Wolf Whistle

It didn’t come.

And suddenly the weight on top of her was gone. Croesus, he bottled it after all!

Claudia spun round on to her back. Magic hadn’t run off, he’d been hauled off. She saw an arm round his throat, a man’s knee in the small of his back. She watched a knife plunge upwards into his kidneys. Saw him arch with the pain. And as he arched, the knife came down straight in his heart.

The last thing she heard as the darkness swallowed her up was a voice in the distance saying, ‘I think you’ll find that terminates the correspondence course.’

*

As Claudia struggled back to consciousness, strange pictures formed and dissolved. A man with the head of a hawk. Another like a jackal. A woman in a blue dress with cow horns on her head ‘Janus!’

‘It’s only the priestess,’ a deep voice said soothingly. ‘You’re in the Temple of Isis.’ He paused. ‘You passed out, I carried you here.’

Isis? Memory crawled back, inch by inch. The Field of Mars. A path into the woods. The old voting hall. There was a fight…

‘Ssssh,’ the man said. ‘Easy, now.’

A cool compress was pressed against her forehead and the lap in which her head lay smelled of musk. Close by, the woodpecker from hell drummed for all it was worth. It turned out to be Claudia’s teeth.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked, remembering everything now.

Kaeso grinned. ‘Most emphatically.’

He dipped his kerchief in the holy fountain and dabbed at the cuts and bruises on her face as images of Magic flashed through her head. The twin blades clutched between his fingers. The surprise upon his face. The professional assassination, with oh so little blood…

Numbly, Claudia allowed Kaeso to ease her into a sitting position. Amber-coloured walls were painted floor to ceiling with regimented lines of birds and snakes and vibrant coloured figures. Hieroglyphics they were called, and the priestess with the cow horns threw heavy resins on the fire and gently rattled a sistrum before the goddess Isis, robed in dazzling white. Behind her, Osiris weighed a heart against a feather.

‘You followed me.’

‘Yes,’ he said simply, and there was no need to ask why. The answer lay there, in his eyes.

Claudia wanted to thank him for saving her life, but words were inadequate, payment obscene. So she cupped her hands and sipped the icy waters and told him instead about Sargon’s plans to sell the children into brothels.

There was silence, while sharp features scanned the symbols on the walls. Cartouches, they were called. Or, holy names.

‘You know, I never once suspected that of Sargon,’ he said eventually, wrenching his gaze from a painted papyrus. ‘I thought he was my friend, yet he imagined I would track down frightened runaways and send them back to his gang of paedophiles.’ Kaeso shook his head in bewilderment. ‘How could he get involved in an enterprise as sordid as that?’

‘Money,’ she said simply. ‘He can never have enough, it runs through his fingers like this water in my hands.’

The rattle of the sistrum ceased when the blue-gowned priestess disappeared through a door in the stonework.

‘Does Dino know?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Nor the Captain.’

An acolyte emerged from the bowels of the temple, wearing a thick black wig and bangles. Smiling shyly, she began to dust the statue of hawk-faced Horus. Claudia waited until her egret feathers had moved on to Anubis.

‘One other matter I think you ought to know about. Arbil has given up the date liqueur.’ She watched the significance of her statement sink in.

‘I see.’ The only sign of anxiety was the pacing.

‘So you’d better get Angel out of Rome, and fast.’ Her eyes followed the slow, familiar lope.

It could not have been Lugal who Angel hooked up with, the boy was too young, too one-dimensional for her tastes. She’d used the groom, led him on, and poor Lugal was too trusting to suspect he’d been tied up tighter than a goose for the oven. Angel wouldn’t care what befell him, either, once Arbil found out. Remember, this was the woman who affected concern for her husband, when in reality those checks were a necessary excuse to mark the progress of his blackouts and sow further seeds of doubt in his mind. The bruise on her cheek she had flaunted as a badge of Arbil’s deterioration-how she must have laughed, knowing it was the effect of her drugs which, by turns, rendered him impotent, put him to sleep and, when it suited her, made him violent. Claudia imagined that Arbil, when he uncovered her treachery, was unlikely to lean towards clemency.

She recalled her very first meeting with Angel. The Indian had not been able to disguise her suspicion, which she masked with hostility, and in the end, that hostility had betrayed her. Otherwise Claudia would have thought nothing of oleanders and thorn apples and strong, date liqueur… Would not have made the connection between the hothouse lilies up at Arbil’s and the hothouse lilies in Kaeso’s bedroom ‘At the start, it was exciting,’ he said. ‘An affair under Arbil’s nose.’