Two For The Lions Read Online Free Page A

you're out."
    "I'll make a note to ask for the big cats if I ever fall foul of the law!"
    Leonidas was still young. He was fit and bright-eyed, though foul of breath from eating bloody meat. Not too much of it--they kept him starved so he would do his work efficiently. He lay at the far edge of his cage in the semi-darkness. The heavy twitch of his tail was filled with contemptuous menace. Distrustful golden eyes watched us.
    "What I admire about you, Falco," Anacrites commented, coming up behind me on stealthy feet, "is your personal attention to the most obscure detail."
    It was better than hearing Petronius Longus constantly moaning that I became bogged down in trivia, but it meant the same: just like the old one, my new partner was telling me I wasted time.
    "Leonidas," I stated (wondering what the chances were of persuading the lion to devour my new partner), "is entirely relevant. He cost a lot of money, didn't he, Buxus?"
    "Naturally." The keeper nodded. He was ignoring Anacrites; he preferred to deal with me. "The problem is catching them alive. I've been over to Africa and seen it. They use a kid for bait. Getting beasts to pounce and fall into a pit is dodgy enough--then they have to extract the cats without damage, while they are roaring their heads off and trying to maul anyone who comes close. Calliopus uses an agent who sometimes snatches cubs for us--but he has to hunt and kill the mother first. And then there's the bother of rearing the cubs until they're a useful size for the Games."
    I grinned. "No wonder the proverb says the first requirement for a successful politician is knowing a good source for tigers."
    "We don't have tigers," said Buxus gravely. Satire was lost on him. Jokes about senators bribing the people with gory spectacles just bounced off his bald cranium. "Tigers come from Asia, and that's why so few reach Rome. We only have links with North Africa, Falco. We get lions and leopards. Calliopus comes from Oea--"
    "Right. He keeps the business in the family. Does Calliopus' agent rear his lion cubs over there?"
    "No point wasting the expense of shipping them--that's a game in itself--not until they're big enough to be of some use."
    "So Calliopus owns a menagerie in Tripolitania as well as this one?"
    "Yes." That would be the establishment in Oea that Calliopus had sworn to the Censors was in his brother's name. Anacrites surreptitiously made a note on a tablet, finally aware what I was driving at. The beasts could be as valuable as they liked; it was land, whether in Italy or the provinces, that we were tracking down. We suspected that this Oean "brother" of Calliopus was a fiction.
    That had been enough for us to pursue on site the first day. We collected the menagerie records to add to a pile of scrolls about Calliopus' fighting tough men, then we slogged back with the documents to our new office.
    This roost was another point of disagreement. All my career I had operated as an informer from a gruesome apartment in Fountain Court up on the Aventine. Complainants could traipse up the six flights of stairs and rouse me from bed to listen to their woes. Timewasters baulked at the climb. Bad fellows who wanted to dissuade me from my investigations by hitting me hard on the head could be heard coming.
    When Helena and I had needed more spacious living accommodation we moved across the road, keeping my old place to work from. I had let Petronius move in after his wife threw him out for philandering, and even though we were no longer partners, he was still there. Anacrites insisted that we now required somewhere to stash the scrolls we amassed for the Census job, somewhere without Petro glowering at us disapprovingly. What we did not need, as I wasted my breath saying, was to install ourselves among the deadbeats at the Saepta Julia.
    He fixed it up without consulting me. That was the kind of partner my mother had stuck me with.
    The Saepta is a large enclosure next to the Pantheon and the Election