David Wishart - Parthian Shot

‘Yeah.’ Jupiter on a trolley! ‘It’s clear.’

‘Fine. Don’t forget it, then.’ The scowl didn’t lift. Obviously, my fat pal the consular wasn’t any more tickled to have me aboard the good ship Diplomacy than his boss was. Only Isidorus covered it better.

Isidorus stood up. I’d been right about his lack of height; the top of his head was about level with my chin. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I wish you luck, Corvinus.’ He held out his hand and we shook. ‘Luck, and success. Incidentally, I’ll have a word with Quintus on the front desk. If you do need to see me at any stage without Lucius here in attendance you should have no trouble.’

Meeting over, evidently. I drank the last of the Caecuban at a gulp — that I wasn’t going to waste — and got to my feet.

‘I’ll pick you up at sunset,’ Vitellius growled. ‘Wear your best mantle.’

Well, that was the easy part over. Now I had to explain things to Perilla.

Perilla was in when I got back, copying out the notes she’d taken at the Pollio library. I carried Bathyllus’s welcome-home jug and cup over to my couch, planting the usual smacker on her raised lips in passing.

‘Marcus, where on earth were you?’ She put the pen down. ‘Bathyllus just said you’d gone out. I thought you were doing the household accounts today.’

‘Yeah, I was.’ Gods! This wasn’t going to be easy. ‘I got sort of sidetracked. You have a good time?’

‘Oh, yes. Very interesting.’ She consulted her notes. ‘Did you realise that the goby can stop a ship under full sail dead in the water, just by fastening itself by its jaws to the hull?’

‘What the hell’s a goby?’

‘A small carnivorous marine fish, two inches long.’

‘Really? And where did you find that little nugget of information?’

‘In Trebius Niger. Seemingly one of them immobilised Antony’s flagship at the Battle of Actium. He also says that swordfish exist which sink ships by puncturing them.’

‘Trebius Niger is a credulous prat.’

She frowned down at the wax tablet and closed it. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right, dear. I wasn’t totally convinced by the goby, I must admit. I mean, why would it bother? Some of him is quite good, though. Niger, that is. Oh, and apropos of fish, Meton asked me to tell you that he’s got a basket of lampreys. We’re having them for dinner tonight.’

My blood ran cold. Hell; I hadn’t even thought of Meton. Our prima-donna food-fixated chef needed three days’ notice in writing for an ordinary skipped meal. A few hours and a special fish evening combined put the potential repercussions into the mythical bracket, up alongside the punishment of Sisyphus. ‘Er…I won’t be in for dinner tonight,’ I said.

Her eyes met mine; the lady had got the implications as well as I had. ‘Oh, Marcus! ’ she said.

‘Don’t worry; I’ll speak to Meton.’

She was still staring at me in horror. ‘He’ll go berserk. Do you know how often he has a whole basket of lampreys? I mean, these things cost a fortune. When you can even get them.’

‘Yeah, well…’

‘Where are you going?’

‘The, ah, Palatine. With Lucius Vitellius and a few Parthians. It’s a sort of…diplomatic dinner.’

The temperature in the room suddenly dropped below freezing. Perilla set the tablets down carefully on the floor.

‘Tell me,’ she said, very quietly.

So I told her.

‘At least there isn’t a body this time,’ I said when I’d finished and the spiders had come out of cover. ‘The guy survived.’

‘Corvinus, this is politics!’ You could’ve used the line of the lady’s lips to slice marble. ‘You know how dangerous politics are. I’d have thought you would’ve learned your lesson after Sejanus. Why on earth didn’t you tell them to find someone else?’

‘That wasn’t an option. In any case, this time’s different. It’s official, and I’m on the right side of the line.’

‘You think that matters?’

‘Perilla, the letter was signed by the Wart himself. I can’t buck that.’

She turned away. ‘Why does it always have to be you?’

‘Maybe I’m just lucky.’ I saw her shoulders stiffen. ‘Joke.’

‘Was it really?’ She still wasn’t looking at me. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, that anyone who is capable of murdering or assassinating or otherwise disposing of another human being or attempting to do so might just have no compunction about adding to their score whoever is stupid enough to shove his nose into their business?’

‘’Course it has. Usually in the middle of the night after too much cheese last thing.’

‘Will you please, for one minute, be serious!’

Pause; long pause. I got up, went over and put my arms round her. She was shaking. Uh-oh; this was a bad one.

‘I think,’ she said, softly, her forehead against my chest, ‘that one of these days I am going to be upstairs working on a poem, or sitting reading, or doing something equally innocent and inane, when Bathyllus will come in and tell me you’ve been found in an alleyway with your throat cut or your head pulped, and that will be that. It’s happened — or almost happened — once before, when it was a hole in the ribs. The next time it will be real, and it will be permanent. Now tell me I’m wrong.’

Jupiter in tights! When Perilla’s in this mood — and it doesn’t happen often — then all you can do is sit it out.

‘You want me to put in for some government office, lady?’ I said quietly. ‘Spend our evenings discussing grain quotas and the latest contract proposals for manufacturing sediment traps in the public water supply?’

‘No, of course not. You’d hate that sort of life, I know that. But it still doesn’t mean you have to — ’

‘Okay, then. How about business? I’m a narrow-striper; there’s nothing to stop me setting up a shipping company. You choose the product; Syrian glassware, for instance. You know the breakage and loss statistics on the Antioch/Puteoli run for Syrian glass and how that’d affect the mark-up? I could give you really fascinating bits of information like that over the fruit and nuts after dinner. Or there’s farming. Good solid purple-striper tradition, farming. I could set something up with Alexis the botanical whizz-kid, breed a new kind of super-radish — ’

She hit me. Not hard, just a gentle punch, but she meant it all the same. ‘Look, stop it. All right, point taken. You’ve got to do it, I know that. Get yourself involved. Still, knowing doesn’t make things any easier.’

I kissed her. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, well…’

Crisis over. I knew the signs. The thing is, if I ever did turn respectable — or what my father would’ve called respectable, anyway, which meant boring-conventional — it would hit Perilla bad. Whether she admitted it to me, or to herself, or not I was as sure of that as I was of anything. And that would be that.

Not that she didn’t have a point, mind.

‘So.’ She pulled away and wiped her nose. ‘What are your plans? Besides talking to this Prince Phraates at the wretched dinner?’

‘I hadn’t really thought. Maybe pay Lippillus a visit.’ Decimus Lippillus was the local Watch head at Public Pond and an old friend. He was also smart as paint, and the Esquiline mightn’t be his own patch but he’d have contacts. ‘See if I can trace the knifemen responsible, work back from there to whoever set the attack up…’

‘Knifemen,’ Perilla said. I skidded to a mental halt. Bugger. Now that had been a mistake.

‘Uh…yeah. Not that I’m thinking of tracing the actual knifemen themselves, of course, no, no, perish the thought, but…’