Wolf Whistle

As a small, dry hand slipped into hers, Claudia had a feeling they were not entirely alone on the Argiletum. It could be the lamps flickering from the upper storeys. It could be the dark, damp, starless sky. But she had the strangest feeling that wretched lovesick ghost was back to haunt her.

The one whose name was Trouble…

II

Less than a mile away, in the smart town house of the pepper merchant, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio killed time by admiring the exquisite decor. Sweeping pastoral frescoes, so perfect you could almost hear the goats bleat. Hanging lamps with six or seven wicks lit the room brighter than a midsummer noon. A bronze dog was curled in the corner and rare aromatics filled the air. He glanced at the water clock. It was not like his informant to be late, but these were difficult times. Less than a fortnight before, the Empire had been rocked to its core when Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa — at once the Emperor’s closest friend, finest general, son-in-law and Regent-had returned from campaign and promptly died. The shock waves could not have been greater had the earth itself trembled, because if the Fates could cut this man’s thread at fifty-two, what chance for Augustus who was the same age?

Orbilio slid open one of the doors to the garden, where torchlight breathed life into the marble statuary and made gems of the whispering fountains. But cloying wallflowers did not understand sophisticated room scents and he closed it again. What chance for Augustus, indeed? There was many a fellow who, in his youth, had been Julius Caesar’s man and had been outraged when Augustus ingratiated himself to become the Great Man’s heir. Although more rational men blamed Caesar for setting his catamite above his natural-born son, any waverers had their doubts dispelled after Caesar’s murder, when the catamite showed the people precisely why he’d paid such a high price for adoption.

First he dealt with Brutus, then he dealt with Cassius and, finally, he dealt with Mark Anthony. Orbilio was only six at the time, yet still he remembered the tremendous ripple of excitement which spread through Rome when Augustus promised an end, once and for all, to three generations of civil war. After that, he went from strength to strength-annexing Egypt, Galatia, Spain, all the Alpine territories, Liguria, Illyria and Germany, as far as the Danube. He eliminated piracy, set up a network of trade hitherto unimagined and certainly unparalleled and finally, with his promise fulfilled, he disbanded the army’s part-time peasant farmers in exchange for a hard core of professionals, releasing the land for full-time farming. Small wonder his people took an ever swelling pride in their new roads, their sewers, the aqueducts which carried sweet water from the springs in the hills. The Emperor Augustus had given them twenty years of ineffable stability, their bellies and the Treasury were full. The spoils of war had turned their temples into marble masterpieces, bronze heroes galloped across the Forum, public baths, libraries, theatres and gardens were springing up pretty well everywhere.

Who, now, remembers that, to be on the safe side, Augustus had felt obliged to murder Caesar’s natural-born son?

Who, now, cares?

No one. But then sedition doesn’t always hinge on history and past grudges. Money is a factor. And let’s never forget the lure of power for its own sake. The Empire was poised on the brink of disaster.

The heat from the braziers had reached unbearable proportions, and Orbilio shrugged off that symbol of his birthright, the toga. That was a real perk of being attached to the Security Police, dispensing with the toga. Heavy and unwieldy, it restricted a man’s movements, although gentlemanly attire was a necessary evil when mingling with the wealthy and the noble (and naturally he’d worn the black toga throughout the public mourning for Agrippa). However, life must move on, and nine days at standstill takes a heavy toll on commerce and industry, there was much catching up to be done.

‘Marcus!’ A young woman, pink and immaculate, swept into the room. ‘Am I terribly late?’

Who said informants were restricted to the dross of society, or that they should be exclusively male?

‘I’m early,’ he lied, drinking in Mevia’s full breasts and rounded hips as she turned the key in the lock.

‘It’s this silly market day that causes so much chaos,’ she pouted. ‘You’d think we hadn’t had one for ten weeks, much less ten days.’

‘When you hold them every eight days, people become dependent upon the routine.’ Disrupt that routine and you disrupt the structure of their lives. Praise be to Jupiter, we’re right back on schedule. ‘So, Mevia. What have you got for me?’

‘Just myself,’ she purred, slipping off her sandals. ‘But you won’t be disappointed.’