‘Please, sir – I can’t. Please, you’re hurting my arm.’ Martin’s voice was a ragged whisper.
‘Hurting your arm, am I?’ said I, grimly. I was angry. More than that, I was horrified. ‘I’ll hurt more than that if I have to. I know you’ve been fucking some girl. I know her belly is full of your trash. Do you think I give a shit about any of that? I want the truth about you and Maximin’s death. Do you understand?’
Martin twisted ineffectually in my grip. I had him too tight. ‘Please, please,’ he cried, ‘don’t bring Sveta into this. She knows nothing. Please, sir!’
‘You’re coming with me,’ I said, now squeezing on his arm until I felt the bones. But where to, I thought? To the prefect? What a joke! To the dispensator? What was his role in the murder? Where to? It was obvious.
‘You’re coming with me to Lucius. We’ll have the truth out of you.’
Martin blenched again. ‘No, sir – not to the lord Basilius. Please, not to him.’
Indeed not. I could imagine what Martin was thinking. Lucius would have the back off him without putting his wine cup down or raising his voice. If that didn’t work, there were the spiked whips and red-hot pincers, or whatever else he kept in reserve for particularly naughty slaves.
I turned with him and began marching him away from the Lateran, now towards the house of Lucius. ‘You’ll tell us all you know about the Column of Phocas – who is in it, and how much you were paid. You’ll also tell us about those letters. After all, that’s why you volunteered yourself for the copying mission, isn’t it? Your job was to help get those letters.’
Thump!
‘Urgh!… Fuck you!’
I’d misjudged Martin. Just because he was weedy and didn’t know how to use a sword didn’t mean he was incapable of violence. He’d suddenly raised his knee and got me in the stomach. I doubled over, gasping for breath.
And he was off.
He was lighter than me, and his legs were longer. He was off like a rabbit before I could straighten up. But I gave chase. So long as I kept him in sight, I’d run him down. Then it would be off to Lucius and whatever it took to get the truth out of the man who’d killed or had some part in killing Maximin.
‘Stop that slave!’ I bellowed at some barbarian pilgrim further down the street. ‘Stop him!’
The barbarian smiled and reached out a heavily muscled arm to scoop Martin as he tried to run past. I could see the gleam of the gold band on his bicep.
But Martin was deft as well as fast. He dodged the outstretched arm and continued running, his speed hardly broken. We both followed, shouting at others in the street to join the chase.
Martin ran and ran. We followed. As I’d expected, he had speed but little stamina. He was like my horse on the road from Populonium. He wasn’t built for a long chase. He ran down long, almost empty streets, jumping here and there over the fallen ruins. But we followed close behind. Little by little we gained on him. I could hear his rasping breath as his energy began to fail him. He rounded a corner.
‘It’s a dead end,’ the barbarian called exultantly. ‘We’ve got the worthless cunt!’
He was right. It was a dead end. The street was blocked with a sheer, ten-foot-high pile of fallen rubble. No one could get over that without slowing to a crawl. We’d have him.
But there was another of those bastard sewers open. Martin stepped straight into a hole in the grating, and was gone. We were there within a few heartbeats. But he was gone.
‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ I shouted, looking down. ‘Fuck!’ This one wasn’t blocked. I pushed my head through the hole into a cold, shitty draught. Of all the sewers in all the streets in Rome, Martin had chosen to escape into one that was still in working order.
Neither I nor the barbarian could follow. At its widest, the hole in the grating was only about fifteen inches wide. Even without the muscling piled on top, we both had those big Germanic shoulders. We pulled at the rest of the grating. But time had set it into the road as if it had been concreted in.
I looked around. There were others now with us. But they were all too big to fit through.
‘Where does this lead?’ I cried, looking round.
Someone told me it led down to the river, but that it might also connect to the great main drain that led underneath the city.
‘Stay here!’ I shouted to the barbarian. ‘If he comes out, grab him. There’s a price on his head.’
I raced back down to the river. I looked at the series of holes issuing from the embankment. Some were choked with weeds and filth, and were probably backed up solid. Others still ran clear into the Tiber, just as they had in the old days. Which one had Martin used for his exit? Had he come out?
I asked some fishermen who were washing their nets over the side of their little boat. They had seen no one come out. I offered them a price for catching whoever did come out.
I ran back to the broken grating. The barbarian had seen and heard nothing. Martin might be cowering just a few inches underneath our feet. He might be sinking slowly into a swamp of semi-liquid filth. He might have got clear away. Whatever, we’d lost him.
I pulled my right arm back from the hole. I’d been poking a long broken spar in all directions that I could reach. In all directions, I felt nothing.
‘Fucking little shitbag,’ I snarled as I thanked the barbarian and gave him some silver for his trouble. ‘I’ll get the fucker yet. I’ll have all the gates watched. I’ll post notice of reward. You can’t hide long in this city. I’ll have him in these two hands – and he’ll beg for death before I’m finished with him.
‘Fucking Celtic shit-eating motherfucker,’ I added to no one in particular as I walked off, trying not to show how baffled I was by the man’s sudden escape.
I came face to face with two men dressed in clerical garb.
‘You must come with us,’ one of them said in a tone that didn’t permit argument or delay. ‘The dispensator will want to see you.’
39
I sat in the dispensator’s office. He was on his feet, pacing about in a white anger.
‘You have been in Rome one week,’ he hissed malevolently at me. ‘In this time, you have been associated with three murders. You have been a principal in a serious fraud on several of the Church’s most useful financial intermediaries. You have assaulted a valuable – indeed, currently irreplaceable – Church slave in the street, and caused him to run away. You have been brawling in the street and, according to my account, killed three men.
‘You have also associated yourself with a man of the most shocking reputation – a man with whom I am ashamed to be connected by ties of common blood. You have committed one unspeakable crime with him in the Colosseum. And, from the reports I have of your movements last night, you have almost certainly committed another at his house.’
He might have added – and doubtless he did in his mind – that I’d come close to wrecking his most important public appearance that year. But he contented himself with my less arguable derelictions in Rome.
‘I’ve told you,’ I said back to him, ‘I will do whatever I must to find Maximin’s killers.’
The dispensator stopped and looked down at me, a sneer on his face. ‘So, Father Maximin – soon perhaps to be Saint Maximin – would have found blasphemy, fraud and sodomy perfectly acceptable instruments of law enforcement? I think not. And what have you found for all this? Have you found the killers? Have you even found the letters that you and my nephew seem to think so important?’
‘I haven’t found the killers yet,’ I answered, looking away from that nasty, cold face. ‘But I know who they were.’ I told him about the Column of Phocas. I told him that Martin was connected with it.
His face contorted into a thin smile. ‘So you know about the Column of Phocas. And you think Martin was connected with it. But you can’t lead me to it, or to Martin, or to those letters. For all your frantic hoeing and trenching, you have not reaped a great harvest of fact.
‘All you have been able to establish is that those letters are lost to everyone who might want them. This may not be an ideal answer to the question of where they are. I think, however, it is an answer with which all should be satisfied. Yes, perhaps all should be satisfied.’
He sat down behind his desk and straightened his tunic. ‘The matter now remains of what I am to do with
