White murder marcus corv.., p.3
White Murder (Marcus Corvinus Book 7), page 3
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Who was he, and what exactly happened?’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I was counting, lady. You made fifty-two before you cracked. That’s a record.’
‘Corvinus, I will kill you.’
I grinned and chewed: nothing annoys Perilla more than knowing she’s been sussed. ‘Yeah. Right. The guy’s name was Pegasus. He –’
Her eyes widened. ‘The Pegasus? The charioteer?’
‘Uh-huh.’ I gave her the rest, including the details of my little brush with Delicatus and his cronies; at which point the lady’s mouth set in a line you could’ve used to slice marble.
‘Marcus, I really don’t think you should get involved in this,’ she said. ‘It’s Watch business.’
‘I told you. The Watch aren’t interested. Or at least that bastard Valgius isn’t.’
‘Turn it over to Decimus Lippillus, then.’
But I’d thought about that on the way back. ‘I can’t do that. First because Lippillus is Public Pond and it would offend the guy’s professional ethics to poach, second because I don’t like the smell of the case already and that smart midget’d likely end up with his backside in a sling.’
‘My point exactly.’ Perilla shelled an egg of her own. ‘Marcus, dear, listen to me. You cannot afford to tangle with Sertorius Macro. Let alone Prince Gaius.’
Oops; mistake. I backtracked. ‘Macro isn’t involved. That was just Delicatus shooting his mouth off. And the Prince is on Capri whooping it up with the Wart.’
‘Do you have your fingers crossed or am I just imagining it?’
I uncrossed them. ‘Look, Perilla, forget conspiracy theories, okay? Pegasus had jumped the fence. One gets you ten all we’ve got here’s a simple case of racegoer’s fever. The new season’s coming up and Valgius and his ultra-Green gorillas were just too happy to hear that the guy had hung up his tunic to make any waves. End of story, right?’
‘So why do you have to interfere?’
Jupiter’s balls! ‘Because it was murder; not just a killing, but murder. If I don’t interfere then no one else will. Also I don’t like having my arm twisted. And cut the hypocritical crap. You’re just as curious as I am.’
‘Hmm.’ She dipped the egg in sauce. I’d got her; sure I had. ‘All right. So what’s the theory so far? I assume you have one.’
I shrugged. ‘The gods know. I’d say the murderer had arranged to meet the guy at Renatius’s, only instead of turning up he’d squirrelled himself away in the empty house across the street, watched for Pegasus to come out again then followed and stabbed him. That’s as far as I go.’
‘Pegasus was waiting for someone?’
‘Sure. Or that was the impression I got. He was keeping an eye on the door, anyway.’
‘How?’
‘How do you mean, “How”?’
‘Did he look relaxed or anxious?’
‘Oh. Yeah. Right.’ Good question, and one I hadn’t thought of. Relaxed would mean he was easy in his mind about whoever he was meeting, anxious the opposite. I cast my mind back. ‘Relaxed. Not obviously anxious, anyway.’
‘Very well. Now why? I mean, why kill him in the first place?’
I took a swig of Setinian. ‘Could be several reasons. Professional or personal. Like I said, the guy had shifted teams recently, Green to White. That wouldn’t be popular in certain quarters.’
Perilla’s hand paused over a stuffed olive. ‘Green to White? Isn’t that unusual?’
‘Yeah. That’s what I thought. It happens, sure, but –’
‘But not with drivers of that calibre.’
‘Right. It’s somewhere to start, anyway.’ I frowned. ‘Hey, lady. I didn’t know you were a racing buff.’
‘I’m not an absolute idiot, either.’
Ouch. ‘Uh...yeah. Yeah. Right.’ I crunched on a carrot stick.
‘He can’t be all that old, and he’s been doing very well lately. Or am I wrong?’
‘He’s been doing okay.’ Like I said before, I’m no racing nut and I couldn’t’ve gone into details, but you can’t have your chin scraped in a Market Square barber’s without the guy with the razor giving you his unsolicited views ad nauseam on how the factions are shaping. Most of the time I just close my ears and nod when nodding doesn’t risk a slit windpipe, but I distinctly remembered that the guy had had more than his fair share of wins in the last two sets of games.
‘So why did he change, then?’ Perilla said.
I sipped the wine. Yeah; that was something I’d wondered about myself when young Lucius had mentioned it, only now having an answer was more important. Or it might be. Green to Blue or vice-versa, sure, like I said, no problem; but there are only two reasons, normally, for a lead driver with the top teams to move down a level. One is simply age, when his reactions slow and – skilled driver or not – he loses his edge over the up-and-coming youngsters; the other, which has the same effect, is that his nerve goes because of a bad spill or something similar. Even so, the guy tends to stick with the original team, if only out of pride, or – sometimes – he moves across to an equivalent level in the second-string Colour: Blue to White or Green to Red. I could be wrong on either, of course – reading some kind of illness for age in the first – but I didn’t think so, not with the recent wins the guy had notched up.
Which left the rarer, third reason...
‘Sir?’
‘Hmm?’ I came back to myself: Bathyllus, with the mullet and the quiche. ‘Yeah, okay, little guy, serve away.’
I topped up my cup from the jug on the table. Well, at least we had a logical starting point. The Green and White stables – in fact, the stables of all four factions – were in Mars Field, a stone’s throw from the Tiber. I could go there tomorrow, have a word with Pegasus’s current and former bosses.
They might, too – at least the White boss might – be able to shed a bit of light on what the guy had been doing at Renatius’s. No reason why he shouldn’t go there, of course, but the factions, like most other closed groups in the city, are a gregarious bunch. They have their own favourite wineshops, and when they’re off-base the drivers tend to stick to them. Besides, although the Whites – like the Reds – are a second-string team their stables are self-contained units, with eating and drinking facilities on site. That was another problem that needed solving.
I looked up. Perilla was watching me with a small smile on her lips.
‘What’s tickling you?’ I said.
‘Nothing, Marcus.’ She started in on her mullet. ‘Nothing at all.’
Sometimes I wonder about that lady. I held up my plate for Bathyllus to fill. He slid the mullet off the serving dish. It missed and landed on the table.
The little guy looked mortified. He scooped the fish up onto the plate with the spatula. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, that was clumsy of me,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a cloth at once.’
I watched his retreating back. One thing our major-domo wasn’t was clumsy; it went with ‘distracted’. And a lot of his sarky snap was missing, too. Odd; more than odd. ‘Hey, Perilla,’ I said. ‘What’s biting Bathyllus?’
‘I don’t know, dear. He’s been distant all day. I did ask, but he only sniffed at me.’
Yeah; been there, had the experience. Jupiter! Staff! It wasn’t anything we’d done, at least, I was sure of that: even the little guy’s huffs don’t allow him to compromise where his job’s concerned. The same went for the opening of fresh hostilities in his ongoing battle with the anarchist Meton. Whatever was going on under that hairless pate it was something very much out of the usual.
Well, I wasn’t going to push. Bathyllus isn’t exactly the type you can take into a quiet corner and have a heart-to-heart master-and-slave chat with. If it was important we’d find out eventually. I ate my mullet.
Something out of the usual was right; but then at that stage I couldn’t even have guessed at the answer. That came out later.
Even then I didn’t believe it.
4.
Well, we’d got spring, finally. The weather over the past few days had been a hangover from winter, but this was real March stuff, bright and blustery, and the city looked like someone had just taken it to the cleaners to have the grime washed out. Even the crowds were different. Most of the time your average city centre punter is a prime contender for the All-comers’ Unfriendly Bastard title and you need to move sideways fast if you don’t want to be mown down by yard-wide old biddies en route from the vegetable market; but that morning even the chunky bullet-heads who do the portering in the Velabrum seemed willing to give an inch or two. I even heard one whistling, and there weren’t any pigs flying over the Capitol, either.
I turned up Triumph Road and headed for Mars Field. The stables are all in a line on the stretch between Pompey’s Theatre and the river: adjacent-paired Blue/White and Green/Red, with the Blues and Greens being the biggies, self-sufficient units more like a country farm than something you’d normally find inside the city boundaries. Or rather something between a farm and a military base, because racing’s a big business in Rome, horse-nobbling’s endemic and security procedures are tighter than a gnat’s sphincter. Mean, too: try sneaking in past the gate guards and you’re likely to leave in a hurry with a few bust ribs and a deficit in the teeth department. Get caught with serious cash or a suspect substance under your tunic and you don’t come out at all.
The Whites stable was second in the row after the Blues, just beyond Tiberius Arch. The guy outside the big double gates looked like he’d been put together from the same material they’d used to build the wall, and whatever effect the spring weather had had on the rest of the population it obviously hadn’t stretched his length. I got a scowl like I’d turned up clinking with enough bottles of whacky medicine to put the entire string of nags on their backs with their hooves in the air.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘The boss around?’
‘Who wants him?’
I gave him my name. ‘I’m looking into the death of one of your drivers. Pegasus.’
If I’d thought that might ease matters I was wrong, because all it got me was a long stare. Not a particularly friendly one either.
‘You with the Watch?’ he said finally.
This was the tricky part. ‘No. But I was in the wineshop when it happened. And when the Watch turned up. I thought maybe your boss might like a second opinion.’
‘Is that so, now?’ Cement-Features didn’t bat an eyelid. The stare raked me from crown to toes before he gave a grudging nod. ‘Okay. Wait here.’
Not that I’d any option, because when he disappeared inside he closed the gate behind him and I heard the clunk of a bar thudding into place. I stepped back and looked around.
Military base was right: the wall must’ve been ten feet high, with broken pottery sherds spiking the top. It stretched all the way back to a junction with the Blues wall a hundred yards down the road, and it was smooth-faced with concrete: no foot- or handholds. You might’ve got over with grappling-hooks and a rope, sure, but that’d be what it took, nothing less. And I’d bet sides and rear were the same.
The gate opened and Cement-Features came back out, looking almost friendly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The boss says he’ll see you. You follow me close, right?’
‘Right.’ I went through the hallowed portal and he shut it behind me, pulling the heavy bar down into its sockets. ‘Uh...what’s the boss’s name, by the way?’
That got me another stare; not a hostile one this time, just an unbelieving one like young Lucius’s when I’d asked who Pegasus was. Fair enough; every racegoer out of leading-strings, whichever team he supports, knows the names of the four faction masters. ‘Cammius,’ he said. ‘Lucius Cammius.’
I was looking round me with interest because this was the first time I’d been inside a faction stable. It was a complete world in itself. Over to the right, beyond a fenced exercise yard, were the stables proper: long and low like a series of army barrack blocks with tiled roofs and half-doors every two or three yards. Some of the doors had an equine head sticking out above the bottom flap, but most had piles of dirty straw outside and what looked like a small army of guys beavering away with pitchforks loading the stuff onto carts. There was a hell of a lot of it. Disposal must’ve presented quite a logistical problem, and I was just lucky the breeze was blowing in the right direction.
‘How many horse have you got here, friend?’ I asked.
I was only making conversation, but obviously that information came into the classified category. Cement-Features gave me a suspicious look and no answer.
We went through what turned out to be the workshop area: smithies, tackle shops and so on, all busy, all well-manned; like I say, the factions operate as self-contained units, like an army camp. I breathed in. The whole place smelled of horses and leather, and it buzzed; there isn’t a better word, because the feeling was like being inside a giant beehive, with the qualification that there were no drones around, just workers. Single-minded workers at that. The fans aren’t the only obsessives. The racing world’s all about obsession, and when you’re inside it the rest of the city might just as well not exist.
Past the workshops the buildings moved upmarket. Cement-Features led me to a stone-built block that could’ve done duty for a permanent army headquarters and through the main door.
Upmarket was right. We were in an entrance hall that wouldn’t’ve disgraced a proper town house, and the decoration had that same obsessive feel to it: a frieze, running all the way round the walls, of horses with their drivers standing next to them, the guys all in white tunics with whips and round racing helmets. Both the horses and the drivers had names written underneath, like this was some kind of roll of honour. Maybe it was, at that, but I wasn’t risking any more questions.
C-F knocked at the biggest door, waited for an answer, then opened up and stood aside.
I’d expected the usual formal lounge; what I got was a businesslike office with a big desk and stacks of book-cupboards with most of their pigeonholes filled. I’d also expected one guy, but there were two: one behind the desk, the other in a visitor’s chair to one side. The decor was more horses, including a beaut of a bronze on a pedestal in the centre that looked like it might be a Greek original.
‘Valerius Corvinus?’ The guy behind the desk stood up and held out his hand. ‘Lucius Cammius.’ We shook: the hand was hard and dry, and it gave mine a quick, sharp squeeze that fitted the character of the room. He’d be in his mid-sixties: medium height but chunky, strong face and short grey hair like a wire brush, eyes like chips of gravel. Narrow stripe on his mantle, but an accent that was pure provincial Spanish: if he was purple-striper grade then he’d clawed his way up and bought his way in. Not that I had any quarrel with that: a large slice of the hereditary variety were overbred slobs. ‘The gate man says you’ve come about Pegasus.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said.
‘Pull up a chair.’ Cammius sat down. I glanced behind me and found a no-nonsense, wood-and-leather folding stool. I pulled it over and sat on it. ‘This is Gaius Acceptus. He heads the Blues.’
The second guy nodded. He was a good ten years younger than Cammius and definitely a step up the social ladder: chiselled patrician features, well-barbered, wearing his smart narrow-stripe mantle like it was a natural extension of his character. The sort of man you’d expect to find fronting a top-notch team, or any other successful business, and being totally in control. Knowing it, too. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. The voice fitted the appearance: top-drawer, bland, quietly confident.
‘Now, Corvinus.’ Cammius rested his hands on the desk. ‘I’m told that you’re not Watch. Nor are you from the city judge’s office, and that doesn’t leave much. What’s your involvement and what’s your angle?’
Straight to the point, no messing. Well, that matched the rest. I cleared my throat. ‘I was in the wineshop at the time of the murder and I saw the body. The Watch seem to think the motive was simple robbery. It wasn’t.’
Things went very quiet. Acceptus flashed me a sharp look, but Cammius’s expression didn’t change. He leaned back in his chair. ‘You sound pretty sure of that,’ he said.
‘I am.’
His eyes held mine. I felt that I was being turned inside out, assessed. Finally he grunted and said: ‘All right. Care to tell me why?’
‘Like I say, I saw the body myself, before the Watchmen arrived. The man’s purse was still on his belt and it hadn’t been touched.’
‘Watch Commander Valgius says different.’ I noticed the grammar slip. Also that Acceptus’s straight-bridged nose twitched and he pursed his lips. ‘I’ll ask you again because it’s important. You say you’re sure. How sure, exactly?’
Problems with grammar or not, the guy was no hayseed: the grey eyes were level, and very, very smart. ‘One hundred percent,’ I said. ‘The purse was there, then it wasn’t.’
Acceptus laid his fingertips together and touched the praying hands to his lips. Cammius grunted again.
‘You’re accusing the Watchmen of stealing it.’ he said. Statement, not question.
I had to go careful here. Carefully. Whatever. ‘I was with the corpse when the guys turned up. When they’d finished the purse had gone.’
‘Then your short answer’s yes.’
I shook my head. ‘No. I’m saying the purse was removed. And that it had to have been removed by the Watchmen. That’s a different thing from claiming theft.’
‘Maybe it is. But what other reason could there be?’
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. The interview was turning into an interrogation with me at the blunt end, and although the Blues boss had moved his chair back slightly and crossed his legs as though he were staying outside of things he was still taking a keen interest. ‘Delicatus and his pals were Greens supporters. So is Valgius. The dead man used to drive for the Greens before he switched.’
Cammius held up a hand. ‘Hang on there a moment. Let’s get this straight. You mean the Watch – or the Eighth District branch of it – are claiming that Pegasus was killed by an ordinary thief so they can drop the case? Or at least supply an uncomplicated motive for the killing?’
