John gazed pointedly around the room. Two chairs, a bed, a couple of battered chests, a table cluttered with bottles and jars of cosmetics. Whatever schemes Theophilus had taken part in couldn’t have been very profitable. Unless he’d spent all his money on jewelry. “In the circumstances, I’d be happy to buy anything he left behind.”
Maritza let loose a polyglot torrent of curses she must have learned from sailors. John recognized several that had traveled from Egypt where he had spent considerable time during his youthful career as a mercenary. “Bastard keeps on cheating me after he’s dead. He left very little behind. There’s a couple of odds and ends, but I’m keeping them to pay for what he stole off me. Oh, and a bit of parchment. He was always reading it and swore it would make his fortune but I can’t read so it’s no good to me.” She stopped. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Could it be that what you’re really after?”
John half closed his own eyes. The smell from the tannery was making them water. “No. But it might be helpful to me, worth money to you. Let me see it.”
She rummaged in a chest and finally produced a grubby sheet of parchment. Reluctantly she placed it in John’s hand and waited anxiously, as if she expected him to bolt off with it.
John carried it nearer to the lamp and read:
“My father on his deathbed told me in his youth he saw Corinth looted and razed at Alaric’s command, and described deeds that should have been cloaked in merciful darkness seen on every street by the glare of burning buildings, and how he aided certain priests to flee from the bloody chaos, thereby learning they intended to place gold and silver sacred vessels, and such diverse holinesses as they had been able to rescue, into the care of she who wails her daughter, the unwilling bride, and thereafter make pact the burial place would remain secret until they could restore such glorious tributes to the church, and though he became separated from them by the grace of heaven he escaped capture, yet none with whom he fled returned, he believing they were caught and put to the sword or sold as slaves along with such inhabitants of Corinth as were not slaughtered, and although he had dug here and there in many places over the years after his return the sacred treasures remain hidden to this day, and he told me…”
It appeared to be nothing more than a page from a history, or considering the rather poor quality of the penmanship a copy of such a page. Holding it closer to the light, he could discern traces of the erased writing over which the account of the sacking of Corinth had been penned.
“I thought it was nothing but nonsense, that the fool was fooling himself,” Maritza said. “But perhaps I was wrong. If you are willing to buy, it is valuable.”
John couldn’t make out the words beneath the historical account but he could easily read the greed written on Maritza’s face.
He showed her a handful of coins, of a denomination she rarely glimpsed. “This scrap is worth something to me, along with everything you know about what Theophilus was doing before he left.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Everything Maritza knew about Theophilus’ activities before his disappearance turned out to amount to nothing. Or so she insisted. Even the emperor himself, pleading from a gold nomisma, could not jar any memories loose.
“’Man’s work’ is all he ever told me. We kept our noses out of each other’s business.”
“You must have known he was a thief,” John insisted.
“I do now,” was her sharp reply.
John had put the gold coin back in his pouch and left, telling her the emperor would be happy to see her again if she suddenly recalled anything. He wasn’t surprised Theophilus had kept her in the dark about his schemes. Her sort might easily have betrayed him to the authorities for less than John had paid her already.
Walking back to his lodgings he tried not to think about his mother being married to a man who would marry the woman he had just interviewed.
Although Maritza had told him very little, he hoped the scrap of parchment would have something to say to him-or rather the faint writing he could see beneath the historical note would. The message about the iron shipment had been hidden under words engraved in the tablet’s wax. Perhaps Theophilus had regularly employed such concealment.
John passed through light spilling from the door of a tavern. He had decided against further investigations tonight. Word about the man looking for Theophilus had obviously spread, as evidenced by Maritza’s approaching him.
This time John approached the dim stairway at his lodgings with caution. He didn’t want to fall prey to a real attack. As always the steps creaked loudly enough to drown out any sound made by someone lying in wait in the shadows above. He arrived at the upper hallway unscathed and pushed open the warped door to his room, which, as with most of the doors in the place, hung partly ajar in its crooked frame.
The man seated on John’s bed gestured for him to come in with a wave of the long-bladed knife in his hand. “Please shut the door quietly behind you. We don’t want to disturb the other guests, do we?”
“You’re the fellow on the church steps who told me to trust no one except myself and my horse,” John said.
“I’m glad you remembered me. I forgot to add one should also trust a man with a drawn blade.”
“You were not so intoxicated or sleepy as you appeared, it seems.”
“No one pays much attention to public drunkards.”
The man was right, John thought ruefully. Now he noticed that aside from apparently being nothing more than a pathetic fellow reeling about in a haze of wine fumes, the speaker was a big, solidly built man in early middle age, with close cropped hair and enough scars showing on his face and the backs of his hands to indicate an intimate knowledge of the weapon he displayed.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you,” the man went on. “You claim to know Theophilus, which I wouldn’t have believed except that I saw you leaving Maritza’s room.”
But he had not, seemingly, seen her going into John’s lodgings or John and her leaving.
“Do you know where the bastard is?”
“You don’t think I believe your story, do you? You’re no petty thief. I don’t know what you are, or who you are, but a simple thief? No.”
“Why don’t you try asking who I am?”
“Because you won’t tell me the truth, any more than I would tell who I am.”
John was still standing in front of the closed door. Could he yank it open and escape downstairs before the man with the knife could leap off the bed? Could he get his own weapon out in time to defend himself?
The long blade waggled at him. “Away from the door, friend. Have a seat.”
John lowered himself onto the indicated stool.
The blade pointed at him from the bed, not much more than an arms-breadth away. “Good. Now we are face to face. Let’s just call ourselves businessmen.”
“And our business is…what?”
“According to you, it is iron.”
“That’s right. Theophilus hasn’t paid me for the assistance I gave him with his last shipment.” John repeated what he had been proclaiming in various taverns. “But then you said you didn’t believe I was a petty thief, so why would you believe I am telling the truth?”
“I don’t believe you’re a petty thief, but I might entertain the idea that you are involved in the iron trade, and as far as the matter of Theophilus cheating you-well, I would take that as a given. Which shipment was it?”
John related the details so far as he knew them, watching the other’s face. “Theophilus cheated you too, didn’t he? Being cheated is the price of working with him!”
The blade plunged into John’s bedding and ripped across it. Cloth tore with a high thin noise. “Wait until I find the swine! I’ve been waiting for him to get back for over a week. If he’s taken flight with my share I’ll be joining you in your search with the intention of slipping sharp metal, and not necessarily iron, between his ribs.”