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  For Helen

  with thanks for once keeping me alive with Chanel

  (and with gin …)

  ROME: TWO WEEKS IN OCTOBER, AD 72

  ‘It’s the City that creates luxury. And out of luxury, inevitably, comes greed, out of greed bursts forth violence, out of violence proliferate all the various kinds of crime and iniquity.’

  Cicero

  Principal Characters

  High Society

  Vespasian

  an Emperor (no one comes higher)

  Titus Caesar

  next in line (top substitute)

  Caenis

  the Emperor’s mistress (discreetly important)

  T. Claudius Laeta

  top clerk (even more discreet)

  Anacrites

  chief spy (indiscreet even to list him)

  A Very Important Patrician

  (unnamed on legal advice)

  D. Camillus Verus

  a senator and friend of the Emperor

  Julia Justa

  his noble and put-upon wife

  Helena Justina

  Camillus Aelianus

  Camillus Justinus

  their noble and dutiful children

  Some Honest Citizens

  Balbinus Pius

  a big rissole leaving town

  Flaccida

  his wife, a hard woman in difficult circumstances

  Milvia

  their daughter, a soft-hearted girl leading the easy life

  Florius

  her husband, a worm on the verge of turning

  Nonnius Albius

  a poorly court witness

  Alexander

  his pessimistic doctor (private sector)

  The Miller & Little Icarus

  strong men, interested in education

  Lalage

  refined proprietress of the Bower of Venus

  Macra

  a young lady at that élite finishing school

  Gaius & Phlosis

  two extremely helpful boatmen

  Low Society (Fountain Court)

  Lenia

  a blushing bride

  Smaractus

  her bashful groom

  Cassius

  a baker whose oven may get too hot

  Ennianus

  a basket-weaver who may be tangling with trouble

  Castus

  a newcomer, dealing in old junk

  An old bag woman Nux

  a homeless dog looking for a soft touch

  Falco

  her target (not as tough as he thinks)

  A baby

  abandoned, also looking for a nice home with kindly folk

  Law and Order (all under suspicion)

  Marcus Rubella

  tribune of the scrupulous Fourth Cohort of vigiles

  L. Petronius Longus

  enquiry chief in the XIII region

  Arria Silvia

  his often furious wife

  Their cat

  (a cohort joke)

  Martinus

  A deputy (not for long, he hopes)

  Fusculus

  an expert on rackets

  Linus

  on detached duty on the Aphrodite

  Rufina

  the reason Linus has detached himself

  Sergius

  a happy punishment officer

  Porcius

  a young recruit (unhappy)

  Scythax

  an optimistic doctor (public sector)

  Tibullinus

  a centurion of the dubious Sixth Cohort

  Arica

  his sidekick (certainly needs kicking)

  I

  ‘I still can’t believe I’ve put the bastard away for good!’ Petronius muttered.

  ‘He’s not on the boat yet,’ Fusculus corrected him. Clearly the Watch’s optimist.

  There were five us waiting on a quayside. Mid-October. An hour before dawn. A wakening breeze chilled our tense faces as we huddled in cloaks. The day was making itself ready for action somewhere on the other side of Italy, but here in Portus, Rome’s new harbour, it was still fully dark. We could see the huge beacon on the lighthouse flaunting itself, with glimpses of tiny figures tending the fire; pale sheets of flame sometimes lit the statue of Neptune presiding over the entrance. The sea god’s illuminated torso stood out strangely in our surroundings. Only the scents of old, hardened rope and rotting fish scales told us we were standing on the grand harbour bowl.

  We were five honest, respectable citizens who had been waiting all night for a sixth. He had never been honest, though like most criminals he had no difficulty passing himself off as respectable. Roman society had always been readily bamboozled by brazen acts. But now, thanks to Petronius Longus, the man and his crimes had been publicly exposed.

  We had been waiting too long. Although nobody said it, we were starting to dread that the big rissole would not show.

  * * *

  The lowlife was called Balbinus.

  I had been hearing his name as long as I could remember. It had certainly been notorious when Petronius and I had come home from the army six years before. At that time my old tentmate Petro, being a dutiful type who fancied a good salary, had put himself forward as a public officer; I set up in business alone. He was chasing cabbage thieves through the markets while I was picking through clerks’ divorces and tracing stolen art. On the face of it we lived in different worlds, yet we stumbled across the same tragedies and heard the same worrying stories on the streets.

  Balbinus was renowned throughout our district as one of the dirtiest underworld organisers ever to gild imperial Rome. The area he terrorised included brothels, wharfside warehouses, the back-doubles on the Aventine slopes, the dark colonnades around the Circus Maximus. He ran jostlers and confidence tricksters; prostitutes and cutpurses; cat burglars and marauding gangs of street beggars with fake blind eyes who could soon spot trouble coming. He kept a couple of safe houses for receiving, set up under the cover of straight businesses. Petronius reckoned that the flow of stolen goods into these dens of illicit commerce rivalled the international trade at the Emporium.

  Petro had been trying to nail Balbinus for years. Now, somehow, he had managed to set up a capital charge – and go on to secure a conviction despite all Balbinus’ efforts to escape using democratic channels (intimidation and bribes). I had yet to hear the full details. Barely back in Rome from what I liked to describe as a confidential diplomatic mission, I had been roped in tonight as a dependable extra and friend.

  ‘He’s not going to come now,’ I suggested easily, since I knew how stubborn Petro was.

  ‘I’ll not risk losing him.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Don’t niggle me, Falco.’

  ‘You’re so conscientious you’re tying yourself up in knots. Listen to someone rational: he’ll either have left Rome last evening, in which case we would have seen him by now, or he went
to bed first. If that’s it, he won’t arrive for another hour or two. When’s the ship due to leave?’

  ‘The minute he gets here, if I have any control over it.’

  ‘With the light,’ clarified Fusculus in a quiet tone. I guessed my point about our quarry’s arrival had already been made to Petro by his men. Since they knew him too, their reaction to my attempt was restrained. They were hoping he would either listen to a pal, or at least give them some entertainment by losing his temper and thumping me.

  ‘I need a drink,’ I commented.

  ‘Stuff you, Falco. Don’t try that one.’ It was too dark to see his face. All the same, I chuckled; he was weakening.

  The trick was not to make an issue of it. I said nothing, and about five minutes afterwards Petronius Longus burst out with an obscenity that I hadn’t heard uttered in a public place since we left Britain. Then he growled that he was cold and past caring – and was off to the nearest wine bar for a beaker to console himself.

  Nobody chortled. By then we were too relieved that he had given way to gloat over our victory, just as Petro had known we would be. He had a nice sense of timing. Martinus growled, ‘Better take the bloody barnacle. It’ll be his last chance for a long time.’

  So we bawled out to Linus to stop pretending he was a sailor and to come off the ship and have a drink with us.

  II

  The atmosphere was thick with lamp smoke; hard to see why, as there was a mean supply of lamps. Something crunched under my boot – either an old oyster shell, or part of a whore’s broken necklace. There seemed to be a lot of debris on the floor. Probably best not to investigate.

  No one else was in the dump. No customers, anyway. A couple of grimy lasses roused themselves slightly when we tramped inside, but they soon got the message and slumped back into sleep. They looked too exhausted even to be curious. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be listening in, but we were not intending any loud indiscretions. There was too much at stake.

  We cramped ourselves on to benches, feeling stiff and oversized in our outdoor dress. We were all armed, to the point where it was impossible to be discreet when crowding around small tables. If we tried to pretend we were just carrying Lucanian sausage rolls, someone would have his privates shorn off by an awkwardly placed sword blade. We arranged ourselves with care.

  The landlord was an unsmiling, unwelcoming coastal type who had summed us up as we crossed his threshold. ‘We were just closing.’ We must have brought in a suggestion of imminent violence.

  ‘I apologise.’ Petronius could have used his official status to insist we were served, but as usual he preferred to try his charm first. His brevity probably screamed ‘law and order’. The landlord knew he had no choice. He served us, but made it plain that he hoped we would be leaving quickly. It was too late in the night for trouble.

  Well, we agreed with that.

  * * *

  There was tension in all of us. I noticed Martinus, the cocky bantam who was Petro’s second in command, took one deep swig of his drink, then kept going to the doorway and staring out. The others ignored him fidgeting. In the end he parked his rather jutting backside on a stool just beyond the threshold, occasionally calling in some remark to the rest, but watching the waterfront. In Petro’s troop even the tame annoyance was a decent officer.

  Petronius and I ended up at a table to ourselves.

  He had strong bonds with his men. He always led from the front. He pulled his weight in routine enquiries and on a surveillance he mucked in as one of them. But he and I had been friends for a long time. Between us were even stronger links, forged from when we had met at eighteen and shared a legionary posting to one of the grimmest parts of the Empire while it was earning dismal fame – Britain, in Nero’s time, with the Boudiccan Rebellion as our special treat. Now, although for long periods we often failed to meet, when we did we could pick up straight away, as if we had shared an amphora only last Saturday. And when we entered a wine bar with others it was understood that we two would sit together, very slightly separate from the rest.

  Petro gulped his wine, then visibly regretted it. ‘Jupiter! You could paint that on warts and they’d fall off by dinner time … So how was the East?’

  ‘Wild women and wicked politics.’

  ‘Didius Falco, the world traveller!’ He didn’t believe a word of it. ‘What really happened?’

  I grinned, then gave him a neat summary of five months’ travelling: ‘I got my ear gnawed by a few camels. Helena was stung by a scorpion and spent a lot of money – much of it my father’s, I’m delighted to say.’ We had brought a quantity of stuff back with us; Petro had promised to help me unload in return for my assistance tonight. ‘I ended up in a hack job scribbling Greek jokes for second-rate touring actors.’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘I thought you went on a special task for the Palace?’

  ‘The bureaucratic mission rapidly fell through – especially after I found out that Vespasian’s Chief Spy had sent a message ahead of me encouraging my hosts to lock me up. Or worse,’ I concluded gloomily.

  ‘Anacrites? The bastard.’ Petronius had no time for officials, whatever smooth title they dressed themselves up in. ‘Did he land you in bad trouble?’

  ‘I survived.’

  Petronius was frowning. He viewed my career like a kind of blocked gutter that needed a hefty poke with a stick to shift the sludge and get it running properly. He saw himself as the expert with the stick. ‘What was the point, Falco? What’s in it for Vespasian if he destroys a first-class agent?’

  ‘Interesting question.’ In fact there could be several reasons why the Emperor might feel a foreign jail was just the place for me. I was an upstart who wanted social promotion; since he disapproved of informers, the idea of letting me wear the gold ring and strut like a man of substance had always rankled. Most of the time he owed me money for my undercover services; he would love to renege. Then one of his sons had tender feelings towards a certain young lady who preferred to live with me, while I had a long-term feud with the other. Either Titus or Domitian might have asked their pa to dump me. Besides, who really likes a hireling who handles problems with dispatch, then comes back wearing a happy smile and expecting a huge cash reward?

  ‘I don’t know why you work for him,’ Petronius grumbled angrily.

  ‘I work for myself,’ I said.

  ‘That’s news!’

  ‘That’s the truth. Even if the damned secretariat offers me a straight task with a set fee and vast expenses, I won’t consider it. From now on, I stick to private commissions – which was what I had to do after I got shoved in shit in Arabia by bloody Anacrites and his devious games.’

  ‘You’re a dope,’ Petro answered disbelievingly. ‘You can’t resist the challenge. One nod from the man in purple and you’ll scuttle back.’

  I grabbed the flagon and helped us both to more wine. It still tasted like a cure for swine fever. ‘Petro, the man in purple didn’t try to sell me to a camel trader.’

  Whatever I thought of the rank of emperor, Vespasian the man was completely straight. Even Petronius grudgingly allowed the point. ‘So it was the spy, Falco. What’s the difference?’

  ‘Who knows? But Anacrites thinks I’m rotting in some desert citadel; this could be the lever I’m looking for to show him up. I’ll give my travelogue to Vespasian before the spy finds out I’m alive and back in Rome.’

  It was good to unload my anger, but there were better things to talk about. ‘Come to dinner when we get settled back in – bring Silvia and the girls. We’ll have a gathering and tell our gripping travellers’ tales.’

  ‘How’s Helena?’ Petro remembered to ask when I mentioned his own wife and children.

  ‘Fine. And no, we’re not married, or planning it; nor quarrelling and planning to separate.’

  ‘Any signs of impending fatherhood?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ I retorted, like a man who knew how to handle his private life. I hoped Petro would not notice I
was bluffing. ‘When I’m honoured, you’ll be the first to know … Olympus! Talking to you is like fending off my mother.’

  ‘Wonderful woman,’ he commented in his aggravating way.

  I carried on with a feeling of false confidence. ‘Oh yes, Ma’s a credit to the community. If everyone on the Aventine was as stiff-backed as my mother, you’d have no work to do. Unfortunately some of them are called Balbinus Pius – about whom you still owe me an explanation or two.’