David Wishart - Bodies Politic

We were in our own bit of the house, the east wing. We went through to the big sitting area that looked out through the portico onto the garden courtyard, me in a numbed, guilty silence. Jupiter, this was what I’d been afraid would happen! The kids were evidently unhurt, or comparatively so in Clarus’s case, but still -

When I next got in reach of the bastard responsible I’d kill him with my bare hands. Not if. When. I put it at two hours, max.

‘Now,’ I said, when we were settled on the couches. I was trying to be calm, and I knew I wasn’t succeeding too well. Perilla, I noticed, was deathly pale and shaking. ‘Tell us. The whole thing.’

‘We’d -’ Clarus began.

‘We’d decided that it was such a nice morning we’d just take a walk,’ Marilla said. ‘Clarus didn’t want to do any more sightseeing for the moment’ – she glanced sideways at Perilla, and I found myself despite everything smothering a grin: the guy was human after all – ‘so we went to the Park of Pan.’ Yeah; like I said, that’s the other high spot in Alex, mostly natural but part man-made. A half-wild area with plenty of walks and trees, where from the top there’s a good view over the city. ‘It gets crowded later on, seemingly, but early in the day it’s quite quiet. Anyway, we -’

‘They must’ve followed us,’ Clarus said. ‘There were five of them, with clubs. Anyway, we were on one of the little paths that lead off the main spiral track to the top when they came at us from behind and grabbed Marilla. I managed to put one of them down, but two of the others grabbed me and the one who wasn’t holding Marilla hit me.’ He touched a bruise on his forehead.

‘I managed to kick him in the -’ Marilla hesitated. ‘Well, I managed to kick him hard, anyway, and he didn’t like it, but it meant one of the men holding Clarus let go of him. Then everything got a bit fraught.’

‘We were shouting blue murder, of course,’ Clarus said. ‘There wasn’t anyone else around that far off the main drag, but you must’ve been able to hear the racket half way to the town square. I was slugging it out with two of the guys, getting the worst of it, and the rest were dragging Marilla off, when a young local and a couple of his slaves came round the bend and piled in to help. That was it.’ He shrugged. ‘The men let Marilla go and ran off. End of story.’

Gods! ‘You’re not hurt, Clarus?’ I said. ‘Seriously, I mean?’

‘Uh-uh. Just a sprained ankle and bruises, nothing that won’t mend quickly. I’m a doctor, I know.’ He shot Perilla a quick glance and smiled quietly. ‘I, ah, won’t be up to any more temples or monuments for the next few days, though. Unfortunately.’

‘Certainly not,’ Perilla said tightly. The lady had got her colour back, and she was looking grim. ‘Marcus -’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘Good. This has to stop.’

‘It’ll stop, lady.’ I got up. ‘I’ll see to that.’

Her face changed. ‘Marcus, where are you going?’

‘To the fucking Palace. Where else?’

‘Corvinus, no!’ Clarus said. ‘I told you: we’re fine, and there’s no harm done. We’ll just be more careful next time we go out, take a few of Stratocles’s slaves with us.’

I carried on walking. ‘There won’t be a next time, pal,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I guarantee it. There shouldn’t’ve been a first.’

I ought to have taken the carriage, but Frontis would’ve unharnessed the horses by now and I was too angry to wait. Besides, it was less than a mile in a straightish line, which was possible the way the city was laid out, and I’d got my bearings now well enough to use the side streets. What had been going on was pretty obvious. Marilla was right, it had been an attempted kidnapping, not an attack, and the guys had been armed with clubs, not knives, which showed they’d been told to injure at worst, not kill. Not that that made me feel any better. As I said, targeting me was one thing, I was fair game, but trying to put the pressure on through family was completely off the board.

The only problem was, who was I going for?

The obvious answer, on surface evaluation, would’ve been Flaccus: the theory held there, right enough. But after that talk with Mika I wasn’t certain that Flaccus was the guy I wanted after all. There was what lawyers would call an area of reasonable doubt, and it centred on the business of the Jews’ message of congratulations.

Oh, sure, I could see how it could be argued, and Mika had made the point herself: sending a separate, official message could be interpreted as an indication that Flaccus – and so Rome, since Flaccus was her representative – recognised the Alexandrian Jews as an independent, autonomous body, which politically they weren’t. On the other hand, any governor with an eye to his immediate future career would think twice before actually suppressing it altogether, in any form. Especially if the intended recipient was a vain, touchy bugger like Gaius. Especially if he already knew he wasn’t exactly flavour of the month already with said vain, touchy bugger. And especially, finally, because he’d already promised the Jews that he’d send their message on…

So maybe he had. Or thought he had.

We’d got another theory here, or rather we were back to the original one, which was equally valid: Flaccus was a complete innocent after all, and being set up for some reason with involvement in the fake Gemellus conspiracy. And after what Mika had said I could see how that worked.

Let’s say someone in Rome – not Lepidus and Agrippina, but high up all the same – wanted the Egyptian governor very, very vulnerable where the emperor was concerned; totally dependent on the someone’s continued support and so ready to be manipulated by any agent they sent to Alexandria. If they could control the contents of the diplomatic bag that carried all the official correspondence between the Egyptian governor and Rome then because that would be what the governor was judged by back home they could engineer things how they liked. And to do that all they’d need was a key man at the Alex end. Someone who acted as the middle-man between Flaccus and the bag. Someone like the governor’s aide, Acilius Glabrio.

Shit. It was beautiful. Flaccus hands the Jews’ message of congratulation to Glabrio, telling him to put it in the diplomatic bag, and forgets about it, as he naturally would: job done, duty fulfilled. Only Glabrio, on instructions from X in Rome, burns it instead. Oh, official communications channels are much faster than the ones for the use of the ordinary punters, sure – the government has fast cutters, or triremes that can row against the wind, and once any message is on Italian soil there’s the imperial courier service – but it had to be a clear month at least, probably a lot longer, before Flaccus smelled a rat and realised the Jewish letter hadn’t got through. By which time it was too late to send a copy, not without providing a reasonable excuse with evidence to back it, which he didn’t have. And even if he did it might just make matters worse: Gaius might well interpret the whole thing as a deliberate, studied insult on the part of a man he didn’t like or trust in any case. Better, then – and I’d guess this was what Flaccus decided to do – to leave it alone and hope it would be quietly forgotten about. He wouldn’t automatically think of blaming Glabrio either; why should he? Glabrio – as far as he knew – had no reason to monkey with the mail, and under the circumstances it’d be much more likely that the funny business had happened at the Rome end, where he knew he had real enemies; a passed-on message of congratulation isn’t exactly hush-hush confidential stuff, so it wouldn’t go direct to the emperor, for Gaius’s eyes only…