Imperium (32 page)

“Your client is Crassus, then?” asked Cicero. “Think carefully before you deny it.”

Salinator’s chin twitched slightly, the nearest he dared come to a nod.

“And you were to deliver three hundred votes to Hybrida and Catilina for the consulship?”

Again he gave the ghost of a nod. “For them,” he said, “and the others.”

“Others? You mean Lentulus Sura for praetor?”

“Yes. Him. And the others.”

“You keep saying ‘the others,’” said Cicero, frowning. “Who are these ‘others’?”

“Keep your mouth shut!” shouted the
sequester,
but Quintus kicked him in the stomach and he groaned and rolled over.

“Ignore him,” said Cicero affably. “He is a bad influence. I know the type. You can tell me.” He put an encouraging hand on the bribery agent’s arm. “The others?”

“Cosconius,” said Salinator, casting a nervous glance at the figure writhing on the floor. Then he took a breath and said rapidly, in a quiet voice, “Pomptinus. Balbus. Caecilius. Labienus. Faberius. Gutta. Bulbus. Calidius. Tudicius. Valgius. And Rullus.”

As each new name was mentioned, Cicero looked more and more astonished. “Is that it?” he said when Salinator had finished. “You are sure there is no one left in the Senate you have forgotten?” He glanced across at Quintus, who was looking equally amazed.

“That is not just two candidates for consul,” said Quintus. “That is three candidates for praetor and
ten
for tribune. Crassus is trying to buy the entire government!”

Cicero was not a man who liked to show surprise, but even he could not disguise it that night. “This is completely absurd,” he protested. “How much is each of these votes costing?”

“Five hundred for consul,” replied Salinator, as if he were selling pigs at market. “Two hundred for praetor. One hundred for tribune.”

“So you are telling me,” said Cicero, frowning as he performed the calculation, “that Crassus is willing to pay three quarters of a million merely for the three hundred votes in your syndicate?”

Salinator nodded, this time more vigorously, even happily, and with a certain professional pride. “It has been the most magnificent canvass anyone can remember.”

Cicero turned to Ranunculus, who had been keeping watch at the window in case of any trouble in the street. “How many votes do you think Crassus will have bought altogether at this sort of price?”

“To feel confident of victory?” replied Ranunculus. He pondered the matter judiciously. “It must be seven or eight thousand.”

“
Eight thousand
?” repeated Cicero. “Eight thousand would cost him
twenty million
. Have you ever heard the like? And at the end of it, he is not even in office himself, but has filled the magistracies with ninnies like Hybrida and Lentulus Sura.” He turned back to Salinator. “Did he give you any reason for such an immense exercise?”

“No, senator. Crassus is not a man much given to answering questions.”

“Well, he will answer some fucking questions now,” Quintus said, and to relieve his frustration he aimed another kick at the belly of the
sequester,
who had just started to rise, and sent the fellow groaning and crashing back to the floor.

QUINTUS WAS ALL FOR BEATING the last scrap of information out of the two hapless agents, and then either marching them around to the house of Crassus and demanding that he put a stop to his schemes, or dragging them before the Senate, reading out their confessions, and calling for the elections to be postponed. But Cicero kept a cooler head. With a straight face he thanked Salinator for his honesty, then told Quintus to have a cup of wine and calm down, and me to gather up our silver. Later, when we had returned home, he sat in his study and tossed that little leather exercise ball of his from one hand to the other, while Quintus raged that he had been a fool to let the two bribery agents go, that they would surely now alert Crassus or flee the city.

“They will not do either,” replied Cicero. “To go to Crassus and tell him what has happened would be to sign their own death warrants. Crassus would never leave such incriminating witnesses alive, and they know it. And flight would merely bring about the same result, except that it would take him longer to track them down.” Back and forth, back and forth went the ball. “Besides, no crime has been committed. Bribery is hard enough to prove at the best of times—impossible to establish when not a vote has been cast. Crassus and the Senate would merely laugh at us. No, the best thing is to leave them at liberty, where at least we know where to find them again, and be ready to subpoena them if we lose the election.” He threw the ball higher and caught it with a swiping motion. “You were right about one thing, though, Quintus.”

“Was I really?” said Quintus bitterly. “How kind of you to say so.”

“Crassus’s action has nothing to do with his enmity for me. He would not spend twenty million simply to frustrate
my
hopes. He would only invest twenty million if the likely return were
huge
. What can it be? On that issue I must confess myself baffled.” He stared at the wall for a while. “Tiro, you always got on well with young Caelius Rufus, didn’t you?”

I remembered the shirked tasks which I had been obliged to complete for him, the lies I had told to keep him out of trouble the day he stole my savings and persuaded me not to report his thieving to Cicero. “Reasonably well, senator,” I replied cautiously.

“Go and talk to him tomorrow morning. Be subtle about it. See if you can extract any clues from him about what Crassus is up to. He lives under the same roof, after all. He must know something.”

I lay awake long into the night, pondering all of this, and feeling increasingly anxious for the future. Cicero did not sleep much either. I could hear him pacing around upstairs. The force of his concentration seemed almost to penetrate the floorboards, and when sleep at last came to me, it was restless and full of portents.

The following morning I left Laurea to deal with Cicero’s press of visitors and set off to walk the mile or so to the house of Crassus. Even today, when the sky is cloudless and the mid-July heat feels oppressive even before the sun is up, I whisper to myself, “Election weather!” and feel again that familiar clench of excitement in my stomach. The sound of hammering and sawing rose from the Forum, as the workmen finished the erection of the ramps and fences around the Temple of Castor. It was the day on which the bribery bill was to be put to the vote of the people, and I cut through behind the temple and paused to take a drink from the tepid waters of the fountain of Juturna. I had no idea what I was going to say to Caelius. I am a most inexpert liar—I always have been—and I realized I should have asked Cicero to advise me on some line to take, but it was too late now. I climbed the path to the Palatine, and when I reached the house of Crassus I told the porter that I had an urgent message for Caelius Rufus. He offered to let me wait inside but I declined. Instead, while he went off to fetch the young man, I crossed the street and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

Crassus’s house, like the man himself, presented a very modest façade to the world, although I had been told that this was deceptive, and that once you got inside it went back a long way. The door was dark, low and narrow but stout, flanked by two small barred windows. Ivy climbed across peeling walls of light ocher. The terra-cotta roof was also ancient, and the edges of the tiles where they overhung the pavement were cracked and black, like a row of broken teeth. It might have been the home of an unwise banker, or some hard-up country landowner who had allowed his town house to fall into disrepair. I suppose this was Crassus’s way of showing that he was so fabulously rich, he had no need to keep up a smart appearance, but in that street of millionaires it only drew attention to his wealth, and there was something almost vulgar in its studied lack of vulgarity. The dark little door was constantly opening and shutting as visitors scurried in and out, revealing the extent of the activity within; it put me in mind of a buzzing wasps’ nest, which shows itself only as a tiny hole in the masonry. None of these men was recognizable to me until Julius Caesar stepped out. He did not see me, but walked straight off down the street in the direction of the Forum, trailed by a secretary carrying a document case. Shortly afterwards, the door opened again and Caelius appeared. He paused on the threshold, cupped his hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun, and squinted across the street toward me. I could see at once that he had been out all night as usual, and was not in a good humor at being woken. Thick stubble covered his handsome chin, and he kept sticking out his tongue, swallowing and wincing, as if the taste was too horrible to hold in his mouth. He walked carefully toward me and when he asked me what in the name of the gods I wanted, I blurted out that I needed to borrow some money.

He squinted at me in disbelief. “What for?”

“There is a girl,” I replied helplessly, simply because it was the sort of thing he used to say to me when he wanted money and I had not the wit to come up with anything else. I tried to steer him along the street a little way, anxious that Crassus might come out and see us together. But he shook me off and stood swaying in the gutter.

“A girl?” he repeated incredulously. “You?” And then he began to laugh, but that obviously hurt his head, so he stopped and put his fingers gently to his temple. “If I had any money, Tiro, I should give it to you willingly—it would be a gift, bestowed simply for the pleasure of seeing you with any living person other than Cicero. But that could never happen. You are not the type for girls. Poor Tiro—you are not any kind of type, that I can see.” He peered at me closely. “What do you really need it for?” I could smell the stale wine hot on his breath and could not prevent myself flinching, which he mistook for an admission of guilt. “You are lying,” he said, and then a grin spread slowly across his stubbled face. “Cicero sent you to find out something.”

I pleaded with him to move away from the house, and this time he did. But the motion of walking evidently did not agree with him. He halted again, turned very white, and held up a warning finger. Then his eyes and throat bulged, he gave an alarming groan, and out came such a heavy gush of vomit it reminded me of a chambermaid emptying a bucket out of an upstairs window into the street. (Forgive these details, but the scene just came entirely back into my mind after an absence of sixty years, and I could not help but laugh at the memory.) Anyway, this seemed to act as a purge; his color returned and he became much brighter. He asked me what it was that Cicero wanted to know.

“What do you think?” I replied, a little impatiently.

“I wish I could help you, Tiro,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You know I would if I could. It is not nearly as pleasant living with Crassus as it was with Cicero. Old Baldhead is the most awful shit—worse even than my father. He has me learning accountancy all day, and a duller business was never invented, except for commercial law, which was last month’s torture. As for politics, which does amuse me, he is careful to keep me away from all that side of things.”

I tried asking him a few more questions, for instance about Caesar’s visit that morning, but it quickly became clear that he was genuinely ignorant of Crassus’s plans. (I suppose he might have been lying, but given his habitual garrulity, I doubted it.) When I thanked him anyway and turned to leave, he grabbed my elbow. “Cicero must be really desperate,” he said, with an expression of unaccustomed seriousness, “to ask for help from me. Tell him I am sorry to hear it. He is worth a dozen of Crassus and my father put together.”

I DID NOT EXPECT to be seeing Caelius again for a while, and banished him from my mind for the remainder of the day, which was entirely given over to the vote on the bribery bill. Cicero was very active among the tribes in the Forum, going from one to another with his entourage and urging the merits of Figula’s proposal. He was especially pleased to find, under the standard marked VETURIA, several hundred citizens from Nearer Gaul who had responded to his campaign and turned out to vote for the first time. He talked to them for a long while about the importance of stamping out bribery, and as he turned away he had the glint of tears in his eyes. “Poor people,” he muttered, “to have come so far, only to be mocked by Crassus’s money. But if we can get this bill through, I may yet have a weapon to bring the villain down.”

My impression was that his canvassing was proving effective, and that when it came to a vote the
lex Figula
would pass, for the majority were not corrupt. But simply because a measure is honest and sensible, there is no guarantee that it will be adopted; rather the opposite, in my experience. Early in the afternoon, the populist tribune, Mucius Orestinus—he, you may remember, who had formerly been a client of Cicero’s on a charge of robbery—came to the front of the rostra and denounced the measure as an attack by the aristocrats on the integrity of the plebs. He actually singled out Cicero by name as a man “unfit to be consul”—those were his precise words—who posed as a friend of the people but never did anything for them unless it furthered his own selfish interests. That set half the crowd booing and jeering and the other half—presumably those who were accustomed to selling their votes and wished to continue doing so—yelling their approval.

This was too much for Cicero. He had, after all, only the year before, secured Mucius’s acquittal, and if such a glossy rat as this was leaving his sinking ship, it really must be halfway to the seabed already. He shouldered his way to the steps of the temple, his face red with the heat and with anger, and demanded to be allowed to answer. “Who is paying for
your
vote, Mucius?” he shouted, but Mucius pretended not to hear. The crowd around us now pointed to Cicero, pushing him forward and calling on the tribune to let him speak. Obviously, that was the last thing Mucius wanted, nor did he want a vote on the bill which he might lose. Raising his arm, he solemnly announced that he was vetoing the legislation, and amid scenes of pandemonium, with scuffles between the rival factions, the
lex Figula
was lost. Figulus immediately announced that he would summon a meeting of the Senate the following day to debate what should be done.