Imperium:

  Salinator nodded, this time more vigorously, even happily, and with a certain professional pride. ‘It has been the most magnificent canvass anyone can remember.’

  Cicero turned to Ranunculus, who had been keeping watch at the window in case of any trouble in the street. ‘How many votes do you think Crassus will have bought altogether at this sort of price?’

  ‘To feel confident of victory?’ replied Ranunculus. He pondered the matter judiciously. ‘It must be seven or eight thousand.’

  ‘Eight thousand?’ repeated Cicero. ‘Eight thousand would cost him twenty million. Have you ever heard the like? And at the end of it, he is not even in office himself, but has filled the magistracies with ninnies like Hybrida and Lentulus Sura.’ He turned back to Salinator. ‘Did he give you any reason for such an immense exercise?’

  ‘No, Senator. Crassus is not a man much given to answering questions.’

  Quintus swore. ‘Well, he will answer some fucking questions now,’ he said, and to relieve his frustration he aimed another kick at the belly of the sequester, who had just started to rise, and sent the fellow groaning and crashing back to the floor.

  QUINTUS WAS ALL for beating the last scrap of information out of the two hapless agents, and then either marching them round to the house of Crassus and demanding that he put a stop to his schemes, or dragging them before the senate, reading out their confessions, and calling for the elections to be postponed. But Cicero kept a cooler head. With a straight face he thanked Salinator for his honesty, told Quintus to have a cup of wine and calm down, and me to gather up our silver. Later, when we had returned home, he sat in his study and tossed that little leather exercise ball of his from one hand to the other, while Quintus raged that he had been a fool to let the two bribery agents go, that they would surely now alert Crassus or flee the city.

  ‘They will not do either,’ replied Cicero. ‘To go to Crassus and tell him what has happened would be to sign their own death warrants. Crassus would never leave such incriminating witnesses alive, and they know it. And flight would merely bring about the same result, except that it would take him longer to track them down.’ Back and forth, back and forth went the ball. ‘Besides, no crime has been committed. Bribery is hard enough to prove at the best of times – impossible to establish when not a vote has been cast. Crassus and the senate would merely laugh at us. No, the best thing is to leave them at liberty, where at least we know where to find them again, and be ready to subpoena them if we lose the election.’ He threw the ball higher and caught it with a swiping motion. ‘You were right about one thing, though, Quintus.’

  ‘Was I really?’ said Quintus bitterly. ‘How kind of you to say so.’

  ‘Crassus’s action has nothing to do with his enmity for me. He would not spend twenty million simply to frustrate my hopes. He would only invest twenty million if the likely return were huge. What can it be? On that issue I must confess myself baffled.’ He stared at the wall for a while. ‘Tiro, you always got on well with young Caelius Rufus, didn’t you?’

  I remembered the shirked tasks which I had been obliged to complete for him, the lies I had told to keep him out of trouble, the day he stole my savings and persuaded me not to report his thieving to Cicero. ‘Reasonably well, Senator,’ I replied cautiously.

  ‘Go and talk to him tomorrow morning. Be subtle about it. See if you can extract any clues from him about what Crassus is up to. He lives under the same roof, after all. He must know something.’

  I lay awake long into the night, pondering all of this, and feeling increasingly anxious for the future. Cicero did not sleep much either. I could hear him pacing around upstairs. The force of his concentration seemed almost to penetrate the floorboards, and when sleep did at last come to me, it was restless and full of portents.

  The following morning I left Laurea to deal with Cicero’s press of visitors and set off to walk the mile or so to the house of Crassus. Even today, when the sky is cloudless and the mid-July heat feels oppressive even before the sun is up, I whisper to myself, ‘Election weather!’ and feel again that familiar clench of excitement in my stomach. The sound of hammering and sawing rose from the forum, where the workmen were finishing the erection of the ramps and fences around the Temple of Castor, for this was the day on which the bribery bill was to be put to the vote of the people. I cut through behind the temple and paused to take a drink from the tepid waters of the fountain of Juturna. I had no idea what I was going to say to Caelius. I am a most inexpert liar – I always have been – and I realised I should have asked Cicero to advise me on some line to take, but it was too late now. I climbed the path to the Palatine, and when I reached the house of Crassus I told the porter that I had an urgent message for Caelius Rufus. He offered to let me wait inside but I declined. Instead, while he went off to fetch the young man, I crossed the street and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

  Crassus’s house, like the man himself, presented a very modest façade to the world, although I had been told that this was deceptive, and that once you got inside it went back a long way. The door was dark, low and narrow, but stout, flanked by two small, barred windows. Ivy climbed across peeling walls of light ochre. The terracotta roof was also ancient, and the edges of the tiles where they overhung the pavement were cracked and black, like a row of broken teeth. It might have been the home of an unwise banker, or some hard-up country landowner who had allowed his town house to fall into disrepair. I suppose this was Crassus’s way of showing that he was so fabulously rich, he had no need to keep up a smart appearance, but of course in that street of millionaires it only drew attention to his wealth, and there was something almost vulgar in this studied lack of vulgarity. The dark little door was constantly opening and shutting as visitors scurried in and out, revealing the extent of the activity within: it put me in mind of a buzzing wasps’ nest, which shows itself only as a tiny hole in the masonry. None of these men was recognisable to me until Julius Caesar stepped out. He did not see me, but walked straight off down the street in the direction of the forum, trailed by a secretary carrying a document case. Shortly afterwards, the door opened again and Caelius appeared. He paused on the threshold, cupped his hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun and squinted across the street towards me. I could see at once that he had been out all night as usual, and was not in a good humour at being woken. Thick stubble covered his handsome chin, and he kept sticking out his tongue, swallowing and wincing, as if the taste of it was too horrible to hold it in his mouth. He walked carefully towards me, and when he asked me what in the name of the gods I wanted, I blurted out that I needed to borrow some money.

  He squinted at me in disbelief. ‘What for?’

  ‘There is a girl,’ I replied helplessly, simply because it was the sort of thing he used to say to me when he wanted money and I had not the wit to come up with anything else. I tried to steer him along the street a little way, anxious that Crassus might come out and see us together. But he shook me off and stood swaying in the gutter.

  ‘A girl?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘You?’ And then he began to laugh, but that obviously hurt his head, so he stopped and put his fingers gently to his temple. ‘If I had any money, Tiro, I should give it to you willingly – it would be a gift, bestowed simply for the pleasure of seeing you with any living person other than Cicero. But that could never happen. You are not the type for girls. Poor Tiro – you are not any kind of type, that I can see.’ He peered at me closely. ‘What do you really need it for?’ I could smell the stale wine hot on his breath, and could not prevent myself flinching, which he mistook for an admission of guilt. ‘You are lying,’ he said, and then a grin spread slowly across his stubbled face. ‘Cicero sent you to find out something.’

  I pleaded with him to move away from the house, and this time he did. But the motion of walking evidently did not agree with him. He halted again, turned very white and held up a warning finger. Then his eyes and throat bulged, he gave an alarming groan
, and out came such a heavy gush of vomit it reminded me of a chambermaid emptying a bucket out of an upstairs window into the street. (Forgive these details, but the scene just came entirely back into my mind after an absence of sixty years, and I could not help but laugh at the memory.) Anyway, this seemed to act as a purge; his colour returned and he became much brighter. He asked me what it was that Cicero wanted to know.

  ‘What do you think?’ I replied, a little impatiently.

  ‘I wish I could help you, Tiro,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You know I would if I could. It is not nearly as pleasant living with Crassus as it was with Cicero. Old Baldhead is the most awful shit – worse even than my father. He has me learning accountancy all day, and a duller business was never invented, except for commercial law, which was last month’s torture. As for politics, which does amuse me, he is careful to keep me away from all that side of things.’

  I tried asking him a few more questions, for instance about Caesar’s visit that morning, but it quickly became clear that he was genuinely ignorant of Crassus’s plans. (I suppose he might have been lying, but given his habitual garrulity, I doubted it.) When I thanked him anyway and turned to leave, he grabbed my elbow. ‘Cicero must be really desperate,’ he said, with an expression of unaccustomed seriousness, ‘to ask for help from me. Tell him I am sorry to hear it. He is worth a dozen of Crassus and my father put together.’

  I DID NOT expect to be seeing Caelius again for a while, and banished him from my mind for the remainder of the day, which was entirely given over to the vote on the bribery bill. Cicero was very active among the tribes in the forum, going from one to another with his entourage, and urging the merits of Figula’s proposal. He was especially pleased to find, under the standard marked VETURIA, several hundred citizens from Nearer Gaul, who had responded to his campaign and turned out to vote for the first time. He talked to them for a long while about the importance of stamping out bribery, and as he turned away he had the glint of tears in his eyes. ‘Poor people,’ he muttered, ‘to have come so far, only to be mocked by Crassus’s money. But if we can get this bill through, I may yet have a weapon to bring the villain down.’

  My impression was that his canvassing was proving effective, and that when it came to a vote the lex Figula would pass, for the majority were not corrupt. But simply because a measure is honest and sensible does not guarantee that it will be adopted; rather the opposite, in my experience. Early in the afternoon, the populist tribune Mucius Orestinus – he, you may remember, who had formerly been a client of Cicero’s on a charge of robbery – came to the front of the rostra and denounced the measure as an attack by the aristocrats on the integrity of the plebs. He actually singled out Cicero by name as a man ‘unfit to be consul’ – those were his precise words – who posed as a friend of the people, but never did anything for them unless it furthered his own selfish interests. That set half the crowd booing and jeering and the other half – presumably those who were accustomed to selling their votes, and wished to continue doing so – yelling their approval.

  This was too much for Cicero. He had, after all, only the year before, secured Mucius’s acquittal, and if such a glossy rat as this was leaving his sinking ship, it really must be halfway to the sea bed already. He shouldered his way to the steps of the temple, his face red with the heat and with anger, and demanded to be allowed to answer. ‘Who is paying for your vote, Mucius?’ he shouted, but Mucius pretended not to hear. The crowd around us were now pointing to Cicero, pushing him forward and calling on the tribune to let him speak, but obviously that was the last thing Mucius wanted. Nor did he want a vote on the bill which he might lose. Raising his arm, he solemnly announced that he was vetoing the legislation, and amid scenes of pandemonium, with scuffles between the rival factions, the lex Figula was lost. Figulus immediately announced that he would summon a meeting of the senate the following day to debate what should be done.

  It was a bitter moment for Cicero, and when at last we reached his house and he was able to close the door on the crowd of his supporters in the street, I thought he might collapse again, as on the eve of the elections for aedile. For once he was too tired to play with Tullia. And even when Terentia came down with little Marcus, and showed him how the infant had learned to take a wobbly step or two unaided, he did not hoist him up and toss him into the air, which was his usual greeting, but simply patted his cheek and squeezed his ear in an absent-minded way, and then passed on towards his study – only to stop dead in surprise on the threshold, for who should be sitting at his desk but Caelius Rufus.

  Laurea, who was waiting just inside the door, apologised to Cicero and explained that he would have told Caelius to wait in the tablinum, like every other visitor, but he had been insistent that his business was so confidential he could not be seen in the public rooms.

  ‘That is all right, Laurea. I am always pleased to see young Caelius. Although I fear,’ he added, shaking Caelius’s hand, ‘that you will find me dull company at the end of a long and dispiriting day.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Caelius with a grin, ‘perhaps I might have just the news to cheer you up.’

  ‘Crassus is dead?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ laughed Caelius, ‘very much alive, and planning a great conference tonight in anticipation of his triumph at the polls.’

  ‘Is he indeed?’ said Cicero, and immediately, at this touch of gossip, I saw him start to revive a little, like some wilted flower after a sprinkle of rain. ‘And who will be at this conference?’

  ‘Catilina. Hybrida. Caesar. I am not sure who else. But the chairs were being set out as I left. I have all this from one of Crassus’s secretaries, who went around the city with the invitations while the popular assembly was in progress.’

  ‘Well, well,’ murmured Cicero. ‘What I would not give to have an ear at that keyhole!’

  ‘But you could have,’ responded Caelius. ‘This meeting is in the chamber where Crassus transacts all his business affairs. Often – but not tonight, I am told by my informant – he likes to keep a secretary close at hand, to make a note of what is said, but without the other person being aware of it. For that purpose he has had a small listening post constructed. It is just a simple cubicle, hidden behind a tapestry. He showed it to me when he was giving me lessons in how to be a man of business.’

  ‘You mean to tell me that Crassus eavesdrops on himself?’ asked Cicero in wonder. ‘What sort of statesman would do that?’

  ‘“There is many a rash promise made by a man who thinks there are no witnesses” – that was what he said.’

  ‘So you think that you could hide yourself in there, and make an account of what is said?’

  ‘Not me,’ scoffed Caelius. ‘I am no secretary. I was thinking of Tiro here,’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder, ‘with his miraculous shorthand.’

  I WOULD LIKE to be able to boast that I volunteered readily for this suicidal assignment. But it would not be true. On the contrary, I threw up all manner of practical objections to Caelius’s scheme. How would I enter Crassus’s house undetected? How would I leave it? How would I determine which speaker was which from the babble of voices if I was concealed behind a screen? But to all my questions Caelius had answers. The essential fact was that I was terrified. ‘What if I am caught,’ I protested to Cicero, finally coming to the crux of what really bothered me, ‘and tortured? I cannot claim to be so courageous that I would not betray you.’

  ‘Cicero can simply deny any knowledge of what you were doing,’ said Caelius – unhelpfully, I thought, from my point of view. ‘Besides, everyone knows that evidence obtained under torture is unreliable.’

  ‘I am beginning to feel faint,’ I joked feebly.

  ‘Compose yourself, Tiro,’ said Cicero, who had become increasingly excited the more he heard. ‘There would be no torture and no trial. I would make sure of that. If you were detected, I would negotiate your release, and I would pay any price to see that you were unharme
d.’ He took both my hands in that sincere double grip of his, and looked deep into my eyes. ‘You are more my second brother than my slave, Tiro, and have been ever since we sat and learned philosophy together in Athens all those years ago – do you remember? I should have discussed your freedom with you before now, but somehow there has always seemed to be some fresh crisis to distract me. So let me tell you now, with Caelius here as my witness, that it is my intention to give you your liberty – yes, and that simple life in the country you have long desired so much. And I see a day when I shall ride over from my place to your little farm, and sit in your garden, and as we watch the sun go down over some distant, dusty olive grove or vineyard, we shall discuss the great adventures we have had together.’ He let go of my hands, and this rustic vision trembled on the warm dusky air an instant longer, then faded. ‘Now,’ he said briskly, ‘this offer of mine is not conditional in any way on your undertaking this mission – let me make that clear: you have earned it many times over already. I would never order you to put yourself in danger. You know how badly my cause stands tonight. You must do whatever you think best.’

  Those were very nearly his exact words: how could I forget them?

  XVII

  THE CONFERENCE WAS set for nightfall, which meant there was no time to be lost. As the sun vanished behind the brow of the Esquiline, and as I climbed the slope of the Palatine Hill for the second time that day, I had a disturbing premonition that I was walking into a trap. For how could I, or Cicero for that matter, be certain that Caelius had not transferred his loyalty to Crassus? Indeed, was ‘loyalty’ not an absurd word to apply to whatever shifting, temporary focus of amusement seized the fancy of my young companion? But there was nothing to be done about it now. Caelius was already leading me down a small alley towards the back of Crassus’s house. Pulling aside a thick curtain of trailing ivy, he uncovered a tiny, iron-studded door, which looked to have long since rusted shut. But a sharp jab from his shoulder caused it to swing silently open and we jumped down into an empty storeroom.