He knew the names, most of them. The officials of the cubiculo, the Emperor’s intimate attendants, his grooms and pimps and butlers, many of them men of immense wealth in their own right, who went home from the royal palace every night to pleasant palaces of their own: there was Polybius, there was Hilarion—two Greeks, he thought, clamping his lips in displeasure—and the Hebrew, Judas Antonius Soranus, and the private secretary, Statius, and the royal cobbler, Claudius Nero, who made the fabulous jewel-encrusted shoes that Demetrius would never wear twice, and the court physician who prescribed such costly rarities as medicines for the monarch, taking his own percentage from the suppliers—what was his name, Mallo, Trallo, something like that?—and the architect, Tiberius Ulpius Draco, who as Minister of Public Works had built all those useless new palaces for the Emperor, and then had torn them down and built even grander ones on their sites—
No, Draco had died a year or two ago, probably of shame over his own misdeeds, for as Torquatus remembered him he was fundamentally an honorable man. But there were plenty of others to go on the list. Gradually, over the next hour, Torquatus added name after name, until he had fifty or sixty of them. A good beginning, that. His fury mounted as he contemplated their sins. A cold fury, it was, for he was by nature a frosty man.
After twenty years it was time, and long past time, to put a stop to Demetrius’s imbecilic prodigality, before he brought the Empire down about him. Whatever the risks, Torquatus meant to place himself in the Emperor’s way. It was in his blood, his loyalty to the Empire. A Torquatus had been Consul in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and another in the reign of Diocletianus, and there had been other great Torquati along the way, and now he was the Torquatus of the era, the Consul Marcus Larcius Torquatus, adding distinction to his line. Those other Torquati looked down on him out of history. He knew he must save Roma for them.
This Roma, he thought, this Empire, to which we have devoted so much loyalty, so great a part of our lives, for these two thousand years past—
For a moment he supposed that the best tactic would be to round up five or six of the Emperor’s henchmen at a time, extracting them piecemeal from the Emperor’s proximity so that Demetrius might not notice what was going on, but then he saw that that was precisely the wrong approach. Get them all, right away, a single bold sweep, the way Apollinaris had handled things in the provinces. Out of the palace, into the prisons: bring the situation to immediate resolution. Yes. That was the way.
He imagined the conversation with the Emperor that would follow.
“Where are my beloved friends? Where is Statius? Where is Hilarion? What has become of Claudius Nero?”
“All of them under arrest, your majesty. Crimes against the state. We have reached such a precarious position that we can no longer afford the luxury of having such people in your household.”
“My doctor! My cobbler!”
“Dangerous to the welfare of the nation, Caesar. Dangerous in the extreme. I have had spies out among the people in the taverns, and they are talking revolution. They are saying that the streets and bridges and public buildings are going unrepaired, that there is no money available for distribution to the populace, that the war in the provinces is likely to break out again at any moment—and that the Emperor must be removed before things get even worse.”
“Removed? The Emperor? Me?”
“They cry out for a return to the Republic.”
Demetrius would laugh at that. “The Republic! People have been crying out for a return to the Republic for the last eighteen hundred years! They were saying it in Augustus’s time, ten minutes after he threw the Republic overboard. They don’t mean it. They know the Emperor is the father of the country, their beloved prince, the one essential figure who—”
“No, your majesty, this time they mean it.” And Torquatus would sketch for the Emperor a vivid, terrifying picture of what a revolution would mean, laying it on as thickly as he knew how, the uprising in the streets, Senators hunted down, some of them slaughtered in their beds, and, above all, the massacre of the royal family, blood flowing, the Imperial museums looted, the burning of palaces and governmental buildings, the desecration of temples. The Emperor himself, Demetrius II Augustus Caesar, crucified in the Forum. Better yet: crucified head downward, hanging there dizzy with agony, while the jeering populace threw rocks or perhaps hurled spears—
Yes. Ten minutes of that and he would have Demetrius cowering in his golden sandals, wetting his purple robe in fear. He would retreat into his palace and hide himself there among his toys and his mistresses and his tame lions and tigers. Meanwhile the trials would go forward, the miscreants would rapidly be found guilty of their embezzlements and malfeasances, sent into exile in the remote provinces of the realm—
Exile?
Exile might be too risky, Torquatus thought. Exiles sometimes find their way home—seek vengeance—
Something more permanent than exile might be a wiser idea, he told himself.
He scratched away with his stylus. The list grew and grew. Apollinaris would be proud of him. Constantly quoting ancient history at him, telling him how much better things had been under the Republic, when staunch stoic men like Cato the Elder and Furius Camillus and Aemilius Paulus set examples of self-denial and discipline for all the nation. “The Empire is in profound need of purification,” Apollinaris liked to say: Torquatus had heard him say it a thousand times. So it was. And by the time the Count got back from Gallia or Lusitania or wherever he was right now, he would discover that that profoundly needed purification was already under way.
They will all die, he told himself: these parasites who surround the Emperor, these caterpillars who devour the commonwealth.
That something strange was going on at Roma began to become apparent to Apollinaris in the first minutes after the merchant vessel that had brought him from Tarraco had reached the harbor at Ostia. The familiar ritual in which the customs officials of the port came aboard, received their bribes, and presented a perfunctory bill of duty payable did not take place. Instead there was an actual search, six men in the black-and-gold uniforms of the Imperial treasury poking through the ship’s hold and making a formal tally of the cargo, item by item.
In theory all merchandise shipped into Italia from the provinces for resale was subject to customs duties. In practice, the customs inspectors, having paid stiff bribes to the secretariat of their department to get their jobs, skimmed off most of the customs revenue and allowed only a fraction of the legitimate amount to dribble through to the Imperial Treasury. Everyone knew it, but no one seemed to care. Apollinaris himself disliked the arrangement, even though he did not see why transfers of merchandise from one part of the Empire to another should be subject to customs charges in the first place. But the bribing of customs officials in lieu of paying duty was only one out of myriad practices of the Imperial regime that cried out for reform, and in any event the affairs of merchants and shippers had never been anything to which he had devoted much attention.
Today’s process, though, caused unusual delays in disembarking. After a time he sent for the ship’s captain, a genial black-bearded Carthaginian, and asked what was going on.
The captain, who was livid with dismay and indignation, wasn’t sure. New procedures, he said. Some sort of shakeup in the Department of Customs, that was all he knew.
Apollinaris guessed at first that it might have something to do with the revenue shortfall about which Torquatus had written him: the Emperor, running low on cash, had instructed his officials to start increasing governmental revenues. Then he realized how little sense that notion made. Demetrius had never shown any awareness that there was a relationship between governmental income and Imperial expenditure. No, this must be the doing of Torquatus himself, Apollinaris decided: one of the “severe measures” that his co-Consul had said he would be taking in order to set things to rights.