The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

them for me! If you find the missing silver, you can expect a substantial bonus."
    "I'd like to meet your principal!" I snapped. "My idea of a bonus may not be the same as his."
    Decimus Camillus snapped straight back: "My principal's idea of a bonus is the best you will get!"
    I knew it meant working for some snooty secretariat of jumped-up scribes who would slash my expenses given half a chance, but I took the job. I must have been mad. Still, he was Sosia's uncle, and I felt sorry for his wife.
    There was something odd about this case.
    "By the way, sir, did you set a slick lynx called Atius Pertinax on my tail?"
    He looked annoyed. "No!"
    "Has he ties with your family?"
    "No," he chipped in impatiently, then checked. Nothing was simple here. "A slight connection," he corrected himself, and by now his expression had deliberately cleared. "Business links with my brother."
    "Did you tell your brother that Sosia was with me?"
    "I had no opportunity."
    "Someone did. He asked Pertinax to arrest me."
    The senator smiled. "I do apologize. My brother has been frantically worried about his daughter. He'll be delighted you brought her home."
    Tidily cleared up. Petronius Longus had said my description was known, so an aedile might track me down. Pertinax and
    Publius assumed I was a villain. Big brother Decimus had omitted to mention to little brother Publius the fact that he hired me. I was not surprised. I come from a large family myself. There were lots of things Festus had never remembered to tell me.

XIV

    This silver leak was a clever scheme! The British mines, which in my day were guarded so cautiously by the army, had apparently been tapped off as neatly as those illegal standpipes plugged in by private citizens all along the Claudian aqueduct; silver bars sparkling all the way to Rome like the crystal waters of the Caerulean Spring. I wished Petro and I had done it ten years before.
    Passing the Capena Gate lockup, I nipped in to see the loafers from the cook shop whom I had seen being arrested that morning for spying on the senator. I was out of luck. Pertinax had let them go no evidence to hold them, he maintained.
    I gazed at the duty guard with my world-weary fellow comrade sigh.
    "Typical! Did he bother to question them?"
    "Few friendly words."
    "Brilliant! What about this Pertinax?"
    "Knows it all!" the squaddie complained. We were both acquainted with the type. We exchanged a painful look.
    Ts he just inefficient, or would you say it was something else?"
    T'd say I don't like him but I say that about them all."
    I grinned. "Thank you! Look," I cajoled frankly, "what's the word on an ingot of government lead? This is unofficially official, if you understand what I mean." This was a lark. I didn't understand what I was saying myself.
    He insisted he was under strict orders to say nothing. I chinked some coinage his way. Never fails.
    "A drayman handed it in last week; turned up hoping for a reward. The magistrate himself came down to look. The drayman lives..." (Another magic chink.) Tn a river booth on the Transtiberina bank, at the sign of the Turbot, near the Sulpician Bridge..."
    I found the booth, but not the drayman. Three days after his horse stumbled over the silver pig in the dark, he was dredged out of the Tiber by two men fishing from a raft. They took him to Tiber Island, the medical hospice at the Temple of Aesculapius. Most of their patients die. It didn't worry the drayman; he was already dead.
    Before leaving the island I leaned on the parapet of the old Fabrician Bridge and did some hard thinking. Someone approached in that all too casual way, the way that is never casual at all.
    "You Falco?"
    "Who wants to know, princess?"
    "My name's Astia. You asking about the man who was drowned?"
    I guessed Astia was the drayman's floosie. She was a thin, bleached waterfront shrimp with a tired, hard waterfront face. Best to know where you are: "You his woman?" I asked her straight out.
    Astia laughed bitterly.