enemy was no taloned eagle, more a twittering sparrow needing to be silenced.
‘Here,’ said Lucius, throwing Gafon a small leather bag full of coins. It was caught and weighed by a person well used to calculating the contents of a purse, a man who knew that what he had in his hand was either his whole agreed fee, or something very close to it. ‘We agreed half your fee in advance. You will already have ascertained that the purse contains more.’
‘Does it, your honour?’ Gafon’s eyes were wide, and larded with insincere surprise.
‘I have another task for you.’ That changed the innocent look to one of barely disguised suspicion. ‘It is nothing like as dangerous, but it is, to me, just as important. It therefore qualifies for a substantial reward.’
His hired assassin was thinking that if there was another fee, it was one of which his thugs would know nothing, therefore payment of whatever was required, if he agreed to it, would be for him alone.
‘I have a slave who has betrayed me,’ said Lucius, fingering a tightly rolled scroll of paper. ‘I could of course just kill him, I have the legal right to do so, but that would not send out the message that I require.’
‘He could die beside Livonius.’
Lucius shook his head. This Gafon was stupid, but he dealt with that every day, quite often with men who held high rank, so masking the thought came easily. ‘Nor would his body in the street point out what’s required, quite apart from his obvious association with me.’
Lucius waited for Gafon to draw the conclusion he sought to convey; that this household slave was in some way connected to the party of populares who supported Tiberius Livonius; that his death had to send a message to them as well as the rest of Rome’s slaves; that spying on their masters would result in only one fate; not just death but total oblivion.
‘You want him to disappear?’
‘Yes. How that is done I leave to you. I am about to call for him and give him some instructions relating to your task. He will readily understand that I distrust you, with the same arrogance that makes him think I have complete faith in him. I will ask him to accompany you, and watch to make sure that you carry out my instructions to the letter. How you do it and when I leave to you, but I want him disposed of, yet some sign of his demise to be publicly visible. Carry out that, as well, and your fee for the night’s work will be increased substantially.’
‘I accept,’ Gafon replied crisply.
‘You do not wish to ponder this?’ asked Lucius, with an arch, almost amused expression. The owner of the gladiator school, more concerned with his indebtedness than the prospect of another murder, shook his head. ‘The slave will have with him a scroll, and that too must disappear.’ Gafon nodded, then grinned as the senator continued. ‘He will also have some money of his own, which I expect you will relieve him of.’
That Gafon would have to share, but he was more concerned with how to make a dead body disappear.
‘Make sure you come back alone to tell me what you have done,’ Lucius added. ‘You will never talk of this to anyone, at the peril of the same fate as those you will dispose of tonight. And tell those brawlers you have with you to hold their tongues as well.’
Gafon was well aware of the potency of the threat. Armed with a sword he might be, but against the power and dignity of this man he would be impotent. He could plead till he was blue that he had been hired to do murder, but that would just guarantee his own removal. That his paymaster may suffer subsequently was little compensation.
Lucius went to the door and signalled that Ragas should enter. With a last glance at the assembled thugs he did so; coming into the well-lit study it was possible for Gafon to examine him. Taller than both men in the room he carried himself as though he was the lord and Lucius the slave. His skin was discoloured around his neck, stained by the metal of the slave collar he had worn for many years, but even that did nothing to dent his natural dignity. Loosely dressed in a light tunic, the muscles of his body rippled on arms and breast and he showed no sign at all that the cold of the open atrium had affected him.
Gafon knew enough about fighting men to recognise a boxer when he saw one. It was in the face certainly; the nose which had once been straight and handsome flattened by numerous blows; the scar tissue on the brow and the raised knuckles on the large hands. This man would have acted as bodyguard as well as a body slave, protecting Lucius from assault in the troubled city streets. But Gafon was also struck by a similarity of features in both men. Lucius was like an aesthetic older relation of the sturdier slave. His hair was receding now and no doubt his fine dark brown mop had once been as thick as that of the servant, but it was around the eyes of both men that the similarity was most marked; deep brown yet penetrating pupils under marked eyebrows.
‘That will be all,’ Lucius said to Gafon, as soon as the assassin had managed to get a good look at his victim. ‘Wait outside the door.’
Gafon obeyed, masking his surprise that one so close to Lucius had betrayed him. But it made sense, for the boxer would be with his master more than any other person, both inside the Falerii house and out on the streets. Who would know more about his movements, whom he visited, the senators he spoke with. Given that most men where blind to the presence of a slave, and would talk freely when he was close, what plans he hatched with people whom Tiberius Livonius might assume were on his side.
Behind the closed door the slave was receiving from his master’s hand a scroll stating that he had been the property of the Falerii family but was now, by order of the head of that household, free. It was an act that should have been witnessed by either his friends or a magistrate, but since he had held the office of consul he had decided to dispense with anything public for the very good reason that he was not sure he wanted this manumission to be generally known. Lucius was uncomfortable, certainly more so than his now ex-slave. Ragas had always carried himself in the manner to which he had been born, a war leader among his own tribe, which had rendered a troubled edge to their relationship from the day he had been accepted as a gift from Aulus Cornelius. Not one to suffer insolence, Lucius had made the man’s life a misery, seeking to rupture a spirit determined to challenge all notions of servitude. It had taken months and he could not claim to have broken him, but he had got Ragas to acknowledge who gave orders and who obeyed, in the process forming, for him, a strange admiration. Lucius did not like Ragas one little bit, but he saw qualities in him; some traits that he had himself, others more physical that he lacked but wished he possessed.
They shared a steely determination, a refusal to buckle under adversity. Where the slave had been physically hard, Lucius possessed a will of iron that could not be deflected from any objective, once set, a trait which had earned him his nickname, Nerva. Beyond those first confrontations, the master had found that his body slave had a brain as well. He learnt Latin with ease, both the written and spoken word, and possessed a devious mind, but it was the attraction of his wife Ameliana for this Dacian which had brought the greatest service of all. The couple had endured near-twenty childless years, not unusual in a Roman family, but galling to a man as proud as Lucius. Adoption was the commonplace solution for a patrician family, yet he was unwilling to take that step, not wishing to open himself up to the gossip of the mob or see ribald drawings on his own villa walls regarding his potency in the bedchamber. Originally furious at the notice his wife afforded to a slave, as well as the nocturnal scrabblings it engendered, his natural pragmatism forced him to look at it objectively. Finally he came to see it as the solution to an intractable dilemma, and to relish the market-place joke that now attached to his name; that he took such a long view of everything that he had saved up his seed over all those years for one mighty endeavour.
‘In the end, you served me well, better than either of us could have imagined.’
Ragas held up the scroll that made him both a free man and a Roman citizen. ‘For this I would have done more.’
‘Will you stay in the city?’ That warranted a shrug from a man who now had the right not to respond. ‘A man of your abilities will prosper here and you always have my good offices to call upon should you need assistance.’
‘We have agreed many times, Lucius Falerius, that haste is fatal. I shall look around me, see what I see, then decide on my next course of action.’
‘I have one last job for you, tonight, if you wish to undertake it. Naturally should you do so there would be a fee.’ Lucius held up another small leather pouch. The Dacian took it and bounced the leather purse in his hand, causing Lucius to add, ‘Those men outside have been engaged for a very special service.’
‘The final reckoning. No more debates.’
That brought forth, from Lucius, a full smile. Proud of his own deductive powers he liked to observe them in a man he had some claim to have trained. No expression on his face betrayed the thought that he would miss Ragas, not for his insolence perhaps but certainly for his sagacity as well as his powerful physical and protective presence.
