Perennius slipped in the door and closed it before the cubicle’s inhabitant could more than glance up from the scroll in his hand. “Zopyrion?” the agent asked in a husky whisper.
“Herakles! Who are you?” the other demanded. Zopyrion was a short man with the cylindrical softness that marked him as a eunuch more clearly than his smooth chin. Like his department head, Zopyrion had a couch and window; but only one window and a couch with a frame of turned wood instead of the filigree of his superior’s.
The section head spoke Latin with a pronounced Carian accent. Perennius answered in that dialect, though he was not fully fluent in it. The partitions separating the offices were thin, and the agent wanted only Zopyrion to understand him at the moment. “I’ve got a letter from Simonides,” the agent said, preferring the sealed tablet in his hand. “He said for me to take back an answer.”
There was a one-legged tablet near the head of the couch. It held writing instruments. “Simonides?” the bureaucrat repeated as he took the document. He picked up a stylus with which to break the thread which held the tablet closed. Concern had replaced the initial anger in his voice.
“Simonides of Antioch, the banker,” Perennius said as he stepped closer. “You know, the one you used to wash the – ”
“Silence, by Herakles!” Zopyrion gasped. He too had slipped into his native Carian. That was a result of confusion rather than a conscious desire for secrecy, however. He looked down at the document in his hand.
It was a tablet of three waxed wooden leaves, hollowed to keep the writing from being flattened to illegibility when they were closed. Zopyrion began to read the first page in a low sing-song, holding the page by habit at a flat angle to the light so that shadows brought the wax impressions into relief. ” ‘Simonides, son of Eustachios, greets Sextus Claudius Zopyrion. I return herewith the draft by which you ordered me to transfer two hundred gold solidi from Imperial accounts to your brother-in-law, Nelius Juturnus. .. .’ ” The clerk looked up again in utter, abject terror at Perennius, who now stood beside him. The agent’s left hand rested on the table, covering the alabaster ink pot there. “Why in the name of Fortune did he write this?” Zopyrion demanded.
The agent laughed. “Oh,” he said, “maybe it was when I asked him which orifice he wanted to swallow my sword through, hey? But take a look at the draft – ” he tapped with his right forefinger the pair of pages which were still closed. “You know, it seems to me your department head’s seal is a bit fuzzy, like somebody used a plaster copy instead of the original.”
Zopyrion’s eyes followed the tapping finger. As his head bent slightly, Perennius hit him behind the ear with the base of the ink pot. It was an awkward, left-handed blow, but there was enough muscle behind it to spill the clerk flaccidly onto the floor. The table went over on top of him with a crash.
Perennius set the stone pot down on its side carefully, so that there would be no additional noise. There was a neat circle of ink on the palm of his left hand. He did not wipe it off, because the smear might be harder to hide than the ink where it now was. Working fast, the agent unhooked a skin of powerful wine from the inner hem of his cloak where it had been hidden. He tilted up Zopyrion’s face and squirted a jet of wine into the corner of the unconscious man’s mouth. The liquid drooled back down his chin. The air of the office filled with the wine’s thick, sweet odor. Perennius laid the skin, still uncorked, beside the eunuch’s outflung hand. Its contents leaked and pooled across the terrazzo, drawing whorls of ink into them.
The agent straightened. In a voice that even he could barely hear, he said to the fallen man, “Next time you leave somebody hanging in hostile territory, make damn sure that he doesn’t make it back.”
He threw open the office door. “Sir! Sir!” he cried as he ran toward the double office at the head of the row. “Sir, you’ve got to come here!”