"Yes, I got to most of them ahead of you; what kept you dawdling?"
"Romantic mentality. I like to admire the scenery. You may have got to them first, but most of them talked to me for longer."
"Learn anything?" she jeered.
I ignored it. "You knew I was official. Why not make contact? We could have shared the work."
Perella dismissed my quibbles as mere prissiness. "Making contact with you took second place! Until I decided whether I could trust you I didn"t want to give you any clue who I was or what I was there for. I nearly managed to get to you the night of the Parilia."
"Was it you who hurled that rock at me?"
"Just a pebble," she smirked.
"Then why make yourself invisible afterwards?" "Because unbeknown to you, Quadratus was lurking up ahead."
"He had left in a carriage with two others."
"He"d stopped it, pretending he wanted to throw up. The girl -" Aelia Annaea - "was distracted, looking after the youth, who really was chucking his heart up. Quadratus had walked back slowly along the track as if he was getting some air, but it looked to me as if he was expecting somebody. That was why I flung the stone, to stop you before you blundered into him. I thought he was waiting for a meeting with Sella; I wanted to overhear what they said."
"I never saw you and I never saw him."
"You never saw Selia either! She was creeping up behind. In fact, Falco, the only one who wasn"t hiding in the dark from you that night was Selia"s sheep!"
"Did Selia make contact with Quadratus?"
"No, the girl in the carriage called out and he had to go off with her and the youth."
"I thought it might have been you dressed up as the shepherdess?" I suggested. No chance of that: Perella could not compete with the dead girl"s glorious brown eyes.
She laughed. "No fear. Can you imagine trying to get Anacrites to sign an expenses chit for the hire of a sheep?"
So she still thought he was in operation, then.
"Let"s talk about Rome," I suggested. "Double dealing is afoot; that"s clear. It"s in both our interests to explore who"s doing what to whom, and why two thoroughly reasonable agents like ourselves have ended up in the same province on two different missions involving the same racket."
"You mean," mouthed Perella, "are we on the same side?"
"I was sent by Laeta; I"ll tell you that for nothing."
"And I was not."
"Now that raises an interesting question, Perella, because I had worked out you were a staffer for Anacrites - but the last time I saw him he was lying in my mother"s house withthe fare for the ferrymen to Hades all ready in his outstretched paw."
"The Praetorians have got him in their camp." "I arranged that."
"I saw him there."
"Oh, so I"m dealing with a girl who mingles with Guardsmen. Now that"s a real professional!"
"I do what I have to."
"Spare my blushes; I"m a shy boy."
"We all work well together." That"s usually a pious lie.
"How fortunate," I said. Still, the intelligence service was attached to the Guard. "Did the Praetorians tell you he was with them?"
"I tracked him down myself, after you told me he had been beaten up. It was hard going, I admit. In the end I came to ask you where he was -" I remembered giving her my address. "You"d just left Rome, but someone put me on to your mother. She didn"t tell me where he was, but she had a big pot of soup bubbling, and I guessed it was for the invalid. When she went out with a basket, I followed her."
"Ma"s still taking Anacrites broth?" I was amazed.
"According to the Praetorians she regards him as her responsibility."
I had to think about that. "And when you took your own bunch of flowers to his sickbed, exactly how was your unlikeable superior?"
"As tricky as ever." This was a shrewd lady. "He croaked and moaned as sick men always do. Maybe he was dying. Maybe the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was rallying and fighting back."
"And Ma"s still nursing him? I don"t believe it! In the Praetorian camp?"
"The Praetorians are great lumps of slush. They adore the maternal virtues and such old-fashioned tripe. Anyway, Anacrites is safe with them. If he survives he"ll think your mother"s wonderful."
I experienced a swooning dread that I would go home to Rome and find my mother married off to the Chief Spy. Never fear; she would have to divorce Pa first. They wouldnever sort out arrangements while neither was on speaking terms.
"And you talked to Anacrites? What did he say?" "Nothing useful."
"How like him!"
"You saw the state he was in. It was only a couple of days after you left."
"So who sent you here?"
"Own initiative."
Do you have the authority?"
"I do now!" Perella laughed, fished down inside her satchel and held something up for me to see. It was a seal ring; rather poor chalcedony; its cartouche showing two elephants with entwined trunks. "Sebeh had it. I found it when I searched her. She must have stolen it when she clonked Anacrites."
"You searched her?" I enquired politely. "Would that be before or after you squeezed very hard on her pearly throat?" I received a sideways look. "I knew the ring was missing, Perella. Knowing Anacrites, I a.s.sumed he heard Selia and her heavies creeping up behind him, so he swallowed it to safeguard public funds."
Perella liked that. After she finished laughing she spun the ring in the air, then threw it as far as possible across the road and into a copse opposite. I applauded the action gently. I always enjoy a rebel. And with Selia dead, the ring was no longer useful evidence. "I"ll tell Anacrites you"ve got it, Falco. He"ll be on at you about it for the next fifty years."