The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis Read Free Book Online

the Mint. We rolled it, and banged it topside up, looking for an official stamp.
    It was stamped all right: TCL TRIP, some new piece of nonsense, not once but four times, then EX ARC BRIT the old familiar mark we half hoped and half dreaded to find. Petronius groaned.
    "Britain; a perfect signature! Someone must be sweating."
    An uncomfortable feeling struck us both at the same time.
    "Better move," Petro suggested. "Shall I tidy this away? Our usual place? You take the girl?"
    I nodded.
    "Falco, what's happening?" Sosia demanded excitedly.
    "He's putting the silver pig somewhere smelly where felons will be too sensitive to look," I said. "You're going home. And J need an urgent chat with your Uncle Decimus!"

XIII

    I took Sosia Camillina home in a sedan chair. There was room for two; she was a diminutive scrap and I could so rarely afford enough to eat that the bearers let us both ride. I stayed silent for a long time, so once she worked out I was no longer disgruntled with her, she chattered. I listened without listening. She was too young to sit in peace after a surprise.
    I was beginning to be annoyed with the entire Camillus family. Nothing any of them ever said was true or complete, unless it turned into something I preferred not to hear. My open-ended contract had led me down a cul-de-sac.
    "Why are you so quiet?" Sosia demanded suddenly. "Are you wishing you could steal the silver pig?" I said nothing. Naturally. I was wondering how that might be arranged. "Do you ever * have any money, Falco?"
    "Sometimes."
    "What do you do with it?"
    I told her I paid the rent.
    "I see!" she commented gravely. She was looking up at me with those great unsettling eyes. Her expression saddened into melting reproach for my aggressiveness. I wanted to suggest it was a bad idea to turn a look like that on men with whom she found herself alone, though I said nothing because I foresaw difficulties explaining why.
    "Didius Falco, what do you really do with it?"
    "I send it to my mother." My tone of voice left her unsure whether I meant it, which was how I liked a woman to be left.
    At that time I thought a man should never tell women what he does with his money. (Those days were the days, of course, before I was married and had this issue placed in true perspective by my wife.)
    What I really did with my money in those days was that sometimes I paid the rent. (More often not.) Then, after deducting unavoidable expenses, I sent half to mama; I gave the rest to the young woman my brother never found the time to marry before he was killed in Judaea, and the child he never even discovered he had.
    None of that was any business of a senator's niece.
    I dumped the girl on her relieved aunt.
    Senators' wives, in my scheme, fall into three types. The ones who sleep with senators, but not the senators who married them; the ones who sleep with gladiators; and a few who stay at home. Before Vespasian, the first two types were everywhere. There were even more afterwards, because when Vespasian became Emperor, while he and his elder son were out in the east, his young puppy Domitian lived in Rome. Domitian's idea of becoming a Caesar was seducing senators' wives.
    The wife of Decimus Camillus fell into my third type: she stayed at home. I knew that already, otherwise I would have heard of her. She was what I expected: glossy, tense, perfect manners, jingling with gold jewellery a well-treated woman with an even better-kept face. She glanced first at Sosia, then her shrewd black eyes flicked over me. She was just the sort of sensible matron a bachelor would be lucky to find when he was presented with an illegitimate child he felt unable to ignore. I could see why the nifty Publius parked his Sosia here.
    Julia Justa, the senator's wife, took back her lost niece without fuss. She would ask her questions later, once the household settled down. Just the sort of decent, deserving woman who has the unhappy luck to be married to a man who dabbles in illegal