Killer

"There's always some new beast to be found, if you go looking," Lycon tried to reassure her. "And N'Sumu is in charge now-at least he thinks he is. He's hunted lizard-apes since he was old enough to crawl."

Lycon couldn't imagine N'Sumu as a child, although the fantasy of a crawling N'Sumu suddenly conjured forth an unpleasant image of the tall Egyptian-bronze-scaled and wriggling on his belly like a monstrous man-snake.

"Have Geta bring Alexandros to the compound, once he's had his breakfast," Lycon said, changing the direction of his thoughts.

"Lycon! Won't it be too dangerous?" Zoe protested. "Alexandros is just a boy!"

"Time he becomes a man, then," Lycon told her. "Besides, there's no danger. Vonones' people can show him around the compound-let him get a close look at the beasts his father hunts. No more faggot schoolmasters for my son!"

"But I'm not sure Alexandros will want to go!"

"I didn't ask about what he wants to do! See that he's there! Chances are I'll be sitting on my ass in the office with Vonones all day anyway. I'll keep an eye on Alexandros. Stop worrying about the boy."

Lycon didn't add that the actual danger arose from just this sort of inactivity. Domitian's patience-even with his imported lizard-ape specialist-was not going to last much longer. If they couldn't produce a sauropithecus for the Emperor soon…

Well, he and Vonones had discussed it often enough. The merchant had discreetly arranged to have a ship in readiness at Portus. They might be able to flee beyond Domitian's wrath, but Lycon didn't like to think about having to try it. In the field he had only his own life to consider-that was quite acceptable-but if he failed here, Domitian would spare not even the lowliest household slave.

Chapter Twelve

Carretius the rent-taker climbed the stairs to the sixth level between his two assistants, Smiler and Ox. Carretius was wheezing. It was growing dark, this was the third and last building on the day's rounds, and each flight of stairs grew longer as the day dragged on.

Besides, he'd been a fool at one of the initial stops. A cobbler rented a nice ground floor location for his shop and workroom that should have guaranteed a decent living, had the fellow not insisted on drinking all his profits-and the rent money. In a voice thick with tears and redolent of the heavy, sweet wine lees to which poverty had reduced him, he had offered the services of his daughter in exchange for the rent money. Carretius had badgered him down to an extension-a minor misjudgment for which he would have to account next month when the craftsman inevitably missed another payment, and the bailiffs were sent to seize the fellow's chattels.

As her father had promised-saying that he should know-the girl was quite accomplished. Too accomplished for a man of Carretius' flabbiness and years. He had only a hazy remembrance of that morning's dalliance, and now he was not only ru

The close weather amplified the odor of the huge waste jar at the bottom of the stairwell. It held the contents of the chamber pots-at least those of the tenants sophisticated enough to understand what a chamber pot was for. The upper levels, not only of the units Carretius serviced but of all apartment blocks in Rome, primarily held displaced country folk of one sort or another. One lot of Numidians had been found keeping a live sheep on their balcony, pla

Smiler led on the stairs as he always did. Carretius himself, with the wooden-backed wax tablets of the account clattering on waist thongs, was in the middle. Ox closed the rear. He carried the collected rents in a leather pouch hung against his chest on a neck strap. The real advantage of Ox's size was that he literally blocked the staircases in the buildings Carretius serviced. It was impossible for a footpad or desperate tenant to reach the rent-taker from behind.

Nor was Carretius worried about a frontal attack. Smiler was a nondescript fellow, a Gaul by birth, Carretius suspected. The rent-taker had never asked; questions about his assistant's background were at best impolitic. Smiler's nickname-and the only name by which he was known in the city-had nothing to do with his expression. He was a generally morose man but no stone-face, especially when he had downed enough wine to loosen up a little. But when his hand moved just so, the razor he carried could open a throat all the way around before the victim even felt the sting of the metal.

However, there was no potential for danger on the sixth floor here. The whole area, a loft whose ceiling was the tiled roof and the laths on which the tiles were laid, had been rented for over a decade by a white-bearded patriarch named Mephibaal. He and a woman who was either his wife or mother housed a troop of beggars, whom they directed with a rigid discipline of a sort from which the Jewish revolutionaries of twenty-five years earlier could have benefited.

Carretius dealt with no one but Mephibaal himself or sometimes the woman of whose name he was as i

The door at the stairhead was a solid one, set there by the tenant himself-more to restrain his charges than out of fear of burglars. Smiler knocked on it with his left hand. It was late in the evening. Even here at the top, very little light ever came through the slats of the cupola that covered and ventilated the staircase. They would have to light a torch on the way back.

"They don't answer," said Smiler puzzledly. He rubbed his knuckles against his cheek instead of the opposite palm. "I hear them inside, but they don't answer." He openly displayed the razor which was normally covered, with his hand, beneath a fold of his tunic.

"Do you suppose something happened to Mephibaal?" Carretius wondered aloud. He was too tired at the moment to respond with real enthusiasm to any unexpected difficulty, but he saw the dim crescent of the blade in Smiler's hand. "Pollux! He always seemed like he was older than Numa, but I never thought he'd die in bed. Do you suppose that lot have murdered him?"

Ox looked up stolidly at the two smaller men. "Should I?" he asked in a voice thick with his German accent. His short hair was so pale that it seemed to disappear in bright sun, but here on the stairs he seemed to be wearing a casque of fine gold. When he hunched, the points of his shoulders lifted but he still had no neck-only a triangle of muscle where lesser men had necks.

"Wait a minute," the rent-taker said. His mind had aroused itself from dull fatigue to a state of general concern. He took a tinder pump and a wax candle from his wallet. "Knock again," he ordered, as he rotated the thumb-sized pump to unlock it.