The Director touched his wig unconsciously. “Well, if you wouldn’t feel offended, Aulus,” he said apologetically. “I probably would feel better if I dealt with them.” He eyed the lighted window again. “Not that you’re wrong
about the .. . lack of consequence,” he added morosely. “I sometimes fear that I’ve concentrated too much on minutiae in the past few years because the major problems are …” His voice trailed off.
“No problem is insoluble,” said Calvus. His flat calm made the statement an article of faith. He must have been surprised at how he sounded, because his body at once gave a tiny shudder as if to settle its contents. “Aulus Perennius,” the tall man went on, “I will accompany you, then.”
“No,” said the agent, dipping his head in negation, “that won’t be necessary, sir. I’ll call for you at the palace in the morning.” He smiled. “We’re in a transit barracks, my companion and I. I doubt you’d find the accommodations much to your taste.” The three of them were drifting back toward the door, now. The social circumstances were too unclear for either of the Bureau employees to act as decisively as they would have preferred to do.
“I’ll have to get used to worse accommodations and to none at all,” Calvus said simply. He stepped briskly ahead of the others, knowing that the discussion would end when an attendant opened the door for them. “And you’ll have to get used to me, I’m afraid, because it is quite necessary for me to reach the site.”
The agent laughed. It was Navigatus who actually found words to comment. “In school,” he said, “I read Homer’s accounts of ships that sailed themselves and gods trading spear-thrusts with mortals. …” He gestured his companions onward, through the doorway and into the corridor with the men eagerly awaiting their pointless audiences with him.
“I couldn’t imagine how anyone ever had believed such nonsense,” the Director went on. “But I see now that I just needed exercise to increase my capacity for faith.”
CHAPTER SIX
Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. “Slow up, damn you,” he snarled to the linkman. “I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!”
It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.
Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.
The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman’s scowl. “Through here,” he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. “Me go first.” As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.
“Hold the damned light where it does some good!” Perennius said. He turned to his companion. “Here, sir, you go first. It won’t hurt this – ” he gave his travelling cloak a flick – “to get dropped in the slops again.”
“This is safe, then?” Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.
“Slow down,” Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, “Safe for us. I wouldn’t advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but – we’re sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the pay-out wouldn’t be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us.”