The Silver Pigs Read Online Free Page A

blissful with wine and excitement; I did not care whether I had a pillow or not. I hooked one hand behind my head then flung her mine, wide, but she caught it.
    Sosia Camillina inspected my pillow as though it might harbour fleas. Another charge of resentment against the nobility. Possibly it did, but any wildlife was tightly sewn inside a cheerful red and purple cover inflicted on me by my mama. I did not care to have snooty chits of girls casting aspersions on my household goods.
    "It's perfectly clean! Use it and be grateful."
    She laid the pillow very neatly at the end of her bed. I blew out the light. Private informers can be gentlemen when they are too drunk for anything else.
    I slept like a babe. I have no idea whether my visitor did the same. Probably not.

VI

    The senator Decimus Camillas Verus lived in the Capena Gate Sector. The Capena Gate was the district next but one to mine, so I walked. On the way I passed my youngest sister Maia and at least two little roughnecks off our family tree.
    Some informers give the impression we are solitary men. Perhaps that was where I went wrong. Every time I was surreptitiously trailing some adulterous clerk in a shiny tunic, I looked up to find one of these midgets wiping his nose on his arm and bawling my name across the street. I was a hobbled donkey in Rome. I must have been related to most people between the Tiber and the Ardeatine Gate. I had five sisters, the poor girl my brother Festus never found the time to marry, thirteen nephews and four nieces, with several more visibly on the way. That excludes what lawyers call my heirs of the fourth and fifth degree: my mother's brothers, and my father's sisters, and all the second cousins of the first marriage children of the stepfathers of my grandfather's aunts.
    I had a mother too, though I tried to ignore that.
    I waved back at the roughnecks. I keep them sweet. One or two of them are. Anyway, I use these artful urchins to trail the adulterers when I slope off to the races instead.
    Decimus Camillus owned a freehold mansion on his own square of land among quiet domestic streets. He had purchased the right to draw water direct from the old Appian aqueduct nearby. He felt no financial necessity to lease his frontage out as shops, nor his upper storey as lodging rooms, though he did share his desirable plot with the owner of an identical house next door. From which I deduced that this senator was by no means extravagantly rich. Like the rest of us, the poor muffin was struggling to keep up the way of life appropriate to his rank. The difference between him and most of us being that to qualify for the senate Decimus Camillus Verus must be a millionaire.
    Since I was visiting a million sesterces I risked my throat under a barber's razor. I wore a worn white toga with the holes folded out of sight, a short clean tunic, my best belt with the Celtic buckle, and brown boots. A free citizen, his importance signalled by the length of his train of slaves in my case, none.
    There were spanking new escutcheon plates on the senator's door locks but a hangdog porter with a badly bruised cheekbone looked through his grille and opened up as soon as I pulled at the rope on the big copper bell. They were expecting someone. Probably the same someone who socked the porter yesterday and carried off the girl.
    We crossed a black and white tiled hall, with a spluttery fountain and faded cinnabar paint. Camillus was a diffident man in his fifties who lurked in a library among a mass of paperwork, a bust of the Emperor, and one or two decent bronze lamps. He looked normal, but he wasn't. For one thing, he was polite.
    "Good morning. How can I help you?"
    The name's Didius Falco. Credentials, sir." I bowled him one of Sosia's bracelets. It was British jet, the stuff they ship down from the northeast coast, carved in interlocking pieces like whale's teeth. She had told me her cousin sent it. I knew the style from my army days, but they were rare in