Perennius felt the cat grin at him as it was swept past; but the feeling, of course, was nonsense.
Ten minutes after the head of the mob had passed, the street was empty enough that Gaius and Perennius could walk against what had been the flow. The agent was weary from a journey of over a thousand straight-line miles – and he had not traversed them in a straight line. He was used to being weary. He was used to being delayed as well. Throughout the past six months, Perennius had been delayed repeatedly because the draft transferring funds to his account in Antioch had not arrived.
The agent had made do because he was the sort of person who did make do. Perennius had never learned patience, but he knew the value of restraint and the power of necessity. The banker in Antioch had advanced some money and more information when he understood precisely what alternatives the stocky Imperial agent was setting before him. The sum Perennius had set as the bottom line for both of them to walk out of the room alive would not bankrupt the other, even if the “mistake” in Rome were never cleared up.
The banker never seriously considered the possibility that Perennius was bluffing.
The mob had not done a great deal of damage, since its racket was warning enough for most potential victims to drop their shutters or scamper out of the way. Half a dozen shopkeepers had dared a police fine by spreading their merchandise out on the sidewalks in front of their alcoves. Anarchy had punished them more condignly and suddenly than anything the law might have metered out. One old man moaned in the remains of his trampled, looted woolen goods. His wife was chattering in Egyptian as she dabbed blood from the pressure-cut in the fellow’s scalp.
Perennius picked his way past them with more anger than sympathy. The Empire would work if everyone obeyed its rules. No one knew better than the agent how great was the Empire’s potential if it would cling together, if its millions would accept what the Empire offered them in the knowledge that it was more than they would get from chaos if each went his own way.
But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats. Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.
And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They’d made their choice.
Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra; intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.
The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere in Rome. Its facade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor, beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to which spring was coming late.
Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks differing from that of the surrounding stone.