David Wishart - Old Bones

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'My condolences again.'

She was giving me a look that would've put a coating of ice on a firebrick. 'Sestus!' she snapped. Baldy must've been hanging about outside to make sure the mistress's virtue wasn't threatened, because he was right there before she'd got the second syllable out. 'Valerius Corvinus is just leaving. Show him to the door, please.'

I went quietly.

So. I'd been right about Arria having passed on Clusinus's name to Aternius; or at least she'd realised what I was getting at or she wouldn't've jumped up like a startled pheasant and thrown me out. The question was, how did this strongroom business fit in? The lady had said it herself; to spend that amount of time and effort building a strongroom you didn't use made no sense at all. And Bubo hadn't used it: the fact that he'd left the keys at home instead of keeping them on him showed he'd no intention of using it. Not immediately, anyway. So what the hell was he playing at?

Not immediately, anyway…

I stopped. Shit! That was it, it had to be!

Bubo hadn't used the strongroom because he was keeping it for something special. And if he'd only had it built a month ago then whatever that was had only come on the horizon recently; about the time, say, that he'd begun to deal with Titus Clusinus. And the deal had never gone through…

So what was valuable enough to justify a guy like Bubo, who was used to big deals, taking extra security precautions that involved him in a lot of unwonted personal expense? Whatever it was, it had to be big: physically big, because otherwise why a whole strongroom, why not a simple strongbox cemented to the floor like most people had to hold their ready cash and Great-Auntie's pearl-and-ruby necklace?

I started down the stairs. It wasn't much easier going down than it had been coming up; you only strained different leg muscles. No wonder the guy had spent so much time at his shop. There was a road, sure, but it zigzagged so much that it'd take three or four times as long to get down to the town centre. Also, there was the view. Downhill was even more impressive because you had it all the time. The sun glinted off the small stream far below, and the line of the road that wound its way through the old cemetery on its far side. I stopped to look and give my calf muscles a rest. Gods! There must be hundreds of tombs down there, plus hundreds more the other side. A real City of the Dead that made Caere itself seem like a village. A city with proper houses, too, that guys who'd died when Rome was a clutch of mud huts had built to spend eternity in and stocked with…

With…

And then it hit me. Oh, Jupiter! Jupiter Best and Greatest! Bubo handled antiques. And where did you find antiques by the barrow-load, just squirreled away out of sight where no one would ever see them again or know if they'd gone missing?

Right.

That was what Clusinus had been up to, I'd bet my last copper coin on it.

The guy had been robbing tombs.

Which, believe me, sounds a lot simpler a proposition than it is.

Oh, sure, there're hundreds of the things in the cemeteries around Caere laid out and waiting, maybe even thousands, and the other Etruscan cities have just as many, even more. If we're talking just numbers, tomb robbing should rank pretty high on the list of lucrative criminal activities. Only it doesn't, not at all, and there are good reasons why it shouldn't.

First of all, and most important, there's the religious angle. I'm no more superstitious than the next guy, but personally just the thought of breaking into a tomb gives me goosebumps, and the same would go for ninety- nine percent of the population, even the bastards who'd slit their grandmother's throat for a jug of third-rate Surrentine. You don't mess with the dead, ever; that's a rule everyone knows. These buggers have got their own ways of getting even, and they don't play around.

Second's the law. Grave-robbing's a semi-religious offence, and there's only one penalty, crucifixion and half-burning. Sure, Perilla's philosopher pals could be right about the soul not surviving death, and if you're one of the free-thinkers who don't believe a proper funeral's important, then fine. Me, I'd hedge my bets, and so would most people, low-life included. The prospect of wandering around this side of the River for the next thousand years or so scares me silly.

Third's security. The tombs themselves are locked, or their doors are bricked up if the family isn't there to use them any more. Also, the cemeteries are patrolled at night. Get caught by the local militia hanging around a graveyard after midnight with a crowbar and a pickaxe and it ain't no use claiming you were digging truffles. And as far as your future prospects are concerned thereafter, see point two.

So. If Clusinus had been robbing tombs then it was no small deal. I'd never met the guy properly, so I couldn't make an assessment of his nerves, but he'd have to be some tough cookie, and I don't mean tough in the way that my pals Tolumnius and Baro were tough. Skulking around cemeteries alone after dark and breaking into tombs takes a special kind of courage. For a start he'd have to cope with the constant fear of the Watch butting in while his attention was on the business in hand. Because naturally he wouldn't know if or when the militia guys were going to come piling round the corner…

I stopped.

Wait a minute. Wait just one minute.

Unless of course he did.

Let's go back a bit. The dead were one thing, the living were another. Sure, any tomb robber would need iron nerves to do the job in the first place, but given these he was half way there. If he knew he was in no danger of being disturbed then breaking into a tomb was easy-peasy. The cemeteries covered at least as much ground as the town itself, and there were three of them. So long as the guy was careful not to leave any traces and kept to the older, out-of-the-way piles which weren't even visited any more there was no reason why the thefts would ever be noticed. All he'd need was someone high up in local government who could make sure that, wherever he was that particular night, the militia wasn't.

Someone like the Caeretan mayor. The very crooked Caeretan mayor. Or, of course, one of his immediate family…

Okay; so how would it work? I'd already got a connection between Aternius and Bubo through Arria Metella to match the link between Bubo and Clusinus. The triangle was complete. So. A scenario. Let's say there was more than one scam involved here, the tomb-robbing and the property angle. Tomb-robbing first. Clusinus is the muscle, Bubo's the brains and Aternius and his uncle are the sleeping partners who make it all possible. Bubo goes to Clusinus -forget why he chooses him for the present – and sets up a deal: together they'll go into the tomb-looting business, with Clusinus doing the heavy work and Bubo selling on the result through his brother in Rome where the markets are. Bubo tells Clusinus their necks are safe, because part of the profits will go as kickbacks to the Cominii who'll see to it that the scam proceeds undisturbed. Everyone wins, nobody loses: Aternius and his uncle get to tap into a flow of hard cash which they badly need to pull their finances out of the hole, Bubo gains access to a major source of antiquities which is for all practical purposes inexhaustible, and Clusinus is making a hell of a lot more than he could pull in growing apples and goats. As a scam, it's a literal gold mine, with maximum profit and minimum risk. Perfect, in fact.

Only something screws up before it properly takes off. What that could've been was anybody's guess, but my bet reading backwards from what actually happened was that Clusinus, being Clusinus, had got greedy and had tried to pad out his share of the deal by soaking the Cominii. That would make sense, even if it was just a matter of threatening to spread ugly rumours: unlike simple fraud, tomb raiding isn't a gentleman's crime, and Caere's an old-fashioned town. Come the election, even the barest hint that the Cominian ticket was being funded from the sale of black market grave goods would have the guy's tail off the curule chair so fast his head would spin. So. The family decides to dissolve the partnership and plaster over the cracks. Being the clever bastards they are they don't just zero Clusinus and Bubo straight off; they work out a way to kill three birds with one stone. Hence the property scam. Old Navius is dead, his widow's loaded and looking round for a suitable replacement, and she's already got her eye on smoothie Aternius. The only fly in the financial ointment is young Navius, but if they can get rid of him with no risk to themselves then the Navius property is in the bag. So they set Clusinus up. Aternius kills Navius on Clusinus's land, making him the natural suspect; and with the Cominii running the local judicial system pinning the rap where it doesn't belong will pose no problems…