Second Act by Marilyn Todd

throbbing behind his eyes. No one doubted that the ten men currently swearing to uphold their tribuneship were genuine in their intentions. It was everybody else, he thought. How broad a purple stripe you had on your toga. Whether your shorter, military tunic was more impressive than your magisterial neighbour’s long one. Who cared?
    In front of him, and a whole head and shoulders shorter, the Head of the Security Police oiled his way through the ceremony in a way that only a man with a narrow purple stripe hoping to get a wider one can do. But then Callisunus would sell his mother into harlotry and throw in his sisters for good luck if it secured him a promotion.
    Orbilio made a mental calculation. Another two mind-numbing hours, if he was lucky. The way things were going, though, it might be three.
    On his face, his patrician breeding showed nothing but encouragement and interest, the expression of a man stimulated by long-winded procedures, as he reviewed his current case notes in his head.
    December being a particularly active month for criminals, there was quite a pot on the boil. Too many festivals combined with too many layers of thick clothing equals too many purses snatched and secreted, but that wasn’t the concern of the Security Police. Nor was the fact that, because people went to bed earlier to save lamp oil and thus unwittingly improved working conditions for burglars, incidents of rape and murder went up in proportion, often as a result of those burglaries going horribly wrong. What did concern the Security Police was that, with the courts closed from the beginning of November, jails were overcrowded through lack of trials, while the crime rate continued to soar.
    Perfect conditions for anarchy to breed and Rome was positively rife with plots to bring down the Emperor. Small wonder Augustus had installed the Praetorian Guard.
    But apart from conspiracies requiring sharp nips in their buds, he had a killing down in the Subura to deal with. A domestic, which the husband tried to pass off as the work of an intruder, but Orbilio was gathering witnesses and evidence. No challenge there, he’d have the man in irons by tomorrow. And then there was that forgery ring operating out of an old warehouse on the edge of town. Small-scale stuff, just the duplication of dole tablets, and that wouldn’t take long to wrap up. Orbilio had the place under twenty-four-hour surveillance and the next time the mastermind dropped in—a swarthy, low-ranking civil servant from the Water Department—that was that.
    Callisunus, even though he’d taken no interest in either case, would nevertheless scoop the credit for both. Orbilio glanced down to where his boss was smarming away to Olympic standards, and knew his only course of action was to congratulate him on the outcome with a smile. Nothing got up the little toady’s nose more than the knowledge that his younger, taller, good-looking patrician subordinate didn’t give a damn. Petty tactics, Orbilio admitted. But a soldier is trained to employ any weapon in his armoury, even if it’s only a pin, and he hadn’t spent two years in uniform for nothing. (Which was another thing that raised Callisunus’s low-born hackles. That he hadn’t been given a commission.)
    From the corner of his eye, Marcus noticed a legionary slip into the hall and murmur something to the soldiers on guard. His mind turned to another item on his case load, one involving a certain Claudia Seferius. He shook his head in amazement. Mother of Tarquin, what was it with that woman? Couldn’t she ever stay out of trouble? A smile twisted up one corner of his mouth. He bloody hoped not. But what amazed him about this particular business was that someone as sharp as Claudia had been taken in by someone as obviously slippery as Moschus. Was she growing careless, or just desperate, he wondered? Either way, if she’d only thought to check how many ships the captain had lost in various storms, she’d have