Last Rites (Marcus Corvinus Book 6) Read online

  LAST RITES

  David Wishart

  First published as a US Kindle edition 2016

  Copyright © David Wishart 2001

  www.david-wishart.co.uk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Dramatis Personae

  (Historical characters’ names appear in upper case)

  CORVINUS’S FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD

  Alexis: the smart-as-paint gardener

  Bathyllus: Corvinus’s head slave

  Lysias: the coachman

  Meton: the chef

  Perilla, Rufia: Corvinus’s wife

  IMPERIALS ETC

  AGRIPPINA: Gaius’s mother, now dead

  DRUSUS: Gaius’s elder brother, now dead

  GAIUS: Tiberius’s ‘crown prince’ and later emperor (‘Caligula’ – ‘Little Army Boot’ – was a nickname). Currently with Tiberius on Capri

  MACRO, Sertorius: commander of Praetorians and Tiberius’s de facto representative at Rome

  SEJANUS, Aelius: Macro’s predecessor, now dead (executed for treason AD 31)

  TIBERIUS (‘The Wart’): the emperor, currently in retirement on Capri

  PURPLE-STRIPERS

  AEMELIA: Galba’s wife

  ARRUNTIUS, Lucius: a prominent member of the Senate

  CAMILLUS, Marcus Furius: the deputy chief priest. (The actual chief priest was the emperor)

  Cornelia: the dead Vestal

  GALBA, Servius Sulpicius: the current senior consul and later emperor

  Gemella, Furia: Secundus’s wife

  LEPIDA: Lepidus Senior’s daughter, formerly the wife of Drusus Caesar

  LEPIDUS, Marcus Aemelius (Senior): a prominent (and wealthy) member of the Senate

  LEPIDUS, Marcus Aemelius (Junior): his son

  Murena, Gaius Licinius: a junior finance officer (‘quaestor’)

  Nomentanus, Sextius: a city judge (‘praetor’)

  PROCULUS, Gaius Considius: Myrrhine’s former owner

  Secundus, Gaius: an old friend of Corvinus’s, currently city judge in charge of the Treasury

  Servilia: a Vestal

  TORQUATA, Junia: the chief Vestal

  OTHER RANKS

  Aegle: a flutegirl

  Antistius, Titus: Crocodile customer

  Aquillia: Harmodia’s neighbour

  ‘ARCHIGALLUS, THE’: title of the chief priest of the Great Mother (Cybele). The holder was traditionally given the name Attis after Cybele’s divine (or semi-divine) lover

  Celer: expediter at the fluteplayers’ guildhouse

  Chilo: with Faustus, a member of the Public Ponds Watch

  Crispus, Caelius: a rumour-merchant, currently on the city judges’ staff

  Harmodia (‘Harmy’): a flutegirl

  Hippo, the: owner of the Crocodile

  Lippillus, Decimus Flavonius: commander of the Public Ponds district Watch

  Melissa: Lepida’s maid

  Myrrhine: a runaway slave

  Niobe: Cornelia’s maid

  Perdicca: a slave in the House of the Vestals

  Phoebe: employee at the Crocodile

  Phrixus: Thalia’s brother

  Scorpus: a second-hand furniture dealer

  Thalia: a flutegirl

  Valgius, Publius: a clerk in the citizen births registration office

  1.

  Even without the bundle of rods that he carried when he was on active duty, the guy interrupting our breakfast was something: six foot six high by four wide, muscles like boulders and all the facial delicacy of an Alp. Jupiter knows where they find these buggers. They must breed them special and feed them on gravel.

  ‘Marcus Valerius Caecinus?’ he growled.

  Bathyllus was doing his scandalised Greek chorus act in the doorway, and I could feel the waves of disapproval all the way across the room. Bathyllus’s waves would’ve reduced any ordinary mortal to a cringing, apologetic wreck, but then Axemen aren’t your ordinary mortals. These bastards have skin like rhinos. Tempers, too.

  ‘I told him he had the name wrong, sir,’ he said, ‘but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘That’s okay Bathyllus.’ I’d set down my roll and honey. ‘No harm done. Go and count the statues, sunshine.’ He left, fizzing. I looked back at the Axeman. Shit, this didn’t look good. Axemen worked as gophers for the top brass, and they were bad news; especially these days with Macro running things as Praetorian commander. Less than a month in Rome and I was in trouble already. Worse, I’d no idea why. ‘You made two out of three, friend. The name’s Corvinus.’

  That got me a scowl and ten flexed fingers.

  ‘The mistress told me Caecinus.’

  Yeah, well, I’d give him full marks for persistence. Speed of uptake was something else, but then smart isn’t an adjective that figures very highly in the job description. With these muscle-bound hulks the thought process is so straight and narrow you could use it for an aqueduct. You don’t contradict them, either. I shrugged. ‘Fine. We won’t argue. Uh . . . “mistress”?’

  ‘The Lady Junia Torquata. She said find Marcus Valerius Caecinus, Rufia Perilla’s husband, just moved in to the old Apronius place on the Caelian. This is the place so you must be him, right?’

  There ain’t no arguing with logic like that. I glanced at Perilla, lying on the other couch. Her eyes were wide and there was a crust of bread she seemed to have forgotten about poised halfway to her mouth. Well, that explained the confusion, anyway. I’d met Junia Torquata a couple of years back, when we’d had her round to dinner and she’d put a hole in my wine cellar you could drive a marble-cart through and still managed to walk out the door straight as a legion’s First Spear. She hadn’t been able to hold my name in her head then, either. I grinned and relaxed; if the guy was Torquata’s then unsociable hour or not maybe I wasn’t going to be hauled off to the Mamertine after all.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So what can I do for the chief Vestal, pal?’

  The Axeman was flexing his hands like he was squeezing a couple of those wooden balls wrestlers use to strengthen their grip. ‘I’m to take you to the Galba place,’ he said.

  ‘Is that so, now? And why would you do that?’

  ‘Because there’s been a death.’

  I stared at him. Jupiter, not again! Five minutes back in residence at the Hub of the World and we were already hitting corpses. At breakfast-time, too. Maybe I was the thanaturgic equivalent of one of those screwy stones from Magnesia that snatch iron pins from your hands.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What kind of death?’

  The guy hesitated and the squeezing went up a notch. Axemen aren’t particularly known for showing their feelings, but if he’d been human I’d’ve said he was nervous. And where an Axeman’s concerned that takes a hell of a lot of doing.

  ‘Just a death,’ he said.

  This was getting silly. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You care to tell me whose, at least? Or is that a secret too?’

  His eyes rolled: personal initiative is another quality that isn’t a prime requirement for Axemen, and we were obviously working right on the edge here.

  ‘One of the Ladies.’

  Shit. I sat back and heard Perilla draw in her breath. One of the Ladies, eh? For Torquata’s Axeman that could mean only one thing.

  The dead woman was a Vestal.

  He’d brought a litter. Usually I’ve no time for litters, but an hour after dawn on a raw December morning with the rain gusting in from the north it beat walking hands down, especially where a trip across town to the S
acred Way was involved. Besides, I needed space to think.

  Bubbling George hadn’t been exactly forthcoming: ask as I might while Bathyllus had helped me into my formal mantle and thick cloak, the guy had zipped up tighter than a constipated clam. Still, certain things were clear enough. First off, we were moving in exalted circles here. Sulpicius Galba was the current senior consul, at the tail end of his year of office. I’d never met him, and from what I’d heard that was no loss because he was a first-rate, twenty-four-carat bastard; an arch-snob, tight-fisted as an Aventine landlord and with a sadistic streak you’d need a yardstick to measure. He was also (which went a long way to explaining how the guy had made consul) a close crony of Prince Gaius, currently strutting his stuff with the Wart on Capri, and – if you believed wineshop rumour, which I always do – queer as a five-legged cat.

  His wife, on the other hand, I didn’t know at all, not even her name; and if I didn’t miss my guess it was his wife who’d be relevant here because that was where the Vestals came in. Early December is when the nocturnal rite of the Good Goddess is held at the senior consul’s house, with the guy’s wife playing hostess, and last night had been the night. The ceremony involves only women, and only those at the top of the social tree. Galba, along with every other male and male animal in the house, would’ve been thrown out on his ear while his wife, the Vestals and a pretty large slice of Rome’s female beautiful and good did whatever the hell they do that evening after dark and then partied until dawn with not a man in the place.

  Only this year, obviously, they hadn’t. Something had gone wrong, and in the morning when the barriers came up Junia Torquata had sent Bubbling George to look for me.

  That last bit was what really bugged. ‘A death’, Bubbling George had said, and he’d said it very carefully, which implied that that was the word Torquata had told him to use. A death, not a murder. Murder I could’ve understood as the reason for hauling me away from my porridge, but there again Vestals don’t get murdered: they’re about as sacred as you can get in Rome, and you don’t mess with them, nohow, no way, never. Oh sure, when they go out – and Vestals are as free to come and go as anyone – they have complimentary Axeman bodyguards, but that’s only because of who they are, not for protection. A Vestal could walk through the Subura end to end alone with a purse stuffed with gold pieces any time of the day or night and not a mugger would touch a single hair of her six-tressed head. He wouldn’t dare. Just the thought of murdering a Vestal made my scalp crawl.

  Also, Torquata wasn’t the sort of person to call a spade a digging implement. If she said a death, then that was what she’d meant.

  It just didn’t make sense.

  The other question, of course, was why me?

  I settled back against the cushions. I had the feeling I wasn’t going to enjoy this at all.

  2.

  The Galba house was one of these big old rambling patrician mansions you get near Market Square, taking up a whole corner just short of the Temple of Jupiter Stayer of the Host, and it had half a dozen of Bubbling George’s colleagues round the door leaning on their rods and dripping stoically on to the pavement. I noticed there were none of the ghouls hanging around that you usually find when someone’s been hustled into an urn before their time, but that didn’t surprise me: even ghouls have a healthy respect for Axemen, and with six of the buggers standing guard that pavement would not be a healthy place to be. I climbed out of the litter and went inside, past a door-slave whose grey face you could’ve used as a dish-rag: deaths in the family, especially suspicious ones, are always bad news for slaves. Sometimes fatally bad.

  Junia Torquata was waiting for me in the atrium. The place was still rigged out for the ceremony, with the goddess’s couch – empty, now, of course: they’d’ve taken her back to the Aventine – at the far end where the screens and curtains had been pulled back from the family rooms beyond to give more space. The walls and ceiling were hung with greenery and some of the statues still had sheets over them; these would be the male ones, too heavy to lug out but decently covered over, because not even male statues are allowed to see the rites of the Good Goddess. There was a gaggle of people clustered in the middle of the room, and they looked round when I came in. I recognised old Lucius Arruntius, the pal of my father who I’d last seen at Dad’s funeral two or three years back, the time when he and Aelius Lamia had asked me to dig the dirt on Sejanus.

  ‘Ah, Caecinus.’ The lady came over nose first, like a trireme heading for the kill. Junia Torquata might be pushing sixty but she was built like a Suburan bruiser and you could’ve used her voice to warn shipping. Given the choice of meeting a qef-stoned gorilla head-on down a dark alley and Rome’s chief Vestal I’d’ve taken the monkey any time. ‘Decimus found you, then.’

  ‘Uh . . . yeah,’ I said. ‘And the name’s Corvinus, by the way.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Well, that disposed of that one nicely. ‘How’s your wife? Thriving, I trust?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, Perilla’s –’

  ‘Excellent. Well done. Now take your cloak off, young man, the weather is exceptionally mild for the time of year and it isn’t a bit cold in here.’

  Jupiter! I found my fingers going automatically for the pin and another grey-faced slave was at my elbow to catch the falling cloak.

  ‘You know everyone, I assume?’ The trireme’s ram nose turned towards the group. Maybe it was my imagination, but the huddle seemed to tighten. Probably a self-protective herd instinct.

  ‘No, I can’t say I –’

  ‘The consul Servius Sulpicius Galba and his wife Aemilia. Terrible for them, of course, the whole house will have to be purified top to bottom, and that is such a chore you can’t imagine.’

  ‘Corvinus.’ Rome’s current brightest and best gave me a stiff nod. He was a fattish, balding man with a hooked nose and quick, shifty eyes. Aemilia was short and on the plain side, but a snappy dresser: tight-fisted as the guy was rumoured to be, that mantle and the jewellery that went with it must’ve set him back a couple of months’ income. Her perfume – it had to be hers, because she was the only other woman in the room except for Torquata, and that lady just smelled scrubbed – was four-figures too, and despite the fact she’d been up all night she was made up like a doll. All I got from her was a scared flutter of eyelashes.

  ‘The deputy chief priest, Marcus Furius Camillus.’ The trireme’s ram pointed to a big old guy with white hair who wore his broad-striper mantle like it was a military uniform. Yeah; I’d heard of Furius Camillus. As governor of Africa twenty-odd years back he’d been the guy who finally put the skids under that bastard Tacfarinas. Camillus was no puffball: the bulk under that mantle was muscle, not fat, and there was a mean brain behind the pair of ice-grey eyes that turned in my direction.

  ‘Delighted to meet you, Valerius Corvinus,’ he said. ‘Even under these sad circumstances. I knew your father well. A good man.’

  ‘No introduction in my case, Torquata.’ Arruntius had stepped forward. ‘Corvinus here did me – and Rome – an inestimable favour two years back.’ He held out his hand. I hesitated, then took it. Broad-striper to the bone though he was, and not my type at all, I’d always respected Lucius Arruntius. He might be one of that shifty bunch of hypocritical self-servers in the Senate House down the road, but he was a lion among jackals and he stuck by his principles, politically correct or not. ‘Also, Corvinus, I should admit here and now that I’m the reason for dragging you away from your family at such an ungodly hour.’

  Well, that was one question answered, anyway. ‘Is that so?’ I said.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ He hesitated. ‘I did it because you possess a flair for this sort of business which I felt we should avail ourselves of. Also a commendable degree of tact.’ Hah! Perilla would love that! ‘The latter is important because we would prefer any investigation to be conducted privately rather than involve the usual authorities.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ In other words, whatever was going on here stank like a cat’s-
meat factory in high summer and he was just about to land me with the whole boiling. Thank you, Lucius bloody Arruntius and the gods bless and keep you. However, it wouldn’t do to come out with any sarky comments at this juncture. I kept my lips buttoned.

  ‘Myself, I have a double interest in the matter.’ The smile was gone now and Arruntius looked grave. Clearly we’d come to – or were coming to – the nitty-gritty. ‘First of all the dead woman is the daughter of Cornelius Lentulus, a cousin of mine currently abroad; second, Aemilia here is my wife’s niece.

  Right; in other words, the old blue-blood network in operation. Well, at least I had a name now if nothing else: the dead Vestal must be Cornelia, one of the Cornelii if her father’s surname was anything to go by. And the mention of Aemilia had got me another eyelid-bat. I had the impression that physically exhausted or not, stressed out or not, the lady enjoyed making up to any presentable male within range. Although given her husband’s rumoured predilections maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

  Not that it left me any further forward understanding the situation here. I was beginning to think this crowd was giving me the run-around on purpose; like no one wanted to be the first to put the thing into words. ‘Uh, that’s all very interesting, pal,’ I said. ‘But maybe you could just tell me what –’

  Arruntius laid a hand on my arm. ‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘I am asking you formally, Valerius Corvinus: will you help us?’

  I’ve never been happy with the cold, clinical way that the Roman upper classes go about things. Even an invitation to dinner can end up sounding like a treaty of alliance complete with oaths before the Fetial priests. Still, it was how the guy was made. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem. If I can. Now I’d really like to know –’

  ‘Excellent. You’ll be liaising with Camillus, naturally, but he has an appointment shortly so with his permission I’ll deputise.’ He glanced at Camillus, who frowned and nodded. ‘Very well. The body, I think. Torquata? If you’d care to do the honours?’