He would have spent the rest of his life regretting that he snipped his stick," Pa agreed with me. Helena calmly wrapped the end of her cloak around the child in her arms and let the conversation drop. Helena and I set off back to our apartment. The outer wall of Privatus" house still had my ropes and cleaning material beside it from when I was on watch. That would never have happened in Rome. I retrieved my bucket. At the old town gate, there were no lights in the upper room. I had forgotten to ask Petronius whether the woman who guarded the kidnap victims during their ordeal, Pullia, had been pulled in along with her lover Lygon. And if so, what had happened to the seven year-old we met that day, the lad Zeno? We had arrived at the right moment to find out. Fusculus and a couple of his men clattered down to street level. They had taken in Pullia earlier, and had just finished searching the gatehouse.
We found a load of drugs," said Fusculus, gesturing to a basketful of glass phials now being removed. Opium poppy, I reckon."
So tomorrow we can expect to see the vigiles staggering about the streets, blissfully comatose?" Fusculus grinned in his happy way. You want to volunteer to test the extracts?"
No, he doesn't," said Helena. But if none of the kidnap victims will testify, don't forget Marcus and Lucius Petronius once saw Pullia herself insensible after she had sampled the sleeping draught."
Looks as if the woman is the only one we can snare with evidence," Fusculus told us. Rubella thinks he may have to release the males." Helena was angry. A whole gang of men are terrorising victims, raping teenagers, extorting and killing, but you will hold only their female assistant!" As she stormed off growling, one of the vigiles let out a shout from the interior of the gatehouse. A small figure scuttled out, ducked around Fusculus, and hared off up the road. It was Zeno. No one made much attempt to catch him, and he legged it out of sight.
There are various problems in letting the generals run a battlefield. mainly, they pay too much attention to their budgets. Marcus Rubella, the tribune of the Fourth Cohort of Vigiles, was keyed up to solve the Ostian kidnappings ahead of rival troops. However, he had already been forced to authorise a light supper and night-soil removal for thirty unexpected prisoners. When he realised that as a result he now had to choose between giving them breakfast or providing the customary Saturnalia drinks to his own men next December, it was no contest. The thought that by evening the pirates would be eating supper at the expense of a new candelabrum in his Rome office clinched it. He had set his heart on improved lighting and had spotted a faux bronze upright four-branch model with an Ionian top which he thought would do just nicely. So Rubella scrutinised his meagre interrogation notes; he saw there was bugger all chance of making charges stick; and he let the Cilicians go. That said, Rubella was not stupid. Nor, possibly, was he corrupt. His brain, according to Petronius Longus, worked on different principles from those of normal human beings, but brain there was beneath that short-haired, low-profile cranium. In fact Petro regularly tried to persuade Scythax, the vigiles" doctor, that Marcus Rubella's brain needed maintenance, in the form of having a hole drilled through his skull for inspection purposes. Trepanation would have been a good idea for the normally pre scribed purposes. relieving pressure. Rubella liked to think. This was well known. He spent long hours in his office on the Aventine apparently doing nothing at all, but in rare moments when he confided in people, he claimed that his method as a cohort commander was to do the thinking other people chose to omit. According to him [and Petronius had been given the benefit of this theory at some length, at one of the cohort's legendary Saturnalia drinks parties] this method of leadership enabled Rubella to foresee problems, to anticipate criminal tendencies, and to plan cunning ambushes that other cohort commanders, with their less intellectual methods, would never achieve. Thus, on the next sunny morning when many of the vigiles were despairing of their leader's stupid action, we were informed that when he let the Cilicians walk, Marcus Rubella had had a clever plan. This plan had been formulated as a result of research he had conducted in the few days between me paying him that visit in Rome and him bringing his men to Ostia. In order to be at the top of his profession in the matter of outwitting pirates, or pirates" descendants, or ex pirates, the thinking man had been to a library and borrowed some scrolls. The cohort tribune was now an expert on Cilician habits and Cilician ways of thought.
