David Wishart - Parthian Shot

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.

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?