Persona Non Grata (22 page)

46

P
ROBUS’S SLAVE USHERED Ruso through an entrance hall that had changed little in the years since his last visit. The heavy ironbound chests in which his former father-in-law kept other people’s money were still flanked by two surly faced men armed with clubs and daggers. The man who had told him about Marcia’s attempts to borrow money, now back on duty, showed no sign of recognizing him. He followed the slave out into the garden where he had once asked for Claudia’s hand in marriage and wondered whether Probus knew that she had murdered her latest husband.

Probus was seated by a fountain that much resembled the one in Ruso’s own garden, except that it was built properly and it worked. When the slave had been dismissed he said, “Keep your voice down. We won’t be heard over the water.”

Evidently Probus did not trust his staff any more than he trusted Ruso, who perched on the side of the fountain and trailed one hand in the cool water. He wondered what Claudia was telling the investigators. None of it would answer any of his own questions: questions like how she had managed to poison Severus without harming the rest of the house hold, and why he had been such a fool as to believe her.

Probus was still talking. “. . . but I haven’t heard anything.”

Ruso cleared his throat. “Anything about what?”

The corners of Probus’s mouth turned down even farther than usual. “You were the one who wanted to meet, Ruso. Kindly have the courtesy to listen.”

“Sorry.”

“You wanted to know about Severus’s business affairs.”

Ruso nodded, although in the light of what he now knew, they were of limited interest.

“Everyone knows the Gabinii are hard men if you cross them, but until recently I thought he was honest. If I hadn’t, I would never have loaned him the money for the shipping deals.”

“Or let him marry your daughter,” put in Ruso.

“Of course not.”

Ruso had been considering telling Probus what he had found out about Claudia, but the arrival of the investigators had changed everything. With luck, they would find out about her for themselves. He would be clear of the murder charge without incriminating her himself or incurring Probus’s revenge in the process. On the other hand, her denial had been remarkably convincing . . .

“. . . whether it was Justinus all along,” Probus was saying.

Ruso did not like to admit that his attention had wandered again. He said, “Ah.”

“But Justinus was with me for fourteen years and was always entirely reliable.”

“Like his sister,” put in Ruso.

“I like to think I know how to judge a man,” continued Probus, “but when the letters of credit started appearing in different ports after the ship had gone down, it was difficult to know what conclusion to draw.”

Ruso frowned. “You mean things turned up later that should have been at the bottom of the sea?”

Probus gave a tut of exasperation. “You’ve never really understood how business works, have you, Ruso?”

“No. Did you say there was more than one shipping deal?”

“This was the third. The others had gone smoothly, so I had no reason to suspect there was anything wrong when Severus asked for a bigger investment.”

Probus’s voice was calm, but there was a faint involuntary flicker of the left eyelid that Ruso had not noticed before.

“When Justinus left here, he was carrying a certain amount of cash, but certainly not enough to fund him for the whole trip or purchase the cargoes. That was arranged in the usual way, with letters authorizing him to withdraw cash up to specified amounts from bankers in the various ports where I have arrangements. Since the ship disappeared, someone has been going around withdrawing the cash.”

“So you started to wonder if he really was dead and went to ask Cass if she’d heard from him?”

“He may be dead,” continued Probus, oblivious to any distress he might have caused. “Or he may have been part of a conspiracy to rob me. As I’m fairly certain Severus was.”

“The letters could have been washed up on a beach somewhere. Anybody could have gotten hold of them.”

“Justinus had orders to keep them on his person at all times and destroy them in the event of a shipwreck.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t!” Probus seemed to startle himself with the sudden exclamation. He glanced around the colonnades that surrounded the garden, then dropped his voice again for, “I accept that you probably didn’t kill Severus. I don’t know who did and frankly, I’m not interested. He was a serious disappointment, he lost me a lot of money, and my advice to Claudia was to get rid of him.”

He caught Ruso’s eye and added, “Divorce him, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Ruso. “Divorce him. Unless you and she decided to take revenge on him together.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ruso. We don’t all do business like the Gabinii.”

Probus dismissed the possibility so summarily that Ruso was inclined to believe him.

“But if you stir up some false connection between Severus’s death and this shipping business,” Probus continued, “the senator’s investigator will start poking around in all sorts of affairs that could have . . .” He paused. “Unintended consequences.”

“There may already be a whisper in Rome that Severus was up to something,” said Ruso. “Did you know that two investigators have arrived this morning? Apparently they were already up here.”

Probus was as surprised as Ruso had been, and no more pleased. He leaned back in his seat and surveyed his former son-in-law. “Let’s hope they can be persuaded to keep out of things that don’t concern the inquiry.”

“I think they’ll be the ones doing the persuading.”

Probus sighed. “You may be clueless about business, Ruso, but until now you were always fairly good at keeping your mouth shut.”

“Thank you.”

“And you do appear to have some residual sense of duty to my daughter. So I’m going to tell you exactly what I think happened, and then perhaps you’ll understand why it’s so important that I know if your Cas-siana hears from her brother. At the same time you’ll understand what a difficult position you’ll put me in if you aren’t discreet.”

Ruso waited. If he could glean some information to help Cass, this would not have been such a wasted meeting.

“It’s my suspicion,” said Probus, “that the captain and the crew sold the cargo— or possibly there never was one in the first place— and then scuttled the ship, which my in formants now tell me was practically worthless. Presumably Severus paid next to nothing for it, despite having taken a large sum of money from me to invest in a decent vessel. They may have done away with Justinus and stolen the letters, or he may have joined them and used the letters himself to defraud me. What matters is that this is kept confidential. If there’s any whisper of suspicion that there are unauthorized letters of credit circulating around the banking fraternity in my name . . .”

“You’d be ruined. Nobody would ever trust your seal again.”

“This is only a short-term problem,” insisted Probus. “The letters had cash limits and an expiry date on them. All I have to do is weather the storm. But after the loss I sustained on the ship in the first place, it’s a considerable nuisance.”

Ruso thought for a moment. Over the years experience had formed a small clearing in the fog of his commercial ignorance, and it had revealed some of the dangerous terrain of borrowing and lending. “Who else put in money to the shipping deal?”

Probus visibly stiffened. “I was acting alone.”

“I’m surprised,” observed Ruso. “With that large a risk, I’d have thought you’d want to spread it. The first trips went well. Severus seemed to know what he was doing. I’d have thought you might suggest to a few clients that if they had money to spare, they might want to invest it in something that would give them a good percentage.”

“I was acting alone,” insisted Probus. “It was a family arrangement between myself and my son-in-law.”

“Come on, Probus! Most of your reputation is built on introducing rich lenders to good borrowers.”

“Will you keep your voice down?” hissed Probus, halfway out of his chair. “You have no idea how these things are arranged!” When Ruso made no attempt to argue, he settled back down again. “Even if there were other investors, I couldn’t possibly divulge their names,” he insisted. “No more than you would divulge details of a patient. Everyone who invests in shipping knows they risk losing their money. That’s why the interest rates are so good.”

“So you haven’t told your investors that you think they were swindled by the man you recommended to them.”

“Even if there were other people involved,” said Probus, skirting around the question, “none of them has complained. So if nobody suspects anything, nobody would have a motive to do away with Severus.”

“And they won’t be asking you to refund their money.”

Probus winced. “Ruso, try not to interfere in things you don’t understand. The loss of the ship is not relevant to the murder.” He leaned closer. “If word gets out, Claudia will be ruined. All she has is what I can give her. It looks as though that worthless husband left her nothing at all.”

“So who’s got the money? He can’t have set all this up for nothing.”

“I have no idea. If it’s here, he hid it away somewhere neither Claudia nor I can trace it. Possibly it’s all still over in Arelate with his contact there.”

Ruso looked up. “He’s got a man in the port?”

Probus sighed. “Of course he has. You don’t imagine he made all the arrangements from this distance by himself, do you?”

“Who is he? This contact?”

“I always assumed he kept the name to himself so I couldn’t deal with the man directly and cut him out altogether. I’ve been told since that he was called Ponticus. He must have been in one of the marine shipping guilds, but nobody seems to know how to find him now. There’s a rumor he drowned on the ship with the captain and crew.”

“If he’s that heavily involved in a fraud, he probably started the rumor himself.”

“He’s not someone I want to do business with,” agreed Probus. “The sooner I can wash my hands of this whole affair, the better.”

“What I can’t understand,” said Ruso, “is how you can know that Severus was doing business with violent and ruthless criminals who did away with your own man, and yet when Severus is poisoned, you’re confident it didn’t have anything to do with the shipping deal. Is there something else you’re not telling me?”

Probus frowned. “Obviously it wasn’t the same people. Severus was on their side.”

Ruso reached for his stick. “You need to go and have a serious talk with your daughter, Probus. There are things she might tell you that she won’t tell me.”

“What? Why? Claudia knows nothing about any of this.” Probus’s voice rose as Ruso stood. “I thought we had an understanding?”

“Talk to her.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Arelate,” he said. “There’s something else going on here. Something I think the investigators might already know about. I’m going to find out what it is.”

47

Y
OU HAVEN��T SEEN Tilla, have you?”

The slave brought his handcart to a halt on the way to the refuse heap. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“Never mind,” said Ruso, heading toward the winery. It was a shame the boy was not a year or two older. Before long, he would have no difficulty remembering whether he had seen a young woman like Tilla.

The winery contained only his brother. Lucius did not look well enough for a trip to Arelate, even if he could be persuaded that anything useful might be found out when they got there.

Ruso leaned on one of the tree trunks that supported the press and watched the precious juice oozing out and trickling down the sides of the slats. Deliberately casual, he said, “How’s the head?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” growled Lucius, squinting at the angle of the massive main beam and checking the pulley ropes that held it in position. “Why is it if a man has a few things to say, everyone assumes he’s drunk?”

Ruso moved away from the press and began to pick his way between the rows of jars set in the floor. The magic of fermentation had begun. Yesterday’s juice had vanished beneath a froth that sparkled in the streak of sunlight from the double doors. By contrast, the black pitch that coated the insides of the empty jars made them look like the openings of tunnels into a dark underworld. He said, “I take it Tilla’s somewhere around with Cass?”

“Cass has been avoiding me all morning. I don’t know what the fuss is about. If people would listen in the first place, I wouldn’t have to shout.”

Ruso reached the far wall and turned. From here, his brother’s bulk was dwarfed by the colossal apparatus of the press. He said, “The investigators have turned up.”

Lucius glared at him across the jars. “You said we had weeks!”

Ruso explained the coincidence of them being over in Aquae Sextiae.

“Why?”

“There must be something else going on that we don’t know about. Maybe the senator sent them to keep an eye on Severus.”

Lucius gave a sigh of exasperation. “They’ll be crawling all over us here before you can blink. How far have you got with saving the family by geometry?”

Ruso wove his way back between the jars, realizing he knew very little that he was yet prepared to tell anyone.

Lucius dipped a scoop into one of the jars and tasted the contents. “Well?”

“When I was in Britannia—”

“You told me. Gaius, does it ever occur to you to wonder why you get tangled up in this sort of business?”

“I was only going to say, things often get worse before they get better.”

Lucius gave a grunt. “I hope that comes out with a bit more conviction when you say it to your patients.” He took another sip from beneath the froth in the scoop. “Mm. That’s about ready for the concentrate.”

Ruso, feeling he should take an interest, tipped the scoop and savored the rich juice that slid out from beneath the froth.

Lucius pulled the cloth cover off a jug and tasted the contents before pouring the rest into the jar he had just sampled and giving it a vigorous stir. He said, “Let’s hope they turn up to night.”

“Who?”

“The senator’s men. Arria’s invited that Diphilus to dinner. I’m surprised anyone dares to eat here.”

“She’s invited the widow next door as well.”

Lucius tapped the last drops off the scoop. “Lollia Saturnina?” he said, dipping it in a rinsing bucket and wiping it dry. “Might not be so bad then. As long as nobody mentions bankruptcy or poisoning.”

“Or the
Pride of the South
?”

The silence that followed revealed more about the depths of last night’s marital row than the shouting had. Ruso was about to change the subject when Lucius said, “This thing with Justinus has sent her odd in the head. Your Briton hasn’t helped, telling her Severus as good as murdered her brother by hiring a rotten ship. What’s the matter with these women?”

“I haven’t got time to speculate.”

“Now she’s got some mad idea about me going around interrogating sailors. As if I’ve got time to rush off to Arelate in the middle of the vintage!”

So that was what the argument had been about. Grateful for the cue, Ruso said, “I’ll go.”

Lucius looked at him oddly. “You?”

“If the investigators turn up while I’m gone, don’t say anything about the ship unless they ask. If they do ask, make it clear that Cass didn’t know what state it was in before yesterday, so she had no more reason to dislike Severus than the rest of us.”

“You mean you knew as well? Gods above! How many other people has that woman of yours told? It’s complete rubbish. I tried to explain to Cass last night, but she wouldn’t listen. If you want to get rid of someone you do it secretly on dry land. You don’t go paying for a ship and drowning a whole lot of sailors as well. She’s not thinking straight.”

“I’ll try and sort it out,” promised Ruso.

“I won’t need the cart tomorrow,” said Lucius. “You can take that bloody interfering barbarian as well.”

“I could ride across this afternoon.”

“Justinus can wait, brother. He’s dead. And so will you be if you don’t turn up to night for Arria’s dinner.”