Lawyers in Hell (9 page)

“We’ve met with Cicero,” Julius said.  “He’s going to do it.  An affair of honor, understand.  To enable him to do it, and to deal with these people you’re involved with –”

“I’m not involved with that place!”

“Technically, involved, since you’re in danger of being sued by them.  And bringing the whole house down, taking the Greeks and the Egyptians with us … we’re a major irregularity in hell’s accounting, and, yes, you are involved.  So a dutiful and pious son will write an apology to the house of Tiberius, and I shall, and your cousin Augustus will – make it good. 
Anything
to get us out of the likelihood of the Audit on our doorstep.  Count this a defense of the house.  In that light,
anything
is honorable.  Understood.  Make it short.  But make it very sincere.”

It was hard to say
I will
.  But he knew that look.  He had no choice.  Absolutely none, or he was going to be talked to by everybody in the house, in succession, until he said he would.

“I will, Father.”

“Good.  Good lad.  Send your brother out.”

“I’ll try,” he said, and went in and said, “Brother.  Father asks for you.”

“So let him ask.”

He went over to the table, pulled back his chair and was quiet a moment.  “I think Father is respecting your privacy.  He’d like to talk to you.  And it’s important.  We’re in a lot of trouble, Caesarion.”

“Screw ’em.  Screw ’em all.”

“Look.  It’s not bad here.”

“What’s not bad?  We’re stuck in a damned room with a talking horse.”

“Had you rather be hiding in an alley somewhere?  We’re in a room with a roof and good food and there’s all sorts of reasons we could be in jail downtown.  And you know that.  So just go with it.  Isn’t that what you say?  Settle it so we don’t have to be stuck in a room anywhere.  Father’s got a lawyer.  A good one.  He’s going to get us out of this.”

“Screw ’em, I say.”

“Well, I don’t!  I don’t want to get locked up downtown, and you don’t either!  So let’s talk sense!”

“Been there,” Caesarion said with a shrug, not looking at him.

“You want to go back?”

No answer.

“Look, brother.  I’m asking you.  Me.  I was with you.  I’ve stood by you.  I’m on your side.  Just – just do it.”

“What’s he want?”

“A letter.”

“A letter.”

“Caesarion, I’ll write it.  You don’t even have to look at it.  Just sign it.  And it’ll all be cool.  Just go out there and tell him you’ll do it and you don’t even have to turn a hand.  It’ll happen.  It’ll get dealt with.”

“He hasn’t called my mother into this, has he?”

Brutus shook his head.  “No.  Just him.”

Caesarion set his jaw.  “What kind of letter?”

“You don’t need to know.  Just shut up, go out there, tell him you’ll do it, and I’ll write it.  Go on.  You don’t want him to call your mother in.”

Caesarion shoved back from the table and slouched his way to the door.  Attitude.  A lot of it.  But he was fragile.  Brutus had that pegged.

It didn’t take too long.

Caesarion came back in, scowling.  “So,” he said, shoved his hands in his pockets and went over and stared out the window.

Brutus didn’t say a thing, just went over to the desk and got paper.  Didn’t want to know what Julius had said, what Julius had offered, but he didn’t want to tip the balance, whatever it was.  Julius could be damned scary.  Usually he wasn’t.

But you didn’t want to be his son and tell him you weren’t going to do something.

*

The house sent papers to Cicero.  Back came back more papers.

Decius Mus took more papers to Cicero.  A considerable sum of money.  A case of wine.  And a potted rosebush.  Mus was gone more than he was present that day, ferrying this and that here and there.

The very next day Cicero announced he was coming to the villa
with
papers to sign.

*

“He wants
what?”
Augustus cried, reading same.

They sat in the portico, overlooking the rose garden.  Galba served, Mus stood by, his Republican-era armor all polished and oiled.  Julius and Augustus were in togas, and everybody else –
everybody
else – was told to keep to the house.

On the other side of the garden gate, the flood had reached the very shadow of the gate.  It stretched past the several estates, and glowed hellfire red as the sky in the distance, next to the skyscrapers of downtown hell.

“It could be further negotiated,” Cicero said.  “But it is very likely the position will harden on some matters.  Right now we have a settlement that costs nothing in personal favors, one statue, a dozen rosebushes, and one truckload of Chian wine.”

“A Praxiteles,” Augustus lamented, looking toward the Niobe, who stood amid the rose garden, appropriately spattered in rain and framed by floodwaters.

“I’ll scour up another one,” Julius said.  “We’ll get something.  That fool Memmius lost a raft of them into the bay.  They come on the market.”

“It took a century to get her!” Augustus said.

“And our alternatives?” Julius said … and noticed, oddly enough, that Dante Alighieri had come out of the house, ahead of two Scorpion Guards in hot pursuit.

The scholarly little Italian was no athlete.  They had him before he reached the gate.  And Cicero didn’t even notice.  The two Mesopotamian bruisers got to the gate first, snagged the little poet up, each by an arm, and carried him off, screaming … which
did
get Cicero’s attention.  The genteel old man cast a look that way, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Julius.

“One of the houseguests,” Julius said.  “Late.  You wouldn’t know him.  A poet.  Quite fond of Vergilius.  Based a lot on him.”

“Ah,” Cicero said.  “Does he give recitals?”

“For a select few,” Julius said.  “Of course – our friends are invited.  We can ask Vergilius himself.  If you’d be interested.”

“A traditional fellow?  None of this Beat poetry.”

“Oh, absolutely traditional,” Julius said.  “Best of the new Old School.  Cheer up, nephew.  We’ll find another Praxiteles.  ‘Prometheus and his Vulture,’ maybe.”

“Not funny,” Augustus said.  “I love that statue.  The old goat is aiming this straight at me.  And where did I deserve it?”

“Your adopted brothers owe you one,” Julius said.  “Let’s get this thing signed, get ink dry on the line and get that statue moved, the roses dug, and the whole transaction done today, before something worse happens.  Galba.”

“Master.”

“Tell Niccolo.  The bushes could stand thinning as is.  Tell him we can’t wait for the weather.”

The house door shut, on Dante and his problems.

“All right, all right,” Augustus said, downcast.  “I’ll sign it.  Damn him.”

*

It was a damned downpour.  Niccolo was soaked to the skin and had
no
help.  Dante, damn him to a nether circle of hell, was sitting warm and dry in the basement and they daren’t let him out until it all had blown over.  So Niccolo Machiavelli got the job of pruning, wrapping, then digging up ten prickly, man-high rose trees, shaping and wrapping their rootballs – the damned roots
moved
when insulted, and stabbed you if you hung on.  Then, solo, in the rain and cursing Dante all the way, he turned the ten thorny, muddy, burlapped bundles over to the armored, uniformed bevy of regulation legion engineers, who showed up with a noisy truck and a small flatbed load of timbers, regular legionaries, and chain.

Niccolo wrapped himself in spare burlap and slogged over to the shelter of the portico, ordering a passing servant to fetch him a mocha latte.  “Grandissimo.  And very hot.”

Then he tucked up in a chair, unwilling to hose off twice.  He’d have work to do when the engineers had their go.  If something was going to go wrong, if somehow they ended up missing a rosebush and in technical violation of the agreement, giving the old lecher a way to wiggle – well, Niccolo Machiavelli wasn’t going to let that happen.  They didn’t
have
mocha lattes in the nether circles of hell.  They didn’t have a lot of things, and Niccolo, who’d had his personal dose of dungeon life, didn’t intend to let anybody screw up.

Besides, they’d gotten a rumor of what one of Erra’s Seven had
done
to a complainant in court.

No.  Niccolo wasn’t going to go there.  Niccolo wasn’t going to make a mistake.

Boards thumped and boomed down off the truck.  The legion engineers, likewise dripping wet, supervising a handful of legionaries, poor sods, who hammered down the disturbed earth and laid planks.  Then while Machiavelli shivered under the portico, and huddled in dry burlap, being muddy from head to foot, the serious work started.

Up went beams in an A frame.  Pulleys.  The engineers set up a pentaspastos on the bed of planks and sent the soldiers swarming up to gird poor weeping, naked Niobe in belts and rope.

One so hoped they didn’t drop the old girl and doom them all.  Niobe rose, rose, rose from her pedestal, and set down again beside the rear of the truck.

Then the pedestal moved, by the same expedient, while legionaries, with sly grins and roving hands, steadied la signora Niobe.

The engineers gave orders, and quite smartly those who weren’t mauling the statue disassembled the pentaspastos and reassembled it on the truck bed, fast as fast.  It
wasn’t
as if the age of the truck didn’t manage hoists somewhat more complicated, Niccolo thought. 
His
age had had them.

But the engineers, stubborn fellows, clearly didn’t believe in powered winches and hoists, and it was amazing how very fast that ancient machine reformed and got into operation.  The legionaries on the ground attached the robes, the legionaries on the flatbed, three of them, hauled, and Niobe rose, rose, rose to the truck bed.

The legionaries scrambled up then to put the lady into her web of braces and ropes, which would hold her steady on the short drive down past the park.  They’d turn at West 96
^th
, round the corner and turn again – easy drive.  They’d manage it.

The engineers gave orders.  The pedestal joined the weeping lady.

Did a romantic imagine a look of panicked distress on the marble face?  Rain glistened on her skin.  Her outstretched hand, so delicate, appealed to brute men for salvation, to the thoughtless heavens for a rescue.

None such was coming. 
You play chess with gods, signora, you just do not expect to win.  You were a vain bitch.

Now you get a new admirer.  Doubtless you’ll grace his bedroom.  Lucky signora.  You’re marble.  He’s
 –
shall we say
 –
less than pure.

“He-us!” the senior engineer shouted, and the legionaries scrambled to grab rose bushes and to get them aboard.  And Julius had probably been watching the progress, since he came out, looked the situation over, counted rosebushes – little nods of his head – and walked grandly back indoors, into the dry.

Well.

Dannazione.
  Not a shred of notice, his direction.  Julius was thinking about those two boys of his.  He was thinking about Augustus, or Cleopatra, or any of a dozen others.

Who did
he
have?  Dante Alighieri.  Who believed heaven and Beatrice awaited him – if he could ever reconstitute his great epic.

Ha.

Well, he had the garden to keep his mind off his problems.  He had to move some rosebushes to cover the scars the trucks had made – and the missing ten bushes.  Eleven, counting Cicero’s.

Couldn’t have made it an even, easy-to-apportion number, could they?

Maybe
he
should send a gift of his own to Cicero … just paving the way for future favors.  One never had too many favors of the inbound sort.

He thought that, gathering up his garden spade from its place, leaning against a pillar of the portico.

And saw, through the gate, three things.

First, there was a great metal tower in the far distance – right next to the edge of the flood, right on the edge of Tiberius’ lawn.

Second, on Richelieu’s lawn, there was a small band of the Cardinal’s men, armed with swords, determinedly facing something, short and singular, splashing its way across the flood at an angle.

Thirdly, and equally determined, there was one of the Cardinal’s men in galoshes, headed for the villa’s back gate, sword in hand, and fire in his eye.

“Toi!”
the man shouted at him.

That did it.  “Don’t you
toi
me,
vous!
”  He flung down the shovel.  “You are addressing Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, Secretary to the Second Chancery de la Repubblica di Fierenze, lately Secretary to Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, master of this villa.  Whom do you think you are addressing?”

“A most peculiar occupation for a gentleman, sir!  You are head to foot in mud, and
that –”

It was
an imp, emanated from the tower on Tiberius’ green rolling lawn, and the Cardinal’s men were having at it, with poor effect.

“Don’t look at us!  We had one cross our grounds with the Viet Cong in hot pursuit!  If you let it get to the Park you’ll have that horde coming back after it!  Tiberius is not under my lord’s jurisdiction!  He’s
your
neighbor!”  There was a horrendous scream.  Niccolo winced.  “My lord views
this
as his property line, and kindly respect it.  I am sure my lord wishes your lord well, and hopes you will succeed in driving that creature back to Tiberius’ premises, where it will be aptly situated.  I shall report it immediately, and you may rest assured
we
will not let it pass.”

“You may rest assured His Eminence will seek damages!” the Cardinal’s man cried.

“You may rest assured His Eminence understands exactly the situation downtown.  If you cannot deal with this yourselves, then appeal to my lord, and we will take over your defense – in a neighborly way.  But
I
think His Eminence has a very clear reason why we will
not
be seeking anything in the law courts at this precise moment!”